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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The "Genius", by Theodore Dreiser
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The "Genius"
+
+Author: Theodore Dreiser
+
+Release Date: March 30, 2010 [EBook #31824]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE "GENIUS" ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jim Adcock and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE "GENIUS"
+
+
+BY THEODORE DREISER
+
+
+
+
+SISTER CARRIE
+
+JENNIE GERHARDT
+
+A TRAVELER AT FORTY
+
+******
+
+A TRILOGY OF DESIRE
+
+  1. THE FINANCIER
+
+  2. THE TITAN
+
+  3. * * * * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+"GENIUS"
+
+BY
+
+THEODORE DREISER
+
+NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
+
+TORONTO: S. B. GUNDY   MCMXV
+
+
+
+
+1915.
+By JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+
+
+Press of
+J. J. Little & Ives Company
+New York, U. S. A.
+
+
+"Eugene Witla, wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live
+together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt
+thou love her, comfort her, honour her, and keep her in sickness and in
+health; and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye
+both shall live?"
+
+"I will."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+------
+YOUTH
+
+
+
+
+THE "GENIUS"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+This story has its beginnings in the town of Alexandria, Illinois,
+between 1884 and 1889, at the time when the place had a population of
+somewhere near ten thousand. There was about it just enough of the air
+of a city to relieve it of the sense of rural life. It had one
+street-car line, a theatre,--or rather, an opera house, so-called (why
+no one might say, for no opera was ever performed there)--two railroads,
+with their stations, and a business district, composed of four brisk
+sides to a public square. In the square were the county court-house and
+four newspapers. These two morning and two evening papers made the
+population fairly aware of the fact that life was full of issues, local
+and national, and that there were many interesting and varied things to
+do. On the edge of town, several lakes and a pretty stream--perhaps
+Alexandria's most pleasant feature--gave it an atmosphere not unakin to
+that of a moderate-priced summer resort. Architecturally the town was
+not new. It was mostly built of wood, as all American towns were at this
+time, but laid out prettily in some sections, with houses that sat back
+in great yards, far from the streets, with flower beds, brick walks, and
+green trees as concomitants of a comfortable home life. Alexandria was a
+city of young Americans. Its spirit was young. Life was all before
+almost everybody. It was really good to be alive.
+
+In one part of this city there lived a family which in its character and
+composition might well have been considered typically American and
+middle western. It was not by any means poor--or, at least, did not
+consider itself so; it was in no sense rich. Thomas Jefferson Witla, the
+father, was a sewing machine agent with the general agency in that
+county of one of the best known and best selling machines made. From
+each twenty, thirty-five or sixty-dollar machine which he sold, he took
+a profit of thirty-five per cent. The sale of machines was not great,
+but it was enough to yield him nearly two thousand dollars a year; and
+on that he had managed to buy a house and lot, to furnish it
+comfortably, to send his children to school, and to maintain a local
+store on the public square where the latest styles of machines were
+displayed. He also took old machines of other makes in exchange,
+allowing ten to fifteen dollars on the purchase price of a new machine.
+He also repaired machines,--and with that peculiar energy of the
+American mind, he tried to do a little insurance business in addition.
+His first idea was that his son, Eugene Tennyson Witla, might take
+charge of this latter work, once he became old enough and the insurance
+trade had developed sufficiently. He did not know what his son might
+turn out to be, but it was always well to have an anchor to windward.
+
+He was a quick, wiry, active man of no great stature, sandy-haired, with
+blue eyes with noticeable eye-brows, an eagle nose, and a rather radiant
+and ingratiating smile. Service as a canvassing salesman, endeavoring to
+persuade recalcitrant wives and indifferent or conservative husbands to
+realize that they really needed a new machine in their home, had taught
+him caution, tact, savoir faire. He knew how to approach people
+pleasantly. His wife thought too much so.
+
+Certainly he was honest, hard working, and thrifty. They had been
+waiting a long time for the day when they could say they owned their own
+home and had a little something laid away for emergencies. That day had
+come, and life was not half bad. Their house was neat,--white with green
+shutters, surrounded by a yard with well kept flower beds, a smooth
+lawn, and some few shapely and broad spreading trees. There was a front
+porch with rockers, a swing under one tree, a hammock under another, a
+buggy and several canvassing wagons in a nearby stable. Witla liked
+dogs, so there were two collies. Mrs. Witla liked live things, so there
+were a canary bird, a cat, some chickens, and a bird house set aloft on
+a pole where a few blue-birds made their home. It was a nice little
+place, and Mr. and Mrs. Witla were rather proud of it.
+
+Miriam Witla was a good wife to her husband. A daughter of a hay and
+grain dealer in Wooster, a small town near Alexandria in McLean County,
+she had never been farther out into the world than Springfield and
+Chicago. She had gone to Springfield as a very young girl, to see
+Lincoln buried, and once with her husband she had gone to the state fair
+or exposition which was held annually in those days on the lake front in
+Chicago. She was well preserved, good looking, poetic under a marked
+outward reserve. It was she who had insisted upon naming her only son
+Eugene Tennyson, a tribute at once to a brother Eugene, and to the
+celebrated romanticist of verse, because she had been so impressed with
+his "Idylls of the King."
+
+Eugene Tennyson seemed rather strong to Witla pere, as the name of a
+middle-western American boy, but he loved his wife and gave her her way
+in most things. He rather liked the names of Sylvia and Myrtle with
+which she had christened the two girls. All three of the children were
+good looking,--Sylvia, a girl of twenty-one, with black hair, dark eyes,
+full blown like a rose, healthy, active, smiling. Myrtle was of a less
+vigorous constitution, small, pale, shy, but intensely sweet--like the
+flower she was named after, her mother said. She was inclined to be
+studious and reflective, to read verse and dream. The young bloods of
+the high school were all crazy to talk to Myrtle and to walk with her,
+but they could find no words. And she herself did not know what to say
+to them.
+
+Eugene Witla was the apple of his family's eye, younger than either of
+his two sisters by two years. He had straight smooth black hair, dark
+almond-shaped eyes, a straight nose, a shapely but not aggressive chin;
+his teeth were even and white, showing with a curious delicacy when he
+smiled, as if he were proud of them. He was not very strong to begin
+with, moody, and to a notable extent artistic. Because of a weak stomach
+and a semi-anaemic condition, he did not really appear as strong as he
+was. He had emotion, fire, longings, that were concealed behind a wall
+of reserve. He was shy, proud, sensitive, and very uncertain of himself.
+
+When at home he lounged about the house, reading Dickens, Thackeray,
+Scott and Poe. He browsed idly through one book after another, wondering
+about life. The great cities appealed to him. He thought of travel as a
+wonderful thing. In school he read Taine and Gibbon between recitation
+hours, wondering at the luxury and beauty of the great courts of the
+world. He cared nothing for grammar, nothing for mathematics, nothing
+for botany or physics, except odd bits here and there. Curious facts
+would strike him--the composition of clouds, the composition of water,
+the chemical elements of the earth. He liked to lie in the hammock at
+home, spring, summer or fall, and look at the blue sky showing through
+the trees. A soaring buzzard poised in speculative flight held his
+attention fixedly. The wonder of a snowy cloud, high piled like wool,
+and drifting as an island, was like a song to him. He had wit, a keen
+sense of humor, a sense of pathos. Sometimes he thought he would draw;
+sometimes write. He had a little talent for both, he thought, but did
+practically nothing with either. He would sketch now and then, but only
+fragments--a small roof-top, with smoke curling from a chimney and birds
+flying; a bit of water with a willow bending over it and perhaps a boat
+anchored; a mill pond with ducks afloat, and a boy or woman on the bank.
+He really had no great talent for interpretation at this time, only an
+intense sense of beauty. The beauty of a bird in flight, a rose in
+bloom, a tree swaying in the wind--these held him. He would walk the
+streets of his native town at night, admiring the brightness of the
+store windows, the sense of youth and enthusiasm that went with a crowd;
+the sense of love and comfort and home that spoke through the glowing
+windows of houses set back among trees.
+
+He admired girls,--was mad about them,--but only about those who were
+truly beautiful. There were two or three in his school who reminded him
+of poetic phrases he had come across--"beauty like a tightened bow,"
+"thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face," "a dancing shape, an image
+gay"--but he could not talk to them with ease. They were beautiful but
+so distant. He invested them with more beauty than they had; the beauty
+was in his own soul. But he did not know that. One girl whose yellow
+hair lay upon her neck in great yellow braids like ripe corn, was
+constantly in his thoughts. He worshiped her from afar but she never
+knew. She never knew what solemn black eyes burned at her when she was
+not looking. She left Alexandria, her family moving to another town, and
+in time he recovered, for there is much of beauty. But the color of her
+hair and the wonder of her neck stayed with him always.
+
+There was some plan on the part of Witla to send these children to
+college, but none of them showed any great desire for education. They
+were perhaps wiser than books, for they were living in the realm of
+imagination and feeling. Sylvia longed to be a mother, and was married
+at twenty-one to Henry Burgess, the son of Benjamin C. Burgess, editor
+of the _Morning Appeal_. There was a baby the first year. Myrtle was
+dreaming through algebra and trigonometry, wondering whether she would
+teach or get married, for the moderate prosperity of the family demanded
+that she do something. Eugene mooned through his studies, learning
+nothing practical. He wrote a little, but his efforts at sixteen were
+puerile. He drew, but there was no one to tell him whether there was any
+merit in the things he did or not. Practical matters were generally
+without significance to him. But he was overawed by the fact that the
+world demanded practical service--buying and selling like his father,
+clerking in stores, running big business. It was a confusing maze, and
+he wondered, even at this age, what was to become of him. He did not
+object to the kind of work his father was doing, but it did not interest
+him. For himself he knew it would be a pointless, dreary way of making a
+living, and as for insurance, that was equally bad. He could hardly
+bring himself to read through the long rigamarole of specifications
+which each insurance paper itemized. There were times--evenings and
+Saturdays--when he clerked in his father's store, but it was painful
+work. His mind was not in it.
+
+As early as his twelfth year his father had begun to see that Eugene was
+not cut out for business, and by the time he was sixteen he was
+convinced of it. From the trend of his reading and his percentage marks
+at school, he was equally convinced that the boy was not interested in
+his studies. Myrtle, who was two classes ahead of him but sometimes in
+the same room, reported that he dreamed too much. He was always looking
+out of the window.
+
+Eugene's experience with girls had not been very wide. There were those
+very minor things that occur in early youth--girls whom we furtively
+kiss, or who furtively kiss us--the latter had been the case with
+Eugene. He had no particular interest in any one girl. At fourteen he
+had been picked by a little girl at a party as an affinity, for the
+evening at least, and in a game of "post-office" had enjoyed the wonder
+of a girl's arms around him in a dark room and a girl's lips against
+his; but since then there had been no re-encounter of any kind. He had
+dreamed of love, with this one experience as a basis, but always in a
+shy, distant way. He was afraid of girls, and they, to tell the truth,
+were afraid of him. They could not make him out.
+
+But in the fall of his seventeenth year Eugene came into contact with
+one girl who made a profound impression on him. Stella Appleton was a
+notably beautiful creature. She was very fair, Eugene's own age, with
+very blue eyes and a slender sylph-like body. She was gay and debonair
+in an enticing way, without really realizing how dangerous she was to
+the average, susceptible male heart. She liked to flirt with the boys
+because it amused her, and not because she cared for anyone in
+particular. There was no petty meanness about it, however, for she
+thought they were all rather nice, the less clever appealing to her
+almost more than the sophisticated. She may have liked Eugene originally
+because of his shyness.
+
+He saw her first at the beginning of his last school year when she came
+to the city and entered the second high school class. Her father had
+come from Moline, Illinois, to take a position as manager of a new
+pulley manufactory which was just starting. She had quickly become
+friends with his sister Myrtle, being perhaps attracted by her quiet
+ways, as Myrtle was by Stella's gaiety.
+
+One afternoon, as Myrtle and Stella were on Main Street, walking home
+from the post office, they met Eugene, who was on his way to visit a boy
+friend. He was really bashful; and when he saw them approaching he
+wanted to escape, but there was no way. They saw him, and Stella
+approached confidently enough. Myrtle was anxious to intercept him,
+because she had her pretty companion with her.
+
+"You haven't been home, have you?" she asked, stopping. This was her
+chance to introduce Stella; Eugene couldn't escape. "Miss Appleton, this
+is my brother Eugene."
+
+Stella gave him a sunny encouraging smile, and her hand, which he took
+gingerly. He was plainly nervous.
+
+"I'm not very clean," he said apologetically. "I've been helping father
+fix a buggy."
+
+"Oh, we don't mind," said Myrtle. "Where are you going?"
+
+"Over to Harry Morris's," he explained.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"We're going for hickory nuts."
+
+"Oh, I wish I had some," said Stella.
+
+"I'll bring you some," he volunteered gallantly.
+
+She smiled again. "I wish you would."
+
+She almost proposed that they should be taken along, but inexperience
+hindered her.
+
+Eugene was struck with all her charm at once. She seemed like one of
+those unattainable creatures who had swum into his ken a little earlier
+and disappeared. There was something of the girl with the corn-colored
+hair about her, only she had been more human, less like a dream. This
+girl was fine, delicate, pink, like porcelain. She was fragile and yet
+virile. He caught his breath, but he was more or less afraid of her. He
+did not know what she might be thinking of him.
+
+"Well, we're going on to the house," said Myrtle.
+
+"I'd go along if I hadn't promised Harry I'd come over."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," replied Myrtle. "We don't mind."
+
+He withdrew, feeling that he had made a very poor impression. Stella's
+eyes had been on him in a very inquiring way. She looked after him when
+he had gone.
+
+"Isn't he nice?" she said to Myrtle frankly.
+
+"I think so," replied Myrtle; "kind o'. He's too moody, though."
+
+"What makes him?"
+
+"He isn't very strong."
+
+"I think he has a nice smile."
+
+"I'll tell him!"
+
+"No, please don't! You won't, will you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But he _has_ a nice smile."
+
+"I'll ask you round to the house some evening and you can meet him
+again."
+
+"I'd like to," said Stella. "It would be a lot of fun."
+
+"Come out Saturday evening and stay all night. He's home then."
+
+"I will," said Stella. "Won't that be fine!"
+
+"I believe you like him!" laughed Myrtle.
+
+"I think he's awfully nice," said Stella, simply.
+
+The second meeting happened on Saturday evening as arranged, when he
+came home from his odd day at his father's insurance office. Stella had
+come to supper. Eugene saw her through the open sitting room door, as he
+bounded upstairs to change his clothes, for he had a fire of youth which
+no sickness of stomach or weakness of lungs could overcome at this age.
+A thrill of anticipation ran over his body. He took especial pains with
+his toilet, adjusting a red tie to a nicety, and parting his hair
+carefully in the middle. He came down after a while, conscious that he
+had to say something smart, worthy of himself, or she would not see how
+attractive he was; and yet he was fearful as to the result. When he
+entered the sitting room she was sitting with his sister before an open
+fire-place, the glow of a lamp with a red-flowered shade warmly
+illuminating the room. It was a commonplace room, with its blue
+cloth-covered center table, its chairs of stereotyped factory design,
+and its bookcase of novels and histories, but it was homey, and the
+sense of hominess was strong.
+
+Mrs. Witla was in and out occasionally, looking for things which
+appertained to her functions as house-mother. The father was not home
+yet; he would get there by supper-time, having been to some outlying
+town of the county trying to sell a machine. Eugene was indifferent to
+his presence or absence. Mr. Witla had a fund of humor which extended to
+joking with his son and daughters, when he was feeling good, to noting
+their budding interest in the opposite sex; to predicting some
+commonplace climax to their one grand passion when it should come. He
+was fond of telling Myrtle that she would one day marry a horse-doctor.
+As for Eugene, he predicted a certain Elsa Brown, who, his wife said,
+had greasy curls. This did not irritate either Myrtle or Eugene. It even
+brought a wry smile to Eugene's face for he was fond of a jest; but he
+saw his father pretty clearly even at this age. He saw the smallness of
+his business, the ridiculousness of any such profession having any claim
+on him. He never wanted to say anything, but there was in him a burning
+opposition to the commonplace, a molten pit in a crater of reserve,
+which smoked ominously now and then for anyone who could have read.
+Neither his father nor his mother understood him. To them he was a
+peculiar boy, dreamy, sickly, unwitting, as yet, of what he really
+wanted.
+
+"Oh, here you are!" said Myrtle, when he came in. "Come and sit down."
+
+Stella gave him an enticing smile.
+
+He walked to the mantel-piece and stood there, posing. He wanted to
+impress this girl, and he did not quite know how. He was almost lost for
+anything to say.
+
+"You can't guess what we've been doing!" his sister chirped helpfully.
+
+"Well--what?" he replied blankly.
+
+"You ought to guess. Can't you be nice and guess?"
+
+"One guess, anyhow," put in Stella.
+
+"Toasting pop-corn," he ventured with a half smile.
+
+"You're warm." It was Myrtle speaking.
+
+Stella looked at him with round blue eyes. "One more guess," she
+suggested.
+
+"Chestnuts!" he guessed.
+
+She nodded her head gaily. "What hair!" he thought. Then--"Where are
+they?"
+
+"Here's one," laughed his new acquaintance, holding out a tiny hand.
+
+Under her laughing encouragement he was finding his voice. "Stingy!" he
+said.
+
+"Now isn't that mean," she exclaimed. "I gave him the only one I had.
+Don't you give him any of yours, Myrtle."
+
+"I take it back," he pleaded. "I didn't know."
+
+"I won't!" exclaimed Myrtle. "Here, Stella," and she held out the few
+nuts she had left, "take these, and don't you give him any!" She put
+them in Stella's eager hands.
+
+He saw her meaning. It was an invitation to a contest. She wanted him to
+try to make her give him some. He fell in with her plan.
+
+"Here!" He stretched out his palm. "That's not right!"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"One, anyhow," he insisted.
+
+Her head moved negatively from side to side slowly.
+
+"One," he pleaded, drawing near.
+
+Again the golden negative. But her hand was at the side nearest him,
+where he could seize it. She started to pass its contents behind her to
+the other hand but he jumped and caught it.
+
+"Myrtle! Quick!" she called.
+
+Myrtle came. It was a three-handed struggle. In the midst of the contest
+Stella twisted and rose to her feet. Her hair brushed his face. He held
+her tiny hand firmly. For a moment he looked into her eyes. What was it?
+He could not say. Only he half let go and gave her the victory.
+
+"There," she smiled. "Now I'll give you one."
+
+He took it, laughing. What he wanted was to take her in his arms.
+
+A little while before supper his father came in and sat down, but
+presently took a Chicago paper and went into the dining room to read.
+Then his mother called them to the table, and he sat by Stella. He was
+intensely interested in what she did and said. If her lips moved he
+noted just how. When her teeth showed he thought they were lovely. A
+little ringlet on her forehead beckoned him like a golden finger. He
+felt the wonder of the poetic phrase, "the shining strands of her hair."
+
+After dinner he and Myrtle and Stella went back to the sitting room. His
+father stayed behind to read, his mother to wash dishes. Myrtle left the
+room after a bit to help her mother, and then these two were left alone.
+He hadn't much to say, now that they were together--he couldn't talk.
+Something about her beauty kept him silent.
+
+"Do you like school?" she asked after a time. She felt as if they must
+talk.
+
+"Only fairly well," he replied. "I'm not much interested. I think I'll
+quit one of these days and go to work."
+
+"What do you expect to do?"
+
+"I don't know yet--I'd like to be an artist." He confessed his ambition
+for the first time in his life--why, he could not have said.
+
+Stella took no note of it.
+
+"I was afraid they wouldn't let me enter second year high school, but
+they did," she remarked. "The superintendent at Moline had to write the
+superintendent here."
+
+"They're mean about those things," he cogitated.
+
+She got up and went to the bookcase to look at the books. He followed
+after a little.
+
+"Do you like Dickens?" she asked.
+
+He nodded his head solemnly in approval. "Pretty much," he said.
+
+"I can't like him. He's too long drawn out. I like Scott better."
+
+"I like Scott," he said.
+
+"I'll tell you a lovely book that I like." She paused, her lips parted
+trying to remember the name. She lifted her hand as though to pick the
+title out of the air. "The Fair God," she exclaimed at last.
+
+"Yes--it's fine," he approved. "I thought the scene in the old Aztec
+temple where they were going to sacrifice Ahwahee was so wonderful!"
+
+"Oh, yes, I liked that," she added. She pulled out "Ben Hur" and turned
+its leaves idly. "And this was so good."
+
+"Wonderful!"
+
+They paused and she went to the window, standing under the cheap lace
+curtains. It was a moonlight night. The rows of trees that lined the
+street on either side were leafless; the grass brown and dead. Through
+the thin, interlaced twigs that were like silver filigree they could see
+the lamps of other houses shining through half-drawn blinds. A man went
+by, a black shadow in the half-light.
+
+"Isn't it lovely?" she said.
+
+Eugene came near. "It's fine," he answered.
+
+"I wish it were cold enough to skate. Do you skate?" She turned to him.
+
+"Yes, indeed," he replied.
+
+"My, it's so nice on a moonlit night. I used to skate a lot at Moline."
+
+"We skate a lot here. There're two lakes, you know."
+
+He thought of the clear crystal nights when the ice of Green Lake had
+split every so often with a great resounding rumble. He thought of the
+crowds of boys and girls shouting, the distant shadows, the stars. Up to
+now he had never found any girl to skate with successfully. He had never
+felt just easy with anyone. He had tried it, but once he had fallen with
+a girl, and it had almost cured him of skating forever. He felt as
+though he could skate with Stella. He felt that she might like to skate
+with him.
+
+"When it gets colder we might go," he ventured. "Myrtle skates."
+
+"Oh, that'll be fine!" she applauded.
+
+Still she looked out into the street.
+
+After a bit she came back to the fire and stood before him, pensively
+looking down.
+
+"Do you think your father will stay here?" he asked.
+
+"He says so. He likes it very much."
+
+"Do you?"
+
+"Yes--now."
+
+"Why _now_?"
+
+"Oh, I didn't like it at first."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Oh, I guess it was because I didn't know anybody. I like it though,
+now." She lifted her eyes.
+
+He drew a little nearer.
+
+"It's a nice place," he said, "but there isn't much for me here. I think
+I'll leave next year."
+
+"Where do you think you'll go?"
+
+"To Chicago. I don't want to stay here."
+
+She turned her body toward the fire and he moved to a chair behind her,
+leaning on its back. She felt him there rather close, but did not move.
+He was surprising himself.
+
+"Aren't you ever coming back?" she asked.
+
+"Maybe. It all depends. I suppose so."
+
+"I shouldn't think you'd want to leave yet."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You say it's so nice."
+
+He made no answer and she looked over her shoulder. He was leaning very
+much toward her.
+
+"Will you skate with me this winter?" he asked meaningly.
+
+She nodded her head.
+
+Myrtle came in.
+
+"What are you two talking about?" she asked.
+
+"The fine skating we have here," he said.
+
+"I love to skate," she exclaimed.
+
+"So do I," added Stella. "It's heavenly."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Some of the incidents of this courtship that followed, ephemeral as it
+was, left a profound impression on Eugene's mind. They met to skate not
+long after, for the snow came and the ice and there was wonderful
+skating on Green Lake. The frost was so prolonged that men with horses
+and ice-saws were cutting blocks a foot thick over at Miller's Point,
+where the ice houses were. Almost every day after Thanksgiving there
+were crowds of boys and girls from the schools scooting about like water
+skippers. Eugene could not always go on week evenings and Saturdays
+because he had to assist his father at the store. But at regular
+intervals he could ask Myrtle to get Stella and let them all go together
+at night. And at other times he would ask her to go alone. Not
+infrequently she did.
+
+On one particular occasion they were below a group of houses which crept
+near the lake on high ground. The moon was up, its wooing rays reflected
+in the polished surfaces of the ice. Through the black masses of trees
+that lined the shore could be seen the glow of windows, yellow and
+homey. Eugene and Stella had slowed up to turn about, having left the
+crowd of skaters some distance back. Stella's golden curls were covered,
+except for a few ringlets, with a French cap; her body, to below the
+hips, encased in a white wool Jersey, close-fitting and shapely. The
+skirt below was a grey mixture of thick wool and the stockings were
+covered by white woolen leggings. She looked tempting and knew it.
+
+Suddenly, as they turned, one of her skates came loose and she hobbled
+and exclaimed about it. "Wait," said Eugene, "I'll fix it."
+
+She stood before him and he fell to his knees, undoing the twisted
+strap. When he had the skate off and ready for her foot he looked up,
+and she looked down on him, smiling. He dropped the skate and flung his
+arms around her hips, laying his head against her waist.
+
+"You're a bad boy," she said.
+
+For a few minutes she kept silent, for as the center of this lovely
+scene she was divine. While he held her she pulled off his wool cap and
+laid her hand on his hair. It almost brought tears to his eyes, he was
+so happy. At the same time it awakened a tremendous passion. He clutched
+her significantly.
+
+"Fix my skate, now," she said wisely.
+
+He got up to hug her but she would not let him.
+
+"No, no," she protested. "You mustn't do like that. I won't come with
+you if you do."
+
+"Oh, Stella!" he pleaded.
+
+"I mean it," she insisted. "You mustn't do like that."
+
+He subsided, hurt, half angry. But he feared her will. She was really
+not as ready for caresses as he had thought.
+
+Another time a sleighing party was given by some school girls, and
+Stella, Eugene and Myrtle were invited. It was a night of snow and
+stars, not too cold but bracing. A great box-wagon had been dismantled
+of its body and the latter put on runners and filled with straw and warm
+robes. Eugene and Myrtle, like the others, had been picked up at their
+door after the sleigh had gone the rounds of some ten peaceful little
+homes. Stella was not in yet, but in a little while her house was
+reached.
+
+"Get in here," called Myrtle, though she was half the length of the box
+away from Eugene. Her request made him angry. "Sit by me," he called,
+fearful that she would not. She climbed in by Myrtle but finding the
+space not to her liking moved farther down. Eugene made a special effort
+to have room by him, and she came there as though by accident. He drew a
+buffalo robe around her and thrilled to think that she was really there.
+The sleigh went jingling around the town for others, and finally struck
+out into the country. It passed great patches of dark woods silent in
+the snow, little white frame farmhouses snuggled close to the ground,
+and with windows that gleamed in a vague romantic way. The stars were
+countless and keen. The whole scene made a tremendous impression on him,
+for he was in love, and here beside him, in the shadow, her face palely
+outlined, was this girl. He could make out the sweetness of her cheek,
+her eyes, the softness of her hair.
+
+There was a good deal of chatter and singing, and in the midst of these
+distractions he managed to slip an arm about her waist, to get her hand
+in his, to look close into her eyes, trying to divine their expression.
+She was always coy with him, not wholly yielding. Three or four times he
+kissed her cheek furtively and once her mouth. In a dark place he pulled
+her vigorously to him, putting a long, sensuous kiss on her lips that
+frightened her.
+
+"No," she protested, nervously. "You mustn't."
+
+He ceased for a time, feeling that he had pressed his advantage too
+closely. But the night in all its beauty, and she in hers made a lasting
+impression.
+
+******
+
+"I think we ought to get Eugene into newspaper work or something like
+that," Witla senior suggested to his wife.
+
+"It looks as though that's all he would be good for, at least now,"
+replied Mrs. Witla, who was satisfied that her boy had not yet found
+himself. "I think he'll do something better later on. His health isn't
+very good, you know."
+
+Witla half suspected that his boy was naturally lazy, but he wasn't
+sure. He suggested that Benjamin C. Burgess, the prospective
+father-in-law of Sylvia and the editor and proprietor of the _Morning
+Appeal_, might give him a place as a reporter or type-setter in order
+that he might learn the business from the ground up. The _Appeal_
+carried few employees, but Mr. Burgess might have no objections to
+starting Eugene as a reporter if he could write, or as a student of
+type-setting, or both. He appealed to Burgess one day on the street.
+
+"Say, Burgess," he said, "you wouldn't have a place over in your shop
+for that boy of mine, would you? He likes to scribble a little, I
+notice. I think he pretends to draw a little, too, though I guess it
+doesn't amount to much. He ought to get into something. He isn't doing
+anything at school. Maybe he could learn type-setting. It wouldn't hurt
+him to begin at the bottom if he's going to follow that line. It
+wouldn't matter what you paid him to begin with."
+
+Burgess thought. He had seen Eugene around town, knew no harm of him
+except that he was lackadaisical and rather moody.
+
+"Send him in to see me some day," he replied noncommittally. "I might do
+something for him."
+
+"I'd certainly be much obliged to you if you would," said Witla. "He is
+not doing much good as it is now," and the two men parted.
+
+He went home and told Eugene. "Burgess says he might give you a position
+as a type-setter or a reporter on the _Appeal_ if you'd come in and see
+him some day," he explained, looking over to where his son was reading
+by the lamp.
+
+"Does he?" replied Eugene calmly. "Well, I can't write. I might set
+type. Did you ask him?"
+
+"Yes," said Witla. "You'd better go to him some day."
+
+Eugene bit his lip. He realized this was a commentary on his loafing
+propensities. He wasn't doing very well, that was certain. Still
+type-setting was no bright field for a person of his temperament. "I
+will," he concluded, "when school's over."
+
+"Better speak before school ends. Some of the other fellows might ask
+for it around that time. It wouldn't hurt you to try your hand at it."
+
+"I will," said Eugene obediently.
+
+He stopped in one sunny April afternoon at Mr. Burgess' office. It was
+on the ground floor of the three-story _Appeal_ building in the public
+square. Mr. Burgess, a fat man, slightly bald, looked at him quizzically
+over his steel rimmed spectacles. What little hair he had was gray.
+
+"So you think you would like to go into the newspaper business, do you?"
+queried Burgess.
+
+"I'd like to try my hand at it," replied the boy. "I'd like to see
+whether I like it."
+
+"I can tell you right now there's very little in it. Your father says
+you like to write."
+
+"I'd like to well enough, but I don't think I can. I wouldn't mind
+learning type-setting. If I ever could write I'd be perfectly willing
+to."
+
+"When do you think you'd like to start?"
+
+"At the end of school, if it's all the same to you."
+
+"It doesn't make much difference. I'm not really in need of anybody, but
+I could use you. Would you be satisfied with five a week?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Well, come in when you are ready. I'll see what I can do."
+
+He waved the prospective type-setter away with a movement of his fat
+hand, and turned to his black walnut desk, dingy, covered with
+newspapers, and lit by a green shaded electric light. Eugene went out,
+the smell of fresh printing ink in his nose, and the equally aggressive
+smell of damp newspapers. It was going to be an interesting experience,
+he thought, but perhaps a waste of time. He did not think so much of
+Alexandria. Some time he was going to get out of it.
+
+The office of the _Appeal_ was not different from that of any other
+country newspaper office within the confines of our two hemispheres. On
+the ground floor in front was the business office, and in the rear the
+one large flat bed press and the job presses. On the second floor was
+the composing room with its rows of type cases on their high racks--for
+this newspaper was, like most other country newspapers, still set by
+hand; and in front was the one dingy office of the so-called editor, or
+managing editor, or city editor--for all three were the same person, a
+Mr. Caleb Williams whom Burgess had picked up in times past from heaven
+knows where. Williams was a small, lean, wiry man, with a black pointed
+beard and a glass eye which fixed you oddly with its black pupil. He was
+talkative, skipped about from duty to duty, wore most of the time a
+green shade pulled low over his forehead, and smoked a brown briar pipe.
+He had a fund of knowledge, piled up in metropolitan journalistic
+experience, but he was anchored here with a wife and three children,
+after sailing, no doubt, a chartless sea of troubles, and was glad to
+talk life and experiences after office hours with almost anybody. It
+took him from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon to gather
+what local news there was, and either write it or edit it. He seemed to
+have a number of correspondents who sent him weekly batches of news from
+surrounding points. The Associated Press furnished him with a few minor
+items by telegraph, and there was a "patent insides," two pages of
+fiction, household hints, medicine ads. and what not, which saved him
+considerable time and stress. Most of the news which came to him
+received short shrift in the matter of editing. "In Chicago we used to
+give a lot of attention to this sort of thing," Williams was wont to
+declare to anyone who was near, "but you can't do it down here. The
+readers really don't expect it. They're looking for local items. I
+always look after the local items pretty sharp."
+
+Mr. Burgess took care of the advertising sections. In fact he solicited
+advertising personally, saw that it was properly set up as the
+advertiser wanted it, and properly placed according to the convenience
+of the day and the rights and demands of others. He was the politician
+of the concern, the handshaker, the guider of its policy. He wrote
+editorials now and then, or, with Williams, decided just what their
+sense must be, met the visitors who came to the office to see the
+editor, and arbitrated all known forms of difficulties. He was at the
+beck and call of certain Republican party-leaders in the county; but
+that seemed natural, for he was a Republican himself by temperament and
+disposition. He was appointed postmaster once to pay him for some useful
+services, but he declined because he was really making more out of his
+paper than his postmastership would have brought. He received whatever
+city or county advertising it was in the power of the Republican leaders
+to give him, and so he did very well. The complications of his political
+relationships Williams knew in part, but they never troubled that
+industrious soul. He dispensed with moralizing. "I have to make a living
+for myself, my wife and three children. That's enough to keep me going
+without bothering my head about other people." So this office was really
+run very quietly, efficiently, and in most ways pleasantly. It was a
+sunny place to work.
+
+Witla, who came here at the end of his eleventh school year and when he
+had just turned seventeen, was impressed with the personality of
+Mr. Williams. He liked him. He came to like a Jonas Lyle who worked at
+what might be called the head desk of the composing room, and a certain
+John Summers who worked at odd times--whenever there was an extra rush
+of job printing. He learned very quickly that John Summers, who was
+fifty-five, grey, and comparatively silent, was troubled with weak lungs
+and drank. Summers would slip out of the office at various times in the
+day and be gone from five to fifteen minutes. No one ever said anything,
+for there was no pressure here. What work was to be done was done. Jonas
+Lyle was of a more interesting nature. He was younger by ten years,
+stronger, better built, but still a character. He was semi-phlegmatic,
+philosophic, feebly literary. He had worked, as Eugene found out in the
+course of time, in nearly every part of the United States--Denver,
+Portland, St. Paul, St. Louis, where not, and had a fund of
+recollections of this proprietor and that. Whenever he saw a name of
+particular distinction in the newspapers he was apt to bring the paper
+to Williams--and later, when they became familiar, to Eugene--and say,
+"I knew that fellow out in ----. He was postmaster (or what not) at
+X----. He's come up considerably since I knew him." In most cases he did
+not know these celebrities personally at all, but he knew of them, and
+the echo of their fame sounding in this out-of-the-way corner of the
+world impressed him. He was a careful reader of proof for Williams in a
+rush, a quick type-setter, a man who stayed by his tasks faithfully. But
+he hadn't got anywhere in the world, for, after all, he was little more
+than a machine. Eugene could see that at a glance.
+
+It was Lyle who taught him the art of type-setting. He demonstrated the
+first day the theory of the squares or pockets in a case, how some
+letters were placed more conveniently to the hand than others, why some
+letters were well represented as to quantity, why capitals were used in
+certain offices for certain purposes, in others not. "Now on the Chicago
+_Tribune_ we used to italicize the names of churches, boats, books,
+hotels, and things of that sort. That's the only paper I ever knew to do
+that," he remarked. What slugs, sticks, galleys, turnovers, meant, came
+rapidly to the surface. That the fingers would come to recognize weights
+of leads by the touch, that a letter would almost instinctively find its
+way back to its proper pocket, even though you were not thinking, once
+you became expert, were facts which he cheerfully communicated. He
+wanted his knowledge taken seriously, and this serious attention,
+Eugene, because of his innate respect for learning of any kind, was only
+too glad to give him. He did not know what he wanted to do, but he knew
+quite well that he wanted to see everything. This shop was interesting
+to him for some little time for this reason, for though he soon found
+that he did not want to be a type-setter or a reporter, or indeed
+anything much in connection with a country newspaper, he was learning
+about life. He worked at his desk cheerfully, smiling out upon the
+world, which indicated its presence to him through an open window, read
+the curious bits of news or opinion or local advertisements as he set
+them up, and dreamed of what the world might have in store for him. He
+was not vastly ambitious as yet, but hopeful and, withal, a little
+melancholy. He could see boys and girls whom he knew, idling in the
+streets or on the corner squares; he could see where Ted Martinwood was
+driving by in his father's buggy, or George Anderson was going up the
+street with the air of someone who would never need to work. George's
+father owned the one and only hotel. There were thoughts in his mind of
+fishing, boating, lolling somewhere with some pretty girl, but alas,
+girls did not apparently take to him so very readily. He was too shy. He
+thought it must be nice to be rich. So he dreamed.
+
+Eugene was at that age when he wished to express himself in ardent
+phrases. He was also at the age when bashfulness held him in reserve,
+even though he were in love and intensely emotional. He could only say
+to Stella what seemed trivial things, and look his intensity, whereas it
+was the trivial things that were most pleasing to her, not the
+intensity. She was even then beginning to think he was a little strange,
+a little too tense for her disposition. Yet she liked him. It became
+generally understood around town that Stella was _his_ girl. School day
+mating usually goes that way in a small city or village. He was seen to
+go out with her. His father teased him. Her mother and father deemed
+this a manifestation of calf love, not so much on her part, for they
+were aware of her tendency to hold lightly any manifestation of
+affection on the part of boys, but on his. They thought his
+sentimentalism would soon be wearisome to Stella. And they were not far
+wrong about her. On one occasion at a party given by several high school
+girls, a "country post office" was organized. That was one of those
+games which mean kissing only. A system of guessing results in a series
+of forfeits. If you miss you must be postmaster, and call someone for
+"mail." _Mail_ means to be kissed in a dark room (where the postmaster
+stands) by someone whom you like or who likes you. You, as postmaster,
+have authority or compulsion--however you feel about it--to call whom
+you please.
+
+In this particular instance Stella, who was caught before Eugene, was
+under compulsion to call someone to kiss. Her first thought was of him,
+but on account of the frankness of the deed, and because there was a
+lurking fear in her of his eagerness, the name she felt impelled to
+speak was Harvey Rutter. Harvey was a handsome boy whom Stella had met
+after her first encounter with Eugene. He was not as yet fascinating to
+her, but pleasing. She had a coquettish desire to see what he was like.
+This was her first direct chance.
+
+He stepped gaily in, and Eugene was at once insane with jealousy. He
+could not understand why she should treat him in that way. When it came
+to his turn he called for Bertha Shoemaker, whom he admired, and who was
+sweet in a way, but who was as nothing to Stella in his estimation. The
+pain of kissing her when he really wanted the other girl was great. When
+he came out Stella saw moodiness in his eyes, but chose to ignore it. He
+was obviously half-hearted and downcast in his simulation of joy.
+
+A second chance came to her and this time she called him. He went, but
+was in a semi-defiant mood. He wanted to punish her. When they met in
+the dark she expected him to put his arms around her. Her own hands were
+up to about where his shoulders should be. Instead he only took hold of
+one of her arms with his hand and planted a chilly kiss on her lips. If
+he had only asked, "Why did you?" or held her close and pleaded with her
+not to treat him so badly, the relationship might have lasted longer.
+Instead he said nothing, and she grew defiant and she went out gaily.
+There was a strain of reserve running between them until the party broke
+up and he took her home.
+
+"You must be melancholy tonight," she remarked, after they had walked
+two blocks in complete silence. The streets were dark, and their feet
+sounded hollowly on the brick pavement.
+
+"Oh, I'm feeling all right," he replied moodily.
+
+"I think it's awfully nice at the Weimers', we always have so much fun
+there."
+
+"Yes, lots of fun," he echoed contemptuously.
+
+"Oh, don't be so cross!" she flared. "You haven't any reason for
+fussing."
+
+"Haven't I?"
+
+"No, you haven't."
+
+"Well if that's the way you feel about it I suppose I haven't. I don't
+see it that way."
+
+"Well, it doesn't make any difference to me how you see it."
+
+"Oh, doesn't it?"
+
+"No, it doesn't." Her head was up and she was angry.
+
+"Well I'm sure then it doesn't to me."
+
+There was another silence which endured until they were almost home.
+
+"Are you coming to the sociable next Thursday?" he inquired. He was
+referring to a Methodist evening entertainment which, although he cared
+very little about it, was a convenience as it enabled him to see her and
+take her home. He was prompted to ask by the fear that an open rupture
+was impending.
+
+"No," she said. "I don't think I will."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I don't care to."
+
+"I think you're mean," he said reprovingly.
+
+"I don't care," she replied. "I think you're too bossy. I don't think I
+like you very much anyhow."
+
+His heart contracted ominously.
+
+"You can do as you please," he persisted.
+
+They reached her gate. It was his wont to kiss her in the shadow--to
+hold her tight for a few minutes in spite of her protests. Tonight, as
+they approached, he thought of doing it, but she gave him no chance.
+When they reached the gate she opened it quickly and slipped in.
+"Good-night," she called.
+
+"Good-night," he said, and then as she reached her door, "Stella!"
+
+It was open, and she slipped in. He stood in the dark, hurt, sore,
+oppressed. What should he do? He strolled home cudgelling his brain
+whether never to speak to or look at her again until she came to him, or
+to hunt her up and fight it all out with her. She was in the wrong, he
+knew that. When he went to bed he was grieving over it, and when he
+awoke it was with him all day.
+
+He had been gaining rather rapidly as a student of type-setting, and to
+a certain extent of the theory of reporting, and he worked diligently
+and earnestly at his proposed trade. He loved to look out of the window
+and draw, though of late, after knowing Stella so well and coming to
+quarrel with her because of her indifference, there was little heart in
+it. This getting to the office, putting on an apron, and starting in on
+some local correspondence left over from the day before, or some
+telegraph copy which had been freshly filed on his hook, had its
+constructive value. Williams endeavored to use him on some local items
+of news as a reporter, but he was a slow worker and almost a failure at
+getting all the facts. He did not appear to know how to interview
+anybody, and would come back with a story which needed to be filled in
+from other sources. He really did not understand the theory of news, and
+Williams could only make it partially clear to him. Mostly he worked at
+his case, but he did learn some things.
+
+For one thing, the theory of advertising began to dawn on him. These
+local merchants put in the same ads. day after day, and many of them did
+not change them noticeably. He saw Lyle and Summers taking the same ads.
+which had appeared unchangingly from month to month in so far as their
+main features were concerned, and alter only a few words before
+returning them to the forms. He wondered at the sameness of them, and
+when, at last, they were given to him to revise he often wished he could
+change them a little. The language seemed so dull.
+
+"Why don't they ever put little drawings in these ads?" he asked Lyle
+one day. "Don't you think they'd look a little better?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," replied Jonas. "They look pretty good. These people
+around here wouldn't want anything like that. They'd think it was too
+fancy." Eugene had seen and in a way studied the ads. in the magazines.
+They seemed so much more fascinating to him. Why couldn't newspaper ads.
+be different?
+
+Still it was never given to him to trouble over this problem.
+Mr. Burgess dealt with the advertisers. He settled how the ads were to
+be. He never talked to Eugene or Summers about them, not always to Lyle.
+He would sometimes have Williams explain just what their character and
+layout was to be. Eugene was so young that Williams at first did not pay
+very much attention to him, but after a while he began to realize that
+there was a personality here, and then he would explain things,--why
+space had to be short for some items and long for others, why county
+news, news of small towns around Alexandria, and about people, was much
+more important financially to the paper than the correct reporting of
+the death of the sultan of Turkey. The most important thing was to get
+the local names right. "Don't ever misspell them," he once cautioned
+him. "Don't ever leave out a part of a name if you can help it. People
+are awfully sensitive about that. They'll stop their subscription if you
+don't watch out, and you won't know what's the matter."
+
+Eugene took all these things to heart. He wanted to see how the thing
+was done, though basically it seemed to be a little small. In fact
+people seemed a little small, mostly.
+
+One of the things that did interest him was to see the paper put on the
+press and run off. He liked to help lock up the forms, and to see how
+they were imposed and registered. He liked to hear the press run, and to
+help carry the wet papers to the mailing tables and the distributing
+counter out in front. The paper hadn't a very large circulation but
+there was a slight hum of life about that time and he liked it. He liked
+the sense of getting his hands and face streaked and not caring, and of
+seeing his hair tousled, in the mirror. He tried to be useful and the
+various people on the paper came to like him, though he was often a
+little awkward and slow. He was not strong at this period and his
+stomach troubled him. He thought, too, that the smell of the ink might
+affect his lungs, though he did not seriously fear it. In the main it
+was interesting but small; there was a much larger world outside, he
+knew that. He hoped to go to it some day; he hoped to go to Chicago.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Eugene grew more and more moody and rather restless under Stella's
+increasing independence. She grew steadily more indifferent because of
+his moods. The fact that other boys were crazy for her consideration was
+a great factor; the fact that one particular boy, Harvey Rutter, was
+persistently genial, not insistent, really better looking than Eugene
+and much better tempered, helped a great deal. Eugene saw her with him
+now and then, saw her go skating with him, or at least with a crowd of
+which he was a member. Eugene hated him heartily; he hated her at times
+for not yielding to him wholly; but he was none the less wild over her
+beauty. It stamped his brain with a type or ideal. Thereafter he knew in
+a really definite way what womanhood ought to be, to be really
+beautiful.
+
+Another thing it did was to bring home to him a sense of his position in
+the world. So far he had always been dependent on his parents for food,
+clothes and spending money, and his parents were not very liberal. He
+knew other boys who had money to run up to Chicago or down to
+Springfield--the latter was nearer--to have a Saturday and Sunday lark.
+No such gaieties were for him. His father would not allow it, or rather
+would not pay for it. There were other boys who, in consequence of amply
+provided spending money, were the town dandies. He saw them kicking
+their heels outside the corner book store, the principal loafing place
+of the elite, on Wednesdays and Saturdays and sometimes on Sunday
+evenings preparatory to going somewhere, dressed in a luxury of clothing
+which was beyond his wildest dreams. Ted Martinwood, the son of the
+principal drygoods man, had a frock coat in which he sometimes appeared
+when he came down to the barber shop for a shave before he went to call
+on his girl. George Anderson was possessed of a dress suit, and wore
+dancing pumps at all dances. There was Ed Waterbury, who was known to
+have a horse and runabout of his own. These youths were slightly older,
+and were interested in girls of a slightly older set, but the point was
+the same. These things hurt him.
+
+He himself had no avenue of progress which, so far as he could see, was
+going to bring him to any financial prosperity. His father was never
+going to be rich, anybody could see that. He himself had made no
+practical progress in schoolwork--he knew that. He hated
+insurance--soliciting or writing, despised the sewing machine business,
+and did not know where he would get with anything which he might like to
+do in literature or art. His drawing seemed a joke, his writing, or wish
+for writing, pointless. He was broodingly unhappy.
+
+One day Williams, who had been watching him for a long time, stopped at
+his desk.
+
+"I say, Witla, why don't you go to Chicago?" he said. "There's a lot
+more up there for a boy like you than down here. You'll never get
+anywhere working on a country newspaper."
+
+"I know it," said Eugene.
+
+"Now with me it's different," went on Williams. "I've had my rounds.
+I've got a wife and three children and when a man's got a family he
+can't afford to take chances. But you're young yet. Why don't you go to
+Chicago and get on a paper? You could get something."
+
+"What could I get?" asked Eugene.
+
+"Well, you might get a job as type-setter if you'd join the union. I
+don't know how good you'd be as a reporter--I hardly think that's your
+line. But you might study art and learn to draw. Newspaper artists make
+good money."
+
+Eugene thought of his art. It wasn't much. He didn't do much with it.
+Still he thought of Chicago; the world appealed to him. If he could only
+get out of here--if he could only make more than seven or eight dollars
+a week. He brooded about this.
+
+One Sunday afternoon he and Stella went with Myrtle to Sylvia's home,
+and after a brief stay Stella announced that she would have to be going;
+her mother would be expecting her back. Myrtle was for going with her,
+but altered her mind when Sylvia asked her to stay to tea. "Let Eugene
+take her home," Sylvia said. Eugene was delighted in his persistent,
+hopeless way. He was not yet convinced that she could not be won to
+love. When they walked out in the fresh sweet air--it was nearing
+spring--he felt that now he should have a chance of saying something
+which would be winning--which would lure her to him.
+
+They went out on a street next to the one she lived on quite to the
+confines of the town. She wanted to turn off at her street, but he had
+urged her not to. "Do you have to go home just yet?" he asked,
+pleadingly.
+
+"No, I can walk a little way," she replied.
+
+They reached a vacant place--the last house a little distance
+back--talking idly. It was getting hard to make talk. In his efforts to
+be entertaining he picked up three twigs to show her how a certain trick
+in balancing was performed. It consisted in laying two at right angles
+with each other and with a third, using the latter as an upright. She
+could not do it, of course. She was not really very much interested. He
+wanted her to try and when she did, took hold of her right hand to
+steady her efforts.
+
+"No, don't," she said, drawing her hand away. "I can do it."
+
+She trifled with the twigs unsuccessfully and was about to let them
+fall, when he took hold of both her hands. It was so sudden that she
+could not free herself, and so she looked him straight in the eye.
+
+"Let go, Eugene, please let go."
+
+He shook his head, gazing at her.
+
+"Please let go," she went on. "You mustn't do this. I don't want you
+to."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because."
+
+"Because why?"
+
+"Well, because I don't."
+
+"Don't you like me any more, Stella, really?" he asked.
+
+"I don't think I do, not that way."
+
+"But you did."
+
+"I thought I did."
+
+"Have you changed your mind?"
+
+"Yes, I think I have."
+
+He dropped her hands and looked at her fixedly and dramatically. The
+attitude did not appeal to her. They strolled back to the street, and
+when they neared her door he said, "Well, I suppose there's no use in my
+coming to see you any more."
+
+"I think you'd better not," she said simply.
+
+She walked in, never looking back, and instead of going back to his
+sister's he went home. He was in a very gloomy mood, and after sitting
+around for a while went to his room. The night fell, and he sat there
+looking out at the trees and grieving about what he had lost. Perhaps he
+was not good enough for her--he could not make her love him. Was it that
+he was not handsome enough--he did not really consider himself good
+looking--or what was it, a lack of courage or strength?
+
+After a time he noticed that the moon was hanging over the trees like a
+bright shield in the sky. Two layers of thin clouds were moving in
+different directions on different levels. He stopped in his cogitations
+to think where these clouds came from. On sunny days when there were
+great argosies of them he had seen them disappear before his eyes, and
+then, marvel of marvels, reappear out of nothingness. The first time he
+ever saw this it astonished him greatly, for he had never known up to
+then what clouds were. Afterward he read about them in his physical
+geography. Tonight he thought of that, and of the great plains over
+which these winds swept, and of the grass and trees--great forests of
+them--miles and miles. What a wonderful world! Poets wrote about these
+things, Longfellow, and Bryant, and Tennyson. He thought of
+"Thanatopsis," and of the "Elegy," both of which he admired greatly.
+What was this thing, life?
+
+Then he came back to Stella with an ache. She was actually gone, and she
+was so beautiful. She would never really talk to him any more. He would
+never get to hold her hand or kiss her. He clenched his hands with the
+hurt. Oh, that night on the ice; that night in the sleigh! How wonderful
+they were! Finally he undressed and went to bed. He wanted to be
+alone--to be lonely. On his clean white pillow he lay and dreamed of the
+things that might have been, kisses, caresses, a thousand joys.
+
+One Sunday afternoon he was lying in his hammock thinking, thinking of
+what a dreary place Alexandria was, anyhow, when he opened a Chicago
+Saturday afternoon paper, which was something like a Sunday one because
+it had no Sunday edition,--and went gloomily through it. It was as he
+had always found, full of a subtle wonder, the wonder of the city, which
+drew him like a magnet. Here was the drawing of a big hotel someone was
+going to build; there was a sketch of a great pianist who was coming to
+play. An account of a new comedy drama; of a little romantic section of
+Goose Island in the Chicago river, with its old decayed boats turned
+into houses and geese waddling about; an item of a man falling through a
+coal hole on South Halstead street fascinated him. This last was at
+sixty-two hundred and something and the idea of such a long street
+seized on his imagination. What a tremendous city Chicago must be. The
+thought of car lines, crowds, trains, came to him with almost a yearning
+appeal.
+
+All at once the magnet got him. It gripped his very soul, this wonder,
+this beauty, this life.
+
+"I'm going to Chicago," he thought, and got up.
+
+There was his nice, quiet little home laid out before him. Inside were
+his mother, his father, Myrtle. Still he was going. He could come back.
+"Sure I can come back," he thought. Propelled by this magnetic power he
+went in and upstairs to his room, and got a little grip or portmanteau
+he had. He put in it the things he thought he would immediately need. In
+his pocket were nine dollars, money he had been saving for some time.
+Finally he came downstairs and stood in the door of the sitting room.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked his mother, looking at his solemn
+introspective face.
+
+"I'm going to Chicago," he said.
+
+"When?" she asked, astonished, a little uncertain of just what he meant.
+
+"Today," he said.
+
+"No, you're joking." She smiled unbelievingly. This was a boyish prank.
+
+"I'm going today," he said. "I'm going to catch that four o'clock
+train."
+
+Her face saddened. "You're not?" she said.
+
+"I can come back," he replied, "if I want to. I want to get something
+else to do."
+
+His father came in at this time. He had a little work room out in the
+barn where he sometimes cleaned machines and repaired vehicles. He was
+fresh from such a task now.
+
+"What's up?" he asked, seeing his wife close to her boy.
+
+"Eugene's going to Chicago."
+
+"Since when?" he inquired amusedly.
+
+"Today. He says he's going right now."
+
+"You don't mean it," said Witla, astonished. He really did not believe
+it. "Why don't you take a little time and think it over? What are you
+going to live on?"
+
+"I'll live," said Eugene. "I'm going. I've had enough of this place. I'm
+going to get out."
+
+"All right," said his father, who, after all, believed in initiative.
+Evidently after all he hadn't quite understood this boy. "Got your trunk
+packed?"
+
+"No, but mother can send me that."
+
+"Don't go today," pleaded his mother. "Wait until you get something
+ready, Eugene. Wait and do a little thinking about it. Wait until
+tomorrow."
+
+"I want to go today, ma." He slipped his arm around her. "Little ma." He
+was bigger than she by now, and still growing.
+
+"All right, Eugene," she said softly, "but I wish you wouldn't." Her boy
+was leaving her--her heart was hurt.
+
+"I can come back, ma. It's only a hundred miles."
+
+"Well, all right," she said finally, trying to brighten. "I'll pack your
+bag."
+
+"I have already."
+
+She went to look.
+
+"Well, it'll soon be time," said Witla, who was thinking that Eugene
+might back down. "I'm sorry. Still it may be a good thing for you.
+You're always welcome here, you know."
+
+"I know," said Eugene.
+
+They went finally to the train together, he and his father and Myrtle.
+His mother couldn't. She stayed to cry.
+
+On the way to the depot they stopped at Sylvia's.
+
+"Why, Eugene," she exclaimed, "how ridiculous! Don't go."
+
+"He's set," said Witla.
+
+Eugene finally got loose. He seemed to be fighting love, home ties,
+everything, every step of the way. Finally he reached the depot. The
+train came. Witla grabbed his hand affectionately. "Be a good boy," he
+said, swallowing a gulp.
+
+Myrtle kissed him. "You're so funny, Eugene. Write me."
+
+"I will."
+
+He stepped on the train. The bell rang. Out the cars rolled--out and on.
+He looked out on the familiar scenes and then a real ache came to
+him--Stella, his mother, his father, Myrtle, the little home. They were
+all going out of his life.
+
+"Hm," he half groaned, clearing his throat. "Gee!"
+
+And then he sank back and tried, as usual, not to think. He must
+succeed. That's what the world was made for. That was what he was made
+for. That was what he would have to do....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The city of Chicago--who shall portray it! This vast ruck of life that
+had sprung suddenly into existence upon the dank marshes of a lake
+shore. Miles and miles of dreary little houses; miles and miles of
+wooden block-paved streets, with gas lamps placed and water mains laid,
+and empty wooden walks set for pedestrians; the beat of a hundred
+thousand hammers; the ring of a hundred thousand trowels! Long,
+converging lines of telegraph poles; thousands upon thousands of
+sentinel cottages, factory plants, towering smoke stacks, and here and
+there a lone, shabby church steeple, sitting out pathetically upon
+vacant land. The raw prairie stretch was covered with yellow grass; the
+great broad highways of the tracks of railroads, ten, fifteen, twenty,
+thirty, laid side by side and strung with thousands upon thousands of
+shabby cars, like beads upon a string. Engines clanging, trains moving,
+people waiting at street crossings--pedestrians, wagon drivers, street
+car drivers, drays of beer, trucks of coal, brick, stone, sand--a
+spectacle of new, raw, necessary life!
+
+As Eugene began to draw near it he caught for the first time the sense
+and significance of a great city. What were these newspaper shadows he
+had been dealing with in his reading compared to this vivid, articulate,
+eager thing? Here was the substance of a new world, substantial,
+fascinating, different. The handsome suburban station at South Chicago,
+the first of its kind he had ever seen, took his eye, as the train
+rolled cityward. He had never before seen a crowd of foreigners--working
+men--and here were Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, waiting for a local
+train. He had never seen a really large factory plant, and here was one,
+and another, and another--steel works, potteries, soap-factories,
+foundries, all gaunt and hard in the Sunday evening air. There seemed to
+be, for all it was Sunday, something youthful, energetic and alive about
+the streets. He noted the streetcars waiting; at one place a small river
+was crossed on a draw,--dirty, gloomy, but crowded with boats and lined
+with great warehouses, grain elevators, coal pockets--that architecture
+of necessity and utility. His imagination was fired by this for here was
+something that could be done brilliantly in black--a spot of red or
+green for ship and bridge lights. There were some men on the magazines
+who did things like this, only not so vivid.
+
+The train threaded its way through long lines of cars coming finally
+into an immense train shed where arc lights were spluttering--a score
+under a great curved steel and glass roof, where people were hurrying to
+and fro. Engines were hissing; bells clanging raucously. He had no
+relatives, no soul to turn to, but somehow he did not feel lonely. This
+picture of life, this newness, fascinated him. He stepped down and
+started leisurely to the gate, wondering which way he should go. He came
+to a corner where a lamp post already lit blazoned the name Madison. He
+looked out on this street and saw, as far as the eye could reach, two
+lines of stores, jingling horse cars, people walking. What a sight, he
+thought, and turned west. For three miles he walked, musing, and then as
+it was dark, and he had arranged for no bed, he wondered where he should
+eat and sleep. A fat man sitting outside a livery stable door in a
+tilted, cane-seated chair offered a possibility of information.
+
+"Do you know where I can get a room around here?" asked Eugene.
+
+The lounger looked him over. He was the proprietor of the place.
+
+"There's an old lady living over there at seven-thirty-two," he said,
+"who has a room, I think. She might take you in." He liked Eugene's
+looks.
+
+Eugene crossed over and rang a downstairs bell. The door was opened
+shortly by a tall, kindly woman, of a rather matriarchal turn. Her hair
+was gray.
+
+"Yes?" she inquired.
+
+"The gentleman at the livery stable over there said I might get a room
+here. I'm looking for one."
+
+She smiled pleasantly. This boy looked his strangeness, his wide-eyed
+interest, his freshness from the country. "Come in," she said. "I have a
+room. You can look at it."
+
+It was a front room--a little bed-room off the one main living room,
+clean, simple, convenient. "This looks all right," he said.
+
+She smiled.
+
+"You can have it for two dollars a week," she proffered.
+
+"That's all right," he said, putting down his grip. "I'll take it."
+
+"Have you had supper?" she asked.
+
+"No, but I'm going out soon. I want to see the streets. I'll find some
+place."
+
+"I'll give you something," she said.
+
+Eugene thanked her, and she smiled. This was what Chicago did to the
+country. It took the boys.
+
+He opened the closed shutters of his window and knelt before it, leaning
+on the sill. He looked out idly, for it was all so wonderful. Bright
+lights were burning in store windows. These people hurrying--how their
+feet sounded--clap, clap, clap. And away east and away west it was all
+like this. It was all like this everywhere, a great big, wonderful city.
+It was nice to be here. He felt that now. It was all worth while. How
+could he have stayed in Alexandria so long! He would get along here.
+Certainly he would. He was perfectly sure of that. He knew.
+
+Chicago at this time certainly offered a world of hope and opportunity
+to the beginner. It was so new, so raw; everything was in the making.
+The long lines of houses and stores were mostly temporary
+make-shifts--one and two story frame affairs--with here and there a
+three and four story brick building which spoke of better days to come.
+Down in the business heart which lay between the lake and the river, the
+North Side and the South Side, was a region which spoke of a tremendous
+future, for here were stores which served the buying public, not only of
+Chicago, but of the Middle West. There were great banks, great office
+buildings, great retail stores, great hotels. The section was running
+with a tide of people which represented the youth, the illusions, the
+untrained aspirations, of millions of souls. When you walked into this
+area you could feel what Chicago meant--eagerness, hope, desire. It was
+a city that put vitality into almost every wavering heart: it made the
+beginner dream dreams; the aged to feel that misfortune was never so
+grim that it might not change.
+
+Underneath, of course, was struggle. Youth and hope and energy were
+setting a terrific pace. You had to work here, to move, to step lively.
+You had to have ideas. This city demanded of you your very best, or it
+would have little to do with you. Youth in its search for something--and
+age--were quickly to feel this. It was no fool's paradise.
+
+Eugene, once he was settled, realized this. He had the notion, somehow,
+that the printer's trade was all over for him. He wanted no more of
+that. He wanted to be an artist or something like that, although he
+hardly knew how to begin. The papers offered one way, but he was not
+sure that they took on beginners. He had had no training whatever. His
+sister Myrtle had once said that some of his little thumb-nail sketches
+were pretty, but what did she know? If he could study somewhere, find
+someone who would teach him.... Meanwhile he would have to work.
+
+He tried the newspapers first of course, for those great institutions
+seemed the ideal resort for anyone who wanted to get up in the world,
+but the teeming offices with frowning art directors and critical
+newspaper workers frightened him. One art director did see something in
+the three or four little sketches he showed, but he happened to be in a
+crusty mood, and did not want anybody anyway. He simply said no, there
+was nothing. Eugene thought that perhaps as an artist also, he was
+destined to be a failure.
+
+The trouble with this boy was really that he was not half awake yet. The
+beauty of life, its wonder, had cast a spell over him, but he could not
+yet interpret it in line and color. He walked about these wonderful
+streets, gazing in the windows, looking at the boats on the river,
+looking at the ships on the lake. One day, while he was standing on the
+lake shore, there came a ship in full sail in the offing--the first he
+had ever seen. It gripped his sense of beauty. He clasped his hands
+nervously and thrilled to it. Then he sat down on the lake wall and
+looked and looked and looked until it gradually sank below the horizon.
+So this was how the great lakes were; and how the great seas must
+be--the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Ah, the sea! Some
+day, perhaps he would go to New York. That was where the sea was. But
+here it was also, in miniature, and it was wonderful.
+
+One cannot moon by lake shores and before store windows and at bridge
+draws and live, unless one is provided with the means of living, and
+this Eugene was not. He had determined when he left home that he would
+be independent. He wanted to get a salary in some way that he could at
+least live on. He wanted to write back and be able to say that he was
+getting along nicely. His trunk came, and a loving letter from his
+mother, and some money, but he sent that back. It was only ten dollars,
+but he objected to beginning that way. He thought he ought to earn his
+own way, and he wanted to try, anyhow.
+
+After ten days his funds were very low, a dollar and seventy-five cents,
+and he decided that any job would have to do. Never mind about art or
+type-setting now. He could not get the last without a union card, he
+must take anything, and so he applied from store to store. The cheap
+little shops in which he asked were so ugly they hurt, but he tried to
+put his artistic sensibilities aside. He asked for anything, to be made
+a clerk in a bakery, in a dry goods store, in a candy store. After a
+time a hardware store loomed up, and he asked there. The man looked at
+him curiously. "I might give you a place at storing stoves."
+
+Eugene did not understand, but he accepted gladly. It only paid six
+dollars a week, but he could live on that. He was shown to a loft in
+charge of two rough men, stove fitters, polishers, and repairers, who
+gruffly explained to him that his work was to brush the rust off the
+decayed stoves, to help piece and screw them together, to polish and
+lift things, for this was a second hand stove business which bought and
+repaired stoves from junk dealers all over the city. Eugene had a low
+bench near a window where he was supposed to do his polishing, but he
+very frequently wasted his time here looking out into the green yards of
+some houses in a side street. The city was full of wonder to him--its
+every detail fascinating. When a rag-picker would go by calling "rags,
+old iron," or a vegetable vender crying "tomatoes, potatoes, green corn,
+peas," he would stop and listen, the musical pathos of the cries
+appealing to him. Alexandria had never had anything like this. It was
+all so strange. He saw himself making pen and ink sketches of things, of
+the clothes lines in the back yards and of the maids with baskets.
+
+On one of the days when he thought he was working fairly well (he had
+been there two weeks), one of the two repairers said, "Hey, get a move
+on you. You're not paid to look out the window." Eugene stopped. He had
+not realized that he was loafing.
+
+"What have you got to do with it?" he asked, hurt and half defiant. He
+was under the impression that he was working with these men, not under
+them.
+
+"I'll show you, you fresh kid," said the older of the two, who was an
+individual built on the order of "Bill Sykes." "You're under me. You get
+a move on you, and don't give me any more of your lip."
