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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
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+Part Two
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+The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part Two
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+August, 1995  [Etext #306]
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
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+The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
+A Ten-Part Collection
+Part Two
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+
+
+                The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
+                        A Ten-Part Collection
+                               Part Two
+
+
+
+                        Contents of Part Two
+
+                               Stories
+           AFTERWARD............................January   1910
+           THE FULNESS OF LIFE..................December  1893
+           A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT.....December  1903
+           XINGU................................December  1911
+           THE VERDICT..........................June      1908
+           THE RECKONING........................August    1902
+
+
+                                Verse
+
+           BOTTICELLI'S MADONNA IN THE LOUVRE...January   1891
+           THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI...........February  1891
+           THE SONNET...........................November  1891
+           TWO BACKGROUNDS......................November  1892
+           EXPERIENCE...........................January   1893
+           CHARTRES.............................September 1893
+           LIFE.................................June      1894
+           AN AUTUMN SUNSET.....................October   1894
+
+
+
+
+AFTERWARD
+January 1910
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Oh, there IS one, of course, but you'll never know it."
+
+The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a
+bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp
+perception of its latent significance as she stood, in the
+December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the
+library.
+
+The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they
+sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very
+house of which the library in question was the central, the
+pivotal "feature."  Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a
+country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties,
+had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight
+to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case;
+but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously,
+several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it
+out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire.  It belongs to Hugo's
+cousins, and you can get it for a song."
+
+The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
+remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water
+pipes, and other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading
+in its favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of
+the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition,
+with unusual architectural felicities.
+
+"I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was
+thoroughly uncomfortable," Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the
+two, had jocosely insisted; "the least hint of 'convenience'
+would make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with
+the pieces numbered, and set up again."  And they had proceeded
+to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various suspicions
+and exactions, refusing to believe that the house their cousin
+recommended was REALLY Tudor till they learned it had no heating
+system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds
+till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-
+supply.
+
+"It's too uncomfortable to be true!" Edward Boyne had continued
+to exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively
+wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a
+sudden relapse to distrust: "And the ghost?  You've been
+concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!"
+
+Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her
+laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent
+perceptions, had noted a sudden flatness of tone in Alida's
+answering hilarity.
+
+"Oh, Dorsetshire's full of ghosts, you know."
+
+"Yes, yes; but that won't do.  I don't want to have to drive ten
+miles to see somebody else's ghost.  I want one of my own on the
+premises.  IS there a ghost at Lyng?"
+
+His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that
+she had flung back tantalizingly: "Oh, there IS one, of course,
+but you'll never know it."
+
+"Never know it?"  Boyne pulled her up.  "But what in the world
+constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?"
+
+"I can't say.  But that's the story."
+
+"That there's a ghost, but that nobody knows it's a ghost?"
+
+"Well--not till afterward, at any rate."
+
+"Till afterward?"
+
+"Not till long, long afterward."
+
+"But if it's once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why
+hasn't its signalement been handed down in the family?  How has
+it managed to preserve its incognito?"
+
+Alida could only shake her head.  "Don't ask me.  But it has."
+
+"And then suddenly--"  Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous
+depth of divination--"suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's
+self, 'THAT WAS it?'"
+
+She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her
+question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the
+shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida's clear pupils.
+"I suppose so.  One just has to wait."
+
+"Oh, hang waiting!" Ned broke in.  "Life's too short for a ghost
+who can only be enjoyed in retrospect.  Can't we do better than
+that, Mary?"
+
+But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to,
+for within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair
+they were established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for
+to the point of planning it out in all its daily details had
+actually begun for them.
+
+It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-
+hooded fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the
+sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to
+a deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate indulgence in such
+sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen years
+the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne
+had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness
+that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue
+Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the
+leisure to taste it.  They had never for a moment meant their new
+state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves
+only to harmonious activities.  She had her vision of painting
+and gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of
+the production of his long-planned book on the "Economic Basis of
+Culture"; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could
+be too sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world,
+or plunge deep enough into the past.
+
+Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of
+remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position.
+But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the
+whole incredibly compressed island--a nest of counties, as they
+put it--that for the production of its effects so little of a
+given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and
+so short a distance a difference.
+
+"It's that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives
+such depth to their effects, such relief to their least
+contrasts.  They've been able to lay the butter so thick on every
+exquisite mouthful."
+
+The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray
+house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the
+finer marks of commerce with a protracted past.  The mere fact
+that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes,
+abound the more richly in its special sense--the sense of having
+been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life.  The life had
+probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no
+doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet
+drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond
+between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes
+breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and
+Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an
+intenser memory.
+
+The feeling had never been stronger than on the December
+afternoon when, waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she
+rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth.
+Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long
+tramps on the downs.  She had noticed of late that he preferred
+to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and, in the tried
+security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude
+that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the
+afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the
+morning's work.  Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as
+she had imagined it would, and the lines of perplexity between
+his eyes had never been there in his engineering days.  Then he
+had often looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native
+demon of "worry" had never branded his brow.  Yet the few pages
+he had so far read to her--the introduction, and a synopsis of
+the opening chapter--gave evidences of a firm possession of his
+subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.
+
+The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had
+done with "business" and its disturbing contingencies, the one
+other possible element of anxiety was eliminated.  Unless it were
+his health, then?  But physically he had gained since they had
+come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed.
+It was only within a week that she had felt in him the
+undefinable change that made her restless in his absence, and as
+tongue-tied in his presence as though it were SHE who had a
+secret to keep from him!
+
+The thought that there WAS a secret somewhere between them struck
+her with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her
+down the dim, long room.
+
+"Can it be the house?" she mused.
+
+The room itself might have been full of secrets.  They seemed to
+be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and
+layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky
+walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.
+
+"Why, of course--the house is haunted!" she reflected.
+
+The ghost--Alida's imperceptible ghost--after figuring largely in
+the banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been
+gradually discarded as too ineffectual for imaginative use.  Mary
+had, indeed, as became the tenant of a haunted house, made the
+customary inquiries among her few rural neighbors, but, beyond a
+vague, "They du say so, Ma'am," the villagers had nothing to
+impart.  The elusive specter had apparently never had sufficient
+identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time
+the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their profit-
+and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses
+good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.
+
+"And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its
+beautiful wings in vain in the void," Mary had laughingly
+concluded.
+
+"Or, rather," Ned answered, in the same strain, "why, amid so
+much that's ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence
+as THE ghost."  And thereupon their invisible housemate had
+finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous
+enough to make them promptly unaware of the loss.
+
+Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier
+curiosity revived in her with a new sense of its meaning--a sense
+gradually acquired through close daily contact with the scene of
+the lurking mystery.  It was the house itself, of course, that
+possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but
+secretly with its own past; and if one could only get into close
+enough communion with the house, one might surprise its secret,
+and acquire the ghost-sight on one's own account.  Perhaps, in
+his long solitary hours in this very room, where she never
+trespassed till the afternoon, her husband HAD acquired it
+already, and was silently carrying the dread weight of whatever
+it had revealed to him.  Mary was too well-versed in the code of
+the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the
+ghosts one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of good-
+breeding as to name a lady in a club.  But this explanation did
+not really satisfy her.  "What, after all, except for the fun of
+the frisson," she reflected, "would he really care for any of
+their old ghosts?"  And thence she was thrown back once more on
+the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's greater or less
+susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing
+on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one did not
+know it.
+
+"Not till long afterward," Alida Stair had said.  Well, supposing
+Ned HAD seen one when they first came, and had known only within
+the last week what had happened to him?  More and more under the
+spell of the hour, she threw back her searching thoughts to the
+early days of their tenancy, but at first only to recall a gay
+confusion of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling
+to each other from remote corners of the house as treasure after
+treasure of their habitation revealed itself to them.  It was in
+this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain
+soft afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the
+first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of
+the old house, she had pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel
+that opened at her touch, on a narrow flight of stairs leading to
+an unsuspected flat ledge of the roof--the roof which, from
+below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but
+practised feet to scale.
+
+The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown
+down to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of
+her discovery.  She remembered still how, standing on the narrow
+ledge, he had passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to
+the long, tossed horizon-line of the downs, and then dropped
+contentedly back to trace the arabesque of yew hedges about the
+fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar on the lawn.
+
+"And now the other way," he had said, gently turning her about
+within his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed,
+like some long, satisfying draft, the picture of the gray-walled
+court, the squat lions on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching
+up to the highroad under the downs.
+
+It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she
+had felt his arm relax, and heard a sharp "Hullo!" that made her
+turn to glance at him.
+
+Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a
+shadow of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face;
+and, following his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man--a man in
+loose, grayish clothes, as it appeared to her--who was sauntering
+down the lime-avenue to the court with the tentative gait of a
+stranger seeking his way.  Her short-sighted eyes had given her
+but a blurred impression of slightness and grayness, with
+something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the figure
+or its garb; but her husband had apparently seen more--seen
+enough to make him push past her with a sharp "Wait!" and dash
+down the twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for
+the descent.
+
+A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional
+clutch at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to
+follow him down more cautiously; and when she had reached the
+attic landing she paused again for a less definite reason,
+leaning over the oak banister to strain her eyes through the
+silence of the brown, sun-flecked depths below.  She lingered
+there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard the closing of a
+door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow
+flights of steps till she reached the lower hall.
+
+The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and
+hall and court were empty.  The library door was open, too, and
+after listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she
+quickly crossed the threshold, and found her husband alone,
+vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.
+
+He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but
+the shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even,
+as she fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.
+
+"What was it?  Who was it?" she asked.
+
+"Who?" he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.
+
+"The man we saw coming toward the house."
+
+He seemed honestly to reflect.  "The man?  Why, I thought I saw
+Peters; I dashed after him to say a word about the stable-drains,
+but he had disappeared before I could get down."
+
+"Disappeared?  Why, he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw
+him."
+
+Boyne shrugged his shoulders.  "So I thought; but he must have
+got up steam in the interval.  What do you say to our trying a
+scramble up Meldon Steep before sunset?"
+
+That was all.  At the time the occurrence had been less than
+nothing, had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic
+of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had
+dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its bare spine
+heaving itself above the low roof of Lyng.  Doubtless it was the
+mere fact of the other incident's having occurred on the very day
+of their ascent to Meldon that had kept it stored away in the
+unconscious fold of association from which it now emerged; for in
+itself it had no mark of the portentous.  At the moment there
+could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash
+himself from the roof in the pursuit of dilatory tradesmen.  It
+was the period when they were always on the watch for one or the
+other of the specialists employed about the place; always lying
+in wait for them, and dashing out at them with questions,
+reproaches, or reminders.  And certainly in the distance the gray
+figure had looked like Peters.
+
+Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband's
+explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety
+on his face.  Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him
+anxious?  Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to
+confer with that authority on the subject of the stable-drains,
+had the failure to find him produced such a look of relief?  Mary
+could not say that any one of these considerations had occurred
+to her at the time, yet, from the promptness with which they now
+marshaled themselves at her summons, she had a sudden sense that
+they must all along have been there, waiting their hour.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window.  The
+library was now completely dark, and she was surprised to see how
+much faint light the outer world still held.
+
+As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped
+itself in the tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a
+mere blot of deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as
+it moved toward her, her heart thumped to the thought, "It's the
+ghost!"
+
+She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man
+of whom, two months earlier, she had a brief distant vision from
+the roof was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal
+himself as NOT having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the
+impending fear of the disclosure.  But almost with the next tick
+of the clock the ambiguous figure, gaining substance and
+character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband's;
+and she turned away to meet him, as he entered, with the
+confession of her folly.
+
+"It's really too absurd," she laughed out from the threshold,
+"but I never CAN remember!"
+
+"Remember what?" Boyne questioned as they drew together.
+
+"That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it."
+
+Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no
+response in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged,
+preoccupied face.
+
+"Did you think you'd seen it?" he asked, after an appreciable
+interval.
+
+"Why, I actually took YOU for it, my dear, in my mad
+determination to spot it!"
+
+"Me--just now?"  His arm dropped away, and he turned from her
+with a faint echo of her laugh.  "Really, dearest, you'd better
+give it up, if that's the best you can do."
+
+"Yes, I give it up--I give it up.  Have YOU?" she asked, turning
+round on him abruptly.
+
+The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the
+light struck up into Boyne's face as he bent above the tray she
+presented.
+
+"Have YOU?" Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had
+disappeared on her errand of illumination.
+
+"Have I what?" he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the
+sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the
+letters.
+
+"Given up trying to see the ghost."  Her heart beat a little at
+the experiment she was making.
+
+Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow
+of the hearth.
+
+"I never tried," he said, tearing open the wrapper of a
+newspaper.
+
+"Well, of course," Mary persisted, "the exasperating thing is
+that there's no use trying, since one can't be sure till so long
+afterward."
+
+He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but
+after a pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically
+between his hands, he lifted his head to say abruptly, "Have you
+any idea HOW LONG?"
+
+Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace.  From her
+seat she looked up, startled, at her husband's profile, which was
+darkly projected against the circle of lamplight.
+
+"No; none.  Have YOU?" she retorted, repeating her former phrase
+with an added keenness of intention.
+
+Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently
+turned back with it toward the lamp.
+
+"Lord, no!  I only meant," he explained, with a faint tinge of
+impatience, "is there any legend, any tradition, as to that?"
+
+"Not that I know of," she answered; but the impulse to add, "What
+makes you ask?" was checked by the reappearance of the parlor-
+maid with tea and a second lamp.
+
+With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily
+domestic office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that
+sense of something mutely imminent which had darkened her
+solitary afternoon.  For a few moments she gave herself silently
+to the details of her task, and when she looked up from it she
+was struck to the point of bewilderment by the change in her
+husband's face.  He had seated himself near the farther lamp, and
+was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it something
+he had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point of
+view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect?  The
+longer she looked, the more definitely the change affirmed
+itself.  The lines of painful tension had vanished, and such
+traces of fatigue as lingered were of the kind easily
+attributable to steady mental effort.  He glanced up, as if drawn
+by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.
+
+"I'm dying for my tea, you know; and here's a letter for you," he
+said.
+
+She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she
+proffered him, and, returning to her seat, broke the seal with
+the languid gesture of the reader whose interests are all
+inclosed in the circle of one cherished presence.
+
+Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the
+letter falling to them as she rose, while she held out to her
+husband a long newspaper clipping.
+
+"Ned!  What's this?  What does it mean?"
+
+He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry
+before she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and
+she studied each other, like adversaries watching for an
+advantage, across the space between her chair and his desk.
+
+"What's what?  You fairly made me jump!" Boyne said at length,
+moving toward her with a sudden, half-exasperated laugh.  The
+shadow of apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of
+fixed foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that
+gave her the sense of his feeling himself invisibly surrounded.
+
+Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.
+
+"This article--from the 'Waukesha Sentinel'--that a man named
+Elwell has brought suit against you--that there was something
+wrong about the Blue Star Mine.  I can't understand more than
+half."
+
+They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her
+astonishment, she saw that her words had the almost immediate
+effect of dissipating the strained watchfulness of his look.
+
+"Oh, THAT!"  He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it
+with the gesture of one who handles something harmless and
+familiar.  "What's the matter with you this afternoon, Mary?  I
+thought you'd got bad news."
+
+She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly
+under the reassuring touch of his composure.
+
+"You knew about this, then--it's all right?"
+
+"Certainly I knew about it; and it's all right."
+
+"But what IS it?  I don't understand.  What does this man accuse
+you of?"
+
+"Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar."  Boyne had
+tossed the clipping down, and thrown himself comfortably into an
+arm-chair near the fire.  "Do you want to hear the story?  It's
+not particularly interesting--just a squabble over interests in
+the Blue Star."
+
+"But who is this Elwell?  I don't know the name."
+
+"Oh, he's a fellow I put into it--gave him a hand up.  I told you
+all about him at the time."
+
+"I daresay.  I must have forgotten."  Vainly she strained back
+among her memories.  "But if you helped him, why does he make
+this return?"
+
+"Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him
+over.  It's all rather technical and complicated.  I thought that
+kind of thing bored you."
+
+His wife felt a sting of compunction.  Theoretically, she
+deprecated the American wife's detachment from her husband's
+professional interests, but in practice she had always found it
+difficult to fix her attention on Boyne's report of the
+transactions in which his varied interests involved him.
+Besides, she had felt from the first that, in a community where
+the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of
+efforts as arduous as her husband's professional labors, such
+brief leisure as they could command should be used as an escape
+from immediate preoccupations, a flight to the life they always
+dreamed of living.  Once or twice, now that this new life had
+actually drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself
+if she had done right; but hitherto such conjectures had been no
+more than the retrospective excursions of an active fancy.  Now,
+for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little
+she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness was
+built.
+
+She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the
+composure of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite
+grounds for her reassurance.
+
+"But doesn't this suit worry you?  Why have you never spoken to
+me about it?"
+
+He answered both questions at once: "I didn't speak of it at
+first because it DID worry me--annoyed me, rather.  But it's all
+ancient history now.  Your correspondent must have got hold of a
+back number of the 'Sentinel.'"
+
+She felt a quick thrill of relief.  "You mean it's over?  He's
+lost his case?"
+
+There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne's reply.  "The suit's
+been withdrawn--that's all."
+
+But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward
+charge of being too easily put off.  "Withdrawn because he saw he
+had no chance?"
+
+"Oh, he had no chance," Boyne answered.
+
+She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back
+of her thoughts.
+
+"How long ago was it withdrawn?"
+
+He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty.
+"I've just had the news now; but I've been expecting it."
+
+"Just now--in one of your letters?"
+
+"Yes; in one of my letters."
+
+She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of
+waiting, that he had risen, and strolling across the room, had
+placed himself on the sofa at her side.  She felt him, as he did
+so, pass an arm about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp
+it, and turning slowly, drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met
+the smiling clearness of his eyes.
+
+"It's all right--it's all right?" she questioned, through the
+flood of her dissolving doubts; and "I give you my word it never
+was righter!" he laughed back at her, holding her close.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of
+all the next day's incredible strangeness was the sudden and
+complete recovery of her sense of security.
+
+It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room;
+it accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed
+out at her from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from
+the flanks of the urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian
+teapot.  It was as if, in some roundabout way, all her diffused
+apprehensions of the previous day, with their moment of sharp
+concentration about the newspaper article,--as if this dim
+questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past,--
+had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral
+obligation.  If she had indeed been careless of her husband's
+affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith
+in him instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right
+to her faith had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face
+of menace and suspicion.  She had never seen him more untroubled,
+more naturally and unconsciously in possession of himself, than
+after the cross-examination to which she had subjected him: it
+was almost as if he had been aware of her lurking doubts, and had
+wanted the air cleared as much as she did.
+
+It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that
+surprised her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from
+the house for her daily round of the gardens.  She had left Boyne
+at his desk, indulging herself, as she passed the library door,
+by a last peep at his quiet face, where he bent, pipe in his
+mouth, above his papers, and now she had her own morning's task
+to perform.  The task involved on such charmed winter days almost
+as much delighted loitering about the different quarters of her
+demesne as if spring were already at work on shrubs and borders.
+There were such inexhaustible possibilities still before her,
+such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old
+place, without a single irreverent touch of alteration, that the
+winter months were all too short to plan what spring and autumn
+executed.  And her recovered sense of safety gave, on this
+particular morning, a peculiar zest to her progress through the
+sweet, still place.  She went first to the kitchen-garden, where
+the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated patterns on the walls,
+and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated
+roof of their cot.  There was something wrong about the piping of
+the hothouse, and she was expecting an authority from Dorchester,
+who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of the
+boiler.  But when she dipped into the damp heat of the
+greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of
+old-fashioned exotics,--even the flora of Lyng was in the note!--
+she learned that the great man had not arrived, and the day being
+too rare to waste in an artificial atmosphere, she came out again
+and paced slowly along the springy turf of the bowling-green to
+the gardens behind the house.  At their farther end rose a grass
+terrace, commanding, over the fish-pond and the yew hedges, a
+view of the long house-front, with its twisted chimney-stacks and
+the blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in the pale
+gold moisture of the air.
+
+Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the
+suffused, mild light, it sent her, from its open windows and
+hospitably smoking chimneys, the look of some warm human
+presence, of a mind slowly ripened on a sunny wall of experience.
+She had never before had so deep a sense of her intimacy with it,
+such a conviction that its secrets were all beneficent, kept, as
+they said to children, "for one's good," so complete a trust in
+its power to gather up her life and Ned's into the harmonious
+pattern of the long, long story it sat there weaving in the sun.
+
+She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the
+gardener, accompanied by the engineer from Dorchester.  But only
+one figure was in sight, that of a youngish, slightly built man,
+who, for reasons she could not on the spot have specified, did
+not remotely resemble her preconceived notion of an authority on
+hot-house boilers.  The new-comer, on seeing her, lifted his hat,
+and paused with the air of a gentleman--perhaps a traveler--
+desirous of having it immediately known that his intrusion is
+involuntary.  The local fame of Lyng occasionally attracted the
+more intelligent sight-seer, and Mary half-expected to see the
+stranger dissemble a camera, or justify his presence by producing
+it.  But he made no gesture of any sort, and after a moment she
+asked, in a tone responding to the courteous deprecation of his
+attitude: "Is there any one you wish to see?"
+
+"I came to see Mr. Boyne," he replied.  His intonation, rather
+than his accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the familiar
+note, looked at him more closely.  The brim of his soft felt hat
+cast a shade on his face, which, thus obscured, wore to her
+short-sighted gaze a look of seriousness, as of a person arriving
+"on business," and civilly but firmly aware of his rights.
+
+Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims;
+but she was jealous of her husband's morning hours, and doubtful
+of his having given any one the right to intrude on them.
+
+"Have you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?" she asked.
+
+He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.
+
+"Not exactly an appointment," he replied.
+
+"Then I'm afraid, this being his working-time, that he can't
+receive you now.  Will you give me a message, or come back
+later?"
+
+The visitor, again lifting his hat, briefly replied that he would
+come back later, and walked away, as if to regain the front of
+the house.  As his figure receded down the walk between the yew
+hedges, Mary saw him pause and look up an instant at the peaceful
+house-front bathed in faint winter sunshine; and it struck her,
+with a tardy touch of compunction, that it would have been more
+humane to ask if he had come from a distance, and to offer, in
+that case, to inquire if her husband could receive him.  But as
+the thought occurred to her he passed out of sight behind a
+pyramidal yew, and at the same moment her attention was
+distracted by the approach of the gardener, attended by the
+bearded pepper-and-salt figure of the boiler-maker from
+Dorchester.
+
+The encounter with this authority led to such far-reaching issues
+that they resulted in his finding it expedient to ignore his
+train, and beguiled Mary into spending the remainder of the
+morning in absorbed confabulation among the greenhouses.  She was
+startled to find, when the colloquy ended, that it was nearly
+luncheon-time, and she half expected, as she hurried back to the
+house, to see her husband coming out to meet her.  But she found
+no one in the court but an under-gardener raking the gravel, and
+the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she guessed
+Boyne to be still at work behind the closed door of the library.
+
+Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and
+there, at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations
+of the outlay to which the morning's conference had committed
+her.  The knowledge that she could permit herself such follies
+had not yet lost its novelty; and somehow, in contrast to the
+vague apprehensions of the previous days, it now seemed an
+element of her recovered security, of the sense that, as Ned had
+said, things in general had never been "righter."
+
+She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the
+parlor-maid, from the threshold, roused her with a dubiously
+worded inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon.  It was
+one of their jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were
+divulging a state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers,
+merely murmured an absent-minded assent.
+
+She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in
+rebuke of such offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps
+sounded down the passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers,
+crossed the hall, and went to the library door.  It was still
+closed, and she wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb her
+husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed his normal measure
+of work.  As she stood there, balancing her impulses, the
+esoteric Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and
+Mary, thus impelled, opened the door and went into the library.
+
+Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to
+discover him at the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of
+the room; but her call brought no response, and gradually it
+became clear to her that he was not in the library.
+
+She turned back to the parlor-maid.
+
+"Mr. Boyne must be up-stairs.  Please tell him that luncheon is
+ready."
+
+The parlor-maid appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of
+obeying orders and an equally obvious conviction of the
+foolishness of the injunction laid upon her.  The struggle
+resulted in her saying doubtfully, "If you please, Madam, Mr.
+Boyne's not up-stairs."
+
+"Not in his room?  Are you sure?"
+
+"I'm sure, Madam."
+
+Mary consulted the clock.  "Where is he, then?"
+
+"He's gone out," Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one
+who has respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered
+mind would have first propounded.
+
+Mary's previous conjecture had been right, then.  Boyne must have
+gone to the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it
+was clear that he had taken the shorter way by the south door,
+instead of going round to the court.  She crossed the hall to the
+glass portal opening directly on the yew garden, but the parlor-
+maid, after another moment of inner conflict, decided to bring
+out recklessly, "Please, Madam, Mr. Boyne didn't go that way."
+
+Mary turned back.  "Where DID he go?  And when?"
+
+"He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam."  It was a
+matter of principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one
+question at a time.
+
+"Up the drive?  At this hour?"  Mary went to the door herself,
+and glanced across the court through the long tunnel of bare
+limes.  But its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned
+it on entering the house.
+
+"Did Mr. Boyne leave no message?" she asked.
+
+Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the
+forces of chaos.
+
+"No, Madam.  He just went out with the gentleman."
+
+"The gentleman?  What gentleman?"  Mary wheeled about, as if to
+front this new factor.
+
+"The gentleman who called, Madam," said Trimmle, resignedly.
+
+"When did a gentleman call?  Do explain yourself, Trimmle!"
+
+Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to
+consult her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her
+to lay so unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now
+she was detached enough to note in Trimmle's eye the dawning
+defiance of the respectful subordinate who has been pressed too
+hard.
+
+"I couldn't exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn't let the
+gentleman in," she replied, with the air of magnanimously
+ignoring the irregularity of her mistress's course.
+
+"You didn't let him in?"
+
+"No, Madam.  When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes--"
+
+"Go and ask Agnes, then," Mary interjected.  Trimmle still wore
+her look of patient magnanimity.  "Agnes would not know, Madam,
+for she had unfortunately burnt her hand in trying the wick of
+the new lamp from town--"  Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always
+been opposed to the new lamp--"and so Mrs. Dockett sent the
+kitchen-maid instead."
+
+Mary looked again at the clock.  "It's after two!  Go and ask the
+kitchen-maid if Mr. Boyne left any word."