+
+Eugene was startled. It was a flash of brutality out of a clear sky. The
+animal, whom he had been scanning as an artist would, as a type, out of
+the corner of his eye, was revealing himself.
+
+"You go to the devil," said Eugene, only half awake to the grim reality
+of the situation.
+
+"What's that!" exclaimed the man, making for him. He gave him a shove
+toward the wall, and attempted to kick him with his big, hob-nailed
+boot. Eugene picked up a stove leg. His face was wax white.
+
+"Don't you try that again," he said darkly. He fixed the leg in his hand
+firmly.
+
+"Call it off, Jim," said the other man, who saw the uselessness of so
+much temper. "Don't hit him. Send him down stairs if you don't like
+him."
+
+"You get to hell out of here, then," said Eugene's noble superior.
+
+Eugene walked to a nail where his hat and coat were, carrying the stove
+leg. He edged past his assailant cautiously, fearing a second attack.
+The man was inclined to kick at him again because of his stubbornness,
+but forebore.
+
+"You're too fresh, Willie. You want to wake up, you dough face," he said
+as Eugene went.
+
+Eugene slipped out quietly. His spirit was hurt and torn. What a scene!
+He, Eugene Witla, kicked at, and almost kicked out, and that in a job
+that paid six dollars a week. A great lump came up in his throat, but it
+went down again. He wanted to cry but he could not. He went downstairs,
+stovepolish on his hands and face and slipped up to the desk.
+
+"I want to quit," he said to the man who had hired him.
+
+"All right, what's the matter?"
+
+"That big brute up there tried to kick me," he explained.
+
+"They're pretty rough men," answered the employer. "I was afraid you
+wouldn't get along. I guess you're not strong enough. Here you are." He
+laid out three dollars and a half. Eugene wondered at this queer
+interpretation of his complaint. He must get along with these men? They
+musn't get along with him? So the city had that sort of brutality in it.
+
+He went home and washed up, and then struck out again, for it was no
+time now to be without a job. After a week he found one,--as a house
+runner for a real estate concern, a young man to bring in the numbers of
+empty houses and post up the "For Rent" signs in the windows. It paid
+eight dollars and seemed to offer opportunities of advancement. Eugene
+might have stayed there indefinitely had it not failed after three
+months. He had reached the season of fall clothes then, and the need of
+a winter overcoat, but he made no complaint to his family. He wanted to
+appear to be getting along well, whether he was or not.
+
+One of the things which tended to harden and sharpen his impressions of
+life at this time was the show of luxury seen in some directions. On
+Michigan Avenue and Prairie Avenue, on Ashland Avenue and Washington
+Boulevard, were sections which were crowded with splendid houses such as
+Eugene had never seen before. He was astonished at the magnificence of
+their appointments, the beauty of the lawns, the show of the windows,
+the distinction of the equipages which accompanied them and served them.
+For the first time in his life he saw liveried footmen at doors: he saw
+at a distance girls and women grown who seemed marvels of beauty to
+him--they were so distinguished in their dress; he saw young men
+carrying themselves with an air of distinction which he had never seen
+before. These must be the society people the newspapers were always
+talking about. His mind made no distinctions as yet. If there were fine
+clothes, fine trappings, of course social prestige went with them. It
+made him see for the first time what far reaches lay between the
+conditions of a beginner from the country and what the world really had
+to offer--or rather what it showered on some at the top. It subdued and
+saddened him a little. Life was unfair.
+
+These fall days, too, with their brown leaves, sharp winds, scudding
+smoke and whirls of dust showed him that the city could be cruel. He met
+shabby men, sunken eyed, gloomy, haggard, who looked at him, apparently
+out of a deep despair. These creatures all seemed to be brought where
+they were by difficult circumstances. If they begged at all,--and they
+rarely did of him, for he did not look prosperous enough, it was with
+the statement that unfortunate circumstances had brought them where they
+were. You could fail so easily. You could really starve if you didn't
+look sharp,--the city quickly taught him that.
+
+During these days he got immensely lonely. He was not very sociable, and
+too introspective. He had no means of making friends, or thought he had
+none. So he wandered about the streets at night, marveling at the sights
+he saw, or staying at home in his little room. Mrs. Woodruff, the
+landlady, was nice and motherly enough, but she was not young and did
+not fit into his fancies. He was thinking about girls and how sad it was
+not to have one to say a word to him. Stella was gone--that dream was
+over. When would he find another like her?
+
+After wandering around for nearly a month, during which time he was
+compelled to use some money his mother sent him to buy a suit of clothes
+on an instalment plan, he got a place as driver of a laundry, which,
+because it paid ten dollars a week, seemed very good. He sketched now
+and then when he was not tired, but what he did seemed pointless. So he
+worked here, driving a wagon, when he should have been applying for an
+art opening, or taking art lessons.
+
+During this winter Myrtle wrote him that Stella Appleton had moved to
+Kansas, whither her father had gone; and that his mother's health was
+bad, and that she did so want him to come home and stay awhile. It was
+about this time that he became acquainted with a little Scotch girl
+named Margaret Duff, who worked in the laundry, and became quickly
+involved in a relationship which established a precedent in his
+experiences with women. Before this he had never physically known a
+girl. Now, and of a sudden, he was plunged into something which awakened
+a new, and if not evil, at least disrupting and disorganizing propensity
+of his character. He loved women, the beauty of the curves of their
+bodies. He loved beauty of feature and after a while was to love beauty
+of mind,--he did now, in a vague, unformed way,--but his ideal was as
+yet not clear to him. Margaret Duff represented some simplicity of
+attitude, some generosity of spirit, some shapeliness of form, some
+comeliness of feature,--it was not more. But, growing by what it fed on,
+his sex appetite became powerful. In a few weeks it had almost mastered
+him. He burned to be with this girl daily--and she was perfectly willing
+that he should, so long as the relationship did not become too
+conspicuous. She was a little afraid of her parents, although those two,
+being working people, retired early and slept soundly. They did not seem
+to mind her early philanderings with boys. This latest one was no
+novelty. It burned fiercely for three months--Eugene was eager,
+insatiable: the girl not so much so, but complaisant. She liked this
+evidence of fire in him,--the hard, burning flame she had aroused, and
+yet after a time she got a little tired. Then little personal
+differences arose,--differences of taste, differences of judgment,
+differences of interest. He really could not talk to her of anything
+serious, could not get a response to his more delicate emotions. For her
+part she could not find in him any ready appreciation of the little
+things she liked--theater jests, and the bright remarks of other boys
+and girls. She had some conception of what was tasteful in dress, but as
+for anything else, art, literature, public affairs, she knew nothing at
+all, while Eugene, for all his youth, was intensely alive to what was
+going on in the great world. The sound of great names and great fames
+was in his ears,--Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman. He read of great
+philosophers, painters, musicians, meteors that sped across the
+intellectual sky of the western world, and he wondered. He felt as
+though some day he would be called to do something--in his youthful
+enthusiasm he half-thought it might be soon. He knew that this girl he
+was trifling with could not hold him. She had lured him, but once lured
+he was master, judge, critic. He was beginning to feel that he could get
+along without her,--that he could find someone better.
+
+Naturally such an attitude would make for the death of passion, as the
+satiation of passion would make for the development of such an attitude.
+Margaret became indifferent. She resented his superior airs, his
+top-lofty tone at times. They quarreled over little things. One night he
+suggested something that she ought to do in the haughty manner customary
+with him.
+
+"Oh, don't be so smart!" she said. "You always talk as though you owned
+me."
+
+"I do," he said jestingly.
+
+"Do you?" she flared. "There are others."
+
+"Well, whenever you're ready you can have them. I'm willing."
+
+The tone cut her, though actually it was only an ill-timed bit of
+teasing, more kindly meant than it sounded.
+
+"Well, I'm ready now. You needn't come to see me unless you want to. I
+can get along."
+
+She tossed her head.
+
+"Don't be foolish, Margy," he said, seeing the ill wind he had aroused.
+"You don't mean that."
+
+"Don't I? Well, we'll see." She walked away from him to another corner
+of the room. He followed her, but her anger re-aroused his opposition.
+"Oh, all right," he said after a time. "I guess I'd better be going."
+
+She made no response, neither pleas nor suggestions. He went and secured
+his hat and coat and came back. "Want to kiss me good-bye?" he inquired.
+
+"No," she said simply.
+
+"Good-night," he called.
+
+"Good-night," she replied indifferently.
+
+The relationship was never amicably readjusted after this, although it
+did endure for some time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+For the time being this encounter stirred to an almost unbridled degree
+Eugene's interest in women. Most men are secretly proud of their triumph
+with woman--their ability to triumph--and any evidence of their ability
+to attract, entertain, hold, is one of those things which tends to give
+them an air of superiority and self-sufficiency which is sometimes
+lacking in those who are not so victorious. This was, in its way, his
+first victory of the sort, and it pleased him mightily. He felt much
+more sure of himself instead of in any way ashamed. What, he thought,
+did the silly boys back in Alexandria know of life compared to this?
+Nothing. He was in Chicago now. The world was different. He was finding
+himself to be a man, free, individual, of interest to other
+personalities. Margaret Duff had told him many pretty things about
+himself. She had complimented his looks, his total appearance, his taste
+in the selection of particular things. He had felt what it is to own a
+woman. He strutted about for a time, the fact that he had been dismissed
+rather arbitrarily having little weight with him because he was so very
+ready to be dismissed, sudden dissatisfaction with his job now stirred
+up in him, for ten dollars a week was no sum wherewith any
+self-respecting youth could maintain himself,--particularly with a view
+to sustaining any such relationship as that which had just ended. He
+felt that he ought to get a better place.
+
+Then one day a woman to whom he was delivering a parcel at her home in
+Warren Avenue, stopped him long enough to ask: "What do you drivers get
+a week for your work?"
+
+"I get ten dollars," said Eugene. "I think some get more."
+
+"You ought to make a good collector," she went on. She was a large,
+homely, incisive, straight-talking woman. "Would you like to change to
+that kind of work?"
+
+Eugene was sick of the laundry business. The hours were killing. He had
+worked as late as one o'clock Sunday morning.
+
+"I think I would," he exclaimed. "I don't know anything about it, but
+this work is no fun."
+
+"My husband is the manager of The People's Furniture Company," she went
+on. "He needs a good collector now and then. I think he's going to make
+a change very soon. I'll speak to him."
+
+Eugene smiled joyously and thanked her. This was surely a windfall. He
+was anxious to know what collectors were paid but he thought it scarcely
+tactful to ask.
+
+"If he gives you a job you will probably get fourteen dollars to begin
+with," she volunteered.
+
+Eugene thrilled. That would be really a rise in the world. Four dollars
+more! He could get some nice clothes out of that and have spending money
+besides. He might get a chance to study art. His visions began to
+multiply. One could get up in the world by trying. The energetic
+delivery he had done for this laundry had brought him this. Further
+effort in the other field might bring him more. And he was young yet.
+
+He had been working for the laundry company for six months. Six weeks
+later, Mr. Henry Mitchly, manager of the People's Furniture, wrote him
+care of the laundry company to call at his home any evening after eight
+and he would see him. "My wife has spoken to me of you," he added.
+
+Eugene complied the same day that he received the note, and was looked
+over by a lean, brisk, unctuous looking man of forty, who asked him
+various questions as to his work, his home, how much money he took in as
+a driver, and what not. Finally he said, "I need a bright young man down
+at my place. It's a good job for one who is steady and honest and
+hardworking. My wife seems to think you work pretty well, so I'm willing
+to give you a trial. I can put you to work at fourteen dollars. I want
+you to come to see me a week from Monday."
+
+Eugene thanked him. He decided, on Mr. Mitchly's advice, to give his
+laundry manager a full week's notice. He told Margaret that he was
+leaving and she was apparently glad for his sake. The management was
+slightly sorry, for Eugene was a good driver. During his last week he
+helped break in a new man in his place, and on Monday appeared before
+Mr. Mitchly.
+
+Mr. Mitchly was glad to have him, for he had seen him as a young man of
+energy and force. He explained the simple nature of the work, which was
+to take bills for clocks, silverware, rugs, anything which the company
+sold, and go over the various routes collecting the money due,--which
+would average from seventy five to a hundred and twenty-five dollars a
+day. "Most companies in our line require a bond," he explained, "but we
+haven't come to that yet. I think I know honest young men when I see
+them. Anyhow we have a system of inspection. If a man's inclined to be
+dishonest he can't get very far with us."
+
+Eugene had never thought of this question of honesty very much. He had
+been raised where he did not need to worry about the matter of a little
+pocket change, and he had made enough at the _Appeal_ to supply his
+immediate wants. Besides, among the people he had always associated with
+it was considered a very right and necessary thing to be honest. Men
+were arrested for not being. He remembered one very sad case of a boy he
+knew being arrested at Alexandria for breaking into a store at night.
+That seemed a terrible thing to him at the time. Since then he had been
+speculating a great deal, in a vague way as to what honesty was, but he
+had not yet decided. He knew that it was expected of him to account for
+the last penny of anything that was placed in his keeping and he was
+perfectly willing to do so. The money he earned seemed enough if he had
+to live on it. There was no need for him to aid in supporting anyone
+else. So he slipped along rather easily and practically untested.
+
+Eugene took the first day's package of bills as laid out for him, and
+carefully went from door to door. In some places money was paid him for
+which he gave a receipt, in others he was put off or refused because of
+previous difficulties with the company. In a number of places people had
+moved, leaving no trace of themselves, and packing the unpaid for goods
+with them. It was his business, as Mr. Mitchly explained, to try to get
+track of them from the neighbors.
+
+Eugene saw at once that he was going to like the work. The fresh air,
+the out-door life, the walking, the quickness with which his task was
+accomplished, all pleased him. His routes took him into strange and new
+parts of the city, where he had never been before, and introduced him to
+types he had never met. His laundry work, taking him from door to door,
+had been a freshening influence, and this was another. He saw scenes
+that he felt sure he could, when he had learned to draw a little better,
+make great things of,--dark, towering factory-sites, great stretches of
+railroad yards laid out like a puzzle in rain, snow, or bright sunlight;
+great smoke-stacks throwing their black heights athwart morning or
+evening skies. He liked them best in the late afternoon when they stood
+out in a glow of red or fading purple. "Wonderful," he used to exclaim
+to himself, and think how the world would marvel if he could ever come
+to do great pictures like those of Dore. He admired the man's tremendous
+imagination. He never thought of himself as doing anything in oils or
+water colors or chalk--only pen and ink, and that in great, rude
+splotches of black and white. That was the way. That was the way force
+was had.
+
+But he could not do them. He could only think them.
+
+One of his chief joys was the Chicago river, its black, mucky water
+churned by puffing tugs and its banks lined by great red grain elevators
+and black coal chutes and yellow lumber yards. Here was real color and
+life--the thing to draw; and then there were the low, drab, rain-soaked
+cottages standing in lonely, shabby little rows out on flat prairie
+land, perhaps a scrubby tree somewhere near. He loved these. He would
+take an envelope and try to get the sense of them--the feel, as he
+called it--but it wouldn't come. All he did seemed cheap and
+commonplace, mere pointless lines and stiff wooden masses. How did the
+great artists get their smoothness and ease? He wondered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Eugene collected and reported faithfully every day, and had managed to
+save a little money. Margaret was now a part of his past. His landlady,
+Mrs. Woodruff, had gone to live with a daughter in Sedalia, Missouri,
+and he had moved to a comparatively nice house in East Twenty-first
+Street on the South Side. It had taken his eye because of a tree in a
+fifty foot space of ground before it. Like his other room it cost him
+little, and he was in a private family. He arranged a twenty cent rate
+per meal for such meals as he took there, and thus he managed to keep
+his bare living expenses down to five dollars a week. The remaining nine
+he spent sparingly for clothes, car-fare, and amusements--almost nothing
+of the latter. When he saw he had a little money in reserve he began to
+think of looking up the Art Institute, which had been looming up in his
+mind as an avenue of advancement, and find out on what condition he
+could join a night class in drawing. They were very reasonable, he
+heard, only fifteen dollars a quarter, and he decided to begin if the
+conditions were not too severe. He was beginning to be convinced that he
+was born to be an artist--how soon he could not tell.
+
+The old Art Institute, which preceded the present impressive structure,
+was located at Michigan Avenue and Monroe Street, and presented an
+atmosphere of distinction which was not present in most of the
+structures representing the public taste of the period. It was a large
+six storey building of brown stone, and contained a number of studios
+for painters, sculptors, and music teachers, besides the exhibition
+rooms and the rooms for the classes. There were both day and evening
+classes, and even at that time a large number of students. The western
+soul, to a certain extent, was fired by the wonder of art. There was so
+little of it in the life of the people--the fame of those who could
+accomplish things in this field and live in a more refined atmosphere
+was great. To go to Paris! To be a student in any one of the great
+ateliers of that city! Or of Munich or Rome, to know the character of
+the artistic treasures of Europe--the life of the Art quarter--that was
+something. There was what might have been termed a wild desire in the
+breast of many an untutored boy and girl to get out of the ranks of the
+commonplace; to assume the character and the habiliments of the artistic
+temperament as they were then supposed to be; to have a refined,
+semi-languorous, semi-indifferent manner; to live in a studio, to have a
+certain freedom in morals and temperament not accorded to the ordinary
+person--these were the great things to do and be. Of course, art
+composition was a part of this. You were supposed ultimately to paint
+great pictures or do noble sculptures, but in the meanwhile you could
+and should live the life of the artist. And that was beautiful and
+wonderful and free.
+
+Eugene had long had some sense of this. He was aware that there were
+studios in Chicago; that certain men were supposed to be doing good
+work--he saw it in the papers. There were mentions now and then of
+exhibitions, mostly free, which the public attended but sparingly. Once
+there was an exhibition of some of the war pictures of Verestchagin, a
+great Russian painter who had come West for some purpose. Eugene saw
+them one Sunday afternoon, and was enthralled by the magnificence of
+their grasp of the elements of battle; the wonder of color; the truth of
+character; the dramatic quality; the sense of force and danger and
+horror and suffering which was somehow around and in and through
+everything that was shown. This man had virility and insight; stupendous
+imagination and temperament. Eugene stood and stared, wondering how such
+things could be done. Ever afterward the name of Verestchagin was like a
+great call to his imagination; that was the kind of an artist to be if
+you were going to be one.
+
+Another picture came there once, which appealed to another side of his
+nature, although primarily the basis of its appeal was artistic. It was
+a great, warm tinted nude by Bouguereau, a French artist who was
+startling his day with his daring portrayal of the nude. The types he
+depicted were not namby-pamby little slim-bodied women with spindling
+qualities of strength and passion, but great, full-blown women whose
+voluptuous contour of neck and arms and torso and hip and thigh was
+enough to set the blood of youth at fever heat. The man obviously
+understood and had passion, love of form, love of desire, love of
+beauty. He painted with a sense of the bridal bed in the background; of
+motherhood and of fat, growing babies, joyously nursed. These women
+stood up big in their sense of beauty and magnetism, the soft lure of
+desire in their eyes, their full lips parted, their cheeks flushed with
+the blood of health. As such they were anathema to the conservative and
+puritanical in mind, the religious in temperament, the cautious in
+training or taste. The very bringing of this picture to Chicago as a
+product for sale was enough to create a furore of objection. Such
+pictures should not be painted, was the cry of the press; or if painted,
+not exhibited. Bouguereau was conceived of by many as one of those
+dastards of art who were endeavoring to corrupt by their talent the
+morals of the world; there was a cry raised that the thing should be
+suppressed; and as is always the case in all such outbursts of special
+class opposition, the interest of the general public was aroused.
+
+Eugene was one of those who noted the discussion. He had never seen a
+picture by Bouguereau or, indeed, an original nude by any other artist.
+Being usually at liberty after three o'clock, he was free to visit some
+of these things, and having found it possible to do his work in good
+clothes he had come to wear his best suit every day. He was a fairly
+presentable youth with a solemn mien, and his request to be shown
+anything in any art store would have aroused no surprise. He looked as
+though he belonged to the intellectual and artistic classes.
+
+Not being sure of what reception would be accorded one so young--he was
+now nearing twenty--he nevertheless ventured to stop at the gallery
+where the Bouguereau was being exhibited and ask to see it. The
+attendant in charge eyed him curiously, but led him back to a room hung
+in dark red, and turning on a burst of incandescent bulbs set in the
+ceiling of a red plush hung cabinet, pulled back the curtain revealing
+the picture. Eugene had never seen such a figure and face. It was a
+dream of beauty--his ideal come to life. He studied the face and neck,
+the soft mass of brown, sensuous hair massed at the back of the head,
+the flowerlike lips and soft cheeks. He marveled at the suggestion of
+the breasts and the abdomen, that potentiality of motherhood that is so
+firing to the male. He could have stood there hours dreaming,
+luxuriating, but the attendant who had left him alone with it for a few
+minutes returned.
+
+"What is the price of this?" Eugene asked.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars," was the reply.
+
+He smiled solemnly. "It's a wonderful thing," he said, and turned to go.
+The attendant put out the light.
+
+This picture, like those of Verestchagin, made a sharp impression on
+him. Curiously he had no longing to paint anything of this kind. He only
+rejoiced to look at it. It spoke to him of his present ideal of
+womanhood--physical beauty, and he longed with all his heart to find a
+creature like that who would look on him with favor.
+
+There were other exhibitions--one containing a genuine Rembrandt--which
+impressed him, but none like these that had definitely stirred him. His
+interest in art was becoming eager. He wanted to find out all about
+it--to do something himself. One day he ventured to call at the Art
+Institute building and consult the secretary, who explained to him what
+the charges were. He learned from her, for she was a woman of a
+practical, clerical turn, that the classes ran from October to May, that
+he could enter a life or antique class or both, though the antique alone
+was advisable for the time, and a class in illustration, where costumes
+of different periods were presented on different models. He found that
+each class had an instructor of supposed note, whom it was not necessary
+for him to see. Each class had a monitor and each student was supposed
+to work faithfully for his own benefit. Eugene did not get to see the
+class rooms, but he gained a sense of the art of it all, nevertheless,
+for the halls and offices were decorated in an artistic way, and there
+were many plaster casts of arms, legs, busts, and thighs and heads. It
+was as though one stood in an open doorway and looked out upon a new
+world. The one thing that gratified him was that he could study pen and
+ink or brush in the illustration class, and that he could also join a
+sketch class from five to six every afternoon without extra charges if
+he preferred to devote his evening hours to studying drawing in the life
+class. He was a little astonished to learn from a printed prospectus
+given him that the life class meant nude models to work from--both men
+and women. He was surely approaching a different world now. It seemed
+necessary and natural enough, and yet there was an aloof atmosphere
+about it, something that suggested the inner precincts of a shrine, to
+which only talent was admitted. Was he talented? Wait! He would show the
+world, even if he was a raw country boy.
+
+The classes which he decided to enter were first a life class which
+convened Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings at seven in one of the
+study rooms and remained in session until ten o'clock, and second a
+sketch class which met from five to six every afternoon. Eugene felt
+that he knew little or nothing about figure and anatomy and had better
+work at that. Costume and illustration would have to wait, and as for
+the landscapes, or rather city-scapes, of which he was so fond, he could
+afford to defer those until he learned something of the fundamentals of
+art.
+
+Heretofore he had rarely attempted the drawing of a face or figure
+except in miniature and as details of a larger scene. Now he was
+confronted with the necessity of sketching in charcoal the head or body
+of a living person, and it frightened him a little. He knew that he
+would be in a class with fifteen or twenty other male students. They
+would be able to see and comment on what he was doing. Twice a week an
+instructor would come around and pass upon his work. There were honors
+for those who did the best work during any one month, he learned from
+the prospectus, namely: first choice of seats around the model at the
+beginning of each new pose. The class instructors must be of
+considerable significance in the American art world, he thought, for
+they were N. A.'s, and that meant National Academicians. He little knew
+with what contempt this honor was received in some quarters, or he would
+not have attached so much significance to it.
+
+One Monday evening in October, armed with the several sheets of paper
+which he had been told to purchase by his all-informing prospectus, he
+began his work. He was a little nervous at sight of the brightly lighted
+halls and class rooms, and the moving crowd of young men and women did
+not tend to allay his fears. He was struck at once with the quality of
+gaiety, determination and easy grace which marked the different members
+of this company. The boys struck him as interesting, virile, in many
+cases good looking; the girls as graceful, rather dashing and confident.
+One or two whom he noted were beautiful in a dark way. This was a
+wonderful world.
+
+The rooms too, were exceptional. They were old enough in use to be
+almost completely covered, as to the walls, with the accumulation of
+paint scraped from the palettes. There were no easels or other
+paraphernalia, but simply chairs and little stools--the former, as
+Eugene learned, to be turned upside down for easels, the latter for the
+students to sit on. In the center of the room was a platform, the height
+of an ordinary table, for the model to pose on, and in one corner a
+screen which constituted a dressing room. There were no pictures or
+statuary--just the bare walls--but curiously, in one corner, a piano.
+Out in the halls and in the general lounging center were pictures of
+nude figures or parts of figures posed in all sorts of ways which
+Eugene, in his raw, youthful way, thought suggestive. He secretly
+rejoiced to look at them but he felt that he must not say anything about
+what he thought. An art student, he felt sure, must appear to be
+indifferent to such suggestion--to be above such desire. They were here
+to work, not to dream of women.
+
+When the time came for the classes to assemble there was a scurrying to
+and fro, conferring between different students, and then the men found
+themselves in one set of rooms and the women in another. Eugene saw a
+young girl in his room, sitting up near the screen, idly gazing about.
+She was pretty, of a slightly Irish cast of countenance, with black hair
+and black eyes. She wore a cap that was an imitation of the Polish
+national head-dress, and a red cape. Eugene assumed her to be the class
+model and secretly wondered if he was really to see her in the nude. In
+a few minutes all the students were gathered, and then there was a stir
+as there strolled in a rather vigorous and picturesque man of thirty-six
+or thereabouts, who sauntered to the front of the room and called the
+class to order. He was clad in a shabby suit of grey tweed and crowned
+with a little brown hat, shoved rakishly over one ear, which he did not
+trouble to take off. He wore a soft blue hickory shirt without collar or
+tie, and looked immensely self-sufficient. He was tall and lean and
+raw-boned, with a face which was long and narrow; his eyes were large
+and wide set, his mouth big and firm in its lines; he had big hands and
+feet, and an almost rolling gait. Eugene assumed instinctively that this
+was Mr. Temple Boyle, N. A., the class instructor, and he imagined there
+would be an opening address of some kind. But the instructor merely
+announced that Mr. William Ray had been appointed monitor and that he
+hoped that there would be no disorder or wasting of time. There would be
+regular criticism days by him--Wednesdays and Fridays. He hoped that
+each pupil would be able to show marked improvement. The class would now
+begin work. Then he strolled out.
+
+Eugene soon learned from one of the students that this really was
+Mr. Boyle. The young Irish girl had gone behind the screen. Eugene could
+see partially, from where he was sitting, that she was disrobing. It
+shocked him a little, but he kept his courage and his countenance
+because of the presence of so many others. He turned a chair upside down
+as he saw the others do, and sat down on a stool. His charcoal was lying
+in a little box beside him. He straightened his paper on its board and
+fidgeted, keeping as still as he could. Some of the students were
+talking. Suddenly he saw the girl divest herself of a thin, gauze shirt,
+and the next moment she came out, naked and composed, to step upon the
+platform and stand perfectly erect, her arms by her side, her head
+thrown back. Eugene tingled and blushed and was almost afraid to look
+directly at her. Then he took a stick of charcoal and began sketching
+feebly, attempting to convey something of this personality and this pose
+to paper. It seemed a wonderful thing for him to be doing--to be in this
+room, to see this girl posing so; in short, to be an art student. So
+this was what it was, a world absolutely different from anything he had
+ever known. And he was self-called to be a member of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+It was after he had decided to enter the art class that Eugene paid his
+first visit to his family. Though they were only a hundred miles away,
+he had never felt like going back, even at Christmas. Now it seemed to
+him he had something definite to proclaim. He was going to be an artist;
+and as to his work, he was getting along well in that. Mr. Mitchly
+appeared to like him. It was to Mr. Mitchly that he reported daily with
+his collections and his unsatisfied bills. The collections were checked
+up by Mr. Mitchly with the cash, and the unpaid bills certified.
+Sometimes Eugene made a mistake, having too much or too little, but the
+"too much" was always credited against the "too little," so that in the
+main he came out even. In money matters there was no tendency on
+Eugene's part to be dishonest. He thought of lots of things he wanted,
+but he was fairly well content to wait and come by them legitimately. It
+was this note in him that appealed to Mitchly. He thought that possibly
+something could be made of Eugene in a trade way.
+
+He left the Friday night preceding Labor Day, the first Monday in
+September, which was a holiday throughout the city. He had told
+Mr. Mitchly that he thought of leaving Saturday after work for over
+Sunday and Monday, but Mr. Mitchly suggested that he might double up his
+Saturday's work with Thursday's and Friday's if he wished, and go Friday
+evening.
+
+"Saturday's a short day, anyhow," he said. "That would give three days
+at home and still you wouldn't be behind in your work."
+
+Eugene thanked his employer and did as suggested. He packed his bag with
+the best he had in the way of clothes, and journeyed homeward, wondering
+how he would find things. How different it all was! Stella was gone. His
+youthful unsophistication had passed. He could go home as a city man
+with some prospects. He had no idea of how boyish he looked--how much
+the idealist he was--how far removed from hard, practical judgment which
+the world values so highly.
+
+When the train reached Alexandria, his father and Myrtle and Sylvia were
+at the depot to greet him--the latter with her two year old son. They
+had all come down in the family carryall, which left one seat for
+Eugene. He greeted them warmly and received their encomiums on his looks
+with a befitting sense of humility.
+
+"You're bigger," his father exclaimed. "You're going to be a tall man
+after all, Eugene. I was afraid you had stopped growing."
+
+"I hadn't noticed that I had grown any," said Eugene.
+
+"Ah, yes," put in Myrtle. "You're much bigger, Gene. It makes you look a
+little thinner. Are you good and strong?"
+
+"I ought to be," laughed Eugene. "I walk about fifteen or twenty miles a
+day, and I'm out in the air all the time. If I don't get strong now I
+never will."
+
+Sylvia asked him about his "stomach trouble." About the same, he told
+her. Sometimes he thought it was better, sometimes worse. A doctor had
+told him to drink hot water in the morning but he didn't like to do it.
+It was so hard to swallow the stuff.
+
+While they were talking, asking questions, they reached the front gate
+of the house, and Mrs. Witla came out on the front porch. Eugene, at
+sight of her in the late dusk, jumped over the front wheel and ran to
+meet her.
+
+"Little ma," he exclaimed. "Didn't expect me back so soon, did you?"
+
+"So soon," she said, her arms around his neck. Then she held him so,
+quite still for a few moments. "You're getting to be a big man," she
+said when she released him.
+
+He went into the old sitting room and looked around. It was all quite
+the same--no change. There were the same books, the same table, the same
+chairs, the same pulley lamp hanging from the center of the ceiling. In
+the parlor there was nothing new, nor in the bed rooms or the kitchen.
+His mother looked a little older--his father not. Sylvia had changed
+greatly--being slightly "peaked" in the face compared to her former
+plumpness; it was due to motherhood, he thought. Myrtle seemed a little
+more calm and happy. She had a real "steady" now, Frank Bangs, the
+superintendent of the local furniture factory. He was quite young,
+good-looking, going to be well-off some day, so they thought. "Old
+Bill," one of the big horses, had been sold. Rover, one of the two
+collies, was dead. Jake the cat had been killed in a night brawl
+somewhere.
+
+Somehow, as Eugene stood in the kitchen watching his mother fry a big
+steak and make biscuits and gravy in honor of his coming, he felt that
+he did not belong to this world any more. It was smaller, narrower than
+he had ever thought. The town had seemed smaller as he had come through
+its streets, the houses too; and yet it was nice. The yards were sweet
+and simple, but countrified. His father, running a sewing machine
+business, seemed tremendously limited. He had a country or small town
+mind. It struck Eugene as curious now, that they had never had a piano.
+And Myrtle liked music, too. As for himself, he had learned that he was
+passionately fond of it. There were organ recitals in the Central Music
+Hall, of Chicago, on Tuesday and Friday afternoons, and he had managed
+to attend some after his work. There were great preachers like Prof.
+Swing and the Rev. H. W. Thomas and the Rev. F. W. Gunsaulus and Prof.
+Saltus, liberal thinkers all, whose public services in the city were
+always accompanied by lovely music. Eugene had found all these men and
+their services in his search for life and to avoid being lonely. Now
+they had taught him that his old world was no world at all. It was a
+small town. He would never come to this any more.
+
+After a sound night's rest in his old room he went down the next day to
+see Mr. Caleb Williams at the _Appeal_ office, and Mr. Burgess, and
+Jonas Lyle, and John Summers. As he went, on the court house square he
+met Ed Mitchell and George Taps and Will Groniger, and four or five
+others whom he had known in school. From them he learned how things
+were. It appeared that George Anderson had married a local girl and was
+in Chicago, working out in the stock yards. Ed Waterbury had gone to San
+Francisco. The pretty Sampson girl, Bessie Sampson, who had once gone
+with Ted Martinwood so much, had run away with a man from Anderson,
+Indiana. There had been a lot of talk about it at the time. Eugene
+listened.
+
+It all seemed less, though, than the new world that he had entered. Of
+these fellows none knew the visions that were now surging in his brain.
+Paris--no less--and New York--by what far route he could scarcely tell.
+And Will Groniger had got to be a baggage clerk at one of the two depots
+and was proud of it. Good Heavens!
+
+At the office of the _Appeal_ things were unchanged. Somehow Eugene had
+had the feeling that two years would make a lot of difference, whereas
+the difference was in him only. He was the one who had undergone
+cataclysmic changes. He had a been a stove polisher, a real estate
+assistant, a driver and a collector. He had known Margaret Duff, and
+Mr. Redwood, of the laundry, and Mr. Mitchly. The great city had dawned
+on him; Verestchagin, and Bouguereau, and the Art Institute. He was
+going on at one pace, the town was moving at another one--a slower, but
+quite as fast as it had ever gone.
+
+Caleb Williams was there, skipping about as of yore, cheerful,
+communicative, interested. "I'm glad to see you back, Eugene," he
+declared, fixing him with the one good eye which watered. "I'm glad
+you're getting along--that's fine. Going to be an artist, eh? Well, I
+think that's what you were cut out for. I wouldn't advise every young
+fellow to go to Chicago, but that's where you belong. If it wasn't for
+my wife and three children I never would have left it. When you get a
+wife and family though--" he paused and shook his head. "I gad! You got
+to do the best you can." Then he went to look up some missing copy.
+
+Jonas Lyle was as portly, phlegmatic and philosophic as ever. He greeted
+Eugene with a solemn eye in which there was inquiry. "Well, how is it?"
+he asked.
+
+Eugene smiled. "Oh, pretty good."
+
+"Not going to be a printer, then?"
+
+"No, I think not."
+
+"Well, it's just as well, there're an awful lot of them."
+
+While they were talking John Summers sidled up.
+
+"How are you, Mr. Witla?" he inquired.
+
+Eugene looked at him. John was certainly marked for the grave in the
+near future. He was thinner, of a bluish-grey color, bent at the
+shoulders.
+
+"Why, I'm fine, Mr. Summers," Eugene said.
+
+"I'm not so good," said the old printer. He tapped his chest
+significantly. "This thing's getting the best of me."
+
+"Don't you believe it," put in Lyle. "John's always gloomy. He's just as
+good as ever. I tell him he'll live twenty years yet."
+
+"No, no," said Summers, shaking his head, "I know."
+
+He left after a bit to "go across the street," his customary drinking
+excuse.
+
+"He can't last another year," Lyle observed the moment the door was
+closed. "Burgess only keeps him because it would be a shame to turn him
+out. But he's done for."
+
+"Anyone can see that," said Eugene. "He looks terrible."
+
+So they talked.
+
+At noon he went home. Myrtle announced that he was to come with her and
+Mr. Bangs to a party that evening. There were going to be games and
+refreshments. It never occurred to him that in this town there had never
+been dancing among the boys and girls he moved with, and scarcely any
+music. People did not have pianos--or at least only a few of them.
+
+After supper Mr. Bangs called, and the three of them went to a typical
+small town party. It was not much different from the ones Eugene had
+attended with Stella, except that the participants were, in the main,
+just that much older. Two years make a great deal of difference in
+youth. There were some twenty-two young men and women all crowded into
+three fair sized rooms and on a porch, the windows and doors leading to
+which were open. Outside were brown grass and some autumn flowers. Early
+crickets were chirping, and there were late fire-flies. It was warm and
+pleasant.
+
+The opening efforts to be sociable were a little stiff. There were
+introductions all around, much smart badinage among town dandies, for
+most of them were here. There were a number of new faces--girls who had
+moved in from other towns or blossomed into maturity since Eugene had
+left.
+
+"If you'll marry me, Madge, I'll buy you a nice new pair of seal skin
+earrings," he heard one of the young bloods remark.
+
+Eugene smiled, and the girl laughed back. "He always thinks he's so
+cute."
+
+It was almost impossible for Eugene to break through the opening sense
+of reserve which clogged his actions at everything in the way of social
+diversion. He was a little nervous because he was afraid of criticism.
+That was his vanity and deep egotism. He stood about, trying to get into
+the swing of the thing with a bright remark or two. Just as he was
+beginning to bubble, a girl came in from one of the other rooms. Eugene
+had not met her. She was with his prospective brother-in-law, Bangs, and
+was laughing in a sweet, joyous way which arrested his attention. She
+was dressed in white, he noticed, with a band of golden brown ribbon
+pulled through the loops above the flounces at the bottom of her dress.
+Her hair was a wonderful ashen yellow, a great mass of it--and laid in
+big, thick braids above her forehead and ears. Her nose was straight,
+her lips were thin and red, her cheek-bones faintly but curiously
+noticeable. Somehow there was a sense of distinction about her--a faint
+aroma of personality which Eugene did not understand. It appealed to
+him.
+
+Bangs brought her over. He was a tight, smiling youth, as sound as oak,
+as clear as good water.
+
+"Here's Miss Blue, Eugene. She's from up in Wisconsin, and comes down to
+Chicago occasionally. I told her you ought to know her. You might meet
+up there sometime."
+
+"Say, but that's good luck, isn't it?" smiled Eugene. "I'm sure I'm glad
+to know you. What part of Wisconsin do you come from?"
+
+"Blackwood," she laughed, her greenish-blue eyes dancing.
+
+"Her hair is yellow, her eyes are blue, and she comes from Blackwood,"
+commented Bangs. "How's that?" His big mouth, with its even teeth, was
+wide with a smile.
+
+"You left out the blue name and the white dress. She ought to wear white
+all the time."
+
+"Oh, it does harmonize with my name, doesn't it?" she cried. "At home I
+do wear white mostly. You see I'm just a country girl, and I make most
+of my things."
+
+"Did you make that?" asked Eugene.
+
+"Of course I did."
+
+Bangs moved away a little, looking at her as if critically. "Well,
+that's really pretty," he pronounced.
+
+"Mr. Bangs is such a flatterer," she smiled at Eugene. "He doesn't mean
+any thing he says. He just tells me one thing after another."
+
+"He's right," said Eugene. "I agree as to the dress, and it fits the
+hair wonderfully."
+
+"You see, he's lost, too," laughed Bangs. "That's the way they all do.
+Well, I'm going to leave you two. I've got to get back. I left your
+sister in the hands of a rival of mine."
+
+Eugene turned to this girl and laughed his reserved laugh. "I was just
+thinking what was going to become of me. I've been away for two years,
+and I've lost track of some of these people."
+
+"I'm worse yet. I've only been here two weeks and I scarcely know
+anybody. Mrs. King takes me around everywhere, but it's all so new I
+can't get hold of it. I think Alexandria is lovely."
+
+"It is nice. I suppose you've been out on the lakes?"
+
+"Oh, yes. We've fished and rowed and camped. I have had a lovely time
+but I have to go back tomorrow."
+
+"Do you?" said Eugene. "Why I do too. I'm going to take the
+four-fifteen."
+
+"So am I!" she laughed. "Perhaps we can go together."
+
+"Why, certainly. That's fine. I thought I'd have to go back alone. I
+only came down for over Sunday. I've been working up in Chicago."
+
+They fell to telling each other their histories. She was from Blackwood,
+only eighty-five miles from Chicago, and had lived there all her life.
+There were several brothers and sisters. Her father was evidently a
+farmer and politician and what not, and Eugene gleaned from stray
+remarks that they must be well thought of, though poor. One
+brother-in-law was spoken of as a banker; another as the owner of a
+grain elevator; she herself was a school teacher at Blackwood--had been
+for several years.
+
+Eugene did not realize it, but she was fully five years older than
+himself, with the tact and the superior advantage which so much
+difference in years brings. She was tired of school-teaching, tired of
+caring for the babies of married sisters, tired of being left to work
+and stay at home when the ideal marrying age was rapidly passing. She
+was interested in able people, and silly village boys did not appeal to
+her. There was one who was begging her to marry him at this moment, but
+he was a slow soul up in Blackwood, not actually worthy of her nor able
+to support her well. She was hopefully, sadly, vaguely, madly longing
+for something better, and as yet nothing had ever turned up. This
+meeting with Eugene was not anything which promised a way out to her.
+She was not seeking so urgently--nor did she give introductions that
+sort of a twist in her consciousness. But this young man had an appeal
+for her beyond anyone she had met recently. They were in sympathetic
+accord, apparently. She liked his clear, big eyes, his dark hair, his
+rather waxen complexion. He seemed something better than she had known,
+and she hoped that he would be nice to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The rest of that evening Eugene spent not exactly with, but near Miss
+Blue--Miss Angela Blue, as he found her name to be. He was interested in
+her not so much from the point of view of looks, though she was charming
+enough, but because of some peculiarity of temperament which lingered
+with him as a grateful taste might dwell on the palate. He thought her
+young; and was charmed by what he considered her innocence and
+unsophistication. As a matter of fact she was not so much young and
+unsophisticated as an unconscious simulator of simplicity. In the
+conventional sense she was a thoroughly good girl, loyal, financially
+honest, truthful in all commonplace things, and thoroughly virtuous,
+moreover, in that she considered marriage and children the fate and duty
+of all women. Having had so much trouble with other peoples' children
+she was not anxious to have any, or at least many, of her own. Of
+course, she did not believe that she would escape with what seemed to be
+any such good fortune. She fancied that she would be like her sisters,
+the wife of a good business or professional man; the mother of three or
+four or five healthy children; the keeper of an ideal middle class home;
+the handmaiden of her husband's needs. There was a deep current of
+passion in her which she had come to feel would never be satisfied. No
+man would ever understand, no man at least whom she was likely to meet;
+but she knew she had a great capacity to love. If someone would only
+come along and arouse that--be worthy of it--what a whirlwind of
+affection she would return to him! How she would love, how sacrifice!
+But it seemed now that her dreams were destined never to be fulfilled,
+because so much time had slipped by and she had not been courted by the
+right one. So here she was now at twenty-five, dreaming and longing--the
+object of her ideals thus accidentally brought before her, and no
+immediate consciousness that that was the case.
+
+It does not take sexual affinity long to manifest itself, once its
+subjects are brought near to each other. Eugene was older in certain
+forms of knowledge, broader in a sense, potentially greater than she
+would ever comprehend; but nevertheless, swayed helplessly by emotion
+and desire. Her own emotions, though perhaps stronger than his, were
+differently aroused. The stars, the night, a lovely scene, any exquisite
+attribute of nature could fascinate him to the point of melancholy. With
+her, nature in its largest aspects passed practically unnoticed. She
+responded to music feelingly, as did Eugene. In literature, only realism
+appealed to him; for her, sentiment, strained though not necessarily
+unreal, had the greatest charm. Art in its purely aesthetic forms meant
+nothing at all to her. To Eugene it was the last word in the matter of
+emotional perception. History, philosophy, logic, psychology, were
+sealed books to her. To Eugene they were already open doors, or, better
+yet, flowery paths of joy, down which he was wandering. Yet in spite of
+these things they were being attracted toward each other.
+
+And there were other differences. With Eugene convention meant nothing
+at all, and his sense of evil and good was something which the ordinary
+person would not have comprehended. He was prone to like all sorts and
+conditions of human beings--the intellectual, the ignorant, the clean,
+the dirty, the gay, the sorrowful, white, yellow, black. As for Angela,
+she had a distinct preference for those who conducted themselves
+according to given standards of propriety. She was brought up to think
+of those people as best who worked the hardest, denied themselves the
+most, and conformed to the ordinary notions of right and wrong. There
+was no questioning of current standards in her mind. As it was written
+socially and ethically upon the tables of the law, so was it. There
+might be charming characters outside the pale, but they were not
+admitted to association or sympathy. To Eugene a human being was a human
+being. The ruck of misfits or ne'er-do-wells he could laugh joyously
+with or at. It was all wonderful, beautiful, amusing. Even its grimness
+and tragedy were worth while, although they hurt him terribly at times.
+Why, under these circumstances, he should have been so thoroughly
+attracted to Angela remains a mystery. Perhaps they complemented each
+other at this time as a satellite complements a larger luminary--for
+Eugene's egoism required praise, sympathy, feminine coddling; and Angela
+caught fire from the warmth and geniality of his temperament.
+
+On the train next day Eugene had nearly three hours of what he deemed
+most delightful talk with her. They had not journeyed far before he had
+told her how he had traveled this way, on this train, at this hour, two
+years before; how he had walked about the streets of the big city,
+looking for a place to sleep, how he had got work and stayed away until
+he felt that he had found himself. Now he was going to study art and
+then to New York or Paris, and do magazine illustrating and possibly
+paint pictures. He was truly your flamboyant youth of talent when he got
+to talking--when he had a truly sympathetic ear. He loved to boast to
+someone who really admired him, and he felt that he had admiration here.
+Angela looked at him with swimming eyes. He was really different from
+anything she had ever known, young, artistic, imaginative, ambitious. He
+was going out into a world which she had longed for but never hoped to
+see--that of art. Here he was telling her of his prospective art
+studies, and talking of Paris. What a wonderful thing!
+
+As the train neared Chicago she explained that she would have to make an
+almost immediate connection with one which left over the Chicago
+Milwaukee and St. Paul, for Blackwood. She was a little lonely, to tell
+the truth, a little sick at heart, for the summer vacation was over and
+she was going back to teach school. Alexandria, for the two weeks she
+had been there visiting Mrs. King (formerly a Blackwood girl and
+school-day chum of hers), was lovely. Her girlhood friend had tried to
+make things most pleasant and now it was all over. Even Eugene was over,
+for he said nothing much of seeing her again, or had not so far. She was
+wishing she might see more of this world he painted in such glowing
+colors, when he said:
+
+"Mr. Bangs said that you come down to Chicago every now and then?"
+
+"I do," she replied. "I sometimes come down to go to the theatres and
+shop." She did not say that there was an element of practical household
+commercialism in it, for she was considered one of the best buyers in
+the family and that she was sent to buy by various members of the family
+in quantities. From a practical household point of view she was a
+thoroughbred and was valued by her sisters and friends as someone who
+loved to do things. She might have come to be merely a family pack
+horse, solely because she loved to work. It was instinct to do
+everything she did thoroughly, but she worked almost exclusively in
+minor household matters.
+
+"How soon do you expect to come down again?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I can't tell. I sometimes come down when Opera is on in the winter.
+I may be here around Thanksgiving."
+
+"Not before that?"
+
+"I don't think so," she replied archly.
+
+"That's too bad. I thought maybe I'd see you a few times this fall. When
+you do come I wish you could let me know. I'd like to take you to the
+theatre."
+
+Eugene spent precious little money on any entertainment, but he thought
+he could venture this. She would not be down often. Then, too, he had
+the notion that he might get a rise one of these days--that would make a
+difference. When she came again he would be in art school, opening up
+another field for himself. Life looked hopeful.
+
+"That's so nice of you," she replied. "And when I come I'll let you
+know. I'm just a country girl," she added, with a toss of her head, "and
+I don't get to the city often."
+
+Eugene liked what he considered the guileless naivete of her
+confessions--the frankness with which she owned up to simplicity and
+poverty. Most girls didn't. She almost made a virtue out of these
+thing--at least they were charming as a confession in her.
+
+"I'll hold you to that," he assured her.
+
+"Oh, you needn't. I'll be glad to let you know."
+
+They were nearing the station. He forgot, for the moment that she was
+not as remote and delicate in her beauty as Stella, that she was
+apparently not as passionate temperamentally as Margaret. He saw her
+wonderfully dull hair and her thin lips and peculiar blue eyes, and
+admired her honesty and simplicity. He picked up her grip and helped her
+to find her train. When they came to part he pressed her hand warmly,
+for she had been very nice to him, so attentive and sympathetic and
+interested.
+
+"Now remember!" he said gaily, after he had put her in her seat in the
+local.
+
+"I won't forget."
+
+"You wouldn't mind if I wrote you now and then?"
+
+"Not at all. I'd like it."
+
+"Then I will," he said, and went out.
+
+He stood outside and looked at her through the train window as it pulled
+out. He was glad to have met her. This was the right sort of girl,
+clean, honest, simple, attractive. That was the way the best women
+were--good and pure--not wild pieces of fire like Margaret; nor
+unconscious, indifferent beauties like Stella, he was going to add, but
+couldn't. There was a voice within him that said that artistically
+Stella was perfect and even now it hurt him a little to remember. But
+Stella was gone forever, there was no doubt about that.
+
+During the days that followed he thought of the girl often. He wondered
+what sort of a town Blackwood was; what sort of people she moved with,
+what sort of a house she lived in. They must be nice, simple people like
+his own in Alexandria. These types of city bred people whom he
+saw--girls particularly--and those born to wealth, had no appeal for him
+as yet. They were too distant, too far removed from anything he could
+aspire to. A good woman such as Miss Blue obviously was, must be a
+treasure anywhere in the world. He kept thinking he would write to
+her--he had no other girl acquaintance now; and just before he entered
+art school he did this, penning a little note saying that he remembered
+so pleasantly their ride; and when was she coming? Her answer, after a
+week, was that she expected to be in the city about the middle or the
+end of October and that she would be glad to have him call. She gave him
+the number of an aunt who lived out on the North Side in Ohio Street,
+and said she would notify him further. She was hard at work teaching
+school now, and didn't even have time to think of the lovely summer she
+had had.
+
+"Poor little girl," he thought. She deserved a better fate. "When she
+comes I'll surely look her up," he thought, and there was a lot that
+went with the idea. Such wonderful hair!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The succeeding days in the art school after his first admission revealed
+many new things to Eugene. He understood now, or thought he did, why
+artists were different from the rank and file of mankind. This Art
+Institute atmosphere was something so refreshing after his days rambling
+among poor neighborhoods collecting, that he could hardly believe that
+he, Eugene Witla, belonged there. These were exceptional young people;
+some of them, anyhow. If they weren't cut out to be good artists they
+still had imagination--the dream of the artist. They came, as Eugene
+gradually learned, from all parts of the West and South, from Chicago
+and St. Louis--from Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa--from Texas and California
+and Minnesota. One boy was in from Saskatchewan of the Canadian north
+west, another from the then territory of New Mexico. Because his name
+was Gill they called him the Gila monster--the difference in the
+pronunciation of the "G's" not troubling them at all. A boy who came
+down from Minnesota was a farmer's son, and talked about going back to
+plow and sow and reap during the next spring and summer. Another boy was
+the son of a Kansas City millionaire.
+
+The mechanics of drawing interested Eugene from the first. He learned
+the first night that there was some defect in his understanding of light
+and shade as it related to the human form. He could not get any
+roundness or texture in his drawings.
+
+"The darkest shadow is always closest to the high light," observed his
+instructor laconically on Wednesday evening, looking over his shoulder.
+"You're making everything a dull, even tone." So that was it.
+
+"You're drawing this figure as a bricklayer who isn't an architect might
+start to build a house. You're laying bricks without having a plan.
+Where's your plan?" The voice was that of Mr. Boyle looking over his
+shoulder.
+
+Eugene looked up. He had begun to draw the head only.
+
+"A plan! A plan!" said his instructor, making a peculiar motion with his
+hands which described the outline of the pose in a single motion. "Get
+your general lines first. Then you can put in the details afterward."
+
+Eugene saw at once.
+
+Another time his instructor was watching him draw the female breast. He
+was doing it woodenly--without much beauty of contour.
+
+"They're round! They're round! I tell you!" exclaimed Boyle. "If you
+ever see any square ones let me know."
+
+This caught Eugene's sense of humor. It made him laugh, even though he
+flushed painfully, for he knew he had a lot to learn.
+
+The cruelest thing he heard this man say was to a boy who was rather
+thick and fat but conscientious. "You can't draw," he said roughly.
+"Take my advice and go home. You'll make more money driving a wagon."
+
+The class winced, but this man was ugly in his intolerance of futility.
+The idea of anybody wasting his time was obnoxious to him. He took art
+as a business man takes business, and he had no time for the misfit, the
+fool, or the failure. He wanted his class to know that art meant effort.
+
+Aside from this brutal insistence on the significance of art, there was
+another side to the life which was not so hard and in a way more
+alluring. Between the twenty-five minute poses which the model took,
+there were some four or five minute rests during the course of the
+evening in which the students talked, relighted their pipes and did much
+as they pleased. Sometimes students from other classes came in for a few
+moments.
+
+The thing that astonished Eugene though, was the freedom of the model
+with the students and the freedom of the students with her. After the
+first few weeks he observed some of those who had been there the year
+before going up to the platform where the girl sat, and talking with
+her. She had a little pink gauze veil which she drew around her
+shoulders or waist that instead of reducing the suggestiveness of her
+attitudes heightened them.
+
+"Say, ain't that enough to make everything go black in front of your
+eyes," said one boy sitting next to Eugene.
+
+"Well, I guess," he laughed. "There's some edge to that."
+
+The boys would sit and laugh and jest with this girl, and she would
+laugh and coquette in return. He saw her strolling about looking at some
+of the students' drawings of her over their shoulders, standing face to
+face with others--and so calmly. The strong desire which it invariably
+aroused in Eugene he quelled and concealed, for these things were not to
+be shown on the surface. Once, while he was looking at some photographs
+that a student had brought, she came and looked over his shoulder, this
+little flower of the streets, her body graced by the thin scarf, her
+lips and cheeks red with color. She came so close that she leaned
+against his shoulder and arm with her soft flesh. It pulled him tense,
+like a great current; but he made no sign, pretending that it was the
+veriest commonplace. Several times, because the piano was there, and
+because students would sing and play in the interludes, she came and sat
+on the piano stool herself, strumming out an accompaniment to which some
+one or three or four would sing. Somehow this, of all things, seemed
+most sensuous to him--most oriental. It set him wild. He felt his teeth
+click without volition on his part. When she resumed her pose, his
+passion subsided, for then the cold, aesthetic value of her beauty became
+uppermost. It was only the incidental things that upset him.
+
+In spite of these disturbances, Eugene was gradually showing improvement
+as a draughtsman and an artist. He liked to draw the figure. He was not
+as quick at that as he was at the more varied outlines of landscapes and
+buildings, but he could give lovely sensuous touches to the human
+form--particularly to the female form--which were beginning to be
+impressive. He'd got past the place where Boyle had ever to say "They're
+round." He gave a sweep to his lines that attracted the instructor's
+attention.
+
+"You're getting the thing as a whole, I see," he said quietly, one day.
+Eugene thrilled with satisfaction. Another Wednesday he said:--"A little
+colder, my boy, a little colder. There's sex in that. It isn't in the
+figure. You ought to make a good mural decorator some day, if you have
+the inclination," Boyle went on; "you've got the sense of beauty." The
+roots of Eugene's hair tingled. So art was coming to him. This man saw
+his capacity. He really had art in him.
+
+One evening a paper sign pasted up on the bulletin board bore the
+significant legend: "Artists! Attention! We eat! We eat! Nov. 16th. at
+Sofroni's. All those who want to get in give their names to the
+monitor."
+
+Eugene had heard nothing of this, but he judged that it originated in
+one of the other classes. He spoke to the monitor and learned that only
+seventy-five cents was required of him. Students could bring girls if
+they wished. Most of them would. He decided that he would go. But where
+to get a girl? Sofroni's was an Italian restaurant in lower Clark
+Street, which had originally started out as an eating place for Italian
+laborers, because it was near an Italian boarding house section. It was
+located in an old house that was not exactly homely. A yard in the back
+had been set with plain wooden tables, and benches had been placed for
+use in the summer time and, later, this had been covered with a mouldy
+tent-cloth to protect the diners from rain. Still later this became
+glass and was used in winter. The place was clean and the food good.
+Some struggling craftsman in journalism and art had found it and by
+degrees Signor Sofroni had come to realize that he was dealing with a
+better element. He began to exchange greetings with these people to set
+aside a little corner for them. Finally he entertained a small group of
+them at dinner--charging them hardly more than cost price--and so he was
+launched. One student told another. Sofroni now had his yard covered in
+so that he could entertain a hundred at dinner, even in winter. He could
+serve several kinds of wines and liquors with a dinner for seventy-five
+cents a piece. So he was popular.
+
+The dinner was the culmination of several other class treats. It was the
+custom of a class, whenever a stranger, or even a new member appeared,
+to yell "Treat! Treat!" at which the victim or new member was supposed
+to produce two dollars as a contribution to a beer fund. If the money
+was not produced--the stranger was apt to be thrown out or some
+ridiculous trick played upon him--if it was forthcoming, work for the
+evening ceased. A collection was immediately taken up. Kegs of beer were
+sent for, with sandwiches and cheese. Drinking, singing, piano playing,
+jesting followed. Once, to Eugene's utter astonishment, one of the
+students--a big, good natured, carousing boy from Omaha--lifted the nude
+model to his shoulders, set her astride his neck and proceeded around
+the room, jigging as he went--the girl meantime pulling his black hair,
+the other students following and shouting uproariously. Some of the
+girls in an adjoining room, studying in an evening life class, stopped
+their work to peep through a half dozen small holes which had been
+punched in the intervening partition. The sight of Showalter carrying
+the girl so astonished the eavesdroppers that the news of it was soon
+all over the building. Knowledge of the escapade reached the Secretary
+and the next day the student was dropped. But the Bacchic dance had been
+enacted--its impression was left.
+
+There were other treats like this in which Eugene was urged to drink,
+and he did--a very little. He had no taste for beer. He also tried to
+smoke, but he did not care for it. He could become nervously intoxicated
+at times, by the mere sight of such revelry, and then he grew witty,
+easy in his motions, quick to say bright things. On one of these
+occasions one of the models said to him: "Why, you're nicer than I
+thought. I imagined you were very solemn."
+
+"Oh, no," he said, "only at times. You don't know me."
+
+He seized her about the waist, but she pushed him away. He wished now
+that he danced, for he saw that he might have whirled her about the room
+then and there. He decided to learn at once.
+
+The question of a girl for the dinner, troubled him. He knew of no one
+except Margaret, and he did not know that she danced. There was Miss
+Blue, of Blackwood--whom he had seen when she made her promised visit to
+the city--but the thought of her in connection with anything like this
+was to him incongruous. He wondered what she would think if she saw such
+scenes as he had witnessed.
+
+It chanced that one day when he was in the members' room, he met Miss
+Kenny, the girl whom he had seen posing the night he had entered the
+school. Eugene remembered her fascination, for she was the first nude
+model he had ever seen and she was pretty. She was also the one who had
+come and stood by him when she was posing. He had not seen her since
+then. She had liked Eugene, but he had seemed a little distant and, at
+first, a little commonplace. Lately he had taken to a loose, flowing tie
+and a soft round hat which became him. He turned his hair back loosely
+and emulated the independent swing of Mr. Temple Boyle. That man was a
+sort of god to him--strong and successful. To be like that!
+
+The girl noted a change for what she deemed the better. He was so nice
+now, she thought, so white-skinned and clear-eyed and keen.
+
+She pretended to be looking at the drawing of a nude when she saw him.
+
+"How are you?" he asked, smiling, venturing to speak to her because he
+was lonely and because he knew no other girl.
+
+She turned gaily, and returned the question, facing him with smiling
+lips and genial eyes.
+
+"I haven't seen you for some time," he said. "Are you back here now?"
+
+"For this week," she said. "I'm doing studio work. I don't care for
+classes when I can get the other."
+
+"I thought you liked them!" he replied, recalling her gaiety of mood.
+
+"Oh, I don't dislike it. Only, studio work is better."
+
+"We've missed you," he said. "The others haven't been nearly as nice."
+
+"Aren't you complimentary," she laughed, her black eyes looking into his
+with a twinkle.
+
+"No, it's so," he returned, and then asked hopefully, "Are you going to
+the dinner on the 16th?"
+
+"Maybe," she said. "I haven't made up my mind. It all depends."
+
+"On what?"
+
+"On how I feel and who asks me."
+
+"I shouldn't think there'd be any trouble about that," he observed. "If
+I had a girl I'd go," he went on, making a terrific effort to reach the
+point where he could ask her. She saw his intention.
+
+"Well?" she laughed.
+
+"Would you go with me?" he ventured, thus so shamelessly assisted.
+
+"Sure!" she said, for she liked him.
+
+"That's fine!" he exclaimed. "Where do you live? I'll want to know
+that." He searched for a pencil.
+
+She gave him her number on West Fifty-seventh Street.
+
+Because of his collecting he knew the neighborhood. It was a street of
+shabby frame houses far out on the South Side. He remembered great mazes
+of trade near it, and unpaved streets and open stretches of wet prairie
+land. Somehow it seemed fitting to him that this little flower of the
+muck and coal yard area should be a model.
+
+"I'll be sure and get you," he laughed. "You won't forget, will you,
+Miss--"
+
+"Just Ruby," she interrupted. "Ruby Kenny."
+
+"It's a pretty name, isn't it?" he said. "It's euphonious. You wouldn't
+let me come out some Sunday and see just where it is?"
+
+"Yes, you may," she replied, pleased by his comment on her name. "I'm
+home most every Sunday. Come out next Sunday afternoon, if you want to."
+
+"I will," said Eugene.
+
+He walked out to the street with her in a very buoyant mood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Ruby Kenny was the adopted child of an old Irish laborer and his wife
+who had taken her from a quarrelling couple when they had practically
+deserted her at the age of four years. She was bright, good natured, not
+at all informed as to the social organization of the world, just a
+simple little girl with a passion for adventure and no saving insight
+which would indicate beforehand whither adventure might lead. She began
+life as a cash girl in a department store and was spoiled of her virtue
+at fifteen. She was rather fortunate in that her smartness attracted the
+rather superior, capable, self-protecting type of man; and these were
+fortunate too, in that she was not utterly promiscuous, appetite with
+her waiting on strong liking, and in one or two cases real affection,
+and culminating only after a period of dalliance which made her as much
+a victim of her moods as were her lovers. Her foster parents provided no
+guidance of any intelligent character. They liked her, and since she was
+brighter than they were, submitted to her rule, her explanations of
+conduct, her taste. She waved aside with a laughing rejoinder any slight
+objections they might make, and always protested that she did not care
+what the neighbors thought.
+
+The visits which Eugene paid, and the companionship which ensued, were
+of a piece with every other relationship of this character which he ever
+entered into. He worshiped beauty as beauty, and he never wholly missed
+finding a certain quality of mind and heart for which he longed. He
+sought in women, besides beauty, good nature and sympathy; he shunned
+criticism and coldness, and was never apt to select for a sweetheart
+anyone who could outshine him either in emotion or rapidity or
+distinction of ideas.
+
+He liked, at this time, simple things, simple homes, simple
+surroundings, the commonplace atmosphere of simple life, for the more
+elegant and imposing overawed him. The great mansions which he saw, the
+great trade structures, the great, significant personalities, seemed
+artificial and cold. He liked little people--people who were not known,
+but who were sweet and kindly in their moods. If he could find female
+beauty with anything like that as a background he was happy and settled
+down near it, if he could, in comfort. His drawing near to Ruby was
+governed by this mood.
+
+The Sunday Eugene called, it rained and the neighborhood in which she
+lived was exceedingly dreary. Looking around here and there one could
+see in the open spaces between the houses pools of water standing in the
+brown, dead grass. He had crossed a great maze of black cindered car
+tracks, where engines and cars were in great masses, and speculated on
+the drawings such scenes would make--big black engines throwing up
+clouds of smoke and steam in a grey, wet air; great mazes of
+parti-colored cars dank in the rain but lovely. At night the switch
+lights in these great masses of yards bloomed like flowers. He loved the
+sheer yellows, reds, greens, blues, that burned like eyes. Here was the
+stuff that touched him magnificently, and somehow he was glad that this
+raw flowering girl lived near something like this.
+
+When he reached the door and rang the bell he was greeted by an old
+shaky Irish-American who seemed to him rather low in the scale of
+intelligence--the kind of a man who would make a good crossing guard,
+perhaps. He had on common, characterful clothes, the kind that from long
+wear have taken the natural outlines of the body. In his fingers was a
+short pipe which he had been smoking.
+
+"Is Miss Kenny in?" Eugene inquired.
+
+"Yus," said the man. "Come in. I'll git her." He poked back through a
+typical workingman's parlor to a rear room. Someone had seen to it that
+almost everything in the room was red--the big silk-shaded lamp, the
+family album, the carpet and the red flowered wall paper.
+
+While he was waiting he opened the album and looked at what he supposed
+were her relatives--commonplace people, all--clerks, salesmen,
+store-keepers. Presently Ruby came, and then his eye lighted, for there
+was about her a smartness of youth--she was not more than
+nineteen--which captivated his fancy. She had on a black cashmere dress
+with touches of red velvet at the neck and elsewhere, and she wore a
+loose red tie, much as a boy might. She looked gay and cheerful and held
+out her hand.
+
+"Did you have much trouble in getting here?" she asked.
+
+He shook his head. "I know this country pretty well. I collect all
+through here week days. I work for the Peoples' Furniture Company, you
+know."
+
+"Oh, then it's all right," she said, enjoying his frankness. "I thought
+you'd have a hard time finding it. It's a pretty bad day, isn't it?"
+
+Eugene admitted that it was, but commented on the car tracks he had
+seen. "If I could paint at all I'd like to paint those things. They're
+so big and wonderful."
+
+He went to the window and gazed out at the neighborhood.
+
+Ruby watched him with interest. His movements were pleasing to her. She
+felt at home in his company--as though she were going to like him very
+much. It was so easy to talk to him. There were the classes, her studio
+work, his own career, this neighborhood, to give her a feeling of
+congeniality with him.
+
+"Are there many big studios in Chicago?" he asked when they finally got
+around to that phase of her work. He was curious to know what the art
+life of the city was.
+
+"No, not so very many--not, at least, of the good ones. There are a lot
+of fellows who think they can paint."
+
+"Who are the big ones?" he asked.
+
+"Well, I only know by what I hear artists say. Mr. Rose is pretty good.
+Byam Jones is pretty fine on _genre_ subjects, so they say. Walter Low
+is a good portrait painter, and so is Manson Steele. And let's
+see--there's Arthur Biggs--he does landscapes only; I've never been in
+his studio; and Finley Wood, he's another portrait man; and Wilson
+Brooks, he does figures--Oh! I don't know, there are quite a number."
+
+Eugene listened entranced. This patter of art matters was more in the
+way of definite information about personalities than he had heard during
+all the time he had been in the city. The girl knew these things. She
+was in the movement. He wondered what her relationship to these various
+people was?
+
+He got up after a time and looked out of the window again. She came
+also. "It's not very nice around here," she explained, "but papa and
+mamma like to live here. It's near papa's work."
+
+"Was that your father I met at the door?"
+
+"They're not my real parents," she explained. "I'm an adopted child.
+They're just like real parents to me, though, I certainly owe them a
+lot."
+
+"You can't have been posing in art very long," said Eugene thoughtfully,
+thinking of her age.
+
+"No; I only began about a year ago."
+
+She told how she had been a clerk in The Fair and how she and another
+girl had got the idea from seeing articles in the Sunday papers. There
+was once a picture in the Tribune of a model posing in the nude before
+the local life class. This had taken her eye and she had consulted with
+the other girl as to whether they had not better try posing, too. Her
+friend, like herself, was still posing. She was coming to the dinner.
+
+Eugene listened entranced. It reminded him of how he was caught by the
+picture of Goose Island in the Chicago River, of the little tumble-down
+huts and upturned hulls of boats used for homes. He told her of that and
+of how he came, and it touched her fancy. She thought he was sentimental
+but nice--and then he was big, too, and she was so much smaller.
+
+"You play?" he asked, "don't you?"
+
+"Oh, just a little. But we haven't got a piano. I learned what I know by
+practising at the different studios."
+
+"Do you dance?" asked Eugene.
+
+"Yes, indeed," she replied.
+
+"I wish I did," he commented ruefully.
+
+"Why don't you? It's easy. You could learn in no time. I could teach you
+in a lesson."
+
+"I wish you would," he said persuasively.
+
+"It isn't hard," she went on, moving away from him. "I can show you the
+steps. They always begin with the waltz."
+
+She lifted her skirts and exposed her little feet. She explained what to
+do and how to do it. He tried it alone, but failed; so she got him to
+put his arm around her and placed her hand in his. "Now, follow me," she
+said.
+
+It was so delightful to find her in his arms! And she was apparently in
+no hurry to conclude the lesson, for she worked with him quite
+patiently, explaining the steps, stopping and correcting him, laughing
+at her mistakes and his. "You're getting it, though," she said, after
+they had turned around a few times.
+
+They had looked into each other's eyes a number of times and she gave
+him frank smiles in return for his. He thought of the time when she
+stood by him in the studio, looking over his shoulder. Surely, surely
+this gap of formalities might be bridged over at once if he tried if he
+had the courage. He pulled her a little closer and when they stopped he
+did not let go.
+
+"You're mighty sweet to me," he said with an effort.
+
+"No, I'm just good natured," she laughed, not endeavoring to break away.
+
+He became emotionally tense, as always.
+
+She rather liked what seemed the superiority of his mood. It was
+different, stronger than was customary in the men she knew.
+
+"Do you like me?" he asked, looking at her.
+
+She studied his face and hair and eyes.
+
+"I don't know," she returned calmly.
+
+"Are you sure you don't?"
+
+There was another pause in which she looked almost mockingly at him and
+then, sobering, away at the hall door.
+
+"Yes, I think I do," she said.
+
+He picked her up in his arms. "You're as cute as a doll," he said and
+carried her to the red settee. She spent the rest of the rainy afternoon
+resting in his arms and enjoying his kisses. He was a new and peculiar
+kind of boy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+A little while before, Angela Blue at Eugene's earnest solicitation had
+paid her first Fall visit to Chicago. She had made a special effort to
+come, lured by a certain poignancy of expression which he could give to
+any thought, particularly when it concerned his desires. In addition to
+the art of drawing he had the gift of writing--very slow in its
+development from a structural and interpretative point of view, but
+powerful already on its descriptive side. He could describe anything,
+people, houses, horses, dogs, landscapes, much as he could draw them and
+give a sense of tenderness and pathos in the bargain which was moving.
+He could describe city scenes and the personal atmosphere which
+surrounded him in the most alluring fashion. He had little time to
+write, but he took it in this instance to tell this girl what he was
+doing and how he was doing it. She was captivated by the quality of the
+world in which he was moving, and the distinction of his own
+personality, which he indicated rather indirectly than otherwise. By
+contrast her own little world began to look very shabby indeed.
+
+She came shortly after his art school opened, and at her invitation he
+went out to the residence of her aunt on the North Side, a nice,
+pleasant brick house in a quiet side street, which had all the airs of
+middle class peace and comfort. He was impressed with what seemed to him
+a sweet, conservative atmosphere--a fitting domicile for a girl so
+dainty and refined as Angela. He paid his respects early Saturday
+morning because her neighborhood happened to be in the direction of his
+work.
+
+She played for him--better than anyone he had ever known. It seemed to
+him a great accomplishment. Her temperament attracted her to music of a
+high emotional order and to songs and instrumental compositions of
+indefinable sweetness. In the half hour he stayed she played several
+things, and he noted with a new pleasure her small shapely body in a
+dress of a very simple, close fitting design; her hair hung in two great
+braids far below her waist. She reminded him the least bit of Marguerite
+in "Faust."
+
+He went again in the evening, shining and eager, and arrayed in his
+best. He was full of the sense of his art prospects, and happy to see
+her again, for he was satisfied that he was going to fall in love with
+her. She had a strong, sympathetic attitude which allured him. She
+wanted to be nice to this youth--wanted him to like her--and so the
+atmosphere was right.
+
+That evening he took her to the Chicago Opera House, where there was
+playing an extravaganza. This fantasy, so beautiful in its stage-craft,
+so gorgeous in its show of costumes and pretty girls, so idle in its
+humor and sweet in its love songs, captivated both Eugene and Angela.
+Neither had been to a theatre for a long time; both were en rapport with
+some such fantastic interpretation of existence. After the short
+acquaintance at Alexandria it was a nice coming together. It gave point
+to their reunion.
+
+After the performance he guided her through the surging crowds to a
+North Division Street car--they had laid cables since his arrival--and
+together they went over the beauties and humor of the thing they had
+seen. He asked permission to call again next day, and at the end of an
+afternoon in her company, proposed that they go to hear a famous
+preacher who was speaking in Central Music Hall evenings.
+
+Angela was pleased at Eugene's resourcefulness. She wanted to be with
+him; this was a good excuse. They went early and enjoyed it. Eugene
+liked the sermon as an expression of youth and beauty and power to
+command. He would have liked to be an orator like that, and he told
+Angela so. And he confided more and more of himself to her. She was
+impressed by his vivid interest in life, his selective power, and felt
+that he was destined to be a notable personality.
+
+There were other meetings. She came again in early November and before
+Christmas and Eugene was fast becoming lost in the meshes of her hair.
+Although he met Ruby in November and took up a tentative relation on a
+less spiritual basis--as he would have said at the time--he nevertheless
+held this acquaintanceship with Angela in the background as a superior
+and more significant thing. She was purer than Ruby; there was in her
+certainly a deeper vein of feeling, as expressed in her thoughts and
+music. Moreover she represented a country home, something like his own,
+a nice simple country town, nice people. Why should he part with her, or
+ever let her know anything of this other world that he touched? He did
+not think he ought to. He was afraid that he would lose her, and he knew
+that she would make any man an ideal wife. She came again in December
+and he almost proposed to her--he must not be free with her or draw too
+near too rapidly. She made him feel the sacredness of love and marriage.
+And he did propose in January.
+
+The artist is a blend of subtleties in emotion which can not be
+classified. No one woman could have satisfied all sides of Eugene's
+character at that time. Beauty was the point with him. Any girl who was
+young, emotional or sympathetic to the right degree and beautiful would
+have attracted and held him for a while. He loved beauty--not a plan of
+life. He was interested in an artistic career, not in the founding of a
+family. Girlhood--the beauty of youth--was artistic, hence he craved it.
+
+Angela's mental and emotional composition was stable. She had learned to
+believe from childhood that marriage was a fixed thing. She believed in
+one life and one love. When you found that, every other relationship
+which did not minister to it was ended. If children came, very good; if
+not, very good; marriage was permanent anyhow. And if you did not marry
+happily it was nevertheless your duty to endure and suffer for whatever
+good might remain. You might suffer badly in such a union, but it was
+dangerous and disgraceful to break it. If you could not stand it any
+more, your life was a failure.
+
+Of course, Eugene did not know what he was trifling with. He had no
+conception of the nature of the relationship he was building up. He went
+on blindly dreaming of this girl as an ideal, and anticipating eventual
+marriage with her. When that would be, he had no idea, for though his
+salary had been raised at Christmas he was getting only eighteen dollars
+a week; but he deemed it would come within a reasonable time.
+
+Meanwhile, his visits to Ruby had brought the inevitable result. The
+very nature of the situation seemed to compel it. She was young,
+brimming over with a love of adventure, admiring youth and strength in
+men. Eugene, with his pale face, which had just a touch of melancholy
+about it, his sex magnetism, his love of beauty, appealed to her.
+Uncurbed passion was perhaps uppermost to begin with; very shortly it
+was confounded with affection, for this girl could love. She was sweet,
+good natured, ignorant of life from many points of view. Eugene
+represented the most dramatic imagination she had yet seen. She
+described to him the character of her foster parents, told how simple
+they were and how she could do about as she pleased. They did not know
+that she posed in the nude. She confided to him her particular
+friendship for certain artists, denying any present intimacies. She
+admitted them in the past, but asserted that they were bygones. Eugene
+really did not believe this. He suspected her of meeting other
+approaches in the spirit in which she had met his own. It aroused his
+jealousy, and he wished at once that she were not a model. He said as
+much and she laughed. She knew he would act like that, it was the first
+proof of real, definite interest in her on his part.
+
+From that time on there were lovely days and evenings spent in her
+company. Before the dinner she invited him over to breakfast one Sunday.
+Her foster parents were to be away and she was to have the house to
+herself. She wanted to cook Eugene a breakfast--principally to show him
+she could cook--and then it was novel. She waited till he arrived at
+nine to begin operations and then, arrayed in a neat little lavender,
+close fitting house dress, and a ruffled white apron, went about her
+work, setting the table, making biscuit, preparing a kidney ragout with
+strong wine, and making coffee.
+
+Eugene was delighted. He followed her about, delaying her work by taking
+her in his arms and kissing her. She got flour on her nose and he
+brushed it off with his lips.
+
+It was on this occasion that she showed him a very pleasing little dance
+she could do--a clog dance, which had a running, side-ways motion, with
+frequent and rapid clicking of the heels. She gathered her skirts a
+little way above her ankles and twinkled her feet through a maze of
+motions. Eugene was beside himself with admiration. He told himself he
+had never met such a girl--to be so clever at posing, playing and
+dancing, and so young. He thought she would make a delightful creature
+to live with, and he wished now he had money enough to make it possible.
+At this high-flown moment and at some others he thought he might almost
+marry her.
+
+On the night of the dinner he took her to Sofroni's, and was surprised
+to find her arrayed in a red dress with a row of large black leather
+buttons cutting diagonally across the front. She had on red stockings
+and shoes and wore a red carnation in her hair. The bodice was cut low
+in the neck and the sleeves were short. Eugene thought she looked
+stunning and told her so. She laughed. They went in a cab, for she had
+warned him beforehand that they would have to. It cost him two dollars
+each way but he excused his extravagance on the ground of necessity. It
+was little things like this that were beginning to make him think
+strongly of the problem of getting on.
+
+The students who had got up this dinner were from all the art classes,
+day and night. There were over two hundred of them, all of them young,
+and there was a mixed collection of girl art students, artist's models
+and girl friends of various grades of thought and condition, who were
+brought as companions. The big dining-room was tempestuous with the
+rattling of dishes, the shouting of jests, the singing of songs and the
+exchange of greetings. Eugene knew a few of these people outside his own
+classes, enough to give him the chance to be sociable and not appear
+lonely or out of it.
+
+From the outset it was apparent that she, Ruby, was generally known and
+liked. Her costume--a little bold--made her conspicuous. From various
+directions there were cries of "Hey! Rube!" which was a familiar
+interpretation of her first name, Ruby.
+
+Eugene was surprised at this--it shocked him a little. All sorts of boys
+he did not know came and talked to her, exchanging familiar gossip. She
+was called away from him a dozen times in as many minutes. He saw her
+laughing and chatting at the other end of the hall, surrounded by half a
+dozen students. It made him jealous.
+
+As the evening progressed the attitude of each toward the other and all
+toward anyone became more and more familiar. When the courses were over,
+a space was cleared at one end and a screen of green cloth rigged up in
+one corner as a dressing room for _stunts_. Eugene saw one of the
+students called with much applause to do an Irish monologue, wearing
+green whiskers, which he adjusted in the presence of the crowd. There
+was another youth who pretended to have with him an immense roll of
+verse--an epic, no less--wound in so tight a manner that it looked as
+though it might take all night to read it. The crowd groaned. With
+amazing savoir faire he put up one hand for silence, dropped the roll,
+holding, of course, to the outer end and began reading. It was not bad
+verse, but the amusing part was that it was really short, not more than
+twenty lines. The rest of the paper had been covered with scribbling to
+deceive the crowd. It secured a round of applause. There was one
+second-year man who sang a song--"Down in the Lehigh Valley"--and
+another who gave imitations of Temple Boyle and other instructors at
+their work of criticising and painting for the benefit of the class.
+These were greatly enjoyed. Finally one of the models, after much
+calling by the crowd of "Desmond! Desmond!"--her last name--went behind
+the green cloth screen and in a few moments reappeared in the short
+skirt of a Spanish dancer, with black and silver spangles, and
+castanets. Some friendly student had brought a mandolin and "La Paloma"
+was danced.
+
+Eugene had little of Ruby's company during all these doings. She was too
+much sought after. As the other girl was concluding her dance he heard
+the cry of "Hey, Rube! Why don't you do your turn?" Someone else, eager
+to see her dance, called "Come on, Ruby!" The rest of the room, almost
+unthinkingly took it up. Some boys surrounding her had started to push
+her toward the dancing space. Before Eugene knew it she was up in
+someone's arms being passed from group to group for a joke. The crowd
+cheered. Eugene, however, having come so close to her, was irritated by
+this familiarity. She did not appear to belong to him, but to the whole
+art-student body. And she was laughing. When she was put down in the
+clear space she lifted her skirts as she had done for him and danced. A
+crowd of students got very close. He had to draw near to see her at all.
+And there she was, unconscious of him, doing her gay clog dance. When
+she stopped, three or four of the more daring youths urged her, seizing
+her by the hands and arms, to do something else. Someone cleared a table
+and someone else picked her up and put her on it. She did still other
+dances. Someone cried, "Hey, Kenny, do you need the red dress?" So this
+was his temporary sweetheart.
+
+When she was finally ready to go home at four o'clock in the morning, or
+when the others were agreed to let her go, she hardly remembered that
+she had Eugene with her. She saw him waiting as two students were asking
+for the privilege of taking her home.
+
+"No," she exclaimed, seeing him, "I have my escort. I'm going now.
+Good-bye," and came toward him. He felt rather frozen and out of it.
+
+"Are you ready?" she asked.
+
+He nodded gloomily, reproachfully.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+From drawing from the nude, which Eugene came to do very successfully
+that winter, his interest switched to his work in the illustration class
+where costume figures were used. Here, for the first time, he tried his
+hand at wash drawings, the current medium for magazine work, and was
+praised after a time for his execution. Not always, however; for the
+instructors, feeling that harsh criticism would make for steadier
+effort, pooh-poohed some of his best work. But he had faith in what he
+was destined to do, and after sinking to depths of despair he would rise
+to great heights of self-confidence.
+
+His labor for the Peoples' Furniture Company was becoming a rather
+dreary grind when Vincent Beers, the instructor in the illustration
+class, looking over his shoulder one Wednesday afternoon said:--"You
+ought to be able to make a little money by your work pretty soon,
+Witla."
+
+"Do you think so?" questioned Eugene.
+
+"It's pretty good. There ought to be a place on one of the newspapers
+here for a man like you--an afternoon newspaper possibly. Did you ever
+try to get on?"
+
+"I did when I first came to the city, but they didn't want anyone. I'm
+rather glad they didn't now. I guess they wouldn't have kept me very
+long."
+
+"You draw in pen and ink pretty well, don't you?"
+
+"I thought I liked that best of all at first."
+
+"Well, then, they ought to be able to use you. I wouldn't stay very long
+at it though. You ought to go to New York to get in the magazine
+illustration field--there's nothing out here. But a little newspaper
+work now wouldn't hurt you."
+
+Eugene decided to try the afternoon papers, for he knew that if he got
+work on one of these he could still continue his night classes. He could
+give the long evening session to the illustration class and take an
+occasional night off to work on the life studies. That would make an
+admirable arrangement. For several days he took an hour after his work
+to make inquiry, taking with him some examples of his pen and inks.
+Several of the men he saw liked what he had to show, but he found no
+immediate opening. There was only one paper, one of the poorest, that
+offered him any encouragement. The editor-in-chief said he might be in
+need of a man shortly. If Eugene would come in again in three or four
+weeks he could tell him. They did not pay very much--twenty-five dollars
+to beginners.
+
+Eugene thought of this as a great opportunity, and when he went back in
+three weeks and actually secured the place, he felt that he was now
+fairly on the road to prosperity. He was given a desk in a small back
+room on a fourth floor where there was accidentally west and north
+light. He was in a department which held two other men, both several
+years older than himself, one of whom posed as "dean" of the staff.
+
+The work here was peculiar in that it included not only pen and ink but
+the chalk plate process which was a method of drawing with a steel point
+upon a zinc plate covered with a deposit of chalk, which left a design
+which was easily reproduced. Eugene had never done this, he had to be
+shown by the "dean," but he soon picked it up. He found it hard on his
+lungs, for he had constantly to keep blowing the chalk away as he
+scratched the surface of the plate, and sometimes the dust went up into
+his nostrils. He hoped sincerely there would not be much of this work,
+but there was rather an undue proportion at first owing to the fact that
+it was shouldered on to him by the other two--he being the beginner. He
+suspected as much after a little time, but by that time he was beginning
+to make friends with his companions and things were not so bad.
+
+These two, although they did not figure vastly in his life, introduced
+him to conditions and personalities in the Chicago newspaper world which
+broadened him and presented points of view which were helpful. The elder
+of the two, the "dean," was dressy and art-y; his name was Horace Howe.
+The other, Jeremiah Mathews, Jerry for short, was short and fat, with a
+round, cheerful, smiling countenance and a wealth of coarse black hair.
+He loved chewing tobacco, was a little mussy about his clothes, but
+studious, generous and good natured. Eugene found that he had several
+passions, one for good food, another for oriental curios and a third for
+archaeology. He was alive to all that was going on in the world, and was
+utterly without any prejudices, social, moral or religious. He liked his
+work, and whistled or talked as he did it. Eugene took a secret like for
+him from the beginning.
+
+It was while working on this paper that Eugene first learned that he
+really could write. It came about accidentally for he had abandoned the
+idea that he could ever do anything in newspaper work, which was the
+field he had originally contemplated. Here there was great need for
+cheap Sunday specials of a local character, and in reading some of
+these, which were given to him for illustration, he came to the
+conclusion that he could do much better himself.
+
+"Say," he asked Mathews, "who writes the articles in here?" He was
+looking over the Sunday issue.
+
+"Oh, the reporters on the staff--anyone that wants to. I think they buy
+some from outsiders. They only pay four dollars a column."
+
+Eugene wondered if they would pay him, but pay or no pay he wanted to do
+them. Maybe they would let him sign his name. He saw that some were
+signed. He suggested he believed he could do that sort of thing but
+Howe, as a writer himself, frowned on this. He wrote and drew. Howe's
+opposition piqued Eugene who decided to try when the opportunity
+offered. He wanted to write about the Chicago River, which he thought he
+could illustrate effectively. Goose Island, because of the description
+he had read of it several years before, the simple beauties of the city
+parks where he liked to stroll and watch the lovers on Sundays. There
+were many things, but these stood as susceptible of delicious, feeling
+illustration and he wanted to try his hand. He suggested to the Sunday
+Editor, Mitchell Goldfarb, with whom he had become friendly, that he
+thought something nice in an illustrative way could be done on the
+Chicago River.
+
+"Go ahead, try your hand," exclaimed that worthy, who was a vigorous,
+robust, young American of about thirty-one, with a gaspy laugh that
+sounded as if someone had thrown cold water down his back. "We need all
+that stuff. Can you write?"
+
+"I sometimes think I might if I practiced a little."
+
+"Why not," went on the other, who saw visions of a little free copy.
+"Try your hand. You might make a good thing of it. If your writing is
+anything like your drawing it will be all right. We don't pay people on
+the staff, but you can sign your name to it."
+
+This was enough for Eugene. He tried his hand at once. His art work had
+already begun to impress his companions. It was rough, daring, incisive,
+with a touch of soul to it. Howe was already secretly envious, Mathews
+full of admiration. Encouraged thus by Goldfarb Eugene took a Sunday
+afternoon and followed up the branches of the Chicago River, noting its
+wonders and peculiarities, and finally made his drawings. Afterward he
+went to the Chicago library and looked up its history--accidentally
+coming across the reports of some government engineers who dwelt on the
+oddities of its traffic. He did not write an article so much as a
+panegyric on its beauty and littleness, finding the former where few
+would have believed it to exist. Goldfarb was oddly surprised when he
+read it. He had not thought Eugene could do it.
+
+The charm of Eugene's writing was that while his mind was full of color
+and poetry he had logic and a desire for facts which gave what he wrote
+stability. He liked to know the history of things and to comment on the
+current phases of life. He wrote of the parks, Goose Island, the
+Bridewell, whatever took his fancy.
+
+His real passion was for art, however. It was a slightly easier medium
+for him--quicker. He thrilled to think, sometimes, that he could tell a
+thing in words and then actually draw it. It seemed a beautiful
+privilege and he loved the thought of making the commonplace dramatic.
+It was all dramatic to him--the wagons in the streets, the tall
+buildings, the street lamps--anything, everything.
+
+His drawing was not neglected meantime, but seemed to get stronger.
+
+"I don't know what there is about your stuff, Witla, that gets me,"
+Mathews said to him one day, "but you do something to it. Now why did
+you put those birds flying above that smokestack?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," replied Eugene. "It's just the way I feel about it.
+I've seen pigeons flying like that."
+
+"It's all to the good," replied Mathews. "And then you handle your
+masses right. I don't see anybody doing this sort of thing over here."
+
+He meant in America, for these two art workers considered themselves
+connoisseurs of pen and ink and illustration generally. They were
+subscribers to _Jugend_, _Simplicissimus_, _Pick-Me-Up_ and the radical
+European art journals. They were aware of Steinlen and Cheret and Mucha
+and the whole rising young school of French poster workers. Eugene was
+surprised to hear of these men and these papers. He began to gain
+confidence in himself--to think of himself as somebody.
+
+It was while he was gaining this knowledge--finding out who was who and
+what and why that he followed up his relationship with Angela Blue to
+its logical conclusion--he became engaged to her. In spite of his
+connection with Ruby Kenny, which continued unbroken after the dinner,
+he nevertheless felt that he must have Angela; partly because she
+offered more resistance than any girl since Stella, and partly because
+she appeared to be so innocent, simple and good hearted. And she was
+altogether lovely. She had a beautiful figure, which no crudity of
+country dressmaking could conceal. She had her wonderful wealth of hair
+and her large, luring, water-clear blue eyes. She had colorful lips and
+cheeks, a natural grace in walking, could dance and play the piano.
+Eugene looked at her and came to the conclusion after a time that she
+was as beautiful as any girl he had ever seen--that she had more soul,
+more emotion, more sweetness. He tried to hold her hand, to kiss her, to
+take her in his arms, but she eluded him in a careful, wary and yet half
+yielding way. She wanted him to propose to her, not because she was
+anxious to trap him, but because her conventional conscience told her
+these things were not right outside a definite engagement and she wanted
+to be engaged first. She was already in love with him. When he pleaded,
+she was anxious to throw herself in his arms in a mad embrace, but she
+restrained herself, waiting. At last he flung his arms about her as she
+was sitting at the piano one evening and holding her tight pressed his
+lips to her cheek.
+
+She struggled to her feet. "You musn't," she said. "It isn't right. I
+can't let you do that."
+
+"But I love you," he exclaimed, pursuing her. "I want to marry you. Will
+you have me, Angela? Will you be mine?"
+
+She looked at him yearningly, for she realized that she had made him do
+things her way--this wild, unpractical, artistic soul. She wanted to
+yield then and there but something told her to wait.
+
+"I won't tell you now," she said, "I want to talk to papa and mamma. I
+haven't told them anything as yet. I want to ask them about you, and
+then I'll tell you when I come again."
+
+"Oh, Angela," he pleaded.
+
+"Now, please wait, Mr. Witla," she pleaded. She had never yet called him
+Eugene. "I'll come again in two or three weeks. I want to think it over.
+It's better."
+
+He curbed his desire and waited, but it made all the more vigorous and
+binding the illusion that she was the one woman in the world for him.
+She aroused more than any woman yet a sense of the necessity of
+concealing the eagerness of his senses--of pretending something higher.
+He even tried to deceive himself into the belief that this was a
+spiritual relationship, but underneath all was a burning sense of her
+beauty, her physical charm, her passion. She was sleeping as yet, bound
+in convention and a semi-religious interpretation of life. If she were
+aroused! He closed his eyes and dreamed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+In two weeks Angela came back, ready to plight her faith; and Eugene was
+waiting, eager to receive it. He had planned to meet her under the smoky
+train shed of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul depot, to escort her
+to Kinsley's for dinner, to bring her some flowers, to give her a ring
+he had secured in anticipation, a ring which had cost him seventy-five
+dollars and consumed quite all his savings; but she was too regardful of
+the drama of the situation to meet him anywhere but in the parlor of her
+aunt's house, where she could look as she wished. She wrote that she
+must come down early and when he arrived at eight of a Saturday evening
+she was dressed in the dress that seemed most romantic to her, the one
+she had worn when she first met him at Alexandria. She half suspected
+that he would bring flowers and so wore none, and when he came with pink
+roses, she added those to her corsage. She was a picture of rosy youth
+and trimness and not unlike the character by whose name he had
+christened her--the fair Elaine of Arthur's court. Her yellow hair was
+done in a great mass that hung sensuously about her neck; her cheeks
+were rosy with the elation of the hour; her lips moist; her eyes bright.
+She fairly sparkled her welcome as he entered.
+
+At the sight of her Eugene was beside himself. He was always at the
+breaking point over any romantic situation. The beauty of the idea--the
+beauty of love as love; the delight of youth filled his mind as a song
+might, made him tense, feverish, enthusiastic.
+
+"You're here at last, Angela!" he said, trying to keep hold of her
+hands. "What word?"
+
+"Oh, you musn't ask so soon," she replied. "I want to talk to you first.
+I'll play you something."
+
+"No," he said, following her as she backed toward the piano. "I want to
+know. I must. I can't wait."
+
+"I haven't made up my mind," she pleaded evasively. "I want to think.
+You had better let me play."
+
+"Oh, no," he urged.
+
+"Yes, let me play."
+
+She ignored him and swept into the composition, but all the while she
+was conscious of him hovering over her--a force. At the close, when she
+had been made even more emotionally responsive by the suggestion of the
+music, he slipped his arms about her as he had once before, but she
+struggled away again, slipping to a corner and standing at bay. He liked
+her flushed face, her shaken hair, the roses awry at her waist.
+
+"You must tell me now," he said, standing before her. "Will you have
+me?"
+
+She dropped her head down as though doubting, and fearing familiarities;
+he slipped to one knee to see her eyes. Then, looking up, he caught her
+about the waist. "Will you?" he asked.
+
+She looked at his soft hair, dark and thick, his smooth pale brow, his
+black eyes and even chin. She wanted to yield dramatically and this was
+dramatic enough. She put her hands to his head, bent over and looked
+into his eyes; her hair fell forward about her face. "Will you be good
+to me?" she asked, yearning into his eyes.
+
+"Yes, yes," he declared. "You know that. Oh, I love you so."
+
+She put his head far back and laid her lips to his. There was fire,
+agony in it. She held him so and then he stood up heaping kisses upon
+her cheeks, her lips, her eyes, her neck.
+
+"Good God!" he exclaimed, "how wonderful you are!"
+
+The expression shocked her.
+
+"You mustn't," she said.
+
+"I can't help it. You are so beautiful!"
+
+She forgave him for the compliment.
+
+There were burning moments after this, moments in which they clung to
+each other desperately, moments in which he took her in his arms,
+moments in which he whispered his dreams of the future. He took the ring
+he had bought and put it on her finger. He was going to be a great
+artist, she was going to be an artist's bride; he was going to paint her
+lovely face, her hair, her form. If he wanted love scenes he would paint
+these which they were now living together. They talked until one in the
+morning and then she begged him to go, but he would not. At two he left,
+only to come early the next morning to take her to church.
+
+There ensued for Eugene a rather astonishing imaginative and emotional
+period in which he grew in perception of things literary and artistic
+and in dreams of what marriage with Angela would mean to him. There was
+a peculiar awareness about Eugene at this time, which was leading him
+into an understanding of things. The extraordinary demands of some
+phases of dogma in the matter of religion; the depths of human
+perversity in the matter of morality; the fact that there were worlds
+within worlds of our social organism; that really basically and actually
+there was no fixed and definite understanding of anything by
+anybody. From Mathews he learned of philosophies--Kant, Hegel,
+Schopenhauer--faint inklings of what they believed. From association
+with Howe he heard of current authors who expressed new moods, Pierre
+Loti, Thomas Hardy, Maeterlinck, Tolstoi. Eugene was no person to
+read--he was too eager to live,--but he gained much by conversation and
+he liked to talk. He began to think he could do almost anything if he
+tried--write poems, write plays, write stories, paint, illustrate, etc.
+He used to conceive of himself as a general, an orator, a
+politician--thinking how wonderful he would be if he could set himself
+definitely to any one thing. Sometimes he would recite passages from
+great speeches he had composed in his imagination as he walked. The
+saving grace in his whole make-up was that he really loved to work and
+he would work at the things he could do. He would not shirk his
+assignments or dodge his duties.
+
+After his evening class Eugene would sometimes go out to Ruby's house,
+getting there by eleven and being admitted by an arrangement with her
+that the front door be left open so that he could enter quietly. More
+than once he found her sleeping in her little room off the front room,
+arrayed in a red silk dressing gown and curled up like a little
+black-haired child. She knew he liked her art instincts and she strove
+to gratify them, affecting the peculiar and the exceptional. She would
+place a candle under a red shade on a small table by her bed and pretend
+to have been reading, the book being usually tossed to one side on the
+coverlet where he would see it lying when he came. He would enter
+silently, gathering her up in his arms as she dozed, kissing her lips to
+waken her, carrying her in his arms into the front room to caress her
+and whisper his passion. There was no cessation of this devotion to Ruby
+the while he was declaring his love for Angela, and he really did not
+see that the two interfered greatly. He loved Angela, he thought. He
+liked Ruby, thought she was sweet. He felt sorry for her at times
+because she was such a little thing, so unthinking. Who was going to
+marry her eventually? What was going to become of her?
+
+Because of this very attitude he fascinated the girl who was soon ready
+to do anything for him. She dreamed dreams of how nice it would be if
+they could live in just a little flat together--all alone. She would
+give up her art posing and just keep house for him. He talked to her of
+this--imagining it might possibly come to pass--realizing quite fully
+that it probably wouldn't. He wanted Angela for his wife, but if he had
+money he thought Ruby and he might keep a separate place--somehow. What
+Angela would think of this did not trouble him--only that she should not
+know. He never breathed anything to either of the other, but there were
+times when he wondered what they would think each of the other if they
+knew. Money, money, that was the great deterrent. For lack of money he
+could not marry anybody at present--neither Angela nor Ruby nor anyone
+else. His first duty, he thought, was so to place himself financially
+that he could talk seriously to any girl. That was what Angela expected
+of him, he knew. That was what he would have to have if he wanted Ruby.
+
+There came a time when the situation began to grow irksome. He had
+reached the point where he began to understand how limited his life was.
+Mathews and Howe, who drew more money, were able to live better than he.
+They went out to midnight suppers, theatre parties, and expeditions to
+the tenderloin section (not yet known by that name). They had time to
+browse about the sections of the city which had peculiar charms for them
+as Bohemians after dark--the levee, as a certain section of the Chicago
+River was called; Gambler's Row in South Clark Street; the Whitechapel
+Club, as a certain organization of newspaper men was called, and other
+places frequented by the literati and the more talented of the newspaper
+makers. Eugene, first because of a temperament which was introspective
+and reflective, and second because of his aesthetic taste, which was
+offended by much that he thought was tawdry and cheap about these
+places, and third by what he considered his lack of means, took
+practically no part in these diversions. While he worked in his class he
+heard of these things--usually the next day--and they were amplified and
+made more showy and interesting by the narrative powers of the
+participants. Eugene hated coarse, vulgar women and ribald conduct, but
+he felt that he was not even permitted to see them at close range had he
+wanted to. It took money to carouse and he did not have it.
+
+Perhaps, because of his youth and a certain air of unsophistication and
+impracticability which went with him, his employers were not inclined to
+consider money matters in connection with him. They seemed to think he
+would work for little and would not mind. He was allowed to drift here
+six months without a sign of increase, though he really deserved more
+than any one of those who worked with him during the same period. He was
+not the one to push his claims personally but he grew restless and
+slightly embittered under the strain and ached to be free, though his
+work was as effective as ever.
+
+It was this indifference on their part which fixed his determination to
+leave Chicago, although Angela, his art career, his natural restlessness
+and growing judgment of what he might possibly become were deeper
+incentives. Angela haunted him as a dream of future peace. If he could
+marry her and settle down he would be happy. He felt now, having fairly
+satiated himself in the direction of Ruby, that he might leave her. She
+really would not care so very much. Her sentiments were not deep enough.
+Still, he knew she would care, and when he began going less regularly to
+her home, really becoming indifferent to what she did in the artists'
+world, he began also to feel ashamed of himself, for he knew that it was
+a cruel thing to do. He saw by her manner when he absented himself that
+she was hurt and that she knew he was growing cold.
+
+"Are you coming out Sunday night?" she asked him once, wistfully.
+
+"I can't," he apologized; "I have to work."
+
+"Yes, I know how you have to work. But go on. I don't mind, I know."
+
+"Oh, Ruby, how you talk. I can't always be here."
+
+"I know what it is, Eugene," she replied. "You don't care any more. Oh,
+well, don't mind me."
+
+"Now, sweet, don't talk like that," he would say, but after he was gone
+she would stand by her window and look out upon the shabby neighborhood
+and sigh sadly. He was more to her than anyone she had met yet, but she
+was not the kind that cried.
+
+"He is going to leave me," was her one thought. "He is going to leave
+me."
+
+Goldfarb had watched Eugene a long time, was interested in him, realized
+that he had talent. He was leaving shortly to take a better
+Sunday-Editorship himself on a larger paper, and he thought Eugene was
+wasting his time and ought to be told so.
+
+"I think you ought to try to get on one of the bigger papers here,
+Witla," he said to him one Saturday afternoon when things were closing
+up. "You'll never amount to anything on this paper. It isn't big enough.
+You ought to get on one of the big ones. Why don't you try the
+_Tribune_--or else go to New York? I think you ought to do magazine
+work."
+
+Eugene drank it all in. "I've been thinking of that," he said. "I think
+I'll go to New York. I'll be better off there."
+
+"I would either do one or the other. If you stay too long in a place
+like this it's apt to do you harm."
+
+Eugene went back to his desk with the thought of change ringing in his
+ears. He would go. He would save up his money until he had one hundred
+and fifty or two hundred dollars and then try his luck in the East. He
+would leave Ruby and Angela, the latter only temporarily, the former for
+good very likely, though he only vaguely confessed this to himself. He
+would make some money and then he would come back and marry his dream
+from Blackwood. Already his imaginative mind ran forward to a poetic
+wedding in a little country church, with Angela standing beside him in
+white. Then he would bring her back with him to New York--he, Eugene
+Witla, already famous in the East. Already the lure of the big eastern
+city was in his mind, its palaces, its wealth, its fame. It was the
+great world he knew, this side of Paris and London. He would go to it
+now, shortly. What would he be there? How great? How soon?
+
+So he dreamed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Once this idea of New York was fixed in his mind as a necessary step in
+his career, it was no trouble for him to carry it out. He had already
+put aside sixty dollars in a savings bank since he had given Angela the
+ring and he decided to treble it as quickly as possible and then start.
+He fancied that all he needed was just enough to live on for a little
+while until he could get a start. If he could not sell drawings to the
+magazines he might get a place on a newspaper and anyhow he felt
+confident that he could live. He communicated to Howe and Mathews his
+intention of going East pretty soon and aroused in their respective
+bosoms the emotions which were characteristic of each. Howe, envious
+from the start, was glad to have him off the paper, but regretful of the
+stellar career which his determination foreboded. He half suspected now
+that Eugene would do something exceptional--he was so loose in his
+moods--so eccentric. Mathews was glad for Eugene and a little sorry for
+himself. He wished he had Eugene's courage, his fire, his talent.
+
+"You'll make good when you get down there," Mathews said to him one
+afternoon when Howe was out of the room, for he realized that the latter
+was jealous. "You've got the stuff. Some of the work you have done here
+will give you a fine introduction. I wish I were going."
+
+"Why don't you?" suggested Eugene.
+
+"Who? me? What good would it do me? I'm not ready yet. I can't do that
+sort of stuff. I might go down some time."
+
+"I think you do good work," said Eugene generously. He really did not
+believe it was good art, but it was fair newspaper sketching.
+
+"Oh, no, you don't mean that, Witla," replied Mathews. "I know what I
+can do."
+
+Eugene was silent.
+
+"I wish when you get down there," went on Mathews, "you would write us
+occasionally. I would like to know how you are getting along."
+
+"Sure, I'll write," replied Eugene, flattered by the interest his
+determination had aroused. "Sure I will." But he never did.
+
+In Ruby and Angela he had two problems to adjust which were not so easy.
+In the one case it was sympathy, regret, sorrow for her helplessness,
+her hopelessness. She was so sweet and lovely in her way, but not quite
+big enough mentally or emotionally for him. Could he really live with
+her if he wanted to? Could he substitute her for a girl like Angela?
+Could he? And now he had involved Angela, for since her return to tell
+him that she accepted him as her affianced lover, there had been some
+scenes between them in which a new standard of emotion had been set for
+him. This girl who looked so simple and innocent was burning at times
+with a wild fire. It snapped in her eyes when Eugene undid her wonderful
+hair and ran his hands through its heavy strands. "The Rhine Maiden," he
+would say. "Little Lorelei! You are like the mermaid waiting to catch
+the young lover in the strands of her hair. You are Marguerite and I
+Faust. You are a Dutch Gretchen. I love this wonderful hair when it is
+braided. Oh, sweet, you perfect creature! I will put you in a painting
+yet. I will make you famous."
+
+Angela thrilled to this. She burned in a flame which was of his fanning.
+She put her lips to his in long hot kisses, sat on his knee and twined
+her hair about his neck; rubbed his face with it as one might bathe a
+face in strands of silk. Finding such a response he went wild, kissed
+her madly, would have been still more masterful had she not, at the
+slightest indication of his audacity, leaped from his embrace, not
+opposition but self protection in her eyes. She pretended to think
+better of his love, and Eugene, checked by her ideal of him, tried to
+restrain himself. He did manage to desist because he was sure that he
+could not do what he wanted to. Daring such as that would end her love.
+So they wrestled in affection.
+
+It was the fall following his betrothal to Angela that he actually took
+his departure. He had drifted through the summer, pondering. He had
+stayed away from Ruby more and more, and finally left without saying
+good-bye to her, though he thought up to the last that he intended to go
+out and see her.
+
+As for Angela, when it came to parting from her, he was in a depressed
+and downcast mood. He thought now that he did not really want to go to
+New York, but was being drawn by fate. There was no money for him in the
+West; they could not live on what he could earn there. Hence he must go
+and in doing so must lose her. It looked very tragic.
+
+Out at her aunt's house, where she came for the Saturday and Sunday
+preceding his departure, he walked the floor with her gloomily, counted
+the lapse of the hours after which he would be with her no more,
+pictured the day when he would return successful to fetch her. Angela
+had a faint foreboding fear of the events which might intervene. She had
+read stories of artists who had gone to the city and had never come
+back. Eugene seemed such a wonderful person, she might not hold him; and
+yet he had given her his word and he was madly in love with her--no
+doubt of that. That fixed, passionate, yearning look in his eyes--what
+did it mean if not enduring, eternal love? Life had brought her a great
+treasure--a great love and an artist for a lover.
+
+"Go, Eugene!" she cried at last tragically, almost melodramatically. His
+face was in her hands. "I will wait for you. You need never have one
+uneasy thought. When you are ready I will be here, only, come soon--you
+will, won't you?"
+
+"Will I!" he declared, kissing her, "will I? Look at me. Don't you
+know?"
+
+"Yes! Yes! Yes!" she exclaimed, "of course I know. Oh, yes! yes!"
+
+The rest was a passionate embrace. And then they parted. He went out
+brooding over the subtlety and the tragedy of life. The sharp October
+stars saddened him more. It was a wonderful world but bitter to endure
+at times. Still it could be endured and there was happiness and peace in
+store for him probably. He and Angela would find it together living in
+each other's company, living in each other's embrace and by each other's
+kisses. It must be so. The whole world believed it--even he, after
+Stella and Margaret and Ruby and Angela. Even he.
+
+The train which bore him to New York bore a very meditative young man.
+As it pulled out through the great railroad yards of the city, past the
+shabby back yards of the houses, the street crossings at grade, the
+great factories and elevators, he thought of that other time when he had
+first ventured in the city. How different! Then he was so green, so raw.
+Since then he had become a newspaper artist, he could write, he could
+find his tongue with women, he knew a little something about the
+organization of the world. He had not saved any money, true, but he had
+gone through the art school, had given Angela a diamond ring, had this
+two hundred dollars with which he was venturing to reconnoitre the great
+social metropolis of the country. He was passing Fifty-seventh Street;
+he recognized the neighborhood he traversed so often in visiting Ruby.
+He had not said good-bye to her and there in the distance were the rows
+of commonplace, two family frame dwellings, one of which she occupied
+with her foster parents. Poor little Ruby! and she liked him. It was a
+shame, but what was he to do about it? He didn't care for her. It really
+hurt him to think and then he tried not to remember. These tragedies of
+the world could not be healed by thinking.
+
+The train passed out into the flat fields of northern Indiana and as
+little country towns flashed past he thought of Alexandria and how he
+had pulled up his stakes and left it. What was Jonas Lyle doing and John
+Summers? Myrtle wrote that she was going to be married in the spring.
+She had delayed solely because she wanted to delay. He thought sometimes
+that Myrtle was a little like himself, fickle in her moods. He was sure
+he would never want to go back to Alexandria except for a short visit,
+and yet the thought of his father and his mother and his old home were
+sweet to him. His father! How little he knew of the real world!
+
+As they passed out of Pittsburgh he saw for the first time the great
+mountains, raising their heads in solemn majesty in the dark, and great
+lines of coke ovens, flaming red tongues of fire. He saw men working,
+and sleeping towns succeeding one another. What a great country America
+was! What a great thing to be an artist here! Millions of people and no
+vast artistic voice to portray these things--these simple dramatic
+things like the coke ovens in the night. If he could only do it! If he
+could only stir the whole country, so that his name would be like that
+of Dore in France or Verestchagin in Russia. If he could but get fire
+into his work, the fire he felt!
+
+He got into his berth after a time and looked out on the dark night and
+the stars, longing, and then he dozed. When he awoke again the train had
+already passed Philadelphia. It was morning and the cars were speeding
+across the flat meadows toward Trenton. He arose and dressed, watching
+the array of towns the while, Trenton, New Brunswick, Metuchen,
+Elizabeth. Somehow this country was like Illinois, flat. After Newark
+they rushed out upon a great meadow and he caught the sense of the sea.
+It was beyond this. These were tide-water streams, the Passaic and the
+Hackensack, with small ships and coal and brick barges tied at the water
+side. The thrill of something big overtook him as the brakeman began to
+call "Jersey City," and as he stepped out into the vast train shed his
+heart misgave him a little. He was all alone in New York. It was
+wealthy, cold and critical. How should he prosper here? He walked out
+through the gates to where low arches concealed ferry boats, and in
+another moment it was before him, sky line, bay, the Hudson, the Statue
+of Liberty, ferry boats, steamers, liners, all in a grey mist of fierce
+rain and the tugs and liners blowing mournfully upon great whistles. It
+was something he could never have imagined without seeing it, and this
+swish of real salt water, rolling in heavy waves, spoke to him as music
+might, exalting his soul. What a wonderful thing this was, this
+sea--where ships were and whales and great mysteries. What a wonderful
+thing New York was, set down by it, surrounded by it, this metropolis of
+the country. Here was the sea; yonder were the great docks that held the
+vessels that sailed to the ports of all the world. He saw them--great
+grey and black hulls, tied to long piers jutting out into the water. He
+listened to the whistles, the swish of the water, saw the circling
+gulls, realized emotionally the mass of people. Here were Jay Gould and
+Russell Sage and the Vanderbilts and Morgan--all alive and all here.
+Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, Madison Square, Broadway--he knew of these by
+reputation. How would he do here--how fare? Would the city ever acclaim
+him as it did some? He looked wide eyed, with an open heart, with
+intense and immense appreciation. Well, he was going to enter, going to
+try. He could do that--perhaps, perhaps. But he felt lonely. He wished
+he were back with Angela where her soft arms could shut him safe. He
+wished he might feel her hands on his cheeks, his hair. He would not
+need to fight alone then. But now he was alone, and the city was roaring
+about him, a great noise like the sea. He must enter and do battle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Not knowing routes or directions in New York, Eugene took a Desbrosses
+Street ferry, and coming into West Street wandered along that curious
+thoroughfare staring at the dock entrances. Manhattan Island seemed a
+little shabby to him from this angle but he thought that although
+physically, perhaps, it might not be distinguished, there must be other
+things which made it wonderful. Later when he saw the solidity of it,
+the massed houses, the persistent streams of people, the crush of
+traffic, it dawned on him that mere humanity in packed numbers makes a
+kind of greatness, and this was the island's first characteristic. There
+were others, like the prevailing lowness of the buildings in its old
+neighborhoods, the narrowness of the streets in certain areas, the
+shabbiness of brick and stone when they have seen an hundred years of
+weather, which struck him as curious or depressing. He was easily
+touched by exterior conditions.
+
+As he wandered he kept looking for some place where he might like to
+live, some house that had a yard or a tree. At length he found a row of
+houses in lower Seventh Avenue with an array of iron balconies in front
+which appealed to him. He applied here and in one house found a room for
+four dollars which he thought he had better take for the present. It was
+cheaper than any hotel. His hostess was a shabby woman in black who made
+scarcely any impression on him as a personality, merely giving him a
+thought as to what a dreary thing it was to keep roomers and the room
+itself was nothing, a commonplace, but he had a new world before him and
+all his interests were outside. He wanted to see this city. He deposited
+his grip and sent for his trunk and then took to the streets, having
+come to see and hear things which would be of advantage to him.
+
+He went about this early relationship to the city in the right spirit.
+For a little while he did not try to think what he would do, but struck
+out and walked, here, there and everywhere, this very first day down
+Broadway to the City Hall and up Broadway from 14th to 42nd street the
+same night. Soon he knew all Third Avenue and the Bowery, the wonders of
+Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, the beauties of the East River, the
+Battery, Central Park and the lower East Side. He sought out quickly the
+wonders of metropolitan life--its crowds at dinner and theatre time in
+Broadway, its tremendous throngs morning and afternoon in the shopping
+district, its amazing world of carriages in Fifth Avenue and Central
+Park. He had marveled at wealth and luxury in Chicago, but here it took
+his breath away. It was obviously so much more fixed, so definite and
+comprehensible. Here one felt intuitively the far reaches which separate
+the ordinary man from the scion of wealth. It curled him up like a
+frozen leaf, dulled his very soul, and gave him a clear sense of his
+position in the social scale. He had come here with a pretty high
+estimate of himself, but daily, as he looked, he felt himself crumbling.
+What was he? What was art? What did the city care? It was much more
+interested in other things, in dressing, eating, visiting, riding
+abroad. The lower part of the island was filled with cold commercialism
+which frightened him. In the upper half, which concerned only women and
+show--a voluptuous sybaritism--caused him envy. He had but two hundred
+dollars with which to fight his way, and this was the world he must
+conquer.
+
+Men of Eugene's temperament are easily depressed. He first gorged the
+spectacle of life and then suffered from mental indigestion. He saw too
+much of it too quickly. He wandered about for weeks, looking in the shop
+windows, the libraries, the museums, the great streets, growing all the
+while more despondent. At night he would return to his bare room and
+indite long epistles to Angela, describing what he had seen and telling
+her of his undying love for her--largely because he had no other means
+of ridding himself of his superabundant vitality and moods. They were
+beautiful letters, full of color and feeling, but to Angela they gave a
+false impression of emotion and sincerity because they appeared to be
+provoked by absence from her. In part of course they were, but far more
+largely they were the result of loneliness and the desire for expression
+which this vast spectacle of life itself incited. He also sent her some
+tentative sketches of things he had seen--a large crowd in the dark at
+34th Street; a boat off 86th Street in the East River in the driving
+rain; a barge with cars being towed by a tug. He could not think exactly
+what to do with these things at that time, but he wanted to try his hand
+at illustrating for the magazines. He was a little afraid of these great
+publications, however, for now that he was on the ground with them his
+art did not appear so significant.
+
+It was during the first few weeks that he received his only letter from
+Ruby. His parting letter to her, written when he reached New York, had
+been one of those makeshift affairs which faded passion indites. He was
+so sorry he had to leave without seeing her. He had intended to come out
+but the rush of preparation at the last moment, and so forth; he hoped
+to come back to Chicago one of these days and he would look her up. He
+still loved her, but it was necessary for him to leave--to come where
+the greatest possibilities were. "I remember how sweet you were when I
+first saw you," he added. "I shall never forget my first impressions,
+little Ruby."
+
+It was cruel to add this touch of remembrance, but the artist in him
+could not refrain. It cut Ruby as a double edged sword, for she
+understood that he cared well enough that way--aesthetically. It was not
+her but beauty that he loved, and her particular beauty had lost its
+appeal.
+
+She wrote after a time, intending to be defiant, indifferent, but she
+really could not be. She tried to think of something sharp to say, but
+finally put down the simple truth.
+
+"Dear Eugene:" she wrote, "I got your note several weeks ago, but I
+could not bring myself to answer it before this. I know everything is
+over between us and that is all right, for I suppose it has to be. You
+couldn't love any woman long, I think. I know what you say about your
+having to go to New York to broaden your field is true. You ought to,
+but I'm sorry you didn't come out. You might have. Still I don't blame
+you, Eugene. It isn't much different from what has been going on for
+some time. I have cared but I'll get over that, I know, and I won't ever
+think hard of you. Won't you return me the notes I have sent you from
+time to time and my pictures? You won't want them now.
+
+   "Ruby."
+
+There was a little blank space on the paper and then:--
+
+"I stood by the window last night and looked out on the street. The
+moon was shining and those dead trees were waving in the wind. I saw the
+moon on that pool of water over in the field. It looked like silver. Oh,
+Eugene, I wish I were dead."
+
+He jumped up as he read these words and clenched the letter in his
+hands. The pathos of it all cut him to the quick, raised his estimate of
+her, made him feel as if he had made a mistake in leaving her. He really
+cared for her after all. She was sweet. If she were here now he could
+live with her. She might as well be a model in New York as in Chicago.
+He was on the verge of writing this, when one of the long, almost daily
+epistles Angela was sending arrived and changed his mood. He did not see
+how, in the face of so great and clean a love as hers, he could go on
+with Ruby. His affection had obviously been dying. Should he try to
+revive it now?
+
+This conflict of emotions was so characteristic of Eugene's nature, that
+had he been soundly introspective, he would have seen that he was an
+idealist by temperament, in love with the aesthetic, in love with love,
+and that there was no permanent faith in him for anybody--except the
+impossible she.
+
+As it was, he wrote Ruby a letter breathing regret and sorrow but not
+inviting her to come. He could not have supported her long if she had,
+he thought. Besides he was anxious to secure Angela. So that affair
+lapsed.
+
+In the meantime he visited the magazine offices. On leaving Chicago he
+had put in the bottom of his trunk a number of drawings which he had
+done for the _Globe_--his sketches of the Chicago River, of Blue Island
+Avenue, of which he had once made a study as a street, of Goose Island
+and of the Lake front. There were some street scenes, too, all forceful
+in the peculiar massing of their blacks, the unexpected, almost
+flashing, use of a streak of white at times. There was emotion in them,
+a sense of life. He should have been appreciated at once, but, oddly,
+there was just enough of the radically strange about what he did to make
+his work seem crude, almost coarse. He drew a man's coat with a single
+dash of his pen. He indicated a face by a spot. If you looked close
+there was seldom any detail, frequently none at all. From the praise he
+had received at the art school and from Mathews and Goldfarb he was
+slowly coming to the conclusion that he had a way of his own. Being so
+individual he was inclined to stick to it. He walked with an air of
+conviction which had nothing but his own belief in himself to back it
+up, and it was not an air which drew anybody to him. When he showed his
+pictures at the _Century_, _Harper's_, _Scribner's_, they were received
+with an air of weary consideration. Dozens of magnificent drawings were
+displayed on their walls signed by men whom Eugene now knew to be
+leaders in the illustration world. He returned to his room convinced
+that he had made no impression at all. They must be familiar with
+artists a hundred times better than himself.
+
+As a matter of fact Eugene was simply overawed by the material face of
+things. These men whose pictures he saw displayed on the walls of the
+art and editorial rooms of the magazines were really not, in many
+instances, any better than himself, if as good. They had the advantage
+of solid wood frames and artistic acceptance. He was a long way as yet
+from magazine distinction but the work he did later had no more of the
+fire than had this early stuff. It was a little broader in treatment, a
+little less intolerant of detail, but no more vigorous if as much so.
+The various art directors were weary of smart young artists showing
+drawings. A little suffering was good for them in the beginning. So
+Eugene was incontinently turned away with a little faint praise which
+was worse than opposition. He sank very low in spirits.
+
+There were still the smaller magazines and the newspapers, however, and
+he hunted about faithfully, trying to get something to do. From one or
+two of the smaller magazines, he secured commissions, after a time,
+three or four drawings for thirty-five dollars; and from that had to be
+extracted models' fees. He had to have a room where he could work as an
+artist, receiving models to pose, and he finally found one in West 14th
+Street, a back bedroom, looking out over an open court and with a public
+stair which let all come who might without question. This cost him
+twenty-five dollars a month, but he thought he had better risk it. If he
+could get a few commissions he could live.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+The art world of New York is peculiar. It was then and for some time
+after, broken up into cliques with scarcely any unity. There was a world
+of sculptors, for instance, in which some thirty or forty sculptors had
+part--but they knew each other slightly, criticised each other severely
+and retired for the most part into a background of relatives and
+friends. There was a painting world, as distinguished from an
+illustrating world, in which perhaps a thousand alleged artists, perhaps
+more, took part. Most of these were men and women who had some
+ability--enough to have their pictures hung at the National Academy of
+Design exhibition--to sell some pictures, get some decorative work to
+do, paint some portraits. There were studio buildings scattered about
+various portions of the city; in Washington Square; in Ninth and Tenth
+Streets; in odd places, such as Macdougal Alley and occasional cross
+streets from Washington Square to Fifty-ninth Street, which were filled
+with painters, illustrators, sculptors and craftsmen in art generally.
+This painting world had more unity than the world of sculptors and, in a
+way, included the latter. There were several art clubs--the Salmagundi,
+the Kit-Kat and the Lotus--and there were a number of exhibitions, ink,
+water color, oil, with their reception nights where artists could meet
+and exchange the courtesies and friendship of their world. In addition
+to this there were little communal groups such as those who resided in
+the Tenth Street studios; the Twenty-third Street Y. M. C. A.; the Van
+Dyck studios, and so on. It was possible to find little crowds, now and
+then, that harmonized well enough for a time and to get into a group,
+if, to use a colloquialism, one _belonged_. If you did not, art life in
+New York might be a very dreary thing and one might go a long time
+without finding just the particular crowd with which to associate.
+
+Beside the painting world there was the illustrating world, made up of
+beginners and those who had established themselves firmly in editorial
+favor. These were not necessarily a part of the painting or sculpture
+worlds and yet, in spirit, were allied to them, had their clubs also,
+and their studios were in the various neighborhoods where the painters
+and sculptors were. The only difference was that in the case of the
+embryo illustrators they were to be found living three or four in one
+studio, partly because of the saving in expense, but also because of the
+love of companionship and because they could hearten and correct one
+another in their work. A number of such interesting groups were in
+existence when Eugene arrived, but of course he did not know of them.
+
+It takes time for the beginner to get a hearing anywhere. We all have to
+serve an apprenticeship, whatever field we enter. Eugene had talent and
+determination, but no experience, no savoir faire, no circle of friends
+and acquaintances. The whole city was strange and cold, and if he had
+not immediately fallen desperately in love with it as a spectacle he
+would have been unconscionably lonely and unhappy. As it was the great
+fresh squares, such as Washington, Union and Madison; the great streets,
+such as Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue; the great spectacles,
+such as the Bowery at night, the East River, the water front, the
+Battery, all fascinated him with an unchanging glamor.
+
+He was hypnotized by the wonder of this thing--the beauty of it. Such
+seething masses of people! such whirlpools of life! The great hotels,
+the opera, the theatres, the restaurants, all gripped him with a sense
+of beauty. These lovely women in magnificent gowns; these swarms of
+cabs, with golden eyes, like monstrous insects; this ebb and surge of
+life at morning and evening, made him forget his loneliness. He had no
+money to spend, no immediate hope of a successful career, he could walk
+these streets, look in these windows, admire these beautiful women;
+thrill at the daily newspaper announcements of almost hourly successes
+in one field or another. Here and there in the news an author had made a
+great success with a book; a scientist with a discovery; a philosopher
+with a new theory; a financier with an investment. There was news of
+great plays being put on; great actors and actresses coming from abroad;
+great successes being made by debutantes in society; great movements
+forwarded generally. Youth and ambition had the call--he saw that. It
+was only a question of time, if you had talent, when you would get your
+hearing. He longed ardently for his but he had no feeling that it was
+coming to him quickly, so he got the blues. It was a long road to
+travel.
+
+One of his pet diversions these days and nights was to walk the streets
+in rain or fog or snow. The city appealed to him, wet or white,
+particularly the public squares. He saw Fifth Avenue once in a driving
+snowstorm and under sputtering arc lights, and he hurried to his easel
+next morning to see if he could not put it down in black and white. It
+was unsuccessful, or at least he felt so, for after an hour of trying he
+threw it aside in disgust. But these spectacles were drawing him. He was
+wanting to do them--wanting to see them shown somewhere in color.
+Possible success was a solace at a time when all he could pay for a meal
+was fifteen cents and he had no place to go and not a soul with whom to
+talk.
+
+It was an interesting phase of Eugene's character that he had a passion
+for financial independence. He might have written home from Chicago at
+times when he was hard pressed; he might have borrowed some money from
+his father now, but preferred to earn it--to appear to be further along
+than he was. If anyone had asked him he would have said he was doing
+fine. Practically he so wrote to Angela, giving as an excuse for further
+delay that he wanted to wait until he had ample means. He was trying all
+this time to make his two hundred dollars go as far as possible and to
+add to it by any little commissions he could get, however small. He
+figured his expenses down to ten dollars a week and managed to stay
+within that sum.
+
+The particular building in which he had settled was really not a studio
+building but an old, run-down boarding and apartment house turned
+partially to uses of trade. The top floor contained three fair sized
+rooms and two hall bedrooms, all occupied by lonely individuals plying
+some craft or other. Eugene's next door neighbor chanced to be a hack
+illustrator, who had had his training in Boston and had set up his easel
+here in the hope of making a living. There were not many exchanges of
+courtesies between them at first, although, the door being open the
+second day he arrived, he saw that an artist worked there, for the easel
+was visible.
+
+No models applying at first he decided to appeal to the Art Students'
+League. He called on the Secretary and was given the names of four, who
+replied to postal cards from him. One he selected, a young Swedish
+American girl who looked somewhat like the character in the story he had
+in mind. She was neat and attractive, with dark hair, a straight nose
+and pointed chin, and Eugene immediately conceived a liking for her. He
+was ashamed of his surroundings, however, and consequently diffident.
+This particular model was properly distant, and he finished his pictures
+with as much expedition and as little expense as he possibly could.
+
+Eugene was not given to scraping odd acquaintances, though he made
+friends fast enough when the balance of intellect was right. In Chicago
+he had become friendly with several young artists as a result of working
+with them at the Institute, but here he knew no one, having come without
+introductions. He did become acquainted with his neighbor, Philip
+Shotmeyer. He wanted to find out about local art life from him, but
+Shotmeyer was not brilliant, and could not supply him with more than
+minor details of what Eugene desired to know. Through him he learnt a
+little of studio regions, art personalities; the fact that young
+beginners worked in groups. Shotmeyer had been in such a group the year
+before, though why he was alone now he did not say. He sold drawings to
+some of the minor magazines, better magazines than Eugene had yet had
+dealings with. One thing he did at once for Eugene which was very
+helpful: he admired his work. He saw, as had others before him,
+something of his peculiar distinction as an artist, attended every show
+and one day he gave him a suggestion which was the beginning of Eugene's
+successful magazine career. Eugene was working on one of his street
+scenes--a task which he invariably essayed when he had nothing else to
+do. Shotmeyer had drifted in and was following the strokes of his brush
+as he attempted to portray a mass of East Side working girls flooding
+the streets after six o'clock. There were dark walls of buildings, a
+flaring gas lamp or two, some yellow lighted shop windows, and many
+shaded, half seen faces--bare suggestions of souls and pulsing life.
+
+"Say," said Shotmeyer at one point, "that kind o' looks like the real
+thing to me. I've seen a crowd like that."
+
+"Have you?" replied Eugene.
+
+"You ought to be able to get some magazine to use that as a
+frontispiece. Why don't you try _Truth_ with that?"
+
+"Truth" was a weekly which Eugene, along with many others in the West,
+had admired greatly because it ran a double page color insert every week
+and occasionally used scenes of this character. Somehow he always needed
+a shove of this kind to make him act when he was drifting. He put more
+enthusiasm into his work because of Shotmeyer's remark, and when it was
+done decided to carry it to the office of _Truth_. The Art Director
+approved it on sight, though he said nothing, but carried it in to the
+Editor.
+
+"Here's a thing that I consider a find in its way."
+
+He set it proudly upon the editorial desk.
+
+"Say," said the Editor, laying down a manuscript, "that's the real
+thing, isn't it? Who did that?"
+
+"A young fellow by the name of Witla, who has just blown in here. He
+looks like the real thing to me."
+
+"Say," went on the Editor, "look at the suggestion of faces back there!
+What? Reminds me just a little of the masses in Dore stuff--It's good,
+isn't it?"
+
+"It's fine," echoed the Art Director. "I think he's a comer, if nothing
+happens to him. We ought to get a few centre pages out of him."
+
+"How much does he want for this?"
+
+"Oh, he doesn't know. He'll take almost anything. I'll give him
+seventy-five dollars."
+
+"That's all right," said the Editor as the Art Director took the drawing
+down. "There's something new there. You ought to hang on to him."
+
+"I will," replied his associate. "He's young yet. He doesn't want to be
+encouraged too much."