+
+She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently
+brought her there the kitchen-maid's statement that the gentleman
+had called about one o'clock, that Mr. Boyne had gone out with
+him without leaving any message.  The kitchen-maid did not even
+know the caller's name, for he had written it on a slip of paper,
+which he had folded and handed to her, with the injunction to
+deliver it at once to Mr. Boyne.
+
+Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was
+over, and Trimmle had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her
+wonder had deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude.  It
+was unlike Boyne to absent himself without explanation at so
+unwonted an hour, and the difficulty of identifying the visitor
+whose summons he had apparently obeyed made his disappearance the
+more unaccountable.  Mary Boyne's experience as the wife of a
+busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and compelled to keep
+irregular hours, had trained her to the philosophic acceptance of
+surprises; but since Boyne's withdrawal from business he had
+adopted a Benedictine regularity of life.  As if to make up for
+the dispersed and agitated years, with their "stand-up" lunches
+and dinners rattled down to the joltings of the dining-car, he
+cultivated the last refinements of punctuality and monotony,
+discouraging his wife's fancy for the unexpected; and declaring
+that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of
+pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.
+
+Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the
+unforeseen, it was evident that all Boyne's precautions would
+sooner or later prove unavailable, and Mary concluded that he had
+cut short a tiresome visit by walking with his caller to the
+station, or at least accompanying him for part of the way.
+
+This conclusion relieved her from farther preoccupation, and she
+went out herself to take up her conference with the gardener.
+Thence she walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away;
+and when she turned toward home, the early twilight was setting
+in.
+
+She had taken a foot-path across the downs, and as Boyne,
+meanwhile, had probably returned from the station by the
+highroad, there was little likelihood of their meeting on the
+way.  She felt sure, however, of his having reached the house
+before her; so sure that, when she entered it herself, without
+even pausing to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly for the
+library.  But the library was still empty, and with an unwonted
+precision of visual memory she immediately observed that the
+papers on her husband's desk lay precisely as they had lain when
+she had gone in to call him to luncheon.
+
+Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown.
+She had closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood
+alone in the long, silent, shadowy room, her dread seemed to take
+shape and sound, to be there audibly breathing and lurking among
+the shadows.  Her short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-
+discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and
+knew; and in the recoil from that intangible propinquity she
+threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and gave it a desperate
+pull.
+
+The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with
+a lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of
+the usual.
+
+"You may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in," she said, to justify her
+ring.
+
+"Very well, Madam.  But Mr. Boyne is not in," said Trimmle,
+putting down the lamp.
+
+"Not in?  You mean he's come back and gone out again?"
+
+"No, Madam.  He's never been back."
+
+The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.
+
+"Not since he went out with--the gentleman?"
+
+"Not since he went out with the gentleman."
+
+"But who WAS the gentleman?" Mary gasped out, with the sharp note
+of some one trying to be heard through a confusion of meaningless
+noises.
+
+"That I couldn't say, Madam."  Trimmle, standing there by the
+lamp, seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though
+eclipsed by the same creeping shade of apprehension.
+
+"But the kitchen-maid knows--wasn't it the kitchen-maid who let
+him in?"
+
+"She doesn't know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a
+folded paper."
+
+Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both
+designating the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of
+the conventional formula which, till then, had kept their
+allusions within the bounds of custom.  And at the same moment
+her mind caught at the suggestion of the folded paper.
+
+"But he must have a name!  Where is the paper?"
+
+She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the scattered
+documents that littered it.  The first that caught her eye was an
+unfinished letter in her husband's hand, with his pen lying
+across it, as though dropped there at a sudden summons.
+
+"My dear Parvis,"--who was Parvis?--"I have just received your
+letter announcing Elwell's death, and while I suppose there is
+now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--"
+
+She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no
+folded paper was discoverable among the letters and pages of
+manuscript which had been swept together in a promiscuous heap,
+as if by a hurried or a startled gesture.
+
+"But the kitchen-maid SAW him.  Send her here," she commanded,
+wondering at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a
+solution.
+
+Trimmle, at the behest, vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be
+out of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated
+underling, Mary had regained her self-possession, and had her
+questions pat.
+
+The gentleman was a stranger, yes--that she understood.  But what
+had he said?  And, above all, what had he looked like?  The first
+question was easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason
+that he had said so little--had merely asked for Mr. Boyne, and,
+scribbling something on a bit of paper, had requested that it
+should at once be carried in to him.
+
+"Then you don't know what he wrote?  You're not sure it WAS his
+name?"
+
+The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had
+written it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should
+announce.
+
+"And when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he
+say?"
+
+The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr. Boyne had said anything,
+but she could not be sure, for just as she had handed him the
+paper and he was opening it, she had become aware that the
+visitor had followed her into the library, and she had slipped
+out, leaving the two gentlemen together.
+
+"But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that
+they went out of the house?"
+
+This question plunged the witness into momentary
+inarticulateness, from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by
+means of ingenious circumlocutions, elicited the statement that
+before she could cross the hall to the back passage she had heard
+the gentlemen behind her, and had seen them go out of the front
+door together.
+
+"Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell
+me what he looked like."
+
+But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it
+became clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid's endurance had
+been reached.  The obligation of going to the front door to "show
+in" a visitor was in itself so subversive of the fundamental
+order of things that it had thrown her faculties into hopeless
+disarray, and she could only stammer out, after various panting
+efforts at evocation, "His hat, mum, was different-like, as you
+might say--"
+
+"Different?  How different?" Mary flashed out at her, her own
+mind, in the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it
+that morning, but temporarily lost under layers of subsequent
+impressions.
+
+"His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a
+youngish face?" Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity
+of interrogation.  But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate
+answer to this challenge, it was swept away for her listener down
+the rushing current of her own convictions.  The stranger--the
+stranger in the garden!  Why had Mary not thought of him before?
+She needed no one now to tell her that it was he who had called
+for her husband and gone away with him.  But who was he, and why
+had Boyne obeyed his call?
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that
+they had often called England so little--"such a confoundedly
+hard place to get lost in."
+
+A CONFOUNDEDLY HARD PLACE TO GET LOST IN!  That had been her
+husband's phrase.  And now, with the whole machinery of official
+investigation sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and
+across the dividing straits; now, with Boyne's name blazing from
+the walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung
+her!) hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted
+criminal; now the little compact, populous island, so policed,
+surveyed, and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like
+guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife's
+anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something
+they would never know!
+
+In the fortnight since Boyne's disappearance there had been no
+word of him, no trace of his movements.  Even the usual
+misleading reports that raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had
+been few and fleeting.  No one but the bewildered kitchen-maid
+had seen him leave the house, and no one else had seen "the
+gentleman" who accompanied him.  All inquiries in the
+neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a stranger's presence
+that day in the neighborhood of Lyng.  And no one had met Edward
+Boyne, either alone or in company, in any of the neighboring
+villages, or on the road across the downs, or at either of the
+local railway-stations.  The sunny English noon had swallowed him
+as completely as if he had gone out into Cimmerian night.
+
+Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at
+its highest pressure, had ransacked her husband's papers for any
+trace of antecedent complications, of entanglements or
+obligations unknown to her, that might throw a faint ray into the
+darkness.  But if any such had existed in the background of
+Boyne's life, they had disappeared as completely as the slip of
+paper on which the visitor had written his name.  There remained
+no possible thread of guidance except--if it were indeed an
+exception--the letter which Boyne had apparently been in the act
+of writing when he received his mysterious summons.  That letter,
+read and reread by his wife, and submitted by her to the police,
+yielded little enough for conjecture to feed on.
+
+"I have just heard of Elwell's death, and while I suppose there
+is now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--"  That was
+all.  The "risk of trouble" was easily explained by the newspaper
+clipping which had apprised Mary of the suit brought against her
+husband by one of his associates in the Blue Star enterprise.
+The only new information conveyed in the letter was the fact of
+its showing Boyne, when he wrote it, to be still apprehensive of
+the results of the suit, though he had assured his wife that it
+had been withdrawn, and though the letter itself declared that
+the plaintiff was dead.  It took several weeks of exhaustive
+cabling to fix the identity of the "Parvis" to whom the
+fragmentary communication was addressed, but even after these
+inquiries had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts
+concerning the Elwell suit were elicited.  He appeared to have
+had no direct concern in it, but to have been conversant with the
+facts merely as an acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and
+he declared himself unable to divine with what object Boyne
+intended to seek his assistance.
+
+This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight's
+feverish search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks
+that followed.  Mary knew that the investigations were still
+being carried on, but she had a vague sense of their gradually
+slackening, as the actual march of time seemed to slacken.  It
+was as though the days, flying horror-struck from the shrouded
+image of the one inscrutable day, gained assurance as the
+distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their
+normal gait.  And so with the human imaginations at work on the
+dark event.  No doubt it occupied them still, but week by week
+and hour by hour it grew less absorbing, took up less space, was
+slowly but inevitably crowded out of the foreground of
+consciousness by the new problems perpetually bubbling up from
+the vaporous caldron of human experience.
+
+Even Mary Boyne's consciousness gradually felt the same lowering
+of velocity.  It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of
+conjecture; but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat.
+There were moments of overwhelming lassitude when, like the
+victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the
+body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror,
+accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions
+of life.
+
+These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed
+into a phase of stolid acquiescence.  She watched the familiar
+routine of life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the
+meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest
+impression.  She had come to regard herself as part of the
+routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she
+felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an
+insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs
+and tables.  And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in
+spite of the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical
+recommendation of "change."  Her friends supposed that her
+refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her husband would
+one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a
+beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary state of waiting.
+But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of anguish
+inclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope.  She was
+sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of
+her sight as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on
+the threshold.  She had even renounced, one by one, the various
+theories as to his disappearance which had been advanced by the
+press, the police, and her own agonized imagination.  In sheer
+lassitude her mind turned from these alternatives of horror, and
+sank back into the blank fact that he was gone.
+
+No, she would never know what had become of him--no one would
+ever know.  But the house KNEW; the library in which she spent
+her long, lonely evenings knew.  For it was here that the last
+scene had been enacted, here that the stranger had come, and
+spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him.
+The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves
+had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense
+consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out
+into some audible revelation of their secret.  But the revelation
+never came, and she knew it would never come.  Lyng was not one
+of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to
+them.  Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute
+accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had
+surprised.  And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its
+portentous silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by
+any human means.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+"I don't say it WASN'T straight, yet don't say it WAS straight.
+It was business."
+
+Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked
+intently at the speaker.
+
+When, half an hour before, a card with "Mr. Parvis" on it had
+been brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the
+name had been a part of her consciousness ever since she had read
+it at the head of Boyne's unfinished letter.  In the library she
+had found awaiting her a small neutral-tinted man with a bald
+head and gold eye-glasses, and it sent a strange tremor through
+her to know that this was the person to whom her husband's last
+known thought had been directed.
+
+Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,--in the manner of a
+man who has his watch in his hand,--had set forth the object of
+his visit.  He had "run over" to England on business, and finding
+himself in the neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to
+leave it without paying his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without
+asking her, if the occasion offered, what she meant to do about
+Bob Elwell's family.
+
+The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary's
+bosom.  Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by
+his unfinished phrase?  She asked for an elucidation of his
+question, and noticed at once that he seemed surprised at her
+continued ignorance of the subject.  Was it possible that she
+really knew as little as she said?
+
+"I know nothing--you must tell me," she faltered out; and her
+visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story.  It threw, even
+to her confused perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a
+lurid glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine.  Her
+husband had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the
+cost of "getting ahead" of some one less alert to seize the
+chance; the victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who
+had "put him on" to the Blue Star scheme.
+
+Parvis, at Mary's first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering
+glance through his impartial glasses.
+
+"Bob Elwell wasn't smart enough, that's all; if he had been, he
+might have turned round and served Boyne the same way.  It's the
+kind of thing that happens every day in business.  I guess it's
+what the scientists call the survival of the fittest," said Mr.
+Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.
+
+Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried
+to frame; it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that
+nauseated her.
+
+"But then--you accuse my husband of doing something
+dishonorable?"
+
+Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately.  "Oh, no, I
+don't.  I don't even say it wasn't straight."  He glanced up and
+down the long lines of books, as if one of them might have
+supplied him with the definition he sought.  "I don't say it
+WASN'T straight, and yet I don't say it WAS straight.  It was
+business."  After all, no definition in his category could be
+more comprehensive than that.
+
+Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror.  He seemed to her
+like the indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless
+power.
+
+"But Mr. Elwell's lawyers apparently did not take your view,
+since I suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice."
+
+"Oh, yes, they knew he hadn't a leg to stand on, technically.  It
+was when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got
+desperate.  You see, he'd borrowed most of the money he lost in
+the Blue Star, and he was up a tree.  That's why he shot himself
+when they told him he had no show."
+
+The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.
+
+"He shot himself?  He killed himself because of THAT? "
+
+"Well, he didn't kill himself, exactly.  He dragged on two months
+before he died."  Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally
+as a gramophone grinding out its "record."
+
+"You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed?  And tried
+again?"
+
+"Oh, he didn't have to try again," said Parvis, grimly.
+
+They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-
+glass thoughtfully about his finger, she, motionless, her arms
+stretched along her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.
+
+"But if you knew all this," she began at length, hardly able to
+force her voice above a whisper, "how is it that when I wrote you
+at the time of my husband's disappearance you said you didn't
+understand his letter?"
+
+Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture.  "Why, I
+didn't understand it--strictly speaking.  And it wasn't the time
+to talk about it, if I had.  The Elwell business was settled when
+the suit was withdrawn.  Nothing I could have told you would have
+helped you to find your husband."
+
+Mary continued to scrutinize him.  "Then why are you telling me
+now?"
+
+Still Parvis did not hesitate.  "Well, to begin with, I supposed
+you knew more than you appear to--I mean about the circumstances
+of Elwell's death.  And then people are talking of it now; the
+whole matter's been raked up again.  And I thought, if you didn't
+know, you ought to."
+
+She remained silent, and he continued: "You see, it's only come
+out lately what a bad state Elwell's affairs were in.  His wife's
+a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out
+to work, and taking sewing at home, when she got too sick--
+something with the heart, I believe.  But she had his bedridden
+mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under
+it, and finally had to ask for help.  That attracted attention to
+the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was
+started.  Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the
+prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people
+began to wonder why--"
+
+Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket.  "Here," he
+continued, "here's an account of the whole thing from the
+'Sentinel'--a little sensational, of course.  But I guess you'd
+better look it over."
+
+He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly,
+remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room,
+the perusal of a clipping from the "Sentinel" had first shaken
+the depths of her security.
+
+As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring
+head-lines, "Widow of Boyne's Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid,"
+ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it.  The
+first was her husband's, taken from a photograph made the year
+they had come to England.  It was the picture of him that she
+liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table up-stairs in
+her bedroom.  As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it
+would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her
+lids with the sharpness of the pain.
+
+"I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down--" she
+heard Parvis continue.
+
+She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other
+portrait.  It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in
+rough clothes, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a
+projecting hat-brim.  Where had she seen that outline before?
+She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her throat
+and ears.  Then she gave a cry.
+
+"This is the man--the man who came for my husband!"
+
+She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she
+had slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was
+bending above her in alarm.  With an intense effort she
+straightened herself, and reached out for the paper, which she
+had dropped.
+
+"It's the man!  I should know him anywhere!" she cried in a voice
+that sounded in her own ears like a scream.
+
+Parvis's voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless,
+fog-muffled windings.
+
+"Mrs. Boyne, you're not very well.  Shall I call somebody?  Shall
+I get a glass of water?"
+
+"No, no, no!"  She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically
+clenching the newspaper.  "I tell you, it's the man!  I KNOW him!
+He spoke to me in the garden!"
+
+Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the
+portrait.  "It can't be, Mrs. Boyne.  It's Robert Elwell."
+
+"Robert Elwell?"  Her white stare seemed to travel into space.
+"Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him."
+
+"Came for Boyne?  The day he went away?"  Parvis's voice dropped
+as hers rose.  He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as
+if to coax her gently back into her seat.  "Why, Elwell was dead!
+Don't you remember?"
+
+Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what
+he was saying.
+
+"Don't you remember Boyne's unfinished letter to me--the one you
+found on his desk that day?  It was written just after he'd heard
+of Elwell's death."  She noticed an odd shake in Parvis's
+unemotional voice.  "Surely you remember that!" he urged her.
+
+Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it.
+Elwell had died the day before her husband's disappearance; and
+this was Elwell's portrait; and it was the portrait of the man
+who had spoken to her in the garden.  She lifted her head and
+looked slowly about the library.  The library could have borne
+witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in
+that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter.  Through the
+misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-
+forgotten words--words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at
+Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at
+Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live there.
+
+"This was the man who spoke to me," she repeated.
+
+She looked again at Parvis.  He was trying to conceal his
+disturbance under what he imagined to be an expression of
+indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue.
+"He thinks me mad; but I'm not mad," she reflected; and suddenly
+there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange
+affirmation.
+
+She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting
+till she could trust her voice to keep its habitual level; then
+she said, looking straight at Parvis: "Will you answer me one
+question, please?  When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill
+himself?"
+
+"When--when?" Parvis stammered.
+
+"Yes; the date.  Please try to remember."
+
+She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her.  "I have a
+reason," she insisted gently.
+
+"Yes, yes.  Only I can't remember.  About two months before, I
+should say."
+
+"I want the date," she repeated.
+
+Parvis picked up the newspaper.  "We might see here," he said,
+still humoring her.  He ran his eyes down the page.  "Here it is.
+Last October--the--"
+
+She caught the words from him.  "The 20th, wasn't it?"  With a
+sharp look at her, he verified.  "Yes, the 20th.  Then you DID
+know?"
+
+"I know now."  Her white stare continued to travel past him.
+"Sunday, the 20th--that was the day he came first."
+
+Parvis's voice was almost inaudible.  "Came HERE first?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You saw him twice, then?"
+
+"Yes, twice."  She breathed it at him with dilated eyes.  "He
+came first on the 20th of October.  I remember the date because
+it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time."  She
+felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for
+that she might have forgotten.
+
+Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her
+gaze.
+
+"We saw him from the roof," she went on.  "He came down the lime-
+avenue toward the house.  He was dressed just as he is in that
+picture.  My husband saw him first.  He was frightened, and ran
+down ahead of me; but there was no one there.  He had vanished."
+
+"Elwell had vanished?" Parvis faltered.
+
+"Yes."  Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other.  "I
+couldn't think what had happened.  I see now.  He TRIED to come
+then; but he wasn't dead enough--he couldn't reach us.  He had to
+wait for two months; and then he came back again--and Ned went
+with him."
+
+She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has
+successfully worked out a difficult puzzle.  But suddenly she
+lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her
+bursting temples.
+
+"Oh, my God!  I sent him to Ned--I told him where to go!  I sent
+him to this room!" she screamed out.
+
+She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward
+falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if
+through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her.
+But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was
+saying.  Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the
+voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.
+
+"You won't know till afterward," it said.  "You won't know till
+long, long afterward."
+
+
+
+The End of Afterward
+
+
+
+
+THE FULNESS OF LIFE
+December 1893
+
+
+I.
+
+
+For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike
+that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer
+noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and
+insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one
+looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast
+shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.  Now and then, at ever-
+lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like
+the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it
+was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious,
+bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and
+more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an
+effort of reattachment to the vanishing edges of consciousness.
+
+The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but
+now they were at an end.  Through her mind, long harried by
+grotesque visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was
+leaving, tormenting lines of verse, obstinate presentments of
+pictures once beheld, indistinct impressions of rivers, towers,
+and cupolas, gathered in the length of journeys half forgotten--
+through her mind there now only moved a few primal sensations of
+colorless well-being; a vague satisfaction in the thought that
+she had swallowed her noxious last draught of medicine . . . and
+that she should never again hear the creaking of her husband's
+boots--those horrible boots--and that no one would come to bother
+her about the next day's dinner . . . or the butcher's book. . . .
+
+At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the
+thickening obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with
+pale geometric roses, circling softly, interminably before her,
+now darkened to a uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer
+night without stars.  And into this darkness she felt herself
+sinking, sinking, with the gentle sense of security of one upheld
+from beneath.  Like a tepid tide it rose around her, gliding ever
+higher and higher, folding in its velvety embrace her relaxed and
+tired body, now submerging her breast and shoulders, now creeping
+gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her throat to her chin,
+to her ears, to her mouth. . . .  Ah, now it was rising too high;
+the impulse to struggle was renewed;. . . her mouth was full;. . .
+she was choking. . . .  Help!
+
+"It is all over," said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with
+official composure.
+
+The clock struck three.  They remembered it afterward.  Someone
+opened the window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air
+which walks the earth between darkness and dawn; someone else led
+the husband into another room.  He walked vaguely, like a blind
+man, on his creaking boots.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+She stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway
+was in front of her.  Only a wide vista of light, mild yet
+penetrating as the gathered glimmer of innumerable stars,
+expanded gradually before her eyes, in blissful contrast to the
+cavernous darkness from which she had of late emerged.
+
+She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her
+eyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light
+about her, she distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at
+first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of Shelley's vaporous
+creations, then gradually resolved into distincter shape--the
+vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and
+presently the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a
+blue stencilling of trees along its curve--something suggestive
+in its ineffable hue of an azure background of Leonardo's,
+strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and the
+imagination into regions of fabulous delight.  As she gazed, her
+heart beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a
+promise she read in the summons of that hyaline distance.
+
+"And so death is not the end after all," in sheer gladness she
+heard herself exclaiming aloud.  "I always knew that it couldn't
+be.  I believed in Darwin, of course.  I do still; but then
+Darwin himself said that he wasn't sure about the soul--at least,
+I think he did--and Wallace was a spiritualist; and then there
+was St. George Mivart--"
+
+Her gaze lost itself in the ethereal remoteness of the mountains.
+
+"How beautiful!  How satisfying!" she murmured.  "Perhaps now I
+shall really know what it is to live."
+
+As she spoke she felt a sudden thickening of her heart-beats, and
+looking up she was aware that before her stood the Spirit of
+Life.
+
+"Have you never really known what it is to live?" the Spirit of
+Life asked her.
+
+"I have never known," she replied, "that fulness of life which we
+all feel ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not
+been without scattered hints of it, like the scent of earth which
+comes to one sometimes far out at sea."
+
+"And what do you call the fulness of life?" the Spirit asked
+again.
+
+"Oh, I can't tell you, if you don't know," she said, almost
+reproachfully.  "Many words are supposed to define it--love and
+sympathy are those in commonest use, but I am not even sure that
+they are the right ones, and so few people really know what they
+mean."
+
+"You were married," said the Spirit, "yet you did not find the
+fulness of life in your marriage?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no," she replied, with an indulgent scorn, "my
+marriage was a very incomplete affair."
+
+"And yet you were fond of your husband?"
+
+"You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just
+as I was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born
+in, and my old nurse.  Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted
+a very happy couple.  But I have sometimes thought that a woman's
+nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall,
+through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-
+room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where
+the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond
+that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors
+perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one
+knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of
+holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never
+comes."
+
+"And your husband," asked the Spirit, after a pause, "never got
+beyond the family sitting-room?"
+
+"Never," she returned, impatiently; "and the worst of it was that
+he was quite content to remain there.  He thought it perfectly
+beautiful, and sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace
+furniture, insignificant as the chairs and tables of a hotel
+parlor, I felt like crying out to him: 'Fool, will you never
+guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders,
+such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has
+crossed, but that might be yours to live in, could you but find
+the handle of the door?'"
+
+"Then," the Spirit continued, "those moments of which you lately
+spoke, which seemed to come to you like scattered hints of the
+fulness of life, were not shared with your husband?"
+
+"Oh, no--never.  He was different.  His boots creaked, and he
+always slammed the door when he went out, and he never read
+anything but railway novels and the sporting advertisements in
+the papers--and--and, in short, we never understood each other in
+the least."
+
+"To what influence, then, did you owe those exquisite
+sensations?"
+
+"I can hardly tell.  Sometimes to the perfume of a flower;
+sometimes to a verse of Dante or of Shakespeare; sometimes to a
+picture or a sunset, or to one of those calm days at sea, when
+one seems to be lying in the hollow of a blue pearl; sometimes,
+but rarely, to a word spoken by someone who chanced to give
+utterance, at the right moment, to what I felt but could not
+express."
+
+"Someone whom you loved?" asked the Spirit.
+
+"I never loved anyone, in that way," she said, rather sadly, "nor
+was I thinking of any one person when I spoke, but of two or
+three who, by touching for an instant upon a certain chord of my
+being, had called forth a single note of that strange melody
+which seemed sleeping in my soul.  It has seldom happened,
+however, that I have owed such feelings to people; and no one
+ever gave me a moment of such happiness as it was my lot to feel
+one evening in the Church of Or San Michele, in Florence."
+
+"Tell me about it," said the Spirit.
+
+"It was near sunset on a rainy spring afternoon in Easter week.
+The clouds had vanished, dispersed by a sudden wind, and as we
+entered the church the fiery panes of the high windows shone out
+like lamps through the dusk.  A priest was at the high altar, his
+white cope a livid spot in the incense-laden obscurity, the light
+of the candles flickering up and down like fireflies about his
+head; a few people knelt near by.  We stole behind them and sat
+down on a bench close to the tabernacle of Orcagna.
+
+"Strange to say, though Florence was not new to me, I had never
+been in the church before; and in that magical light I saw for
+the first time the inlaid steps, the fluted columns, the
+sculptured bas-reliefs and canopy of the marvellous shrine.  The
+marble, worn and mellowed by the subtle hand of time, took on an
+unspeakable rosy hue, suggestive in some remote way of the honey-
+colored columns of the Parthenon, but more mystic, more complex,
+a color not born of the sun's inveterate kiss, but made up of
+cryptal twilight, and the flame of candles upon martyrs' tombs,
+and gleams of sunset through symbolic panes of chrysoprase and
+ruby; such a light as illumines the missals in the library of
+Siena, or burns like a hidden fire through the Madonna of Gian
+Bellini in the Church of the Redeemer, at Venice; the light of
+the Middle Ages, richer, more solemn, more significant than the
+limpid sunshine of Greece.
+
+"The church was silent, but for the wail of the priest and the
+occasional scraping of a chair against the floor, and as I sat
+there, bathed in that light, absorbed in rapt contemplation of
+the marble miracle which rose before me, cunningly wrought as a
+casket of ivory and enriched with jewel-like incrustations and
+tarnished gleams of gold, I felt myself borne onward along a
+mighty current, whose source seemed to be in the very beginning
+of things, and whose tremendous waters gathered as they went all
+the mingled streams of human passion and endeavor.  Life in all
+its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemed
+weaving a rhythmical dance around me as I moved, and wherever the
+spirit of man had passed I knew that my foot had once been
+familiar.
+
+"As I gazed the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna
+seemed to melt and flow into their primal forms so that the
+folded lotus of the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with
+the runic knots and fish-tailed monsters of the North, and all
+the plastic terror and beauty born of man's hand from the Ganges
+to the Baltic quivered and mingled in Orcagna's apotheosis of
+Mary.  And so the river bore me on, past the alien face of
+antique civilizations and the familiar wonders of Greece, till I
+swam upon the fiercely rushing tide of the Middle Ages, with its
+swirling eddies of passion, its heaven-reflecting pools of poetry
+and art; I heard the rhythmic blow of the craftsmen's hammers in
+the goldsmiths' workshops and on the walls of churches, the
+party-cries of armed factions in the narrow streets, the organ-
+roll of Dante's verse, the crackle of the fagots around Arnold of
+Brescia, the twitter of the swallows to which St. Francis
+preached, the laughter of the ladies listening on the hillside to
+the quips of the Decameron, while plague-struck Florence howled
+beneath them--all this and much more I heard, joined in strange
+unison with voices earlier and more remote, fierce, passionate,
+or tender, yet subdued to such awful harmony that I thought of
+the song that the morning stars sang together and felt as though
+it were sounding in my ears.  My heart beat to suffocation, the
+tears burned my lids, the joy, the mystery of it seemed too
+intolerable to be borne.  I could not understand even then the
+words of the song; but I knew that if there had been someone at
+my side who could have heard it with me, we might have found the
+key to it together.
+
+"I turned to my husband, who was sitting beside me in an attitude
+of patient dejection, gazing into the bottom of his hat; but at
+that moment he rose, and stretching his stiffened legs, said,
+mildly: 'Hadn't we better be going?  There doesn't seem to be
+much to see here, and you know the table d'hote dinner is at
+half-past six o'clock."
+
+
+
+Her recital ended, there was an interval of silence; then the
+Spirit of Life said: "There is a compensation in store for such
+needs as you have expressed."
+
+"Oh, then you DO understand?" she exclaimed.  "Tell me what
+compensation, I entreat you!"
+
+"It is ordained," the Spirit answered, "that every soul which
+seeks in vain on earth for a kindred soul to whom it can lay bare
+its inmost being shall find that soul here and be united to it
+for eternity."
+
+A glad cry broke from her lips.  "Ah, shall I find him at last?"
+she cried, exultant.
+
+"He is here," said the Spirit of Life.
+
+She looked up and saw that a man stood near whose soul (for in
+that unwonted light she seemed to see his soul more clearly than
+his face) drew her toward him with an invincible force.
+
+"Are you really he?" she murmured.
+
+"I am he," he answered.
+
+She laid her hand in his and drew him toward the parapet which
+overhung the valley.
+
+"Shall we go down together," she asked him, "into that marvellous
+country; shall we see it together, as if with the self-same eyes,
+and tell each other in the same words all that we think and feel?"
+
+"So," he replied, "have I hoped and dreamed."
+
+"What?" she asked, with rising joy.  "Then you, too, have looked
+for me?"
+
+"All my life."
+
+"How wonderful!  And did you never, never find anyone in the
+other world who understood you?"
+
+"Not wholly--not as you and I understand each other."
+
+"Then you feel it, too?  Oh, I am happy," she sighed.
+
+They stood, hand in hand, looking down over the parapet upon the
+shimmering landscape which stretched forth beneath them into
+sapphirine space, and the Spirit of Life, who kept watch near the
+threshold, heard now and then a floating fragment of their talk
+blown backward like the stray swallows which the wind sometimes
+separates from their migratory tribe.
+
+"Did you never feel at sunset--"
+
+"Ah, yes; but I never heard anyone else say so.  Did you?"
+
+"Do you remember that line in the third canto of the 'Inferno?'"
+
+"Ah, that line--my favorite always.  Is it possible--"
+
+"You know the stooping Victory in the frieze of the Nike
+Apteros?"
+
+"You mean the one who is tying her sandal?  Then you have
+noticed, too, that all Botticelli and Mantegna are dormant in
+those flying folds of her drapery?"
+
+"After a storm in autumn have you never seen--"
+
+"Yes, it is curious how certain flowers suggest certain painters--
+the perfume of the incarnation, Leonardo; that of the rose,
+Titian; the tuberose, Crivelli--"
+
+"I never supposed that anyone else had noticed it."
+
+"Have you never thought--"
+
+"Oh, yes, often and often; but I never dreamed that anyone else had."
+
+"But surely you must have felt--"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes; and you, too--"
+
+"How beautiful!  How strange--"
+
+Their voices rose and fell, like the murmur of two fountains
+answering each other across a garden full of flowers.  At length,
+with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said:
+"Love, why should we linger here?  All eternity lies before us.
+Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a
+home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river."
+
+As he spoke, the hand she had forgotten in his was suddenly
+withdrawn, and he felt that a cloud was passing over the radiance
+of her soul.
+
+"A home," she repeated, slowly, "a home for you and me to live in
+for all eternity?"
+
+"Why not, love?  Am I not the soul that yours has sought?"
+
+"Y-yes--yes, I know--but, don't you see, home would not be like
+home to me, unless--"
+
+"Unless?" he wonderingly repeated.
+
+She did not answer, but she thought to herself, with an impulse
+of whimsical inconsistency, "Unless you slammed the door and wore
+creaking boots."
+
+But he had recovered his hold upon her hand, and by imperceptible
+degrees was leading her toward the shining steps which descended
+to the valley.
+
+"Come, O my soul's soul," he passionately implored; "why delay a
+moment?  Surely you feel, as I do, that eternity itself is too
+short to hold such bliss as ours.  It seems to me that I can see
+our home already.  Have I not always seem it in my dreams?  It is
+white, love, is it not, with polished columns, and a sculptured
+cornice against the blue?  Groves of laurel and oleander and
+thickets of roses surround it; but from the terrace where we walk
+at sunset, the eye looks out over woodlands and cool meadows
+where, deep-bowered under ancient boughs, a stream goes
+delicately toward the river.  Indoors our favorite pictures hang
+upon the walls and the rooms are lined with books.  Think, dear,
+at last we shall have time to read them all.  With which shall we
+begin?  Come, help me to choose.  Shall it be 'Faust' or the
+'Vita Nuova,' the 'Tempest' or 'Les Caprices de Marianne,' or the
+thirty-first canto of the 'Paradise,' or 'Epipsychidion' or
+"Lycidas'?  Tell me, dear, which one?"
+
+As he spoke he saw the answer trembling joyously upon her lips;
+but it died in the ensuing silence, and she stood motionless,
+resisting the persuasion of his hand.
+
+"What is it?" he entreated.
+
+"Wait a moment," she said, with a strange hesitation in her
+voice.  "Tell me first, are you quite sure of yourself?  Is there
+no one on earth whom you sometimes remember?"
+
+"Not since I have seen you," he replied; for, being a man, he had
+indeed forgotten.
+
+Still she stood motionless, and he saw that the shadow deepened
+on her soul.
+
+"Surely, love," he rebuked her, "it was not that which troubled
+you?  For my part I have walked through Lethe.  The past has
+melted like a cloud before the moon.  I never lived until I saw
+you."
+
+She made no answer to his pleadings, but at length, rousing
+herself with a visible effort, she turned away from him and moved
+toward the Spirit of Life, who still stood near the threshold.
+
+"I want to ask you a question," she said, in a troubled voice.
+
+"Ask," said the Spirit.
+
+"A little while ago," she began, slowly, "you told me that every
+soul which has not found a kindred soul on earth is destined to
+find one here."
+
+"And have you not found one?" asked the Spirit.
+
+"Yes; but will it be so with my husband's soul also?"
+
+"No," answered the Spirit of Life, "for your husband imagined
+that he had found his soul's mate on earth in you; and for such
+delusions eternity itself contains no cure."
+
+She gave a little cry.  Was it of disappointment or triumph?
+
+"Then--then what will happen to him when he comes here?"
+
+"That I cannot tell you.  Some field of activity and happiness he
+will doubtless find, in due measure to his capacity for being
+active and happy."
+
+She interrupted, almost angrily: "He will never be happy without me."
+
+"Do not be too sure of that," said the Spirit.
+
+She took no notice of this, and the Spirit continued: "He will
+not understand you here any better than he did on earth."
+
+"No matter," she said; "I shall be the only sufferer, for he
+always thought that he understood me."
+
+"His boots will creak just as much as ever--"
+
+"No matter."
+
+"And he will slam the door--"
+
+"Very likely."
+
+"And continue to read railway novels--"
+
+She interposed, impatiently: "Many men do worse than that."
+
+"But you said just now," said the Spirit, "that you did not love
+him."
+
+"True," she answered, simply; "but don't you understand that I
+shouldn't feel at home without him?  It is all very well for a
+week or two--but for eternity!  After all, I never minded the
+creaking of his boots, except when my head ached, and I don't
+suppose it will ache HERE; and he was always so sorry when he had
+slammed the door, only he never COULD remember not to.  Besides,
+no one else would know how to look after him, he is so helpless.
+His inkstand would never be filled, and he would always be out of
+stamps and visiting-cards.  He would never remember to have his
+umbrella re-covered, or to ask the price of anything before he
+bought it.  Why, he wouldn't even know what novels to read.  I
+always had to choose the kind he liked, with a murder or a
+forgery and a successful detective."
+
+She turned abruptly to her kindred soul, who stood listening with
+a mien of wonder and dismay.
+
+"Don't you see," she said, "that I can't possibly go with you?"
+
+"But what do you intend to do?" asked the Spirit of Life.
+
+"What do I intend to do?" she returned, indignantly.  "Why, I
+mean to wait for my husband, of course.  If he had come here
+first HE would have waited for me for years and years; and it
+would break his heart not to find me here when he comes."  She
+pointed with a contemptuous gesture to the magic vision of hill
+and vale sloping away to the translucent mountains.  "He wouldn't
+give a fig for all that," she said, "if he didn't find me here."
+
+"But consider," warned the Spirit, "that you are now choosing for
+eternity.  It is a solemn moment."
+
+"Choosing!" she said, with a half-sad smile.  "Do you still keep
+up here that old fiction about choosing?  I should have thought
+that YOU knew better than that.  How can I help myself?  He will
+expect to find me here when he comes, and he would never believe
+you if you told him that I had gone away with someone else--
+never, never."
+
+"So be it," said the Spirit.  "Here, as on earth, each one must
+decide for himself."
+
+She turned to her kindred soul and looked at him gently, almost
+wistfully.  "I am sorry," she said.  "I should have liked to talk
+with you again; but you will understand, I know, and I dare say
+you will find someone else a great deal cleverer--"
+
+And without pausing to hear his answer she waved him a swift
+farewell and turned back toward the threshold.
+
+"Will my husband come soon?" she asked the Spirit of Life.
+
+"That you are not destined to know," the Spirit replied.
+
+"No matter," she said, cheerfully; "I have all eternity to wait
+in."
+
+And still seated alone on the threshold, she listens for the
+creaking of his boots.
+
+
+
+The End of The Fulness of Life
+
+
+
+
+A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT
+December 1903
+
+
+
+This is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon
+Street house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell,
+of the famous East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the
+ladies had withdrawn to the oval parlour (and Maria's harp was
+throwing its gauzy web of sound across the Common), used to
+relate to his grandsons, about the year that Buonaparte marched
+upon Moscow.
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Him Venice!" said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony
+Bracknell, leaning on the high gunwale of his father's East
+Indiaman, the Hepzibah B., saw far off, across the morning sea, a
+faint vision of towers and domes dissolved in golden air.
+
+It was a rare February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony,
+newly of age, and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack
+merchantman of old Bracknell's fleet, felt his heart leap up as
+the distant city trembled into shape.  VENICE!  The name, since
+childhood, had been a magician's wand to him.  In the hall of the
+old Bracknell house at Salem there hung a series of yellowing
+prints which Uncle Richard Saulsbee had brought home from one of
+his long voyages: views of heathen mosques and palaces, of the
+Grand Turk's Seraglio, of St. Peter's Church in Rome; and, in a
+corner--the corner nearest the rack where the old flintlocks
+hung--a busy merry populous scene, entitled: ST. MARK'S SQUARE IN
+VENICE.  This picture, from the first, had singularly taken
+little Tony's fancy.  His unformulated criticism on the others
+was that they lacked action.  True, in the view of St. Peter's an
+experienced-looking gentleman in a full-bottomed wig was pointing
+out the fairly obvious monument to a bashful companion, who had
+presumably not ventured to raise his eyes to it; while, at the
+doors of the Seraglio, a group of turbaned infidels observed with
+less hesitancy the approach of a veiled lady on a camel.  But in
+Venice so many things were happening at once--more, Tony was
+sure, than had ever happened in Boston in a twelve-month or in
+Salem in a long lifetime.  For here, by their garb, were people
+of every nation on earth, Chinamen, Turks, Spaniards, and many
+more, mixed with a parti-coloured throng of gentry, lacqueys,
+chapmen, hucksters, and tall personages in parsons' gowns who
+stalked through the crowd with an air of mastery, a string of
+parasites at their heels.  And all these people seemed to be
+diverting themselves hugely, chaffering with the hucksters,
+watching the antics of trained dogs and monkeys, distributing
+doles to maimed beggars or having their pockets picked by
+slippery-looking fellows in black--the whole with such an air of
+ease and good-humour that one felt the cut-purses to be as much a
+part of the show as the tumbling acrobats and animals.
+
+As Tony advanced in years and experience this childish mumming
+lost its magic; but not so the early imaginings it had excited.
+For the old picture had been but the spring-board of fancy, the
+first step of a cloud-ladder leading to a land of dreams.  With
+these dreams the name of Venice remained associated; and all that
+observation or report subsequently brought him concerning the
+place seemed, on a sober warranty of fact, to confirm its claim
+to stand midway between reality and illusion.  There was, for
+instance, a slender Venice glass, gold-powdered as with lily-
+pollen or the dust of sunbeams, that, standing in the corner
+cabinet betwixt two Lowestoft caddies, seemed, among its lifeless
+neighbours, to palpitate like an impaled butterfly.  There was,
+farther, a gold chain of his mother's, spun of that same sun-
+pollen, so thread-like, impalpable, that it slipped through the
+fingers like light, yet so strong that it carried a heavy pendant
+which seemed held in air as if by magic.  MAGIC!  That was the
+word which the thought of Venice evoked.  It was the kind of
+place, Tony felt, in which things elsewhere impossible might
+naturally happen, in which two and two might make five, a paradox
+elope with a syllogism, and a conclusion give the lie to its own
+premiss.  Was there ever a young heart that did not, once and
+again, long to get away into such a world as that?  Tony, at
+least, had felt the longing from the first hour when the axioms
+in his horn-book had brought home to him his heavy
+responsibilities as a Christian and a sinner.  And now here was
+his wish taking shape before him, as the distant haze of gold
+shaped itself into towers and domes across the morning sea!
+
+The Reverend Ozias Mounce, Tony's governor and bear-leader, was
+just putting a hand to the third clause of the fourth part of a
+sermon on Free-Will and Predestination as the Hepzibah B.'s
+anchor rattled overboard.  Tony, in his haste to be ashore, would
+have made one plunge with the anchor; but the Reverend Ozias, on
+being roused from his lucubrations, earnestly protested against
+leaving his argument in suspense.  What was the trifle of an
+arrival at some Papistical foreign city, where the very churches
+wore turbans like so many Moslem idolators, to the important fact
+of Mr. Mounce's summing up his conclusions before the Muse of
+Theology took flight?  He should be happy, he said, if the tide
+served, to visit Venice with Mr. Bracknell the next morning.
+
+The next morning, ha!--Tony murmured a submissive "Yes, sir,"
+winked at the subjugated captain, buckled on his sword, pressed
+his hat down with a flourish, and before the Reverend Ozias had
+arrived at his next deduction, was skimming merrily shoreward in
+the Hepzibah's gig.
+
+A moment more and he was in the thick of it!  Here was the very
+world of the old print, only suffused with sunlight and colour,
+and bubbling with merry noises.  What a scene it was!  A square
+enclosed in fantastic painted buildings, and peopled with a
+throng as fantastic: a bawling, laughing, jostling, sweating mob,
+parti-coloured, parti-speeched, crackling and sputtering under
+the hot sun like a dish of fritters over a kitchen fire.  Tony,
+agape, shouldered his way through the press, aware at once that,
+spite of the tumult, the shrillness, the gesticulation, there was
+no undercurrent of clownishness, no tendency to horse-play, as in
+such crowds on market-day at home, but a kind of facetious
+suavity which seemed to include everybody in the circumference of
+one huge joke.  In such an air the sense of strangeness soon wore
+off, and Tony was beginning to feel himself vastly at home, when
+a lift of the tide bore him against a droll-looking bell-ringing
+fellow who carried above his head a tall metal tree hung with
+sherbet-glasses.
+
+The encounter set the glasses spinning and three or four spun off
+and clattered to the stones.  The sherbet-seller called on all
+the saints, and Tony, clapping a lordly hand to his pocket,
+tossed him a ducat by mistake for a sequin.  The fellow's eyes
+shot out of their orbits, and just then a personable-looking
+young man who had observed the transaction stepped up to Tony and
+said pleasantly, in English:
+
+"I perceive, sir, that you are not familiar with our currency."
+
+"Does he want more?" says Tony, very lordly; whereat the other
+laughed and replied: "You have given him enough to retire from
+his business and open a gaming-house over the arcade."
+
+Tony joined in the laugh, and this incident bridging the
+preliminaries, the two young men were presently hobnobbing over a
+glass of Canary in front of one of the coffee-houses about the
+square.  Tony counted himself lucky to have run across an
+English-speaking companion who was good-natured enough to give
+him a clue to the labyrinth; and when he had paid for the Canary
+(in the coin his friend selected) they set out again to view the
+town.  The Italian gentleman, who called himself Count Rialto,
+appeared to have a very numerous acquaintance, and was able to
+point out to Tony all the chief dignitaries of the state, the men
+of ton and ladies of fashion, as well as a number of other
+characters of a kind not openly mentioned in taking a census of
+Salem.
+
+Tony, who was not averse from reading when nothing better
+offered, had perused the "Merchant of Venice" and Mr. Otway's
+fine tragedy; but though these pieces had given him a notion that
+the social usages of Venice differed from those at home, he was
+unprepared for the surprising appearance and manners of the great
+people his friend named to him.  The gravest Senators of the
+Republic went in prodigious striped trousers, short cloaks and
+feathered hats.  One nobleman wore a ruff and doctor's gown,
+another a black velvet tunic slashed with rose-colour; while the
+President of the dreaded Council of Ten was a terrible strutting
+fellow with a rapier-like nose, a buff leather jerkin and a
+trailing scarlet cloak that the crowd was careful not to step on.
+
+It was all vastly diverting, and Tony would gladly have gone on
+forever; but he had given his word to the captain to be at the
+landing-place at sunset, and here was dusk already creeping over
+the skies!  Tony was a man of honour; and having pressed on the
+Count a handsome damascened dagger selected from one of the
+goldsmiths' shops in a narrow street lined with such wares, he
+insisted on turning his face toward the Hepzibah's gig.  The
+Count yielded reluctantly; but as they came out again on the
+square they were caught in a great throng pouring toward the
+doors of the cathedral.
+
+"They go to Benediction," said the Count.  "A beautiful sight,
+with many lights and flowers.  It is a pity you cannot take a
+peep at it."
+
+Tony thought so too, and in another minute a legless beggar had
+pulled back the leathern flap of the cathedral door, and they
+stood in a haze of gold and perfume that seemed to rise and fall
+on the mighty undulations of the organ.  Here the press was as
+thick as without; and as Tony flattened himself against a pillar,
+he heard a pretty voice at his elbow:--"Oh, sir, oh, sir, your
+sword!"
+
+He turned at sound of the broken English, and saw a girl who
+matched the voice trying to disengage her dress from the tip of
+his scabbard.  She wore one of the voluminous black hoods which
+the Venetian ladies affected, and under its projecting eaves her
+face spied out at him as sweet as a nesting bird.
+
+In the dusk their hands met over the scabbard, and as she freed
+herself a shred of her lace flounce clung to Tony's enchanted
+fingers.  Looking after her, he saw she was on the arm of a
+pompous-looking graybeard in a long black gown and scarlet
+stockings, who, on perceiving the exchange of glances between the
+young people, drew the lady away with a threatening look.
+
+The Count met Tony's eye with a smile.  "One of our Venetian
+beauties," said he; "the lovely Polixena Cador.  She is thought
+to have the finest eyes in Venice."
+
+"She spoke English," stammered Tony.
+
+"Oh--ah--precisely: she learned the language at the Court of
+Saint James's, where her father, the Senator, was formerly
+accredited as Ambassador.  She played as an infant with the royal
+princes of England."
+
+"And that was her father?"
+
+"Assuredly: young ladies of Donna Polixena's rank do not go
+abroad save with their parents or a duenna."
+
+Just then a soft hand slid into Tony's.  His heart gave a foolish
+bound, and he turned about half-expecting to meet again the merry
+eyes under the hood; but saw instead a slender brown boy, in some
+kind of fanciful page's dress, who thrust a folded paper between
+his fingers and vanished in the throng.  Tony, in a tingle,
+glanced surreptitiously at the Count, who appeared absorbed in
+his prayers.  The crowd, at the ringing of a bell, had in fact
+been overswept by a sudden wave of devotion; and Tony seized the
+moment to step beneath a lighted shrine with his letter.
+
+"I am in dreadful trouble and implore your help.  Polixena"--he
+read; but hardly had he seized the sense of the words when a hand
+fell on his shoulder, and a stern-looking man in a cocked hat,
+and bearing a kind of rod or mace, pronounced a few words in
+Venetian.
+
+Tony, with a start, thrust the letter in his breast, and tried to
+jerk himself free; but the harder he jerked the tighter grew the
+other's grip, and the Count, presently perceiving what had
+happened, pushed his way through the crowd, and whispered hastily
+to his companion: "For God's sake, make no struggle.  This is
+serious.  Keep quiet and do as I tell you."
+
+Tony was no chicken-heart.  He had something of a name for
+pugnacity among the lads of his own age at home, and was not the
+man to stand in Venice what he would have resented in Salem; but
+the devil of it was that this black fellow seemed to be pointing
+to the letter in his breast; and this suspicion was confirmed by
+the Count's agitated whisper.
+
+"This is one of the agents of the Ten.--For God's sake, no
+outcry."  He exchanged a word or two with the mace-bearer and
+again turned to Tony.  "You have been seen concealing a letter
+about your person--"
+
+"And what of that?" says Tony furiously.
+
+"Gently, gently, my master.  A letter handed to you by the page
+of Donna Polixena Cador.--A black business!  Oh, a very black
+business!  This Cador is one of the most powerful nobles in
+Venice--I beseech you, not a word, sir!  Let me think--
+deliberate--"
+
+His hand on Tony's shoulder, he carried on a rapid dialogue with
+the potentate in the cocked hat.
+
+"I am sorry, sir--but our young ladies of rank are as jealously
+guarded as the Grand Turk's wives, and you must be answerable for
+this scandal.  The best I can do is to have you taken privately
+to the Palazzo Cador, instead of being brought before the
+Council.  I have pleaded your youth and inexperience"--Tony
+winced at this--"and I think the business may still be arranged."
+
+Meanwhile the agent of the Ten had yielded his place to a sharp-
+featured shabby-looking fellow in black, dressed somewhat like a
+lawyer's clerk, who laid a grimy hand on Tony's arm, and with
+many apologetic gestures steered him through the crowd to the
+doors of the church.  The Count held him by the other arm, and in
+this fashion they emerged on the square, which now lay in
+darkness save for the many lights twinkling under the arcade and
+in the windows of the gaming-rooms above it.
+
+Tony by this time had regained voice enough to declare that he
+would go where they pleased, but that he must first say a word to
+the mate of the Hepzibah, who had now been awaiting him some two
+hours or more at the landing-place.
+
+The Count repeated this to Tony's custodian, but the latter shook
+his head and rattled off a sharp denial.
+
+"Impossible, sir," said the Count.  "I entreat you not to insist.
+Any resistance will tell against you in the end."
+
+Tony fell silent.  With a rapid eye he was measuring his chances
+of escape.  In wind and limb he was more than a mate for his
+captors, and boyhood's ruses were not so far behind him but he
+felt himself equal to outwitting a dozen grown men; but he had
+the sense to see that at a cry the crowd would close in on him.
+Space was what he wanted: a clear ten yards, and he would have
+laughed at Doge and Council.  But the throng was thick as glue,
+and he walked on submissively, keeping his eye alert for an
+opening.  Suddenly the mob swerved aside after some new show.
+Tony's fist shot out at the black fellow's chest, and before the
+latter could right himself the young New Englander was showing a
+clean pair of heels to his escort.  On he sped, cleaving the
+crowd like a flood-tide in Gloucester bay, diving under the first
+arch that caught his eye, dashing down a lane to an unlit water-
+way, and plunging across a narrow hump-back bridge which landed
+him in a black pocket between walls.  But now his pursuers were
+at his back, reinforced by the yelping mob.  The walls were too
+high to scale, and for all his courage Tony's breath came short
+as he paced the masonry cage in which ill-luck had landed him.
+Suddenly a gate opened in one of the walls, and a slip of a
+servant wench looked out and beckoned him.  There was no time to
+weigh chances.  Tony dashed through the gate, his rescuer slammed
+and bolted it, and the two stood in a narrow paved well between
+high houses.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The servant picked up a lantern and signed to Tony to follow her.
+They climbed a squalid stairway of stone, felt their way along a
+corridor, and entered a tall vaulted room feebly lit by an oil-
+lamp hung from the painted ceiling.  Tony discerned traces of
+former splendour in his surroundings, but he had no time to
+examine them, for a figure started up at his approach and in the
+dim light he recognized the girl who was the cause of all his
+troubles.
+
+She sprang toward him with outstretched hands, but as he advanced
+her face changed and she shrank back abashed.
+
+"This is a misunderstanding--a dreadful misunderstanding," she
+cried out in her pretty broken English.  "Oh, how does it happen
+that you are here?"
+
+"Through no choice of my own, madam, I assure you!" retorted
+Tony, not over-pleased by his reception.
+
+"But why--how--how did you make this unfortunate mistake?"
+
+"Why, madam, if you'll excuse my candour, I think the mistake was
+yours--"
+
+"Mine?"
+
+--"in sending me a letter--"
+
+"YOU--a letter?"