+
+He went out, pulling a solemn countenance.
+
+"I like this fairly well," he said. "We may be able to find room for it.
+I'll send you a check shortly if you'll let me have your address."
+
+Eugene gave it. His heart was beating a gay tattoo in his chest. He did
+not think anything of price, in fact it did not occur to him. All that
+was in his mind was the picture as a double page spread. So he had
+really sold one after all and to _Truth_! Now he could honestly say he
+had made some progress. Now he could write Angela and tell her. He could
+send her copies when it came out. He could really have something to
+point to after this and best of all, now he knew he could do street
+scenes.
+
+He went out into the street treading not the grey stone pavement but
+air. He threw back his head and breathed deep. He thought of other
+scenes like this which he could do. His dreams were beginning to be
+realized--he, Eugene Witla, the painter of a double page spread in
+_Truth_! Already he was doing a whole series in his imagination, all he
+had ever dreamed of. He wanted to run and tell Shotmeyer--to buy him a
+good meal. He almost loved him, commonplace hack that he was--because he
+had suggested to him the right thing to do.
+
+"Say, Shotmeyer," he said, sticking his head in that worthy's door, "you
+and I eat tonight. _Truth_ took that drawing."
+
+"Isn't that fine," said his floor-mate, without a trace of envy. "Well,
+I'm glad. I thought they'd like it."
+
+Eugene could have cried. Poor Shotmeyer! He wasn't a good artist, but he
+had a good heart. He would never forget him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+This one significant sale with its subsequent check of seventy-five
+dollars and later the appearance of the picture in color, gave Eugene
+such a lift in spirit that he felt, for the time being, as though his
+art career had reached a substantial basis, and he began to think of
+going to Blackwood to visit Angela. But first he must do some more work.
+
+He concentrated his attention on several additional scenes, doing a view
+of Greeley Square in a sopping drizzle, and a picture of an L train
+speeding up the Bowery on its high, thin trestle of steel. He had an eye
+for contrasts, picking out lights and shadows sharply, making wonderful
+blurs that were like colors in precious stones, confused and suggestive.
+He took one of these after a month to _Truth_, and again the Art
+Director was his victim. He tried to be indifferent, but it was hard.
+The young man had something that he wanted.
+
+"You might show me anything else you do in this line," he said. "I can
+use a few if they come up to these two."
+
+Eugene went away with his head in the air. He was beginning to get the
+courage of his ability.
+
+It takes quite a number of drawings at seventy-five and one hundred
+dollars each to make a living income, and artists were too numerous to
+make anyone's opportunity for immediate distinction easy. Eugene waited
+months to see his first drawing come out. He stayed away from the
+smaller magazines in the hope that he would soon be able to contribute
+to the larger ones, but they were not eagerly seeking new artists. He
+met, through Shotmeyer, two artists who were living in one studio in
+Waverly Place and took a great liking to them. One of them, McHugh, was
+an importation from Wyoming with delicious stories of mountain farming
+and mining; the other, Smite, was a fisher lad from Nova Scotia. McHugh,
+tall and lean, with a face that looked like that of a raw yokel, but
+with some gleam of humor and insight in the eyes which redeemed it
+instantly, was Eugene's first choice of a pleasing, genial personality.
+Joseph Smite had a sense of the sea about him. He was short and stout,
+and rather solidly put together, like a blacksmith. He had big hands and
+feet, a big mouth, big, bony eye sockets and coarse brown hair. When he
+talked, ordinarily, it was with a slow, halting air and when he smiled
+or laughed it was with his whole face. When he became excited or gay
+something seemed to happen distinctly to every part of his body. His
+face became a curious cross-hatch of genial lines. His tongue loosened
+and he talked fast. He had a habit of emphasizing his language with
+oaths on these occasions--numerous and picturesque, for he had worked
+with sea-faring men and had accumulated a vast vocabulary of picturesque
+expressions. They were vacant of evil intent so far as he was concerned,
+for there was no subtlety or guile in him. He was kindly and genial all
+through. Eugene wanted to be friendly and struck a gay relationship with
+these two. He found that he got along excellently well with them and
+could swap humorous incidents and character touches by the hour. It was
+some months before he could actually say that he was intimate with them,
+but he began to visit them regularly and after a time they called on
+him.
+
+It was during this year that he came to know several models passingly
+well, to visit the various art exhibitions, to be taken up by Hudson
+Dula, the Art Director of _Truth_ and invited to two or three small
+dinners given to artists and girls. He did not find anyone he liked
+exceptionally well barring one Editor of a rather hopeless magazine
+called _Craft_, devoted to art subjects, a young blond, of poetic
+temperament, who saw in him a spirit of beauty and tried to make friends
+with him. Eugene responded cheerfully and thereafter Richard Wheeler was
+a visitor at his studio from time to time. He was not making enough to
+house himself much better these days, but he did manage to buy a few
+plaster casts and to pick up a few nice things in copper and brass for
+his studio. His own drawings, his street scenes, were hung here and
+there. The way in which the exceptionally clever looked at them
+convinced him by degrees that he had something big to say.
+
+It was while he was settling himself in this atmosphere--the spring of
+the second year--that he decided to go back and visit Angela and
+incidentally Alexandria and Chicago. He had been away now sixteen
+months, had not seen anyone who had won his affections or alienated him
+from his love of Angela. He wrote in March that he thought he would be
+coming in May or June. He did get away in July--a season when the city
+was suffering from a wave of intense heat. He had not done so
+much--illustrated eight or ten stories and drawn four double page
+pictures for _Truth_, one of which had appeared; but he was getting
+along. Just as he was starting for Chicago and Blackwood a second one
+was put on the news-stand and he proudly carried a copy of it with him
+on the train. It was the Bowery by night, with the L train rushing
+overhead and, as reproduced, it had color and life. He felt intensely
+proud and knew that Angela would also. She had written him such a
+glowing appreciation of the East Side picture called "Six O'clock."
+
+As he rode he dreamed.
+
+He reached it at last, the long stretch between New York and Chicago
+traversed; he arrived in the Lake city in the afternoon, and without
+pausing to revisit the scenes of his earlier efforts took a five o'clock
+train for Blackwood. It was sultry, and on the way heavy thunder clouds
+gathered and broke in a short, splendid summer rain. The trees and grass
+were thoroughly wet and the dust of the roads was laid. There was a
+refreshing coolness about the air which caressed the weary flesh. Little
+towns nestling among green trees came into view and passed again, and at
+last Blackwood appeared. It was smaller than Alexandria, but not so
+different. Like the other it was marked by a church steeple, a saw mill,
+a pretty brick business street and many broad branching green trees.
+Eugene felt drawn to it at sight. It was such a place as Angela should
+live in.
+
+It was seven o'clock and nearing dusk when he arrived. He had not given
+Angela the definite hour of his arrival and so decided to stay over
+night at the little inn or so-called hotel which he saw up the street.
+He had brought only a large suit case and a traveling bag. He inquired
+of the proprietor the direction and distance of the Blue house from the
+town, found that he could get a vehicle any time in the morning which
+would take him over, as the phrase ran, for a dollar. He ate his supper
+of fried steak and poor coffee and fried potatoes and then sat out on
+the front porch facing the street in a rocking chair, to see how the
+village of Blackwood wagged and to enjoy the cool of the evening. As he
+sat he thought of Angela's home and how nice it must be. This town was
+such a little place--so quiet. There would not be another train coming
+up from the city until after eleven.
+
+After a time he rose and took a short walk, breathing the night air.
+Later he came back and throwing wide the windows of the stuffy room sat
+looking out. The summer night with its early rain, its wet trees, its
+smell of lush, wet, growing things, was impressing itself on Eugene as
+one might impress wet clay with a notable design. Eugene's mood was soft
+toward the little houses with their glowing windows, the occasional
+pedestrians with their "howdy Jakes" and "evenin' Henrys." He was
+touched by the noise of the crickets, the chirp of the tree toads, the
+hang of the lucent suns and planets above the tree tops. The whole night
+was quick with the richness of fertility, stirring subtly about some
+work which concerned man very little or not at all, yet of which he was
+at least a part, till his eyelids drooped after a time and he went to
+bed to sleep deeply and dreamlessly.
+
+Next morning he was up early, eager for the hour to arrive when he might
+start. He did not think it advisable to leave before nine o'clock, and
+attracted considerable attention by strolling about, his tall, spare,
+graceful figure and forceful profile being an unusual sight to the
+natives. At nine o'clock a respectable carryall was placed at his
+disposal and he was driven out over a long yellow road, damp with the
+rain of the night before and shaded in places by overhanging trees.
+There were so many lovely wild flowers growing in the angles of the rail
+fences--wild yellow and pink roses, elder flower, Queen Anne's lace,
+dozens of beautiful blooms, that Eugene was lost in admiration. His
+heart sang over the beauty of yellowing wheatfields, the young corn,
+already three feet high, the vistas of hay and clover, with patches of
+woods enclosing them, and over all, house martens and swallows scudding
+after insects and high up in the air his boyhood dream of beauty, a
+soaring buzzard.
+
+As he rode the moods of his boyhood days came back to him--his love of
+winging butterflies and birds; his passion for the voice of the
+wood-dove (there was one crying in the still distance now)--his
+adoration for the virile strength of the men of the countryside. He
+thought as he rode that he would like to paint a series of country
+scenes that would be as simple as those cottage dooryards that they now
+and then passed; this little stream that cut the road at right angles
+and made a drinking place for the horses; this skeleton of an old
+abandoned home, doorless and windowless, where the roof sagged and
+hollyhocks and morning glories grew high under the eaves. "We city
+dwellers do not know," he sighed, as though he had not taken the country
+in his heart and carried it to town as had every other boy and girl who
+had gone the way of the metropolis.
+
+The Blue homestead was located in the centre of a rather wide rolling
+stretch of country which lay between two gently rising ridges of hill
+covered with trees. One corner of the farm, and that not so very far
+from the house, was cut by a stream, a little shallow thing, singing
+over pebbles and making willows and hazel bushes to grow in profusion
+along its banks, and there was a little lake within a mile of the house.
+In front of it was a ten acre field of wheat, to the right of it a
+grazing patch of several acres, to the left a field of clover; and near
+the house by a barn, a well, a pig pen, a corn crib and some smaller
+sheds. In front of the house was a long open lawn, down the centre of
+which ran a gravel path, lined on either side by tall old elm trees. The
+immediate dooryard was shut from this noble lawn by a low picket fence
+along the length of which grew lilac bushes and inside which, nearer the
+house, were simple beds of roses, calycanthus and golden glow. Over an
+arbor leading from the backdoor to a rather distant summer kitchen
+flourished a grapevine, and there was a tall remnant of a tree trunk
+covered completely with a yellow blooming trumpet vine. The dooryard's
+lawn was smooth enough, and the great lawn was a dream of green grass,
+graced with the shadows of a few great trees. The house was long and of
+no great depth, the front a series of six rooms ranged in a row, without
+an upper storey. The two middle rooms which had originally, perhaps
+seventy years before, been all there was of the house. Since then all
+the other rooms had been added, and there was in addition to these a
+lean-to containing a winter kitchen and dining room, and to the west of
+the arbor leading to the summer kitchen, an old unpainted frame
+storehouse. In all its parts the place was shabby and run down but
+picturesque and quaint.
+
+Eugene was surprised to find the place so charming. It appealed to him,
+the long, low front, with doors opening from the centre and end rooms
+direct upon the grass, with windows set in climbing vines and the lilac
+bushes forming a green wall between the house and the main lawn. The
+great rows of elm trees throwing a grateful shade seemed like sentinel
+files. As the carryall turned in at the wagon gate in front he thought
+"What a place for love! and to think Angela should live here."
+
+The carryall rattled down the pebble road to the left of the lawn and
+stopped at the garden gate. Marietta came out. Marietta was twenty-two
+years old, and as gay and joyous as her elder sister Angela was sober
+and in a way morbid. Light souled as a kitten, looking always on the
+bright side of things, she made hosts of friends everywhere she went,
+having a perfect swarm of lovers who wrote her eager notes, but whom she
+rebuffed with good natured, sympathetic simplicity. Here on this farm
+there was not supposed to be so much opportunity for social life as in
+town, but beaux made their way here on one pretext and another. Marietta
+was the magnet, and in the world of gaiety which she created Angela
+shared.
+
+Angela was now in the dining room--easy to be called--but Marietta
+wanted to see for herself what sort of lover her sister had captured.
+She was surprised at his height, his presence, the keenness of his eyes.
+She hardly understood so fine a lover for her own sister, but held out
+her hand smilingly.
+
+"This is Mr. Witla, isn't it?" she asked.
+
+"The same," he replied, a little pompously. "Isn't it a lovely drive
+over here?"
+
+"We think it nice in nice weather," she laughed. "You wouldn't like it
+so much in winter. Won't you come in and put your grip here in the hall?
+David will take it to your room."
+
+Eugene obeyed, but he was thinking of Angela and when she would appear
+and how she would look. He stepped into the large, low ceiled, dark,
+cool parlor and was delighted to see a piano and some music piled on a
+rack. Through an open window he saw several hammocks out on the main
+lawn, under the trees. It seemed a wonderful place to him, the substance
+of poetry--and then Angela appeared. She was dressed in plain white
+linen. Her hair, braided as he liked it in a great rope, lay as a band
+across her forehead. She had picked a big pink rose and put it in her
+waist. At sight of her Eugene held out his arms and she flew to them. He
+kissed her vigorously, for Marietta had discreetly retired and they were
+left alone.
+
+"So I have you at last," he whispered, and kissed her again.
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, and it has been so long," she sighed.
+
+"You couldn't have suffered any more than I have," he consoled. "Every
+minute has been torture, waiting, waiting, waiting!"
+
+"Let's not think of that now," she urged. "We have each other. You are
+here."
+
+"Yes, here I am," he laughed, "all the virtues done up in one brown
+suit. Isn't it lovely--these great trees, that beautiful lawn?"
+
+He paused from kissing to look out of the window.
+
+"I'm glad you like it," she replied joyously. "We think it's nice, but
+this place is so old."
+
+"I love it for that," he cried appreciatively. "Those bushes are so
+nice--those roses. Oh, dear, you don't know how sweet it all seems--and
+you--you are so nice."
+
+He held her off at arm's length and surveyed her while she blushed
+becomingly. His eager, direct, vigorous onslaught confused her at
+times--caused her pulse to beat at a high rate.
+
+They went out into the dooryard after a time and then Marietta appeared
+again, and with her Mrs. Blue, a comfortable, round bodied mother of
+sixty, who greeted Eugene cordially. He could feel in her what he felt
+in his own mother--in every good mother--love of order and peace, love
+of the well being of her children, love of public respect and private
+honor and morality. All these things Eugene heartily respected in
+others. He was glad to see them, believed they had a place in society,
+but was uncertain whether they bore any fixed or important relationship
+to him. He was always thinking in his private conscience that life was
+somehow bigger and subtler and darker than any given theory or order of
+living. It might well be worth while for a man or woman to be honest and
+moral within a given condition or quality of society, but it did not
+matter at all in the ultimate substance and composition of the universe.
+Any form or order of society which hoped to endure must have individuals
+like Mrs. Blue, who would conform to the highest standards and theories
+of that society, and when found they were admirable, but they meant
+nothing in the shifting, subtle forces of nature. They were just
+accidental harmonies blossoming out of something which meant everything
+here to this order, nothing to the universe at large. At twenty-two
+years of age he was thinking these things, wondering whether it would be
+possible ever to express them; wondering what people would think of him
+if they actually knew what he did think; wondering if there was
+anything, anything, which was really stable--a rock to cling to--and not
+mere shifting shadow and unreality.
+
+Mrs. Blue looked at her daughter's young lover with a kindly eye. She
+had heard a great deal about him. Having raised her children to be
+honest, moral and truthful she trusted them to associate only with those
+who were equally so. She assumed that Eugene was such a man, and his
+frank open countenance and smiling eyes and mouth convinced her that he
+was basically good. Also, what to her were his wonderful drawings, sent
+to Angela in the form of proofs from time to time, particularly the one
+of the East Side crowd, had been enough to prejudice her in his favor.
+No other daughter of the family, and there were three married, had
+approximated to this type of man in her choice. Eugene was looked upon
+as a prospective son-in-law who would fulfill all the conventional
+obligations joyfully and as a matter of course.
+
+"It's very good of you to put me up, Mrs. Blue," Eugene said pleasantly.
+"I've always wanted to come out here for a visit--I've heard so much of
+the family from Angela."
+
+"It's just a country home we have, not much to look at, but we like it,"
+replied his hostess. She smiled blandly, asked if he wouldn't make
+himself comfortable in one of the hammocks, wanted to know how he was
+getting along with his work in New York and then returned to her
+cooking, for she was already preparing his first meal. Eugene strolled
+with Angela to the big lawn under the trees and sat down. He was
+experiencing the loftiest of human emotions on earth--love in youth,
+accepted and requited, hope in youth, justified in action by his success
+in New York; peace in youth, for he had a well earned holiday in his
+grasp, was resting with the means to do so and with love and beauty and
+admiration and joyous summer weather to comfort him.
+
+As he rocked to and fro in the hammock gazing at the charming lawn and
+realizing all these things, his glance rested at last upon Angela, and
+he thought, "Life can really hold no finer thing than this."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Toward noon old Jotham Blue came in from a cornfield where he had been
+turning the earth between the rows. Although sixty-five and with snowy
+hair and beard he looked to be vigorous, and good to live until ninety
+or a hundred. His eyes were blue and keen, his color rosy. He had great
+broad shoulders set upon a spare waist, for he had been a handsome
+figure of a man in his youth.
+
+"How do you do, Mr. Witla," he inquired with easy grace as he strolled
+up, the yellow mud of the fields on his boots. He had pulled a big
+jackknife out of his pocket and begun whittling a fine twig he had
+picked up. "I'm glad to see you. My daughter, Angela, has been telling
+me one thing and another about you."
+
+He smiled as he looked at Eugene. Angela, who was sitting beside him,
+rose and strolled toward the house.
+
+"I'm glad to see you," said Eugene. "I like your country around here. It
+looks prosperous."
+
+"It is prosperous," said the old patriarch, drawing up a chair which
+stood at the foot of a tree and seating himself. Eugene sank back into
+the hammock.
+
+"It's a soil that's rich in lime and carbon and sodium--the things which
+make plant life grow. We need very little fertilizer here--very little.
+The principal thing is to keep the ground thoroughly cultivated and to
+keep out the bugs and weeds."
+
+He cut at his stick meditatively. Eugene noted the chemical and physical
+knowledge relative to farming. It pleased him to find brain coupled with
+crop cultivation.
+
+"I noticed some splendid fields of wheat as I came over," he observed.
+
+"Yes, wheat does well here," Blue went on, "when the weather is
+moderately favorable. Corn does well. We have a splendid apple crop and
+grapes are generally successful in this state. I have always thought
+that Wisconsin had a little the best of the other valley states, for we
+are blessed with a moderate climate, plenty of streams and rivers and a
+fine, broken landscape. There are good mines up north and lots of
+lumber. We are a prosperous people, we Wisconsiners, decidedly
+prosperous. This state has a great future."
+
+Eugene noted the wide space between his clear blue eyes as he talked. He
+liked the bigness of his conception of his state and of his country. No
+petty little ground-harnessed ploughman this, but a farmer in the big
+sense of the word--a cultivator of the soil, with an understanding of
+it--an American who loved his state and his country.
+
+"I have always thought of the Mississippi valley as the country of the
+future," said Eugene. "We have had the Valley of the Nile and the Valley
+of the Euphrates with big populations, but this is something larger. I
+rather feel as though a great wave of population were coming here in the
+future."
+
+"It is the new paradise of the world," said Jotham Blue, pausing in his
+whittling and holding up his right hand for emphasis. "We haven't come
+to realize its possibilities. The fruit, the corn, the wheat, to feed
+the nations of the world can be raised here. I sometimes marvel at the
+productivity of the soil. It is so generous. It is like a great mother.
+It only asks to be treated kindly to give all that it has."
+
+Eugene smiled. The bigness of his prospective father-in-law's feelings
+lured him. He felt as though he could love this man.
+
+They talked on about other things, the character of the surrounding
+population, the growth of Chicago, the recent threat of a war with
+Venezuela, the rise of a new leader in the Democratic party, a man whom
+Jotham admired very much. As he was telling of the latter's exploits--it
+appeared he had recently met him at Blackwood--Mrs. Blue appeared in the
+front door.
+
+"Jotham!" she called.
+
+He rose. "My wife must want a bucket of water," he said, and strolled
+away.
+
+Eugene smiled. This was lovely. This was the way life should
+be--compounded of health, strength, good nature, understanding,
+simplicity. He wished he were a man like Jotham, as sound, as hearty, as
+clean and strong. To think he had raised eight children. No wonder
+Angela was lovely. They all were, no doubt.
+
+While he was rocking, Marietta came back smiling, her blond hair blowing
+about her face. Like her father she had blue eyes, like him a sanguine
+temperament, warm and ruddy. Eugene felt drawn to her. She reminded him
+a little of Ruby--a little of Margaret. She was bursting with young
+health.
+
+"You're stronger than Angela," he said, looking at her.
+
+"Oh, yes, I can always outrun Angel-face," she exclaimed. "We fight
+sometimes but I can get things away from her. She has to give in.
+Sometimes I feel older--I always take the lead."
+
+Eugene rejoiced in the sobriquet of Angel-face. It suited Angela, he
+thought. She looked like pictures of Angels in the old prints and in the
+stained glass windows he had seen. He wondered in a vague way, however,
+whether Marietta did not have the sweeter temperament--were not really
+more lovable and cosy. But he put the thought forcefully out of his
+mind. He felt he must be loyal to Angela here.
+
+While they were talking the youngest boy, David, came up and sat down on
+the grass. He was short and stocky for his years--sixteen--with an
+intelligent face and an inquiring eye. Eugene noted stability and quiet
+force in his character at once. He began to see that these children had
+inherited character as well as strength from their parents. This was a
+home in which successful children were being reared. Benjamin came up
+after awhile, a tall, overgrown, puritanical youth, with western
+modifications and then Samuel, the oldest of the living boys and the
+most impressive. He was big and serene like his father, of brown
+complexion and hickory strength. Eugene learned in the conversation that
+he was a railroad man in St. Paul--home for a brief vacation, after
+three years of absence. He was with a road called the Great Northern,
+already a Second Assistant Passenger Agent and with great prospects, so
+the family thought. Eugene could see that all the boys and girls, like
+Angela, were ruggedly and honestly truthful. They were written all over
+with Christian precept--not church dogma--but Christian precept, lightly
+and good naturedly applied. They obeyed the ten commandments in so far
+as possible and lived within the limits of what people considered sane
+and decent. Eugene wondered at this. His own moral laxity was a puzzle
+to him. He wondered whether he were not really all wrong and they all
+right. Yet the subtlety of the universe was always with him--the mystery
+of its chemistry. For a given order of society no doubt he was out of
+place--for life in general, well, he could not say.
+
+At 12.30 dinner was announced from the door by Mrs. Blue and they all
+rose. It was one of those simple home feasts common to any intelligent
+farming family. There was a generous supply of fresh vegetables, green
+peas, new potatoes, new string beans. A steak had been secured from the
+itinerant butcher who served these parts and Mrs. Blue had made hot
+light biscuit. Eugene expressed a predilection for fresh buttermilk and
+they brought him a pitcherful, saying that as a rule it was given to the
+pigs; the children did not care for it. They talked and jested and he
+heard odd bits of information concerning people here and there--some
+farmer who had lost a horse by colic; some other farmer who was
+preparing to cut his wheat. There were frequent references to the three
+oldest sisters, who lived in other Wisconsin towns. Their children
+appeared to be numerous and fairly troublesome. They all came home
+frequently, it appeared, and were bound up closely with the interests of
+the family as a whole.
+
+"The more you know about the Blue family," observed Samuel to Eugene,
+who expressed surprise at the solidarity of interest, "the more you
+realize that they're a clan not a family. They stick together like
+glue."
+
+"That's a rather nice trait, I should say," laughed Eugene, who felt no
+such keen interest in his relatives.
+
+"Well, if you want to find out how the Blue family stick together just
+do something to one of them," observed Jake Doll, a neighbor who had
+entered.
+
+"That's sure true, isn't it, Sis," observed Samuel, who was sitting next
+to Angela, putting his hand affectionately on his sister's arm. Eugene
+noted the movement. She nodded her head affectionately.
+
+"Yes, we Blues all hang together."
+
+Eugene almost begrudged him his sister's apparent affection. Could such
+a girl be cut out of such an atmosphere--separated from it completely,
+brought into a radically different world, he wondered. Would she
+understand him; would he stick by her. He smiled at Jotham and Mrs. Blue
+and thought he ought to, but life was strange. You never could tell what
+might happen.
+
+During the afternoon there were more lovely impressions. He and Angela
+sat alone in the cool parlor for two hours after dinner while he
+restated his impressions of her over and over. He told her how charming
+he thought her home was, how nice her father and mother, what
+interesting brothers she had. He made a genial sketch of Jotham as he
+had strolled up to him at noon, which pleased Angela and she kept it to
+show to her father. He made her pose in the window and sketched her head
+and her halo of hair. He thought of his double page illustration of the
+Bowery by night and went to fetch it, looking for the first time at the
+sweet cool room at the end of the house which he was to occupy. One
+window, a west one, had hollyhocks looking in, and the door to the north
+gave out on the cool, shady grass. He moved in beauty, he thought; was
+treading on showered happiness. It hurt him to think that such joy might
+not always be, as though beauty were not everywhere and forever present.
+
+When Angela saw the picture which _Truth_ had reproduced, she was beside
+herself with joy and pride and happiness. It was such a testimony to her
+lover's ability. He had written almost daily of the New York art world,
+so she was familiar with that in exaggerated ideas, but these actual
+things, like reproduced pictures, were different. The whole world would
+see this picture. He must be famous already, she imagined.
+
+That evening and the next and the next as they sat in the parlor alone
+he drew nearer and nearer to that definite understanding which comes
+between a man and woman when they love. Eugene could never stop with
+mere kissing and caressing in a reserved way, if not persistently
+restrained. It seemed natural to him that love should go on. He had not
+been married. He did not know what its responsibilities were. He had
+never given a thought to what his parents had endured to make him worth
+while. There was no instinct in him to tell him. He had no yearnings for
+parenthood, that normal desire which gives visions of a home and the
+proper social conditions for rearing a family. All he thought of was the
+love making period--the billing and cooing and the transports of delight
+which come with it. With Angela he felt that these would be super-normal
+precisely because she was so slow in yielding--so on the defensive
+against herself. He could look in her eyes at times and see a swooning
+veil which foreshadowed a storm of emotion. He would sit by her stroking
+her hands, touching her cheek, smoothing her hair, or at other times
+holding her in his arms. It was hard for her to resist those significant
+pressures he gave, to hold him at arm's length, for she herself was
+eager for the delights of love.
+
+It was on the third night of his stay and in the face of his growing
+respect for every member of this family, that he swept Angela to the
+danger line--would have carried her across it had it not been for a
+fortuitous wave of emotion, which was not of his creation, but of hers.
+
+They had been to the little lake, Okoonee, a little way from the house
+during the afternoon for a swim.
+
+Afterward he and Angela and David and Marietta had taken a drive. It was
+one of those lovely afternoons that come sometimes in summer and speak
+direct to the heart of love and beauty. It was so fair and warm, the
+shadows of the trees so comforting that they fairly made Eugene's heart
+ache. He was young now, life was beautiful, but how would it be when he
+was old? A morbid anticipation of disaster seemed to harrow his soul.
+
+The sunset had already died away when they drew near home. Insects
+hummed, a cow-bell tinkled now and then; breaths of cool air, those
+harbingers of the approaching eve, swept their cheeks as they passed
+occasional hollows. Approaching the house they saw the blue smoke curls
+rising from the kitchen chimney, foretelling the preparation of the
+evening meal. Eugene clasped Angela's hand in an ecstasy of emotion.
+
+He wanted to dream--sitting in the hammock with Angela as the dusk fell,
+watching the pretty scene. Life was all around. Jotham and Benjamin came
+in from the fields and the sound of their voices and of the splashing
+water came from the kitchen door where they were washing. There was an
+anticipatory stamping of horses' feet in the barn, the lowing of a
+distant cow, the hungry grunt of pigs. Eugene shook his head--it was so
+pastoral, so sweet.
+
+At supper he scarcely touched what was put before him, the group at the
+dining table holding his attention as a spectacle. Afterwards he sat
+with the family on the lawn outside the door, breathing the odor of
+flowers, watching the stars over the trees, listening to Jotham and
+Mrs. Blue, to Samuel, Benjamin, David, Marietta and occasionally Angela.
+Because of his mood, sad in the face of exquisite beauty, she also was
+subdued. She said little, listening to Eugene and her father, but when
+she did talk her voice was sweet.
+
+Jotham arose, after a time, and went to bed, and one by one the others
+followed. David and Marietta went into the sitting room and then Samuel
+and Benjamin left. They gave as an excuse hard work for the morning.
+Samuel was going to try his hand again at thrashing. Eugene took Angela
+by the hand and led her out where some hydrangeas were blooming, white
+as snow by day, but pale and silvery in the dark. He took her face in
+his hands, telling her again of love.
+
+"It's been such a wonderful day I'm all wrought up," he said. "Life is
+so beautiful here. This place is so sweet and peaceful. And you! oh,
+you!" kisses ended his words.
+
+They stood there a little while, then went back into the parlor where
+she lighted a lamp. It cast a soft yellow glow over the room, just
+enough to make it warm, he thought. They sat first side by side on two
+rocking chairs and then later on a settee, he holding her in his arms.
+Before supper she had changed to a loose cream colored house gown. Now
+Eugene persuaded her to let her hair hang in the two braids.
+
+Real passion is silent. It was so intense with him that he sat
+contemplating her as if in a spell. She leaned back against his shoulder
+stroking his hair, but finally ceased even that, for her own feeling was
+too intense to make movement possible. She thought of him as a young
+god, strong, virile, beautiful--a brilliant future before him. All these
+years she had waited for someone to truly love her and now this splendid
+youth had apparently cast himself at her feet. He stroked her hands, her
+neck, cheeks, then slowly gathered her close and buried his head against
+her bosom.
+
+Angela was strong in convention, in the precepts of her parents, in the
+sense of her family and its attitude, but this situation was more than
+she could resist. She accepted first the pressure of his arm, then the
+slow subtlety with which he caressed her. Resistance seemed almost
+impossible now for he held her close--tight within the range of his
+magnetism. When finally she felt the pressure of his hand upon her
+quivering limbs, she threw herself back in a transport of agony and
+delight.
+
+"No, no, Eugene," she begged. "No, no! Save me from myself. Save me from
+myself. Oh, Eugene!"
+
+He paused a moment to look at her face. It was wrought in lines of
+intense suffering--pale as though she were ill. Her body was quite limp.
+Only the hot, moist lips told the significant story. He could not stop
+at once. Slowly he drew his hand away, then let his sensitive artists'
+fingers rest gently on her neck--her bosom.
+
+She struggled lamely at this point and slipped to her knees, her dress
+loosened at the neck.
+
+"Don't, Eugene," she begged, "don't. Think of my father, my mother. I,
+who have boasted so. I of whom they feel so sure. Oh, Eugene, I beg of
+you!"
+
+He stroked her hair, her cheeks, looking into her face as Abelard might
+have looked at Heloise.
+
+"Oh, I know why it is," she exclaimed, convulsively. "I am no better
+than any other, but I have waited so long, so long! But I mustn't! Oh,
+Eugene, I mustn't! Help me!"
+
+Vaguely Eugene understood. She had been without lovers. Why? he thought.
+She was beautiful. He got up, half intending to carry her to his room,
+but he paused, thinking. She was such a pathetic figure. Was he really
+as bad as this? Could he not be fair in this one instance? Her father
+had been so nice to him--her mother--He saw Jotham Blue before him,
+Mrs. Blue, her admiring brothers and sisters, as they had been a little
+while before. He looked at her and still the prize lured him--almost
+swept him on in spite of himself, but he stayed.
+
+"Stand up, Angela," he said at last, pulling himself together, looking
+at her intensely. She did so. "Leave me now," he went on, "right away! I
+won't answer for myself if you don't. I am really trying. Please go."
+
+She paused, looking at him fearfully, regretfully.
+
+"Oh, forgive me, Eugene," she pleaded.
+
+"Forgive me," he said. "I'm the one. But you go now, sweet. You don't
+know how hard this is. Help me by going."
+
+She moved away and he followed her with his eyes, yearningly, burningly,
+until she reached the door. When she closed it softly he went into his
+own room and sat down. His body was limp and weary. He ached from head
+to foot from the intensity of the mood he had passed through. He went
+over the recent incidents, almost stunned by his experience and then
+went outside and stood under the stairs, listening. Tree toads were
+chirping, there were suspicious cracklings in the grass as of bugs
+stirring. A duck quacked somewhere feebly. The bell of the family cow
+tinkled somewhere over near the water of the little stream. He saw the
+great dipper in the sky, Sirius, Canopus, the vast galaxy of the Milky
+Way.
+
+"What is life anyway?" he asked himself. "What is the human body? What
+produces passion? Here we are for a few years surging with a fever of
+longing and then we burn out and die." He thought of some lines he might
+write, of pictures he might paint. All the while, reproduced before his
+mind's eye like a cinematograph, were views of Angela as she had been
+tonight in his arms, on her knees. He had seen her true form. He had
+held her in his arms. He had voluntarily resigned her charms for
+tonight; anyhow, no harm had come. It never should.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+It would be hard to say in what respect, if any, the experiences of this
+particular night altered Eugene's opinion of Angela. He was inclined to
+like her better for what he would have called her humanness. Thus
+frankly to confess her weakness and inability to save herself was
+splendid. That he was given the chance to do a noble deed was fortunate
+and uplifting. He knew now that he could take her if he wished, but once
+calm again he resolved to be fair and not to insist. He could wait.
+
+The state of Angela's mind, on the contrary, once she had come out of
+her paroxysm and gained the privacy of her own room, or rather the room
+she shared with Marietta at the other extreme of the house, was
+pitiable. She had for so long considered herself an estimable and
+virtuous girl. There was in her just a faint trace of prudery which
+might readily have led to an unhappy old maid existence for her if
+Eugene, with his superiority, or non-understanding, or indifference to
+conventional theories and to old-maidish feelings, had not come along
+and with his customary blindness to material prosperity and age
+limitations, seized upon and made love to her. He had filled her brain
+with a whirlwind of notions hitherto unfamiliar to her world and set
+himself up in her brain as a law unto himself. He was not like other
+men--she could see that. He was superior to them. He might not make much
+money, being an artist, but he could make other things which to her
+seemed more desirable. Fame, beautiful pictures, notable friends, were
+not these things far superior to money? She had had little enough money
+in all conscience, and if Eugene made anything at all it would be enough
+for her. He seemed to be under the notion that he needed a lot to get
+married, whereas she would have been glad to risk it on almost anything
+at all.
+
+This latest revelation of herself, besides tearing her mind from a
+carefully nurtured belief in her own virtuous impregnability, raised at
+the same time a spectre of disaster in so far as Eugene's love for her
+was concerned. Would he, now that she had allowed him those precious
+endearments which should have been reserved for the marriage bed only,
+care for her as much as he had before? Would he not think of her as a
+light minded, easily spoiled creature who was waiting only for a
+propitious moment to yield herself? She had been lost to all sense of
+right and wrong in that hour, that she knew. Her father's character and
+what he stood for, her mother's decency and love of virtue, her
+cleanly-minded, right-living brothers and sisters,--all had been
+forgotten and here she was, a tainted maiden, virtuous in technical
+sense it is true, but tainted. Her convention-trained conscience smote
+her vigorously and she groaned in her heart. She went outside the door
+of her own room and sat down on the damp grass in the early morning to
+think. It was so cool and calm everywhere but in her own soul. She held
+her face in her hands, feeling her hot cheeks, wondering what Eugene was
+thinking now. What would her father think, her mother? She wrung her
+hands more than once and finally went inside to see if she could not
+rest. She was not unconscious of the beauty and joy of the episode, but
+she was troubled by what she felt she ought to think, what the
+consequences to her future might be. To hold Eugene now--that was a
+subtle question. To hold up her head in front of him as she had, could
+she? To keep him from going further. It was a difficult situation and
+she tossed restlessly all night, getting little sleep. In the morning
+she arose weary and disturbed, but more desperately in love than ever.
+This wonderful youth had revealed an entirely new and intensely dramatic
+world to her.
+
+When they met on the lawn again before breakfast, Angela was garbed in
+white linen. She looked waxen and delicate and her eyes showed dark
+rings as well as the dark thoughts that were troubling her. Eugene took
+her hand sympathetically.
+
+"Don't worry," he said, "I know. It isn't as bad as you think." And he
+smiled tenderly.
+
+"Oh, Eugene, I don't understand myself now," she said sorrowfully. "I
+thought I was better than that."
+
+"We're none of us better than that," he replied simply. "We just think
+we are sometimes. You are not any different to me. You just think you
+are."
+
+"Oh, are you sure?" she asked eagerly.
+
+"Quite sure," he replied. "Love isn't a terrible thing between any two.
+It's just lovely. Why should I think worse of you?"
+
+"Oh, because good girls don't do what I have done. I have been raised to
+know better--to do better."
+
+"All a belief, my dear, which you get from what has been taught you. You
+think it wrong. Why? Because your father and mother told you so. Isn't
+that it?"
+
+"Oh, not that alone. Everybody thinks it's wrong. The Bible teaches that
+it is. Everybody turns his back on you when he finds out."
+
+"Wait a minute," pleaded Eugene argumentatively. He was trying to solve
+this puzzle for himself. "Let's leave the Bible out of it, for I don't
+believe in the Bible--not as a law of action anyhow. The fact that
+everybody thinks it's wrong wouldn't necessarily make it so, would it?"
+He was ignoring completely the significance of _everybody_ as a
+reflection of those principles which govern the universe.
+
+"No-o-o," ventured Angela doubtfully.
+
+"Listen," went on Eugene. "Everybody in Constantinople believes that
+Mahomet is the Prophet of God. That doesn't make him so, does it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, then, everyone here might believe that what we did last night was
+wrong without making it so. Isn't that true?"
+
+"Yes," replied Angela confusedly. She really did not know. She could not
+argue with him. He was too subtle, but her innate principles and
+instincts were speaking plainly enough, nevertheless.
+
+"Now what you're really thinking about is what people will do. They'll
+turn their backs on you, you say. That is a practical matter. Your
+father might turn you out of doors--"
+
+"I think he would," replied Angela, little understanding the bigness of
+the heart of her father.
+
+"I think he wouldn't," said Eugene, "but that's neither here nor there.
+Men might refuse to marry you. Those are material considerations. You
+wouldn't say they had anything to do with real right or wrong, would
+you?"
+
+Eugene had no convincing end to his argument. He did not know any more
+than anyone else what was right or wrong in this matter. He was merely
+talking to convince himself, but he had enough logic to confuse Angela.
+
+"I don't know," she said vaguely.
+
+"Right," he went on loftily, "is something which is supposed to be in
+accordance with a standard of truth. Now no one in all the world knows
+what truth is, no one. There is no way of telling. You can only act
+wisely or unwisely as regards your personal welfare. If that's what
+you're worrying about, and it is, I can tell you that you're no worse
+off. There's nothing the matter with your welfare. I think you're better
+off, for I like you better."
+
+Angela wondered at the subtlety of his brain. She was not sure but that
+what he said might be true. Could her fears be baseless? She felt sure
+she had lost some of the bloom of her youth anyhow.
+
+"How can you?" she asked, referring to his saying that he liked her
+better.
+
+"Easily enough," he replied. "I know more about you. I admire your
+frankness. You're lovely--altogether so. You are sweet beyond compare."
+He started to particularize.
+
+"Don't, Eugene," she pleaded, putting her finger over her lips. The
+color was leaving her cheeks. "Please don't, I can't stand it."
+
+"All right," he said, "I won't. But you're altogether lovely. Let's go
+and sit in the hammock."
+
+"No. I'm going to get you your breakfast. It's time you had something."
+
+He took comfort in his privileges, for the others had all gone. Jotham,
+Samuel, Benjamin and David were in the fields. Mrs. Blue was sewing and
+Marietta had gone to see a girl friend up the road. Angela, as Ruby
+before her, bestirred herself about the youth's meal, mixing biscuit,
+broiling him some bacon, cleaning a basket of fresh dewberries for him.
+
+"I like your man," said her mother, coming out where she was working.
+"He looks to be good-natured. But don't spoil him. If you begin wrong
+you'll be sorry."
+
+"You spoiled papa, didn't you?" asked Angela sagely, recalling all the
+little humorings her father had received.
+
+"Your father has a keen sense of duty," retorted her mother. "It didn't
+hurt him to be spoiled a little."
+
+"Maybe Eugene has," replied her daughter, turning her slices of bacon.
+
+Her mother smiled. All her daughters had married well. Perhaps Angela
+was doing the best of all. Certainly her lover was the most
+distinguished. Yet, "well to be careful," she suggested.
+
+Angela thought. If her mother only knew, or her father. Dear Heaven! And
+yet Eugene was altogether lovely. She wanted to wait on him, to spoil
+him. She wished she could be with him every day from now on--that they
+need not part any more.
+
+"Oh, if he would only marry me," she sighed. It was the one divine event
+which would complete her life.
+
+Eugene would have liked to linger in this atmosphere indefinitely. Old
+Jotham, he found, liked to talk to him. He took an interest in national
+and international affairs, was aware of distinguished and peculiar
+personalities, seemed to follow world currents everywhere. Eugene began
+to think of him as a distinguished personality in himself, but old
+Jotham waved the suggestion blandly aside.
+
+"I'm a farmer," he said. "I've seen my greatest success in raising good
+children. My boys will do well, I know."
+
+For the first time Eugene caught the sense of fatherhood, of what it
+means to live again in your children, but only vaguely. He was too
+young, too eager for a varied life, too lustful. So its true import was
+lost for the time.
+
+Sunday came and with it the necessity to leave. He had been here nine
+days, really two days more than he had intended to stay. It was farewell
+to Angela, who had come so close, so much in his grasp that she was like
+a child in his hands. It was farewell, moreover, to an ideal scene, a
+bit of bucolic poetry. When would he see again an old patriarch like
+Jotham, clean, kindly, intelligent, standing upright amid his rows of
+corn, proud to be a good father, not ashamed to be poor, not afraid to
+be old or to die. Eugene had drawn so much from him. It was like sitting
+at the feet of Isaiah. It was farewell to the lovely fields and the blue
+hills, the long rows of trees down the lawn walk, the white and red and
+blue flowers about the dooryard. He had slept so sweetly in his clean
+room, he had listened so joyously to the voices of birds, the wood dove
+and the poet thrush; he had heard the water in the Blue's branch
+rippling over its clean pebbles. The pigs in the barnyard pen, the
+horses, the cows, all had appealed to him. He thought of Gray's
+"Elegy"--of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" and "The Traveller." This was
+something like the things those men had loved.
+
+He walked down the lawn with Angela, when the time came, repeating how
+sorry he was to go. David had hitched up a little brown mare and was
+waiting at the extreme end of the lawn.
+
+"Oh, Sweet," he sighed. "I shall never be happy until I have you."
+
+"I will wait," sighed Angela, although she was wishing to exclaim: "Oh,
+take me, take me!" When he was gone she went about her duties
+mechanically, for it was as if all the fire and joy had gone out of her
+life. Without this brilliant imagination of his to illuminate things,
+life seemed dull.
+
+And he rode, parting in his mind with each lovely thing as he went--the
+fields of wheat, the little stream, Lake Okoonee, the pretty Blue
+farmhouse, all.
+
+He said to himself: "Nothing more lovely will ever come again. Angela in
+my arms in her simple little parlor. Dear God! and there are only
+seventy years of life--not more than ten or fifteen of true youth, all
+told."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+Eugene carried home with him not only a curiously deepened feeling for
+Angela, due to their altered and more intimate relationship, but
+moreover a growing respect for her family. Old Jotham was so impressive
+a figure of a man; his wife so kindly and earnest. Their attitude toward
+their children and to each other was so sound, and their whole
+relationship to society so respectable. Another observer might have been
+repelled by the narrowness and frugality of their lives. But Eugene had
+not known enough of luxury to be scornful of the material simplicity of
+such existence. Here he had found character, poetry of location, poetry
+of ambition, youth and happy prospects. These boys, so sturdy and
+independent, were sure to make for themselves such places in the world
+as they desired. Marietta, so charming a girl, could not but make a good
+marriage. Samuel was doing well in his position with the railroad
+company; Benjamin was studying to be a lawyer and David was to be sent
+to West Point. He liked them for their familiar, sterling worth. And
+they all treated him as the destined husband of Angela. By the end of
+his stay he had become as much en rapport with the family as if he had
+known it all his life.
+
+Before going back to New York he had stopped in Chicago, where he had
+seen Howe and Mathews grinding away at their old tasks, and then for a
+few days in Alexandria, where he found his father busy about his old
+affairs. Sewing machines were still being delivered by him in person,
+and the long roads of the country were as briskly traversed by his light
+machine-carrying buggy as in his earliest days. Eugene saw him now as
+just a little futile, and yet he admired him, his patience, his
+industry. The brisk sewing machine agent was considerably impressed by
+his son's success, and was actually trying to take an interest in art.
+One evening coming home from the post office he pointed out a street
+scene in Alexandria as a subject for a painting. Eugene knew that art
+had only been called to his father's attention by his own efforts. He
+had noticed these things all his life, no doubt, but attached no
+significance to them until he had seen his son's work in the magazines.
+"If you ever paint country things, you ought to paint Cook's Mill, over
+here by the falls. That's one of the prettiest things I know anywhere,"
+he said to him one evening, trying to make his son feel the interest he
+took. Eugene knew the place. It was attractive, a little branch of
+bright water running at the base of a forty foot wall of red sandstone
+and finally tumbling down a fifteen foot declivity of grey mossy stones.
+It was close to a yellow road which carried a good deal of traffic and
+was surrounded by a company of trees which ornamented it and sheltered
+it on all sides. Eugene had admired it in his youth as beautiful and
+peaceful.
+
+"It is nice," he replied to his father. "I'll take a look at it some
+day."
+
+Witla senior felt set up. His son was doing him honor. Mrs. Witla, like
+her husband, was showing the first notable traces of the flight of time.
+The crow's-feet at the sides of her eyes were deeper, the wrinkles in
+her forehead longer. At the sight of Eugene the first night she fairly
+thrilled, for he was so well developed now, so self-reliant. He had come
+through his experiences to a kind of poise which she realized was
+manhood. Her boy, requiring her careful guidance, was gone. This was
+someone who could guide her, tease her as a man would a child.
+
+"You've got so big I hardly know you," she said, as he folded her in his
+arms.
+
+"No, you're just getting little, ma. I used to think I'd never get to
+the point where you couldn't shake me, but that's all over, isn't it?"
+
+"You never did need much shaking," she said fondly.
+
+Myrtle, who had married Frank Bangs the preceding year, had gone with
+her husband to live in Ottumwa, Iowa, where he had taken charge of a
+mill, so Eugene did not see her, but he spent some little time with
+Sylvia, now the mother of two children. Her husband was the same quiet,
+conservative plodder Eugene had first noted him to be. Revisiting the
+office of the _Appeal_ he found that John Summers had recently died.
+Otherwise things were as they had been. Jonas Lyle and Caleb Williams
+were still in charge--quite the same as before. Eugene was glad when his
+time was up, and took the train back to Chicago with a light heart.
+
+Again as on his entrance to Chicago from the East, and on his return to
+it from Blackwood, he was touched keenly by the remembrance of Ruby. She
+had been so sweet to him. His opening art experiences had in a way been
+centred about her. But in spite of all, he did not want to go out and
+see her. Or did he? He asked himself this question with a pang of
+sorrow, for in a way he cared. He cared for her as one might care for a
+girl in a play or book. She had the quality of a tragedy about her.
+She--her life, her surroundings, her misfortune in loving him,
+constituted an artistic composition. He thought he might be able to
+write a poem about it some time. He was able to write rather charming
+verse which he kept to himself. He had the knack of saying things in a
+simple way and with feeling--making you see a picture. The trouble with
+his verse was that it lacked as yet any real nobility of thought--was
+not as final in understanding as it might have been.
+
+He did not go to see Ruby. The reason he assigned to himself was that it
+would not be nice. She might not want him to now. She might be trying to
+forget. And he had Angela. It really wasn't fair to her. But he looked
+over toward the region in which she lived, as he travelled out of the
+city eastward and wished that some of those lovely moments he had spent
+with her might be lived again.
+
+Back in New York, life seemed to promise a repetition of the preceding
+year, with some minor modifications. In the fall Eugene went to live
+with McHugh and Smite, the studio they had consisting of one big working
+room and three bed-rooms. They agreed that they could get along
+together, and for a while it was good for them all. The criticism they
+furnished each other was of real value. And they found it pleasant to
+dine together, to walk, to see the exhibitions. They stimulated each
+other with argument, each having a special point of view. It was much as
+it had been with Howe and Mathews in Chicago.
+
+During this winter Eugene made his first appearance in one of the
+leading publications of the time--_Harper's Magazine_. He had gone to
+the Art Director with some proofs of his previous work, and had been
+told that it was admirable; if some suitable story turned up he would be
+considered. Later a letter came asking him to call, and a commission
+involving three pictures for $125 was given him. He worked them out
+successfully with models and was complimented on the result. His
+associates cheered him on also, for they really admired what he was
+doing. He set out definitely to _make Scribner's_ and the _Century_, as
+getting into those publications was called, and after a time he
+succeeded in making an impression on their respective Art Directors,
+though no notable commissions were given him. From one he secured a
+poem, rather out of his mood to decorate, and from the other a short
+story; but somehow he could not feel that either was a real opportunity.
+He wanted an appropriate subject or to sell them some of his scenes.
+
+Building up a paying reputation was slow work. Although he was being
+mentioned here and there among artists, his name was anything but a
+significant factor with the public or with the Art Directors. He was
+still a promising beginner--growing, but not yet arrived by a long
+distance.
+
+There was one editor who was inclined to see him at his real worth, but
+had no money to offer. This was Richard Wheeler, editor of _Craft_, a
+rather hopeless magazine in a commercial sense, but devoted sincerely
+enough to art. Wheeler was a blond young man of poetic temperament,
+whose enthusiasm for Eugene's work made it easy for them to become
+friends.
+
+It was through Wheeler that he met that winter Miriam Finch and
+Christina Channing, two women of radically different temperaments and
+professions, who opened for Eugene two entirely new worlds.
+
+Miriam Finch was a sculptor by profession--a critic by temperament, with
+no great capacity for emotion in herself but an intense appreciation of
+its significance in others. To see her was to be immediately impressed
+with a vital force in womanhood. She was a woman who had never had a
+real youth or a real love affair, but clung to her ideal of both with a
+passionate, almost fatuous, faith that they could still be brought to
+pass. Wheeler had invited him to go round to her studio with him one
+evening. He was interested to know what Eugene would think of her.
+Miriam, already thirty-two when Eugene met her--a tiny, brown haired,
+brown eyed girl, with a slender, rather cat-like figure and a suavity of
+address and manner which was artistic to the finger tips. She had none
+of that budding beauty that is the glory of eighteen, but she was
+altogether artistic and delightful. Her hair encircled her head in a
+fluffy cloudy mass; her eyes moved quickly, with intense intelligence,
+feeling, humor, sympathy. Her lips were sweetly modelled after the
+pattern of a Cupid's bow and her smile was subtly ingratiating. Her
+sallow complexion matched her brown hair and the drab velvet or corduroy
+of her dress. There was a striking simplicity about the things she wore
+which gave her a distinctive air. Her clothes were seldom fashionable
+but always exceedingly becoming, for she saw herself as a whole and
+arrayed herself as a decorative composition from head to foot, with a
+sense of fitness in regard to self and life.
+
+To such a nature as Eugene's, an intelligent, artistic, self-regulating
+and self-poised human being was always intensely magnetic and
+gratifying. He turned to the capable person as naturally as a flower
+turns toward the light, finding a joy in contemplating the completeness
+and sufficiency of such a being. To have ideas of your own seemed to him
+a marvellous thing. To be able definitely to formulate your thoughts and
+reach positive and satisfying conclusions was a great and beautiful
+thing. From such personalities Eugene drank admiringly until his thirst
+was satiated--then he would turn away. If his thirst for what they had
+to give returned, he might come back--not otherwise.
+
+Hitherto all his relationships with personages of this quality had been
+confined to the male sex, for he had not known any women of distinction.
+Beginning with Temple Boyle, instructor in the life class in Chicago,
+and Vincent Beers, instructor in the illustration class, he had
+encountered successively Jerry Mathews, Mitchell Goldfarb, Peter McHugh,
+David Smite and Jotham Blue, all men of intense personal feeling and
+convictions and men who had impressed him greatly. Now he was to
+encounter for the first time some forceful, really exceptional women of
+the same calibre. Stella Appleton, Margaret Duff, Ruby Kenny and Angela
+Blue were charming girls in their way, but they did not think for
+themselves. They were not organized, self-directed, self-controlled
+personalities in the way that Miriam Finch was. She would have
+recognized herself at once as being infinitely superior intellectually
+and artistically to any or all of them, while entertaining at the same
+time a sympathetic, appreciative understanding of their beauty, fitness,
+equality of value in the social scheme. She was a student of life, a
+critic of emotions and understanding, with keen appreciative
+intelligence, and yet longing intensely for just what Stella and
+Margaret and Ruby and even Angela had--youth, beauty, interest for men,
+the power or magnetism or charm of face and form to compel the impetuous
+passion of a lover. She wanted to be loved by someone who could love
+madly and beautifully, and this had never come to her.
+
+Miss Finch's home, or rather studio, was with her family in East
+Twenty-sixth Street, where she occupied a north room on the third floor,
+but her presence in the bosom of that family did not prevent her from
+attaining an individuality and an exclusiveness which was most
+illuminating to Eugene. Her room was done in silver, brown and grey,
+with a great wax-festooned candlestick fully five feet high standing in
+one corner and a magnificent carved chest of early Flemish workmanship
+standing in another. There was a brown combination writing desk and
+book-shelf which was arrayed with some of the most curious
+volumes--Pater's "Marius the Epicurean," Daudet's "Wives of Men of
+Genius," Richard Jefferies' "Story of My Heart," Stevenson's "Aes
+Triplex," "The Kasidah" of Richard Burton, "The House of Life" by Dante
+Gabriel Rossetti, "Also sprach Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche. The
+fact that they were here, after he had taken one look at the woman and
+the room, was to Eugene sufficient proof that they were important. He
+handled them curiously, reading odd paragraphs, nosing about, looking at
+pictures, and making rapid notes in his mental notebook. This was
+someone worth knowing, he felt that. He wanted to make a sufficiently
+favorable impression to be permitted to know her better.
+
+Miriam Finch was at once taken with Eugene. There was such an air of
+vigor, inquiry, appreciation and understanding about him that she could
+not help being impressed. He seemed somewhat like a lighted lamp casting
+a soft, shaded, velvety glow. He went about her room, after his
+introduction, looking at her pictures, her bronzes and clays, asking
+after the creator of this, the painter of that, where a third thing came
+from.
+
+"I never heard of one of these books," he said frankly, when he looked
+over the small, specially selected collection.
+
+"There are some very interesting things here," she volunteered, coming
+to his side. His simple confession appealed to her. He was like a breath
+of fresh air. Richard Wheeler, who had brought him in, made no objection
+to being neglected. He wanted her to enjoy his find.
+
+"You know," said Eugene, looking up from Burton's "Kasidah" and into her
+brown eyes, "New York gets me dizzy. It's so wonderful!"
+
+"Just how?" she asked.
+
+"It's so compact of wonderful things. I saw a shop the other day full of
+old jewelry and ornaments and quaint stones and clothes, and O Heaven! I
+don't know what all--more things than I had ever seen in my whole life
+before; and here in this quiet side street and this unpretentious house
+I find this room. Nothing seems to show on the outside; everything seems
+crowded to suffocation with luxury or art value on the inside."
+
+"Are you talking about this room?" she ventured.
+
+"Why, yes," he replied.
+
+"Take note, Mr. Wheeler," she called, over her shoulder to her young
+editor friend. "This is the first time in my life that I have been
+accused of possessing luxury. When you write me up again I want you to
+give me credit for luxury. I like it."
+
+"I'll certainly do it," said Wheeler.
+
+"Yes. 'Art values' too."
+
+"Yes. 'Art values.' I have it," said Wheeler.
+
+Eugene smiled. He liked her vivacity. "I know what you mean," she added.
+"I've felt the same thing about Paris. You go into little unpretentious
+places there and come across such wonderful things--heaps and heaps of
+fine clothes, antiques, jewels. Where was it I read such an interesting
+article about that?"
+
+"Not in _Craft_ I hope?" ventured Wheeler.
+
+"No, I don't think so. _Harper's Bazaar_, I believe."
+
+"Oh, pshaw!" exclaimed Wheeler. "_Harper's Bazaar!_ What rot!"
+
+"But that's just what you ought to have. Why don't you do it--right?"
+
+"I will," he said.
+
+Eugene went to the piano and turned over a pile of music. Again he came
+across the unfamiliar, the strange, the obviously distinguished--Grieg's
+"Arabian Dance"; "Es war ein Traum" by Lassen; "Elegie" by Massenet;
+"Otidi" by Davydoff; "Nymphs and Shepherds" by Purcell--things whose
+very titles smacked of color and beauty. Gluck, Sgambati, Rossini,
+Tschaikowsky--the Italian Scarlatti--Eugene marvelled at what he did not
+know about music.
+
+"Play something," he pleaded, and with a smile Miriam stepped to the
+piano.
+
+"Do you know 'Es war ein Traum'?" she inquired.
+
+"No," said he.
+
+"That's lovely," put in Wheeler. "Sing it!"
+
+Eugene had thought that possibly she sang, but he was not prepared for
+the burst of color that came with her voice. It was not a great voice,
+but sweet and sympathetic, equal to the tasks she set herself. She
+selected her music as she selected her clothes--to suit her capacity.
+The poetic, sympathetic reminiscence of the song struck home. Eugene was
+delighted.
+
+"Oh," he exclaimed, bringing his chair close to the piano and looking
+into her face, "you sing beautifully."
+
+She gave him a glittering smile.
+
+"Now I'll sing anything you want for you if you go on like that."
+
+"I'm crazy about music," he said; "I don't know anything about it, but I
+like this sort of thing."
+
+"You like the really good things. I know. So do I."
+
+He felt flattered and grateful. They went through "Otidi," "The
+Nightingale," "Elegie," "The Last Spring"--music Eugene had never heard
+before. But he knew at once that he was listening to playing which
+represented a better intelligence, a keener selective judgment, a finer
+artistic impulse than anyone he had ever known had possessed. Ruby
+played and Angela, the latter rather well, but neither had ever heard of
+these things he was sure. Ruby had only liked popular things; Angela the
+standard melodies--beautiful but familiar. Here was someone who ignored
+popular taste--was in advance of it. In all her music he had found
+nothing he knew. It grew on him as a significant fact. He wanted to be
+nice to her, to have her like him. So he drew close and smiled and she
+always smiled back. Like the others she liked his face, his mouth, his
+eyes, his hair.
+
+"He's charming," she thought, when he eventually left; and his
+impression of her was of a woman who was notably and significantly
+distinguished.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+But Miriam Finch's family, of which she seemed so independent, had not
+been without its influence on her. This family was of Middle West
+origin, and did not understand or sympathize very much with the artistic
+temperament. Since her sixteenth year, when Miriam had first begun to
+exhibit a definite striving toward the artistic, her parents had guarded
+her jealously against what they considered the corrupting atmosphere of
+the art world. Her mother had accompanied her from Ohio to New York, and
+lived with her while she studied art in the art school, chaperoning her
+everywhere. When it became advisable, as she thought, for Miriam to go
+abroad, she went with her. Miriam's artistic career was to be properly
+supervised. When she lived in the Latin Quarter in Paris her mother was
+with her; when she loitered in the atmosphere of the galleries and
+palaces in Rome it was with her mother at her side. At Pompeii and
+Herculaneum--in London and in Berlin--her mother, an iron-willed little
+woman at forty-five at that time, was with her. She was convinced that
+she knew exactly what was good for her daughter and had more or less
+made the girl accept her theories. Later, Miriam's personal judgment
+began to diverge slightly from that of her mother and then trouble
+began.
+
+It was vague at first, hardly a definite, tangible thing in the
+daughter's mind, but later it grew to be a definite feeling that her
+life was being cramped. She had been warned off from association with
+this person and that; had been shown the pitfalls that surround the
+free, untrammelled life of the art studio. Marriage with the average
+artist was not to be considered. Modelling from the nude, particularly
+the nude of a man, was to her mother at first most distressing. She
+insisted on being present and for a long time her daughter thought that
+was all right. Finally the presence, the viewpoint, the intellectual
+insistence of her mother, became too irksome, and an open break
+followed. It was one of those family tragedies which almost kill
+conservative parents. Mrs. Finch's heart was practically broken.
+
+The trouble with this break was that it came a little too late for
+Miriam's happiness. In the stress of this insistent chaperonage she had
+lost her youth--the period during which she felt she should have had her
+natural freedom. She had lost the interest of several men who in her
+nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first years had approached her
+longingly, but who could not stand the criticism of her mother. At
+twenty-eight when the break came the most delightful love period was
+over and she felt grieved and resentful.
+
+At that time she had insisted on a complete and radical change for
+herself. She had managed to get, through one art dealer and another,
+orders for some of her spirited clay figurines. There was a dancing
+girl, a visualization of one of the moods of Carmencita, a celebrated
+dancer of the period, which had caught the public fancy--at least the
+particular art dealer who was handling her work for her had managed to
+sell some eighteen replicas of it at $175 each. Miss Finch's share of
+this was $100, each. There was another little thing, a six-inch bronze
+called "Sleep," which had sold some twenty replicas at $150 each, and
+was still selling. "The Wind," a figure crouching and huddling as if
+from cold, was also selling. It looked as though she might be able to
+make from three to four thousand dollars a year steadily.
+
+She demanded of her mother at this time the right to a private studio,
+to go and come when she pleased, to go about alone wherever she wished,
+to have men and women come to her private apartment, and be entertained
+by her in her own manner. She objected to supervision in any form, cast
+aside criticism and declared roundly that she would lead her own life.
+She realized sadly while she was doing it, however, that the best was
+gone--that she had not had the wit or the stamina to do as she pleased
+at the time she most wanted to do so. Now she would be almost
+automatically conservative. She could not help it.
+
+Eugene when he first met her felt something of this. He felt the
+subtlety of her temperament, her philosophic conclusions, what might be
+called her emotional disappointment. She was eager for life, which
+seemed to him odd, for she appeared to have so much. By degrees he got
+it out of her, for they came to be quite friendly and then he understood
+clearly just how things were.
+
+By the end of three months and before Christina Channing appeared,
+Eugene had come to the sanest, cleanest understanding with Miss Finch
+that he had yet reached with any woman. He had dropped into the habit of
+calling there once and sometimes twice a week. He had learned to
+understand her point of view, which was detachedly aesthetic and rather
+removed from the world of the sensuous. Her ideal of a lover had been
+fixed to a certain extent by statues and poems of Greek youth--Hylas,
+Adonis, Perseus, and by those men of the Middle Ages painted by Millais,
+Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. She had hoped
+for a youth with a classic outline of face, distinction of form,
+graciousness of demeanor and an appreciative intellect. He must be manly
+but artistic. It was a rather high ideal, not readily capable of
+attainment by a woman already turned thirty, but nevertheless worth
+dreaming about.
+
+Although she had surrounded herself with talented youth as much as
+possible--both young men and young women--she had not come across _the
+one_. There had been a number of times when, for a very little while,
+she had imagined she had found him, but had been compelled to see her
+fancies fail. All the youths she knew had been inclined to fall in love
+with girls younger than themselves--some to the interesting maidens she
+had introduced them to. It is hard to witness an ideal turning from
+yourself, its spiritual counterpart, and fixing itself upon some mere
+fleshly vision of beauty which a few years will cause to fade. Such had
+been her fate, however, and she was at times inclined to despair. When
+Eugene appeared she had almost concluded that love was not for her, and
+she did not flatter herself that he would fall in love with her.
+Nevertheless she could not help but be interested in him and look at
+times with a longing eye at his interesting face and figure. It was so
+obvious that if he loved at all it would be dramatically, in all
+probability, beautifully.
+
+As time went on she took pains to be agreeable to him. He had, as it
+were, the freedom of her room. She knew of exhibitions, personalities,
+movements--in religion, art, science, government, literature. She was
+inclined to take an interest in socialism, and believed in righting the
+wrongs of the people. Eugene thought he did, but he was so keenly
+interested in life as a spectacle that he hadn't as much time to
+sympathize as he thought he ought to have. She took him to see
+exhibitions, and to meet people, being rather proud of a boy with so
+much talent; and she was pleased to find that he was so generally
+acceptable. People, particularly writers, poets, musicians--beginners in
+every field, were inclined to remember him. He was an easy talker,
+witty, quick to make himself at home and perfectly natural. He tried to
+be accurate in his judgments of things, and fair, but he was young and
+subject to strong prejudices. He appreciated her friendship, and did not
+seek to make their relationship more intimate. He knew that only a
+sincere proposal of marriage could have won her, and he did not care
+enough for her for that. He felt himself bound to Angela and, curiously,
+he felt Miriam's age as a bar between them. He admired her tremendously
+and was learning in part through her what his ideal ought to be, but he
+was not drawn sufficiently to want to make love to her.