+
+--"by a simpleton of a lad, who must needs hand it to me under
+your father's very nose--"
+
+The girl broke in on him with a cry.  "What!  It was YOU who
+received my letter?"  She swept round on the little maid-servant
+and submerged her under a flood of Venetian.  The latter volleyed
+back in the same jargon, and as she did so, Tony's astonished eye
+detected in her the doubleted page who had handed him the letter
+in Saint Mark's.
+
+"What!" he cried, "the lad was this girl in disguise?"
+
+Polixena broke off with an irrepressible smile; but her face
+clouded instantly and she returned to the charge.
+
+"This wicked, careless girl--she has ruined me, she will be my
+undoing!  Oh, sir, how can I make you understand?  The letter was
+not intended for you--it was meant for the English Ambassador, an
+old friend of my mother's, from whom I hoped to obtain
+assistance--oh, how can I ever excuse myself to you?"
+
+"No excuses are needed, madam," said Tony, bowing; "though I am
+surprised, I own, that any one should mistake me for an
+ambassador."
+
+Here a wave of mirth again overran Polixena's face.  "Oh, sir,
+you must pardon my poor girl's mistake.  She heard you speaking
+English, and--and--I had told her to hand the letter to the
+handsomest foreigner in the church."  Tony bowed again, more
+profoundly.  "The English Ambassador," Polixena added simply, "is
+a very handsome man."
+
+"I wish, madam, I were a better proxy!"
+
+She echoed his laugh, and then clapped her hands together with a
+look of anguish.  "Fool that I am!  How can I jest at such a
+moment?  I am in dreadful trouble, and now perhaps I have brought
+trouble on you also--  Oh, my father!  I hear my father coming!"
+She turned pale and leaned tremblingly upon the little servant.
+
+Footsteps and loud voices were in fact heard outside, and a
+moment later the red-stockinged Senator stalked into the room
+attended by half-a-dozen of the magnificoes whom Tony had seen
+abroad in the square.  At sight of him, all clapped hands to
+their swords and burst into furious outcries; and though their
+jargon was unintelligible to the young man, their tones and
+gestures made their meaning unpleasantly plain.  The Senator,
+with a start of anger, first flung himself on the intruder; then,
+snatched back by his companions, turned wrathfully on his
+daughter, who, at his feet, with outstretched arms and streaming
+face, pleaded her cause with all the eloquence of young distress.
+Meanwhile the other nobles gesticulated vehemently among
+themselves, and one, a truculent-looking personage in ruff and
+Spanish cape, stalked apart, keeping a jealous eye on Tony.  The
+latter was at his wit's end how to comport himself, for the
+lovely Polixena's tears had quite drowned her few words of
+English, and beyond guessing that the magnificoes meant him a
+mischief he had no notion what they would be at.
+
+At this point, luckily, his friend Count Rialto suddenly broke in
+on the scene, and was at once assailed by all the tongues in the
+room.  He pulled a long face at sight of Tony, but signed to the
+young man to be silent, and addressed himself earnestly to the
+Senator.  The latter, at first, would not draw breath to hear
+him; but presently, sobering, he walked apart with the Count, and
+the two conversed together out of earshot.
+
+"My dear sir," said the Count, at length turning to Tony with a
+perturbed countenance, "it is as I feared, and you are fallen
+into a great misfortune."
+
+"A great misfortune!  A great trap, I call it!" shouted Tony,
+whose blood, by this time, was boiling; but as he uttered the
+word the beautiful Polixena cast such a stricken look on him that
+he blushed up to the forehead.
+
+"Be careful," said the Count, in a low tone.  "Though his
+Illustriousness does not speak your language, he understands a
+few words of it, and--"
+
+"So much the better!" broke in Tony; "I hope he will understand
+me if I ask him in plain English what is his grievance against
+me."
+
+The Senator, at this, would have burst forth again; but the
+Count, stepping between, answered quickly: "His grievance against
+you is that you have been detected in secret correspondence with
+his daughter, the most noble Polixena Cador, the betrothed bride
+of this gentleman, the most illustrious Marquess Zanipolo--" and
+he waved a deferential hand at the frowning hidalgo of the cape
+and ruff.
+
+"Sir," said Tony, "if that is the extent of my offence, it lies
+with the young lady to set me free, since by her own avowal--"
+but here he stopped short, for, to his surprise, Polixena shot a
+terrified glance at him.
+
+"Sir," interposed the Count, "we are not accustomed in Venice to
+take shelter behind a lady's reputation."
+
+"No more are we in Salem," retorted Tony in a white heat.  "I was
+merely about to remark that, by the young lady's avowal, she has
+never seen me before."
+
+Polixena's eyes signalled her gratitude, and he felt he would
+have died to defend her.
+
+The Count translated his statement, and presently pursued: "His
+Illustriousness observes that, in that case, his daughter's
+misconduct has been all the more reprehensible."
+
+"Her misconduct?  Of what does he accuse her?"
+
+"Of sending you, just now, in the church of Saint Mark's, a
+letter which you were seen to read openly and thrust in your
+bosom.  The incident was witnessed by his Illustriousness the
+Marquess Zanipolo, who, in consequence, has already repudiated
+his unhappy bride."
+
+Tony stared contemptuously at the black Marquess.  "If his
+Illustriousness is so lacking in gallantry as to repudiate a lady
+on so trivial a pretext, it is he and not I who should be the
+object of her father's resentment."
+
+"That, my dear young gentleman, is hardly for you to decide.
+Your only excuse being your ignorance of our customs, it is
+scarcely for you to advise us how to behave in matters of
+punctilio."
+
+It seemed to Tony as though the Count were going over to his
+enemies, and the thought sharpened his retort.
+
+"I had supposed," said he, "that men of sense had much the same
+behaviour in all countries, and that, here as elsewhere, a
+gentleman would be taken at his word.  I solemnly affirm that the
+letter I was seen to read reflects in no way on the honour of
+this young lady, and has in fact nothing to do with what you
+suppose."
+
+As he had himself no notion what the letter was about, this was
+as far as he dared commit himself.
+
+There was another brief consultation in the opposing camp, and
+the Count then said:--"We all know, sir, that a gentleman is
+obliged to meet certain enquiries by a denial; but you have at
+your command the means of immediately clearing the lady.  Will
+you show the letter to her father?"
+
+There was a perceptible pause, during which Tony, while appearing
+to look straight before him, managed to deflect an interrogatory
+glance toward Polixena.  Her reply was a faint negative motion,
+accompanied by unmistakable signs of apprehension.
+
+"Poor girl!" he thought, "she is in a worse case than I imagined,
+and whatever happens I must keep her secret."
+
+He turned to the Senator with a deep bow.  "I am not," said he,
+"in the habit of showing my private correspondence to strangers."
+
+The Count interpreted these words, and Donna Polixena's father,
+dashing his hand on his hilt, broke into furious invective, while
+the Marquess continued to nurse his outraged feelings aloof.
+
+The Count shook his head funereally.  "Alas, sir, it is as I
+feared.  This is not the first time that youth and propinquity
+have led to fatal imprudence.  But I need hardly, I suppose,
+point out the obligation incumbent upon you as a man of honour."
+
+Tony stared at him haughtily, with a look which was meant for the
+Marquess.  "And what obligation is that?"
+
+"To repair the wrong you have done--in other words, to marry the
+lady."
+
+Polixena at this burst into tears, and Tony said to himself: "Why
+in heaven does she not bid me show the letter?"  Then he
+remembered that it had no superscription, and that the words it
+contained, supposing them to have been addressed to himself, were
+hardly of a nature to disarm suspicion.  The sense of the girl's
+grave plight effaced all thought of his own risk, but the Count's
+last words struck him as so preposterous that he could not
+repress a smile.
+
+"I cannot flatter myself," said he, "that the lady would welcome
+this solution."
+
+The Count's manner became increasingly ceremonious.  "Such
+modesty," he said, "becomes your youth and inexperience; but even
+if it were justified it would scarcely alter the case, as it is
+always assumed in this country that a young lady wishes to marry
+the man whom her father has selected."
+
+"But I understood just now," Tony interposed, "that the gentleman
+yonder was in that enviable position."
+
+"So he was, till circumstances obliged him to waive the privilege
+in your favour."
+
+"He does me too much honour; but if a deep sense of my
+unworthiness obliges me to decline--"
+
+"You are still," interrupted the Count, "labouring under a
+misapprehension.  Your choice in the matter is no more to be
+consulted than the lady's.  Not to put too fine a point on it, it
+is necessary that you should marry her within the hour."
+
+Tony, at this, for all his spirit, felt the blood run thin in his
+veins.  He looked in silence at the threatening visages between
+himself and the door, stole a side-glance at the high barred
+windows of the apartment, and then turned to Polixena, who had
+fallen sobbing at her father's feet.
+
+"And if I refuse?" said he.
+
+The Count made a significant gesture.  "I am not so foolish as to
+threaten a man of your mettle.  But perhaps you are unaware what
+the consequences would be to the lady."
+
+Polixena, at this, struggling to her feet, addressed a few
+impassioned words to the Count and her father; but the latter put
+her aside with an obdurate gesture.
+
+The Count turned to Tony.  "The lady herself pleads for you--at
+what cost you do not guess--but as you see it is vain.  In an
+hour his Illustriousness's chaplain will be here.  Meanwhile his
+Illustriousness consents to leave you in the custody of your
+betrothed."
+
+He stepped back, and the other gentlemen, bowing with deep
+ceremony to Tony, stalked out one by one from the room.  Tony
+heard the key turn in the lock, and found himself alone with
+Polixena.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The girl had sunk into a chair, her face hidden, a picture of
+shame and agony.  So moving was the sight that Tony once again
+forgot his own extremity in the view of her distress.  He went
+and kneeled beside her, drawing her hands from her face.
+
+"Oh, don't make me look at you!" she sobbed; but it was on his
+bosom that she hid from his gaze.  He held her there a breathing-
+space, as he might have clasped a weeping child; then she drew
+back and put him gently from her.
+
+"What humiliation!" she lamented.
+
+"Do you think I blame you for what has happened?"
+
+"Alas, was it not my foolish letter that brought you to this
+plight?  And how nobly you defended me!  How generous it was of
+you not to show the letter!  If my father knew I had written to
+the Ambassador to save me from this dreadful marriage his anger
+against me would be even greater."
+
+"Ah--it was that you wrote for?" cried Tony with unaccountable
+relief.
+
+"Of course--what else did you think?"
+
+"But is it too late for the Ambassador to save you?"
+
+"From YOU?"  A smile flashed through her tears.  "Alas, yes."
+She drew back and hid her face again, as though overcome by a
+fresh wave of shame.
+
+Tony glanced about him.  "If I could wrench a bar out of that
+window--" he muttered.
+
+"Impossible!  The court is guarded.  You are a prisoner, alas.--
+Oh, I must speak!"  She sprang up and paced the room.  "But
+indeed you can scarce think worse of me than you do already--"
+
+"I think ill of you?"
+
+"Alas, you must!  To be unwilling to marry the man my father has
+chosen for me--"
+
+"Such a beetle-browed lout!  It would be a burning shame if you
+married him."
+
+"Ah, you come from a free country.  Here a girl is allowed no
+choice."
+
+"It is infamous, I say--infamous!"
+
+"No, no--I ought to have resigned myself, like so many others."
+
+"Resigned yourself to that brute!  Impossible!"
+
+"He has a dreadful name for violence--his gondolier has told my
+little maid such tales of him!  But why do I talk of myself, when
+it is of you I should be thinking?"
+
+"Of me, poor child?" cried Tony, losing his head.
+
+"Yes, and how to save you--for I CAN save you!  But every moment
+counts--and yet what I have to say is so dreadful."
+
+"Nothing from your lips could seem dreadful."
+
+"Ah, if he had had your way of speaking!"
+
+"Well, now at least you are free of him," said Tony, a little
+wildly; but at this she stood up and bent a grave look on him.
+
+"No, I am not free," she said; "but you are, if you will do as I
+tell you."
+
+Tony, at this, felt a sudden dizziness; as though, from a mad
+flight through clouds and darkness, he had dropped to safety
+again, and the fall had stunned him.
+
+"What am I to do?" he said.
+
+"Look away from me, or I can never tell you."
+
+He thought at first that this was a jest, but her eyes commanded
+him, and reluctantly he walked away and leaned in the embrasure
+of the window.  She stood in the middle of the room, and as soon
+as his back was turned she began to speak in a quick monotonous
+voice, as though she were reciting a lesson.
+
+"You must know that the Marquess Zanipolo, though a great noble,
+is not a rich man.  True, he has large estates, but he is a
+desperate spendthrift and gambler, and would sell his soul for a
+round sum of ready money.--If you turn round I shall not go on!--
+He wrangled horribly with my father over my dowry--he wanted me
+to have more than either of my sisters, though one married a
+Procurator and the other a grandee of Spain.  But my father is a
+gambler too--oh, such fortunes as are squandered over the arcade
+yonder!  And so--and so--don't turn, I implore you--oh, do you
+begin to see my meaning?"
+
+She broke off sobbing, and it took all his strength to keep his
+eyes from her.
+
+"Go on," he said.
+
+"Will you not understand?  Oh, I would say anything to save you!
+You don't know us Venetians--we're all to be bought for a price.
+It is not only the brides who are marketable--sometimes the
+husbands sell themselves too.  And they think you rich--my father
+does, and the others--I don't know why, unless you have shown
+your money too freely--and the English are all rich, are they
+not?  And--oh, oh--do you understand?  Oh, I can't bear your
+eyes!"
+
+She dropped into a chair, her head on her arms, and Tony in a
+flash was at her side.
+
+"My poor child, my poor Polixena!" he cried, and wept and clasped
+her.
+
+"You ARE rich, are you not?  You would promise them a ransom?"
+she persisted.
+
+"To enable you to marry the Marquess?"
+
+"To enable you to escape from this place.  Oh, I hope I may never
+see your face again."  She fell to weeping once more, and he drew
+away and paced the floor in a fever.
+
+Presently she sprang up with a fresh air of resolution, and
+pointed to a clock against the wall.  "The hour is nearly over.
+It is quite true that my father is gone to fetch his chaplain.
+Oh, I implore you, be warned by me!  There is no other way of
+escape."
+
+"And if I do as you say--?"
+
+"You are safe!  You are free!  I stake my life on it."
+
+"And you--you are married to that villain?"
+
+"But I shall have saved you.  Tell me your name, that I may say
+it to myself when I am alone."
+
+"My name is Anthony.  But you must not marry that fellow."
+
+"You forgive me, Anthony?  You don't think too badly of me?"
+
+"I say you must not marry that fellow."
+
+She laid a trembling hand on his arm.  "Time presses," she
+adjured him, "and I warn you there is no other way."
+
+For a moment he had a vision of his mother, sitting very upright,
+on a Sunday evening, reading Dr. Tillotson's sermons in the best
+parlour at Salem; then he swung round on the girl and caught both
+her hands in his.  "Yes, there is," he cried, "if you are
+willing.  Polixena, let the priest come!"
+
+She shrank back from him, white and radiant.  "Oh, hush, be
+silent!" she said.
+
+"I am no noble Marquess, and have no great estates," he cried.
+"My father is a plain India merchant in the colony of
+Massachusetts--but if you--"
+
+"Oh, hush, I say!  I don't know what your long words mean.  But I
+bless you, bless you, bless you on my knees!"  And she knelt
+before him, and fell to kissing his hands.
+
+He drew her up to his breast and held her there.
+
+"You are willing, Polixena?" he said.
+
+"No, no!"  She broke from him with outstretched hands.  "I am not
+willing.  You mistake me.  I must marry the Marquess, I tell
+you!"
+
+"On my money?" he taunted her; and her burning blush rebuked him.
+
+"Yes, on your money," she said sadly.
+
+"Why?  Because, much as you hate him, you hate me still more?"
+
+She was silent.
+
+"If you hate me, why do you sacrifice yourself for me?" he
+persisted.
+
+"You torture me!  And I tell you the hour is past."
+
+"Let it pass.  I'll not accept your sacrifice.  I will not lift a
+finger to help another man to marry you."
+
+"Oh, madman, madman!" she murmured.
+
+Tony, with crossed arms, faced her squarely, and she leaned
+against the wall a few feet off from him.  Her breast throbbed
+under its lace and falbalas, and her eyes swam with terror and
+entreaty.
+
+"Polixena, I love you!" he cried.
+
+A blush swept over her throat and bosom, bathing her in light to
+the verge of her troubled brows.
+
+"I love you!  I love you!" he repeated.
+
+And now she was on his breast again, and all their youth was in
+their lips.  But her embrace was as fleeting as a bird's poise
+and before he knew it he clasped empty air, and half the room was
+between them.
+
+She was holding up a little coral charm and laughing.  "I took it
+from your fob," she said.  "It is of no value, is it?  And I
+shall not get any of the money, you know."
+
+She continued to laugh strangely, and the rouge burned like fire
+in her ashen face.
+
+"What are you talking of?" he said.
+
+"They never give me anything but the clothes I wear.  And I shall
+never see you again, Anthony!"  She gave him a dreadful look.
+"Oh, my poor boy, my poor love--'I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU,
+POLIXENA!'"
+
+He thought she had turned light-headed, and advanced to her with
+soothing words; but she held him quietly at arm's length, and as
+he gazed he read the truth in her face.
+
+He fell back from her, and a sob broke from him as he bowed his
+head on his hands.
+
+"Only, for God's sake, have the money ready, or there may be foul
+play here," she said.
+
+As she spoke there was a great tramping of steps outside and a
+burst of voices on the threshold.
+
+"It is all a lie," she gasped out, "about my marriage, and the
+Marquess, and the Ambassador, and the Senator--but not, oh, not
+about your danger in this place--or about my love," she breathed
+to him.  And as the key rattled in the door she laid her lips on
+his brow.
+
+The key rattled, and the door swung open--but the black-cassocked
+gentleman who stepped in, though a priest indeed, was no votary
+of idolatrous rites, but that sound orthodox divine, the Reverend
+Ozias Mounce, looking very much perturbed at his surroundings,
+and very much on the alert for the Scarlet Woman.  He was
+supported, to his evident relief, by the captain of the Hepzibah
+B., and the procession was closed by an escort of stern-looking
+fellows in cocked hats and small-swords, who led between them
+Tony's late friends the magnificoes, now as sorry a looking
+company as the law ever landed in her net.
+
+The captain strode briskly into the room, uttering a grunt of
+satisfaction as he clapped eyes on Tony.
+
+"So, Mr. Bracknell," said he, "you have been seeing the Carnival
+with this pack of mummers, have you?  And this is where your
+pleasuring has landed you?  H'm--a pretty establishment, and a
+pretty lady at the head of it."  He glanced about the apartment
+and doffed his hat with mock ceremony to Polixena, who faced him
+like a princess.
+
+"Why, my girl," said he, amicably, "I think I saw you this
+morning in the square, on the arm of the Pantaloon yonder; and as
+for that Captain Spavent--" and he pointed a derisive finger at
+the Marquess--"I've watched him drive his bully's trade under the
+arcade ever since I first dropped anchor in these waters.  Well,
+well," he continued, his indignation subsiding, "all's fair in
+Carnival, I suppose, but this gentleman here is under sailing
+orders, and I fear we must break up your little party."
+
+At this Tony saw Count Rialto step forward, looking very small
+and explanatory, and uncovering obsequiously to the captain.
+
+"I can assure you, sir," said the Count in his best English,
+"that this incident is the result of an unfortunate
+misunderstanding, and if you will oblige us by dismissing these
+myrmidons, any of my friends here will be happy to offer
+satisfaction to Mr. Bracknell and his companions."
+
+Mr. Mounce shrank visibly at this, and the captain burst into a
+loud guffaw.
+
+"Satisfaction?" says he.  "Why, my cock, that's very handsome of
+you, considering the rope's at your throats.  But we'll not take
+advantage of your generosity, for I fear Mr. Bracknell has
+already trespassed on it too long.  You pack of galley-slaves,
+you!" he spluttered suddenly, "decoying young innocents with that
+devil's bait of yours--"  His eye fell on Polixena, and his voice
+softened unaccountably.  "Ah, well, we must all see the Carnival
+once, I suppose," he said.  "All's well that ends well, as the
+fellow says in the play; and now, if you please, Mr. Bracknell,
+if you'll take the reverend gentleman's arm there, we'll bid
+adieu to our hospitable entertainers, and right about face for
+the Hepzibah."
+
+
+
+The End of A Venetian Night's Entertainment
+
+
+
+
+XINGU
+December, 1911
+
+
+Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands,
+as though it were dangerous to meet alone.  To this end she had
+founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and
+several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.  The Lunch
+Club, after three or four winters of lunching and debate, had
+acquired such local distinction that the entertainment of
+distinguished strangers became one of its accepted functions; in
+recognition of which it duly extended to the celebrated "Osric
+Dane," on the day of her arrival in Hillbridge, an invitation to
+be present at the next meeting.
+
+The Club was to meet at Mrs. Ballinger's.  The other members,
+behind her back, were of one voice in deploring her unwillingness
+to cede her rights in favor of Mrs. Plinth, whose house made a
+more impressive setting for the entertainment of celebrities;
+while, as Mrs. Leveret observed, there was always the picture-
+gallery to fall back on.
+
+Mrs. Plinth made no secret of sharing this view.  She had always
+regarded it as one of her obligations to entertain the Lunch
+Club's distinguished guests.  Mrs. Plinth was almost as proud of
+her obligations as she was of her picture-gallery; she was in
+fact fond of implying that the one possession implied the other,
+and that only a woman of her wealth could afford to live up to a
+standard as high as that which she had set herself.  An all-round
+sense of duty, roughly adaptable to various ends, was, in her
+opinion, all that Providence exacted of the more humbly
+stationed; but the power which had predestined Mrs. Plinth to
+keep footmen clearly intended her to maintain an equally
+specialized staff of responsibilities.  It was the more to be
+regretted that Mrs. Ballinger, whose obligations to society were
+bounded by the narrow scope of two parlour-maids, should have
+been so tenacious of the right to entertain Osric Dane.
+
+The question of that lady's reception had for a month past
+profoundly moved the members of the Lunch Club.  It was not that
+they felt themselves unequal to the task, but that their sense of
+the opportunity plunged them into the agreeable uncertainty of
+the lady who weighs the alternatives of a well-stocked wardrobe.
+If such subsidiary members as Mrs. Leveret were fluttered by the
+thought of exchanging ideas with the author of "The Wings of
+Death," no forebodings of the kind disturbed the conscious
+adequacy of Mrs. Plinth, Mrs. Ballinger and Miss Van Vluyck.
+"The Wings of Death" had, in fact, at Miss Van Vluyck's
+suggestion, been chosen as the subject of discussion at the last
+club meeting, and each member had thus been enabled to express
+her own opinion or to appropriate whatever seemed most likely to
+be of use in the comments of the others.  Mrs. Roby alone had
+abstained from profiting by the opportunity thus offered; but it
+was now openly recognised that, as a member of the Lunch Club,
+Mrs. Roby was a failure.  "It all comes," as Miss Van Vluyck put
+it, "of accepting a woman on a man's estimation."  Mrs. Roby,
+returning to Hillbridge from a prolonged sojourn in exotic
+regions--the other ladies no longer took the trouble to remember
+where--had been emphatically commended by the distinguished
+biologist, Professor Foreland, as the most agreeable woman he had
+ever met; and the members of the Lunch Club, awed by an encomium
+that carried the weight of a diploma, and rashly assuming that
+the Professor's social sympathies would follow the line of his
+scientific bent, had seized the chance of annexing a biological
+member.  Their disillusionment was complete.  At Miss Van
+Vluyck's first off-hand mention of the pterodactyl Mrs. Roby had
+confusedly murmured: "I know so little about metres--" and after
+that painful betrayal of incompetence she had prudently withdrawn
+from farther participation in the mental gymnastics of the club.
+
+"I suppose she flattered him," Miss Van Vluyck summed up--"or
+else it's the way she does her hair."
+
+The dimensions of Miss Van Vluyck's dining-room having restricted
+the membership of the club to six, the non-conductiveness of one
+member was a serious obstacle to the exchange of ideas, and some
+wonder had already been expressed that Mrs. Roby should care to
+live, as it were, on the intellectual bounty of the others.  This
+feeling was augmented by the discovery that she had not yet read
+"The Wings of Death."  She owned to having heard the name of
+Osric Dane; but that--incredible as it appeared--was the extent
+of her acquaintance with the celebrated novelist.  The ladies
+could not conceal their surprise, but Mrs. Ballinger, whose pride
+in the club made her wish to put even Mrs. Roby in the best
+possible light, gently insinuated that, though she had not had
+time to acquaint herself with "The Wings of Death," she must at
+least be familiar with its equally remarkable predecessor, "The
+Supreme Instant."
+
+Mrs. Roby wrinkled her sunny brows in a conscientious effort of
+memory, as a result of which she recalled that, oh, yes, she HAD
+seen the book at her brother's, when she was staying with him in
+Brazil, and had even carried it off to read one day on a boating
+party; but they had all got to shying things at each other in the
+boat, and the book had gone overboard, so she had never had the
+chance--
+
+The picture evoked by this anecdote did not advance Mrs. Roby's
+credit with the club, and there was a painful pause, which was
+broken by Mrs. Plinth's remarking: "I can understand that, with
+all your other pursuits, you should not find much time for
+reading; but I should have thought you might at least have GOT UP
+'The Wings of Death' before Osric Dane's arrival."
+
+Mrs. Roby took this rebuke good-humouredly.  She had meant, she
+owned to glance through the book; but she had been so absorbed in
+a novel of Trollope's that--
+
+"No one reads Trollope now," Mrs. Ballinger interrupted
+impatiently.
+
+Mrs. Roby looked pained.  "I'm only just beginning," she
+confessed.
+
+"And does he interest you?" Mrs. Plinth inquired.
+
+"He amuses me."
+
+"Amusement," said Mrs. Plinth sententiously, "is hardly what I
+look for in my choice of books."
+
+"Oh, certainly, 'The Wings of Death' is not amusing," ventured
+Mrs. Leveret, whose manner of putting forth an opinion was like
+that of an obliging salesman with a variety of other styles to
+submit if his first selection does not suit.
+
+"Was it MEANT to be?" enquired Mrs. Plinth, who was fond of
+asking questions that she permitted no one but herself to answer.
+"Assuredly not."
+
+"Assuredly not--that is what I was going to say," assented Mrs.
+Leveret, hastily rolling up her opinion and reaching for another.
+"It was meant to--to elevate."
+
+Miss Van Vluyck adjusted her spectacles as though they were the
+black cap of condemnation.  "I hardly see," she interposed, "how
+a book steeped in the bitterest pessimism can be said to elevate,
+however much it may instruct."
+
+"I meant, of course, to instruct," said Mrs. Leveret, flurried by
+the unexpected distinction between two terms which she had
+supposed to be synonymous.  Mrs. Leveret's enjoyment of the Lunch
+Club was frequently marred by such surprises; and not knowing her
+own value to the other ladies as a mirror for their mental
+complacency she was sometimes troubled by a doubt of her
+worthiness to join in their debates.  It was only the fact of
+having a dull sister who thought her clever that saved her from a
+sense of hopeless inferiority.
+
+"Do they get married in the end?" Mrs. Roby interposed.
+
+"They--who?" the Lunch Club collectively exclaimed.
+
+"Why, the girl and man.  It's a novel, isn't it?  I always think
+that's the one thing that matters.  If they're parted it spoils
+my dinner."
+
+Mrs. Plinth and Mrs. Ballinger exchanged scandalised glances, and
+the latter said: "I should hardly advise you to read 'The Wings
+of Death,' in that spirit.  For my part, when there are so many
+books that one HAS to read, I wonder how any one can find time
+for those that are merely amusing."
+
+"The beautiful part of it," Laura Glyde murmured, "is surely just
+this--that no one can tell HOW 'The Wings of Death' ends.  Osric
+Dane, overcome by the dread significance of her own meaning, has
+mercifully veiled it--perhaps even from herself--as Apelles, in
+representing the sacrifice of Iphigenia, veiled the face of
+Agamemnon."
+
+"What's that?  Is it poetry?" whispered Mrs. Leveret nervously to
+Mrs. Plinth, who, disdaining a definite reply, said coldly: "You
+should look it up.  I always make it a point to look things up."
+Her tone added--"though I might easily have it done for me by the
+footman."
+
+"I was about to say," Miss Van Vluyck resumed, "that it must
+always be a question whether a book CAN instruct unless it
+elevates."
+
+"Oh--" murmured Mrs. Leveret, now feeling herself hopelessly
+astray.
+
+"I don't know," said Mrs. Ballinger, scenting in Miss Van
+Vluyck's tone a tendency to depreciate the coveted distinction of
+entertaining Osric Dane; "I don't know that such a question can
+seriously be raised as to a book which has attracted more
+attention among thoughtful people than any novel since 'Robert
+Elsmere.'"
+
+"Oh, but don't you see," exclaimed Laura Glyde, "that it's just
+the dark hopelessness of it all--the wonderful tone-scheme of
+black on black--that makes it such an artistic achievement?  It
+reminded me so when I read it of Prince Rupert's maniere noire . . .
+the book is etched, not painted, yet one feels the colour
+values so intensely . . ."
+
+"Who is HE?" Mrs. Leveret whispered to her neighbour.  "Some one
+she's met abroad?"
+
+"The wonderful part of the book," Mrs. Ballinger conceded, "is
+that it may be looked at from so many points of view.  I hear
+that as a study of determinism Professor Lupton ranks it with
+'The Data of Ethics.'"
+
+"I'm told that Osric Dane spent ten years in preparatory studies
+before beginning to write it," said Mrs. Plinth.  "She looks up
+everything--verifies everything.  It has always been my
+principle, as you know.  Nothing would induce me, now, to put
+aside a book before I'd finished it, just because I can buy as
+many more as I want."
+
+"And what do YOU think of 'The Wings of Death'?" Mrs. Roby
+abruptly asked her.
+
+It was the kind of question that might be termed out of order,
+and the ladies glanced at each other as though disclaiming any
+share in such a breach of discipline.  They all knew that there
+was nothing Mrs. Plinth so much disliked as being asked her
+opinion of a book.  Books were written to read; if one read them
+what more could be expected?  To be questioned in detail
+regarding the contents of a volume seemed to her as great an
+outrage as being searched for smuggled laces at the Custom House.
+The club had always respected this idiosyncrasy of Mrs. Plinth's.
+Such opinions as she had were imposing and substantial: her mind,
+like her house, was furnished with monumental "pieces" that were
+not meant to be suddenly disarranged; and it was one of the
+unwritten rules of the Lunch Club that, within her own province,
+each member's habits of thought should be respected.  The meeting
+therefore closed with an increased sense, on the part of the
+other ladies, of Mrs. Roby's hopeless unfitness to be one of
+them.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Mrs. Leveret, on the eventful day, had arrived early at Mrs.
+Ballinger's, her volume of Appropriate Allusions in her pocket.
+
+It always flustered Mrs. Leveret to be late at the Lunch Club:
+she liked to collect her thoughts and gather a hint, as the
+others assembled, of the turn the conversation was likely to
+take.  To-day, however, she felt herself completely at a loss;
+and even the familiar contact of Appropriate Allusions, which
+stuck into her as she sat down, failed to give her any
+reassurance.  It was an admirable little volume, compiled to meet
+all the social emergencies; so that, whether on the occasion of
+Anniversaries, joyful or melancholy (as the classification ran),
+of Banquets, social or municipal, or of Baptisms, Church of
+England or sectarian, its student need never be at a loss for a
+pertinent reference.  Mrs. Leveret, though she had for years
+devoutly conned its pages, valued it, however, rather for its
+moral support than for its practical services; for though in the
+privacy of her own room she commanded an army of quotations,
+these invariably deserted her at the critical moment, and the
+only line she retained--CANST THOU DRAW OUT LEVIATHAN WITH A
+HOOK?--was one she had never yet found the occasion to apply.
+
+To-day she felt that even the complete mastery of the volume
+would hardly have insured her self-possession; for she thought it
+probable, even if she DID, in some miraculous way, remember an
+Allusion, it would be only to find that Osric Dane used a
+different volume (Mrs. Leveret was convinced that literary people
+always carried them), and would consequently not recognise her
+quotations.
+
+Mrs. Leveret's sense of being adrift was intensified by the
+appearance of Mrs. Ballinger's drawing-room.  To a careless eye
+its aspect was unchanged; but those acquainted with Mrs.
+Ballinger's way of arranging her books would instantly have
+detected the marks of recent perturbation.  Mrs. Ballinger's
+province, as a member of the Lunch Club, was the Book of the Day.
+On that, whatever it was, from a novel to a treatise on
+experimental psychology, she was confidently, authoritatively
+"up."  What became of last year's books, or last week's even;
+what she did with the "subjects" she had previously professed
+with equal authority; no one had ever yet discovered.  Her mind
+was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers,
+without leaving their address behind, and frequently without
+paying for their board.  It was Mrs. Ballinger's boast that she
+was "abreast with the Thought of the Day," and her pride that
+this advanced position should be expressed by the books on her
+drawing-room table.  These volumes, frequently renewed, and
+almost always damp from the press, bore names generally
+unfamiliar to Mrs. Leveret, and giving her, as she furtively
+scanned them, a disheartening glimpse of new fields of knowledge
+to be breathlessly traversed in Mrs. Ballinger's wake.  But to-
+day a number of maturer-looking volumes were adroitly mingled
+with the primeurs of the press--Karl Marx jostled Professor
+Bergson, and the "Confessions of St. Augustine" lay beside the
+last work on "Mendelism"; so that even to Mrs. Leveret's
+fluttered perceptions it was clear that Mrs. Ballinger didn't in
+the least know what Osric Dane was likely to talk about, and had
+taken measures to be prepared for anything.  Mrs. Leveret felt
+like a passenger on an ocean steamer who is told that there is no
+immediate danger, but that she had better put on her life-belt.
+
+It was a relief to be roused from these forebodings by Miss Van
+Vluyck's arrival.
+
+"Well, my dear," the new-comer briskly asked her hostess, "what
+subjects are we to discuss to-day?"
+
+Mrs. Ballinger was furtively replacing a volume of Wordsworth by
+a copy of Verlaine.  "I hardly know," she said somewhat
+nervously.  "Perhaps we had better leave that to circumstances."
+
+"Circumstances?" said Miss Van Vluyck drily.  "That means, I
+suppose, that Laura Glyde will take the floor as usual, and we
+shall be deluged with literature."
+
+Philanthropy and statistics were Miss Van Vluyck's province, and
+she naturally resented any tendency to divert their guest's
+attention from these topics.
+
+Mrs. Plinth at this moment appeared.
+
+"Literature?" she protested in a tone of remonstrance.  "But this
+is perfectly unexpected.  I understood we were to talk of Osric
+Dane's novel."
+
+Mrs. Ballinger winced at the discrimination, but let it pass.
+"We can hardly make that our chief subject--at least not TOO
+intentionally," she suggested.  "Of course we can let our talk
+DRIFT in that direction; but we ought to have some other topic as
+an introduction, and that is what I wanted to consult you about.
+The fact is, we know so little of Osric Dane's tastes and
+interests that it is difficult to make any special preparation."
+
+"It may be difficult," said Mrs. Plinth with decision, "but it is
+absolutely necessary.  I know what that happy-go-lucky principle
+leads to.  As I told one of my nieces the other day, there are
+certain emergencies for which a lady should always be prepared.
+It's in shocking taste to wear colours when one pays a visit of
+condolence, or a last year's dress when there are reports that
+one's husband is on the wrong side of the market; and so it is
+with conversation.  All I ask is that I should know beforehand
+what is to be talked about; then I feel sure of being able to say
+the proper thing."
+
+"I quite agree with you," Mrs. Ballinger anxiously assented;
+"but--"
+
+And at that instant, heralded by the fluttered parlour-maid,
+Osric Dane appeared upon the threshold.
+
+Mrs. Leveret told her sister afterward that she had known at a
+glance what was coming.  She saw that Osric Dane was not going to
+meet them half way.  That distinguished personage had indeed
+entered with an air of compulsion not calculated to promote the
+easy exercise of hospitality.  She looked as though she were
+about to be photographed for a new edition of her books.
+
+The desire to propitiate a divinity is generally in inverse ratio
+to its responsiveness, and the sense of discouragement produced
+by Osric Dane's entrance visibly increased the Lunch Club's
+eagerness to please her.  Any lingering idea that she might
+consider herself under an obligation to her entertainers was at
+once dispelled by her manner: as Mrs. Leveret said afterward to
+her sister, she had a way of looking at you that made you feel as
+if there was something wrong with your hat.  This evidence of
+greatness produced such an immediate impression on the ladies
+that a shudder of awe ran through them when Mrs. Roby, as their
+hostess led the great personage into the dining-room, turned back
+to whisper to the others: "What a brute she is!"
+
+The hour about the table did not tend to correct this verdict.
+It was passed by Osric Dane in the silent deglutition of Mrs.
+Ballinger's menu, and by the members of the Club in the emission
+of tentative platitudes which their guest seemed to swallow as
+perfunctorily as the successive courses of the luncheon.
+
+Mrs. Ballinger's deplorable delay in fixing a topic had thrown
+the Club into a mental disarray which increased with the return
+to the drawing-room, where the actual business of discussion was
+to open.  Each lady waited for the other to speak; and there was
+a general shock of disappointment when their hostess opened the
+conversation by the painfully commonplace inquiry: "Is this your
+first visit to Hillbridge?"
+
+Even Mrs. Leveret was conscious that this was a bad beginning;
+and a vague impulse of deprecation made Miss Glyde interject: "It
+is a very small place indeed."
+
+Mrs. Plinth bristled.  "We have a great many representative
+people," she said, in the tone of one who speaks for her order.
+
+Osric Dane turned to her thoughtfully.  "What do they represent?"
+she asked.
+
+Mrs. Plinth's constitutional dislike to being questioned was
+intensified by her sense of unpreparedness; and her reproachful
+glance passed the question on to Mrs. Ballinger.
+
+"Why," said that lady, glancing in turn at the other members, "as
+a community I hope it is not too much to say that we stand for
+culture."
+
+"For art--" Miss Glyde eagerly interjected.
+
+"For art and literature," Mrs. Ballinger emended.
+
+"And for sociology, I trust," snapped Miss Van Vluyck.
+
+"We have a standard," said Mrs. Plinth, feeling herself suddenly
+secure on the vast expanse of a generalisation: and Mrs. Leveret,
+thinking there must be room for more than one on so broad a
+statement, took courage to murmur: "Oh, certainly; we have a
+standard."
+
+"The object of our little club," Mrs. Ballinger continued, "is to
+concentrate the highest tendencies of Hillbridge--to centralise
+and focus its complex intellectual effort."
+
+This was felt to be so happy that the ladies drew an almost
+audible breath of relief.
+
+"We aspire," the President went on, "to stand for what is highest
+in art, literature and ethics."
+
+Osric Dane again turned to her.  "What ethics?" she asked.
+
+A tremor of apprehension encircled the room.  None of the ladies
+required any preparation to pronounce on a question of morals;
+but when they were called ethics it was different.  The club,
+when fresh from the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," the "Reader's
+Handbook" or Smith's "Classical Dictionary," could deal
+confidently with any subject; but when taken unawares it had been
+known to define agnosticism as a heresy of the Early Church and
+Professor Froude as a distinguished histologist; and such minor
+members as Mrs. Leveret still secretly regarded ethics as
+something vaguely pagan.
+
+Even to Mrs. Ballinger, Osric Dane's question was unsettling, and
+there was a general sense of gratitude when Laura Glyde leaned
+forward to say, with her most sympathetic accent: "You must
+excuse us, Mrs. Dane, for not being able, just at present, to
+talk of anything but 'The Wings of Death.'"
+
+"Yes," said Miss Van Vluyck, with a sudden resolve to carry the
+war into the enemy's camp.  "We are so anxious to know the exact
+purpose you had in mind in writing your wonderful book."
+
+"You will find," Mrs. Plinth interposed, "that we are not
+superficial readers."
+
+"We are eager to hear from you," Miss Van Vluyck continued, "if
+the pessimistic tendency of the book is an expression of your own
+convictions or--"
+
+"Or merely," Miss Glyde hastily thrust in, "a sombre background
+brushed in to throw your figures into more vivid relief.  ARE you
+not primarily plastic?"
+
+"I have always maintained," Mrs. Ballinger interposed, "that you
+represent the purely objective method--"
+
+Osric Dane helped herself critically to coffee.  "How do you
+define objective?" she then inquired.
+
+There was a flurried pause before Laura Glyde intensely murmured:
+"In reading YOU we don't define, we feel."
+
+Osric Dane smiled.  "The cerebellum," she remarked, "is not
+infrequently the seat of the literary emotions."  And she took a
+second lump of sugar.
+
+The sting that this remark was vaguely felt to conceal was almost
+neutralised by the satisfaction of being addressed in such
+technical language.
+
+"Ah, the cerebellum," said Miss Van Vluyck complacently.  "The
+Club took a course in psychology last winter."
+
+"Which psychology?" asked Osric Dane.
+
+There was an agonising pause, during which each member of the
+Club secretly deplored the distressing inefficiency of the
+others.  Only Mrs. Roby went on placidly sipping her chartreuse.
+At last Mrs. Ballinger said, with an attempt at a high tone:
+"Well, really, you know, it was last year that we took
+psychology, and this winter we have been so absorbed in--"
+
+She broke off, nervously trying to recall some of the Club's
+discussions; but her faculties seemed to be paralysed by the
+petrifying stare of Osric Dane.  What HAD the club been absorbed
+in lately?  Mrs. Ballinger, with a vague purpose of gaining time,
+repeated slowly: "We've been so intensely absorbed in--"
+
+Mrs. Roby put down her liqueur glass and drew near the group with
+a smile.
+
+"In Xingu?" she gently prompted.
+
+A thrill ran through the other members.  They exchanged confused
+glances, and then, with one accord, turned a gaze of mingled
+relief and interrogation on their unexpected rescuer.  The
+expression of each denoted a different phase of the same emotion.
+Mrs. Plinth was the first to compose her features to an air of
+reassurance: after a moment's hasty adjustment her look almost
+implied that it was she who had given the word to Mrs. Ballinger.
+
+"Xingu, of course!" exclaimed the latter with her accustomed
+promptness, while Miss Van Vluyck and Laura Glyde seemed to be
+plumbing the depths of memory, and Mrs. Leveret, feeling
+apprehensively for Appropriate Allusions, was somehow reassured
+by the uncomfortable pressure of its bulk against her person.
+
+Osric Dane's change of countenance was no less striking than that
+of her entertainers.  She too put down her coffee-cup, but with a
+look of distinct annoyance: she too wore, for a brief moment,
+what Mrs. Roby afterward described as the look of feeling for
+something in the back of her head; and before she could dissemble
+these momentary signs of weakness, Mrs. Roby, turning to her with
+a deferential smile, had said: "And we've been so hoping that
+to-day you would tell us just what you think of it."
+
+Osric Dane received the homage of the smile as a matter of
+course; but the accompanying question obviously embarrassed her,
+and it became clear to her observers that she was not quick at
+shifting her facial scenery.  It was as though her countenance
+had so long been set in an expression of unchallenged superiority
+that the muscles had stiffened, and refused to obey her orders.
+
+"Xingu--" she murmured, as if seeking in her turn to gain time.
+
+Mrs. Roby continued to press her.  "Knowing how engrossing the
+subject is, you will understand how it happens that the Club has
+let everything else go to the wall for the moment.  Since we took
+up Xingu I might almost say--were it not for your books--that
+nothing else seems to us worth remembering."
+
+Osric Dane's stern features were darkened rather than lit up by
+an uneasy smile.  "I am glad to hear there is one exception," she
+gave out between narrowed lips.
+
+"Oh, of course," Mrs. Roby said prettily; "but as you have shown
+us that--so very naturally!--you don't care to talk about your
+own things, we really can't let you off from telling us exactly
+what you think about Xingu; especially," she added, with a
+persuasive smile, "as some people say that one of your last books
+was simply saturated with it."
+
+It was an IT, then--the assurance sped like fire through the
+parched minds of the other members.  In their eagerness to gain
+the least little clue to Xingu they almost forgot the joy of
+assisting at the discomfiture of Mrs. Dane.
+
+The latter reddened nervously under her antagonist's direct
+assault.  "May I ask," she faltered out in an embarrassed tone,
+"to which of my books you refer?"
+
+Mrs. Roby did not falter.  "That's just what I want you to tell
+us; because, though I was present, I didn't actually take part."
+
+"Present at what?" Mrs. Dane took her up; and for an instant the
+trembling members of the Lunch Club thought that the champion
+Providence had raised up for them had lost a point.  But Mrs.
+Roby explained herself gaily: "At the discussion, of course.  And
+so we're dreadfully anxious to know just how it was that you went
+into the Xingu."
+
+There was a portentous pause, a silence so big with incalculable
+dangers that the members with one accord checked the words on
+their lips, like soldiers dropping their arms to watch a single
+combat between their leaders.  Then Mrs. Dane gave expression to
+their inmost dread by saying sharply: "Ah--you say THE Xingu, do
+you?"
+
+Mrs. Roby smiled undauntedly.  "It IS a shade pedantic, isn't it?
+Personally, I always drop the article; but I don't know how the
+other members feel about it."
+
+The other members looked as though they would willingly have
+dispensed with this deferential appeal to their opinion, and Mrs.
+Roby, after a bright glance about the group, went on: "They
+probably think, as I do, that nothing really matters except the
+thing itself--except Xingu."
+
+No immediate reply seemed to occur to Mrs. Dane, and Mrs.
+Ballinger gathered courage to say: "Surely every one must feel
+that about Xingu."
+
+Mrs. Plinth came to her support with a heavy murmur of assent,
+and Laura Glyde breathed emotionally: "I have known cases where
+it has changed a whole life."
+
+"It has done me worlds of good," Mrs. Leveret interjected,
+seeming to herself to remember that she had either taken it or
+read it in the winter before.
+
+"Of course," Mrs. Roby admitted, "the difficulty is that one must
+give up so much time to it.  It's very long."
+
+"I can't imagine," said Miss Van Vluyck tartly, "grudging the
+time given to such a subject."
+
+"And deep in places," Mrs. Roby pursued; (so then it was a book!)
+"And it isn't easy to skip."
+
+"I never skip," said Mrs. Plinth dogmatically.
+
+"Ah, it's dangerous to, in Xingu.  Even at the start there are
+places where one can't.  One must just wade through."
+
+"I should hardly call it WADING," said Mrs. Ballinger
+sarcastically.
+
+Mrs. Roby sent her a look of interest.  "Ah--you always found it
+went swimmingly?"
+
+Mrs. Ballinger hesitated.  "Of course there are difficult
+passages," she conceded modestly.
+
+"Yes; some are not at all clear--even," Mrs. Roby added, "if one
+is familiar with the original."
+
+"As I suppose you are?" Osric Dane interposed, suddenly fixing
+her with a look of challenge.
+
+Mrs. Roby met it by a deprecating smile.  "Oh, it's really not
+difficult up to a certain point; though some of the branches are
+very little known, and it's almost impossible to get at the
+source."
+
+"Have you ever tried?" Mrs. Plinth enquired, still distrustful of
+Mrs. Roby's thoroughness.
+
+Mrs. Roby was silent for a moment; then she replied with lowered
+lids: "No--but a friend of mine did; a very brilliant man; and he
+told me it was best for women--not to . . ."
+
+A shudder ran around the room.  Mrs. Leveret coughed so that the
+parlour-maid, who was handing the cigarettes, should not hear;
+Miss Van Vluyck's face took on a nauseated expression, and Mrs.
+Plinth looked as if she were passing some one she did not care to
+bow to.  But the most remarkable result of Mrs. Roby's words was
+the effect they produced on the Lunch Club's distinguished guest.
+Osric Dane's impassive features suddenly melted to an expression
+of the warmest human sympathy, and edging her chair toward Mrs.
+Roby's she asked: "Did he really?  And--did you find he was
+right?"
+
+Mrs. Ballinger, in whom annoyance at Mrs. Roby's unwonted
+assumption of prominence was beginning to displace gratitude for
+the aid she had rendered, could not consent to her being allowed,
+by such dubious means, to monopolise the attention of their
+guest.  If Osric Dane had not enough self-respect to resent Mrs.
+Roby's flippancy, at least the Lunch Club would do so in the
+person of its President.
+
+Mrs. Ballinger laid her hand on Mrs. Roby's arm.  "We must not
+forget," she said with a frigid amiability, "that absorbing as
+Xingu is to US, it may be less interesting to--"
+
+"Oh, no, on the contrary, I assure you," Osric Dane energetically
+intervened.
+
+"--to others," Mrs. Ballinger finished firmly; "and we must not
+allow our little meeting to end without persuading Mrs. Dane to
+say a few words to us on a subject which, to-day, is much more
+present in all our thoughts.  I refer, of course, to 'The Wings
+of Death.'"
+
+The other members, animated by various degrees of the same
+sentiment, and encouraged by the humanised mien of their
+redoubtable guest, repeated after Mrs. Ballinger: "Oh, yes, you
+really MUST talk to us a little about your book."
+
+Osric Dane's expression became as bored, though not as haughty,
+as when her work had been previously mentioned.  But before she
+could respond to Mrs. Ballinger's request, Mrs. Roby had risen
+from her seat, and was pulling her veil down over her frivolous
+nose.
+
+"I'm so sorry," she said, advancing toward her hostess with
+outstretched hand, "but before Mrs. Dane begins I think I'd
+better run away.  Unluckily, as you know, I haven't read her
+books, so I should be at a terrible disadvantage among you all;
+and besides, I've an engagement to play bridge."
+
+If Mrs. Roby had simply pleaded her ignorance of Osric Dane's
+works as a reason for withdrawing, the Lunch Club, in view of her
+recent prowess, might have approved such evidence of discretion;
+but to couple this excuse with the brazen announcement that she
+was foregoing the privilege for the purpose of joining a bridge-
+party, was only one more instance of her deplorable lack of
+discrimination.
+
+The ladies were disposed, however, to feel that her departure--
+now that she had performed the sole service she was ever likely
+to render them--would probably make for greater order and dignity
+in the impending discussion, besides relieving them of the sense
+of self-distrust which her presence always mysteriously produced.
+Mrs. Ballinger therefore restricted herself to a formal murmur of
+regret, and the other members were just grouping themselves
+comfortably about Osric Dane when the latter, to their dismay,
+started up from the sofa on which she had been deferentially
+enthroned.
+
+"Oh wait--do wait, and I'll go with you!" she called out to Mrs.
+Roby; and, seizing the hands of the disconcerted members, she
+administered a series of farewell pressures with the mechanical
+haste of a railway-conductor punching tickets.
+
+"I'm so sorry--I'd quite forgotten--" she flung back at them from
+the threshold; and as she joined Mrs. Roby, who had turned in
+surprise at her appeal, the other ladies had the mortification of
+hearing her say, in a voice which she did not take the pains to
+lower: "If you'll let me walk a little way with you, I should so
+like to ask you a few more questions about Xingu . . ."
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The incident had been so rapid that the door closed on the
+departing pair before the other members had had time to
+understand what was happening.  Then a sense of the indignity put
+upon them by Osric Dane's unceremonious desertion began to
+contend with the confused feeling that they had been cheated out
+of their due without exactly knowing how or why.
+
+There was an awkward silence, during which Mrs. Ballinger, with a
+perfunctory hand, rearranged the skilfully grouped literature at
+which her distinguished guest had not so much as glanced; then
+Miss Van Vluyck tartly pronounced: "Well, I can't say that I
+consider Osric Dane's departure a great loss."
+
+This confession crystallised the fluid resentment of the other
+members, and Mrs. Leveret exclaimed: "I do believe she came on
+purpose to be nasty!"
+
+It was Mrs. Plinth's private opinion that Osric Dane's attitude
+toward the Lunch Club might have been very different had it
+welcomed her in the majestic setting of the Plinth drawing-rooms;
+but not liking to reflect on the inadequacy of Mrs. Ballinger's
+establishment she sought a round-about satisfaction in
+depreciating her savoir faire.
+
+"I said from the first that we ought to have had a subject ready.
+It's what always happens when you're unprepared.  Now if we'd
+only got up Xingu--"
+
+The slowness of Mrs. Plinth's mental processes was always allowed
+for by the Club; but this instance of it was too much for Mrs.
+Ballinger's equanimity.
+
+"Xingu!" she scoffed.  "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so
+much more about it than she did--unprepared though we were--that
+made Osric Dane so furious.  I should have thought that was plain
+enough to everybody!"
+
+This retort impressed even Mrs. Plinth, and Laura Glyde, moved by
+an impulse of generosity, said: "Yes, we really ought to be
+grateful to Mrs. Roby for introducing the topic.  It may have
+made Osric Dane furious, but at least it made her civil."
+
+"I am glad we were able to show her," added Miss Van Vluyck,
+"that a broad and up-to-date culture is not confined to the great
+intellectual centres."
+
+This increased the satisfaction of the other members, and they
+began to forget their wrath against Osric Dane in the pleasure of
+having contributed to her defeat.
+
+Miss Van Vluyck thoughtfully rubbed her spectacles.  "What
+surprised me most," she continued, "was that Fanny Roby should be
+so up on Xingu."