+
+But in Christina Channing, whom he met shortly afterward, he found a
+woman of a more sensuous and lovable type, though hardly less artistic.
+Christina Channing was a singer by profession, living also in New York
+with her mother, but not, as Miss Finch had been, dominated by her so
+thoroughly, although she was still at the age when her mother could and
+did have considerable influence with her. She was twenty-seven years of
+age and so far, had not yet attained the eminence which subsequently was
+hers, though she was full of that buoyant self-confidence which makes
+for eventual triumph. So far she had studied ardently under various
+teachers, had had several love affairs, none serious enough to win her
+away from her chosen profession, and had gone through the various
+experiences of those who begin ignorantly to do something in art and
+eventually reach experience and understanding of how the world is
+organized and what they will have to do to succeed.
+
+Although Miss Channing's artistic sense did not rise to that definite
+artistic expression in her material surroundings which characterized
+Miss Finch's studio atmosphere, it went much farther in its expression
+of her joy in life. Her voice, a rich contralto, deep, full, colorful,
+had a note of pathos and poignancy which gave a touch of emotion to her
+gayest songs. She could play well enough to accompany herself with
+delicacy and emphasis. She was at present one of the soloists with the
+New York Symphony Orchestra, with the privilege of accepting occasional
+outside engagements. The following Fall she was preparing to make a
+final dash to Germany to see if she could not get an engagement with a
+notable court opera company and so pave the way for a New York success.
+She was already quite well known in musical circles as a promising
+operatic candidate and her eventual arrival would be not so much a
+question of talent as of luck.
+
+While these two women fascinated Eugene for the time being, his feeling
+for Angela continued unchanged; for though she suffered in an
+intellectual or artistic comparison, he felt that she was richer
+emotionally. There was a poignancy in her love letters, an intensity
+about her personal feelings when in his presence which moved him in
+spite of himself--an ache went with her which brought a memory of the
+tales of Sappho and Marguerite Gautier. It occurred to him now that if
+he flung her aside it might go seriously with her. He did not actually
+think of doing anything of the sort, but he was realizing that there was
+a difference between her and intellectual women like Miriam Finch.
+Besides that, there was a whole constellation of society women swimming
+into his ken--women whom he only knew, as yet, through the newspapers
+and the smart weeklies like Town Topics and Vogue, who were presenting
+still a third order of perfection. Vaguely he was beginning to see that
+the world was immense and subtle, and that there were many things to
+learn about women that he had never dreamed of.
+
+Christina Channing was a rival of Angela's in one sense, that of bodily
+beauty. She had a tall perfectly rounded form, a lovely oval face, a nut
+brown complexion with the rosy glow of health showing in cheeks and
+lips, and a mass of blue black hair. Her great brown eyes were lustrous
+and sympathetic.
+
+Eugene met her through the good offices of Shotmeyer, who had been given
+by some common friend in Boston a letter of introduction to her. He had
+spoken of Eugene as being a very brilliant young artist and his friend,
+and remarked that he would like to bring him up some evening to hear her
+sing. Miss Channing acquiesced, for she had seen some of his drawings
+and was struck by the poetic note in them. Shotmeyer, vain of his
+notable acquaintances--who in fact tolerated him for his amusing
+gossip--described Miss Channing's voice to Eugene and asked him if he
+did not want to call on her some evening. "Delighted," said Eugene.
+
+The appointment was made and together they went to Miss Channing's suite
+in a superior Nineteenth Street boarding house. Miss Channing received
+them, arrayed in a smooth, close fitting dress of black velvet, touched
+with red. Eugene was reminded of the first costume in which he had seen
+Ruby. He was dazzled. As for her, as she told him afterward, she was
+conscious of a peculiar illogical perturbation.
+
+"When I put on my ribbon that night," she told him, "I was going to put
+on a dark blue silk one I had just bought and then I thought 'No, he'll
+like me better in a red one.' Isn't that curious? I just felt as though
+you were going to like me--as though we might know each other better.
+That young man--what's his name--described you so accurately." It was
+months afterward when she confessed that.
+
+When Eugene entered it was with the grand air he had acquired since his
+life had begun to broaden in the East. He took his relationship with
+talent, particularly female talent, seriously. He stood up very
+straight, walked with a noticeable stride, drove an examining glance
+into the very soul of the person he was looking at. He was quick to get
+impressions, especially of talent. He could feel ability in another.
+When he looked at Miss Channing he felt it like a strong wave--the
+vibrating wave of an intense consciousness.
+
+She greeted him, extending a soft white hand. They spoke of how they had
+heard of each other. Eugene somehow made her feel his enthusiasm for her
+art. "Music is the finer thing," he said, when she spoke of his own
+gift.
+
+Christina's dark brown eyes swept him from head to foot. He was like his
+pictures, she thought--and as good to look at.
+
+He was introduced to her mother. They sat down, talking, and presently
+Miss Channing sang--"Che faro senza Euridice." Eugene felt as if she
+were singing to him. Her cheeks were flushed and her lips red.
+
+Her mother remarked after she had finished, "You're in splendid voice
+this evening, Christina."
+
+"I feel particularly fit," she replied.
+
+"A wonderful voice--it's like a big red poppy or a great yellow orchid!"
+cried Eugene.
+
+Christina thrilled. The description caught her fancy. It seemed true.
+She felt something of that in the sounds to which she gave utterance.
+
+"Please sing 'Who is Sylvia,'" he begged a little later. She complied
+gladly.
+
+"That was written for you," he said softly as she ceased, for he had
+come close to the piano. "You image Sylvia for me." Her cheeks colored
+warmly.
+
+"Thanks," she nodded, and her eyes spoke too. She welcomed his daring
+and she was glad to let him know it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+The chief trouble with his present situation, and with the entrance of
+these two women into his life, and it had begun to be a serious one to
+him, was that he was not making money. He had been able to earn about
+$1200 the first year; the second he made a little over two thousand, and
+this third year he was possibly doing a little better. But in view of
+what he saw around him and what he now knew of life, it was nothing. New
+York presented a spectacle of material display such as he had never
+known existed. The carriages on Fifth Avenue, the dinners at the great
+hotels, the constant talk of society functions in the newspapers, made
+his brain dizzy. He was inclined to idle about the streets, to watch the
+handsomely dressed crowds, to consider the evidences of show and
+refinement everywhere, and he came to the conclusion that he was not
+living at all, but existing. Art as he had first dreamed of it, art had
+seemed not only a road to distinction but also to affluence. Now, as he
+studied those about him, he found that it was not so. Artists were never
+tremendously rich, he learned. He remembered reading in Balzac's story
+"Cousin Betty," of a certain artist of great distinction who had been
+allowed condescendingly by one of the rich families of Paris to marry a
+daughter, but it was considered a great come down for her. He had hardly
+been able to credit the idea at the time, so exalted was his notion of
+the artist. But now he was beginning to see that it represented the
+world's treatment of artists. There were in America a few who were very
+popular--meretriciously so he thought in certain cases--who were said to
+be earning from ten to fifteen thousand a year. How high would that
+place them, he asked himself, in that world of real luxury which was
+made up of the so-called _four hundred_--the people of immense wealth
+and social position. He had read in the papers that it took from fifteen
+to twenty-five thousand dollars a year to clothe a debutante. It was
+nothing uncommon, he heard, for a man to spend from fifteen to twenty
+dollars on his dinner at the restaurant. The prices he heard that
+tailors demanded--that dressmakers commanded, the display of jewels and
+expensive garments at the opera, made the poor little income of an
+artist look like nothing at all. Miss Finch was constantly telling him
+of the show and swagger she met with in her circle of acquaintances, for
+her tact and adaptability had gained her the friendship of a number of
+society people. Miss Channing, when he came to know her better, made
+constant references to things she came in contact with--great singers or
+violinists paid $1000 a night, or the tremendous salaries commanded by
+the successful opera stars. He began, as he looked at his own meagre
+little income, to feel shabby again, and run down, much as he had during
+those first days in Chicago. Why, art, outside the fame, was nothing. It
+did not make for real living. It made for a kind of mental blooming,
+which everybody recognized, but you could be a poor, sick, hungry,
+shabby genius--you actually could. Look at Verlaine, who had recently
+died in Paris.
+
+A part of this feeling was due to the opening of a golden age of luxury
+in New York, and the effect the reiterated sight of it was having on
+Eugene. Huge fortunes had been amassed in the preceding fifty years and
+now there were thousands of residents in the great new city who were
+worth anything from one to fifty and in some instances a hundred million
+dollars. The metropolitan area, particularly Manhattan Island above
+Fifty-ninth Street, was growing like a weed. Great hotels were being
+erected in various parts of the so-called "white light" district. There
+was beginning, just then, the first organized attempt of capital to
+supply a new need--the modern sumptuous, eight, ten and twelve story
+apartment house, which was to house the world of newly rich middle class
+folk who were pouring into New York from every direction. Money was
+being made in the West, the South and the North, and as soon as those
+who were making it had sufficient to permit them to live in luxury for
+the rest of their days they were moving East, occupying these expensive
+apartments, crowding the great hotels, patronizing the sumptuous
+restaurants, giving the city its air of spendthrift luxury. All the
+things which catered to showy material living were beginning to flourish
+tremendously, art and curio shops, rug shops, decorative companies
+dealing with the old and the new in hangings, furniture, objects of art;
+dealers in paintings, jewelry stores, china and glassware
+houses--anything and everything which goes to make life comfortable and
+brilliant. Eugene, as he strolled about the city, saw this, felt the
+change, realized that the drift was toward greater population, greater
+luxury, greater beauty. His mind was full of the necessity of living
+_now_. He was young _now_; he was vigorous _now_; he was keen _now_; in
+a few years he might not be--seventy years was the allotted span and
+twenty-five of his had already gone. How would it be if he never came
+into this luxury, was never allowed to enter society, was never
+permitted to live as wealth was now living! The thought hurt him. He
+felt an eager desire to tear wealth and fame from the bosom of the
+world. Life must give him his share. If it did not he would curse it to
+his dying day. So he felt when he was approaching twenty-six.
+
+The effect of Christina Channing's friendship for him was particularly
+to emphasize this. She was not so much older than he, was possessed of
+very much the same temperament, the same hopes and aspirations, and she
+discerned almost as clearly as he did the current of events. New York
+was to witness a golden age of luxury. It was already passing into it.
+Those who rose to distinction in any field, particularly music or the
+stage, were likely to share in a most notable spectacle of luxury.
+Christina hoped to. She was sure she would. After a few conversations
+with Eugene she was inclined to feel that he would. He was so brilliant,
+so incisive.
+
+"You have such a way with you," she said the second time he came. "You
+are so commanding. You make me think you can do almost anything you want
+to."
+
+"Oh, no," he deprecated. "Not as bad as that. I have just as much
+trouble as anyone getting what I want."
+
+"Oh, but you will though. You have ideas."
+
+It did not take these two long to reach an understanding. They confided
+to each other their individual histories, with reservations, of course,
+at first. Christina told him of her musical history, beginning at
+Hagerstown, Maryland, and he went back to his earliest days in
+Alexandria. They discussed the differences in parental control to which
+they had been subject. He learned of her father's business, which was
+that of oyster farming, and confessed on his part to being the son of a
+sewing machine agent. They talked of small town influences, early
+illusions, the different things they had tried to do. She had sung in
+the local Methodist church, had once thought she would like to be a
+milliner, had fallen in the hands of a teacher who tried to get her to
+marry him and she had been on the verge of consenting. Something
+happened--she went away for the summer, or something of that sort, and
+changed her mind.
+
+After an evening at the theatre with her, a late supper one night and a
+third call, to spend a quiet evening in her room, he took her by the
+hand. She was standing by the piano and he was looking at her cheeks,
+her large inquiring eyes, her smooth rounded neck and chin.
+
+"You like me," he said suddenly a propos of nothing save the mutual
+attraction that was always running strong between them.
+
+Without hesitation she nodded her head, though the bright blood mounted
+to her neck and cheeks.
+
+"You are so lovely to me," he went on, "that words are of no value. I
+can paint you. Or you can sing me what you are, but mere words won't
+show it. I have been in love before, but never with anyone like you."
+
+"Are you in love?" she asked naively.
+
+"What is this?" he asked and slipped his arms about her, drawing her
+close.
+
+She turned her head away, leaving her rosy cheek near his lips. He
+kissed that, then her mouth and her neck. He held her chin and looked
+into her eyes.
+
+"Be careful," she said, "mamma may come in."
+
+"Hang mamma!" he laughed.
+
+"She'll hang you if she sees you. Mamma would never suspect me of
+anything like this."
+
+"That shows how little mamma knows of her Christina," he answered.
+
+"She knows enough at that," she confessed gaily. "Oh, if we were only up
+in the mountains now," she added.
+
+"What mountains," he inquired curiously.
+
+"The Blue Ridge. We have a bungalow up at Florizel. You must come up
+when we go there next summer."
+
+"Will mamma be there?" he asked.
+
+"And papa," she laughed.
+
+"And I suppose Cousin Annie."
+
+"No, brother George will be."
+
+"Nix for the bungalow," he replied, using a slang word that had become
+immensely popular.
+
+"Oh, but I know all the country round there. There are some lovely walks
+and drives." She said this archly, naively, suggestively, her bright
+face lit with an intelligence that seemed perfection.
+
+"Well--such being the case!" he smiled, "and meanwhile--"
+
+"Oh, meanwhile you just have to wait. You see how things are." She
+nodded her head towards an inside room where Mrs. Channing was lying
+down with a slight headache. "Mamma doesn't leave me very often."
+
+Eugene did not know exactly how to take Christina. He had never
+encountered this attitude before. Her directness, in connection with so
+much talent, such real ability, rather took him by surprise. He did not
+expect it--did not think she would confess affection for him; did not
+know just what she meant by speaking in the way she did of the bungalow
+and Florizel. He was flattered, raised in his own self-esteem. If such a
+beautiful, talented creature as this could confess her love for him,
+what a personage he must be. And she was thinking of freer
+conditions--just what?
+
+He did not want to press the matter too closely then and she was not
+anxious to have him do so--she preferred to be enigmatic. But there was
+a light of affection and admiration in her eye which made him very proud
+and happy with things just as they were.
+
+As she said, there was little chance for love-making under conditions
+then existing. Her mother was with her most of the time. Christina
+invited Eugene to come and hear her sing at the Philharmonic Concerts;
+so once in a great ball-room at the Waldorf-Astoria and again in the
+imposing auditorium of Carnegie Hall and a third time in the splendid
+auditorium of the Arion Society, he had the pleasure of seeing her walk
+briskly to the footlights, the great orchestra waiting, the audience
+expectant, herself arch, assured--almost defiant, he thought, and so
+beautiful. When the great house thundered its applause he was basking in
+one delicious memory of her.
+
+"Last night she had her arms about my neck. Tonight when I call and we
+are alone she will kiss me. That beautiful, distinguished creature
+standing there bowing and smiling loves me and no one else. If I were to
+ask her she would marry me--if I were in a position and had the means."
+
+"If I were in a position--" that thought cut him, for he knew that he
+was not. He could not marry her. In reality she would not have him
+knowing how little he made--or would she? He wondered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+Towards the end of spring Eugene concluded he would rather go up in the
+mountains near Christina's bungalow this summer, than back to see
+Angela. The memory of that precious creature was, under the stress and
+excitement of metropolitan life, becoming a little tarnished. His
+recollections of her were as delightful as ever, as redolent of beauty,
+but he was beginning to wonder. The smart crowd in New York was composed
+of a different type. Angela was sweet and lovely, but would she fit in?
+
+Meanwhile Miriam Finch with her subtle eclecticism continued her
+education of Eugene. She was as good as a school. He would sit and
+listen to her descriptions of plays, her appreciation of books, her
+summing up of current philosophies, and he would almost feel himself
+growing. She knew so many people, could tell him where to go to see just
+such and such an important thing. All the startling personalities, the
+worth while preachers, the new actors, somehow she knew all about them.
+
+"Now, Eugene," she would exclaim on seeing him, "you positively must go
+and see Haydon Boyd in 'The Signet,'" or--"see Elmina Deming in her new
+dances," or--"look at the pictures of Winslow Homer that are being shown
+at Knoedler's."
+
+She would explain with exactness why she wanted him to see them, what
+she thought they would do for him. She frankly confessed to him that she
+considered him a genius and always insisted on knowing what new thing he
+was doing. When any work of his appeared and she liked it she was swift
+to tell him. He almost felt as if he owned her room and herself, as if
+all that she was--her ideas, her friends, her experiences--belonged to
+him. He could go and draw on them by sitting at her feet or going with
+her somewhere. When spring came she liked to walk with him, to listen to
+his comments on nature and life.
+
+"That's splendid!" she would exclaim. "Now, why don't you write that?"
+or "why don't you paint that?"
+
+He showed her some of his poems once and she had made copies of them and
+pasted them in a book of what she called exceptional things. So he was
+coddled by her.
+
+In another way Christina was equally nice. She was fond of telling
+Eugene how much she thought of him, how nice she thought he was. "You're
+so big and smarty," she said to him once, affectionately, pinioning his
+arms and looking into his eyes. "I like the way you part your hair, too!
+You're kind o' like an artist ought to be!"
+
+"That's the way to spoil me," he replied. "Let me tell you how nice you
+are. Want to know how nice you are?"
+
+"Uh-uh," she smiled, shaking her head to mean "no."
+
+"Wait till we get to the mountains. I'll tell you." He sealed her lips
+with his, holding her until her breath was almost gone.
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed; "you're terrible. You're like steel."
+
+"And you're like a big red rose. Kiss me!"
+
+From Christina he learned all about the musical world and musical
+personalities. He gained an insight into the different forms of music,
+operatic, symphonic, instrumental. He learned of the different forms of
+composition, the terminology, the mystery of the vocal cords, the
+methods of training. He learned of the jealousies within the profession,
+and what the best musical authorities thought of such and such
+composers, or singers. He learned how difficult it was to gain a place
+in the operatic world, how bitterly singers fought each other, how quick
+the public was to desert a fading star. Christina took it all so
+unconcernedly that he almost loved her for her courage. She was so wise
+and so good natured.
+
+"You have to give up a lot of things to be a good artist," she said to
+Eugene one day. "You can't have the ordinary life, and art too."
+
+"Just what do you mean, Chrissy?" he asked, petting her hand, for they
+were alone together.
+
+"Why, you can't get married very well and have children, and you can't
+do much in a social way. Oh, I know they do get married, but sometimes I
+think it is a mistake. Most of the singers I know don't do so very well
+tied down by marriage."
+
+"Don't you intend to get married?" asked Eugene curiously.
+
+"I don't know," she replied, realizing what he was driving at. "I'd want
+to think about that. A woman artist is in a d---- of a position anyway,"
+using the letter d only to indicate the word "devil." "She has so many
+things to think about."
+
+"For instance?"
+
+"Oh, what people think and her family think, and I don't know what all.
+They ought to get a new sex for artists--like they have for worker
+bees."
+
+Eugene smiled. He knew what she was driving at. But he did not know how
+long she had been debating the problem of her virginity as conflicting
+with her love of distinction in art. She was nearly sure she did not
+want to complicate her art life with marriage. She was almost positive
+that success on the operatic stage--particularly the great opportunity
+for the beginner abroad--was complicated with some liaison. Some
+escaped, but it was not many. She was wondering in her own mind whether
+she owed it to current morality to remain absolutely pure. It was
+assumed generally that girls should remain virtuous and marry, but this
+did not necessarily apply to her--should it apply to the artistic
+temperament? Her mother and her family troubled her. She was virtuous,
+but youth and desire had given her some bitter moments. And here was
+Eugene to emphasize it.
+
+"It is a difficult problem," he said sympathetically, wondering what she
+would eventually do. He felt keenly that her attitude in regard to
+marriage affected his relationship to her. Was she wedded to her art at
+the expense of love?
+
+"It's a big problem," she said and went to the piano to sing.
+
+He half suspected for a little while after this that she might be
+contemplating some radical step--what, he did not care to say to
+himself, but he was intensely interested in her problem. This peculiar
+freedom of thought astonished him--broadened his horizon. He wondered
+what his sister Myrtle would think of a girl discussing marriage in this
+way--the to be or not to be of it--what Sylvia? He wondered if many
+girls did that. Most of the women he had known seemed to think more
+logically along these lines than he did. He remembered asking Ruby once
+whether she didn't think illicit love was wrong and hearing her reply,
+"No. Some people thought it was wrong, but that didn't make it so to
+her." Here was another girl with another theory.
+
+They talked more of love, and he wondered why she wanted him to come up
+to Florizel in the summer. She could not be thinking--no, she was too
+conservative. He began to suspect, though, that she would not marry
+him--would not marry anyone at present. She merely wanted to be loved
+for awhile, no doubt.
+
+May came and with it the end of Christina's concert work and voice study
+so far as New York was concerned. She had been in and out of the city
+all the winter--to Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Chicago, St. Paul and now after
+a winter's hard work retired to Hagerstown with her mother for a few
+weeks prior to leaving for Florizel.
+
+"You ought to come down here," she wrote to Eugene early in June. "There
+is a sickle moon that shines in my garden and the roses are in bloom.
+Oh, the odors are so sweet, and the dew! Some of our windows open out
+level with the grass and I sing! I sing!! I sing!!!"
+
+He had a notion to run down but restrained himself, for she told him
+that they were leaving in two weeks for the mountains. He had a set of
+drawings to complete for a magazine for which they were in a hurry. So
+he decided to wait till that was done.
+
+In late June he went up to the Blue Ridge, in Southern Pennsylvania,
+where Florizel was situated. He thought at first he would be invited to
+stay at the Channing bungalow, but Christina warned him that it would be
+safer and better for him to stay at one of the adjoining hotels. There
+were several on the slope of adjacent hills at prices ranging from five
+to ten dollars a day. Though this was high for Eugene he decided to go.
+He wanted to be with this marvellous creature--to see just what she did
+mean by wishing they were in the mountains together.
+
+He had saved some eight hundred dollars, which was in a savings bank and
+he withdrew three hundred for his little outing. He took Christina a
+very handsomely bound copy of Villon, of whom she was fond, and several
+volumes of new verse. Most of these, chosen according to his most recent
+mood, were sad in their poetic texture; they all preached the
+nothingness of life, its sadness, albeit the perfection of its beauty.
+
+At this time Eugene had quite reached the conclusion that there was no
+hereafter--there was nothing save blind, dark force moving
+aimlessly--where formerly he had believed vaguely in a heaven and had
+speculated as to a possible hell. His reading had led him through some
+main roads and some odd by-paths of logic and philosophy. He was an
+omnivorous reader now and a fairly logical thinker. He had already
+tackled Spencer's "First Principles," which had literally torn him up by
+the roots and set him adrift and from that had gone back to Marcus
+Aurelius, Epictetus, Spinoza and Schopenhauer--men who ripped out all
+his private theories and made him wonder what life really was. He had
+walked the streets for a long time after reading some of these things,
+speculating on the play of forces, the decay of matter, the fact that
+thought-forms had no more stability than cloud-forms. Philosophies came
+and went, governments came and went, races arose and disappeared. He
+walked into the great natural history museum of New York once to
+discover enormous skeletons of prehistoric animals--things said to have
+lived two, three, five millions of years before his day and he marvelled
+at the forces which produced them, the indifference, apparently, with
+which they had been allowed to die. Nature seemed lavish of its types
+and utterly indifferent to the persistence of anything. He came to the
+conclusion that he was nothing, a mere shell, a sound, a leaf which had
+no general significance, and for the time being it almost broke his
+heart. It tended to smash his egotism, to tear away his intellectual
+pride. He wandered about dazed, hurt, moody, like a lost child. But he
+was thinking persistently.
+
+Then came Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lubbock--a whole string of British
+thinkers who fortified the original conclusions of the others, but
+showed him a beauty, a formality, a lavishness of form and idea in
+nature's methods which fairly transfixed him. He was still
+reading--poets, naturalists, essayists, but he was still gloomy. Life
+was nothing save dark forces moving aimlessly.
+
+The manner in which he applied this thinking to his life was
+characteristic and individual. To think that beauty should blossom for a
+little while and disappear for ever seemed sad. To think that his life
+should endure but for seventy years and then be no more was terrible. He
+and Angela were chance acquaintances--chemical affinities--never to meet
+again in all time. He and Christina, he and Ruby--he and anyone--a few
+bright hours were all they could have together, and then would come the
+great silence, dissolution, and he would never be anymore. It hurt him
+to think of this, but it made him all the more eager to live, to be
+loved while he was here. If he could only have a lovely girl's arms to
+shut him in safely always!
+
+It was while he was in this mood that he reached Florizel after a long
+night's ride, and Christina who was a good deal of a philosopher and
+thinker herself at times was quick to notice it. She was waiting at the
+depot with a dainty little trap of her own to take him for a drive.
+
+The trap rolled out along the soft, yellow, dusty roads. The mountain
+dew was still in the earth though and the dust was heavy with damp and
+not flying. Green branches of trees hung low over them, charming vistas
+came into view at every turn. Eugene kissed her, for there was no one to
+see, twisting her head to kiss her lips at leisure.
+
+"It's a blessed thing this horse is tame or we'd be in for some
+accident. What makes you so moody?" she said.
+
+"I'm not moody--or am I? I've been thinking a lot of things of late--of
+you principally."
+
+"Do I make you sad?"
+
+"From one point of view, yes."
+
+"And what is that, sir?" she asked with an assumption of severity.
+
+"You are so beautiful, so wonderful, and life is so short."
+
+"You have only fifty years to love me in," she laughed, calculating his
+age. "Oh, Eugene, what a boy you are!--Wait a minute," she added after a
+pause, drawing the horse to a stop under some trees. "Hold these," she
+said, offering him the reins. He took them and she put her arms about
+his neck. "Now, you silly," she exclaimed, "I love you, love you, love
+you! There was never anyone quite like you. Will that help you?" she
+smiled into his eyes.
+
+"Yes," he answered, "but it isn't enough. Seventy years isn't enough.
+Eternity isn't enough of life as it is now."
+
+"As it is now," she echoed and then took the reins, for she felt what he
+felt, the need of persistent youth and persistent beauty to keep it as
+it should be, and these things would not stay.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+The days spent in the mountains were seventeen exactly, and during that
+time with Christina, Eugene reached a curious exaltation of spirit
+different from anything he had experienced before. In the first place he
+had never known a girl like Christina, so beautiful, so perfect
+physically, so incisive mentally, so full of a fine artistic perception.
+She was so quick to perceive exactly what he meant. She was so
+suggestive to him in her own thoughts and feelings. The mysteries of
+life employed her mind quite as fully as they did his. She thought much
+of the subtlety of the human body, of its mysterious emotions, of its
+conscious and subconscious activities and relationships. The passions,
+the desires, the necessities of life, were as a fine tapestry for her
+mind to contemplate. She had no time to sit down and formulate her
+thoughts; she did not want to write--but she worked out through her
+emotions and through her singing the beautiful and pathetic things she
+felt. And she could talk in a fine, poetic melancholy vein on occasion,
+though there was so much courage and strength in her young blood that
+she was not afraid of any phase of life or what nature might do with the
+little substance which she called herself, when it should dissolve.
+"Time and change happeneth to us all," she would quote to Eugene and he
+would gravely nod his head.
+
+The hotel where he stopped was more pretentious than any he had been
+previously acquainted with. He had never had so much money in his life
+before, nor had he ever felt called upon to spend it lavishly. The room
+he took was--because of what Christina might think--one of the best. He
+took Christina's suggestion and invited her, her mother and her brother
+to dinner on several occasions; the remainder of the family had not
+arrived yet. In return he was invited to breakfast, to lunch and dinner
+at the bungalow.
+
+Christina showed on his arrival that she had planned to be with him
+alone as much as possible, for she suggested that they make expeditions
+to High Hill, to Bold Face, and The Chimney--three surrounding
+mountains. She knew of good hotels at seven, ten, fifteen miles distance
+to which they could go by train, or else they drive and return by
+moonlight. She had selected two or three secluded spots in thickets and
+groves where the trees gave way to little open spaces of grass, and in
+these they would string a hammock, scatter their books of verse about
+and sit down to enjoy the delights of talk and love-making.
+
+Under the influence of this companionship, under cloudless skies and in
+the heart of the June weather, Christina finally yielded to an
+arrangement which brought Eugene into a relationship which he had never
+dreamed possible with her. They had progressed by degrees through all
+the subtleties of courtship. They had come to discuss the nature of
+passion and emotion, and had swept aside as negligible the conviction
+that there was any inherent evil in the most intimate relationship. At
+last Christina said frankly:
+
+"I don't want to be married. It isn't for me--not until I've thoroughly
+succeeded, anyhow. I'd rather wait--If I could just have you and
+singleness too."
+
+"Why do you want to yield yourself to me?" Eugene asked curiously.
+
+"I don't know that I exactly want to. I could do with just your love--if
+you were satisfied. It's you that I want to make happy. I want to give
+you anything you want."
+
+"Curious girl," observed her lover, smoothing her high forehead with his
+hand. "I don't understand you, Christina. I don't know how your mind
+works. Why should you? You have everything to lose if worst came to
+worst."
+
+"Oh, no," she smiled. "I'd marry you then."
+
+"But to do this out of hand, because you love me, because you want me to
+be happy!" he paused.
+
+"I don't understand it either, honey boy," she offered, "I just do."
+
+"But why, if you are willing to do this, you wouldn't prefer to live
+with me, is what I don't understand."
+
+She took his face between her hands. "I think I understand you better
+than you do yourself. I don't think you'd be happy married. You might
+not always love me. I might not always love you. You might come to
+regret. If we could be happy now you might reach the point where you
+wouldn't care any more. Then you see I wouldn't be remorseful thinking
+that we had never known happiness."
+
+"What logic!" he exclaimed. "Do you mean to say you wouldn't care any
+more?"
+
+"Oh, I'd care, but not in the same way. Don't you see, Eugene, I would
+have the satisfaction of knowing that even if we did separate you had
+had the best of me."
+
+It seemed astounding to Eugene that she should talk in this way--reason
+this way. What a curious, sacrificial, fatalistic turn of mind. Could a
+young, beautiful, talented girl really be like this? Would anybody on
+earth really believe it if they knew? He looked at her and shook his
+head sorrowfully.
+
+"To think that the quintessence of life should not stay with us always."
+He sighed.
+
+"No, honey boy," she replied, "you want too much. You think you want it
+to stay, but you don't. You want it to go. You wouldn't be satisfied to
+live with me always, I know it. Take what the gods provide and have no
+regrets. Refuse to think; you can, you know."
+
+Eugene gathered her up in his arms. He kissed her over and over,
+forgetting in her embrace all the loves he had ever known. She yielded
+herself to him gladly, joyously, telling him over and over that it made
+her happy.
+
+"If you could only see how nice you are to me you wouldn't wonder," she
+explained.
+
+He concluded she was the most wonderful being he had ever known. No
+woman had ever revealed herself to him so unselfishly in love. No woman
+he had ever known appeared to have the courage and the insight to go
+thus simply and directly to what she desired. To hear an artist of her
+power, a girl of her beauty, discussing calmly whether she should
+sacrifice her virtue to love; whether marriage in the customary form was
+good for her art; whether she should take him now when they were young
+or bow to the conventions and let youth pass, was enough to shock his
+still trammelled soul. For after all, and despite his desire for
+personal freedom, his intellectual doubts and mental exceptions, he
+still had a profound reverence for a home such as that maintained by
+Jotham Blue and his wife, and for its results in the form of normal,
+healthy, dutiful children. Nature had no doubt attained to this standard
+through a long series of difficulties and experiments, and she would not
+readily relinquish it. Was it really necessary to abandon it entirely?
+Did he want to see a world in which a woman would take him for a little
+while as Christina was doing now, and then leave him? His experience
+here was making him think, throwing his theories and ideas up in the
+air, making a mess of all the notions he had ever formed about things.
+He racked his brain over the intricacies of sex and life, sitting on the
+great verandas of the hotel and wondering over and over just what the
+answer was, and why he could not like other men be faithful to one woman
+and be happy. He wondered whether this was really so, and whether he
+could not. It seemed to him then that he might. He knew that he did not
+understand himself very clearly; that he had no grasp on himself at all
+as yet--his tendencies, his possibilities.
+
+These days, under such halcyon conditions, made a profound impression on
+him. He was struck with the perfection life could reach at odd moments.
+These great quiet hills, so uniform in their roundness, so green, so
+peaceful, rested his soul. He and Christina climbed, one day, two
+thousand feet to a ledge which jutted out over a valley and commanded
+what seemed to him the kingdoms and the powers of the earth--vast
+stretches of green land and subdivided fields, little cottage
+settlements and towns, great hills that stood up like friendly brothers
+to this one in the distance.
+
+"See that man down in that yard," said Christina, pointing to a speck of
+a being chopping wood in a front space serving as a garden to a country
+cottage fully a mile distant.
+
+"Where?" asked Eugene.
+
+"See where that red barn is, just this side of that clump of
+trees?--don't you see? there, where the cows are in that field."
+
+"I don't see any cows."
+
+"Oh, Eugene, what's the matter with your eyes?"
+
+"Oh, now I see," he replied, squeezing her fingers. "He looks like a
+cockroach, doesn't he?"
+
+"Yes," she laughed.
+
+"How wide the earth is and how small we are. Now think of that speck
+with all his hopes and ambitions--all the machinery of his brain and
+nerves and tell me whether any God can care. How can He, Christina?"
+
+"He can't care for any one particular speck much, sweet. He might care
+for the idea of man or a race of men as a whole. Still, I'm not sure,
+honey. All I know is that I'm happy now."
+
+"And I," he echoed.
+
+Still they dug at this problem, the question of the origin of life--its
+why. The tremendous and wearisome age of the earth; the veritable storms
+of birth and death that seemed to have raged at different periods, held
+them in discussion.
+
+"We can't solve it, Eugenio mio," she laughed. "We might as well go
+home. Poor, dear mamma will be wondering where her Christina is. You
+know I think she suspects that I'm falling in love with you. She doesn't
+care how many men fall in love with me, but if I show the least sign of
+a strong preference she begins to worry."
+
+"Have there been many preferences?" he inquired.
+
+"No, but don't ask. What difference does it make? Oh, Eugene, what
+difference does it make? I love you now."
+
+"I don't know what difference it makes," he replied, "only there is an
+ache that goes with the thought of previous experience. I can't tell you
+why it is. It just is."
+
+She looked thoughtfully away.
+
+"Anyhow, no man ever was to me before what you have been. Isn't that
+enough? Doesn't that speak?"
+
+"Yes, yes, sweet, it does. Oh, yes it does. Forgive me. I won't grieve
+any more."
+
+"Don't, please," she said, "you hurt me as much as you hurt yourself."
+
+There were evenings when he sat on some one of the great verandas and
+watched them trim and string the interspaces between the columns with
+soft, glowing, Chinese lanterns, preparatory to the evening's dancing.
+He loved to see the girls and men of the summer colony arrive, the
+former treading the soft grass in filmy white gowns and white slippers,
+the latter in white ducks and flannels, gaily chatting as they came.
+Christina would come to these affairs with her mother and brother,
+beautifully clad in white linen or lawns and laces, and he would be
+beside himself with chagrin that he had not practised dancing to the
+perfection of the art. He could dance now, but not like her brother or
+scores of men he saw upon the waxen floor. It hurt him. At times he
+would sit all alone after his splendid evenings with his love, dreaming
+of the beauty of it all. The stars would be as a great wealth of diamond
+seed flung from the lavish hand of an aimless sower. The hills would
+loom dark and tall. There was peace and quiet everywhere.
+
+"Why may not life be always like this?" he would ask, and then he would
+answer himself out of his philosophy that it would become deadly after
+awhile, as does all unchanging beauty. The call of the soul is for
+motion, not peace. Peace after activity for a little while, then
+activity again. So must it be. He understood that.
+
+Just before he left for New York, Christina said to him:
+
+"Now, when you see me again I will be Miss Channing of New York. You
+will be Mr. Witla. We will almost forget that we were ever here
+together. We will scarcely believe that we have seen what we have seen
+and done what we have done."
+
+"But, Christina, you talk as though everything were over. It isn't, is
+it?"
+
+"We can't do anything like this in New York," she sighed. "I haven't
+time and you must work."
+
+There was a shade of finality in her tone.
+
+"Oh, Christina, don't talk so. I can't think that way. Please don't."
+
+"I won't," she said. "We'll see. Wait till I get back."
+
+He kissed her a dozen farewells and at the door held her close once
+more.
+
+"Will you forsake me?" he asked.
+
+"No, you will forsake me. But remember, dear! Don't you see? You've had
+all. Let me be your wood nymph. The rest is commonplace."
+
+He went back to his hotel with an ache in his heart, for he knew they
+had gone through all they ever would. She had had her summer with him.
+She had given him of herself fully. She wanted to be free to work now.
+He could not understand it, but he knew it to be so.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+It is a rather dreary thing to come back into the hot city in the summer
+after a period of beauty in the mountains. The quiet of the hills was in
+Eugene's mind, the glisten and babble of mountain streams, the soar and
+poise of hawks and buzzards and eagles sailing the crystal blue. He felt
+lonely and sick for awhile, out of touch with work and with practical
+life generally. There were little souvenirs of his recent happiness in
+the shape of letters and notes from Christina, but he was full of the
+premonition of the end which had troubled him on leaving.
+
+He must write to Angela. He had not thought of her all the time he had
+been gone. He had been in the habit of writing to her every third or
+fourth day at least; while of late his letters had been less passionate
+they had remained fairly regular. But now this sudden break coming--it
+was fully three weeks--made her think he must be ill, although she had
+begun to feel also that he might be changing. His letters had grown
+steadily less reminiscent of the joys they had experienced together and
+of the happiness they were anticipating, and more inclined to deal with
+the color and character of city life and of what he hoped to achieve.
+Angela was inclined to excuse much of this on the grounds of the special
+effort he was making to achieve distinction and a living income for
+themselves. But it was hard to explain three weeks of silence without
+something quite serious having happened.
+
+Eugene understood this. He tried to explain it on the grounds of
+illness, stating that he was now up and feeling much better. But when
+his explanation came, it had the hollow ring of insincerity. Angela
+wondered what the truth could be. Was he yielding to the temptation of
+that looser life that all artists were supposed to lead? She wondered
+and worried, for time was slipping away and he was setting no definite
+date for their much discussed nuptials.
+
+The trouble with Angela's position was that the delay involved
+practically everything which was important in her life. She was five
+years older than Eugene. She had long since lost that atmosphere of
+youth and buoyancy which is so characteristic of a girl between eighteen
+and twenty-two. Those few short years following, when the body of
+maidenhood blooms like a rose and there is about it the freshness and
+color of all rich, new, lush life, were behind her. Ahead was that
+persistent decline towards something harder, shrewder and less
+beautiful. In the case of some persons the decline is slow and the
+fragrance of youth lingers for years, the artifices of the dressmaker,
+the chemist, and the jeweller being but little needed. In others it is
+fast and no contrivance will stay the ravages of a restless, eager,
+dissatisfied soul. Sometimes art combines with slowness of decay to make
+a woman of almost perennial charm, loveliness of mind matching
+loveliness of body, and taste and tact supplementing both. Angela was
+fortunate in being slow to fade and she had a loveliness of imagination
+and emotion to sustain her; but she had also a restless, anxious
+disposition of mind which, if it had not been stayed by the kindly color
+of her home life and by the fortunate or unfortunate intervention of
+Eugene at a time when she considered her ideal of love to have fairly
+passed out of the range of possibility, would already have set on her
+face the signs of old maidenhood. She was not of the newer order of
+femininity, eager to get out in the world and follow some individual
+line of self-development and interest. Rather was she a home woman
+wanting some one man to look after and love. The wonder and beauty of
+her dream of happiness with Eugene now made the danger of its loss and
+the possible compulsory continuance of a humdrum, underpaid, backwoods
+existence, heart-sickening.
+
+Meanwhile, as the summer passed, Eugene was casually enlarging his
+acquaintance with women. MacHugh and Smite had gone back home for the
+summer, and it was a relief from his loneliness to encounter one day in
+an editorial office, Norma Whitmore, a dark, keen, temperamental and
+moody but brilliant writer and editor who, like others before her, took
+a fancy to Eugene. She was introduced to him by Jans Jansen, Art
+Director of the paper, and after some light banter she offered to show
+him her office.
+
+She led the way to a little room no larger than six by eight where she
+had her desk. Eugene noticed that she was lean and sallow, about his own
+age or older, and brilliant and vivacious. Her hands took his attention
+for they were thin, shapely and artistic. Her eyes burned with a
+peculiar lustre and her loose-fitting clothes were draped artistically
+about her. A conversation sprang up as to his work, which she knew and
+admired, and he was invited to her apartment. He looked at Norma with an
+unconsciously speculative eye.
+
+Christina was out of the city, but the memory of her made it impossible
+for him to write to Angela in his old vein of devotion. Nevertheless he
+still thought of her as charming. He thought that he ought to write more
+regularly. He thought that he ought pretty soon to go back and marry
+her. He was approaching the point where he could support her in a studio
+if they lived economically. But he did not want to exactly.
+
+He had known her now for three years. It was fully a year and a half
+since he had seen her last. In the last year his letters had been less
+and less about themselves and more and more about everything else. He
+was finding the conventional love letters difficult. But he did not
+permit himself to realize just what that meant--to take careful stock of
+his emotions. That would have compelled him to the painful course of
+deciding that he could not marry her, and asking her to be released from
+his promise. He did not want to do that. Instead he parleyed, held by
+pity for her passing youth and her undeniable affection for him, by his
+sense of the unfairness of having taken up so much of her time to the
+exclusion of every other person who might have proposed to her, by
+sorrow for the cruelty of her position in being left to explain to her
+family that she had been jilted. He hated to hurt any person's feelings.
+He did not want to be conscious of the grief of any person who had come
+to suffering through him and he could not make them suffer very well and
+not be conscious. He was too tender hearted. He had pledged himself to
+Angela, giving her a ring, begging her to wait, writing her fulsome
+letters of protest and desire. Now, after three years, to shame her
+before her charming family--old Jotham, her mother, her sisters and
+brothers--it seemed a cruel thing to do, and he did not care to
+contemplate it.
+
+Angela, with her morbid, passionate, apprehensive nature, did not fail
+to see disaster looming in the distance. She loved Eugene passionately
+and the pent-up fires of her nature had been waiting all these years the
+warrant to express their ardor which marriage alone could confer.
+Eugene, by the charm of his manner and person, no less than by the
+sensuous character of some of his moods and the subtleties and
+refinements of his references to the ties of sex, had stirred her to
+anticipate a perfect fruition of her dreams, and she was now eager for
+that fruition almost to the point of being willing to sacrifice
+virginity itself. The remembrance of the one significant scene between
+her and Eugene tormented her. She felt that if his love was to terminate
+in indifference now it would have been better to have yielded then. She
+wished that she had not tried to save herself. Perhaps there would have
+been a child, and he would have been true to her out of a sense of
+sympathy and duty. At least she would have had that crowning glory of
+womanhood, ardent union with her lover, and if worst had come to worst
+she could have died.
+
+She thought of the quiet little lake near her home, its glassy bosom a
+mirror to the sky, and how, in case of failure, she would have looked
+lying on its sandy bottom, her pale hair diffused by some aimless motion
+of the water, her eyes sealed by the end of consciousness, her hands
+folded. Her fancy outran her daring. She would not have done this, but
+she could dream about it, and it made her distress all the more intense.
+
+As time went by and Eugene's ardor did not revive, this problem of her
+love became more harrassing and she began to wonder seriously what she
+could do to win him back to her. He had expressed such a violent desire
+for her on his last visit, had painted his love in such glowing terms
+that she felt convinced he must love her still, though absence and the
+excitements of city life had dimmed the memory of her temporarily. She
+remembered a line in a comic opera which she and Eugene had seen
+together: "Absence is the dark room in which lovers develop negatives"
+and this seemed a case in point. If she could get him back, if he could
+be near her again, his old fever would develop and she would then find
+some way of making him take her, perhaps. It did not occur to her quite
+clearly just how this could be done at this time but some vague notion
+of self-immolation was already stirring vaguely and disturbingly in her
+brain.
+
+The trying and in a way disheartening conditions of her home went some
+way to sustain this notion. Her sister Marietta was surrounded by a
+score of suitors who were as eager for her love as a bee is for the
+honey of a flower, and Angela could see that they were already looking
+upon herself as an elderly chaperon. Her mother and father watched her
+going about her work and grieved because so good a girl should be made
+to suffer for want of a proper understanding. She could not conceal her
+feelings entirely and they could see at times that she was unhappy. She
+could see that they saw it. It was hard to have to explain to her
+sisters and brothers, who occasionally asked after Eugene, that he was
+doing all right, and never be able to say that he was coming for her
+some day soon.
+
+At first Marietta had been envious of her. She thought she would like to
+win Eugene for herself, and only consideration for Angela's age and the
+fact that she had not been so much sought after had deterred her. Now
+that Eugene was obviously neglecting her, or at least delaying beyond
+any reasonable period, she was deeply sorry. Once, before she had grown
+into the age of courtship, she had said to Angela: "I'm going to be nice
+to the men. You're too cold. You'll never get married." And Angela had
+realized that it was not a matter of "too cold," but an innate prejudice
+against most of the types she met. And then the average man did not take
+to her. She could not spur herself to pleasure in their company. It took
+a fire like Eugene's to stir her mightily, and once having known that
+she could brook no other. Marietta realized this too. Now because of
+these three years she had cut herself off from other men, particularly
+the one who had been most attentive to her--faithful Victor Dean. The
+one thing that might save Angela from being completely ignored was a
+spirit of romance which kept her young in looks as in feelings.
+
+With the fear of desertion in her mind Angela began to hint in her
+letters to Eugene that he should come back to see her, to express the
+hope in her letters that their marriage need not--because of any
+difficulty of establishing himself--be postponed much longer. She said
+to him over and over that she could be happy with him in a cottage and
+that she so longed to see him again. Eugene began to ask himself what he
+wanted to do.
+
+The fact that on the passional side Angela appealed to him more than any
+woman he had ever known was a saving point in her favor at this
+juncture. There was a note in her make-up which was stronger, deeper,
+more suggestive of joy to come than anything he had found elsewhere. He
+remembered keenly the wonderful days he had spent with her--the one
+significant night when she begged him to save her against herself. All
+the beauty of the season with which she was surrounded at that time; the
+charm of her family, the odor of flowers and the shade of trees served
+to make a setting for her delightfulness which still endured with him as
+fresh as yesterday. Now, without having completed that romance--a very
+perfect flower--could he cast it aside?
+
+At this time he was not entangled with any woman. Miriam Finch was too
+conservative and intellectual; Norma Whitmore not attractive enough. As
+for some other charming examples of femininity whom he had met here and
+there, he had not been drawn to them or they to him. Emotionally he was
+lonely and this for him was always a very susceptible mood. He could not
+make up his mind that the end had come with Angela.
+
+It so happened that Marietta, after watching her sister's love affair
+some time, reached the conclusion that she ought to try to help her.
+Angela was obviously concealing a weariness of heart which was telling
+on her peace of mind and her sweetness of disposition. She was unhappy
+and it grieved her sister greatly. The latter loved her in a
+whole-hearted way, in spite of the fact that their affections might
+possibly have clashed over Eugene, and she thought once of writing in a
+sweet way and telling him how things were. She thought he was good and
+kind, that he loved Angela, that perhaps he was delaying as her sister
+said until he should have sufficient means to marry well, and that if
+the right word were said now he would cease chasing a phantom fortune
+long enough to realize that it were better to take Angela while they
+were still young, than to wait until they were so old that the romance
+of marriage would for them be over. She revolved this in her mind a long
+time, picturing to herself how sweet Angela really was, and finally
+nerved herself to pen the following letter, which she sent.
+
+Dear Eugene:
+
+You will be surprised to get a letter from me and I want you to promise
+me that you will never say anything about it to anyone--above all never
+to Angela. Eugene, I have been watching her for a long time now and I
+know she is not happy. She is so desperately in love with you. I notice
+when a letter does not come promptly she is downcast and I can't help
+seeing that she is longing to have you here with her. Eugene, why don't
+you marry Angela? She is lovely and attractive now and she is as good as
+she is beautiful. She doesn't want to wait for a fine house and
+luxuries--no girl wants to do that, Eugene, when she loves as I know
+Angela does you. She would rather have you now when you are both young
+and can enjoy life than any fine house or nice things you might give her
+later. Now, I haven't talked to her at all, Eugene--never one word--and
+I know it would hurt her terribly if she thought I had written to you.
+She would never forgive me. But I can't help it. I can't bear to see her
+grieving and longing, and I know that when you know you will come and
+get her. Don't ever indicate in any way, please, that I wrote to you.
+Don't write to me unless you want to very much. I would rather you
+didn't. And tear up this letter. But do come for her soon, Eugene,
+please do. She wants you. And she will make you a perfectly wonderful
+wife for she is a wonderful girl. We all love her so--papa and mamma and
+all. I hope you will forgive me. I can't help it.
+
+   "With love I am yours,
+
+      "Marietta."
+
+When Eugene received this letter he was surprised and astonished, but
+also distressed for himself and Angela and Marietta and the whole
+situation. The tragedy of this situation appealed to him perhaps as much
+from the dramatic as from the personal point of view. Little Angela,
+with her yellow hair and classic face. What a shame that they could not
+be together as she wished; as really, in a way, he wished. She was
+beautiful--no doubt of that. And there was a charm about her which was
+as alluring as that of any girl barring the intellectually exceptional.
+Her emotions in a way were deeper than those of Miriam Finch and
+Christina Channing. She could not reason about them--that was all. She
+just felt them. He saw all the phases of her anguish--the probable
+attitude of her parents, her own feelings at being looked at by them,
+the way her friends wondered. It was a shame, no doubt of that--a cruel
+situation. Perhaps he had better go back. He could be happy with her.
+They could live in a studio and no doubt things would work out all
+right. Had he better be cruel and not go? He hated to think of it.
+
+Anyhow he did not answer Marietta's letter, and he did tear it up into a
+thousand bits, as she requested. "If Angela knew no doubt she would feel
+wretched," he thought.
+
+In the meanwhile Angela was thinking, and her brooding led her to the
+conclusion that it might be advisable, if ever her lover came back, to
+yield herself in order that he might feel compelled to take her. She was
+no reasoner about life in any big sense. Her judgment of affairs was
+more confused at this time than at a later period. She had no clear
+conception of how foolish any trickery of this sort would be. She loved
+Eugene, felt that she must have him, felt that she would be willing to
+die rather than lose him and the thought of trickery came only as a last
+resource. If he refused her she was determined on one thing--the lake.
+She would quit this dreary world where love was crossed with despair in
+its finest moments; she would forget it all. If only there were rest and
+silence on the other side that would be enough.
+
+The year moved on toward spring and because of some note of this,
+reiterated in pathetic phrases, he came to feel that he must go back.
+Marietta's letter preyed on his mind. The intensity of Angela's attitude
+made him feel that something desperate would happen. He could not, in
+cold blood, sit down and write her that he would not see her any more.
+The impressions of Blackwood were too fresh in his mind--the summer
+incense and green beauty of the world in which she lived. He wrote in
+April that he would come again in June, and Angela was beside herself
+with joy.
+
+One of the things which helped Eugene to this conclusion was the fact
+that Christina Channing was not coming back from Europe that year. She
+had written a few times during the winter, but very guardedly. A casual
+reader could not have drawn from what she said that there had ever been
+anything between them. He had written much more ardently, of course, but
+she had chosen to ignore his eager references, making him feel by
+degrees that he was not to know much of her in the future. They were
+going to be good friends, but not necessarily lovers nor eventually
+husband and wife. It irritated him to think she could be so calm about a
+thing which to him seemed so important. It hurt his pride to think she
+could so deliberately throw him over. Finally he began to be incensed,
+and then Angela's fidelity appeared in a much finer light. There was a
+girl who would not treat him so. She really loved him. She was faithful
+and true. So his promised trip began to look much more attractive, and
+by June he was in a fever to see her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+The beautiful June weather arrived and with it Eugene took his departure
+once more for Blackwood. He was in a peculiar mood, for while he was
+anxious to see Angela again it was with the thought that perhaps he was
+making a mistake. A notion of fatality was beginning to run through his
+mind. Perhaps he was destined to take her! and yet, could anything be
+more ridiculous? He could decide. He had deliberately decided to go back
+there--or had he? He admitted to himself that his passion was drawing
+him--in fact he could not see that there was anything much in love
+outside of passion. Desire! Wasn't that all that pulled two people
+together? There was some little charm of personality above that, but
+desire was the keynote. And if the physical attraction were strong
+enough, wasn't that sufficient to hold two people together? Did you
+really need so much more? It was logic based on youth, enthusiasm and
+inexperience, but it was enough to hold him for the time being--to
+soothe him. To Angela he was not drawn by any of the things which drew
+him to Miriam Finch and Norma Whitmore, nor was there the wonderful art
+of Christina Channing. Still he was going.
+
+His interest in Norma Whitmore had increased greatly as the winter
+passed. In this woman he had found an intellect as broadening and
+refining as any he had encountered. Her taste for the exceptional in
+literature and art was as great as that of anyone he had ever known and
+it was just as individual. She ran to impressive realistic fiction in
+literature and to the kind of fresh-from-the-soil art which Eugene
+represented. Her sense of just how big and fresh was the thing he was
+trying to do was very encouraging, and she was carrying the word about
+town to all her friends that he was doing it. She had even gone so far
+as to speak to two different art dealers asking them why they had not
+looked into what seemed to her his perfectly wonderful drawings.
+
+"Why, they're astonishing in their newness," she told Eberhard Zang, one
+of the important picture dealers on Fifth Avenue. She knew him from
+having gone there to borrow pictures for reproduction.
+
+"Witla! Witla!" he commented in his conservative German way, rubbing his
+chin, "I doand remember seeing anything by him."
+
+"Of course you don't," replied Norma persistently. "He's new, I tell
+you. He hasn't been here so very long. You get _Truth_ for some week in
+last month--I forget which one--and see that picture of Greeley Square.
+It will show you what I mean."
+
+"Witla! Witla!" repeated Zang, much as a parrot might fix a sound in its
+memory. "Tell him to come in here and see me some day. I should like to
+see some of his things."
+
+"I will," said Norma, genially. She was anxious to have Eugene go, but
+he was more anxious to get a lot of things done before he had an
+exhibition. He did not want to risk an impression with anything short of
+a rather extensive series. And his collection of views was not complete
+at that time. Besides he had a much more significant art dealer in mind.
+
+He and Norma had reached the point by this time where they were like
+brother and sister, or better yet, two good men friends. He would slip
+his arm about her waist when entering her rooms and was free to hold her
+hands or pat her on the arm or shoulder. There was nothing more than
+strong good feeling on his part, while on hers a burning affection might
+have been inspired, but his genial, brotherly attitude convinced her
+that it was useless. He had never told her of any of his other women
+friends and he was wondering as he rode west how she and Miriam Finch
+would take his marriage with Angela, supposing that he ever did marry
+her. As for Christina Channing, he did not want to think--really did not
+dare to think of her very much. Some sense of lost beauty came to him
+out of that experience--a touch of memory that had a pang in it.
+
+Chicago in June was just a little dreary to him with its hurry of life,
+its breath of past experience, the Art Institute, the _Daily Globe_
+building, the street and house in which Ruby had lived. He wondered
+about her (as he had before) the moment he neared the city, and had a
+strong desire to go and look her up. Then he visited the _Globe_
+offices, but Mathews had gone. Genial, cheerful Jerry had moved to
+Philadelphia recently, taking a position on the Philadelphia _North
+American_, leaving Howe alone, more finicky and picayune than ever.
+Goldfarb, of course, was gone and Eugene felt out of it. He was glad to
+take the train for Blackwood, for he felt lonesome. He left the city
+with quite an ache for old times in his heart and the feeling that life
+was a jumble of meaningless, strange and pathetic things.
+
+"To think that we should grow old," he pondered, "that things that were
+as real as these things were to me, should become mere memories."
+
+The time just before he reached Blackwood was one of great emotional
+stress for Angela. Now she was to learn whether he really loved her as
+much as he had. She was to feel the joy of his presence, the subtle
+influence of his attitude. She was to find whether she could hold him or
+not. Marietta, who on hearing that he was coming, had rather plumed
+herself that her letter had had something to do with it, was afraid that
+her sister would not make good use of this opportune occasion. She was
+anxious that Angela should look her best, and made suggestions as to
+things she might wear, games she might play (they had installed tennis
+and croquet as part of the home pleasures since he had been there last)
+and places they might go to. Marietta was convinced that Angela was not
+artful enough--not sufficiently subtle in her presentation of her
+charms. He could be made to feel very keen about her if she dressed
+right and showed herself to the best advantage. Marietta herself
+intended to keep out of the way as much as possible when Eugene arrived,
+and to appear at great disadvantage in the matter of dress and
+appearance when seen; for she had become a perfect beauty and was a
+breaker of hearts without conscious effort.
+
+"You know that string of coral beads I have, Angel Face," she asked
+Angela one morning some ten days before Eugene arrived. "Wear them with
+that tan linen dress of mine and your tan shoes some day for Eugene.
+You'll look stunning in those things and he'll like you. Why don't you
+take the new buggy and drive over to Blackwood to meet him? That's it.
+You must meet him."
+
+"Oh, I don't think I want to, Babyette," she replied. She was afraid of
+this first impression. She did not want to appear to run after him.
+Babyette was a nickname which had been applied to Marietta in childhood
+and had never been dropped.
+
+"Oh, pshaw, Angel Face, don't be so backward! You're the shyest thing I
+know. Why that's nothing. He'll like you all the better for treating him
+just a little smartly. You do that now, will you?"
+
+"I can't," replied Angela. "I can't do it that way. Let him come over
+here first; then I'll drive him over some afternoon."
+
+"Oh, Angel Face! Well, anyhow, when he comes you must wear that little
+rose flowered house dress and put a wreath of green leaves in your
+hair."
+
+"Oh, I won't do anything of the sort, Babyette," exclaimed Angela.
+
+"Yes, you will," replied her sister. "Now you just have to do what I
+tell you for once. That dress looks beautiful on you and the wreath will
+make it perfect."
+
+"It isn't the dress. I know that's nice. It's the wreath."
+
+Marietta was incensed by this bit of pointless reserve.
+
+"Oh, Angela," she exclaimed, "don't be so silly. You're older than I am,
+but I know more about men in a minute than you'll ever know. Don't you
+want him to like you? You'll have to be more daring--goodness! Lots of
+girls would go a lot farther than that."
+
+She caught her sister about the waist and looked into her eyes. "Now
+you've got to wear it," she added finally, and Angela understood that
+Marietta wanted her to entice Eugene by any means in her power to make
+him declare himself finally and set a definite date or take her back to
+New York with him.
+
+There were other conversations in which a trip to the lake was
+suggested, games of tennis, with Angela wearing her white tennis suit
+and shoes, a country dance which might be got up--there were rumors of
+one to be given in the new barn of a farmer some seven miles away.
+Marietta was determined that Angela should appear youthful, gay, active,
+just the things which she knew instinctively would fascinate Eugene.
+
+Finally Eugene came. He arrived at Blackwood at noon. Despite her
+objections Angela met him, dressed smartly and, as urged by Marietta,
+carrying herself with an air. She hoped to impress Eugene with a sense
+of independence, but when she saw him stepping down from the train in
+belted corduroy travelling suit with a grey English travelling cap,
+carrying a green leather bag of the latest design, her heart misgave
+her. He was so worldly now, so experienced. You could see by his manner
+that this country place meant little or nothing to him. He had tasted of
+the world at large.
+
+Angela had stayed in her buggy at the end of the depot platform and she
+soon caught Eugene's eye and waved to him. He came briskly forward.
+
+"Why, sweet," he exclaimed, "here you are. How nice you look!" He jumped
+up beside her, surveying her critically and she could feel his examining
+glance. After the first pleasant impression he sensed the difference
+between his new world and hers and was a little depressed by it. She was
+a little older, no doubt of that. You cannot hope and yearn and worry
+for three years and not show it. And yet she was fine and tender and
+sympathetic and emotional. He felt all this. It hurt him a little for
+her sake and his too.
+
+"Well, how have you been?" he asked. They were in the confines of the
+village and no demonstration could be made. Until the quiet of a country
+road could be reached all had to be formal.
+
+"Oh, just the same, Eugene, longing to see you."
+
+She looked into his eyes and he felt the impact of that emotional force
+which governed her when she was near him. There was something in the
+chemistry of her being which roused to blazing the ordinarily dormant
+forces of his sympathies. She tried to conceal her real feeling--to
+pretend gaiety and enthusiasm, but her eyes betrayed her. Something
+roused in him now at her look--a combined sense of emotion and desire.
+
+"It's so fine to be out in the country again," he said, pressing her
+hand, for he was letting her drive. "After the city, to see you and the
+green fields!" He looked about at the little one-storey cottages, each
+with a small plot of grass, a few trees, a neat confining fence. After
+New York and Chicago, a village like this was quaint.
+
+"Do you love me just as much as ever?"
+
+She nodded her head. They reached a strip of yellow road, he asking
+after her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters, and when he saw
+that they were unobserved he slipped his arm about her and drew her head
+to him.
+
+"Now we can," he said.
+
+She felt the force of his desire but she missed that note of adoration
+which had seemed to characterize his first lovemaking. How true it was
+he had changed! He must have. The city had made her seem less
+significant. It hurt her to think that life should treat her so. But
+perhaps she could win him back--could hold him anyhow.
+
+They drove over toward Okoonee, a little crossroads settlement, near a
+small lake of the same name, a place which was close to the Blue house,
+and which the Blue's were wont to speak of as "home." On the way Eugene
+learned that her youngest brother David was a cadet at West Point now
+and doing splendidly. Samuel had become western freight agent of the
+Great Northern and was on the way to desirable promotion. Benjamin had
+completed his law studies and was practising in Racine. He was
+interested in politics and was going to run for the state legislature.
+Marietta was still the gay carefree girl she had always been, not at all
+inclined to choose yet among her many anxious suitors. Eugene thought of
+her letter to him--wondered if she would look her thoughts into his eyes
+when he saw her.
+
+"Oh, Marietta," Angela replied when Eugene asked after her, "she's just
+as dangerous as ever. She makes all the men make love to her."
+
+Eugene smiled. Marietta was always a pleasing thought to him. He wished
+for the moment that it was Marietta instead of Angela that he was coming
+to see.
+
+She was as shrewd as she was kind in this instance. Her appearance on
+meeting Eugene was purposely indifferent and her attitude anything but
+coaxing and gay. At the same time she suffered a genuine pang of
+feeling, for Eugene appealed to her. If it were anybody but Angela, she
+thought, how she would dress and how quickly she would be coquetting
+with him. Then his love would be won by her and she felt that she could
+hold it. She had great confidence in her ability to keep any man, and
+Eugene was a man she would have delighted to hold. As it was she kept
+out of his way, took sly glances at him here and there, wondered if
+Angela would truly win him. She was so anxious for Angela's sake. Never,
+never, she told herself, would she cross her sister's path.
+
+At the Blue homestead he was received as cordially as before. After an
+hour it quite brought back the feeling of three years before. These open
+fields, this old house and its lovely lawn, all served to awaken the
+most poignant sensations. One of Marietta's beaux, over from Waukesha,
+appeared after Eugene had greeted Mrs. Blue and Marietta, and the latter
+persuaded him to play a game of tennis with Angela. She invited Eugene
+to make it a four with her, but not knowing how he refused.
+
+Angela changed to her tennis suit and Eugene opened his eyes to her
+charms. She was very attractive on the court, quick, flushed, laughing.
+And when she laughed she had a charming way of showing her even, small,
+white teeth. She quite awakened a feeling of interest--she looked so
+dainty and frail. When he saw her afterward in the dark, quiet parlor,
+he gathered her to his heart with much of the old ardour. She felt the
+quick change of feeling. Marietta was right. Eugene loved gaiety and
+color. Although on the way home she had despaired this was much more
+promising.
+
+Eugene rarely entered on anything half heartedly. If interested at all
+he was greatly interested. He could so yield himself to the glamour of a
+situation as to come finally to believe that he was something which he
+was not. Thus, now he was beginning to accept this situation as Angela
+and Marietta wished he should, and to see her in somewhat the old light.
+He overlooked things which in his New York studio, surrounded by the
+influences which there modified his judgment, he would have seen. Angela
+was not young enough for him. She was not liberal in her views. She was
+charming, no doubt of that, but he could not bring her to an
+understanding of his casual acceptance of life. She knew nothing of his
+real disposition and he did not tell her. He played the part of a
+seemingly single-minded Romeo, and as such he was from a woman's point
+of view beautiful to contemplate. In his own mind he was coming to see
+that he was fickle but he still did not want to admit it to himself.
+
+There was a night of stars after an evening of June perfection. At five
+old Jotham came in from the fields, as dignified and patriarchal as
+ever. He greeted Eugene with a hearty handshake, for he admired him. "I
+see some of your work now and then," he said, "in these monthly
+magazines. It's fine. There's a young minister down here near the lake
+that's very anxious to meet you. He likes to get hold of anything you
+do, and I always send the books down as soon as Angela gets through with
+them."