+
+This frank admission threw a slight chill on the company, but
+Mrs. Ballinger said with an air of indulgent irony: "Mrs. Roby
+always has the knack of making a little go a long way; still, we
+certainly owe her a debt for happening to remember that she'd
+heard of Xingu."  And this was felt by the other members to be a
+graceful way of cancelling once for all the Club's obligation to
+Mrs. Roby.
+
+Even Mrs. Leveret took courage to speed a timid shaft of irony:
+"I fancy Osric Dane hardly expected to take a lesson in Xingu at
+Hillbridge!"
+
+Mrs. Ballinger smiled.  "When she asked me what we represented--
+do you remember?--I wish I'd simply said we represented Xingu!"
+
+All the ladies laughed appreciatively at this sally, except Mrs.
+Plinth, who said, after a moment's deliberation: "I'm not sure it
+would have been wise to do so."
+
+Mrs. Ballinger, who was already beginning to feel as if she had
+launched at Osric Dane the retort which had just occurred to her,
+looked ironically at Mrs. Plinth.  "May I ask why?" she enquired.
+
+Mrs. Plinth looked grave.  "Surely," she said, "I understood from
+Mrs. Roby herself that the subject was one it was as well not to
+go into too deeply?"
+
+Miss Van Vluyck rejoined with precision: "I think that applied
+only to an investigation of the origin of the--of the--"; and
+suddenly she found that her usually accurate memory had failed
+her.  "It's a part of the subject I never studied myself," she
+concluded lamely.
+
+"Nor I," said Mrs. Ballinger.
+
+Laura Glyde bent toward them with widened eyes.  "And yet it
+seems--doesn't it?--the part that is fullest of an esoteric
+fascination?"
+
+"I don't know on what you base that," said Miss Van Vluyck
+argumentatively.
+
+"Well, didn't you notice how intensely interested Osric Dane
+became as soon as she heard what the brilliant foreigner--he WAS
+a foreigner, wasn't he?--had told Mrs. Roby about the origin--the
+origin of the rite--or whatever you call it?"
+
+Mrs. Plinth looked disapproving, and Mrs. Ballinger visibly
+wavered.  Then she said in a decisive tone: "It may not be
+desirable to touch on the--on that part of the subject in general
+conversation; but, from the importance it evidently has to a
+woman of Osric Dane's distinction, I feel as if we ought not to
+be afraid to discuss it among ourselves--without gloves--though
+with closed doors, if necessary."
+
+"I'm quite of your opinion," Miss Van Vluyck came briskly to her
+support; "on condition, that is, that all grossness of language
+is avoided."
+
+"Oh, I'm sure we shall understand without that," Mrs. Leveret
+tittered; and Laura Glyde added significantly: "I fancy we can
+read between the lines," while Mrs. Ballinger rose to assure
+herself that the doors were really closed.
+
+Mrs. Plinth had not yet given her adhesion.  "I hardly see," she
+began, "what benefit is to be derived from investigating such
+peculiar customs--"
+
+But Mrs. Ballinger's patience had reached the extreme limit of
+tension.  "This at least," she returned; "that we shall not be
+placed again in the humiliating position of finding ourselves
+less up on our own subjects than Fanny Roby!"
+
+Even to Mrs. Plinth this argument was conclusive.  She peered
+furtively about the room and lowered her commanding tones to ask:
+"Have you got a copy?"
+
+"A--a copy?" stammered Mrs. Ballinger.  She was aware that the
+other members were looking at her expectantly, and that this
+answer was inadequate, so she supported it by asking another
+question.  "A copy of what?"
+
+Her companions bent their expectant gaze on Mrs. Plinth, who, in
+turn, appeared less sure of herself than usual.  "Why, of--of--
+the book," she explained.
+
+"What book?" snapped Miss Van Vluyck, almost as sharply as Osric
+Dane.
+
+Mrs. Ballinger looked at Laura Glyde, whose eyes were
+interrogatively fixed on Mrs. Leveret.  The fact of being
+deferred to was so new to the latter that it filled her with an
+insane temerity.  "Why, Xingu, of course!" she exclaimed.
+
+A profound silence followed this direct challenge to the
+resources of Mrs. Ballinger's library, and the latter, after
+glancing nervously toward the Books of the Day, returned in a
+deprecating voice: "It's not a thing one cares to leave about."
+
+"I should think NOT!" exclaimed Mrs. Plinth.
+
+"It IS a book, then?" said Miss Van Vluyck.
+
+This again threw the company into disarray, and Mrs. Ballinger,
+with an impatient sigh, rejoined: "Why--there IS a book--
+naturally . . ."
+
+"Then why did Miss Glyde call it a religion?"
+
+Laura Glyde started up.  "A religion?  I never--"
+
+"Yes, you did," Miss Van Vluyck insisted; "you spoke of rites;
+and Mrs. Plinth said it was a custom."
+
+Miss Glyde was evidently making a desperate effort to reinforce
+her statement; but accuracy of detail was not her strongest
+point.  At length she began in a deep murmur: "Surely they used
+to do something of the kind at the Eleusinian mysteries--"
+
+"Oh--" said Miss Van Vluyck, on the verge of disapproval; and
+Mrs. Plinth protested: "I understood there was to be no
+indelicacy!"
+
+Mrs. Ballinger could not control her irritation.  "Really, it is
+too bad that we should not be able to talk the matter over
+quietly among ourselves.  Personally, I think that if one goes
+into Xingu at all--"
+
+"Oh, so do I!" cried Miss Glyde.
+
+"And I don't see how one can avoid doing so, if one wishes to
+keep up with the Thought of the Day--"
+
+Mrs. Leveret uttered an exclamation of relief.  "There--that's
+it!" she interposed.
+
+"What's it?" the President curtly took her up.
+
+"Why--it's a--a Thought: I mean a philosophy."
+
+This seemed to bring a certain relief to Mrs. Ballinger and Laura
+Glyde, but Miss Van Vluyck said dogmatically: "Excuse me if I
+tell you that you're all mistaken.  Xingu happens to be a
+language."
+
+"A language!" the Lunch Club cried.
+
+"Certainly.  Don't you remember Fanny Roby's saying that there
+were several branches, and that some were hard to trace?  What
+could that apply to but dialects?"
+
+Mrs. Ballinger could no longer restrain a contemptuous laugh.
+"Really, if the Lunch Club has reached such a pass that it has to
+go to Fanny Roby for instruction on a subject like Xingu, it had
+almost better cease to exist!"
+
+"It's really her fault for not being clearer," Laura Glyde put
+in.
+
+"Oh, clearness and Fanny Roby!" Mrs. Ballinger shrugged.  "I
+daresay we shall find she was mistaken on almost every point."
+
+"Why not look it up?" said Mrs. Plinth.
+
+As a rule this recurrent suggestion of Mrs. Plinth's was ignored
+in the heat of discussion, and only resorted to afterward in the
+privacy of each member's home.  But on the present occasion the
+desire to ascribe their own confusion of thought to the vague and
+contradictory nature of Mrs. Roby's statements caused the members
+of the Lunch Club to utter a collective demand for a book of
+reference.
+
+At this point the production of her treasured volume gave Mrs.
+Leveret, for a moment, the unusual experience of occupying the
+centre front; but she was not able to hold it long, for
+Appropriate Allusions contained no mention of Xingu.
+
+"Oh, that's not the kind of thing we want!" exclaimed Miss Van
+Vluyck.  She cast a disparaging glance over Mrs. Ballinger's
+assortment of literature, and added impatiently: "Haven't you any
+useful books?"
+
+"Of course I have," replied Mrs. Ballinger indignantly; "but I
+keep them in my husband's dressing-room."
+
+From this region, after some difficulty and delay, the parlour-
+maid produced the W-Z volume of an Encyclopaedia and, in
+deference to the fact that the demand for it had come from Miss
+Van Vluyck, laid the ponderous tome before her.
+
+There was a moment of painful suspense while Miss Van Vluyck
+rubbed her spectacles, adjusted them, and turned to Z; and a
+murmur of surprise when she said: "It isn't here."
+
+"I suppose," said Mrs. Plinth, "it's not fit to be put in a book
+of reference."
+
+"Oh, nonsense!" exclaimed Mrs. Ballinger.  "Try X."
+
+Miss Van Vluyck turned back through the volume, peering short-
+sightedly up and down the pages, till she came to a stop and
+remained motionless, like a dog on a point.
+
+"Well, have you found it?" Mrs. Ballinger enquired, after a
+considerable delay.
+
+"Yes.  I've found it," said Miss Van Vluyck in a queer voice.
+
+Mrs. Plinth hastily interposed: "I beg you won't read it aloud if
+there's anything offensive."
+
+Miss Van Vluyck, without answering, continued her silent
+scrutiny.
+
+"Well, what IS it?" exclaimed Laura Glyde excitedly.
+
+"DO tell us!" urged Mrs. Leveret, feeling that she would have
+something awful to tell her sister.
+
+Miss Van Vluyck pushed the volume aside and turned slowly toward
+the expectant group.
+
+"It's a river."
+
+"A RIVER?"
+
+"Yes: in Brazil.  Isn't that where she's been living?"
+
+"Who?  Fanny Roby?  Oh, but you must be mistaken.  You've been
+reading the wrong thing," Mrs. Ballinger exclaimed, leaning over
+her to seize the volume.
+
+"It's the only XINGU in the Encyclopaedia; and she HAS been
+living in Brazil," Miss Van Vluyck persisted.
+
+"Yes: her brother has a consulship there," Mrs. Leveret eagerly
+interposed.
+
+"But it's too ridiculous!  I--we--why we ALL remember studying
+Xingu last year--or the year before last," Mrs. Ballinger
+stammered.
+
+"I thought I did when YOU said so," Laura Glyde avowed.
+
+"I said so?" cried Mrs. Ballinger.
+
+"Yes.  You said it had crowded everything else out of your mind."
+
+"Well, YOU said it had changed your whole life!"
+
+"For that matter, Miss Van Vluyck said she had never grudged the
+time she'd given it."
+
+Mrs. Plinth interposed: "I made it clear that I knew nothing
+whatever of the original."
+
+Mrs. Ballinger broke off the dispute with a groan.  "Oh, what
+does it all matter if she's been making fools of us?  I believe
+Miss Van Vluyck's right--she was talking of the river all the
+while!"
+
+"How could she?  It's too preposterous," Miss Glyde exclaimed.
+
+"Listen."  Miss Van Vluyck had repossessed herself of the
+Encyclopaedia, and restored her spectacles to a nose reddened by
+excitement.  "'The Xingu, one of the principal rivers of Brazil,
+rises on the plateau of Mato Grosso, and flows in a northerly
+direction for a length of no less than one thousand one hundred
+and eighteen miles, entering the Amazon near the mouth of the
+latter river.  The upper course of the Xingu is auriferous and
+fed by numerous branches.  Its source was first discovered in
+1884 by the German explorer von den Steinen, after a difficult
+and dangerous expedition through a region inhabited by tribes
+still in the Stone Age of culture.'"
+
+The ladies received this communication in a state of stupefied
+silence from which Mrs. Leveret was the first to rally.  "She
+certainly DID speak of its having branches."
+
+The word seemed to snap the last thread of their incredulity.
+"And of its great length," gasped Mrs. Ballinger.
+
+"She said it was awfully deep, and you couldn't skip--you just
+had to wade through," Miss Glyde subjoined.
+
+The idea worked its way more slowly through Mrs. Plinth's compact
+resistances.  "How could there be anything improper about a
+river?" she inquired.
+
+"Improper?"
+
+"Why, what she said about the source--that it was corrupt?"
+
+"Not corrupt, but hard to get at," Laura Glyde corrected.  "Some
+one who'd been there had told her so.  I daresay it was the
+explorer himself--doesn't it say the expedition was dangerous?"
+
+"'Difficult and dangerous,'" read Miss Van Vluyck.
+
+Mrs. Ballinger pressed her hands to her throbbing temples.
+"There's nothing she said that wouldn't apply to a river--to this
+river!"  She swung about excitedly to the other members.  "Why,
+do you remember her telling us that she hadn't read 'The Supreme
+Instant' because she'd taken it on a boating party while she was
+staying with her brother, and some one had 'shied' it overboard--
+'shied' of course was her own expression?"
+
+The ladies breathlessly signified that the expression had not
+escaped them.
+
+"Well--and then didn't she tell Osric Dane that one of her books
+was simply saturated with Xingu?  Of course it was, if some of
+Mrs. Roby's rowdy friends had thrown it into the river!"
+
+This surprising reconstruction of the scene in which they had
+just participated left the members of the Lunch Club
+inarticulate.  At length Mrs. Plinth, after visibly labouring
+with the problem, said in a heavy tone: "Osric Dane was taken in
+too."
+
+Mrs. Leveret took courage at this.  "Perhaps that's what Mrs.
+Roby did it for.  She said Osric Dane was a brute, and she may
+have wanted to give her a lesson."
+
+Miss Van Vluyck frowned.  "It was hardly worth while to do it at
+our expense."
+
+"At least," said Miss Glyde with a touch of bitterness, "she
+succeeded in interesting her, which was more than we did."
+
+"What chance had we?" rejoined Mrs. Ballinger.  "Mrs. Roby
+monopolised her from the first.  And THAT, I've no doubt, was her
+purpose--to give Osric Dane a false impression of her own
+standing in the Club.  She would hesitate at nothing to attract
+attention: we all know how she took in poor Professor Foreland."
+
+"She actually makes him give bridge-teas every Thursday," Mrs.
+Leveret piped up.
+
+Laura Glyde struck her hands together.  "Why, this is Thursday,
+and it's THERE she's gone, of course; and taken Osric with her!"
+
+"And they're shrieking over us at this moment," said Mrs.
+Ballinger between her teeth.
+
+This possibility seemed too preposterous to be admitted.  "She
+would hardly dare," said Miss Van Vluyck, "confess the imposture
+to Osric Dane."
+
+"I'm not so sure: I thought I saw her make a sign as she left.
+If she hadn't made a sign, why should Osric Dane have rushed out
+after her?"
+
+"Well, you know, we'd all been telling her how wonderful Xingu
+was, and she said she wanted to find out more about it," Mrs.
+Leveret said, with a tardy impulse of justice to the absent.
+
+This reminder, far from mitigating the wrath of the other
+members, gave it a stronger impetus.
+
+"Yes--and that's exactly what they're both laughing over now,"
+said Laura Glyde ironically.
+
+Mrs. Plinth stood up and gathered her expensive furs about her
+monumental form.  "I have no wish to criticise," she said; "but
+unless the Lunch Club can protect its members against the
+recurrence of such--such unbecoming scenes, I for one--"
+
+"Oh, so do I!" agreed Miss Glyde, rising also.
+
+Miss Van Vluyck closed the Encyclopaedia and proceeded to button
+herself into her jacket.  "My time is really too valuable--" she
+began.
+
+"I fancy we are all of one mind," said Mrs. Ballinger, looking
+searchingly at Mrs. Leveret, who looked at the others.
+
+"I always deprecate anything like a scandal--" Mrs. Plinth
+continued.
+
+"She has been the cause of one to-day!" exclaimed Miss Glyde.
+
+Mrs. Leveret moaned: "I don't see how she COULD!" and Miss Van
+Vluyck said, picking up her note-book: "Some women stop at
+nothing."
+
+"--but if," Mrs. Plinth took up her argument impressively,
+"anything of the kind had happened in MY house" (it never would
+have, her tone implied), "I should have felt that I owed it to
+myself either to ask for Mrs. Roby's resignation--or to offer
+mine."
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Plinth--" gasped the Lunch Club.
+
+"Fortunately for me," Mrs. Plinth continued with an awful
+magnanimity, "the matter was taken out of my hands by our
+President's decision that the right to entertain distinguished
+guests was a privilege vested in her office; and I think the
+other members will agree that, as she was alone in this opinion,
+she ought to be alone in deciding on the best way of effacing
+its--its really deplorable consequences."
+
+A deep silence followed this unexpected outbreak of Mrs. Plinth's
+long-stored resentment.
+
+"I don't see why I should be expected to ask her to resign--"
+Mrs. Ballinger at length began; but Laura Glyde turned back to
+remind her: "You know she made you say that you'd got on
+swimmingly in Xingu."
+
+An ill-timed giggle escaped from Mrs. Leveret, and Mrs. Ballinger
+energetically continued "--but you needn't think for a moment
+that I'm afraid to!"
+
+The door of the drawing-room closed on the retreating backs of
+the Lunch Club, and the President of that distinguished
+association, seating herself at her writing-table, and pushing
+away a copy of "The Wings of Death" to make room for her elbow,
+drew forth a sheet of the club's note-paper, on which she began
+to write: "My dear Mrs. Roby--"
+
+
+
+The End of Xingu
+
+
+
+
+THE VERDICT
+June 1908
+
+
+I had always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius--though a
+good fellow enough--so it was no great surprise to me to hear
+that, in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting,
+married a rich widow, and established himself in a villa on the
+Riviera.  (Though I rather thought it would have been Rome or
+Florence.)
+
+"The height of his glory"--that was what the women called it.  I
+can hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing--his last Chicago sitter--deploring
+his unaccountable abdication.  "Of course it's going to send the
+value of my picture 'way up; but I don't think of that, Mr.
+Rickham--the loss to Arrt is all I think of."  The word, on Mrs.
+Thwing's lips, multiplied its RS as though they were reflected in
+an endless vista of mirrors.  And it was not only the Mrs. Thwings
+who mourned.  Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the last
+Grafton Gallery show, stopped me before Gisburn's "Moon-dancers"
+to say, with tears in her eyes: "We shall not look upon
+its like again"?
+
+Well!--even through the prism of Hermia's tears I felt able to
+face the fact with equanimity.  Poor Jack Gisburn!  The women had
+made him--it was fitting that they should mourn him.  Among his
+own sex fewer regrets were heard, and in his own trade hardly a
+murmur.  Professional jealousy?  Perhaps.  If it were, the honour
+of the craft was vindicated by little Claude Nutley, who, in all
+good faith, brought out in the Burlington a very handsome
+"obituary" on Jack--one of those showy articles stocked with
+random technicalities that I have heard (I won't say by whom)
+compared to Gisburn's painting.  And so--his resolve being
+apparently irrevocable--the discussion gradually died out, and,
+as Mrs. Thwing had predicted, the price of "Gisburns" went up.
+
+It was not till three years later that, in the course of a few
+weeks' idling on the Riviera, it suddenly occurred to me to
+wonder why Gisburn had given up his painting.  On reflection, it
+really was a tempting problem.  To accuse his wife would have
+been too easy--his fair sitters had been denied the solace of
+saying that Mrs. Gisburn had "dragged him down."  For Mrs.
+Gisburn--as such--had not existed till nearly a year after Jack's
+resolve had been taken.  It might be that he had married her--
+since he liked his ease--because he didn't want to go on
+painting; but it would have been hard to prove that he had given
+up his painting because he had married her.
+
+Of course, if she had not dragged him down, she had equally, as
+Miss Croft contended, failed to "lift him up"--she had not led
+him back to the easel.  To put the brush into his hand again--
+what a vocation for a wife!  But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have
+disdained it--and I felt it might be interesting to find out why.
+
+The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely
+academic speculations; and having, on my way to Monte Carlo,
+caught a glimpse of Jack's balustraded terraces between the
+pines, I had myself borne thither the next day.
+
+I found the couple at tea beneath their palm-trees; and Mrs.
+Gisburn's welcome was so genial that, in the ensuing weeks, I
+claimed it frequently.  It was not that my hostess was
+"interesting": on that point I could have given Miss Croft the
+fullest reassurance.  It was just because she was NOT
+interesting--if I may be pardoned the bull--that I found her so.
+For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by interesting women:
+they had fostered his art, it had been reared in the hot-house of
+their adulation.  And it was therefore instructive to note what
+effect the "deadening atmosphere of mediocrity" (I quote Miss
+Croft) was having on him.
+
+I have mentioned that Mrs. Gisburn was rich; and it was
+immediately perceptible that her husband was extracting from this
+circumstance a delicate but substantial satisfaction.  It is, as
+a rule, the people who scorn money who get most out of it; and
+Jack's elegant disdain of his wife's big balance enabled him,
+with an appearance of perfect good-breeding, to transmute it into
+objects of art and luxury.  To the latter, I must add, he
+remained relatively indifferent; but he was buying Renaissance
+bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with a discrimination
+that bespoke the amplest resources.
+
+"Money's only excuse is to put beauty into circulation," was one
+of the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an
+exquisitely appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had
+again run over from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on
+him, added for my enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive
+to every form of beauty."
+
+Poor Jack!  It had always been his fate to have women say such
+things of him: the fact should be set down in extenuation.  What
+struck me now was that, for the first time, he resented the tone.
+I had seen him, so often, basking under similar tributes--was it
+the conjugal note that robbed them of their savour?  No--for,
+oddly enough, it became apparent that he was fond of Mrs.
+Gisburn--fond enough not to see her absurdity.  It was his own
+absurdity he seemed to be wincing under--his own attitude as an
+object for garlands and incense.
+
+"My dear, since I've chucked painting people don't say that stuff
+about me--they say it about Victor Grindle," was his only
+protest, as he rose from the table and strolled out onto the
+sunlit terrace.
+
+I glanced after him, struck by his last word.  Victor Grindle
+was, in fact, becoming the man of the moment--as Jack himself,
+one might put it, had been the man of the hour.  The younger
+artist was said to have formed himself at my friend's feet, and I
+wondered if a tinge of jealousy underlay the latter's mysterious
+abdication.  But no--for it was not till after that event that
+the rose Dubarry drawing-rooms had begun to display their
+"Grindles."
+
+I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of
+sugar to her spaniel in the dining-room.
+
+"Why HAS he chucked painting?" I asked abruptly.
+
+She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.
+
+"Oh, he doesn't HAVE to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy
+himself," she said quite simply.
+
+I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its
+famille-verte vases repeating the tones of the pale damask
+curtains, and its eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded
+frames.
+
+"Has he chucked his pictures too?  I haven't seen a single one in
+the house."
+
+A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open
+countenance.  "It's his ridiculous modesty, you know.  He says
+they're not fit to have about; he's sent them all away except
+one--my portrait--and that I have to keep upstairs."
+
+His ridiculous modesty--Jack's modesty about his pictures?  My
+curiosity was growing like the bean-stalk.  I said persuasively
+to my hostess: "I must really see your portrait, you know."
+
+She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her
+husband, lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a cigar and drawn
+the Russian deerhound's head between his knees.
+
+"Well, come while he's not looking," she said, with a laugh that
+tried to hide her nervousness; and I followed her between the
+marble Emperors of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terra-
+cotta nymphs poised among flowers at each landing.
+
+In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of
+delicate and distinguished objects, hung one of the familiar oval
+canvases, in the inevitable garlanded frame.  The mere outline of
+the frame called up all Gisburn's past!
+
+Mrs. Gisburn drew back the window-curtains, moved aside a
+jardiniere full of pink azaleas, pushed an arm-chair away, and
+said: "If you stand here you can just manage to see it.  I had it
+over the mantel-piece, but he wouldn't let it stay."
+
+Yes--I could just manage to see it--the first portrait of Jack's
+I had ever had to strain my eyes over!  Usually they had the
+place of honour--say the central panel in a pale yellow or rose
+Dubarry drawing-room, or a monumental easel placed so that it
+took the light through curtains of old Venetian point.  The more
+modest place became the picture better; yet, as my eyes grew
+accustomed to the half-light, all the characteristic qualities
+came out--all the hesitations disguised as audacities, the tricks
+of prestidigitation by which, with such consummate skill, he
+managed to divert attention from the real business of the picture
+to some pretty irrelevance of detail.  Mrs. Gisburn, presenting a
+neutral surface to work on--forming, as it were, so inevitably
+the background of her own picture--had lent herself in an unusual
+degree to the display of this false virtuosity.  The picture was
+one of Jack's "strongest," as his admirers would have put it--it
+represented, on his part, a swelling of muscles, a congesting of
+veins, a balancing, straddling and straining, that reminded one
+of the circus-clown's ironic efforts to lift a feather.  It met,
+in short, at every point the demand of lovely woman to be painted
+"strongly" because she was tired of being painted "sweetly"--and
+yet not to lose an atom of the sweetness.
+
+"It's the last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with
+pardonable pride.  "The last but one," she corrected herself--
+"but the other doesn't count, because he destroyed it."
+
+"Destroyed it?"  I was about to follow up this clue when I heard
+a footstep and saw Jack himself on the threshold.
+
+As he stood there, his hands in the pockets of his velveteen
+coat, the thin brown waves of hair pushed back from his white
+forehead, his lean sunburnt cheeks furrowed by a smile that
+lifted the tips of a self-confident moustache, I felt to what a
+degree he had the same quality as his pictures--the quality of
+looking cleverer than he was.
+
+His wife glanced at him deprecatingly, but his eyes travelled
+past her to the portrait.
+
+"Mr. Rickham wanted to see it," she began, as if excusing
+herself.  He shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.
+
+"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," he said lightly; then,
+passing his arm through mine: "Come and see the rest of the
+house."
+
+He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the
+bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the trouser-
+presses--all the complex simplifications of the millionaire's
+domestic economy.  And whenever my wonder paid the expected
+tribute he said, throwing out his chest a little: "Yes, I really
+don't see how people manage to live without that."
+
+Well--it was just the end one might have foreseen for him.  Only
+he was, through it all and in spite of it all--as he had been
+through, and in spite of, his pictures--so handsome, so charming,
+so disarming, that one longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with
+your leisure!" as once one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied
+with your work!"
+
+But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected
+check.
+
+"This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room
+at the end of the florid vista.  It was square and brown and
+leathery: no "effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing
+for reproduction in a picture weekly--above all, no least sign of
+ever having been used as a studio.
+
+The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack's break
+with his old life.
+
+"Don't you ever dabble with paint any more?" I asked, still
+looking about for a trace of such activity.
+
+"Never," he said briefly.
+
+"Or water-colour--or etching?"
+
+His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under
+their handsome sunburn.
+
+"Never think of it, my dear fellow--any more than if I'd never
+touched a brush."
+
+And his tone told me in a flash that he never thought of anything
+else.
+
+I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected
+discovery; and as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above
+the mantel-piece--the only object breaking the plain oak
+panelling of the room.
+
+"Oh, by Jove!" I said.
+
+It was a sketch of a donkey--an old tired donkey, standing in the
+rain under a wall.
+
+"By Jove--a Stroud!" I cried.
+
+He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little
+quickly.
+
+"What a wonder!  Made with a dozen lines--but on everlasting
+foundations.  You lucky chap, where did you get it?"
+
+He answered slowly: "Mrs. Stroud gave it to me."
+
+"Ah--I didn't know you even knew the Strouds.  He was such an
+inflexible hermit."
+
+"I didn't--till after. . . .  She sent for me to paint him when
+he was dead."
+
+"When he was dead?  You?"
+
+I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my
+surprise, for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes--she's
+an awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud.  Her only idea was to
+have him done by a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud!  She
+thought it the surest way of proclaiming his greatness--of
+forcing it on a purblind public.  And at the moment I was THE
+fashionable painter."
+
+"Ah, poor Stroud--as you say.  Was THAT his history?"
+
+"That was his history.  She believed in him, gloried in him--or
+thought she did.  But she couldn't bear not to have all the
+drawing-rooms with her.  She couldn't bear the fact that, on
+varnishing days, one could always get near enough to see his
+pictures.  Poor woman!  She's just a fragment groping for other
+fragments.  Stroud is the only whole I ever knew."
+
+"You ever knew?  But you just said--"
+
+Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.
+
+"Oh, I knew him, and he knew me--only it happened after he was
+dead."
+
+I dropped my voice instinctively.  "When she sent for you?"
+
+"Yes--quite insensible to the irony.  She wanted him vindicated--
+and by me!"
+
+He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the
+sketch of the donkey.  "There were days when I couldn't look at
+that thing--couldn't face it.  But I forced myself to put it
+here; and now it's cured me--cured me.  That's the reason why I
+don't dabble any more, my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself
+is the reason."
+
+For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned
+into a serious desire to understand him better.
+
+"I wish you'd tell me how it happened," I said.
+
+He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his
+fingers a cigarette he had forgotten to light.  Suddenly he
+turned toward me.
+
+"I'd rather like to tell you--because I've always suspected you
+of loathing my work."
+
+I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a good-
+humoured shrug.
+
+"Oh, I didn't care a straw when I believed in myself--and now
+it's an added tie between us!"
+
+He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the
+deep arm-chairs forward.  "There: make yourself comfortable--and
+here are the cigars you like."
+
+He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down
+the room, stopping now and then beneath the picture.
+
+"How it happened?  I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn't
+take much longer to happen. . . .  I can remember now how
+surprised and pleased I was when I got Mrs. Stroud's note.  Of
+course, deep down, I had always FELT there was no one like him--
+only I had gone with the stream, echoed the usual platitudes
+about him, till I half got to think he was a failure, one of the
+kind that are left behind.  By Jove, and he WAS left behind--
+because he had come to stay!  The rest of us had to let ourselves
+be swept along or go under, but he was high above the current--on
+everlasting foundations, as you say.
+
+"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather
+moved, Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud's career of
+failure being crowned by the glory of my painting him!  Of course
+I meant to do the picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when
+she began to stammer something about her poverty.  I remember
+getting off a prodigious phrase about the honour being MINE--oh,
+I was princely, my dear Rickham!  I was posing to myself like one
+of my own sitters.
+
+"Then I was taken up and left alone with him.  I had sent all my
+traps in advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to
+work.  He had been dead only twenty-four hours, and he died
+suddenly, of heart disease, so that there had been no preliminary
+work of destruction--his face was clear and untouched.  I had met
+him once or twice, years before, and thought him insignificant
+and dingy.  Now I saw that he was superb.
+
+"I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad
+to have my hand on such a 'subject.'  Then his strange life-
+likeness began to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I
+felt as if he were watching me do it.  The sensation was followed
+by the thought: if he WERE watching me, what would he say to my
+way of working?  My strokes began to go a little wild--I felt
+nervous and uncertain.
+
+"Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close
+grayish beard--as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself
+by holding it back from me.  That exasperated me still more.  The
+secret?  Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his!  I dashed at
+the canvas furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks.  But
+they failed me, they crumbled.  I saw that he wasn't watching the
+showy bits--I couldn't distract his attention; he just kept his
+eyes on the hard passages between.  Those were the ones I had
+always shirked, or covered up with some lying paint.  And how he
+saw through my lies!
+
+"I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey
+hanging on the wall near his bed.  His wife told me afterward it
+was the last thing he had done--just a note taken with a shaking
+hand, when he was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous
+heart attack.  Just a note!  But it tells his whole history.
+There are years of patient scornful persistence in every line.  A
+man who had swum with the current could never have learned that
+mighty up-stream stroke. . . .
+
+"I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then
+I looked at the donkey again.  I saw that, when Stroud laid in
+the first stroke, he knew just what the end would be.  He had
+possessed his subject, absorbed it, recreated it.  When had I
+done that with any of my things?  They hadn't been born of me--I
+had just adopted them. . . .
+
+"Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn't do
+another stroke.  The plain truth was, I didn't know where to put
+it--I HAD NEVER KNOWN.  Only, with my sitters and my public, a
+showy splash of colour covered up the fact--I just threw paint
+into their faces. . . .  Well, paint was the one medium those
+dead eyes could see through--see straight to the tottering
+foundations underneath.  Don't you know how, in talking a foreign
+language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one
+wants to but what one can?  Well--that was the way I painted; and
+as he lay there and watched me, the thing they called my
+'technique' collapsed like a house of cards.  He didn't sneer,
+you understand, poor Stroud--he just lay there quietly watching,
+and on his lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear the
+question: 'Are you sure you know where you're coming out?'
+
+"If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I
+should have done a great thing.  The next greatest thing was to
+see that I couldn't--and that grace was given me.  But, oh, at
+that minute, Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn't have
+given to have Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: 'It's
+not too late--I'll show you how'?
+
+"It WAS too late--it would have been, even if he'd been alive.  I
+packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud.  Of
+course I didn't tell her THAT--it would have been Greek to her.
+I simply said I couldn't paint him, that I was too moved.  She
+rather liked the idea--she's so romantic!  It was that that made
+her give me the donkey.  But she was terribly upset at not
+getting the portrait--she did so want him 'done' by some one
+showy!  At first I was afraid she wouldn't let me off--and at my
+wits' end I suggested Grindle.  Yes, it was I who started
+Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the 'coming' man, and she told
+somebody else, and so it got to be true. . . .  And he painted
+Stroud without wincing; and she hung the picture among her
+husband's things. . . ."
+
+He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his
+head, and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture
+above the chimney-piece.
+
+"I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me,
+if he'd been able to say what he thought that day."
+
+And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--"Begin
+again?" he flashed out.  "When the one thing that brings me
+anywhere near him is that I knew enough to leave off?"
+
+He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh.  "Only
+the irony of it is that I AM still painting--since Grindle's
+doing it for me!  The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but
+there's no exterminating our kind of art."
+
+
+
+The End of The Verdict
+
+
+
+
+THE RECKONING
+August, 1902
+
+
+I
+
+
+"The marriage law of the new dispensation will be: THOU SHALT NOT
+BE UNFAITHFUL--TO THYSELF."
+
+A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the
+haze of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband
+descended from his improvised platform, saw him merged in a
+congratulatory group of ladies.  Westall's informal talks on "The
+New Ethics" had drawn about him an eager following of the
+mentally unemployed--those who, as he had once phrased it, liked
+to have their brain-food cut up for them.  The talks had begun by
+accident.  Westall's ideas were known to be "advanced," but
+hitherto their advance had not been in the direction of
+publicity.  He had been, in his wife's opinion, almost
+pusillanimously careful not to let his personal views endanger
+his professional standing.  Of late, however, he had shown a
+puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down the gauntlet, to
+flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the relation
+of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a few
+admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner
+opinions a larger circulation by summing them up in a series of
+talks at the Van Sideren studio.
+
+The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially,
+on the fact that they had a studio.  Van Sideren's pictures were
+chiefly valuable as accessories to the mise en scene which
+differentiated his wife's "afternoons" from the blighting
+functions held in long New York drawing-rooms, and permitted her
+to offer their friends whiskey-and-soda instead of tea.  Mrs. Van
+Sideren, for her part, was skilled in making the most of the kind
+of atmosphere which a lay-figure and an easel create; and if at
+times she found the illusion hard to maintain, and lost courage
+to the extent of almost wishing that Herbert could paint, she
+promptly overcame such moments of weakness by calling in some
+fresh talent, some extraneous re-enforcement of the "artistic"
+impression.  It was in quest of such aid that she had seized on
+Westall, coaxing him, somewhat to his wife's surprise, into a
+flattered participation in her fraud.  It was vaguely felt, in
+the Van Sideren circle, that all the audacities were artistic,
+and that a teacher who pronounced marriage immoral was somehow as
+distinguished as a painter who depicted purple grass and a green
+sky.  The Van Sideren set were tired of the conventional color-
+scheme in art and conduct.
+
+Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of
+marriage; she might indeed have claimed her husband as a
+disciple.  In the early days of their union she had secretly
+resented his disinclination to proclaim himself a follower of the
+new creed; had been inclined to tax him with moral cowardice,
+with a failure to live up to the convictions for which their
+marriage was supposed to stand.  That was in the first burst of
+propagandism, when, womanlike, she wanted to turn her
+disobedience into a law.  Now she felt differently.  She could
+hardly account for the change, yet being a woman who never
+allowed her impulses to remain unaccounted for, she tried to do
+so by saying that she did not care to have the articles of her
+faith misinterpreted by the vulgar.  In this connection, she was
+beginning to think that almost every one was vulgar; certainly
+there were few to whom she would have cared to intrust the
+defence of so esoteric a doctrine.  And it was precisely at this
+point that Westall, discarding his unspoken principles, had
+chosen to descend from the heights of privacy, and stand hawking
+his convictions at the street-corner!
+
+It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously
+focussed upon herself Mrs. Westall's wandering resentment.  In
+the first place, the girl had no business to be there.  It was
+"horrid"--Mrs. Westall found herself slipping back into the old
+feminine vocabulary--simply "horrid" to think of a young girl's
+being allowed to listen to such talk.  The fact that Una smoked
+cigarettes and sipped an occasional cocktail did not in the least
+tarnish a certain radiant innocency which made her appear the
+victim, rather than the accomplice, of her parents' vulgarities.
+Julia Westall felt in a hot helpless way that something ought to
+be done--that some one ought to speak to the girl's mother.  And
+just then Una glided up.
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!"  Una fixed her with
+large limpid eyes.  "You believe it all, I suppose?" she asked
+with seraphic gravity.
+
+"All--what, my dear child?"
+
+The girl shone on her.  "About the higher life--the freer
+expansion of the individual--the law of fidelity to one's self,"
+she glibly recited.
+
+Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning
+blush.
+
+"My dear Una," she said, "you don't in the least understand what
+it's all about!"
+
+Miss Van Sideren stared, with a slowly answering blush.  "Don't
+YOU, then?" she murmured.
+
+Mrs. Westall laughed.  "Not always--or altogether!  But I should
+like some tea, please."
+
+Una led her to the corner where innocent beverages were
+dispensed.  As Julia received her cup she scrutinized the girl
+more carefully.  It was not such a girlish face, after all--
+definite lines were forming under the rosy haze of youth.  She
+reflected that Una must be six-and-twenty, and wondered why she
+had not married.  A nice stock of ideas she would have as her
+dower!  If THEY were to be a part of the modern girl's trousseau--
+
+Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start.  It was as though
+some one else had been speaking--a stranger who had borrowed her
+own voice: she felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental
+ventriloquism.  Concluding suddenly that the room was stifling
+and Una's tea too sweet, she set down her cup, and looked about
+for Westall: to meet his eyes had long been her refuge from every
+uncertainty.  She met them now, but only, as she felt, in
+transit; they included her parenthetically in a larger flight.
+She followed the flight, and it carried her to a corner to which
+Una had withdrawn--one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van
+Sideren attributed the success of her Saturdays.  Westall, a
+moment later, had overtaken his look, and found a place at the
+girl's side.  She bent forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back,
+listening, with the depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to
+flattery, enabling him to swallow the strongest doses without
+apparent grossness of appetite.  Julia winced at her own
+definition of the smile.
+
+
+On the way home, in the deserted winter dusk, Westall surprised
+his wife by a sudden boyish pressure of her arm.  "Did I open
+their eyes a bit?  Did I tell them what you wanted me to?" he
+asked gaily.
+
+Almost unconsciously, she let her arm slip from his.  "What I
+wanted--?"
+
+"Why, haven't you--all this time?"  She caught the honest wonder
+of his tone.  "I somehow fancied you'd rather blamed me for not
+talking more openly--before--  You've made me feel, at times, that
+I was sacrificing principles to expediency."
+
+She paused a moment over her reply; then she asked quietly: "What
+made you decide not to--any longer?"
+
+She felt again the vibration of a faint surprise.  "Why--the wish
+to please you!" he answered, almost too simply.
+
+"I wish you would not go on, then," she said abruptly.
+
+He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the
+darkness.
+
+"Not go on--?"
+
+"Call a hansom, please.  I'm tired," broke from her with a sudden
+rush of physical weariness.
+
+Instantly his solicitude enveloped her.  The room had been
+infernally hot--and then that confounded cigarette smoke--he had
+noticed once or twice that she looked pale--she mustn't come to
+another Saturday.  She felt herself yielding, as she always did,
+to the warm influence of his concern for her, the feminine in her
+leaning on the man in him with a conscious intensity of
+abandonment.  He put her in the hansom, and her hand stole into
+his in the darkness.  A tear or two rose, and she let them fall.
+It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles!
+
+That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the
+subject of his talk.  He combined a man's dislike of
+uncomfortable questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding
+them; and she knew that if he returned to the subject he must
+have some special reason for doing so.
+
+"You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon.  Did
+I put the case badly?"
+
+"No--you put it very well."
+
+"Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have
+me go on with it?"
+
+She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention
+deepening her sense of helplessness.
+
+"I don't think I care to hear such things discussed in public."
+
+"I don't understand you," he exclaimed.  Again the feeling that
+his surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own
+attitude.  She was not sure that she understood herself.
+
+"Won't you explain?" he said with a tinge of impatience.
+Her eyes wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been
+the scene of so many of their evening confidences.  The shaded
+lamps, the quiet-colored walls hung with mezzotints, the pale
+spring flowers scattered here and there in Venice glasses and
+bowls of old Sevres, recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment
+in which the evenings of her first marriage had been passed--a
+wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a picture of a Roman
+peasant above the mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in "statuary
+marble" between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room.  It
+was a room with which she had never been able to establish any
+closer relation than that between a traveller and a railway
+station; and now, as she looked about at the surroundings which
+stood for her deepest affinities--the room for which she had left
+that other room--she was startled by the same sense of
+strangeness and unfamiliarity.  The prints, the flowers, the
+subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed to typify a
+superficial refinement that had no relation to the deeper
+significances of life.
+
+Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.
+
+"I don't know that I can explain," she faltered.
+
+He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the
+hearth.  The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn
+face, which had a kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the
+surface-refinement of its setting.
+
+"Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?" he asked.
+
+"In our ideas--?"
+
+"The ideas I am trying to teach.  The ideas you and I are
+supposed to stand for."  He paused a moment.  "The ideas on which
+our marriage was founded."
+
+The blood rushed to her face.  He had his reasons, then--she was
+sure now that he had his reasons!  In the ten years of their
+marriage, how often had either of them stopped to consider the
+ideas on which it was founded?  How often does a man dig about
+the basement of his house to examine its foundation?  The
+foundation is there, of course--the house rests on it--but one
+lives abovestairs and not in the cellar.  It was she, indeed, who
+in the beginning had insisted on reviewing the situation now and
+then, on recapitulating the reasons which justified her course,
+on proclaiming, from time to time, her adherence to the religion
+of personal independence; but she had long ceased to feel the
+need of any such ideal standards, and had accepted her marriage
+as frankly and naturally as though it had been based on the
+primitive needs of the heart, and needed no special sanction to
+explain or justify it.
+
+"Of course I still believe in our ideas!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Then I repeat that I don't understand.  It was a part of your
+theory that the greatest possible publicity should be given to
+our view of marriage.  Have you changed your mind in that
+respect?"
+
+She hesitated.  "It depends on circumstances--on the public one
+is addressing.  The set of people that the Van Siderens get about
+them don't care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine.  They
+are attracted simply by its novelty."
+
+"And yet it was in just such a set of people that you and I met,
+and learned the truth from each other."
+
+"That was different."
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"I was not a young girl, to begin with.  It is perfectly
+unfitting that young girls should be present at--at such times--
+should hear such things discussed--"
+
+"I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs
+that such things never ARE discussed before young girls; but that
+is beside the point, for I don't remember seeing any young girl
+in my audience to-day--"
+
+"Except Una Van Sideren!"
+
+He turned slightly and pushed back the lamp at his elbow.
+
+"Oh, Miss Van Sideren--naturally--"
+
+"Why naturally?"
+
+"The daughter of the house--would you have had her sent out with
+her governess?"
+
+"If I had a daughter I should not allow such things to go on in
+my house!"
+
+Westall, stroking his mustache, leaned back with a faint smile.
+"I fancy Miss Van Sideren is quite capable of taking care of
+herself."
+
+"No girl knows how to take care of herself--till it's too late."
+
+"And yet you would deliberately deny her the surest means of
+self-defence?"
+
+"What do you call the surest means of self-defence?"
+
+"Some preliminary knowledge of human nature in its relation to
+the marriage tie."
+
+She made an impatient gesture.  "How should you like to marry
+that kind of a girl?"
+
+"Immensely--if she were my kind of girl in other respects."
+
+She took up the argument at another point.
+
+"You are quite mistaken if you think such talk does not affect
+young girls.  Una was in a state of the most absurd exaltation--"
+She broke off, wondering why she had spoken.
+
+Westall reopened a magazine which he had laid aside at the
+beginning of their discussion.  "What you tell me is immensely
+flattering to my oratorical talent--but I fear you overrate its
+effect.  I can assure you that Miss Van Sideren doesn't have to
+have her thinking done for her.  She's quite capable of doing it
+herself."
+
+"You seem very familiar with her mental processes!" flashed
+unguardedly from his wife.
+
+He looked up quietly from the pages he was cutting.
+
+"I should like to be," he answered.  "She interests me."
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+If there be a distinction in being misunderstood, it was one
+denied to Julia Westall when she left her first husband.  Every
+one was ready to excuse and even to defend her.  The world she
+adorned agreed that John Arment was "impossible," and hostesses
+gave a sigh of relief at the thought that it would no longer be
+necessary to ask him to dine.
+
+There had been no scandal connected with the divorce: neither
+side had accused the other of the offence euphemistically
+described as "statutory."  The Arments had indeed been obliged to
+transfer their allegiance to a State which recognized desertion
+as a cause for divorce, and construed the term so liberally that
+the seeds of desertion were shown to exist in every union.  Even
+Mrs. Arment's second marriage did not make traditional morality
+stir in its sleep.  It was known that she had not met her second
+husband till after she had parted from the first, and she had,
+moreover, replaced a rich man by a poor one.  Though Clement
+Westall was acknowledged to be a rising lawyer, it was generally
+felt that his fortunes would not rise as rapidly as his
+reputation.  The Westalls would probably always have to live
+quietly and go out to dinner in cabs.  Could there be better
+evidence of Mrs. Arment's complete disinterestedness?
+
+If the reasoning by which her friends justified her course was
+somewhat cruder and less complex than her own elucidation of the
+matter, both explanations led to the same conclusion: John Arment
+was impossible.  The only difference was that, to his wife, his
+impossibility was something deeper than a social
+disqualification.  She had once said, in ironical defence of her
+marriage, that it had at least preserved her from the necessity
+of sitting next to him at dinner; but she had not then realized
+at what cost the immunity was purchased.  John Arment was
+impossible; but the sting of his impossibility lay in the fact
+that he made it impossible for those about him to be other than
+himself.  By an unconscious process of elimination he had
+excluded from the world everything of which he did not feel a
+personal need: had become, as it were, a climate in which only
+his own requirements survived.  This might seem to imply a
+deliberate selfishness; but there was nothing deliberate about
+Arment.  He was as instinctive as an animal or a child.  It was
+this childish element in his nature which sometimes for a moment
+unsettled his wife's estimate of him.  Was it possible that he
+was simply undeveloped, that he had delayed, somewhat longer than
+is usual, the laborious process of growing up?  He had the kind
+of sporadic shrewdness which causes it to be said of a dull man
+that he is "no fool"; and it was this quality that his wife found
+most trying.  Even to the naturalist it is annoying to have his
+deductions disturbed by some unforeseen aberrancy of form or
+function; and how much more so to the wife whose estimate of
+herself is inevitably bound up with her judgment of her husband!
+
+Arment's shrewdness did not, indeed, imply any latent
+intellectual power; it suggested, rather, potentialities of
+feeling, of suffering, perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on
+which Julia's sensibilities naturally declined to linger.  She so
+fully understood her own reasons for leaving him that she
+disliked to think they were not as comprehensible to her husband.
+She was haunted, in her analytic moments, by the look of
+perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with which he had
+acquiesced to her explanations.
+
+These moments were rare with her, however.  Her marriage had been
+too concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically.  If she had
+been unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as real as
+though it had been uncomplicated.  Soul is more bruisable than
+flesh, and Julia was wounded in every fibre of her spirit.  Her
+husband's personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her,
+obscuring the sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself
+shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes.  A sense
+of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this
+bondage of body and soul filled her with despair.  If marriage
+was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in
+ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.  She,
+for one, would have no share in maintaining the pretence of which
+she had been a victim: the pretence that a man and a woman,
+forced into the narrowest of personal relations, must remain
+there till the end, though they may have outgrown the span of
+each other's natures as the mature tree outgrows the iron brace
+about the sapling.
+
+It was in the first heat of her moral indignation that she had
+met Clement Westall.  She had seen at once that he was
+"interested," and had fought off the discovery, dreading any
+influence that should draw her back into the bondage of
+conventional relations.  To ward off the peril she had, with an
+almost crude precipitancy, revealed her opinions to him.  To her
+surprise, she found that he shared them.  She was attracted by
+the frankness of a suitor who, while pressing his suit, admitted
+that he did not believe in marriage.  Her worst audacities did
+not seem to surprise him: he had thought out all that she had
+felt, and they had reached the same conclusion.  People grew at
+varying rates, and the yoke that was an easy fit for the one
+might soon become galling to the other.  That was what divorce
+was for: the readjustment of personal relations.  As soon as
+their necessarily transitive nature was recognized they would
+gain in dignity as well as in harmony.  There would be no farther
+need of the ignoble concessions and connivances, the perpetual
+sacrifice of personal delicacy and moral pride, by means of which
+imperfect marriages were now held together.  Each partner to the
+contract would be on his mettle, forced to live up to the highest
+standard of self-development, on pain of losing the other's
+respect and affection.  The low nature could no longer drag the
+higher down, but must struggle to rise, or remain alone on its
+inferior level.  The only necessary condition to a harmonious
+marriage was a frank recognition of this truth, and a solemn
+agreement between the contracting parties to keep faith with
+themselves, and not to live together for a moment after complete
+accord had ceased to exist between them.  The new adultery was
+unfaithfulness to self.
+
+It was, as Westall had just reminded her, on this understanding
+that they had married.  The ceremony was an unimportant
+concession to social prejudice: now that the door of divorce
+stood open, no marriage need be an imprisonment, and the contract
+therefore no longer involved any diminution of self-respect.  The
+nature of their attachment placed them so far beyond the reach of
+such contingencies that it was easy to discuss them with an open
+mind; and Julia's sense of security made her dwell with a tender
+insistence on Westall's promise to claim his release when he
+should cease to love her.  The exchange of these vows seemed to
+make them, in a sense, champions of the new law, pioneers in the
+forbidden realm of individual freedom: they felt that they had
+somehow achieved beatitude without martyrdom.
+
+This, as Julia now reviewed the past, she perceived to have been
+her theoretical attitude toward marriage.  It was unconsciously,
+insidiously, that her ten years of happiness with Westall had
+developed another conception of the tie; a reversion, rather, to
+the old instinct of passionate dependency and possessorship that
+now made her blood revolt at the mere hint of change.  Change?
+Renewal?  Was that what they had called it, in their foolish
+jargon?  Destruction, extermination rather--this rending of a
+myriad fibres interwoven with another's being!  Another?  But he
+was not other!  He and she were one, one in the mystic sense
+which alone gave marriage its significance.  The new law was not
+for them, but for the disunited creatures forced into a mockery
+of union.  The gospel she had felt called on to proclaim had no
+bearing on her own case. . . .  She sent for the doctor and told
+him she was sure she needed a nerve tonic.
+
+She took the nerve tonic diligently, but it failed to act as a
+sedative to her fears.  She did not know what she feared; but
+that made her anxiety the more pervasive.  Her husband had not
+reverted to the subject of his Saturday talks.  He was unusually
+kind and considerate, with a softening of his quick manner, a
+touch of shyness in his consideration, that sickened her with new
+fears.  She told herself that it was because she looked badly--
+because he knew about the doctor and the nerve tonic--that he
+showed this deference to her wishes, this eagerness to screen her
+from moral draughts; but the explanation simply cleared the way
+for fresh inferences.
+
+The week passed slowly, vacantly, like a prolonged Sunday.  On
+Saturday the morning post brought a note from Mrs. Van Sideren.
+Would dear Julia ask Mr. Westall to come half an hour earlier
+than usual, as there was to be some music after his "talk"?
+Westall was just leaving for his office when his wife read the
+note.  She opened the drawing-room door and called him back to
+deliver the message.
+
+He glanced at the note and tossed it aside.  "What a bore!  I
+shall have to cut my game of racquets.  Well, I suppose it can't
+be helped.  Will you write and say it's all right?"
+
+Julia hesitated a moment, her hand stiffening on the chair-back
+against which she leaned.
+
+"You mean to go on with these talks?" she asked.
+
+"I--why not?" he returned; and this time it struck her that his
+surprise was not quite unfeigned.  The discovery helped her to
+find words.
+
+"You said you had started them with the idea of pleasing me--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I told you last week that they didn't please me."
+
+"Last week?  Oh--"  He seemed to make an effort of memory.  "I
+thought you were nervous then; you sent for the doctor the next
+day."
+
+"It was not the doctor I needed; it was your assurance--"
+
+"My assurance?"
+
+Suddenly she felt the floor fail under her.  She sank into the
+chair with a choking throat, her words, her reasons slipping away
+from her like straws down a whirling flood.
+
+"Clement," she cried, "isn't it enough for you to know that I
+hate it?"
+
+He turned to close the door behind them; then he walked toward
+her and sat down.  "What is it that you hate?" he asked gently.
+
+She had made a desperate effort to rally her routed argument.