+
+He used the words books and magazines interchangeably, and spoke as
+though they were not much more important to him than the leaves of the
+trees, as indeed, they were not. To a mind used to contemplating the
+succession of crops and seasons, all life with its multitudinous
+interplay of shapes and forms seemed passing shadows. Even men were like
+leaves that fall.
+
+Eugene was drawn to old Jotham as a filing to a magnet. His was just the
+type of mind that appealed to him, and Angela gained by the radiated
+glory of her father. If he was so wonderful she must be something above
+the average of womanhood. Such a man could not help but produce
+exceptional children.
+
+Left alone together it was hardly possible for Angela and Eugene not to
+renew the old relationship on the old basis. Having gone as far as he
+had the first time it was natural that he should wish to go as far again
+and further. After dinner, when she turned to him from her room, arrayed
+in a soft evening dress of clinging texture--somewhat low in the neck by
+request of Marietta, who had helped her to dress--Eugene was conscious
+of her emotional perturbation. He himself was distraught, for he did not
+know what he would do--how far he would dare to trust himself. He was
+always troubled when dealing with his physical passion, for it was a
+raging lion at times. It seemed to overcome him quite as a drug might or
+a soporific fume. He would mentally resolve to control himself, but
+unless he instantly fled there was no hope, and he did not seem able to
+run away. He would linger and parley, and in a few moments it was master
+and he was following its behest blindly, desperately, to the point
+almost of exposure and destruction.
+
+Tonight when Angela came back he was cogitating, wondering what it might
+mean. Should he? Would he marry her? Could he escape? They sat down to
+talk, but presently he drew her to him. It was the old story--moment
+after moment of increasing feeling. Presently she, from the excess of
+longing and waiting was lost to all sense of consideration. And he--
+
+"I shall have to go away, Eugene," she pleaded, when he carried her
+recklessly into his room, "if anything happens. I cannot stay here."
+
+"Don't talk," he said. "You can come to me."
+
+"You mean it, Eugene, surely?" she begged.
+
+"As sure as I'm holding you here," he replied.
+
+At midnight Angela lifted frightened, wondering, doubting eyes, feeling
+herself the most depraved creature. Two pictures were in her mind
+alternately and with pendulum-like reiteration. One was a composite of a
+marriage altar and a charming New York studio with friends coming in to
+see them much as he had often described to her. The other was of the
+still blue waters of Okoonee with herself lying there pale and still.
+Yes, she would die if he did not marry her now. Life would not be worth
+while. She would not force him. She would slip out some night when it
+was too late and all hope had been abandoned--when exposure was
+near--and the next day they would find her.
+
+Little Marietta how she would cry. And old Jotham--she could see him,
+but he would never be really sure of the truth. And her mother. "Oh God
+in heaven," she thought, "how hard life is! How terrible it can be."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+The atmosphere of the house after this night seemed charged with
+reproach to Eugene, although it took on no semblance of reality in
+either look or word. When he awoke in the morning and looked through the
+half closed shutters to the green world outside he felt a sense of
+freshness and of shame. It was cruel to come into such a home as this
+and do a thing as mean as he had done. After all, philosophy or no
+philosophy, didn't a fine old citizen like Jotham, honest, upright,
+genuine in his moral point of view and his observance of the golden
+rule, didn't he deserve better from a man whom he so sincerely admired?
+Jotham had been so nice to him. Their conversations together were so
+kindly and sympathetic. Eugene felt that Jotham believed him to be an
+honest man. He knew he had that appearance. He was frank, genial,
+considerate, not willing to condemn anyone--but this sex question--that
+was where he was weak. And was not the whole world keyed to that? Did
+not the decencies and the sanities of life depend on right moral
+conduct? Was not the world dependent on how the homes were run? How
+could anyone be good if his mother and father had not been good before
+him? How could the children of the world expect to be anything if people
+rushed here and there holding illicit relations? Take his sister Myrtle,
+now--would he have wanted her rifled in this manner? In the face of this
+question he was not ready to say exactly what he wanted or was willing
+to countenance. Myrtle was a free agent, as was every other girl. She
+could do as she pleased. It might not please him exactly but--he went
+round and round from one problem to another, trying to untie this
+Gordian knot. One thing, this home had appeared sweet and clean when he
+came into it; now it was just a little tarnished, and by him! Or was it?
+His mind was always asking this question. There was nothing that he was
+actually accepting as true any more. He was going round in a ring asking
+questions of this proposition and that. Are you true? And are you true?
+And are you true? And all the while he was apparently not getting
+anywhere. It puzzled him, this life. Sometimes it shamed him. This deed
+shamed him. And he asked himself whether he was wrong to be ashamed or
+not. Perhaps he was just foolish. Was not life made for living, not
+worrying? He had not created his passions and desires.
+
+He threw open the shutters and there was the bright day. Everything was
+so green outside, the flowers in bloom, the trees casting a cool, lovely
+shade, the birds twittering. Bees were humming. He could smell the
+lilacs. "Dear God," he exclaimed, throwing his arms above his head, "How
+lovely life is! How beautiful! Oh!" He drew in a deep breath of the
+flower and privet laden air. If only he could live always like this--for
+ever and ever.
+
+When he had sponged himself with cold water and dressed, putting on a
+soft negligee shirt with turn-down collar and dark flowing tie, he
+issued forth clean and fresh. Angela was there to greet him. Her face
+was pale but she looked intensely sweet because of her sadness.
+
+"There, there," he said, touching her chin, "less of that now!"
+
+"I told them that I had a headache," she said. "So I have. Do you
+understand?"
+
+"I understand your headache," he laughed. "But everything is all
+right--very much all right. Isn't this a lovely day!"
+
+"Beautiful," replied Angela sadly.
+
+"Cheer up," he insisted. "Don't worry. Everything is coming out fine."
+He walked to the window and stared out.
+
+"I'll have your breakfast ready in a minute," she said, and, pressing
+his hand, left him.
+
+Eugene went out to the hammock. He was so deliciously contented and
+joyous now that he saw the green world about him, that he felt that
+everything was all right again. The vigorous blooming forces of nature
+everywhere present belied the sense of evil and decay to which mortality
+is so readily subject. He felt that everything was justified in youth
+and love, particularly where mutual affection reigned. Why should he not
+take Angela? Why should they not be together? He went in to breakfast at
+her call, eating comfortably of the things she provided. He felt the
+easy familiarity and graciousness of the conqueror. Angela on her part
+felt the fear and uncertainty of one who has embarked upon a dangerous
+voyage. She had set sail--whither? At what port would she land? Was it
+the lake or his studio? Would she live and be happy or would she die to
+face a black uncertainty? Was there a hell as some preachers insisted?
+Was there a gloomy place of lost souls such as the poets described? She
+looked into the face of this same world which Eugene found so beautiful
+and its very beauty trembled with forebodings of danger.
+
+And there were days and days yet to be lived of this. For all her fear,
+once having tasted of the forbidden fruit, it was sweet and inviting.
+She could not go near Eugene, nor he near her but this flush of emotion
+would return.
+
+In the daylight she was too fearful, but when the night came with its
+stars, its fresh winds, its urge to desire, her fears could not stand in
+their way. Eugene was insatiable and she was yearning. The slightest
+touch was as fire to tow. She yielded saying she would not yield.
+
+The Blue family were of course blissfully ignorant of what was
+happening. It seemed so astonishing to Angela at first that the very air
+did not register her actions in some visible way. That they should be
+able thus to be alone was not so remarkable, seeing that Eugene's
+courtship was being aided and abetted, for her sake, but that her lapse
+should not be exposed by some sinister influence seemed
+strange--accidental and subtly ominous. Something would happen--that was
+her fear. She had not the courage of her desire or need.
+
+By the end of the week, though Eugene was less ardent and more or less
+oppressed by the seeming completeness with which he had conquered, he
+was not ready to leave. He was sorry to go, for it ended a honeymoon of
+sweetness and beauty--all the more wonderful and enchanting because so
+clandestine--yet he was beginning to be aware that he had bound himself
+in chains of duty and responsibility. Angela had thrown herself on his
+mercy and his sense of honor to begin with. She had exacted a promise of
+marriage--not urgently, and as one who sought to entrap him, but with
+the explanation that otherwise life must end in disaster for her. Eugene
+could look in her face and see that it would. And now that he had had
+his way and plumbed the depths of her emotions and desires he had a
+higher estimate of her personality. Despite the fact that she was older
+than he, there was a breath of youth and beauty here that held him. Her
+body was exquisite. Her feeling about life and love was tender and
+beautiful. He wished he could make true her dreams of bliss without
+injury to himself.
+
+It so turned out that as his visit was drawing to a close Angela decided
+that she ought to go to Chicago, for there were purchases which must be
+made. Her mother wanted her to go and she decided that she would go with
+Eugene. This made the separation easier, gave them more time to talk.
+Her usual plan was to stay with her aunt and she was going there now.
+
+On the way she asked over and over what he would think of her in the
+future; whether what had passed would not lower her in his eyes. He did
+not feel that it would. Once she said to him sadly--"only death or
+marriage can help me now."
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked, her yellow head pillowed on his shoulder,
+her dark blue eyes looking sadly into his.
+
+"That if you don't marry me I'll have to kill myself. I can't stay at
+home."
+
+He thought of her with her beautiful body, her mass of soft hair all
+tarnished in death.
+
+"You wouldn't do that?" he asked unbelievingly.
+
+"Yes, I would," she said sadly. "I must, I will."
+
+"Hush, Angel Face," he pleaded. "You won't do anything like that. You
+won't have to. I'll marry you--How would you do it?"
+
+"Oh, I've thought it all out," she continued gloomily. "You know that
+little lake. I'd drown myself."
+
+"Don't, sweetheart," he pleaded. "Don't talk that way. It's terrible.
+You won't have to do anything like that."
+
+To think of her under the waters of little Okoonee, with its green
+banks, and yellow sandy shores. All her love come to this! All her
+passion! Her death would be upon his head and he could not stand the
+thought of that. It frightened him. Such tragedies occasionally appeared
+in the papers with all the pathetic details convincingly set forth, but
+this should not enter his life. He would marry her. She was lovely after
+all. He would have to. He might as well make up his mind to that now. He
+began to speculate how soon it might be. For the sake of her family she
+wanted no secret marriage but one which, if they could not be present at
+it, they could at least know was taking place. She was willing to come
+East--that could be arranged. But they must be married. Eugene realized
+the depth of her conventional feeling so keenly that it never occurred
+to him to suggest an alternative. She would not consent, would scorn him
+for it. The only alternative, she appeared to believe, was death.
+
+One evening--the last--when it was necessary for her to return to
+Blackwood, and he had seen her off on the train, her face a study in
+sadness, he rode out gloomily to Jackson Park where he had once seen a
+beautiful lake in the moonlight. When he reached there the waters of the
+lake were still suffused and tinged with lovely suggestions of lavender,
+pink and silver, for this was near the twenty-first of June. The trees
+to the east and west were dark. The sky showed a last blush of orange.
+Odours were about--warm June fragrance. He thought now, as he walked
+about the quiet paths where the sand and pebbles crunched lightly
+beneath his feet, of all the glory of this wonderful week. How dramatic
+was life; how full of romance. This love of Angela's, how beautiful.
+Youth was with him--love. Would he go on to greater days of beauty or
+would he stumble, idling his time, wasting his substance in riotous
+living? Was this riotous living? Would there be evil fruition of his
+deeds? Would he really love Angela after he married her? Would they be
+happy?
+
+Thus he stood by the bank of this still lake, studying the water,
+marvelling at the subtleties of reflected radiance, feeling the artist's
+joy in perfect natural beauty, twining and intertwining it all with
+love, death, failure, fame. It was romantic to think that in such a
+lake, if he were unkind, would Angela be found. By such a dark as was
+now descending would all her bright dreams be submerged. It would be
+beautiful as romance. He could imagine a great artist like Daudet or
+Balzac making a great story out of it. It was even a subject for some
+form of romantic expression in art. Poor Angela! If he were a great
+portrait painter he would paint her. He thought of some treatment of her
+in the nude with that mass of hair of hers falling about her neck and
+breasts. It would be beautiful. Should he marry her? Yes, though he was
+not sure of the outcome, he must. It might be a mistake but--
+
+He stared at the fading surface of the lake, silver, lavender, leaden
+gray. Overhead a vivid star was already shining. How would it be with
+her if she were really below those still waters? How would it be with
+him? It would be too desperate, too regretful. No, he must marry her. It
+was in this mood that he returned to the city, the ache of life in his
+heart. It was in this mood that he secured his grip from the hotel and
+sought the midnight train for New York. For once Ruby, Miriam,
+Christina, were forgotten. He was involved in a love drama which meant
+life or death to Angela, peace or reproach of conscience to himself in
+the future. He could not guess what the outcome would be, but he felt
+that he must marry her--how soon he could not say. Circumstances would
+dictate that. From present appearances it must be immediately. He must
+see about a studio, announce the news of his departure to Smite and
+MacHugh; make a special effort to further his art ambitions so that he
+and Angela would have enough to live on. He had talked so glowingly of
+his art life that now, when the necessity for demonstrating it was at
+hand, he was troubled as to what the showing might be. The studio had to
+be attractive. He would need to introduce his friends. All the way back
+to New York he turned this over in his mind--Smite, MacHugh, Miriam,
+Norma, Wheeler, Christina--what would Christina think if she ever
+returned to New York and found him married? There was no question but
+that there was a difference between Angela and these. It was
+something--a matter of courage--more soul, more daring, more awareness,
+perhaps--something. When they saw her would they think he had made a
+mistake, would they put him down as a fool? MacHugh was going with a
+girl, but she was a different type--intellectual, smart. He thought and
+thought, but he came back to the same conclusion always. He would have
+to marry her. There was no way out. He would have to.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+The studio of Messrs. Smite, MacHugh and Witla in Waverley Place was
+concerned the following October with a rather picturesque event. Even in
+the city the time when the leaves begin to yellow and fall brings a
+sense of melancholy, augmented by those preliminaries of winter, gray,
+lowery days, with scraps of paper, straws, bits of wood blown about by
+gusty currents of air through the streets, making it almost disagreeable
+to be abroad. The fear of cold and storm and suffering among those who
+have little was already apparent. Apparent too was the air of renewed
+vitality common to those who have spent an idle summer and are anxious
+to work again. Shopping and marketing and barter and sale were at high
+key. The art world, the social world, the manufacturing world, the
+professional worlds of law, medicine, finance, literature, were bubbling
+with a feeling of the necessity to do and achieve. The whole city, stung
+by the apprehension of winter, had an atmosphere of emprise and energy.
+
+In this atmosphere, with a fairly clear comprehension of the elements
+which were at work making the colour of the life about him, was Eugene,
+digging away at the task he had set himself. Since leaving Angela he had
+come to the conclusion that he must complete the jointings for the
+exhibition which had been running in his mind during the last two years.
+There was no other way for him to make a notable impression--he saw
+that. Since he had returned he had gone through various experiences: the
+experience of having Angela tell him that she was sure there was
+something wrong with her; an impression sincere enough, but based on an
+excited and overwrought imagination of evil to follow, and having no
+foundation in fact. Eugene was as yet, despite his several experiences,
+not sufficiently informed in such affairs to know. His lack of courage
+would have delayed him from asking if he had known. In the next place,
+facing this crisis, he had declared that he would marry her, and because
+of her distressed condition he thought he might as well do it now. He
+had wanted time to do some of the pictures he was working on, to take in
+a little money for drawing, to find a suitable place to live in. He had
+looked at various studios in various sections of the city and had found
+nothing, as yet, which answered to his taste or his purse. Anything with
+a proper light, a bath, a suitable sleeping room, and an inconspicuous
+chamber which might be turned into a kitchen, was difficult to find.
+Prices were high, ranging from fifty to one hundred and twenty-five and
+one hundred and fifty a month. There were some new studios being erected
+for the rich loungers and idlers which commanded, so he understood,
+three or four thousand dollars a year. He wondered if he should ever
+attain to any such magnificence through his art.
+
+Again, in taking a studio for Angela and himself there was the matter of
+furniture. The studio he had with Smite and MacHugh was more or less of
+a camp. The work room was bare of carpets or rugs. The two folding beds
+and the cot which graced their individual chambers were heirlooms from
+ancient predecessors--substantial but shabby. Beyond various drawings,
+three easels, and a chest of drawers for each, there was no suitable
+household equipment. A woman came twice a week to clean, send out the
+linen, and make up the beds.
+
+To live with Angela required, in his judgment, many and much more
+significant things. His idea of a studio was some such one as that now
+occupied by Miriam Finch or Norma Whitmore. There ought to be furniture
+of a period--old Flemish or Colonial, Heppelwhite or Chippendale or
+Sheraton, such as he saw occasionally knocking about in curio shops and
+second hand stores. It could be picked up if he had time. He was
+satisfied that Angela knew nothing of these things. There ought to be
+rugs, hangings of tapestry, bits of brass, pewter, copper, old silver,
+if he could afford it. He had an idea of some day obtaining a figure of
+the Christ in brass or plaster, hung upon a rough cross of walnut or
+teak, which he could hang or stand in some corner as one might a shrine
+and place before it two great candlesticks with immense candles smoked
+and dripping with wax. These lighted in a dark studio, with the outlines
+of the Christ flickering in the shadows behind would give the desired
+atmosphere to his studio. Such an equipment as he dreamed of would have
+cost in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars.
+
+Of course this was not to be thought of at this period. He had no more
+than that in ready cash. He was writing to Angela about his difficulties
+in finding a suitable place, when he heard of a studio in Washington
+Square South, which its literary possessor was going to quit for the
+winter. It was, so he understood, handsomely furnished, and was to be
+let for the rent of the studio. The owner wanted someone who would take
+care of it by occupying it for him until he should return the following
+fall. Eugene hurried round to look at it and, taken with the location,
+the appearance of the square from the windows, the beauty of the
+furnishings, felt that he would like to live here. This would be the way
+to introduce Angela to New York. This would be the first and proper
+impression to give her. Here, as in every well arranged studio he had
+yet seen were books, pictures, bits of statuary, implements of copper
+and some few of silver. There was a great fish net dyed green and
+spangled with small bits of mirror to look like scales which hung as a
+veil between the studio proper and an alcove. There was a piano done in
+black walnut, and odd pieces of furniture, Mission, Flemish, Venetian of
+the sixteenth century and English of the seventeenth, which, despite
+that diversity offered a unity of appearance and a harmony of
+usefulness. There was one bed room, a bath, and a small partitioned
+section which could be used as a kitchen. With a few of his pictures
+judiciously substituted he could see a perfect abode here for himself
+and his wife. The rent was fifty dollars. He decided that he would risk
+it.
+
+Having gone so far as to indicate that he would take it--he was made to
+feel partially resigned to marriage by the very appearance of this
+place--he decided that he would marry in October. Angela could come to
+New York or Buffalo--she had never seen Niagara Falls--and they could be
+married there. She had spoken recently of visiting her brother at West
+Point. Then they could come here and settle down. He decided that this
+must be so, wrote to her to that effect, and vaguely hinted to Smite and
+MacHugh that he might get married shortly.
+
+This was a great blow to his partners in art, for Eugene was very
+popular with them. He had the habit, with those he liked, of jesting
+constantly. "Look at the look of noble determination on Smite's brow
+this morning," he would comment cheerfully on getting up; or "MacHugh,
+you lazy lout, crawl out and earn your living."
+
+MacHugh's nose, eyes and ears would be comfortably buried in the folds
+of a blanket.
+
+"These hack artists," Eugene would sigh disconsolately. "There's not
+much to be made out of them. A pile of straw and a couple of boiled
+potatoes a day is all they need."
+
+"Aw, cut it out," MacHugh would grunt.
+
+"To hell, to hell, I yell, I yell," would come from somewhere in the
+voice of Smite.
+
+"If it weren't for me," Eugene would go on, "God knows what would become
+of this place. A lot of farmers and fishermen trying to be artists."
+
+"And laundry wagon drivers, don't forget that," MacHugh would add,
+sitting up and rubbing his tousled head, for Eugene had related some of
+his experiences. "Don't forget the contribution made by the American
+Steam Laundry Company to the world of true art."
+
+"Collars and cuffs I would have you know is artistic," Eugene at once
+declared with mock dignity, "whereas plows and fish is trash."
+
+Sometimes this "kidding" would continue for a quarter of an hour at a
+stretch, when some one remark really brighter than any other would
+dissolve the whole in laughter. Work began after breakfast, to which
+they usually sallied forth together, and would continue unbroken save
+for necessary engagements or periods of entertainment, lunch and so on,
+until five in the afternoon.
+
+They had worked together now for a couple of years. They had, by
+experience, learned of each other's reliability, courtesy, kindness and
+liberality. Criticism was free, generous, and sincerely intended to be
+helpful. Pleasure trips, such as walks on grey, lowery days, or in rain
+or brilliant sunshine, or trips to Coney Island, Far Rockaway, the
+theatres, the art exhibitions, the odd and peculiar restaurants of
+different nationalities, were always undertaken in a spirit of joyous
+camaraderie. Jesting as to morality, their respective abilities, their
+tendencies and characteristics were all taken and given in good part. At
+one time it would be Joseph Smite who would come in for a united
+drubbing and excoriation on the part of Eugene and MacHugh. At another
+time Eugene or MacHugh would be the victim, the other two joining forces
+vigorously. Art, literature, personalities, phases of life, philosophy,
+were discussed by turn. As with Jerry Mathews, Eugene had learned of new
+things from these men--the life of fisher-folk, and the characteristics
+of the ocean from Joseph Smite; the nature and spirit of the great West
+from MacHugh. Each appeared to have an inexhaustible fund of experiences
+and reminiscences which refreshed and entertained the trio day by day
+year in and year out. They were at their best strolling through some
+exhibit or preliminary view of an art collection offered for sale, when
+all their inmost convictions of what was valuable and enduring in art
+would come to the surface. All three were intolerant of reputations as
+such, but were strong for individual merit whether it carried a great
+name or not. They were constantly becoming acquainted with the work of
+some genius little known here, and celebrating his talents, each to the
+others. Thus Monet, Degas, Manet, Ribera, Monticelli, by turns came up
+for examination and praise.
+
+When Eugene then, toward the end of September, announced that he might
+be leaving them shortly, there was a united wail of opposition. Joseph
+Smite was working on a sea scene at the time, doing his best to get the
+proper colour harmony between the worm-eaten deck of a Gold Coast
+trading ship, a half naked West Coast negro handling a broken wheel, and
+a mass of blue black undulations in the distance which represented the
+boundless sea.
+
+"G'wan!" said Smite, incredulously, for he assumed that Eugene was
+jesting. There had been a steady stream of letters issuing from
+somewhere in the West and delivered here week after week, as there had
+been for MacHugh, but this by now was a commonplace, and apparently
+meant nothing. "You marry? What the hell do you want to get married for?
+A fine specimen you will make! I'll come around and tell your wife."
+
+"Sure," returned Eugene. "It's true, I may get married." He was amused
+at Smite's natural assumption that it was a jest.
+
+"Stow that," called MacHugh, from his easel. He was working on a country
+corner picture, a group of farmers before a country post office. "You
+don't want to break up this shack, do you?" Both of these men were fond
+of Eugene. They found him inspiring, helpful, always intensely vigorous
+and apparently optimistic.
+
+"I don't want to break up any shack. But haven't I a right to get
+married?"
+
+"I vote no, by God!" said Smite emphatically. "You'll never go out of
+here with my consent. Peter, are we going to stand for anything like
+that?"
+
+"We are not," replied MacHugh. "We'll call out the reserves if he tries
+any game like that on us. I'll prefer charges against him. Who's the
+lady, Eugene?"
+
+"I bet I know," suggested Smite. "He's been running up to Twenty-sixth
+Street pretty regularly." Joseph was thinking of Miriam Finch, to whom
+Eugene had introduced both him and MacHugh.
+
+"Nothing like that, surely," inquired MacHugh, looking over at Eugene to
+see if it possibly could be so.
+
+"It's all true, fellers," replied Eugene, "--as God is my judge. I'm
+going to leave you soon."
+
+"You're not really talking seriously, are you, Witla?" inquired Joseph
+soberly.
+
+"I am, Joe," said Eugene quietly. He was studying the perspective of his
+sixteenth New York view,--three engines coming abreast into a great yard
+of cars. The smoke, the haze, the dingy reds and blues and yellows and
+greens of kicked about box cars were showing with beauty--the vigor and
+beauty of raw reality.
+
+"Soon?" asked MacHugh, equally quietly. He was feeling that touch of
+pensiveness which comes with a sense of vanishing pleasures.
+
+"I think some time in October, very likely," replied Eugene.
+
+"Jesus Christ, I'm sorry to hear that," put in Smite.
+
+He laid down his brush and strolled over to the window. MacHugh, less
+expressive in extremes, worked on medatively.
+
+"When'd you reach that conclusion, Witla?" he asked after a time.
+
+"Oh, I've been thinking it over for a long time, Peter," he returned. "I
+should really have married before if I could have afforded it. I know
+how things are here or I wouldn't have sprung this so suddenly. I'll
+hold up my end on the rent here until you get someone else."
+
+"To hell with the rent," said Smite. "We don't want anyone else, do we,
+Peter? We didn't have anyone else before."
+
+Smite was rubbing his square chin and contemplating his partner as if
+they were facing a catastrophe.
+
+"There's no use talking about that," said Peter. "You know we don't care
+about the rent. Do you mind telling us who you're going to marry? Do we
+know her?"
+
+"You don't," returned Eugene. "She's out in Wisconsin. It's the one who
+writes the letters. Angela Blue is her name."
+
+"Well, here's to Angela Blue, by God, say I," said Smite, recovering his
+spirits and picking up his paint brush from his board to hold aloft.
+"Here's to Mrs. Eugene Witla, and may she never reef a sail to a storm
+or foul an anchor, as they say up Nova Scotia way."
+
+"Right oh," added MacHugh, catching the spirit of Smite's generous
+attitude. "Them's my sentiments. When d'you expect to get married
+really, Eugene?"
+
+"Oh I haven't fixed the time exactly. About November first, I should
+say. I hope you won't say anything about it though, either of you. I
+don't want to go through any explanations."
+
+"We won't, but it's tough, you old walrus. Why the hell didn't you give
+us time to think it over? You're a fine jellyfish, you are."
+
+He poked him reprimandingly in the ribs.
+
+"There isn't anyone any more sorry than I am," said Eugene. "I hate to
+leave here, I do. But we won't lose track of each other. I'll still be
+around here."
+
+"Where do you expect to live? Here in the city?" asked MacHugh, still a
+little gloomy.
+
+"Sure. Right here in Washington Square. Remember that Dexter studio
+Weaver was telling about? The one in the third floor at sixty-one?
+That's it."
+
+"You don't say!" exclaimed Smite. "You're in right. How'd you get that?"
+
+Eugene explained.
+
+"Well, you sure are a lucky man," observed MacHugh. "Your wife ought to
+like that. I suppose there'll be a cozy corner for an occasional
+strolling artist?"
+
+"No farmers, no sea-faring men, no artistic hacks--nothing!" declared
+Eugene dramatically.
+
+"You to Hell," said Smite. "When Mrs. Witla sees us--"
+
+"She'll wish she'd never come to New York," put in Eugene.
+
+"She'll wish she'd seen us first," said MacHugh.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+THE STRUGGLE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The marriage ceremony between Eugene and Angela was solemnized at
+Buffalo on November second. As planned, Marietta was with them. They
+would go, the three of them, to the Falls, and to West Point, where the
+girls would see their brother David, and then Marietta would return to
+tell the family about it. Naturally, under the circumstances, it was a
+very simple affair, for there were no congratulations to go through with
+and no gifts--at least immediately--to consider and acknowledge. Angela
+had explained to her parents and friends that it was quite impossible
+for Eugene to come West at this time. She knew that he objected to a
+public ceremony where he would have to run the gauntlet of all her
+relatives, and so she was quite willing to meet him in the East and be
+married there. Eugene had not troubled to take his family into his
+confidence as yet. He had indicated on his last visit home that he might
+get married, and that Angela was the girl in question, but since Myrtle
+was the only one of his family who had seen her and she was now in
+Ottumwa, Iowa, they could not recall anything about her. Eugene's father
+was a little disappointed, for he expected to hear some day that Eugene
+had made a brilliant match. His boy, whose pictures were in the
+magazines so frequently and whose appearance was so generally
+distinguished, ought in New York, where opportunities abounded, to marry
+an heiress at least. It was all right of course if Eugene wanted to
+marry a girl from the country, but it robbed the family of a possible
+glory.
+
+The spirit of this marriage celebration, so far as Eugene was concerned,
+was hardly right. There was the consciousness, always with him, of his
+possibly making a mistake; the feeling that he was being compelled by
+circumstances and his own weakness to fulfil an agreement which might
+better remain unfulfilled. His only urge was his desire, in the
+gratification of which he might find compensation, for saving Angela
+from an unhappy spinsterhood. It was a thin reed to lean on; there could
+be no honest satisfaction in it. Angela was sweet, devoted, painstaking
+in her attitude toward life, toward him, toward everything with which
+she came in contact, but she was not what he had always fancied his true
+mate would be--the be all and the end all of his existence. Where was
+the divine fire which on this occasion should have animated him; the
+lofty thoughts of future companionship; that intense feeling he had
+first felt about her when he had called on her at her aunt's house in
+Chicago? Something had happened. Was it that he had cheapened his ideal
+by too close contact with it? Had he taken a beautiful flower and
+trailed it in the dust? Was passion all there was to marriage? Or was it
+that true marriage was something higher--a union of fine thoughts and
+feelings? Did Angela share his with him? Angela did have exalted
+feelings and moods at times. They were not sensibly intellectual--but
+she seemed to respond to the better things in music and to some extent
+in literature. She knew nothing about art, but she was emotionally
+responsive to many fine things. Why was not this enough to make life
+durable and comfortable between them? Was it not really enough? After he
+had gone over all these points, there was still the thought that there
+was something wrong in this union. Despite his supposedly laudable
+conduct in fulfilling an obligation which, in a way, he had helped
+create or created, he was not happy. He went to his marriage as a man
+goes to fulfil an uncomfortable social obligation. It might turn out
+that he would have an enjoyable and happy life and it might turn out
+very much otherwise. He could not face the weight and significance of
+the social theory that this was for life--that if he married her today
+he would have to live with her all the rest of his days. He knew that
+was the generally accepted interpretation of marriage, but it did not
+appeal to him. Union ought in his estimation to be based on a keen
+desire to live together and on nothing else. He did not feel the
+obligation which attaches to children, for he had never had any and did
+not feel the desire for any. A child was a kind of a nuisance. Marriage
+was a trick of Nature's by which you were compelled to carry out her
+scheme of race continuance. Love was a lure; desire a scheme of
+propagation devised by the way. Nature, the race spirit, used you as you
+would use a work-horse to pull a load. The load in this case was race
+progress and man was the victim. He did not think he owed anything to
+nature, or to this race spirit. He had not asked to come here. He had
+not been treated as generously as he might have been since he arrived.
+Why should he do what nature bid?
+
+When he met Angela he kissed her fondly, for of course the sight of her
+aroused the feeling of desire which had been running in his mind so
+keenly for some time. Since last seeing Angela he had touched no woman,
+principally because the right one had not presented herself and because
+the memories and the anticipations in connection with Angela were so
+close. Now that he was with her again the old fire came over him and he
+was eager for the completion of the ceremony. He had seen to the
+marriage license in the morning,--and from the train on which Angela and
+Marietta arrived they proceeded in a carriage direct to the Methodist
+preacher. The ceremony which meant so much to Angela meant practically
+nothing to him. It seemed a silly formula--this piece of paper from the
+marriage clerk's office and this instructed phraseology concerning
+"love, honor and cherish." Certainly he would love, honor and cherish if
+it were possible--if not, then not. Angela, with the marriage ring on
+her finger and the words "with this ring I thee wed" echoing in her
+ears, felt that all her dreams had come true. Now she was, really,
+truly, Mrs. Eugene Witla. She did not need to worry about drowning
+herself, or being disgraced, or enduring a lonely, commiserated old age.
+She was the wife of an artist--a rising one, and she was going to live
+in New York. What a future stretched before her! Eugene loved her after
+all. She imagined she could see that. His slowness in marrying her was
+due to the difficulty of establishing himself properly. Otherwise he
+would have done it before. They drove to the Iroquois hotel and
+registered as man and wife, securing a separate room for Marietta. The
+latter pretending an urgent desire to bathe after her railroad journey,
+left them, promising to be ready in time for dinner. Eugene and Angela
+were finally alone.
+
+He now saw how, in spite of his fine theories, his previous experiences
+with Angela had deadened to an extent his joy in this occasion. He had
+her again it was true. His desire that he had thought of so keenly was
+to be gratified, but there was no mystery connected with it. His real
+nuptials had been celebrated at Blackwood months before. This was the
+commonplace of any marriage relation. It was intense and gratifying, but
+the original, wonderful mystery of unexplored character was absent. He
+eagerly took her in his arms, but there was more of crude desire than of
+awed delight in the whole proceeding.
+
+Nevertheless Angela was sweet to him. Hers was a loving disposition and
+Eugene was the be all and end all of her love. His figure was of heroic
+proportions to her. His talent was divine fire. No one could know as
+much as Eugene, of course! No one could be as artistic. True, he was not
+as practical as some men--her brothers and brothers-in-law, for
+instance--but he was a man of genius. Why should he be practical? She
+was beginning to think already of how thoroughly she would help him
+shape his life toward success--what a good wife she would be to him. Her
+training as a teacher, her experience as a buyer, her practical
+judgment, would help him so much. They spent the two hours before dinner
+in renewed transports and then dressed and made their public appearance.
+Angela had had designed a number of dresses for this occasion,
+representing the saving of years, and tonight at dinner she looked
+exceptionally pretty in a dress of black silk with neck piece and half
+sleeves of mother-of-pearl silk, set off with a decoration of seed
+pearls and black beads in set designs. Marietta, in a pale pink silk of
+peachblow softness of hue with short sleeves and a low cut bodice was,
+with all her youth and natural plumpness and gaiety of soul, ravishing.
+Now that she had Angela safely married, she was under no obligations to
+keep out of Eugene's way nor to modify her charms in order that her
+sister's might shine. She was particularly ebullient in her mood and
+Eugene could not help contrasting, even in this hour, the qualities of
+the two sisters. Marietta's smile, her humor, her unconscious courage,
+contrasted so markedly with Angela's quietness.
+
+The luxuries of the modern hotel have become the commonplaces of
+ordinary existence, but to the girls they were still strange enough to
+be impressive. To Angela they were a foretaste of what was to be an
+enduring higher life. These carpets, hangings, elevators, waiters,
+seemed in their shabby materialism to speak of superior things.
+
+One day in Buffalo, with a view of the magnificent falls at Niagara, and
+then came West Point with a dress parade accidentally provided for a
+visiting general and a ball for the cadets. Marietta, because of her
+charm and her brother's popularity, found herself so much in demand at
+West Point that she extended her stay to a week, leaving Eugene and
+Angela free to come to New York together and have a little time to
+themselves. They only stayed long enough to see Marietta safely housed
+and then came to the city and the apartment in Washington Square.
+
+It was dark when they arrived and Angela was impressed with the
+glittering galaxy of lights the city presented across the North River
+from Forty-second Street. She had no idea of the nature of the city, but
+as the cab at Eugene's request turned into Broadway at Forty-second
+Street and clattered with interrupted progress south to Fifth Avenue she
+had her first glimpse of that tawdry world which subsequently became
+known as the "Great White Way." Already its make-believe and inherent
+cheapness had come to seem to Eugene largely characteristic of the city
+and of life, but it still retained enough of the lure of the flesh and
+of clothes and of rush-light reputations to hold his attention. Here
+were dramatic critics and noted actors and actresses and chorus girls,
+the gods and toys of avid, inexperienced, unsatisfied wealth. He showed
+Angela the different theatres, called her attention to distinguished
+names; made much of restaurants and hotels and shops and stores that
+sell trifles and trash, and finally turned into lower Fifth Avenue,
+where the dignity of great houses and great conservative wealth still
+lingered. At Fourteenth Street Angela could already see Washington Arch
+glowing cream white in the glare of electric lights.
+
+"What is that?" she asked interestedly.
+
+"It's Washington Arch," he replied. "We live in sight of that on the
+south side of the Square."
+
+"Oh! but it is beautiful!" she exclaimed.
+
+It seemed very wonderful to her, and as they passed under it, and the
+whole Square spread out before her, it seemed a perfect world in which
+to live.
+
+"Is this where it is?" she asked, as they stopped in front of the studio
+building.
+
+"Yes, this is it. How do you like it?"
+
+"I think it's beautiful," she said.
+
+They went up the white stone steps of the old Bride house in which was
+Eugene's leased studio, up two flights of red-carpeted stairs and
+finally into the dark studio where he struck a match and lit, for the
+art of it, candles. A soft waxen glow irradiated the place as he
+proceeded and then Angela saw old Chippendale chairs, a Heppelwhite
+writing-table, a Flemish strong box containing used and unused drawings,
+the green stained fish-net studded with bits of looking glass in
+imitation of scales, a square, gold-framed mirror over the mantel, and
+one of Eugene's drawings--the three engines in the gray, lowering
+weather, standing large and impressive upon an easel. It seemed to
+Angela the perfection of beauty. She saw the difference now between the
+tawdry gorgeousness of a commonplace hotel and this selection and
+arrangement of individual taste. The glowing candelabrum of seven
+candles on either side of the square mirror surprised her deeply. The
+black walnut piano in the alcove behind the half draped net drew forth
+an exclamation of delight. "Oh, how lovely it all is!" she exclaimed and
+ran to Eugene to be kissed. He fondled her for a few minutes and then
+she left again to examine in detail pictures, pieces of furniture,
+ornaments of brass and copper.
+
+"When did you get all this?" she asked, for Eugene had not told her of
+his luck in finding the departing Dexter and leasing it for the rent of
+the studio and its care. He was lighting the fire in the grate which had
+been prepared by the house attendant.
+
+"Oh, it isn't mine," he replied easily. "I leased this from Russell
+Dexter. He's going to be in Europe until next winter. I thought that
+would be easier than waiting around to fix up a place after you came. We
+can get our things together next fall."
+
+He was thinking he would be able to have his exhibition in the spring,
+and perhaps that would bring some notable sales. Anyhow it might bring a
+few, increase his repute and give him a greater earning power.
+
+Angela's heart sank just a little but she recovered in a moment, for
+after all it was very exceptional even to be able to lease a place of
+this character. She went to the window and looked out. There was the
+great square with its four walls of houses, the spread of trees, still
+decorated with a few dusty leaves, and the dozens of arc lights
+sputtering their white radiance in between, the graceful arch, cream
+white over at the entrance of Fifth Avenue.
+
+"It's so beautiful," she exclaimed again, coming back to Eugene and
+putting her arms about him. "I didn't think it would be anything as fine
+as this. You're so good to me." She put up her lips and he kissed her,
+pinching her cheeks. Together they walked to the kitchen, the bedroom,
+the bathroom. Then after a time they blew out the candles and retired
+for the night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+After the quiet of a small town, the monotony and simplicity of country
+life, the dreary, reiterated weariness of teaching a country school,
+this new world into which Angela was plunged seemed to her astonished
+eyes to be compounded of little save beauties, curiosities and delights.
+The human senses, which weary so quickly of reiterated sensory
+impressions, exaggerate with equal readiness the beauty and charm of the
+unaccustomed. If it is new, therefore it must be better than that which
+we have had of old. The material details with which we are able to
+surround ourselves seem at times to remake our point of view. If we have
+been poor, wealth will seem temporarily to make us happy; when we have
+been amid elements and personages discordant to our thoughts, to be put
+among harmonious conditions seems, for the time being, to solve all our
+woes. So little do we have that interior peace which no material
+conditions can truly affect or disturb.
+
+When Angela awoke the next morning, this studio in which she was now to
+live seemed the most perfect habitation which could be devised by man.
+The artistry of the arrangement of the rooms, the charm of the
+conveniences--a bathroom with hot and cold water next to the bedroom; a
+kitchen with an array of necessary utensils. In the rear portion of the
+studio used as a dining-room a glimpse of the main studio gave her the
+sense of art which dealt with nature, the beauty of the human form,
+colors, tones--how different from teaching school. To her the difference
+between the long, low rambling house at Blackwood with its vine
+ornamented windows, its somewhat haphazard arrangement of flowers and
+its great lawn, and this peculiarly compact and ornate studio apartment
+looking out upon Washington Square, was all in favor of the latter. In
+Angela's judgment there was no comparison. She could not have understood
+if she could have seen into Eugene's mind at this time how her home
+town, her father's single farm, the blue waters of the little lake near
+her door, the shadows of the tall trees on her lawn were somehow,
+compounded for him not only with classic beauty itself, but with her own
+charm. When she was among these things she partook of their beauty and
+was made more beautiful thereby. She did not know how much she had lost
+in leaving them behind. To her all these older elements of her life were
+shabby and unimportant, pointless and to be neglected.
+
+This new world was in its way for her an Aladdin's cave of delight. When
+she looked out on the great square for the first time the next morning,
+seeing it bathed in sunlight, a dignified line of red brick dwellings to
+the north, a towering office building to the east, trucks, carts, cars
+and vehicles clattering over the pavement below, it all seemed gay with
+youth and energy.
+
+"We'll have to dress and go out to breakfast," said Eugene. "I didn't
+think to lay anything in. As a matter of fact I wouldn't have known what
+to buy if I had wanted to. I never tried housekeeping for myself."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Angela, fondling his hands, "only let's not
+go out to breakfast unless we have to. Let's see what's here," and she
+went back to the very small room devoted to cooking purposes to see what
+cooking utensils had been provided. She had been dreaming of
+housekeeping and cooking for Eugene, of petting and spoiling him, and
+now the opportunity had arrived. She found that Mr. Dexter, their
+generous lessor, had provided himself with many conveniences--breakfast
+and dinner sets of brown and blue porcelain, a coffee percolator, a
+charming dull blue teapot with cups to match, a chafing dish, a set of
+waffle irons, griddles, spiders, skillets, stew and roasting pans and
+knives and forks of steel and silver in abundance. Obviously he had
+entertained from time to time, for there were bread, cake, sugar, flour
+and salt boxes and a little chest containing, in small drawers, various
+spices.
+
+"Oh, it will be easy to get something here," said Angela, lighting the
+burners of the gas stove to see whether it was in good working order.
+"We can just go out to market if you'll come and show me once and get
+what we want. It won't take a minute. I'll know after that." Eugene
+consented gladly.
+
+She had always fancied she would be an ideal housekeeper and now that
+she had her Eugene she was anxious to begin. It would be such a pleasure
+to show him what a manager she was, how everything would go smoothly in
+her hands, how careful she would be of his earnings--their joint
+possessions.
+
+She was sorry, now that she saw that art was no great producer of
+wealth, that she had no money to bring him, but she knew that Eugene in
+the depth of his heart thought nothing of that. He was too impractical.
+He was a great artist, but when it came to practical affairs she felt
+instinctively that she was much the wiser. She had bought so long,
+calculated so well for her sisters and brothers.
+
+Out of her bag (for her trunks had not yet arrived) she extracted a neat
+house dress of pale green linen which she put on after she had done up
+her hair in a cosy coil, and together with Eugene for a temporary guide,
+they set forth to find the stores. He had told her, looking out the
+windows, that there were lines of Italian grocers, butchers and
+vegetable men in the side streets, leading south from the square, and
+into one of these they now ventured. The swarming, impressive life of
+the street almost took her breath away, it was so crowded. Potatoes,
+tomatoes, eggs, flour, butter, lamb chops, salt--a dozen little
+accessories were all purchased in small quantities, and then they
+eagerly returned to the studio. Angela was a little disgusted with the
+appearance of some of the stores, but some of them were clean enough. It
+seemed so strange to her to be buying in an Italian street, with Italian
+women and children about, their swarthy leathern faces set with bright,
+almost feverish eyes. Eugene in his brown corduroy suit and soft green
+hat, watching and commenting at her side, presented such a contrast. He
+was so tall, so exceptional, so laconic.
+
+"I like them when they wear rings in their ears," he said at one time.
+
+"Get the coal man who looks like a bandit," he observed at another.
+
+"This old woman here might do for the witch of Endor."
+
+Angela attended strictly to her marketing. She was gay and smiling, but
+practical. She was busy wondering in what quantities she should buy
+things, how she would keep fresh vegetables, whether the ice box was
+really clean; how much delicate dusting the various objects in the
+studio would require. The raw brick walls of the street, the dirt and
+slops in the gutter, the stray cats and dogs hungry and lean, the
+swarming stream of people, did not appeal to her as picturesque at all.
+Only when she heard Eugene expatiating gravely did she begin to realize
+that all this must have artistic significance. If Eugene said so it did.
+But it was a fascinating world whatever it was, and it was obvious that
+she was going to be very, very happy.
+
+There was a breakfast in the studio then of hot biscuit with fresh
+butter, an omelette with tomatoes, potatoes stewed in cream, and coffee.
+After the long period of commonplace restaurant dining which Eugene had
+endured, this seemed ideal. To sit in your own private apartment with a
+charming wife opposite you ready to render you any service, and with an
+array of food before you which revived the finest memories in your
+gustatory experience, seemed perfect. Nothing could be better. He saw
+visions of a happy future if he could finance this sort of thing. It
+would require a lot of money, more than he had been making, but he
+thought he could make out. After breakfast Angela played on the piano,
+and then, Eugene wanting to work, she started housekeeping in earnest.
+The trunks arriving gave her the task of unpacking and with that and
+lunch and dinner to say nothing of love she had sufficient to do.
+
+It was a charming existence for a little while. Eugene suggested that
+they should have Smite and MacHugh to dinner first of all, these being
+his closest friends. Angela agreed heartily for she was only too anxious
+to meet the people he knew. She wanted to show him she knew how to
+receive and entertain as well as anyone. She made great preparations for
+the Wednesday evening following--the night fixed for the dinner--and
+when it came was on the qui vive to see what his friends were like and
+what they would think of her.
+
+The occasion passed off smoothly enough and was the occasion of
+considerable jollity. These two cheerful worthies were greatly impressed
+with the studio. They were quick to praise it before Angela, and to
+congratulate him on his good fortune in having married her. Angela, in
+the same dress in which she had appeared at dinner in Buffalo, was
+impressive. Her mass of yellow hair fascinated the gaze of both Smite
+and MacHugh.
+
+"Gee, what hair!" Smite observed secretly to MacHugh when neither Angela
+nor Eugene were within hearing distance.
+
+"You're right," returned MacHugh. "She's not at all bad looking, is
+she?"
+
+"I should say not," returned Smite who admired Angela's simple,
+good-natured western manners. A little later, more subtly, they
+expressed their admiration to her, and she was greatly pleased.
+
+Marietta, who had arrived late that afternoon, had not made her
+appearance yet. She was in the one available studio bedroom making her
+toilet. Angela, in spite of her fine raiment, was busy superintending
+the cooking, for although through the janitor she had managed to
+negotiate the loan of a girl to serve, she could not get anyone to cook.
+A soup, a fish, a chicken and a salad, were the order of procedure.
+Marietta finally appeared, ravishing in pink silk. Both Smite and
+MacHugh sat up and Marietta proceeded to bewitch them. Marietta knew no
+order or distinctions in men. They were all slaves to her--victims to be
+stuck on the spit of her beauty and broiled in their amorous
+uncertainties at her leisure. In after years Eugene learned to speak of
+Marietta's smile as "the dagger." The moment she appeared smiling he
+would say, "Ah, we have it out again, have we? Who gets the blade this
+evening? Poor victim!"
+
+Being her brother-in-law now, he was free to slip his arm about her
+waist and she took this family connection as license to kiss him. There
+was something about Eugene which held her always. During these very
+first days she gratified her desire to be in his arms, but always with a
+sense of reserve which kept him in check. She wondered secretly how much
+he liked her.
+
+Smite and MacHugh, when she appeared, both rose to do her service.
+MacHugh offered her his chair by the fire. Smite bestirred himself in an
+aimless fashion.
+
+"I've just had such a dandy week up at West Point," began Marietta
+cheerfully, "dancing, seeing dress parades, walking with the soldier
+boys."
+
+"I warn you two, here and now," began Eugene, who had already learned to
+tease Marietta, "that you're not safe. This woman here is dangerous. As
+artists in good standing you had better look out for yourselves."
+
+"Oh, Eugene, how you talk," laughed Marietta, her teeth showing
+effectively. "Mr. Smite, I leave it to you. Isn't that a mean way to
+introduce a sister-in-law? I'm here for just a few days too, and have so
+little time. I think it cruel!"
+
+"It's a shame!" said Smite, who was plainly a willing victim. "You ought
+to have another kind of brother-in-law. If you had some people I know
+now--"
+
+"It's an outrage," commented MacHugh. "There's one thing though. You may
+not require so very much time."
+
+"Now I think that's ungallant," Marietta laughed. "I see I'm all alone
+here except for Mr. Smite. Never mind. You all will be sorry when I'm
+gone."
+
+"I believe that," replied MacHugh, feelingly.
+
+Smite simply stared. He was lost in admiration of her cream and peach
+complexion, her fluffy, silky brown hair, her bright blue eyes and plump
+rounded arms. Such radiant good nature would be heavenly to live with.
+He wondered what sort of a family this was that Eugene had become
+connected with. Angela, Marietta, a brother at West Point. They must be
+nice, conservative, well-to-do western people. Marietta went to help her
+sister, and Smite, in the absence of Eugene, said: "Say, he's in right,
+isn't he? She's a peach. She's got it a little on her sister."
+
+MacHugh merely stared at the room. He was taken with the complexion and
+arrangement of things generally. The old furniture, the rugs, the
+hangings, the pictures, Eugene's borrowed maid servant in a white apron
+and cap, Angela, Marietta, the bright table set with colored china and
+an arrangement of silver candlesticks--Eugene had certainly changed the
+tenor of his life radically within the last ten days. Why he was
+marvellously fortunate. This studio was a wonderful piece of luck. Some
+people--and he shook his head meditatively.
+
+"Well," said Eugene, coming back after some final touches to his
+appearance, "what do you think of it, Peter?"
+
+"You're certainly moving along, Eugene. I never expected to see it. You
+ought to praise God. You're plain lucky."
+
+Eugene smiled enigmatically. He was wondering whether he was. Neither
+Smite nor MacHugh nor anyone could dream of the conditions under which
+this came about. What a sham the world was anyhow. It's surface
+appearances so ridiculously deceptive! If anyone had known of the
+apparent necessity when he first started to look for an apartment, of
+his own mood toward it!
+
+Marietta came back, and Angela. The latter had taken kindly to both
+these men, or boys as she already considered them. Eugene had a talent
+for reducing everybody to "simply folks," as he called them. So these
+two capable and talented men were mere country boys like himself--and
+Angela caught his attitude.
+
+"I'd like to have you let me make a sketch of you some day, Mrs. Witla,"
+MacHugh said to Angela when she came back to the fire. He was essaying
+portraiture as a side line and he was anxious for good opportunities to
+practice.
+
+Angela thrilled at the invitation, and the use of her new name,
+Mrs. Witla, by Eugene's old friends.
+
+"I'd be delighted," she replied, flushing.
+
+"My word, you look nice, Angel-Face," exclaimed Marietta, catching her
+about the waist. "You paint her with her hair down in braids,
+Mr. MacHugh. She makes a stunning Gretchen."
+
+Angela flushed anew.
+
+"I've been reserving that for myself, Peter," said Eugene, "but you try
+your hand at it. I'm not much in portraiture anyhow."
+
+Smite smiled at Marietta. He wished he could paint her, but he was poor
+at figure work except as incidental characters in sea scenes. He could
+do men better than he could women.
+
+"If you were an old sea captain now, Miss Blue," he said to Marietta
+gallantly, "I could make a striking thing out of you."
+
+"I'll try to be, if you want to paint me," she replied gaily. "I'd look
+fine in a big pair of boots and a raincoat, wouldn't I, Eugene?"
+
+"You certainly would, if I'm any judge," replied Smite. "Come over to
+the studio and I'll rig you out. I have all those things on hand."
+
+"I will," she replied, laughing. "You just say the word."
+
+MacHugh felt as if Smite were stealing a march on him. He wanted to be
+nice to Marietta, to have her take an interest in him.
+
+"Now, looky, Joseph," he protested. "I was going to suggest making a
+study of Miss Blue myself."
+
+"Well, you're too late," replied Smite. "You didn't speak quick enough."
+
+Marietta was greatly impressed with this atmosphere in which Angela and
+Eugene were living. She expected to see something artistic, but nothing
+so nice as this particular studio. Angela explained to her that Eugene
+did not own it, but that made small difference in Marietta's estimate of
+its significance. Eugene had it. His art and social connections brought
+it about. They were beginning excellently well. If she could have as
+nice a home when she started on her married career she would be
+satisfied.
+
+They sat down about the round teak table which was one of Dexter's
+prized possessions, and were served by Angela's borrowed maid. The
+conversation was light and for the most part pointless, serving only to
+familiarize these people with each other. Both Angela and Marietta were
+taken with the two artists because they felt in them a note of homely
+conservatism. These men spoke easily and naturally of the trials and
+triumphs of art life, and the difficulty of making a good living, and
+seemed to be at home with personages of repute in one world and another,
+its greatest reward.
+
+During the dinner Smite narrated experiences in his sea-faring life, and
+MacHugh of his mountain camping experiences in the West. Marietta
+described experiences with her beaux in Wisconsin and characteristics of
+her yokel neighbors at Blackwood, Angela joining in. Finally MacHugh
+drew a pencil sketch of Marietta followed by a long train of admiring
+yokels, her eyes turned up in a very shy, deceptive manner.
+
+"Now I think that's cruel," she declared, when Eugene laughed heartily.
+"I never look like that."
+
+"That's just the way you look and do," he declared. "You're the broad
+and flowery path that leadeth to destruction."
+
+"Never mind, Babyette," put in Angela, "I'll take your part if no one
+else will. You're a nice, demure, shrinking girl and you wouldn't look
+at anyone, would you?"
+
+Angela got up and was holding Marietta's head mock sympathetically in
+her arms.
+
+"Say, that's a dandy pet name," called Smite, moved by Marietta's
+beauty.
+
+"Poor Marietta," observed Eugene. "Come over here to me and I'll
+sympathize with you."
+
+"You don't take my drawing in the right spirit, Miss Blue," put in
+MacHugh cheerfully. "It's simply to show how popular you are."
+
+Angela stood beside Eugene as her guests departed, her slender arm about
+his waist. Marietta was coquetting finally with MacHugh. These two
+friends of his, thought Eugene, had the privilege of singleness to be
+gay and alluring to her. With him that was over now. He could not be
+that way to any girl any more. He had to behave--be calm and
+circumspect. It cut him, this thought. He saw at once it was not in
+accord with his nature. He wanted to do just as he had always done--make
+love to Marietta if she would let him, but he could not. He walked to
+the fire when the studio door was closed.
+
+"They're such nice boys," exclaimed Marietta. "I think Mr. MacHugh is as
+funny as he can be. He has such droll wit."
+
+"Smite is nice too," replied Eugene defensively.
+
+"They're both lovely--just lovely," returned Marietta.
+
+"I like Mr. MacHugh a little the best--he's quainter," said Angela, "but
+I think Mr. Smite is just as nice as he can be. He's so old fashioned.
+There's not anyone as nice as my Eugene, though," she said
+affectionately, putting her arm about him.
+
+"Oh, dear, you two!" exclaimed Marietta. "Well, I'm going to bed."
+
+Eugene sighed.
+
+They had arranged a couch for her which could be put behind the
+silver-spangled fish net in the alcove when company was gone.
+
+Eugene thought what a pity that already this affection of Angela's was
+old to him. It was not as it would be if he had taken Marietta or
+Christina. They went to their bed room to retire and then he saw that
+all he had was passion. Must he be satisfied with that? Could he be? It
+started a chain of thought which, while persistently interrupted or
+befogged, was really never broken. Momentary sympathy, desire,
+admiration, might obscure it, but always fundamentally it was there. He
+had made a mistake. He had put his head in a noose. He had subjected
+himself to conditions which he did not sincerely approve of. How was he
+going to remedy this--or could it ever be remedied?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Whatever were Eugene's secret thoughts, he began his married life with
+the outward air of one who takes it seriously enough. Now that he was
+married, was actually bound by legal ties, he felt that he might as well
+make the best of it. He had once had the notion that it might be
+possible to say nothing of his marriage, and keep Angela in the
+background, but this notion had been dispelled by the attitude of
+MacHugh and Smite, to say nothing of Angela. So he began to consider the
+necessity of notifying his friends--Miriam Finch and Norma Whitmore and
+possibly Christina Channing, when she should return. These three women
+offered the largest difficulty to his mind. He felt the commentary which
+their personalities represented. What would they think of him? What of
+Angela? Now that she was right here in the city he could see that she
+represented a different order of thought. He had opened the campaign by
+suggesting that they invite Smite and MacHugh. The thing to do now was
+to go further in this matter.
+
+The one thing that troubled him was the thought of breaking the news to
+Miriam Finch, for Christina Channing was away, and Norma Whitmore was
+not of sufficient importance. He argued now that he should have done
+this beforehand, but having neglected that it behoved him to act at
+once. He did so, finally, writing to Norma Whitmore and saying, for he
+had no long explanation to make--"Yours truly is married. May I bring my
+wife up to see you?" Miss Whitmore was truly taken by surprise. She was
+sorry at first--very--because Eugene interested her greatly and she was
+afraid he would make a mistake in his marriage; but she hastened to make
+the best of a bad turn on the part of fate and wrote a note which ran as
+follows:
+
+"Dear Eugene and Eugene's Wife:
+
+"This is news as is news. Congratulations. And I am coming right down as
+soon as I get my breath. And then you two must come to see me.
+
+   "Norma Whitmore."
+
+Eugene was pleased and grateful that she took it so nicely, but Angela
+was the least big chagrined secretly that he had not told her before.
+Why hadn't he? Was this someone that he was interested in? Those three
+years in which she had doubtingly waited for Eugene had whetted her
+suspicions and nurtured her fears. Still she tried to make little of it
+and to put on an air of joyousness. She would be so glad to meet Miss
+Whitmore. Eugene told her how kind she had been to him, how much she
+admired his art, how helpful she was in bringing together young literary
+and artistic people and how influential with those who counted. She
+could do him many a good turn. Angela listened patiently, but she was
+just the least bit resentful that he should think so much of any one
+woman outside of herself. Why should he, Eugene Witla, be dependent on
+the favor of any woman? Of course she must be very nice and they would
+be good friends, but--
+
+Norma came one afternoon two days later with the atmosphere of
+enthusiasm trailing, as it seemed to Eugene, like a cloud of glory about
+her. She was both fire and strength to him in her regard and sympathy,
+even though she resented, ever so slightly, his affectional desertion.
+
+"You piggy-wiggy Eugene Witla," she exclaimed. "What do you mean by
+running off and getting married and never saying a word. I never even
+had a chance to get you a present and now I have to bring it. Isn't this
+a charming place--why it's perfectly delightful," and as she laid her
+present down unopened she looked about to see where Mrs. Eugene Witla
+might be.
+
+Angela was in the bedroom finishing her toilet. She was expecting this
+descent and so was prepared, being suitably dressed in the light green
+house gown. When she heard Miss Whitmore's familiar mode of address she
+winced, for this spoke volumes for a boon companionship of long
+endurance. Eugene hadn't said so much of Miss Whitmore in the past as he
+had recently, but she could see that they were very intimate. She looked
+out and saw her--this tall, not very shapely, but graceful woman, whose
+whole being represented dynamic energy, awareness, subtlety of
+perception. Eugene was shaking her hand and looking genially into her
+face.
+
+"Why should Eugene like her so much?" she asked herself instantly. "Why
+did his face shine with that light of intense enthusiasm?" The
+"piggy-wiggy Eugene Witla" expression irritated her. It sounded as
+though she might be in love with him. She came out after a moment with a
+glad smile on her face and approached with every show of good feeling,
+but Miss Whitmore could sense opposition.
+
+"So this is Mrs. Witla," she exclaimed, kissing her. "I'm delighted to
+know you. I have always wondered what sort of a girl Mr. Witla would
+marry. You'll just have to pardon my calling him Eugene. I'll get over
+it after a bit, I suppose, now that he's married. But we've been such
+good friends and I admire his work so much. How do you like studio
+life--or are you used to it?"
+
+Angela, who was taking in every detail of Eugene's old friend, replied
+in what seemed an affected tone that no, she wasn't used to studio life:
+she was just from the country, you know--a regular farmer
+girl--Blackwood, Wisconsin, no less! She stopped to let Norma express
+friendly surprise, and then went on to say that she supposed Eugene had
+not said very much about her, but he wrote her often enough. She was
+rejoicing in the fact that whatever slight Eugene's previous silence
+seemed to put upon her, she had the satisfaction that she had won him
+after all and Miss Whitmore had not. She fancied from Miss Whitmore's
+enthusiastic attitude that she must like Eugene very much, and she could
+see now what sort of women might have made him wish to delay. Who were
+the others, she wondered?
+
+They talked of metropolitan experiences generally. Marietta came in from
+a shopping expedition with a Mrs. Link, wife of an army captain acting
+as an instructor at West Point, and tea was served immediately
+afterward. Miss Whitmore was insistent that they should come and take
+dinner with her some evening. Eugene confided that he was sending a
+painting to the Academy.
+
+"They'll hang it, of course," assured Norma, "but you ought to have an
+exhibition of your own."
+
+Marietta gushed about the wonder of the big stores and so it finally
+came time for Miss Whitmore to go.
+
+"Now you will come up, won't you?" she said to Angela, for in spite of a
+certain feeling of incompatibility and difference she was determined to
+like her. She thought Angela a little inexperienced and presumptuous in
+marrying Eugene. She was afraid she was not up to his standard. Still
+she was quaint, piquant. Perhaps she would do very well. Angela was
+thinking all the while that Miss Whitmore was presuming on her old
+acquaintance with Eugene--that she was too affected and enthusiastic.
+
+There was another day on which Miriam Finch called. Richard Wheeler,
+having learned at Smite's and MacHugh's studio of Eugene's marriage and
+present whereabouts, had hurried over, and then immediately afterwards
+off to Miriam Finch's studio. Surprised himself, he knew that she would
+be more so.
+
+"Witla's married!" he exclaimed, bursting into her room, and for the
+moment Miriam lost her self-possession sufficiently to reply almost
+dramatically: "Richard Wheeler, what are you talking about! You don't
+mean that, do you?"
+
+"He's married," insisted Wheeler, "and he's living down in Washington
+Square, 61 is the number. He has the cutest yellow-haired wife you ever
+saw."
+
+Angela had been nice to Wheeler and he liked her. He liked the air of
+this domicile and thought it was going to be a good thing for Eugene. He
+needed to settle down and work hard.
+
+Miriam winced mentally at the picture. She was hurt by this deception of
+Eugene's, chagrined because he had not thought enough of her even to
+indicate that he was going to get married.
+
+"He's been married ten days," communicated Wheeler, and this added force
+to her temporary chagrin. The fact that Angela was yellow-haired and
+cute was also disturbing.
+
+"Well," she finally exclaimed cheerfully, "he might have said something
+to us, mightn't he?" and she covered her own original confusion by a gay
+nonchalance which showed nothing of what she was really thinking. This
+was certainly indifference on Eugene's part, and yet, why shouldn't he?
+He had never proposed to her. Still they had been so intimate mentally.
+
+She was interested to see Angela. She wondered what sort of a woman she
+really was. "Yellow-haired! Cute!" Of course, like all men, Eugene had
+sacrificed intellect and mental charm for a dainty form and a pretty
+face. It seemed queer, but she had fancied that he would not do
+that--that his wife, if he ever took one, would be tall perhaps, and
+gracious, and of a beautiful mind--someone distinguished. Why would men,
+intellectual men, artistic men, any kind of men, invariably make fools
+of themselves! Well, she would go and see her.
+
+Because Wheeler informed him that he had told Miriam, Eugene wrote,
+saying as briefly as possible that he was married and that he wanted to
+bring Angela to her studio. For reply she came herself, gay, smiling,
+immaculately dressed, anxious to hurt Angela because she had proved the
+victor. She also wanted to show Eugene how little difference it all made
+to her.
+
+"You certainly are a secretive young man, Mr. Eugene Witla," she
+exclaimed, when she saw him. "Why didn't you make him tell us,
+Mrs. Witla?" she demanded archly of Angela, but with a secret dagger
+thrust in her eyes. "You'd think he didn't want us to know."
+
+Angela cowered beneath the sting of this whip cord. Miriam made her feel
+as though Eugene had attempted to conceal his relationship to her--as
+though he was ashamed of her. How many more women were there like Miriam
+and Norma Whitmore?
+
+Eugene was gaily unconscious of the real animus in Miriam's
+conversation, and now that the first cruel moment was over, was talking
+glibly of things in general, anxious to make everything seem as simple
+and natural as possible. He was working at one of his pictures when
+Miriam came in and was eager to obtain her critical opinion, since it
+was nearly done. She squinted at it narrowly but said nothing when he
+asked. Ordinarily she would have applauded it vigorously. She did think
+it exceptional, but was determined to say nothing. She walked
+indifferently about, examining this and that object in a superior way,
+asking how he came to obtain the studio, congratulating him upon his
+good luck. Angela, she decided, was interesting, but not in Eugene's
+class mentally, and should be ignored. He had made a mistake, that was
+plain.