+
+"I can't bear to have you speak as if--as if--our marriage--were
+like the other kind--the wrong kind.  When I heard you there, the
+other afternoon, before all those inquisitive gossiping people,
+proclaiming that husbands and wives had a right to leave each
+other whenever they were tired--or had seen some one else--"
+
+Westall sat motionless, his eyes fixed on a pattern of the
+carpet.
+
+"You HAVE ceased to take this view, then?" he said as she broke
+off.  "You no longer believe that husbands and wives ARE
+justified in separating--under such conditions?"
+
+"Under such conditions?" she stammered.  "Yes--I still believe
+that--but how can we judge for others?  What can we know of the
+circumstances--?"
+
+He interrupted her.  "I thought it was a fundamental article of
+our creed that the special circumstances produced by marriage
+were not to interfere with the full assertion of individual
+liberty."  He paused a moment.  "I thought that was your reason
+for leaving Arment."
+
+She flushed to the forehead.  It was not like him to give a
+personal turn to the argument.
+
+"It was my reason," she said simply.
+
+"Well, then--why do you refuse to recognize its validity now?"
+
+"I don't--I don't--I only say that one can't judge for others."
+
+He made an impatient movement.  "This is mere hair-splitting.
+What you mean is that, the doctrine having served your purpose
+when you needed it, you now repudiate it."
+
+"Well," she exclaimed, flushing again, "what if I do?  What does
+it matter to us?"
+
+Westall rose from his chair.  He was excessively pale, and stood
+before his wife with something of the formality of a stranger.
+
+"It matters to me," he said in a low voice, "because I do NOT
+repudiate it."
+
+"Well--?"
+
+"And because I had intended to invoke it as"--
+
+He paused and drew his breath deeply.  She sat silent, almost
+deafened by her heart-beats.
+
+--"as a complete justification of the course I am about to take."
+
+Julia remained motionless.  "What course is that?" she asked.
+
+He cleared his throat.  "I mean to claim the fulfilment of your
+promise."
+
+For an instant the room wavered and darkened; then she recovered
+a torturing acuteness of vision.  Every detail of her
+surroundings pressed upon her: the tick of the clock, the slant
+of sunlight on the wall, the hardness of the chair-arms that she
+grasped, were a separate wound to each sense.
+
+"My promise--" she faltered.
+
+"Your part of our mutual agreement to set each other free if one
+or the other should wish to be released."
+
+She was silent again.  He waited a moment, shifting his position
+nervously; then he said, with a touch of irritability: "You
+acknowledge the agreement?"
+
+The question went through her like a shock.  She lifted her head
+to it proudly.  "I acknowledge the agreement," she said.
+
+"And--you don't mean to repudiate it?"
+
+A log on the hearth fell forward, and mechanically he advanced
+and pushed it back.
+
+"No," she answered slowly, "I don't mean to repudiate it."
+
+There was a pause.  He remained near the hearth, his elbow
+resting on the mantel-shelf.  Close to his hand stood a little
+cup of jade that he had given her on one of their wedding
+anniversaries.  She wondered vaguely if he noticed it.
+
+"You intend to leave me, then?" she said at length.
+
+His gesture seemed to deprecate the crudeness of the allusion.
+
+"To marry some one else?"
+
+Again his eye and hand protested.  She rose and stood before him.
+
+"Why should you be afraid to tell me?  Is it Una Van Sideren?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+"I wish you good luck," she said.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+She looked up, finding herself alone.  She did not remember when
+or how he had left the room, or how long afterward she had sat
+there.  The fire still smouldered on the hearth, but the slant of
+sunlight had left the wall.
+
+Her first conscious thought was that she had not broken her word,
+that she had fulfilled the very letter of their bargain.  There
+had been no crying out, no vain appeal to the past, no attempt at
+temporizing or evasion.  She had marched straight up to the guns.
+
+Now that it was over, she sickened to find herself alive.  She
+looked about her, trying to recover her hold on reality.  Her
+identity seemed to be slipping from her, as it disappears in a
+physical swoon.  "This is my room--this is my house," she heard
+herself saying.  Her room?  Her house?  She could almost hear the
+walls laugh back at her.
+
+She stood up, a dull ache in every bone.  The silence of the room
+frightened her.  She remembered, now, having heard the front door
+close a long time ago: the sound suddenly re-echoed through her
+brain.  Her husband must have left the house, then--her HUSBAND?
+She no longer knew in what terms to think: the simplest phrases
+had a poisoned edge.  She sank back into her chair, overcome by a
+strange weakness.  The clock struck ten--it was only ten o'clock!
+Suddenly she remembered that she had not ordered dinner . . . or
+were they dining out that evening?  DINNER--DINING OUT--the old
+meaningless phraseology pursued her!  She must try to think of
+herself as she would think of some one else, a some one
+dissociated from all the familiar routine of the past, whose
+wants and habits must gradually be learned, as one might spy out
+the ways of a strange animal. . .
+
+The clock struck another hour--eleven.  She stood up again and
+walked to the door: she thought she would go up stairs to her
+room.  HER room?  Again the word derided her.  She opened the
+door, crossed the narrow hall, and walked up the stairs.  As she
+passed, she noticed Westall's sticks and umbrellas: a pair of his
+gloves lay on the hall table.  The same stair-carpet mounted
+between the same walls; the same old French print, in its narrow
+black frame, faced her on the landing.  This visual continuity
+was intolerable.  Within, a gaping chasm; without, the same
+untroubled and familiar surface.  She must get away from it
+before she could attempt to think.  But, once in her room, she
+sat down on the lounge, a stupor creeping over her. . .
+
+Gradually her vision cleared.  A great deal had happened in the
+interval--a wild marching and countermarching of emotions,
+arguments, ideas--a fury of insurgent impulses that fell back
+spent upon themselves.  She had tried, at first, to rally, to
+organize these chaotic forces.  There must be help somewhere, if
+only she could master the inner tumult.  Life could not be broken
+off short like this, for a whim, a fancy; the law itself would
+side with her, would defend her.  The law?  What claim had she
+upon it?  She was the prisoner of her own choice: she had been
+her own legislator, and she was the predestined victim of the
+code she had devised.  But this was grotesque, intolerable--a mad
+mistake, for which she could not be held accountable!  The law
+she had despised was still there, might still be invoked . . .
+invoked, but to what end?  Could she ask it to chain Westall to
+her side?  SHE had been allowed to go free when she claimed her
+freedom--should she show less magnanimity than she had exacted?
+Magnanimity?  The word lashed her with its irony--one does not
+strike an attitude when one is fighting for life!  She would
+threaten, grovel, cajole . . . she would yield anything to keep
+her hold on happiness.  Ah, but the difficulty lay deeper!  The
+law could not help her--her own apostasy could not help her.  She
+was the victim of the theories she renounced.  It was as though
+some giant machine of her own making had caught her up in its
+wheels and was grinding her to atoms. . .
+
+It was afternoon when she found herself out-of-doors.  She walked
+with an aimless haste, fearing to meet familiar faces.  The day
+was radiant, metallic: one of those searching American days so
+calculated to reveal the shortcomings of our street-cleaning and
+the excesses of our architecture.  The streets looked bare and
+hideous; everything stared and glittered.  She called a passing
+hansom, and gave Mrs. Van Sideren's address.  She did not know
+what had led up to the act; but she found herself suddenly
+resolved to speak, to cry out a warning.  it was too late to save
+herself--but the girl might still be told.  The hansom rattled up
+Fifth Avenue; she sat with her eyes fixed, avoiding recognition.
+At the Van Siderens' door she sprang out and rang the bell.
+Action had cleared her brain, and she felt calm and self-
+possessed.  She knew now exactly what she meant to say.
+
+The ladies were both out . . . the parlor-maid stood waiting for
+a card.  Julia, with a vague murmur, turned away from the door
+and lingered a moment on the sidewalk.  Then she remembered that
+she had not paid the cab-driver.  She drew a dollar from her
+purse and handed it to him.  He touched his hat and drove off,
+leaving her alone in the long empty street.  She wandered away
+westward, toward strange thoroughfares, where she was not likely
+to meet acquaintances.  The feeling of aimlessness had returned.
+Once she found herself in the afternoon torrent of Broadway,
+swept past tawdry shops and flaming theatrical posters, with a
+succession of meaningless faces gliding by in the opposite
+direction. . .
+
+A feeling of faintness reminded her that she had not eaten since
+morning.  She turned into a side street of shabby houses, with
+rows of ash-barrels behind bent area railings.  In a basement
+window she saw the sign LADIES' RESTAURANT: a pie and a dish of
+doughnuts lay against the dusty pane like petrified food in an
+ethnological museum.  She entered, and a young woman with a weak
+mouth and a brazen eye cleared a table for her near the window.
+The table was covered with a red and white cotton cloth and
+adorned with a bunch of celery in a thick tumbler and a salt-
+cellar full of grayish lumpy salt.  Julia ordered tea, and sat a
+long time waiting for it.  She was glad to be away from the noise
+and confusion of the streets.  The low-ceilinged room was empty,
+and two or three waitresses with thin pert faces lounged in the
+background staring at her and whispering together.  At last the
+tea was brought in a discolored metal teapot.  Julia poured a cup
+and drank it hastily.  It was black and bitter, but it flowed
+through her veins like an elixir.  She was almost dizzy with
+exhilaration.  Oh, how tired, how unutterably tired she had been!
+
+She drank a second cup, blacker and bitterer, and now her mind
+was once more working clearly.  She felt as vigorous, as
+decisive, as when she had stood on the Van Siderens' door-step--
+but the wish to return there had subsided.  She saw now the
+futility of such an attempt--the humiliation to which it might
+have exposed her. . .  The pity of it was that she did not know
+what to do next.  The short winter day was fading, and she
+realized that she could not remain much longer in the restaurant
+without attracting notice.  She paid for her tea and went out
+into the street.  The lamps were alight, and here and there a
+basement shop cast an oblong of gas-light across the fissured
+pavement.  In the dusk there was something sinister about the
+aspect of the street, and she hastened back toward Fifth Avenue.
+She was not used to being out alone at that hour.
+
+At the corner of Fifth Avenue she paused and stood watching the
+stream of carriages.  At last a policeman caught sight of her and
+signed to her that he would take her across.  She had not meant
+to cross the street, but she obeyed automatically, and presently
+found herself on the farther corner.  There she paused again for
+a moment; but she fancied the policeman was watching her, and
+this sent her hastening down the nearest side street. . .  After
+that she walked a long time, vaguely. . .  Night had fallen, and
+now and then, through the windows of a passing carriage, she
+caught the expanse of an evening waistcoat or the shimmer of an
+opera cloak. . .
+
+Suddenly she found herself in a familiar street.  She stood still
+a moment, breathing quickly.  She had turned the corner without
+noticing whither it led; but now, a few yards ahead of her, she
+saw the house in which she had once lived--her first husband's
+house.  The blinds were drawn, and only a faint translucence
+marked the windows and the transom above the door.  As she stood
+there she heard a step behind her, and a man walked by in the
+direction of the house.  He walked slowly, with a heavy middle-
+aged gait, his head sunk a little between the shoulders, the red
+crease of his neck visible above the fur collar of his overcoat.
+He crossed the street, went up the steps of the house, drew forth
+a latch-key, and let himself in. . .
+
+There was no one else in sight.  Julia leaned for a long time
+against the area-rail at the corner, her eyes fixed on the front
+of the house.  The feeling of physical weariness had returned,
+but the strong tea still throbbed in her veins and lit her brain
+with an unnatural clearness.  Presently she heard another step
+draw near, and moving quickly away, she too crossed the street
+and mounted the steps of the house.  The impulse which had
+carried her there prolonged itself in a quick pressure of the
+electric bell--then she felt suddenly weak and tremulous, and
+grasped the balustrade for support.  The door opened and a young
+footman with a fresh inexperienced face stood on the threshold.
+Julia knew in an instant that he would admit her.
+
+"I saw Mr. Arment going in just now," she said.  "Will you ask
+him to see me for a moment?"
+
+The footman hesitated.  "I think Mr. Arment has gone up to dress
+for dinner, madam."
+
+Julia advanced into the hall.  "I am sure he will see me--I will
+not detain him long," she said.  She spoke quietly,
+authoritatively, in the tone which a good servant does not
+mistake.  The footman had his hand on the drawing-room door.
+
+"I will tell him, madam.  What name, please?"
+
+Julia trembled: she had not thought of that.  "Merely say a
+lady," she returned carelessly.
+
+The footman wavered and she fancied herself lost; but at that
+instant the door opened from within and John Arment stepped into
+the hall.  He drew back sharply as he saw her, his florid face
+turning sallow with the shock; then the blood poured back to it,
+swelling the veins on his temples and reddening the lobes of his
+thick ears.
+
+It was long since Julia had seen him, and she was startled at the
+change in his appearance.  He had thickened, coarsened, settled
+down into the enclosing flesh.  But she noted this insensibly:
+her one conscious thought was that, now she was face to face with
+him, she must not let him escape till he had heard her.  Every
+pulse in her body throbbed with the urgency of her message.
+
+She went up to him as he drew back.  "I must speak to you," she
+said.
+
+Arment hesitated, red and stammering.  Julia glanced at the
+footman, and her look acted as a warning.  The instinctive
+shrinking from a "scene" predominated over every other impulse,
+and Arment said slowly: "Will you come this way?"
+
+He followed her into the drawing-room and closed the door.
+Julia, as she advanced, was vaguely aware that the room at least
+was unchanged: time had not mitigated its horrors.  The contadina
+still lurched from the chimney-breast, and the Greek slave
+obstructed the threshold of the inner room.  The place was alive
+with memories: they started out from every fold of the yellow
+satin curtains and glided between the angles of the rosewood
+furniture.  But while some subordinate agency was carrying these
+impressions to her brain, her whole conscious effort was centred
+in the act of dominating Arment's will.  The fear that he would
+refuse to hear her mounted like fever to her brain.  She felt her
+purpose melt before it, words and arguments running into each
+other in the heat of her longing.  For a moment her voice failed
+her, and she imagined herself thrust out before she could speak;
+but as she was struggling for a word, Arment pushed a chair
+forward, and said quietly: "You are not well."
+
+The sound of his voice steadied her.  It was neither kind nor
+unkind--a voice that suspended judgment, rather, awaiting
+unforeseen developments.  She supported herself against the back
+of the chair and drew a deep breath.  "Shall I send for
+something?" he continued, with a cold embarrassed politeness.
+
+Julia raised an entreating hand.  "No--no--thank you.  I am quite
+well."
+
+He paused midway toward the bell and turned on her.  "Then may I
+ask--?"
+
+"Yes," she interrupted him.  "I came here because I wanted to see
+you.  There is something I must tell you."
+
+Arment continued to scrutinize her.  "I am surprised at that," he
+said.  "I should have supposed that any communication you may
+wish to make could have been made through our lawyers."
+
+"Our lawyers!"  She burst into a little laugh.  "I don't think
+they could help me--this time."
+
+Arment's face took on a barricaded look.  "If there is any
+question of help--of course--"
+
+It struck her, whimsically, that she had seen that look when some
+shabby devil called with a subscription-book.  Perhaps he thought
+she wanted him to put his name down for so much in sympathy--or
+even in money. . .  The thought made her laugh again.  She saw
+his look change slowly to perplexity.  All his facial changes
+were slow, and she remembered, suddenly, how it had once diverted
+her to shift that lumbering scenery with a word.  For the first
+time it struck her that she had been cruel.  "There IS a question
+of help," she said in a softer key: "you can help me; but only by
+listening. . .  I want to tell you something. . ."
+
+Arment's resistance was not yielding.  "Would it not be easier
+to--write?" he suggested.
+
+She shook her head.  "There is no time to write . . . and it
+won't take long."  She raised her head and their eyes met.  "My
+husband has left me," she said.
+
+"Westall--?" he stammered, reddening again.
+
+"Yes.  This morning.  Just as I left you.  Because he was tired
+of me."
+
+The words, uttered scarcely above a whisper, seemed to dilate to
+the limit of the room.  Arment looked toward the door; then his
+embarrassed glance returned to Julia.
+
+"I am very sorry," he said awkwardly.
+
+"Thank you," she murmured.
+
+"But I don't see--"
+
+"No--but you will--in a moment.  Won't you listen to me?
+Please!"  Instinctively she had shifted her position putting
+herself between him and the door.  "It happened this morning,"
+she went on in short breathless phrases.  "I never suspected
+anything--I thought we were--perfectly happy. . .  Suddenly he
+told me he was tired of me . . . there is a girl he likes better. . .
+He has gone to her. . ."  As she spoke, the lurking anguish
+rose upon her, possessing her once more to the exclusion of every
+other emotion.  Her eyes ached, her throat swelled with it, and
+two painful tears burnt a way down her face.
+
+Arment's constraint was increasing visibly.  "This--this is very
+unfortunate," he began.  "But I should say the law--"
+
+"The law?" she echoed ironically.  "When he asks for his
+freedom?"
+
+"You are not obliged to give it."
+
+"You were not obliged to give me mine--but you did."
+
+He made a protesting gesture.
+
+"You saw that the law couldn't help you--didn't you?" she went
+on.  "That is what I see now.  The law represents material
+rights--it can't go beyond.  If we don't recognize an inner law . . .
+the obligation that love creates . . . being loved as well as
+loving . . . there is nothing to prevent our spreading ruin
+unhindered . . . is there?"  She raised her head plaintively,
+with the look of a bewildered child.  "That is what I see now . . .
+what I wanted to tell you.  He leaves me because he's tired . . .
+but I was not tired; and I don't understand why he is.  That's
+the dreadful part of it--the not understanding: I hadn't realized
+what it meant.  But I've been thinking of it all day, and things
+have come back to me--things I hadn't noticed . . . when you and
+I. . ."  She moved closer to him, and fixed her eyes on his with
+the gaze that tries to reach beyond words.  "I see now that YOU
+didn't understand--did you?"
+
+Their eyes met in a sudden shock of comprehension: a veil seemed
+to be lifted between them.  Arment's lip trembled.
+
+"No," he said, "I didn't understand."
+
+She gave a little cry, almost of triumph.  "I knew it!  I knew
+it!  You wondered--you tried to tell me--but no words came. . .
+You saw your life falling in ruins . . . the world slipping from
+you . . . and you couldn't speak or move!"
+
+She sank down on the chair against which she had been leaning.
+"Now I know--now I know," she repeated.
+
+"I am very sorry for you," she heard Arment stammer.
+
+She looked up quickly.  "That's not what I came for.  I don't
+want you to be sorry.  I came to ask you to forgive me . . . for
+not understanding that YOU didn't understand. . .  That's all I
+wanted to say."  She rose with a vague sense that the end had
+come, and put out a groping hand toward the door.
+
+Arment stood motionless.  She turned to him with a faint smile.
+
+"You forgive me?"
+
+"There is nothing to forgive--"
+
+"Then will you shake hands for good-by?"  She felt his hand in
+hers: it was nerveless, reluctant.
+
+"Good-by," she repeated.  "I understand now."
+
+She opened the door and passed out into the hall.  As she did so,
+Arment took an impulsive step forward; but just then the footman,
+who was evidently alive to his obligations, advanced from the
+background to let her out.  She heard Arment fall back.  The
+footman threw open the door, and she found herself outside in the
+darkness.
+
+
+
+The End of The Reckoning
+
+
+
+
+Verse
+
+
+
+BOTTICELLI'S MADONNA IN THE LOUVRE.
+
+
+WHAT strange presentiment, O Mother, lies
+On thy waste brow and sadly-folded lips,
+Forefeeling the Light's terrible eclipse
+On Calvary, as if love made thee wise,
+And thou couldst read in those dear infant eyes
+The sorrow that beneath their smiling sleeps,
+And guess what bitter tears a mother weeps
+When the cross darkens her unclouded skies?
+
+Sad Lady, if some mother, passing thee,
+Should feel a throb of thy foreboding pain,
+And think--"My child at home clings so to me,
+With the same smile . . . and yet in vain, in vain,
+Since even this Jesus died on Calvary"--
+Say to her then: "He also rose again."
+
+
+
+
+THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI.
+
+
+ILARIA, thou that wert so fair and dear
+That death would fain disown thee, grief made wise
+With prophecy thy husband's widowed eyes
+And bade him call the master's art to rear
+Thy perfect image on the sculptured bier,
+With dreaming lids, hands laid in peaceful guise
+Beneath the breast that seems to fall and rise,
+And lips that at love's call should answer, "Here!"
+
+First-born of the Renascence, when thy soul
+Cast the sweet robing of the flesh aside,
+Into these lovelier marble limbs it stole,
+Regenerate in art's sunrise clear and wide
+As saints who, having kept faith's raiment whole,
+Change it above for garments glorified.
+
+
+
+
+THE SONNET.
+
+PURE form, that like some chalice of old time
+   Contain'st the liquid of the poet's thought
+   Within thy curving hollow, gem-enwrought
+   With interwoven traceries of rhyme,
+While o'er thy brim the bubbling fancies climb,
+   What thing am I, that undismayed have sought
+   To pour my verse with trembling hand untaught
+   Into a shape so small yet so sublime?
+Because perfection haunts the hearts of men,
+   Because thy sacred chalice gathered up
+   The wine of Petrarch, Shakspere, Shelley--then
+Receive these tears of failure as they drop
+   (Sole vintage of my life), since I am fain
+   To pour them in a consecrated cup.
+
+
+
+
+TWO BACKGROUNDS.
+
+I.
+
+LA VIERGE AU DONATEUR.
+
+
+HERE  by the ample river's argent sweep,
+Bosomed in tilth and vintage to her walls,
+A tower-crowned Cybele in armored sleep
+The city lies, fat plenty in her halls,
+With calm, parochial spires that hold in fee
+The friendly gables clustered at their base,
+And, equipoised o'er tower and market-place,
+The Gothic minster's winged immensity;
+And in that narrow burgh, with equal mood,
+Two placid hearts, to all life's good resigned,
+Might, from the altar to the lych-gate, find
+Long years of peace and dreamless plenitude.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+MONA LISA.
+
+
+Yon strange blue city crowns a scarped steep
+No mortal foot hath bloodlessly essayed;
+Dreams and illusions beacon from its keep,
+But at the gate an Angel bares his blade;
+And tales are told of those who thought to gain
+At dawn its ramparts; but when evening fell
+Far off they saw each fading pinnacle
+Lit with wild lightnings from the heaven of pain;
+Yet there two souls, whom life's perversities
+Had mocked with want in plenty, tears in mirth,
+Might meet in dreams, ungarmented of earth,
+And drain Joy's awful chalice to the lees.
+
+
+
+
+EXPERIENCE.
+
+
+I.
+
+LIKE Crusoe with the bootless gold we stand
+Upon the desert verge of death, and say:
+"What shall avail the woes of yesterday
+To buy to-morrow's wisdom, in the land
+Whose currency is strange unto our hand?
+In life's small market they have served to pay
+Some late-found rapture, could we but delay
+Till Time hath matched our means to our demand."
+
+But otherwise Fate wills it, for, behold,
+Our gathered strength of individual pain,
+When Time's long alchemy hath made it gold,
+Dies with us--hoarded all these years in vain,
+Since those that might be heir to it the mould
+Renew, and coin themselves new griefs again.
+
+
+II.
+
+O, Death, we come full-handed to thy gate,
+Rich with strange burden of the mingled years,
+Gains and renunciations, mirth and tears,
+And love's oblivion, and remembering hate,
+Nor know we what compulsion laid such freight
+Upon our souls--and shall our hopes and fears
+Buy nothing of thee, Death?  Behold our wares,
+And sell us the one joy for which we wait.
+Had we lived longer, life had such for sale,
+With the last coin of sorrow purchased cheap,
+But now we stand before thy shadowy pale,
+And all our longings lie within thy keep--
+Death, can it be the years shall naught avail?
+
+"Not so," Death answered, "they shall purchase sleep."
+
+
+
+
+CHARTRES.
+
+
+I.
+
+IMMENSE, august, like some Titanic bloom,
+   The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core,
+Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or,
+   Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom,
+And stamened with keen flamelets that illume
+   The pale high-altar.  On the prayer-worn floor,
+By surging worshippers thick-thronged of yore,
+   A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb,
+The stranded driftwood of Faith's ebbing sea--
+   For these alone the finials fret the skies,
+The topmost bosses shake their blossoms free,
+   While from the triple portals, with grave eyes,
+Tranquil, and fixed upon eternity,
+   The cloud of witnesses still testifies.
+
+
+II.
+
+The crimson panes like blood-drops stigmatize
+   The western floor.  The aisles are mute and cold.
+A rigid fetich in her robe of gold
+   The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes,
+Enthroned beneath her votive canopies,
+   Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold.
+The rest is solitude; the church, grown old,
+   Stands stark and gray beneath the burning skies.
+Wellnigh again its mighty frame-work grows
+   To be a part of nature's self, withdrawn
+From hot humanity's impatient woes;
+   The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn,
+And in the east one giant window shows
+   The roseate coldness of an Alp at dawn.
+
+
+
+
+LIFE.
+
+
+LIFE, like a marble block, is given to all,
+A blank, inchoate mass of years and days,
+Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays
+Some shape of strength or symmetry to call;
+One shatters it in bits to mend a wall;
+One in a craftier hand the chisel lays,
+And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia's gaze,
+Carves it apace in toys fantastical.
+
+But least is he who, with enchanted eyes
+Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be,
+Muses which god he shall immortalize
+In the proud Parian's perpetuity,
+Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies
+That the night cometh wherein none shall see.
+
+
+
+
+AN AUTUMN SUNSET
+
+
+I
+
+LEAGUERED in fire
+The wild black promontories of the coast extend
+Their savage silhouettes;
+The sun in universal carnage sets,
+And, halting higher,
+The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats,
+Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned,
+That, balked, yet stands at bay.
+Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day
+In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline,
+A wan valkyrie whose wide pinions shine
+Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray,
+And in her lifted hand swings high o'erhead,
+Above the waste of war,
+The silver torch-light of the evening star
+Wherewith to search the faces of the dead.
+
+
+II
+
+Lagooned in gold,
+Seem not those jetty promontories rather
+The outposts of some ancient land forlorn,
+Uncomforted of morn,
+Where old oblivions gather,
+The melancholy, unconsoling fold
+Of all things that go utterly to death
+And mix no more, no more
+With life's perpetually awakening breath?
+Shall Time not ferry me to such a shore,
+Over such sailless seas,
+To walk with hope's slain importunities
+In miserable marriage?  Nay, shall not
+All things be there forgot,
+Save the sea's golden barrier and the black
+Closecrouching promontories?
+Dead to all shames, forgotten of all glories,
+Shall I not wander there, a shadow's shade,
+A spectre self-destroyed,
+So purged of all remembrance and sucked back
+Into the primal void,
+That should we on that shore phantasmal meet
+I should not know the coming of your feet?
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
+Part Two
+