+
+"Now you must bring Mrs. Witla up to see me," she said on leaving. "I'll
+play and sing all my latest songs for you. I have made some of the
+daintest discoveries in old Italian and Spanish pieces."
+
+Angela, who had posed to Eugene as knowing something about music,
+resented this superior invitation, without inquiry as to her own
+possible ability or taste, as she did Miriam's entire attitude. Why was
+she so haughty--so superior? What was it to her whether Eugene had said
+anything about her or not?
+
+She said nothing to show that she herself played, but she wondered that
+Eugene said nothing. It seemed neglectful and inconsiderate of him. He
+was busy wondering what Miriam thought of his picture. Miriam took his
+hand warmly at parting, looked cheerfully into his eyes, and said, "I
+know you two are going to be irrationally happy," and went out.
+
+Eugene felt the irritation at last. He knew Angela felt something.
+Miriam was resentful, that was it. She was angry at him for his seeming
+indifference. She had commented to herself on Angela's appearance and to
+her disadvantage. In her manner had been the statement that his wife was
+not very important after all, not of the artistic and superior world to
+which she and he belonged.
+
+"How do you like her?" he asked tentatively after she had gone, feeling
+a strong current of opposition, but not knowing on what it might be
+based exactly.
+
+"I don't like her," returned Angela petulantly. "She thinks she's sweet.
+She treats you as though she thought you were her personal property. She
+openly insulted me about your not telling her. Miss Whitmore did the
+same thing--they all do! They all will! Oh!!"
+
+She suddenly burst into tears and ran crying toward their bedroom.
+
+Eugene followed, astonished, ashamed, rebuked, guilty minded, almost
+terror-stricken--he hardly knew what.
+
+"Why, Angela," he urged pleadingly, leaning over her and attempting to
+raise her. "You know that isn't true."
+
+"It is! It is!!" she insisted. "Don't touch me! Don't come near me! You
+know it is true! You don't love me. You haven't treated me right at all
+since I've been here. You haven't done anything that you should have
+done. She insulted me openly to my face."
+
+She was speaking with sobs, and Eugene was at once pained and terrorized
+by the persistent and unexpected display of emotion. He had never seen
+Angela like this before. He had never seen any woman so.
+
+"Why, Angelface," he urged, "how can you go on like this? You know what
+you say isn't true. What have I done?"
+
+"You haven't told your friends--that's what you haven't done," she
+exclaimed between gasps. "They still think you're single. You keep me
+here hidden in the background as though I were a--were a--I don't know
+what! Your friends come and insult me openly to my face. They do! They
+do! Oh!" and she sobbed anew.
+
+She knew very well what she was doing in her anger and rage. She felt
+that she was acting in the right way. Eugene needed a severe reproof; he
+had acted very badly, and this was the way to administer it to him now
+in the beginning. His conduct was indefensible, and only the fact that
+he was an artist, immersed in cloudy artistic thoughts and not really
+subject to the ordinary conventions of life, saved him in her
+estimation. It didn't matter that she had urged him to marry her. It
+didn't absolve him that he had done so. She thought he owed her that.
+Anyhow they were married now, and he should do the proper thing.
+
+Eugene stood there cut as with a knife by this terrific charge. He had
+not meant anything by concealing her presence, he thought. He had only
+endeavored to protect himself very slightly, temporarily.
+
+"You oughtn't to say that, Angela," he pleaded. "There aren't any more
+that don't know--at least any more that I care anything about. I didn't
+think. I didn't mean to conceal anything. I'll write to everybody that
+might be interested."
+
+He still felt hurt that she should brutally attack him this way even in
+her sorrow. He was wrong, no doubt, but she? Was this a way to act, this
+the nature of true love? He mentally writhed and twisted.
+
+Taking her up in his arms, smoothing her hair, he asked her to forgive
+him. Finally, when she thought she had punished him enough, and that he
+was truly sorry and would make amends in the future, she pretended to
+listen and then of a sudden threw her arms about his neck and began to
+hug and kiss him. Passion, of course, was the end of this, but the whole
+thing left a disagreeable taste in Eugene's mouth. He did not like
+scenes. He preferred the lofty indifference of Miriam, the gay
+subterfuge of Norma, the supreme stoicism of Christina Channing. This
+noisy, tempestuous, angry emotion was not quite the thing to have
+introduced into his life. He did not see how that would make for love
+between them.
+
+Still Angela was sweet, he thought. She was a little girl--not as wise
+as Norma Whitmore, not as self-protective as Miriam Finch or Christina
+Channing. Perhaps after all she needed his care and affection. Maybe it
+was best for her and for him that he had married her.
+
+So thinking he rocked her in his arms, and Angela, lying there, was
+satisfied. She had won a most important victory. She was starting right.
+She was starting Eugene right. She would get the moral, mental and
+emotional upper hand of him and keep it. Then these women, who thought
+themselves so superior, could go their way. She would have Eugene and he
+would be a great man and she would be his wife. That was all she wanted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The result of Angela's outburst was that Eugene hastened to notify those
+whom he had not already informed--Shotmeyer, his father and mother,
+Sylvia, Myrtle, Hudson Dula--and received in return cards and letters of
+congratulation expressing surprise and interest, which he presented to
+Angela in a conciliatory spirit. She realized, after it was all over,
+that she had given him an unpleasant shock, and was anxious to make up
+to him in personal affection what she had apparently compelled him to
+suffer for policy's sake. Eugene did not know that in Angela, despite
+her smallness of body and what seemed to him her babyishness of spirit,
+he had to deal with a thinking woman who was quite wise as to ways and
+means of handling her personal affairs. She was, of course, whirled in
+the maelstrom of her affection for Eugene and this was confusing, and
+she did not understand the emotional and philosophic reaches of his
+mind; but she did understand instinctively what made for a stable
+relationship between husband and wife and between any married couple and
+the world. To her the utterance of the marriage vow meant just what it
+said, that they would cleave each to the other; there should be
+henceforth no thoughts, feelings, or emotions, and decidedly no actions
+which would not conform with the letter and the spirit of the marriage
+vow.
+
+Eugene had sensed something of this, but not accurately or completely.
+He did not correctly estimate either the courage or the rigidity of her
+beliefs and convictions. He thought that her character might possibly
+partake of some of his own easy tolerance and good nature. She must know
+that people--men particularly--were more or less unstable in their
+make-up. Life could not be governed by hard and fast rules. Why,
+everybody knew that. You might try, and should hold yourself in check as
+much as possible for the sake of self-preservation and social
+appearances, but if you erred--and you might easily--it was no crime.
+Certainly it was no crime to look at another woman longingly. If you
+went astray, overbalanced by your desires, wasn't it after all in the
+scheme of things? Did we make our desires? Certainly we did not, and if
+we did not succeed completely in controlling them--well--
+
+The drift of life into which they now settled was interesting enough,
+though for Eugene it was complicated with the thought of possible
+failure, for he was, as might well be expected of such a temperament, of
+a worrying nature, and inclined, in his hours of ordinary effort, to
+look on the dark side of things. The fact that he had married Angela
+against his will, the fact that he had no definite art connections which
+produced him as yet anything more than two thousand dollars a year, the
+fact that he had assumed financial obligations which doubled the cost of
+food, clothing, entertainment, and rent--for their studio was costing
+him thirty dollars more than had his share of the Smite-MacHugh
+chambers--weighed on him. The dinner which he had given to Smite and
+MacHugh had cost about eight dollars over and above the ordinary
+expenses of the week. Others of a similar character would cost as much
+and more. He would have to take Angela to the theatre occasionally.
+There would be the need of furnishing a new studio the following fall,
+unless another such windfall as this manifested itself. Although Angela
+had equipped herself with a varied and serviceable trousseau, her
+clothes would not last forever. Odd necessities began to crop up not
+long after they were married, and he began to see that if they lived
+with anything like the freedom and care with which he had before he was
+married, his income would have to be larger and surer.
+
+The energy which these thoughts provoked was not without result. For one
+thing he sent the original of the East Side picture, "Six O'clock" to
+the American Academy of Design exhibition--a thing which he might have
+done long before but failed to do.
+
+Angela had heard from Eugene that the National Academy of Design was a
+forum for the display of art to which the public was invited or admitted
+for a charge. To have a picture accepted by this society and hung on the
+line was in its way a mark of merit and approval, though Eugene did not
+think very highly of it. All the pictures were judged by a jury of
+artists which decided whether they should be admitted or rejected, and
+if admitted whether they should be given a place of honor or hung in
+some inconspicuous position. To be hung "on the line" was to have your
+picture placed in the lower tier where the light was excellent and the
+public could get a good view of it. Eugene had thought the first two
+years he was in New York that he was really not sufficiently experienced
+or meritorious, and the previous year he had thought that he would hoard
+all that he was doing for his first appearance in some exhibition of his
+own, thinking the National Academy commonplace and retrogressive. The
+exhibitions he had seen thus far had been full of commonplace,
+dead-and-alive stuff, he thought. It was no great honor to be admitted
+to such a collection. Now, because MacHugh was trying, and because he
+had accumulated nearly enough pictures for exhibition at a private
+gallery which he hoped to interest, he was anxious to see what the
+standard body of American artists thought of his work. They might reject
+him. If so that would merely prove that they did not recognize a radical
+departure from accepted methods and subject matter as art. The
+impressionists, he understood, were being so ignored. Later they would
+accept him. If he were admitted it would simply mean that they knew
+better than he believed they did.
+
+"I believe I will do it," he said; "I'd like to know what they think of
+my stuff anyhow."
+
+The picture was sent as he had planned, and to his immense satisfaction
+it was accepted and hung. It did not, for some reason, attract as much
+attention as it might, but it was not without its modicum of praise.
+Owen Overman, the poet, met him in the general reception entrance of the
+Academy on the opening night, and congratulated him sincerely. "I
+remember seeing that in _Truth_," he said, "but it's much better in the
+original. It's fine. You ought to do a lot of those things."
+
+"I am," replied Eugene. "I expect to have a show of my own one of these
+days."
+
+He called Angela, who had wandered away to look at a piece of statuary,
+and introduced her.
+
+"I was just telling your husband how much I like his picture," Overman
+informed her.
+
+Angela was flattered that her husband was so much of a personage that he
+could have his picture hung in a great exhibition such as this, with its
+walls crowded with what seemed to her magnificent canvases, and its
+rooms filled with important and distinguished people. As they strolled
+about Eugene pointed out to her this well known artist and that writer,
+saying almost always that they were very able. He knew three or four of
+the celebrated collectors, prize givers, and art patrons by sight, and
+told Angela who they were. There were a number of striking looking
+models present whom Eugene knew either by reputation, whispered comment
+of friends, or personally--Zelma Desmond, who had posed for Eugene,
+Hedda Anderson, Anna Magruder and Laura Matthewson among others. Angela
+was struck and in a way taken by the dash and beauty of these girls.
+They carried themselves with an air of personal freedom and courage
+which surprised her. Hedda Anderson was bold in her appearance but
+immensely smart. Her manner seemed to comment on the ordinary woman as
+being indifferent and not worth while. She looked at Angela walking with
+Eugene and wondered who she was.
+
+"Isn't she striking," observed Angela, not knowing she was anyone whom
+Eugene knew.
+
+"I know her well," he replied; "she's a model."
+
+Just then Miss Anderson in return for his nod gave him a fetching smile.
+Angela chilled.
+
+Elizabeth Stein passed by and he nodded to her.
+
+"Who is she?" asked Angela.
+
+"She's a socialist agitator and radical. She sometimes speaks from a
+soap-box on the East Side."
+
+Angela studied her carefully. Her waxen complexion, smooth black hair
+laid in even plaits over her forehead, her straight, thin, chiseled
+nose, even red lips and low forehead indicated a daring and subtle soul.
+Angela did not understand her. She could not understand a girl as good
+looking as that doing any such thing as Eugene said, and yet she had a
+bold, rather free and easy air. She thought Eugene certainly knew
+strange people. He introduced to her William McConnell, Hudson Dula, who
+had not yet been to see them, Jan Jansen, Louis Deesa, Leonard Baker and
+Paynter Stone.
+
+In regard to Eugene's picture the papers, with one exception, had
+nothing to say, but this one in both Eugene's and Angela's minds made up
+for all the others. It was the _Evening Sun_, a most excellent medium
+for art opinion, and it was very definite in its conclusions in regard
+to this particular work. The statement was:
+
+"A new painter, Eugene Witla, has an oil entitled 'Six O'clock' which
+for directness, virility, sympathy, faithfulness to detail and what for
+want of a better term we may call totality of spirit, is quite the best
+thing in the exhibition. It looks rather out of place surrounded by the
+weak and spindling interpretations of scenery and water which so readily
+find a place in the exhibition of the Academy, but it is none the weaker
+for that. The artist has a new, crude, raw and almost rough method, but
+his picture seems to say quite clearly what he sees and feels. He may
+have to wait--if this is not a single burst of ability--but he will have
+a hearing. There is no question of that. Eugene Witla is an artist."
+
+Eugene thrilled when he read this commentary. It was quite what he would
+have said himself if he had dared. Angela was beside herself with joy.
+Who was the critic who had said this, they wondered? What was he like?
+He must be truly an intellectual personage. Eugene wanted to go and look
+him up. If one saw his talent now, others would see it later. It was for
+this reason--though the picture subsequently came back to him unsold,
+and unmentioned so far as merit or prizes were concerned--that he
+decided to try for an exhibition of his own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+The hope of fame--what hours of speculation, what pulses of enthusiasm,
+what fevers of effort, are based on that peculiarly subtle illusion! It
+is yet the lure, the ignis fatuus of almost every breathing heart. In
+the young particularly it burns with the sweetness and perfume of spring
+fires. Then most of all does there seem substantial reality in the
+shadow of fame--those deep, beautiful illusions which tremendous figures
+throw over the world. Attainable, it seems, must be the peace and plenty
+and sweet content of fame--that glamour of achievement that never was on
+sea or land. Fame partakes of the beauty and freshness of the morning.
+It has in it the odour of the rose, the feel of rich satin, the color of
+the cheeks of youth. If we could but be famous when we dream of fame,
+and not when locks are tinged with grey, faces seamed with the lines
+that speak of past struggles, and eyes wearied with the tensity, the
+longings and the despairs of years! To bestride the world in the morning
+of life, to walk amid the plaudits and the huzzahs when love and faith
+are young; to feel youth and the world's affection when youth and health
+are sweet--what dream is that, of pure sunlight and moonlight
+compounded. A sun-kissed breath of mist in the sky; the reflection of
+moonlight upon water; the remembrance of dreams to the waking mind--of
+such is fame in our youth, and never afterward.
+
+By such an illusion was Eugene's mind possessed. He had no conception of
+what life would bring him for his efforts. He thought if he could have
+his pictures hung in a Fifth Avenue gallery much as he had seen
+Bouguereau's "Venus" in Chicago, with people coming as he had come on
+that occasion--it would be of great comfort and satisfaction to him. If
+he could paint something which would be purchased by the Metropolitan
+Museum in New York he would then be somewhat of a classic figure,
+ranking with Corot and Daubigny and Rousseau of the French or with
+Turner and Watts and Millais of the English, the leading artistic
+figures of his pantheon. These men seemed to have something which he did
+not have, he thought, a greater breadth of technique, a finer
+comprehension of color and character, a feeling for the subtleties at
+the back of life which somehow showed through what they did. Larger
+experience, larger vision, larger feeling--these things seemed to be
+imminent in the great pictures exhibited here, and it made him a little
+uncertain of himself. Only the criticism in the _Evening Sun_ fortified
+him against all thought of failure. _He was an artist._
+
+He gathered up the various oils he had done--there were some twenty-six
+all told now, scenes of the rivers, the streets, the night life, and so
+forth--and went over them carefully, touching up details which in the
+beginning he had merely sketched or indicated, adding to the force of a
+spot of color here, modifying a tone or shade there, and finally, after
+much brooding over the possible result, set forth to find a gallery
+which would give them place and commercial approval.
+
+Eugene's feeling was that they were a little raw and sketchy--that they
+might not have sufficient human appeal, seeing that they dealt with
+factory architecture at times, scows, tugs, engines, the elevated roads
+in raw reds, yellows and blacks; but MacHugh, Dula, Smite, Miss Finch,
+Christina, the _Evening Sun_, Norma Whitmore, all had praised them, or
+some of them. Was not the world much more interested in the form and
+spirit of classic beauty such as that represented by Sir John Millais?
+Would it not prefer Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel" to any street scene
+ever painted? He could never be sure. In the very hour of his triumph
+when the _Sun_ had just praised his picture, there lurked the spectre of
+possible intrinsic weakness. Did the world wish this sort of thing?
+Would it ever buy of him? Was he of any real value?
+
+"No, artist heart!" one might have answered, "of no more value than any
+other worker of existence and no less. The sunlight on the corn, the
+color of dawn in the maid's cheek, the moonlight on the water--these are
+of value and of no value according to the soul to whom is the appeal.
+Fear not. Of dreams and the beauty of dreams is the world compounded."
+
+Kellner and Son, purveyors of artistic treasures by both past and
+present masters, with offices in Fifth Avenue near Twenty-eighth Street,
+was the one truly significant firm of art-dealers in the city. The
+pictures in the windows of Kellner and Son, the exhibitions in their
+very exclusive show rooms, the general approval which their
+discriminating taste evoked, had attracted the attention of artists and
+the lay public for fully thirty years. Eugene had followed their shows
+with interest ever since he had been in New York. He had seen, every now
+and then, a most astonishing picture of one school or another displayed
+in their imposing shop window, and had heard artists comment from time
+to time on other things there with considerable enthusiasm. The first
+important picture of the impressionistic school--a heavy spring rain in
+a grove of silver poplars by Winthrop--had been shown in the window of
+this firm, fascinating Eugene with its technique. He had encountered
+here collections of Aubrey Beardsley's decadent drawings, of Helleu's
+silverpoints, of Rodin's astonishing sculptures and Thaulow's solid
+Scandinavian eclecticism. This house appeared to have capable artistic
+connections all over the world, for the latest art force in Italy,
+Spain, Switzerland, or Sweden, was quite as likely to find its timely
+expression here as the more accredited work of England, Germany or
+France. Kellner and Son were art connoisseurs in the best sense of the
+word, and although the German founder of the house had died many years
+before, its management and taste had never deteriorated.
+
+Eugene did not know at this time how very difficult it was to obtain an
+exhibition under Kellner's auspices, they being over-crowded with offers
+of art material and appeals for display from celebrated artists who were
+quite willing and able to pay for the space and time they occupied. A
+fixed charge was made, never deviated from except in rare instances
+where the talent of the artist, his poverty, and the advisability of the
+exhibition were extreme. Two hundred dollars was considered little
+enough for the use of one of their show rooms for ten days.
+
+Eugene had no such sum to spare, but one day in January, without any
+real knowledge as to what the conditions were, he carried four of the
+reproductions which had been made from time to time in _Truth_ to the
+office of Mr. Kellner, certain that he had something to show. Miss
+Whitmore had indicated to him that Eberhard Zang wanted him to come and
+see him, but he thought if he was going anywhere he would prefer to go
+to Kellner and Son. He wanted to explain to Mr. Kellner, if there were
+such a person, that he had many more paintings which he considered even
+better--more expressive of his growing understanding of American life
+and of himself and his technique. He went in timidly, albeit with quite
+an air, for this adventure disturbed him much.
+
+The American manager of Kellner and Son, M. Anatole Charles, was a
+Frenchman by birth and training, familiar with the spirit and history of
+French art, and with the drift and tendency of art in various other
+sections of the world. He had been sent here by the home office in
+Berlin not only because of his very thorough training in English art
+ways, and because of his ability to select that type of picture which
+would attract attention and bring credit and prosperity to the house
+here and abroad; but also because of his ability to make friends among
+the rich and powerful wherever he was, and to sell one type of important
+picture after another--having some knack or magnetic capacity for
+attracting to him those who cared for good art and were willing to pay
+for it. His specialties, of course, were the canvases of the eminently
+successful artists in various parts of the world--the living successful.
+He knew by experience what sold--here, in France, in England, in
+Germany. He was convinced that there was practically nothing of value in
+American art as yet--certainly not from the commercial point of view,
+and very little from the artistic. Beyond a few canvases by Inness,
+Homer, Sargent, Abbey, Whistler, men who were more foreign, or rather
+universal, than American in their attitude, he considered that the
+American art spirit was as yet young and raw and crude. "They do not
+seem to be grown up as yet over here," he said to his intimate friends.
+"They paint little things in a forceful way, but they do not seem as yet
+to see things as a whole. I miss that sense of the universe in miniature
+which we find in the canvases of so many of the great Europeans. They
+are better illustrators than artists over here--why I don't know."
+
+M. Anatole Charles spoke English almost more than perfectly. He was an
+example of your true man of the world--polished, dignified, immaculately
+dressed, conservative in thought and of few words in expression. Critics
+and art enthusiasts were constantly running to him with this and that
+suggestion in regard to this and that artist, but he only lifted his
+sophisticated eyebrows, curled his superior mustachios, pulled at his
+highly artistic goatee, and exclaimed: "Ah!" or "So?" He asserted always
+that he was most anxious to find talent--profitable talent--though on
+occasion (and he would demonstrate that by an outward wave of his hands
+and a shrug of his shoulders), the house of Kellner and Son was not
+averse to doing what it could for art--and that for art's sake without
+any thought of profit whatsoever. "Where are your artists?" he would
+ask. "I look and look. Whistler, Abbey, Inness, Sargent--ah--they are
+old, where are the new ones?"
+
+"Well, this one"--the critic would probably persist.
+
+"Well, well, I go. I shall look. But I have little hope--very, very
+little hope."
+
+He was constantly appearing under such pressure, at this studio and
+that--examining, criticising. Alas, he selected the work of but few
+artists for purposes of public exhibition and usually charged them well
+for it.
+
+It was this man, polished, artistically superb in his way, whom Eugene
+was destined to meet this morning. When he entered the sumptuously
+furnished office of M. Charles the latter arose. He was seated at a
+little rosewood desk lighted by a lamp with green silk shade. One glance
+told him that Eugene was an artist--very likely of ability, more than
+likely of a sensitive, high-strung nature. He had long since learned
+that politeness and savoir faire cost nothing. It was the first
+essential so far as the good will of an artist was concerned. Eugene's
+card and message brought by a uniformed attendant had indicated the
+nature of his business. As he approached, M. Charles' raised eyebrows
+indicated that he would be very pleased to know what he could do for
+Mr. Witla.
+
+"I should like to show you several reproductions of pictures of mine,"
+began Eugene in his most courageous manner. "I have been working on a
+number with a view to making a show and I thought that possibly you
+might be interested in looking at them with a view to displaying them
+for me. I have twenty-six all told and--"
+
+"Ah! that is a difficult thing to suggest," replied M. Charles
+cautiously. "We have a great many exhibitions scheduled now--enough to
+carry us through two years if we considered nothing more. Obligations to
+artists with whom we have dealt in the past take up a great deal of our
+time. Contracts, which our Berlin and Paris branches enter into,
+sometimes crowd out our local shows entirely. Of course, we are always
+anxious to make interesting exhibitions if opportunity should permit.
+You know our charges?"
+
+"No," said Eugene, surprised that there should be any.
+
+"Two hundred dollars for two weeks. We do not take exhibitions for less
+than that time."
+
+Eugene's countenance fell. He had expected quite a different reception.
+Nevertheless, since he had brought them, he untied the tape of the
+portfolio in which the prints were laid.
+
+M. Charles looked at them curiously. He was much impressed with the
+picture of the East Side Crowd at first, but looking at one of Fifth
+Avenue in a snow storm, the battered, shabby bus pulled by a team of
+lean, unkempt, bony horses, he paused, struck by its force. He liked the
+delineation of swirling, wind-driven snow. The emptiness of this
+thoroughfare, usually so crowded, the buttoned, huddled, hunched,
+withdrawn look of those who traveled it, the exceptional details of
+piles of snow sifted on to window sills and ledges and into doorways and
+on to the windows of the bus itself, attracted his attention.
+
+"An effective detail," he said to Eugene, as one critic might say to
+another, pointing to a line of white snow on the window of one side of
+the bus. Another dash of snow on a man's hat rim took his eye also. "I
+can feel the wind," he added.
+
+Eugene smiled.
+
+M. Charles passed on in silence to the steaming tug coming up the East
+River in the dark hauling two great freight barges. He was saying to
+himself that after all Eugene's art was that of merely seizing upon the
+obviously dramatic. It wasn't so much the art of color composition and
+life analysis as it was stage craft. The man before him had the ability
+to see the dramatic side of life. Still--
+
+He turned to the last reproduction which was that of Greeley Square in a
+drizzling rain. Eugene by some mystery of his art had caught the exact
+texture of seeping water on gray stones in the glare of various electric
+lights. He had caught the values of various kinds of lights, those in
+cabs, those in cable cars, those in shop windows, those in the street
+lamp--relieving by them the black shadows of the crowds and of the sky.
+The color work here was unmistakably good.
+
+"How large are the originals of these?" he asked thoughtfully.
+
+"Nearly all of them thirty by forty."
+
+Eugene could not tell by his manner whether he were merely curious or
+interested.
+
+"All of them done in oil, I fancy."
+
+"Yes, all."
+
+"They are not bad, I must say," he observed cautiously. "A little
+persistently dramatic but--"
+
+"These reproductions--" began Eugene, hoping by criticising the press
+work to interest him in the superior quality of the originals.
+
+"Yes, I see," M. Charles interrupted, knowing full well what was coming.
+"They are very bad. Still they show well enough what the originals are
+like. Where is your studio?"
+
+"61 Washington Square."
+
+"As I say," went on M. Charles, noting the address on Eugene's card,
+"the opportunity for exhibition purposes is very limited and our charge
+is rather high. We have so many things we would like to exhibit--so many
+things we must exhibit. It is hard to say when the situation would
+permit--If you are interested I might come and see them sometime."
+
+Eugene looked perturbed. Two hundred dollars! Two hundred dollars! Could
+he afford it? It would mean so much to him. And yet the man was not at
+all anxious to rent him the show room even at this price.
+
+"I will come," said M. Charles, seeing his mood, "if you wish. That is
+what you want me to do. We have to be careful of what we exhibit here.
+It isn't as if it were an ordinary show room. I will drop you a card
+some day when occasion offers, if you wish, and you can let me know
+whether the time I suggest is all right. I am rather anxious to see
+these scenes of yours. They are very good of their kind. It may be--one
+never can tell--an opportunity might offer--a week or ten days,
+somewhere in between other things."
+
+Eugene sighed inwardly. So this was how these things were done. It
+wasn't very flattering. Still, he must have an exhibition. He could
+afford two hundred if he had to. An exhibition elsewhere would not be so
+valuable. He had expected to make a better impression than this.
+
+"I wish you would come," he said at last meditatively. "I think I should
+like the space if I can get it. I would like to know what you think."
+
+M. Charles raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Very well," he said, "I will communicate with you."
+
+Eugene went out.
+
+What a poor thing this exhibiting business was, he thought. Here he had
+been dreaming of an exhibition at Kellners which should be brought about
+without charge to him because they were tremendously impressed with his
+work. Now they did not even want his pictures--would charge him two
+hundred dollars to show them. It was a great come down--very
+discouraging.
+
+Still he went home thinking it would do him some good. The critics would
+discuss his work just as they did that of other artists. They would have
+to see what he could do should it be that at last this thing which he
+had dreamed of and so deliberately planned had come true. He had thought
+of an exhibition at Kellner's as the last joyous thing to be attained in
+the world of rising art and now it looked as though he was near it. It
+might actually be coming to pass. This man wanted to see the rest of his
+work. He was not opposed to looking at them. What a triumph even that
+was!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+It was some little time before M. Charles condescended to write saying
+that if it was agreeable he would call Wednesday morning, January 16th,
+at 10 A. M., but the letter finally did come and this dispelled all his
+intermediary doubts and fears. At last he was to have a hearing! This
+man might see something in his work, possibly take a fancy to it. Who
+could tell? He showed the letter to Angela with an easy air as though it
+were quite a matter of course, but he felt intensely hopeful.
+
+Angela put the studio in perfect order for she knew what this visit
+meant to Eugene, and in her eager, faithful way was anxious to help him
+as much as possible. She bought flowers from the Italian florist at the
+corner and put them in vases here and there. She swept and dusted,
+dressed herself immaculately in her most becoming house dress and waited
+with nerves at high tension for the fateful ring of the door bell.
+Eugene pretended to work at one of his pictures which he had done long
+before--the raw jangling wall of an East Side street with its swarms of
+children, its shabby push-carts, its mass of eager, shuffling, pushing
+mortals, the sense of rugged ground life running all through it, but he
+had no heart for the work. He was asking himself over and over what M.
+Charles would think. Thank heaven this studio looked so charming! Thank
+heaven Angela was so dainty in her pale green gown with a single red
+coral pin at her throat. He walked to the window and stared out at
+Washington Square, with its bare, wind-shaken branches of trees, its
+snow, its ant-like pedestrians hurrying here and there. If he were only
+rich--how peacefully he would paint! M. Charles could go to the devil.
+
+The door bell rang.
+
+Angela clicked a button and up came M. Charles quietly. They could hear
+his steps in the hall. He knocked and Eugene answered, decidedly nervous
+in his mind, but outwardly calm and dignified. M. Charles entered, clad
+in a fur-lined overcoat, fur cap and yellow chamois gloves.
+
+"Ah, good morning!" said M. Charles in greeting. "A fine bracing day,
+isn't it? What a charming view you have here. Mrs. Witla! I'm delighted
+to meet you. I am a little late but I was unavoidably detained. One of
+our German associates is in the city."
+
+He divested himself of his great coat and rubbed his hands before the
+fire. He tried, now that he had unbent so far, to be genial and
+considerate. If he and Eugene were to do any business in the future it
+must be so. Besides the picture on the easel before him, near the
+window, which for the time being he pretended not to see, was an
+astonishingly virile thing. Of whose work did it remind him--anybody's?
+He confessed to himself as he stirred around among his numerous art
+memories that he recalled nothing exactly like it. Raw reds, raw greens,
+dirty grey paving stones--such faces! Why this thing fairly shouted its
+facts. It seemed to say: "I'm dirty, I am commonplace, I am grim, I am
+shabby, but I am life." And there was no apologizing for anything in it,
+no glossing anything over. Bang! Smash! Crack! came the facts one after
+another, with a bitter, brutal insistence on their so-ness. Why, on
+moody days when he had felt sour and depressed he had seen somewhere a
+street that looked like this, and there it was--dirty, sad, slovenly,
+immoral, drunken--anything, everything, but here it was. "Thank God for
+a realist," he said to himself as he looked, for he knew life, this cold
+connoisseur; but he made no sign. He looked at the tall, slim frame of
+Eugene, his cheeks slightly sunken, his eyes bright--an artist every
+inch of him, and then at Angela, small, eager, a sweet, loving, little
+woman, and he was glad that he was going to be able to say that he would
+exhibit these things.
+
+"Well," he said, pretending to look at the picture on the easel for the
+first time, "we might as well begin to look at these things. I see you
+have one here. Very good, I think, quite forceful. What others have
+you?"
+
+Eugene was afraid this one hadn't appealed to him as much as he hoped it
+would, and set it aside quickly, picking up the second in the stock
+which stood against the wall, covered by a green curtain. It was the
+three engines entering the great freight yard abreast, the smoke of the
+engines towering straight up like tall whitish-grey plumes, in the damp,
+cold air, the sky lowering with blackish-grey clouds, the red and yellow
+and blue cars standing out in the sodden darkness because of the water.
+You could feel the cold, wet drizzle, the soppy tracks, the weariness of
+"throwing switches." There was a lone brakeman in the foreground,
+"throwing" a red brake signal. He was quite black and evidently wet.
+
+"A symphony in grey," said M. Charles succinctly.
+
+They came swiftly after this, without much comment from either, Eugene
+putting one canvas after another before him, leaving it for a few
+moments and replacing it with another. His estimate of his own work did
+not rise very rapidly, for M. Charles was persistently distant,
+but the latter could not help voicing approval of "After The Theatre,"
+a painting full of the wonder and bustle of a night crowd under
+sputtering electric lamps. He saw that Eugene had covered almost
+every phase of what might be called the dramatic spectacle in the
+public life of the city and much that did not appear dramatic until
+he touched it--the empty canyon of Broadway at three o'clock in the
+morning; a long line of giant milk wagons, swinging curious lanterns,
+coming up from the docks at four o'clock in the morning; a plunging
+parade of fire vehicles, the engines steaming smoke, the people running
+or staring open-mouthed; a crowd of polite society figures emerging
+from the opera; the bread line; an Italian boy throwing pigeons in
+the air from a basket on his arm in a crowded lower West-side
+street. Everything he touched seemed to have romance and beauty, and yet
+it was real and mostly grim and shabby.
+
+"I congratulate you, Mr. Witla," finally exclaimed M. Charles, moved by
+the ability of the man and feeling that caution was no longer necessary.
+"To me this is wonderful material, much more effective than the
+reproductions show, dramatic and true. I question whether you will make
+any money out of it. There is very little sale for American art in this
+country. It might almost do better in Europe. It _ought_ to sell, but
+that is another matter. The best things do not always sell readily. It
+takes time. Still I will do what I can. I will give these pictures a two
+weeks' display early in April without any charge to you whatever."
+(Eugene started.) "I will call them to the attention of those who know.
+I will speak to those who buy. It is an honor, I assure you, to do this.
+I consider you an artist in every sense of the word--I might say a great
+artist. You ought, if you preserve yourself sanely and with caution, to
+go far, very far. I shall be glad to send for these when the time
+comes."
+
+Eugene did not know how to reply to this. He did not quite understand
+the European seriousness of method, its appreciation of genius, which
+was thus so easily and sincerely expressed in a formal way. M. Charles
+meant every word he said. This was one of those rare and gratifying
+moments of his life when he was permitted to extend to waiting and
+unrecognized genius the assurance of the consideration and approval of
+the world. He stood there waiting to hear what Eugene would say, but the
+latter only flushed under his pale skin.
+
+"I'm very glad," he said at last, in his rather commonplace, off-hand,
+American way. "I thought they were pretty good but I wasn't sure. I'm
+very grateful to you."
+
+"You need not feel gratitude toward me," returned M. Charles, now
+modifying his formal manner. "You can congratulate yourself--your art. I
+am honored, as I tell you. We will make a fine display of them. You have
+no frames for these? Well, never mind, I will lend you frames."
+
+He smiled and shook Eugene's hand and congratulated Angela. She had
+listened to this address with astonishment and swelling pride. She had
+perceived, despite Eugene's manner, the anxiety he was feeling, the
+intense hopes he was building on the outcome of this meeting. M.
+Charles' opening manner had deceived her. She had felt that he did not
+care so much after all, and that Eugene was going to be disappointed.
+Now, when this burst of approval came, she hardly knew what to make of
+it. She looked at Eugene and saw that he was intensely moved by not only
+a sense of relief, but pride and joy. His pale, dark face showed it. To
+see this load of care taken off him whom she loved so deeply was enough
+to unsettle Angela. She found herself stirred in a pathetic way and now,
+when M. Charles turned to her, tears welled to her eyes.
+
+"Don't cry, Mrs. Witla," he said grandly on seeing this. "You have a
+right to be proud of your husband. He is a great artist. You should take
+care of him."
+
+"Oh, I'm so happy," half-laughed and half-sobbed Angela, "I can't help
+it."
+
+She went over to where Eugene was and put her face against his coat.
+Eugene slipped his arm about her and smiled sympathetically.
+M. Charles smiled also, proud of the effect of his words. "You both have
+a right to feel very happy," he said.
+
+"Little Angela!" thought Eugene. This was your true wife for you, your
+good woman. Her husband's success meant all to her. She had no life of
+her own--nothing outside of him and his good fortune.
+
+M. Charles smiled. "Well, I will be going now," he said finally. "I will
+send for the pictures when the time comes. And meanwhile you two must
+come with me to dinner. I will let you know."
+
+He bowed himself out with many assurances of good will, and then Angela
+and Eugene looked at each other.
+
+"Oh, isn't it lovely, Honeybun," she cried, half giggling, half crying.
+(She had begun to call him Honeybun the first day they were married.)
+"My Eugene a great artist. He said it was a great honor! Isn't that
+lovely? And all the world is going to know it soon, now. Isn't that
+fine! Oh dear, I'm so proud." And she threw her arms ecstatically about
+his neck.
+
+Eugene kissed her affectionately. He was not thinking so much of her
+though as he was of Kellner and Son--their great exhibit room, the
+appearance of these twenty-seven or thirty great pictures in gold
+frames; the spectators who might come to see; the newspaper criticisms;
+the voices of approval. Now all his artist friends would know that he
+was considered a great artist; he was to have a chance to associate on
+equal terms with men like Sargent and Whistler if he ever met them. The
+world would hear of him widely. His fame might go to the uttermost parts
+of the earth.
+
+He went to the window after a time and looked out. There came back to
+his mind Alexandria, the printing shop, the Peoples' Furniture Company
+in Chicago, the Art Students League, the _Daily Globe_. Surely he had
+come by devious paths.
+
+"Gee!" he exclaimed at last simply. "Smite and MacHugh'll be glad to
+hear this. I'll have to go over and tell them."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The exhibition which followed in April was one of those things which
+happen to fortunate souls--a complete flowering out before the eyes of
+the world of its feelings, emotions, perceptions, and understanding. We
+all have our feelings and emotions, but lack the power of
+self-expression. It is true, the work and actions of any man are to some
+degree expressions of character, but this is a different thing. The
+details of most lives are not held up for public examination at any
+given time. We do not see succinctly in any given place just what an
+individual thinks and feels. Even the artist is not always or often
+given the opportunity of collected public expression under conspicuous
+artistic auspices. Some are so fortunate--many are not. Eugene realized
+that fortune was showering its favors upon him.
+
+When the time came, M. Charles was so kind as to send for the pictures
+and to arrange all the details. He had decided with Eugene that because
+of the vigor of treatment and the prevailing color scheme black frames
+would be the best. The principal exhibition room on the ground floor in
+which these paintings were to be hung was heavily draped in red velvet
+and against this background the different pictures stood out
+effectively. Eugene visited the show room at the time the pictures were
+being hung, with Angela, with Smite and MacHugh, Shotmeyer and others.
+He had long since notified Norma Whitmore and Miriam Finch, but not the
+latter until after Wheeler had had time to tell her. This also chagrined
+her, for she felt in this as she had about his marriage, that he was
+purposely neglecting her.
+
+The dream finally materialized--a room eighteen by forty, hung with dark
+red velvet, irradiated with a soft, illuminating glow from hidden lamps
+in which Eugene's pictures stood forth in all their rawness and
+reality--almost as vigorous as life itself. To some people, those who do
+not see life clearly and directly, but only through other people's eyes,
+they seemed more so.
+
+For this reason Eugene's exhibition of pictures was an astonishing thing
+to most of those who saw it. It concerned phases of life which in the
+main they had but casually glanced at, things which because they were
+commonplace and customary were supposedly beyond the pale of artistic
+significance. One picture in particular, a great hulking, ungainly
+negro, a positively animal man, his ears thick and projecting, his lips
+fat, his nose flat, his cheek bones prominent, his whole body expressing
+brute strength and animal indifference to dirt and cold, illustrated
+this point particularly. He was standing in a cheap, commonplace East
+Side street. The time evidently was a January or February morning. His
+business was driving an ash cart, and his occupation at the moment
+illustrated by the picture was that of lifting a great can of mixed
+ashes, paper and garbage to the edge of the ungainly iron wagon. His
+hands were immense and were covered with great red patched woolen and
+leather gloves--dirty, bulbous, inconvenient, one would have said. His
+head and ears were swaddled about by a red flannel shawl or strip of
+cloth which was knotted under his pugnacious chin, and his forehead,
+shawl and all, surmounted by a brown canvas cap with his badge and
+number as a garbage driver on it. About his waist was tied a great piece
+of rough coffee sacking and his arms and legs looked as though he might
+have on two or three pairs of trousers and as many vests. He was looking
+purblindly down the shabby street, its hard crisp snow littered with tin
+cans, paper, bits of slop and offal. Dust--gray ash dust, was flying
+from his upturned can. In the distance behind him was a milk wagon, a
+few pedestrians, a little thinly clad girl coming out of a delicatessen
+store. Over head were dull small-paned windows, some shutters with a few
+of their slats broken out, a frowsy headed man looking out evidently to
+see whether the day was cold.
+
+Eugene was so cruel in his indictment of life. He seemed to lay on his
+details with bitter lack of consideration. Like a slavedriver lashing a
+slave he spared no least shade of his cutting brush. "Thus, and thus and
+thus" (he seemed to say) "is it." "What do you think of this? and this?
+and this?"
+
+People came and stared. Young society matrons, art dealers, art critics,
+the literary element who were interested in art, some musicians, and,
+because the newspapers made especial mention of it, quite a number of
+those who run wherever they imagine there is something interesting to
+see. It was quite a notable two weeks' display. Miriam Finch (though she
+never admitted to Eugene that she had seen it--she would not give him
+that satisfaction) Norma Whitmore, William McConnell, Louis Deesa, Owen
+Overman, Paynter Stone, the whole ruck and rabble of literary and
+artistic life, came. There were artists of great ability there whom
+Eugene had never seen before. It would have pleased him immensely if he
+had chanced to see several of the city's most distinguished social
+leaders looking, at one time and another, at his pictures. All his
+observers were astonished at his virility, curious as to his
+personality, curious as to what motive, or significance, or point of
+view it might have. The more eclectically cultured turned to the
+newspapers to see what the art critics would say of this--how they would
+label it. Because of the force of the work, the dignity and critical
+judgment of Kellner and Son, the fact that the public of its own
+instinct and volition was interested, most of the criticisms were
+favorable. One art publication, connected with and representative of the
+conservative tendencies of a great publishing house, denied the merit of
+the collection as a whole, ridiculed the artist's insistence on shabby
+details as having artistic merit, denied that he could draw accurately,
+denied that he was a lover of pure beauty, and accused him of having no
+higher ideal than that of desire to shock the current mass by painting
+brutal things brutally.
+
+"Mr. Witla," wrote this critic, "would no doubt be flattered if he were
+referred to as an American Millet. The brutal exaggeration of that
+painter's art would probably testify to him of his own merit. He is
+mistaken. The great Frenchman was a lover of humanity, a reformer in
+spirit, a master of drawing and composition. There was nothing of this
+cheap desire to startle and offend by what he did. If we are to have ash
+cans and engines and broken-down bus-horses thrust down our throats as
+art, Heaven preserve us. We had better turn to commonplace photography
+at once and be done with it. Broken window shutters, dirty pavements,
+half frozen ash cart drivers, overdrawn, heavily exaggerated figures of
+policemen, tenement harridans, beggars, panhandlers, sandwich men--of
+such is _Art_ according to Eugene Witla."
+
+Eugene winced when he read this. For the time being it seemed true
+enough. His art was shabby. Yet there were others like Luke Severas who
+went to the other extreme.
+
+"A true sense of the pathetic, a true sense of the dramatic, the ability
+to endow color--not with its photographic value, though to the current
+thought it may seem so--but with its higher spiritual significance; the
+ability to indict life with its own grossness, to charge it
+prophetically with its own meanness and cruelty in order that mayhap it
+may heal itself; the ability to see wherein is beauty--even in shame and
+pathos and degradation; of such is this man's work. He comes from the
+soil apparently, fresh to a great task. There is no fear here, no bowing
+to traditions, no recognition of any of the accepted methods. It is
+probable that he may not know what the accepted methods are. So much the
+better. We have a new method. The world is the richer for that. As we
+have said before, Mr. Witla may have to wait for his recognition. It is
+certain that these pictures will not be quickly purchased and hung in
+parlors. The average art lover does not take to a new thing so readily.
+But if he persevere, if his art does not fail him, his turn will come.
+It cannot fail. He is a great artist. May he live to realize it
+consciously and in his own soul."
+
+Tears leaped to Eugene's eyes when he read this. The thought that he was
+a medium for some noble and super-human purpose thickened the cords in
+his throat until they felt like a lump. He wanted to be a great artist,
+he wanted to be worthy of the appreciation that was thus extended to
+him. He thought of all the writers and artists and musicians and
+connoisseurs of pictures who would read this and remember him. It was
+just possible that from now onwards some of his pictures would sell. He
+would be so glad to devote himself to this sort of thing--to quit
+magazine illustration entirely. How ridiculous the latter was, how
+confined and unimportant. Henceforth, unless driven by sheer necessity,
+he would do it no more. They should beg in vain. He was an artist in the
+true sense of the word--a great painter, ranking with Whistler, Sargent,
+Velasquez and Turner. Let the magazines with their little ephemeral
+circulation go their way. He was for the whole world.
+
+He stood at the window of his studio one day while the exhibition was
+still in progress, Angela by his side, thinking of all the fine things
+that had been said. No picture had been sold, but M. Charles had told
+him that some might be taken before it was all over.
+
+"I think if I make any money out of this," he said to Angela, "we will
+go to Paris this summer. I have always wanted to see Paris. In the fall
+we'll come back and take a studio up town. They are building some dandy
+ones up in Sixty-fifth Street." He was thinking of the artists who could
+pay three and four thousand dollars a year for a studio. He was thinking
+of men who made four, five, six and even eight hundred dollars out of
+every picture they painted. If he could do that! Or if he could get a
+contract for a mural decoration for next winter. He had very little
+money laid by. He had spent most of his time this winter working with
+these pictures.
+
+"Oh, Eugene," exclaimed Angela, "it seems so wonderful. I can hardly
+believe it. You a really, truly, great artist! And us going to Paris!
+Oh, isn't that beautiful. It seems like a dream. I think and think, but
+it's hard to believe that I am here sometimes, and that your pictures
+are up at Kellner's and oh!--" she clung to him in an ecstasy of
+delight.
+
+Out in the park the leaves were just budding. It looked as though the
+whole square were hung with a transparent green net, spangled, as was
+the net in his room, with tiny green leaves. Songsters were idling in
+the sun. Sparrows were flying noisily about in small clouds. Pigeons
+were picking lazily between the car tracks of the street below.
+
+"I might get a group of pictures illustrative of Paris. You can't tell
+what we'll find. Charles says he will have another exhibition for me
+next spring, if I'll get the material ready." He pushed his arms above
+his head and yawned deliciously.
+
+He wondered what Miss Finch thought now. He wondered where Christina
+Channing was. There was never a word in the papers yet as to what had
+become of her. He knew what Norma Whitmore thought. She was apparently
+as happy as though the exhibition had been her own.
+
+"Well, I must go and get your lunch, Honeybun!" exclaimed Angela. "I
+have to go to Mr. Gioletti, the grocer, and to Mr. Ruggiere, the
+vegetable man." She laughed, for the Italian names amused her.
+
+Eugene went back to his easel. He was thinking of Christina--where was
+she? At that moment, if he had known, she was looking at his pictures,
+only newly returned from Europe. She had seen a notice in the _Evening
+Post_.
+
+"Such work!" Christina thought, "such force! Oh, what a delightful
+artist. And he was with me."
+
+Her mind went back to Florizel and the amphitheatre among the trees. "He
+called me 'Diana of the Mountains,'" she thought, "his 'hamadryad,' his
+'huntress of the morn.'" She knew he was married. An acquaintance of
+hers had written in December. The past was past with her--she wanted no
+more of it. But it was beautiful to think upon--a delicious memory.
+
+"What a queer girl I am," she thought.
+
+Still she wished she could see him again--not face to face, but
+somewhere where he could not see her. She wondered if he was
+changing--if he would ever change. He was so beautiful then--to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Paris now loomed bright in Eugene's imagination, the prospect mingling
+with a thousand other delightful thoughts. Now that he had attained to
+the dignity of a public exhibition, which had been notably commented
+upon by the newspapers and art journals and had been so generally
+attended by the elect, artists, critics, writers generally, seemed to
+know of him. There were many who were anxious to meet and greet him, to
+speak approvingly of his work. It was generally understood, apparently,
+that he was a great artist, not exactly arrived to the fullness of his
+stature as yet, being so new, but on his way. Among those who knew him
+he was, by this one exhibition, lifted almost in a day to a lonely
+height, far above the puny efforts of such men as Smite and MacHugh,
+McConnell and Deesa, the whole world of small artists whose canvases
+packed the semi-annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design and
+the Water color society, and with whom in a way, he had been associated.
+He was a great artist now--recognized as such by the eminent critics who
+knew; and as such, from now on, would be expected to do the work of a
+great artist. One phrase in the criticisms of Luke Severas in the
+_Evening Sun_ as it appeared during the run of his exhibition remained
+in his memory clearly--"If he perseveres, if his art does not fail him."
+Why should his art fail him?--he asked himself. He was immensely pleased
+to hear from M. Charles at the close of the exhibition that three of his
+pictures had been sold--one for three hundred dollars to Henry McKenna,
+a banker; another, the East Side street scene which M. Charles so
+greatly admired, to Isaac Wertheim, for five hundred dollars; a third,
+the one of the three engines and the railroad yard, to Robert C.
+Winchon, a railroad man, first vice-president of one of the great
+railroads entering New York, also for five hundred dollars. Eugene had
+never heard of either Mr. McKenna or Mr. Winchon, but he was assured
+that they were men of wealth and refinement. At Angela's suggestion he
+asked M. Charles if he would not accept one of his pictures as a slight
+testimony of his appreciation for all he had done for him. Eugene would
+not have thought to do this, he was so careless and unpractical. But
+Angela thought of it, and saw that he did it. M. Charles was greatly
+pleased, and took the picture of Greeley Square, which he considered a
+masterpiece of color interpretation. This somehow sealed the friendship
+between these two, and M. Charles was anxious to see Eugene's interests
+properly forwarded. He asked him to leave three of his scenes on sale
+for a time and he would see what he could do. Meanwhile, Eugene, with
+thirteen hundred added to the thousand and some odd dollars he had left
+in his bank from previous earnings, was convinced that his career was
+made, and decided, as he had planned to go to Paris, for the summer at
+least.
+
+This trip, so exceptional to him, so epoch-making, was easily arranged.
+All the time he had been in New York he had heard more in his circle of
+Paris than of any other city. Its streets, its quarters, its museums,
+its theatres and opera were already almost a commonplace to him. The
+cost of living, the ideal methods of living, the way to travel, what to
+see--how often he had sat and listened to descriptions of these things.
+Now he was going. Angela took the initiative in arranging all the
+practical details--such as looking up the steamship routes, deciding on
+the size of trunks required, what to take, buying the tickets, looking
+up the rates of the different hotels and pensions at which they might
+possibly stay. She was so dazed by the glory that had burst upon her
+husband's life that she scarcely knew what to do or what to make of it.
+
+"That Mr. Bierdat," she said to Eugene, referring to one of the
+assistant steam-ship agents with whom she had taken counsel, "tells me
+that if we are just going for the summer it's foolish to take anything
+but absolute necessaries. He says we can buy so many nice little things
+to wear over there if we need them, and then I can bring them back duty
+free in the fall."
+
+Eugene approved of this. He thought Angela would like to see the shops.
+They finally decided to go via London, returning direct from Havre, and
+on the tenth of May they departed, arriving in London a week later and
+in Paris on the first of June. Eugene was greatly impressed with London.
+He had arrived in time to miss the British damp and cold and to see
+London through a golden haze which was entrancing. Angela objected to
+the shops, which she described as "punk," and to the condition of the
+lower classes, who were so poor and wretchedly dressed. She and Eugene
+discussed the interesting fact that all Englishmen looked exactly alike,
+dressed, walked, and wore their hats and carried their canes exactly
+alike. Eugene was impressed with the apparent "go" of the men--their
+smartness and dapperness. The women he objected to in the main as being
+dowdy and homely and awkward.
+
+But when he reached Paris, what a difference! In London, because of the
+lack of sufficient means (he did not feel that as yet he had sufficient
+to permit him to indulge in the more expensive comforts and pleasures of
+the city) and for the want of someone to provide him with proper social
+introductions, he was compelled to content himself with that
+superficial, exterior aspect of things which only the casual traveler
+sees--the winding streets, the crush of traffic, London Tower, Windsor
+Castle, the Inns of court, the Strand, Piccadilly, St. Paul's and, of
+course, the National Gallery and the British Museum. South Kensington
+and all those various endowed palaces where objects of art are displayed
+pleased him greatly. In the main he was struck with the conservatism of
+London, its atmosphere of Empire, its soldiery and the like, though he
+considered it drab, dull, less strident than New York, and really less
+picturesque. When he came to Paris, however, all this was changed. Paris
+is of itself a holiday city--one whose dress is always gay, inviting,
+fresh, like one who sets forth to spend a day in the country. As Eugene
+stepped onto the dock at Calais and later as he journeyed across and
+into the city, he could feel the vast difference between France and
+England. The one country seemed young, hopeful, American, even foolishly
+gay, the other serious, speculative, dour.
+
+Eugene had taken a number of letters from M. Charles, Hudson Dula, Louis
+Deesa, Leonard Baker and others, who, on hearing that he was going, had
+volunteered to send him to friends in Paris who might help him. The
+principal thing, if he did not wish to maintain a studio of his own, and
+did wish to learn, was to live with some pleasant French family where he
+could hear French and pick it up quickly. If he did not wish to do this,
+the next best thing was to settle in the Montmartre district in some
+section or court where he could obtain a nice studio, and where there
+were a number of American or English students. Some of the Americans to
+whom he had letters were already domiciled here. With a small calling
+list of friends who spoke English he would do very well.
+
+"You will be surprised, Witla," said Deesa to him one day, "how much
+English you can get understood by making intelligent signs."
+
+Eugene had laughed at Deesa's descriptions of his own difficulties and
+successes, but he found that Deesa was right. Signs went very far and
+they were, as a rule, thoroughly intelligible.
+
+The studio which he and Angela eventually took after a few days spent at
+an hotel, was a comfortable one on the third floor of a house which
+Eugene found ready to his hand, recommended by M. Arkquin, of the Paris
+branch of Kellner and Son. Another artist, Finley Wood, whom afterwards
+Eugene recalled as having been mentioned to him by Ruby Kenny, in
+Chicago, was leaving Paris for the summer. Because of M. Charles'
+impressive letter, M. Arkquin was most anxious that Eugene should be
+comfortably installed and suggested that he take this, the charge being
+anything he cared to pay--forty francs the month. Eugene looked at it
+and was delighted. It was in the back of the house, looking out on a
+little garden, and because of a westward slope of the ground from this
+direction and an accidental breach in the building line, commanded a
+wide sweep of the city of Paris, the twin towers of Notre Dame, the
+sheer rise of the Eiffel tower. It was fascinating to see the lights of
+the city blinking of an evening. Eugene would invariably draw his chair
+close to his favorite window when he came in, while Angela made lemonade
+or iced tea or practised her culinary art on a chafing dish. In
+presenting to him an almost standard American menu she exhibited the
+executive ability and natural industry which was her chief
+characteristic. She would go to the neighboring groceries, rotisseries,
+patisseries, green vegetable stands, and get the few things she needed
+in the smallest quantities, always selecting the best and preparing them
+with the greatest care. She was an excellent cook and loved to set a
+dainty and shining table. She saw no need of company, for she was
+perfectly happy alone with Eugene and felt that he must be with her. She
+had no desire to go anywhere by herself--only with him; and she would
+hang on every thought and motion waiting for him to say what his
+pleasure would be.
+
+The wonder of Paris to Eugene was its freshness and the richness of its
+art spirit as expressed on every hand. He was never weary of looking at
+the undersized French soldiery with their wide red trousers, blue coats
+and red caps, or the police with their capes and swords and the cab
+drivers with their air of leisurely superiority. The Seine, brisk with
+boats at this season of the year, the garden of the Tuileries, with its
+white marble nudes and formal paths and stone benches, the Bois, the
+Champ de Mars, the Trocadero Museum, the Louvre--all the wonder streets
+and museums held him as in a dream.
+
+"Gee," he exclaimed to Angela one afternoon as he followed the banks of
+the Seine toward Issy, "this is certainly the home of the blessed for
+all good artists. Smell that perfume. (It was from a perfume factory in
+the distance.) See that barge!" He leaned on the river wall. "Ah," he
+sighed, "this is perfect."
+
+They went back in the dusk on the roof of an open car. "When I die," he
+sighed, "I hope I come to Paris. It is all the heaven I want."
+
+Yet like all perfect delights, it lost some of its savour after a time,
+though not much. Eugene felt that he could live in Paris if his art
+would permit him--though he must go back, he knew, for the present
+anyhow.
+
+Angela, he noticed after a time, was growing in confidence, if not in
+mentality. From a certain dazed uncertainty which had characterized her
+the preceding fall when she had first come to New York, heightened and
+increased for the time being by the rush of art life and strange
+personalities she had encountered there and here she was blossoming into
+a kind of assurance born of experience. Finding that Eugene's ideas,
+feelings and interests were of the upper world of thought
+entirely--concerned with types, crowds, the aspect of buildings,
+streets, skylines, the humors and pathetic aspects of living, she
+concerned herself solely with the managerial details. It did not take
+her long to discover that if anyone would relieve Eugene of all care for
+himself he would let him do it. It was no satisfaction to him to buy
+himself anything. He objected to executive and commercial details. If
+tickets had to be bought, time tables consulted, inquiries made, any
+labor of argument or dispute engaged in, he was loath to enter on it.
+"You get these, will you, Angela?" he would plead, or "you see him about
+that. I can't now. Will you?"
+
+Angela would hurry to the task, whatever it was, anxious to show that
+she was of real use and necessity. On the busses of London or Paris, as
+in New York, he was sketching, sketching, sketching--cabs, little
+passenger boats of the Seine, characters in the cafes, parks, gardens,
+music halls, anywhere, anything, for he was practically tireless. All
+that he wanted was not to be bothered very much, to be left to his own
+devices. Sometimes Angela would pay all the bills for him for a day. She
+carried his purse, took charge of all the express orders into which
+their cash had been transferred, kept a list of all their expenditures,
+did the shopping, buying, paying. Eugene was left to see the thing that
+he wanted to see, to think the things that he wanted to think. During
+all those early days Angela made a god of him and he was very willing to
+cross his legs, Buddha fashion, and act as one.
+
+Only at night when there were no alien sights or sounds to engage his
+attention, when not even his art could come between them, and she could
+draw him into her arms and submerge his restless spirit in the tides of
+her love did she feel his equal--really worthy of him. These transports
+which came with the darkness, or with the mellow light of the little oil
+lamp that hung in chains from the ceiling near their wide bed, or in the
+faint freshness of dawn with the birds cheeping in the one tree of the
+little garden below--were to her at once utterly generous and profoundly
+selfish. She had eagerly absorbed Eugene's philosophy of self-indulgent
+joy where it concerned themselves--all the more readily as it coincided
+with her own vague ideas and her own hot impulses.
+
+Angela had come to marriage through years of self-denial, years of
+bitter longing for the marriage that perhaps would never be, and out of
+those years she had come to the marriage bed with a cumulative and
+intense passion. Without any knowledge either of the ethics or
+physiology of sex, except as pertained to her state as a virgin, she was
+vastly ignorant of marriage itself; the hearsay of girls, the equivocal
+confessions of newly married women, and the advice of her elder sister
+(conveyed by Heaven only knows what process of conversation) had left
+her almost as ignorant as before, and now she explored its mysteries
+with abandon, convinced that the unrestrained gratification of passion
+was normal and excellent--in addition to being, as she came to find, a
+universal solvent for all differences of opinion or temperament that
+threatened their peace of mind. Beginning with their life in the studio
+on Washington Square, and continuing with even greater fervor now in
+Paris, there was what might be described as a prolonged riot of
+indulgence between them, bearing no relation to any necessity in their
+natures, and certainly none to the demands which Eugene's intellectual
+and artistic tasks laid upon him. She was to Eugene astonishing and
+delightful; and yet perhaps not so much delightful as astonishing.
+Angela was in a sense elemental, but Eugene was not: he was the artist,
+in this as in other things, rousing himself to a pitch of appreciation
+which no strength so undermined by intellectual subtleties could
+continuously sustain. The excitement of adventure, of intrigue in a
+sense, of discovering the secrets of feminine personality--these were
+really what had constituted the charm, if not the compelling urge, of
+his romances. To conquer was beautiful: but it was in essence an
+intellectual enterprise. To see his rash dreams come true in the
+yielding of the last sweetness possessed by the desired woman, had been
+to him imaginatively as well as physically an irresistible thing. But
+these enterprises were like thin silver strands spun out across an
+abyss, whose beauty but not whose dangers were known to him. Still, he
+rejoiced in this magnificent creature-joy which Angela supplied; it was,
+so far as it was concerned, what he thought he wanted. And Angela
+interpreted her power to respond to what seemed his inexhaustible desire
+as not only a kindness but a duty.
+
+Eugene set up his easel here, painted from nine to noon some days, and
+on others from two to five in the afternoon. If it were dark, he would
+walk or ride with Angela or visit the museums, the galleries and the
+public buildings or stroll in the factory or railroad quarters of the
+city. Eugene sympathized most with sombre types and was constantly
+drawing something which represented grim care. Aside from the dancers in
+the music halls, the toughs, in what later became known as the Apache
+district, the summer picnicking parties at Versailles and St. Cloud, the
+boat crowds on the Seine, he drew factory throngs, watchmen and railroad
+crossings, market people, market in the dark, street sweepers, newspaper
+vendors, flower merchants, always with a memorable street scene in the
+background. Some of the most interesting bits of Paris, its towers,
+bridges, river views, facades, appeared in backgrounds to the grim or
+picturesque or pathetic character studies. It was his hope that he could
+interest America in these things--that his next exhibition would not
+only illustrate his versatility and persistence of talent, but show an
+improvement in his art, a surer sense of color values, a greater
+analytical power in the matter of character, a surer selective taste in
+the matter of composition and arrangement. He did not realize that all
+this might be useless--that he was, aside from his art, living a life
+which might rob talent of its finest flavor, discolor the aspect of the
+world for himself, take scope from imagination and hamper effort with
+nervous irritation, and make accomplishment impossible. He had no
+knowledge of the effect of one's sexual life upon one's work, nor what
+such a life when badly arranged can do to a perfect art--how it can
+distort the sense of color, weaken that balanced judgment of character
+which is so essential to a normal interpretation of life, make all
+striving hopeless, take from art its most joyous conception, make life
+itself seem unimportant and death a relief.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The summer passed, and with it the freshness and novelty of Paris,
+though Eugene never really wearied of it. The peculiarities of a
+different national life, the variations between this and his own country
+in national ideals, an obviously much more complaisant and human
+attitude toward morals, a matter-of-fact acceptance of the ills,
+weaknesses and class differences, to say nothing of the general physical
+appearance, the dress, habitations and amusements of the people,
+astonished as much as they entertained him. He was never weary of
+studying the differences between American and European architecture,
+noting the pacific manner in which the Frenchman appeared to take life,
+listening to Angela's unwearied comments on the cleanliness, economy,
+thoroughness with which the French women kept house, rejoicing in the
+absence of the American leaning to incessant activity. Angela was struck
+by the very moderate prices for laundry, the skill with which their
+concierge--who governed this quarter and who knew sufficient English to
+talk to her--did her marketing, cooking, sewing and entertaining. The
+richness of supply and aimless waste of Americans was alike unknown.
+Because she was naturally of a domestic turn Angela became very intimate
+with Madame Bourgoche and learned of her a hundred and one little tricks
+of domestic economy and arrangement.
+
+"You're a peculiar girl, Angela," Eugene once said to her. "I believe
+you would rather sit down stairs and talk to that French-woman than meet
+the most interesting literary or artistic personage that ever was. What
+do you find that's so interesting to talk about?"
+
+"Oh, nothing much," replied Angela, who was not unconscious of the
+implied hint of her artistic deficiencies. "She's such a smart woman.
+She's so practical. She knows more in a minute about saving and buying
+and making a little go a long way than any American woman I ever saw.
+I'm not interested in her any more than I am in anyone else. All the
+artistic people do, that I can see, is to run around and pretend that
+they're a whole lot when they're not."
+
+Eugene saw that he had made an irritating reference, not wholly intended
+in the way it was being taken.
+
+"I'm not saying she isn't able," he went on. "One talent is as good as
+another, I suppose. She certainly looks clever enough to me. Where is
+her husband?"
+
+"He was killed in the army," returned Angela dolefully.
+
+"Well I suppose you'll learn enough from her to run a hotel when you get
+back to New York. You don't know enough about housekeeping now, do you?"
+
+Eugene smiled with his implied compliment. He was anxious to get
+Angela's mind off the art question. He hoped she would feel or see that
+he meant nothing, but she was not so easily pacified.
+
+"You don't think I'm so bad, Eugene, do you?" she asked after a moment.
+"You don't think it makes so much difference whether I talk to Madame
+Bourgoche? She isn't so dull. She's awfully smart. You just haven't
+talked to her. She says she can tell by looking at you that you're a
+great artist. You're different. You remind her of a Mr. Degas that once
+lived here. Was he a great artist?"
+
+"Was he!" said Eugene. "Well I guess yes. Did he have this studio?"
+
+"Oh, a long time ago--fifteen years ago."
+
+Eugene smiled beatifically. This was a great compliment. He could not
+help liking Madame Bourgoche for it. She was bright, no doubt of that,
+or she would not be able to make such a comparison. Angela drew from
+him, as before, that her domesticity and housekeeping skill was as
+important as anything else in the world, and having done this was
+satisfied and cheerful once more. Eugene thought how little art or
+conditions or climate or country altered the fundamental characteristics
+of human nature. Here he was in Paris, comparatively well supplied with
+money, famous, or in process of becoming so, and quarreling with Angela
+over little domestic idiosyncrasies, just as in Washington Square.
+
+By late September Eugene had most of his Paris sketches so well laid in
+that he could finish them anywhere. Some fifteen were as complete as
+they could be made. A number of others were nearly so. He decided that
+he had had a profitable summer. He had worked hard and here was the work
+to show for it--twenty-six canvases which were as good, in his judgment,
+as those he had painted in New York. They had not taken so long, but he
+was surer of himself--surer of his method. He parted reluctantly with
+all the lovely things he had seen, believing that this collection of
+Parisian views would be as impressive to Americans as had been his New
+York views. M. Arkquin for one, and many others, including the friends
+of Deesa and Dula were delighted with them. The former expressed the
+belief that some of them might be sold in France.
+
+Eugene returned to America with Angela, and learning that he might stay
+in the old studio until December first, settled down to finish the work
+for his exhibition there.
+
+The first suggestion that Eugene had that anything was wrong with him,
+aside from a growing apprehensiveness as to what the American people
+would think of his French work, was in the fall, when he began to
+imagine--or perhaps it was really true--that coffee did not agree with
+him. He had for several years now been free of his old-time
+complaint,--stomach trouble; but gradually it was beginning to reappear
+and he began to complain to Angela that he was feeling an irritation
+after his meals, that coffee came up in his throat. "I think I'll have
+to try tea or something else if this doesn't stop," he observed. She
+suggested chocolate and he changed to that, but this merely resulted in
+shifting the ill to another quarter. He now began to quarrel with his
+work--not being able to get a certain effect, and having sometimes
+altered and re-altered and re-re-altered a canvas until it bore little
+resemblance to the original arrangement, he would grow terribly
+discouraged; or believe that he had attained perfection at last, only to
+change his mind the following morning.
+
+"Now," he would say, "I think I have that thing right at last, thank
+heaven!"
+
+Angela would heave a sigh of relief, for she could feel instantly any
+distress or inability that he felt, but her joy was of short duration.
+In a few hours she would find him working at the same canvas changing
+something. He grew thinner and paler at this time and his apprehensions
+as to his future rapidly became morbid.
+
+"By George! Angela," he said to her one day, "it would be a bad thing
+for me if I were to become sick now. It's just the time that I don't
+want to. I want to finish this exhibition up right and then go to
+London. If I could do London and Chicago as I did New York I would be
+just about made, but if I'm going to get sick--"
+
+"Oh, you're not going to get sick, Eugene," replied Angela, "you just
+think you are. You want to remember that you've worked very hard this
+summer. And think how hard you worked last winter! You need a good rest,
+that's what you need. Why don't you stop after you get this exhibition
+ready and rest awhile? You have enough to live on for a little bit. M.
+Charles will probably sell a few more of those pictures, or some of
+those will sell and then you can wait. Don't try to go to London in the
+spring. Go on a walking tour or go down South or just rest awhile,
+anywhere,--that's what you need."
+
+Eugene realized vaguely that it wasn't rest that he needed so much as
+peace of mind. He was not tired. He was merely nervously excited and
+apprehensive. He began to sleep badly, to have terrifying dreams, to
+feel that his heart was failing him. At two o'clock in the morning, the
+hour when for some reason human vitality appears to undergo a peculiar
+disturbance, he would wake with a sense of sinking physically. His pulse
+would appear to be very low, and he would feel his wrists nervously. Not
+infrequently he would break out in a cold perspiration and would get up
+and walk about to restore himself. Angela would rise and walk with him.
+One day at his easel he was seized with a peculiar nervous
+disturbance--a sudden glittering light before his eyes, a rumbling in
+his ears, and a sensation which was as if his body were being pricked
+with ten million needles. It was as though his whole nervous system had
+given way at every minute point and division. For the time being he was
+intensely frightened, believing that he was going crazy, but he said
+nothing. It came to him as a staggering truth that the trouble with him
+was over-indulgence physically; that the remedy was abstinence, complete
+or at least partial; that he was probably so far weakened mentally and
+physically that it would be very difficult for him to recover; that his
+ability to paint might be seriously affected--his life blighted.
+
+He stood before his canvas holding his brush, wondering. When the shock
+had completely gone he laid the brush down with a trembling hand. He
+walked to the window, wiped his cold, damp forehead with his hand and
+then turned to get his coat from the closet.
+
+"Where are you going?" asked Angela.
+
+"For a little walk. I'll be back soon. I don't feel just as fresh as I
+might."
+
+She kissed him good-bye at the door and let him go, but her heart
+troubled her.
+
+"I'm afraid Eugene is going to get sick," she thought. "He ought to stop
+work."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+It was the beginning of a period destined to last five or six years, in
+which, to say the least, Eugene was not himself. He was not in any sense
+out of his mind, if power to reason clearly, jest sagely, argue and read
+intelligently are any evidences of sanity; but privately his mind was a
+maelstrom of contradictory doubts, feelings and emotions. Always of a
+philosophic and introspective turn, this peculiar faculty of reasoning
+deeply and feeling emotionally were now turned upon himself and his own
+condition and, as in all such cases where we peer too closely into the
+subtleties of creation, confusion was the result. Previously he had been
+well satisfied that the world knew nothing. Neither in religion,
+philosophy nor science was there any answer to the riddle of existence.
+Above and below the little scintillating plane of man's thought
+was--what? Beyond the optic strength of the greatest telescope,--far out
+upon the dim horizon of space--were clouds of stars. What were they
+doing out there? Who governed them? When were their sidereal motions
+calculated? He figured life as a grim dark mystery, a sad semiconscious
+activity turning aimlessly in the dark. No one knew anything. God knew
+nothing--himself least of all. Malevolence, life living on death, plain
+violence--these were the chief characteristics of existence. If one
+failed of strength in any way, if life were not kind in its bestowal of
+gifts, if one were not born to fortune's pampering care--the rest was
+misery. In the days of his strength and prosperity the spectacle of
+existence had been sad enough: in the hours of threatened delay and
+defeat it seemed terrible. Why, if his art failed him now, what had he?
+Nothing. A little puny reputation which he could not sustain, no money,
+a wife to take care of, years of possible suffering and death. The abyss
+of death! When he looked into that after all of life and hope, how it
+shocked him, how it hurt! Here was life and happiness and love in
+health--there was death and nothingness--aeons and aeons of nothingness.
+
+He did not immediately give up hope--immediately succumb to the
+evidences of a crumbling reality. For months and months he fancied each
+day that this was a temporary condition; that drugs and doctors could
+heal him. There were various remedies that were advertised in the
+papers, blood purifiers, nerve restorers, brain foods, which were
+announced at once as specifics and cures, and while he did not think
+that the ordinary patent medicine had anything of value in it, he did
+imagine that some good could be had from tonics, or _the_ tonic. A
+physician whom he consulted recommended rest and an excellent tonic
+which he knew of. He asked whether he was subject to any wasting
+disease. Eugene told him no. He confessed to an over-indulgence in the
+sex-relationship, but the doctor did not believe that ordinarily this
+should bring about a nervous decline. Hard work must have something to
+do with it, over-anxiety. Some temperaments such as his were predisposed
+at birth to nervous breakdowns; they had to guard themselves. Eugene
+would have to be very careful. He should eat regularly, sleep as long as
+possible, observe regular hours. A system of exercise might not be a bad
+thing for him. He could get him a pair of Indian clubs or dumb-bells or
+an exerciser and bring himself back to health that way.
+
+Eugene told Angela that he believed he would try exercising and joined a
+gymnasium. He took a tonic, walked with her a great deal, sought to
+ignore the fact that he was nervously depressed. These things were of
+practically no value, for the body had apparently been drawn a great
+distance below normal and all the hell of a subnormal state had to be
+endured before it could gradually come into its own again.
+
+In the meantime he was continuing his passional relations with Angela,
+in spite of a growing judgment that they were in some way harmful to
+him. But it was not easy to refrain, and each failure to do so made it
+harder. It was a customary remark of his that "he must quit this," but
+it was like the self-apologetic assurance of the drunkard that he must
+reform.
+
+Now that he had stepped out into the limelight of public
+observation--now that artists and critics and writers somewhat knew of
+him, and in their occasional way were wondering what he was doing, it
+was necessary that he should bestir himself to especial effort in order
+to satisfy the public as to the enduring quality of his art. He was
+glad, once he realized that he was in for a siege of bad weather, that
+his Paris drawings had been so nearly completed before the break came.
+By the day he suffered the peculiar nervousness which seemed to mark the
+opening of his real decline, he had completed twenty-two paintings,
+which Angela begged him not to touch; and by sheer strength of will,
+though he misdoubted gravely, he managed to complete five more. All of
+these M. Charles came to see on occasion, and he approved of them
+highly. He was not so sure that they would have the appeal of the
+American pictures, for after all the city of Paris had been pretty well
+done over and over in illustration and genre work. It was not so new as
+New York; the things Eugene chose were not as unconventional. Still, he
+could say truly they were exceptional. They might try an exhibition of
+them later in Paris if they did not take here. He was very sorry to see
+that Eugene was in poor health and urged him to take care of himself.
+
+It seemed as if some malign planetary influence were affecting him.
+Eugene knew of astrology and palmistry and one day, in a spirit of
+curiosity and vague apprehensiveness, consulted a practitioner of the
+former, receiving for his dollar the statement that he was destined to
+great fame in either art or literature but that he was entering a period
+of stress which would endure for a number of years. Eugene's spirits
+sank perceptibly. The musty old gentleman who essayed his books of
+astrological lore shook his head. He had a rather noble growth of white
+hair and a white beard, but his coffee-stained vest was covered with
+tobacco ash and his collar and cuffs were dirty.
+
+"It looks pretty bad between your twenty-eighth and your thirty-second
+years, but after that there is a notable period of prosperity. Somewhere
+around your thirty-eighth or thirty-ninth year there is some more
+trouble--a little--but you will come out of that--that is, it looks as
+though you would. Your stars show you to be of a nervous, imaginative
+character, inclined to worry; and I see that your kidneys are weak. You
+ought never to take much medicine. Your sign is inclined to that but it
+is without benefit to you. You will be married twice, but I don't see
+any children."
+
+He rambled on dolefully and Eugene left in great gloom. So it was
+written in the stars that he was to suffer a period of decline and there
+was to be more trouble for him in the future. But he did see a period of
+great success for him between his thirty-second and his thirty-eighth
+years. That was some comfort. Who was the second woman he was to marry?
+Was Angela going to die? He walked the streets this early December
+afternoon, thinking, thinking.
+
+The Blue family had heard a great deal of Eugene's success since Angela
+had come to New York. There had never been a week but at least one
+letter, and sometimes two, had gone the rounds of the various members of
+the family. It was written to Marietta primarily, but Mrs. Blue, Jotham,
+the boys and the several sisters all received it by turns. Thus the
+whole regiment of Blue connections knew exactly how it was with Angela
+and even better than it was; for although things had looked prosperous
+enough, Angela had not stayed within the limits of bare fact in
+describing her husband's success. She added atmosphere, not fictitious,
+but the seeming glory which dwelt in her mind, until the various
+connections of the Blue family, Marietta in particular, were convinced
+that there was nothing but dignity and bliss in store for the wife of so
+talented a man. The studio life which Angela had seen, here and in
+Paris, the picturesque descriptions which came home from London and
+Paris, the personalities of M. Charles, M. Arkquin, Isaac Wertheim,
+Henry L. Tomlins, Luke Severas--all the celebrities whom they met, both
+in New York and abroad, had been described at length. There was not a
+dinner, a luncheon, a reception, a tea party, which was not pictured in
+all its native colors and more. Eugene had become somewhat of a demi-god
+to his Western connections. The quality of his art was never questioned.
+It was only a little time now before he would be rich or at least
+well-to-do.
+
+All the relatives hoped that he would bring Angela home some day on a
+visit. To think that she should have married such a distinguished man!
+
+In the Witla family it was quite the same. Eugene had not been home to
+see his parents since his last visit to Blackwood, but they had not been
+without news. For one thing, Eugene had been neglectful, and somewhat
+because of this Angela had taken it upon herself to open up a
+correspondence with his mother. She wrote that of course she didn't know
+her but that she was terribly fond of Eugene, that she hoped to make him
+a good wife and that she hoped to make her a satisfactory
+daughter-in-law. Eugene was so dilatory about writing. She would write
+for him now and his mother should hear every week. She asked if she and
+her husband couldn't manage to come and see them sometime. She would be
+so glad and it would do Eugene so much good. She asked if she couldn't
+have Myrtle's address--they had moved from Ottumwa--and if Sylvia
+wouldn't write occasionally. She sent a picture of herself and Eugene, a
+sketch of the studio which Eugene had made one day, a sketch of herself
+looking pensively out of the window into Washington Square. Pictures
+from his first show published in the newspapers, accounts of his work,
+criticisms,--all reached the members of both families impartially and
+they were kept well aware of how things were going.
+
+During the time that Eugene was feeling so badly and because, if he were
+going to lose his health, it might be necessary to economize greatly, it
+occurred to Angela that it might be advisable for them to go home for a
+visit. While her family were not rich, they had sufficient means to live
+on. Eugene's mother also was constantly writing, wanting to know why
+they didn't come out there for a while. She could not see why Eugene
+could not paint his pictures as well in Alexandria as in New York or
+Paris. Eugene listened to this willingly, for it occurred to him that
+instead of going to London he might do Chicago next, and he and Angela
+could stay awhile at Blackwood and another while at his own home. They
+would be welcome guests.
+
+The condition of his finances at this time was not exactly bad, but it
+was not very good. Of the thirteen hundred dollars he had received for
+the first three pictures sold, eleven hundred had been used on the
+foreign trip. He had since used three hundred dollars of his remaining
+capital of twelve hundred, but M. Charles' sale of two pictures at four
+hundred each had swelled his bank balance to seventeen hundred dollars;
+however, on this he had to live now until additional pictures were
+disposed of. He daily hoped to hear of additional sales, but none
+occurred.
+
+Moreover, his exhibition in January did not produce quite the impression
+he thought it would. It was fascinating to look at; the critics and the
+public imagined that by now he must have created a following for
+himself, else why should M. Charles make a feature of his work. But
+Charles pointed out that these foreign studies could not hope to appeal
+to Americans as did the American things. He indicated that they might
+take better in France. Eugene was depressed by the general tone of the
+opinions, but this was due more to his unhealthy state of mind than to
+any inherent reason for feeling so. There was still Paris to try and
+there might be some sales of his work here. The latter were slow in
+materializing, however, and because by February he had not been able to
+work and because it was necessary that he should husband his resources
+as carefully as possible, he decided to accept Angela's family's
+invitation as well as that of his own parents and spend some time in
+Illinois and Wisconsin. Perhaps his health would become better. He
+decided also that, if his health permitted, he would work in Chicago.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+It was in packing the trunks and leaving the studio in Washington Square
+(owing to the continued absence of Mr. Dexter they had never been
+compelled to vacate it) that Angela came across the first evidence of
+Eugene's duplicity. Because of his peculiar indifference to everything
+except matters which related to his art, he had put the letters which he
+had received in times past from Christina Channing, as well as the one
+and only one from Ruby Kenny, in a box which had formerly contained
+writing paper and which he threw carelessly in a corner of his trunk. He
+had by this time forgotten all about them, though his impression was
+that he had placed them somewhere where they would not be found. When
+Angela started to lay out the various things which occupied it she came
+across this box and opening it took out the letters.
+
+Curiosity as to things relative to Eugene was at this time the dominant
+characteristic of her life. She could neither think nor reason outside
+of this relationship which bound her to him. He and his affairs were
+truly the sum and substance of her existence. She looked at the letters
+oddly and then opened one--the first from Christina. It was dated
+Florizel, the summer of three years before when she was waiting so
+patiently for him at Blackwood. It began conservatively enough--"Dear
+E--," but it concerned itself immediately with references to an
+apparently affectionate relationship. "I went this morning to see if by
+chance there were any tell-tale evidences of either Diana or Adonis in
+Arcady. There were none of importance. A hairpin or two, a broken
+mother-of-pearl button from a summer waist, the stub of a lead-pencil
+wherewith a certain genius sketched. The trees seemed just as
+unconscious of any nymphs or hamadryads as they could be. The smooth
+grass was quite unruffled of any feet. It is strange how much the trees
+and forest know and keep their counsel.
+
+"And how is the hot city by now? Do you miss a certain evenly-swung
+hammock? Oh, the odor of leaves and the dew! Don't work too hard. You
+have an easy future and almost too much vitality. More repose for you,
+sir, and considerably more optimism of thought. I send you good
+wishes.--Diana."
+
+Angela wondered at once who Diana was, for before she had begun
+the letter she had looked for the signature on the succeeding page.
+Then after reading this she hurried feverishly from letter to letter,
+seeking a name. There was none. "Diana of the Mountains," "The
+Hamadryad," "The Wood-Nymph," "C," "C C"--so they ran, confusing,
+badgering, enraging her until all at once it came to light--her
+first name at least. It was on the letter from Baltimore suggesting
+that he come to Florizel--"Christina."
+
+"Ah," she thought, "Christina! That is her name." Then she hurried back
+to read the remaining epistles, hoping to find some clue to her surname.
+They were all of the same character, in the manner of writing she
+despised,--top-lofty, make-believe, the nasty, hypocritical, cant and
+make-believe superiority of the studios. How Angela hated her from that
+moment. How she could have taken her by the throat and beaten her head
+against the trees she described. Oh, the horrid creature! How dare she!
+And Eugene--how could he! What a way to reward her love! What an answer
+to make to all her devotion! At the very time when she was waiting so
+patiently, he was in the mountains with this Diana. And here she was
+packing his trunk for him like the little slave that she was when he
+cared so little, had apparently cared so little all this time. How could
+he ever have cared for her and done anything like this! He didn't! He
+never had! Dear Heaven!
+
+She began clenching and unclenching her hands dramatically, working
+herself into that frenzy of emotion and regret which was her most
+notable characteristic. All at once she stopped. There was another
+letter in another handwriting on cheaper paper. "Ruby" was the
+signature.
+
+"Dear Eugene:"--she read--"I got your note several weeks ago, but I
+couldn't bring myself to answer it before this. I know everything is
+over between us and that is all right I suppose. It has to be. You
+couldn't love any woman long, I think. I know what you say about having
+to go to New York to broaden your field is true. You ought to, but I'm
+sorry you didn't come out. You might have. Still I don't blame you,
+Eugene. It isn't much different from what has been going on for some
+time. I have cared, but I'll get over that, I know, and I won't ever
+think hard of you. Won't you return me the notes I have sent you from
+time to time, and my picture? You won't want them now.--Ruby."
+
+"I stood by the window last night and looked out on the street. The moon
+was shining and those dead trees were waving in the wind. I saw the moon
+on that pool of water over in the field. It looked like silver. Oh,
+Eugene, I wish that I were dead."
+
+Angela got up (as Eugene had) when she read this. The pathos struck
+home, for somehow it matched her own. Ruby! Who was she? Where had she
+been concealed while she, Angela, was coming to Chicago? Was this the
+fall and winter of their engagement? It certainly was. Look at the date.
+He had given her the diamond ring on her finger that fall! He had sworn
+eternal affection! He had sworn there was never another girl like her in
+all the world and yet, at that very time, he was apparently paying
+_court_ to this woman if nothing worse. Heaven! Could anything like this
+really be? He was telling her that he loved her and making love to this
+Ruby at the same time. He was kissing and fondling her and Ruby too!!
+Was there ever such a situation? He, Eugene Witla, to deceive her this
+way. No wonder he wanted to get rid of her when he came to New York. He
+would have treated her as he had this Ruby. And Christina! This
+Christina!! Where was she? Who was she? What was she doing now? She
+jumped up prepared to go to Eugene and charge him with his iniquities,
+but remembered that he was out of the studio--that he had gone for a
+walk. He was sick now, very sick. Would she dare to reproach him with
+these reprehensible episodes?
+
+She came back to the trunk where she was working and sat down. Her eyes
+were hard and cold for the time, but at the same time there was a touch
+of terror and of agonized affection. A face that, in the ordinary lines
+of its repose, was very much like that of a madonna, was now drawn and
+peaked and gray. Apparently Christina had forsaken him, or it might be
+that they still corresponded secretly. She got up again at that thought.
+Still the letters were old. It looked as though all communication had
+ceased two years ago. What had he written to her?--love notes. Letters
+full of wooing phrases such as he had written to her. Oh, the
+instability of men, the insincerity, the lack of responsibility and
+sense of duty. Her father,--what a different man he was; her
+brothers,--their word was their bond. And here was she married to a man
+who, even in the days of his most ardent wooing, had been deceiving her.
+She had let him lead her astray, too,--disgrace her own home. Tears came
+after a while, hot, scalding tears that seared her cheeks. And now she
+was married to him and he was sick and she would have to make the best
+of it. She wanted to make the best of it, for after all she loved him.
+
+But oh, the cruelty, the insincerity, the unkindness, the brutality of
+it all.
+
+The fact that Eugene was out for several hours following her discovery
+gave her ample time to reflect as to a suitable course of action. Being
+so impressed by the genius of the man, as imposed upon her by the
+opinion of others and her own affection, she could not readily think of
+anything save some method of ridding her soul of this misery and him of
+his evil tendencies, of making him ashamed of his wretched career, of
+making him see how badly he had treated her and how sorry he ought to
+be. She wanted him to feel sorry, very sorry, so that he would be a long
+time repenting in suffering, but she feared at the same time that she
+could not make him do that. He was so ethereal, so indifferent, so lost
+in the contemplation of life that he could not be made to think of her.
+That was her one complaint. He had other gods before her--the god of his
+art, the god of nature, the god of people as a spectacle. Frequently she
+had complained to him in this last year--"you don't love me! you don't
+love me!" but he would answer, "oh, yes I do. I can't be talking to you
+all the time, Angel-face. I have work to do. My art has to be
+cultivated. I can't be making love all the time."
+
+"Oh, it isn't that, it isn't that!" she would exclaim passionately. "You
+just don't love me, like you ought to. You just don't care. If you did
+I'd feel it."
+
+"Oh, Angela," he answered, "why do you talk so? Why do you carry on so?
+You're the funniest girl I ever knew. Now be reasonable. Why don't you
+bring a little philosophy to bear? We can't be billing and cooing all
+the time!"
+
+"Billing and cooing! That's the way you think of it. That's the way you
+talk of it! As though it were something you had to do. Oh, I hate love!
+I hate life! I hate philosophy! I wish I could die."
+
+"Now, Angela, for Heaven's sake, why will you take on so? I can't stand
+this. I can't stand these tantrums of yours. They're not reasonable. You
+know I love you. Why, haven't I shown it? Why should I have married you
+if I didn't? I wasn't obliged to marry you!"
+
+"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" Angela would sob on, wringing her hands. "Oh, you
+really don't love me! You don't care! And it will go on this way,
+getting worse and worse, with less and less of love and feeling until
+after awhile you won't even want to see me any more--you'll hate me! Oh,
+dear! oh, dear!"
+
+Eugene felt keenly the pathos involved in this picture of decaying love.
+In fact, her fear of the disaster which might overtake her little bark
+of happiness was sufficiently well founded. It might be that his
+affection would cease--it wasn't even affection now in the true sense of
+the word,--a passionate intellectual desire for her companionship. He
+never had really loved her for her mind, the beauty of her thoughts. As
+he meditated he realized that he had never reached an understanding with
+her by an intellectual process at all. It was emotional, subconscious, a
+natural drawing together which was not based on reason and spirituality
+of contemplation apparently, but on grosser emotions and desires.
+Physical desire had been involved--strong, raging, uncontrollable. And
+for some reason he had always felt sorry for her--he always had. She was
+so little, so conscious of disaster, so afraid of life and what it might
+do to her. It was a shame to wreck her hopes and desires. At the same
+time he was sorry now for this bondage he had let himself into--this
+yoke which he had put about his neck. He could have done so much better.
+He might have married a woman of wealth or a woman with artistic
+perceptions and philosophic insight like Christina Channing, who would
+be peaceful and happy with him. Angela couldn't be. He really didn't
+admire her enough, couldn't fuss over her enough. Even while he was
+soothing her in these moments, trying to make her believe that there was
+no basis for her fears, sympathizing with her subconscious intuitions
+that all was not well, he was thinking of how different his life might
+have been.
+
+"It won't end that way," he would soothe. "Don't cry. Come now, don't
+cry. We're going to be very happy. I'm going to love you always, just as
+I'm loving you now, and you're going to love me. Won't that be all
+right? Come on, now. Cheer up. Don't be so pessimistic. Come on, Angela.
+Please do. Please!"
+
+Angela would brighten after a time, but there were spells of
+apprehension and gloom; they were common, apt to burst forth like a
+summer storm when neither of them was really expecting it.
+
+The discovery of these letters now checked the feeling, with which she
+tried to delude herself at times, that there might be anything more than
+kindness here. They confirmed her suspicions that there was not and
+brought on that sense of defeat and despair which so often and so
+tragically overcame her. It did it at a time, too, when Eugene needed
+her undivided consideration and feeling, for he was in a wretched state
+of mind. To have her quarrel with him now, lose her temper, fly into
+rages and compel him to console her, was very trying. He was in no mood
+for it; could not very well endure it without injury to himself. He was
+seeking for an atmosphere of joyousness, wishing to find a cheerful
+optimism somewhere which would pull him out of himself and make him
+whole. Not infrequently he dropped in to see Norma Whitmore, Isadora
+Crane, who was getting along very well on the stage, Hedda Andersen, who
+had a natural charm of intellect with much vivacity, even though she was
+a model, and now and then Miriam Finch. The latter was glad to see him
+alone, almost as a testimony against Angela, though she would not go out
+of her way to conceal from Angela the fact that he had been there. The
+others, though he said nothing, assumed that since Angela did not come
+with him he wanted nothing said and observed his wish. They were
+inclined to think that he had made a matrimonial mistake and was
+possibly artistically or intellectually lonely. All of them noted his
+decline in health with considerate apprehension and sorrow. It was too
+bad, they thought, if his health was going to fail him just at this
+time. Eugene lived in fear lest Angela should become aware of any of
+these visits. He thought he could not tell her because in the first
+place she would resent his not having taken her with him; and in the
+next, if he had proposed it first, she would have objected, or set
+another date, or asked pointless questions. He liked the liberty of
+going where he pleased, saying nothing, not feeling it necessary to say
+anything. He longed for the freedom of his old pre-matrimonial days.
+Just at this time, because he could not work artistically and because he
+was in need of diversion and of joyous artistic palaver, he was
+especially miserable. Life seemed very dark and ugly.
+
+Eugene, returning and feeling, as usual, depressed about his state,
+sought to find consolation in her company. He came in at one o'clock,
+their usual lunch hour, and finding Angela still working, said, "George!
+but you like to keep at things when you get started, don't you? You're a
+regular little work-horse. Having much trouble?"
+
+"No-o," replied Angela, dubiously.
+
+Eugene noted the tone of her voice. He thought she was not very strong
+and this packing was getting on her nerves. Fortunately there were only
+some trunks to look after, for the vast mass of their housekeeping
+materials belonged to the studio. Still no doubt she was weary.
+
+"Are you very tired?" he asked.
+
+"No-o," she replied.
+
+"You look it," he said, slipping his arm about her. Her face, which he
+turned up with his hand, was pale and drawn.
+
+"It isn't anything physical," she replied, looking away from him in a
+tragic way. "It's just my heart. It's here!" and she laid her hand over
+her heart.
+
+"What's the matter now?" he asked, suspecting something emotional,
+though for the life of him he could not imagine what. "Does your heart
+hurt you?"
+
+"It isn't my real heart," she returned, "it's just my mind, my feelings;
+though I don't suppose they ought to matter."
+
+"What's the matter now, Angel-face," he persisted, for he was sorry for
+her. This emotional ability of hers had the power to move him. It might
+have been acting, or it might not have been. It might be either a real
+or a fancied woe;--in either case it was real to her. "What's come up?"
+he continued. "Aren't you just tired? Suppose we quit this and go out
+somewhere and get something to eat. You'll feel better."
+
+"No, I couldn't eat," she replied. "I'll stop now and get your lunch,
+but I don't want anything."
+
+"Oh, what's the matter, Angela?" he begged. "I know there's something.
+Now what is it? You're tired, or you're sick, or something has happened.
+Is it anything that I have done? Look at me! Is it?"
+
+Angela held away from him, looking down. She did not know how to begin
+this but she wanted to make him terribly sorry if she could, as sorry as
+she was for herself. She thought he ought to be; that if he had any true
+feeling of shame and sympathy in him he would be. Her own condition in
+the face of his shameless past was terrible. She had no one to love her.
+She had no one to turn to. Her own family did not understand her life
+any more--it had changed so. She was a different woman now, greater,
+more important, more distinguished. Her experiences with Eugene here in
+New York, in Paris, in London and even before her marriage, in Chicago
+and Blackwood, had changed her point of view. She was no longer the same
+in her ideas, she thought, and to find herself deserted in this way
+emotionally--not really loved, not ever having been really loved but
+just toyed with, made a doll and a plaything, was terrible.
+
+"Oh, dear!" she exclaimed in a shrill staccato, "I don't know what to
+do! I don't know what to say! I don't know what to think! If I only knew
+how to think or what to do!"
+
+"What's the matter?" begged Eugene, releasing his hold and turning his
+thoughts partially to himself and his own condition as well as to hers.
+His nerves were put on edge by these emotional tantrums--his brain
+fairly ached. It made his hands tremble. In his days of physical and
+nervous soundness it did not matter, but now, when he was sick, when his
+own heart was weak, as he fancied, and his nerves set to jangling by the
+least discord, it was almost more than he could bear. "Why don't you
+speak?" he insisted. "You know I can't stand this. I'm in no condition.
+What's the trouble? What's the use of carrying on this way? Are you
+going to tell me?"
+
+"There!" Angela said, pointing her finger at the box of letters she had
+laid aside on the window-sill. She knew he would see them, would
+remember instantly what they were about.
+
+Eugene looked. The box came to his memory instantly. He picked it up
+nervously, sheepishly, for this was like a blow in the face which he had
+no power to resist. The whole peculiar nature of his transactions with
+Ruby and with Christina came back to him, not as they had looked to him
+at the time, but as they were appearing to Angela now. What must she
+think of him? Here he was protesting right along that he loved her, that
+he was happy and satisfied to live with her, that he was not interested
+in any of these other women whom she knew to be interested in him and of
+whom she was inordinately jealous, that he had always loved her and her
+only, and yet here were these letters suddenly come to light, giving the
+lie to all these protestations and asseverations--making him look like
+the coward, the blackguard, the moral thief that he knew himself to be.
+To be dragged out of the friendly darkness of lack of knowledge and
+understanding on her part and set forth under the clear white light of
+positive proof--he stared helplessly, his nerves trembling, his brain
+aching, for truly he was in no condition for an emotional argument.
+
+And yet Angela was crying now. She had walked away from him and was
+leaning against the mantel-piece sobbing as if her heart would break.
+There was a real convincing ache in the sound--the vibration expressing
+the sense of loss and defeat and despair which she felt. He was staring
+at the box wondering why he had been such an idiot as to leave them in
+his trunk, to have saved them at all.
+
+"Well, I don't know that there is anything to say to that," he observed
+finally, strolling over to where she was. There wasn't anything that he
+could say--that he knew. He was terribly sorry--sorry for her, sorry for
+himself. "Did you read them all?" he asked, curiously.
+
+She nodded her head in the affirmative.
+
+"Well, I didn't care so much for Christina Channing," he observed,
+deprecatingly. He wanted to say something, anything which would relieve
+her depressed mood. He knew it couldn't be much. If he could only make
+her believe that there wasn't anything vital in either of these affairs,
+that his interests and protestations had been of a light, philandering
+character. Still the Ruby Kenny letter showed that she cared for him
+desperately. He could not say anything against Ruby.
+
+Angela caught the name of Christina Channing clearly. It seared itself
+in her brain. She recalled now that it was she of whom she had heard him
+speak in a complimentary way from time to time. He had told in studios
+of what a lovely voice she had, what a charming platform presence she
+had, how she could sing so feelingly, how intelligently she looked upon
+life, how good looking she was, how she was coming back to grand opera
+some day. And he had been in the mountains with her--had made love to
+her while she, Angela, was out in Blackwood waiting for him patiently.
+It aroused on the instant all the fighting jealousy that was in her
+breast; it was the same jealousy that had determined her once before to
+hold him in spite of the plotting and scheming that appeared to her to
+be going on about her. They should not have him--these nasty studio
+superiorities--not any one of them, nor all of them combined, if they
+were to unite and try to get him. They had treated her shamefully since
+she had been in the East. They had almost uniformly ignored her. They
+would come to see Eugene, of course, and now that he was famous they
+could not be too nice to him, but as for her--well, they had no
+particular use for her. Hadn't she seen it! Hadn't she watched the
+critical, hypocritical, examining expressions in their eyes! She wasn't
+smart enough! She wasn't literary enough or artistic enough. She knew as
+much about life as they did and more--ten times as much; and yet because
+she couldn't strut and pose and stare and talk in an affected voice they
+thought themselves superior. And so did Eugene, the wretched creature!
+Superior! The cheap, mean, nasty, selfish upstarts! Why, the majority of
+them had nothing. Their clothes were mere rags and tags, when you came
+to examine them closely--badly sewed, of poor material, merely slung
+together, and yet they wore them with such a grand air! She would show
+them. She would dress herself too, one of these days, when Eugene had
+the means. She was doing it now--a great deal more than when she first
+came, and she would do it a great deal more before long. The nasty,
+mean, cheap, selfish, make-belief things. She would show them! O-oh! how
+she hated them.
+
+Now as she cried she also thought of the fact that Eugene could write
+love letters to this horrible Christina Channing--one of the same kind,
+no doubt; her letters showed it. O-oh! how she hated her! If she could
+only get at her to poison her. And her sobs sounded much more of the
+sorrow she felt than of the rage. She was helpless in a way and she knew
+it. She did not dare to show him exactly what she felt. She was afraid
+of him. He might possibly leave her. He really did not care for her
+enough to stand everything from her--or did he? This doubt was the one
+terrible, discouraging, annihilating feature of the whole thing--if he
+only cared.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't cry, Angela," said Eugene appealingly, after a
+time. "It isn't as bad as you think. It looks pretty bad, but I wasn't
+married then, and I didn't care so very much for these people--not as
+much as you think; really I didn't. It may look that way to you, but I
+didn't."
+
+"Didn't care!" sneered Angela, all at once, flaring up. "Didn't care! It
+looks as though you didn't care, with one of them calling you Honey Boy
+and Adonis, and the other saying she wishes she were dead. A fine time
+you'd have convincing anyone that you didn't care. And I out in
+Blackwood at that very time, longing and waiting for you to come, and
+you up in the mountains making love to another woman. Oh, I know how
+much you cared. You showed how much you cared when you could leave me
+out there to wait for you eating my heart out while you were off in the
+mountains having a good time with another woman. 'Dear E--,' and
+'Precious Honey Boy,' and 'Adonis'! That shows how much you cared,
+doesn't it!"
+
+Eugene stared before him helplessly. Her bitterness and wrath surprised
+and irritated him. He did not know that she was capable of such an awful
+rage as showed itself in her face and words at this moment, and yet he
+did not know but that she was well justified. Why so bitter though--so
+almost brutal? He was sick. Had she no consideration for him?
+
+"I tell you it wasn't as bad as you think," he said stolidly, showing
+for the first time a trace of temper and opposition. "I wasn't married
+then. I did like Christina Channing; I did like Ruby Kenny. What of it?
+I can't help it now. What am I going to say about it? What do you want
+me to say? What do you want me to do?"
+
+"Oh," whimpered Angela, changing her tone at once from helpless accusing
+rage to pleading, self-commiserating misery. "And you can stand there
+and say to me 'what of it'? What of it! What of it! What shall you say?
+What do you think you ought to say? And me believing that you were so
+honorable and faithful! Oh, if I had only known! If I had only known! I
+had better have drowned myself a hundred times over than have waked and
+found that I wasn't loved. Oh, dear, oh, dear! I don't know what I ought
+to do! I don't know what I can do!"
+
+"But I do love you," protested Eugene soothingly, anxious to say or do
+anything which would quiet this terrific storm. He could not imagine how
+he could have been so foolish as to leave these letters lying around.
+Dear Heaven! What a mess he had made of this! If only he had put them
+safely outside the home or destroyed them. Still he had wanted to keep
+Christina's letters; they were so charming.
+
+"Yes, you love me!" flared Angela. "I see how you love me. Those letters
+show it! Oh, dear! oh, dear! I wish I were dead."
+
+"Listen to me, Angela," replied Eugene desperately, "I know this
+correspondence looks bad. I did make love to Miss Kenny and to Christina
+Channing, but you see I didn't care enough to marry either of them. If I
+had I would have. I cared for you. Believe it or not. I married you. Why
+did I marry you? Answer me that? I needn't have married you. Why did I?
+Because I loved you, of course. What other reason could I have?"
+
+"Because you couldn't get Christina Channing," snapped Angela, angrily,
+with the intuitive sense of one who reasons from one material fact to
+another, "that's why. If you could have, you would have. I know it. Her
+letters show it."
+
+"Her letters don't show anything of the sort," returned Eugene angrily.
+"I couldn't get her? I could have had her, easily enough. I didn't want
+her. If I had wanted her, I would have married her--you can bet on
+that."
+
+He hated himself for lying in this way, but he felt for the time being
+that he had to do it. He did not care to stand in the role of a jilted
+lover. He half-fancied that he could have married Christina if he had
+really tried.
+
+"Anyhow," he said, "I'm not going to argue that point with you. I didn't
+marry her, so there you are; and I didn't marry Ruby Kenny either. Well
+you can think all you want; but I know. I cared for them, but I didn't
+marry them. I married you instead. I ought to get credit for something
+on that score. I married you because I loved you, I suppose. That's
+perfectly plain, isn't it?" He was half convincing himself that he had
+loved her--in some degree.
+
+"Yes, I see how you love me," persisted Angela, cogitating this very
+peculiar fact which he was insisting on and which it was very hard
+intellectually to overcome. "You married me because you couldn't very
+well get out of it, that's why. Oh, I know. You didn't want to marry me.
+That's very plain. You wanted to marry someone else. Oh, dear! oh,
+dear!"
+
+"Oh, how you talk!" replied Eugene defiantly. "Marry someone else! Who
+did I want to marry? I could have married often enough if I had wanted
+to. I didn't want to marry, that's all. Believe it or not. I wanted to
+marry you and I did. I don't think you have any right to stand there and
+argue so. What you say isn't so, and you know it."
+
+Angela cogitated this argument further. He had married her! Why had he?
+He might have cared for Christina and Ruby, but he must have cared for
+her too. Why hadn't she thought of that? There was something in
+it--something besides a mere desire to deceive her. Perhaps he did care
+for her a little. Anyway it was plain that she could not get very far by
+arguing with him--he was getting stubborn, argumentative, contentious.
+She had not seen him that way before.
+
+"Oh!" she sobbed, taking refuge from this very difficult realm of logic
+in the safer and more comfortable one of illogical tears. "I don't know
+what to do! I don't know what to think!"
+
+She was badly treated, no doubt of that. Her life was a failure, but
+even so there was some charm about him. As he stood there, looking
+aimlessly around, defiant at one moment, appealing at another, she could
+not help seeing that he was not wholly bad. He was just weak on this one
+point. He loved pretty women. They were always trying to win him to
+them. He was probably not wholly to blame. If he would only be repentant
+enough, this thing might be allowed to blow over. It couldn't be
+forgiven. She never could forgive him for the way he had deceived her.
+Her ideal of him had been pretty hopelessly shattered--but she might
+live with him on probation.
+
+"Angela!" he said, while she was still sobbing, and feeling that he
+ought to apologize to her. "Won't you believe me? Won't you forgive me?
+I don't like to hear you cry this way. There's no use saying that I
+didn't do anything. There's no use my saying anything at all, really.
+You won't believe me. I don't want you to; but I'm sorry. Won't you
+believe that? Won't you forgive me?"
+
+Angela listened to this curiously, her thoughts going around in a ring
+for she was at once despairing, regretful, revengeful, critical,
+sympathetic toward him, desirous of retaining her state, desirous of
+obtaining and retaining his love, desirous of punishing him, desirous of
+doing any one of a hundred things. Oh, if he had only never done this!
+And he was sickly, too. He needed her sympathy.
+
+"Won't you forgive me, Angela?" he pleaded softly, laying his hand on
+her arm. "I'm not going to do anything like that any more. Won't you
+believe me? Come on now. Quit crying, won't you?"
+
+Angela hesitated for a while, lingering dolefully. She did not know what
+to do, what to say. It might be that he would not sin against her any
+more. He had not thus far, in so far as she knew. Still this was a
+terrible revelation. All at once, because he manoeuvred himself
+into a suitable position and because she herself was weary of fighting
+and crying, and because she was longing for sympathy, she allowed
+herself to be pulled into his arms, her head to his shoulder, and there
+she cried more copiously than ever. Eugene for the moment felt terribly
+grieved. He was really sorry for her. It wasn't right. He ought to be
+ashamed of himself. He should never have done anything like that.
+
+"I'm sorry," he whispered, "really I am. Won't you forgive me?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know what to do! what to think!" moaned Angela after a
+time.
+
+"Please do, Angela," he urged, holding her questioningly.
+
+There was more of this pleading and emotional badgering until finally
+out of sheer exhaustion Angela said yes. Eugene's nerves were worn to a
+thread by the encounter. He was pale, exhausted, distraught. Many scenes
+like this, he thought, would set him crazy; and still he had to go
+through a world of petting and love-making even now. It was not easy to
+bring her back to her normal self. It was bad business, this
+philandering, he thought. It seemed to lead to all sorts of misery for
+him, and Angela was jealous. Dear Heaven! what a wrathful, vicious,
+contentious nature she had when she was aroused. He had never suspected
+that. How could he truly love her when she acted like that? How could he
+sympathize with her? He recalled how she sneered at him--how she taunted
+him with Christina's having discarded him. He was weary, excited,
+desirous of rest and sleep, but now he must make more love. He fondled
+her, and by degrees she came out of her blackest mood; but he was not
+really forgiven even then. He was just understood better. And she was
+not truly happy again but only hopeful--and watchful.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Spring, summer and fall came and went with Eugene and Angela first in
+Alexandria and then in Blackwood. In suffering this nervous breakdown
+and being compelled to leave New York, Eugene missed some of the finest
+fruits of his artistic efforts, for M. Charles, as well as a number of
+other people, were interested in him and were prepared to entertain him
+in an interesting and conspicuous way. He could have gone out a great
+deal, but his mental state was such that he was poor company for anyone.
+He was exceedingly morbid, inclined to discuss gloomy subjects, to look
+on life as exceedingly sad and to believe that people generally were
+evil. Lust, dishonesty, selfishness, envy, hypocrisy, slander, hate,
+theft, adultery, murder, dementia, insanity, inanity--these and death
+and decay occupied his thoughts. There was no light anywhere. Only a
+storm of evil and death. These ideas coupled with his troubles with
+Angela, the fact that he could not work, the fact that he felt he had
+made a matrimonial mistake, the fact that he feared he might die or go
+crazy, made a terrible and agonizing winter for him.
+
+Angela's attitude, while sympathetic enough, once the first storm of
+feeling was over, was nevertheless involved with a substratum of
+criticism. While she said nothing, agreed that she would forget, Eugene
+had the consciousness all the while that she wasn't forgetting, that she
+was secretly reproaching him and that she was looking for new
+manifestations of weakness in this direction, expecting them and on the
+alert to prevent them.
+
+The spring-time in Alexandria, opening as it did shortly after they
+reached there, was in a way a source of relief to Eugene. He had decided
+for the time being to give up trying to work, to give up his idea of
+going either to London or Chicago, and merely rest. Perhaps it was true
+that he was tired. He didn't feel that way. He couldn't sleep and he
+couldn't work, but he felt brisk enough. It was only because he couldn't
+work that he was miserable. Still he decided to try sheer idleness.
+Perhaps that would revive his wonderful art for him. Meantime he
+speculated ceaselessly on the time he was losing, the celebrities he was
+missing, the places he was not seeing. Oh, London, London! If he could
+only do that.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Witla were immensely pleased to have their boy back with
+them again. Being in their way simple, unsophisticated people, they
+could not understand how their son's health could have undergone such a
+sudden reverse.
+
+"I never saw Gene looking so bad in all his life," observed Witla pere
+to his wife the day Eugene arrived. "His eyes are so sunken. What in the
+world do you suppose is ailing him?"
+
+"How should I know?" replied his wife, who was greatly distressed over
+her boy. "I suppose he's just tired out, that's all. He'll probably be
+all right after he rests awhile. Don't let on that you think he's
+looking out of sorts. Just pretend that he's all right. What do you
+think of his wife?"
+
+"She appears to be a very nice little woman," replied Witla. "She's
+certainly devoted to him. I never thought Eugene would marry just that
+type, but he's the judge. I suppose people thought that I would never
+marry anybody like you, either," he added jokingly.
+
+"Yes, you did make a terrible mistake," jested his wife in return. "You
+worked awfully hard to make it."
+
+"I was young! I was young! You want to remember that," retorted Witla.
+"I didn't know much in those days."
+
+"You don't appear to know much better yet," she replied, "do you?"
+
+He smiled and patted her on the back. "Well, anyhow I'll have to make
+the best of it, won't I? It's too late now."
+
+"It certainly is," replied his wife.
+
+Eugene and Angela were given his old room on the second floor,
+commanding a nice view of the yard and the street corner, and they
+settled down to spend what the Witla parents hoped would be months of
+peaceful days. It was a curious sensation to Eugene to find himself back
+here in Alexandria looking out upon the peaceful neighborhood in which
+he had been raised, the trees, the lawn, the hammock replaced several
+times since he had left, but still in its accustomed place. The thought
+of the little lakes and the small creek winding about the town were a
+comfort to him. He could go fishing now and boating, and there were some
+interesting walks here and there. He began to amuse himself by going
+fishing the first week, but it was still a little cold, and he decided,
+for the time being, to confine himself to walking.
+
+Days of this kind grow as a rule quickly monotonous. To a man of
+Eugene's turn of mind there was so little in Alexandria to entertain
+him. After London and Paris, Chicago and New York, the quiet streets of
+his old home town were a joke. He visited the office of the _Appeal_ but
+both Jonas Lyle and Caleb Williams had gone, the former to St. Louis,
+the latter to Bloomington. Old Benjamin Burgess, his sister's husband's
+father, was unchanged except in the matter of years. He told Eugene that
+he was thinking of running for Congress in the next campaign--the
+Republican organization owed it to him. His son Henry, Sylvia's husband,
+had become a treasurer of the local bank. He was working as patiently
+and quietly as ever, going to church Sundays, going to Chicago
+occasionally on business, consulting with farmers and business men about
+small loans. He was a close student of the several banking journals of
+the country, and seemed to be doing very well financially. Sylvia had
+little to say of how he was getting along. Having lived with him for
+eleven years, she had become somewhat close-mouthed like himself. Eugene
+could not help smiling at the lean, slippered subtlety of the man, young
+as he was. He was so quiet, so conservative, so intent on all the little
+things which make a conventionally successful life. Like a cabinet
+maker, he was busy inlaying the little pieces which would eventually
+make the perfect whole.
+
+Angela took up the household work, which Mrs. Witla grudgingly consented
+to share with her, with a will. She liked to work and would put the
+house in order while Mrs. Witla was washing the dishes after breakfast.
+She would make special pies and cakes for Eugene when she could without
+giving offense, and she tried to conduct herself so that Mrs. Witla
+would like her. She did not think so much of the Witla household. It
+wasn't so much better than her own--hardly as good. Still it was
+Eugene's birthplace and for that reason important. There was a slight
+divergence of view-point though, between his mother and herself, over
+the nature of life and how to live it. Mrs. Witla was of an easier, more
+friendly outlook on life than Angela. She liked to take things as they
+came without much worry, while Angela was of a naturally worrying
+disposition. The two had one very human failing in common--they could
+not work with anyone else at anything. Each preferred to do all that was
+to be done rather than share it at all. Both being so anxious to be
+conciliatory for Eugene's sake and for permanent peace in the family,
+there was small chance for any disagreement, for neither was without
+tact. But there was just a vague hint of something in the air--that
+Angela was a little hard and selfish, on Mrs. Witla's part; that
+Mrs. Witla was just the least bit secretive, or shy or distant--from
+Angela's point of view. All was serene and lovely on the surface,
+however, with many won't-you-let-me's and please-do-now's on both sides.
+Mrs. Witla, being so much older, was, of course, calmer and in the
+family seat of dignity and peace.
+
+To be able to sit about in a chair, lie in a hammock, stroll in the
+woods and country fields and be perfectly happy in idle contemplation
+and loneliness, requires an exceptional talent for just that sort of
+thing. Eugene once fancied he had it, as did his parents, but since he
+had heard the call of fame he could never be still any more. And just at
+this time he was not in need of solitude and idle contemplation but of
+diversion and entertainment. He needed companionship of the right sort,
+gayety, sympathy, enthusiasm. Angela had some of this, when she was not
+troubled about anything, his parents, his sister, his old acquaintances
+had a little more to offer. They could not, however, be forever talking
+to him or paying him attention, and beyond them there was nothing. The
+town had no resources. Eugene would walk the long country roads with
+Angela or go boating or fishing sometimes, but still he was lonely. He
+would sit on the porch or in the hammock and think of what he had seen
+in London and Paris--how he might be at work. St. Paul's in a mist, the
+Thames Embankment, Piccadilly, Blackfriars Bridge, the muck of
+Whitechapel and the East End--how he wished he was out of all this and
+painting them. If he could only paint. He rigged up a studio in his
+father's barn, using a north loft door for light and essayed certain
+things from memory, but there was no making anything come out right. He
+had this fixed belief, which was a notion purely, that there was always
+something wrong. Angela, his mother, his father, whom he occasionally
+asked for an opinion, might protest that it was beautiful or wonderful,
+but he did not believe it. After a few altering ideas of this kind,
+under the influences of which he would change and change and change
+things, he would find himself becoming wild in his feelings, enraged at
+his condition, intensely despondent and sorry for himself.
+
+"Well," he would say, throwing down his brush, "I shall simply have to
+wait until I come out of this. I can't do anything this way." Then he
+would walk or read or row on the lakes or play solitaire, or listen to
+Angela playing on the piano that his father had installed for Myrtle
+long since. All the time though he was thinking of his condition, what
+he was missing, how the gay world was surging on rapidly elsewhere, how
+long it would be before he got well, if ever. He talked of going to
+Chicago and trying his hand at scenes there, but Angela persuaded him to
+rest for a while longer. In June she promised him they would go to
+Blackwood for the summer, coming back here in the fall if he wished, or
+going on to New York or staying in Chicago, just as he felt about it.
+Now he needed rest.
+
+"Eugene will probably be all right by then," Angela volunteered to his
+mother, "and he can make up his mind whether he wants to go to Chicago
+or London."
+
+She was very proud of her ability to talk of where they would go and
+what they would do.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+If it had not been for the lurking hope of some fresh exciting
+experience with a woman, he would have been unconscionably lonely. As it
+was, this thought with him--quite as the confirmed drunkard's thought of
+whiskey--buoyed him up, kept him from despairing utterly, gave his mind
+the only diversion it had from the ever present thought of failure. If
+by chance he should meet some truly beautiful girl, gay, enticing, who
+would fall in love with him! that would be happiness. Only, Angela was
+constantly watching him these days and, besides, more girls would simply
+mean that his condition would be aggravated. Yet so powerful was the
+illusion of desire, the sheer animal magnetism of beauty, that when it
+came near him in the form of a lovely girl of his own temperamental
+inclinations he could not resist it. One look into an inviting eye, one
+glance at a face whose outlines were soft and delicate--full of that
+subtle suggestion of youth and health which is so characteristic of
+girlhood--and the spell was cast. It was as though the very form of the
+face, without will or intention on the part of the possessor, acted
+hypnotically upon its beholder. The Arabians believed in the magic power
+of the word Abracadabra to cast a spell. For Eugene the form of a
+woman's face and body was quite as powerful.
+
+While he and Angela were in Alexandria from February to May, he met one
+night at his sister's house a girl who, from the point of view of the
+beauty which he admired and to which he was so susceptible, was
+extremely hypnotic, and who for the ease and convenience of a flirtation
+was very favorably situated. She was the daughter of a traveling man,
+George Roth by name, whose wife, the child's mother, was dead, but who
+lived with his sister in an old tree-shaded house on the edge of Green
+Lake not far from the spot where Eugene had once attempted to caress his
+first love, Stella Appleton. Frieda was the girl's name. She was
+extremely attractive, not more than eighteen years of age, with large,
+clear, blue eyes, a wealth of yellowish-brown hair and a plump but
+shapely figure. She was a graduate of the local high school, well
+developed for her years, bright, rosy-cheeked, vivacious and with a
+great deal of natural intelligence which attracted the attention of
+Eugene at once. Normally he was extremely fond of a natural, cheerful,
+laughing disposition. In his present state he was abnormally so. This
+girl and her foster mother had heard of him a long time since through
+his parents and his sister, whom they knew well and whom they visited
+frequently. George Roth had moved here since Eugene had first left for
+Chicago, and because he was so much on the road he had not seen him
+since. Frieda, on all his previous visits, had been too young to take an
+interest in men, but now at this age, when she was just blossoming into
+womanhood, her mind was fixed on them. She did not expect to be
+interested in Eugene because she knew he was married, but because of his
+reputation as an artist she was curious about him. Everybody knew who he
+was. The local papers had written up his success and published his
+portrait. Frieda expected to see a man of about forty, stern and sober.
+Instead she met a smiling youth of twenty-nine, rather gaunt and
+hollow-eyed, but none the less attractive for that. Eugene, with
+Angela's approval, still affected a loose, flowing tie, a soft turn-down
+collar, brown corduroy suits as a rule, the coat cut with a belt,
+shooting jacket fashion, a black iron ring of very curious design upon
+one of his fingers, and a soft hat. His hands were very thin and white,
+his skin pale. Frieda, rosy, as thoughtless as a butterfly, charmingly
+clothed in a dress of blue linen, laughing, afraid of him because of his
+reputation, attracted his attention at once. She was like all the young,
+healthy, laughing girls he had ever known, delightful. He wished he were
+single again that he might fall into a jesting conversation with her.
+She seemed inclined to be friendly from the first.
+
+Angela being present, however, and Frieda's foster mother, it was
+necessary for him to be circumspect and distant. The latter, Sylvia and
+Angela, talked of art and listened to Angela's descriptions of Eugene's
+eccentricities, idiosyncrasies and experiences, which were a
+never-failing source of interest to the common run of mortals whom they
+met. Eugene would sit by in a comfortable chair with a weary, genial or
+indifferent look on his face as his mood happened to be. To-night he was
+bored and a little indifferent in his manner. No one here interested him
+save this girl, the beauty of whose face nourished his secret dreams. He
+longed to have some such spirit of youth near him always. Why could not
+women remain young?
+
+While they were laughing and talking, Eugene picked up a copy of Howard
+Pyle's "Knights of the Round Table" with its warm heavy illustrations of
+the Arthurian heroes and heroines, and began to study the stately and
+exaggerated characteristics of the various characters. Sylvia had
+purchased it for her seven-year old boy Jack, asleep upstairs, but
+Frieda had read it in her girlhood a few years before. She had been
+moving restlessly about, conscious of an interest in Eugene but not
+knowing how to find an opportunity for conversation. His smile, which he
+sometimes directed toward her, was to her entrancing.
+
+"Oh, I read that," she said, when she saw him looking at it. She had
+drifted to a position not far behind his chair and near one of the
+windows. She pretended to be looking out at first, but now began to talk
+to him. "I used to be crazy about every one of the Knights and
+Ladies--Sir Launcelot, Sir Galahad, Sir Tristram, Sir Gawaine, Queen
+Guinevere."
+
+"Did you ever hear of Sir Bluff?" he asked teasingly, "or Sir Stuff? or
+Sir Dub?" He looked at her with a mocking light of humor in his eyes.
+
+"Oh, there aren't such people," laughed Frieda, surprised at the titles
+but tickled at the thought of them.
+
+"Don't you let him mock you, Frieda," put in Angela, who was pleased at
+the girl's gayety and glad that Eugene had found someone in whom he
+could take an interest. She did not fear the simple Western type of girl
+like Frieda and her own sister Marietta. They were franker, more kindly,
+better intentioned than the Eastern studio type, and besides they did
+not consider themselves superior. She was playing the role of the
+condescending leader here.
+
+"Certainly there are," replied Eugene solemnly, addressing Frieda. "They
+are the new Knights of the Round Table. Haven't you ever heard of that
+book?"
+
+"No, I haven't," answered Frieda gaily, "and there isn't any such.
+You're just teasing me."
+
+"Teasing you? Why I wouldn't think of such a thing. And there is such a
+book. It's published by Harper and Brothers and is called 'The New
+Knights of the Round Table.' You simply haven't heard of it, that's
+all."
+
+Frieda was impressed. She didn't know whether to believe him or not. She
+opened her eyes in a curiously inquiring girlish way which appealed to
+Eugene strongly. He wished he were free to kiss her pretty, red,
+thoughtlessly-parted lips. Angela herself was faintly doubtful as to
+whether he was speaking of a real book or not.
+
+"Sir Stuff is a very famous Knight," he went on, "and so is Sir Bluff.
+They're inseparable companions in the book. As for Sir Dub and Sir Hack,
+and the Lady Dope--"
+
+"Oh, hush, Eugene," called Angela gaily. "Just listen to what he's
+telling Frieda," she remarked to Miss Roth. "You mustn't mind him
+though. He's always teasing someone. Why didn't you raise him better,
+Sylvia?" she asked of Eugene's sister.
+
+"Oh, don't ask me. We never could do anything with Gene. I never knew he
+had much jesting in him until he came back this time."
+
+"They're very wonderful," they heard him telling Frieda, "all fine rosy
+gentlemen and ladies."
+
+Frieda was impressed by this charming, good-natured man. His spirit was
+evidently as youthful and gay as her own. She sat before him looking
+into his smiling eyes while he teased her about this, that and the other
+foible of youth. Who were her sweethearts? How did she make love? How
+many boys lined up to see her come out of church on Sunday? He knew.
+"I'll bet they look like a line of soldiers on dress parade," he
+volunteered, "all with nice new ties and clean pocket handkerchiefs and
+their shoes polished and--"
+
+"Oh, ha! ha!" laughed Frieda. The idea appealed to her immensely. She
+started giggling and bantering with him and their friendship was
+definitely sealed. She thought he was delightful.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+The opportunity for further meetings seemed to come about quite
+naturally. The Witla boathouse, where the family kept one small boat,
+was at the foot of the Roth lawn, reached by a slightly used lane which
+came down that side of the house; and also by a grape-arbor which
+concealed the lake from the lower end of the house and made a sheltered
+walk to the waterside, at the end of which was a weather-beaten wooden
+bench. Eugene came here sometimes to get the boat to row or to fish. On
+several occasions Angela had accompanied him, but she did not care much
+for rowing or fishing and was perfectly willing that he should go alone
+if he wanted to. There was also the friendship of Miss Roth for Mr. and
+Mrs. Witla, which occasionally brought her and Frieda to the house. And
+Frieda came from time to time to his studio in the barn, to see him
+paint. Because of her youth and innocence Angela thought very little of
+her presence there, which struck Eugene as extremely fortunate. He was
+interested in her charms, anxious to make love to her in a philandering
+sort of way, without intending to do her any harm. It struck him as a
+little curious that he should find her living so near the spot where
+once upon a winter's night he had made love to Stella. There was
+something not unlike Stella about her, though she was softer, more whole
+souledly genial and pliable to his moods.
+
+He saw her one day, when he went for his boat, standing out in the yard,
+and she came down to the waterside to greet him.
+
+"Well," he said, smiling at her fresh morning appearance, and addressing
+her with that easy familiarity with which he knew how to take youth and
+life generally, "we're looking as bright as a butterfly. I don't suppose
+we butterflies have to work very hard, do we?"
+
+"Oh, don't we," replied Frieda. "That's all you know."
+
+"Well, I don't know, that's true, but perhaps one of these butterflies
+will tell me. Now you, for instance."
+
+Frieda smiled. She scarcely knew how to take him, but she thought he was
+delightful. She hadn't the faintest conception either of the depth and
+subtlety of his nature or of the genial, kindly inconstancy of it. She
+only saw him as a handsome, smiling man, not at all too old, witty,
+good-natured, here by the bright green waters of this lake, pulling out
+his boat. He looked so cheerful to her, so care free. She had him
+indissolubly mixed in her impressions with the freshness of the ground,
+the newness of the grass, the brightness of the sky, the chirping of the
+birds and even the little scintillating ripples on the water.
+
+"Butterflies never work, that I know," he said, refusing to take her
+seriously. "They just dance around in the sunlight and have a good time.
+Did you ever talk to a butterfly about that?"
+
+Frieda merely smiled at him.
+
+He pushed his boat into the water, holding it lightly by a rope, got
+down a pair of oars from a rack and stepped into it. Then he stood there
+looking at her.
+
+"Have you lived in Alexandria long?" he asked.
+
+"About eight years now."
+
+"Do you like it?"
+
+"Sometimes, not always. I wish we lived in Chicago. O-oh!" she sniffed,
+turning up her pretty nose, "isn't that lovely!" She was smelling some
+odor of flowers blown from a garden.
+
+"Yes, I get it too. Geraniums, isn't it? They're blooming here, I see. A
+day like this sets me crazy." He sat down in his boat and put his oars
+in place.
+
+"Well, I have to go and try my luck for whales. Wouldn't you like to go
+fishing?"
+
+"I would, all right," said Frieda, "only aunt wouldn't let me, I think.
+I'd just love to go. It's lots of fun, catching fish."
+
+"Yes, _catching_ fish," laughed Eugene. "Well, I'll bring you a nice
+little shark--one that bites. Would you like that? Down in the Atlantic
+Ocean they have sharks that bite and bark. They come up out of the water
+at night and bark like a dog."
+
+"O-o-oh, dear! how funny!" giggled Frieda, and Eugene began slowly
+rowing his boat lakeward.
+
+"Be sure you bring me a nice fish," she called.
+
+"Be sure you're here to get it when I come back," he answered.
+
+He saw her with the lattice of spring leaves behind her, the old house
+showing pleasantly on its rise of ground, some house-martens turning in
+the morning sky.
+
+"What a lovely girl," he thought. "She's beautiful--as fresh as a
+flower. That is the one great thing in the world--the beauty of
+girlhood."
+
+He came back after a time expecting to find her, but her foster-mother
+had sent her on an errand. He felt a keen sense of disappointment.
+
+There were other meetings after this, once on a day when he came back
+practically fishless and she laughed at him; once when he saw her
+sunning her hair on the back porch after she had washed it and she came
+down to stand under the trees near the water, looking like a naiad. He
+wished then he could take her in his arms, but he was a little uncertain
+of her and of himself. Once she came to his studio in the barn to bring
+him a piece of left-over dough which his mother had "turned" on the top
+of the stove.
+
+"Eugene used to be crazy about that when he was a boy," his mother had
+remarked.
+
+"Oh, let me take it to him," said Frieda gaily, gleeful over the idea of
+the adventure.
+
+"That's a good idea," said Angela innocently. "Wait, I'll put it on this
+saucer."
+
+Frieda took it and ran. She found Eugene staring oddly at his canvas,
+his face curiously dark. When her head came above the loft floor his
+expression changed immediately. His guileless, kindly smile returned.
+
+"Guess what," she said, pulling a little white apron she had on over the
+dish.
+
+"Strawberries." They were in season.
+
+"Oh, no."
+
+"Peaches and cream."
+
+"Where would we get peaches now?"
+
+"At the grocery store."
+
+"I'll give you one more guess."
+
+"Angel cake!" He was fond of that, and Angela occasionally made it.
+
+"Your guesses are all gone. You can't have any."
+
+He reached out his hand, but she drew back. He followed and she laughed.
+"No, no, you can't have any now."
+
+He caught her soft arm and drew her close to him. "Sure I can't?"
+
+Their faces were close together.
+
+She looked into his eyes for a moment, then dropped her lashes. Eugene's
+brain swirled with the sense of her beauty. It was the old talisman. He
+covered her sweet lips with his own and she yielded feverishly.
+
+"There now, eat your dough," she exclaimed when he let her go, pushing
+it shamefacedly toward him. She was flustered--so much so that she
+failed to jest about it. "What would Mrs. Witla think," she added, "if
+she could see us?"
+
+Eugene paused solemnly and listened. He was afraid of Angela.
+
+"I've always liked this stuff, ever since I was a boy," he said in an
+offhand way.
+
+"So your mother said," replied Frieda, somewhat recovered. "Let me see
+what you're painting." She came round to his side and he took her hand.
+"I'll have to go now," she said wisely. "They'll be expecting me back."
+
+Eugene speculated on the intelligence of girls--at least on
+that of those he liked. Somehow they were all wise under these
+circumstances--cautious. He could see that instinctively Frieda was
+prepared to protect him and herself. She did not appear to be suffering
+from any shock from this revelation. Rather she was inclined to make the
+best of it.
+
+He folded her in his arms again.
+
+"You're the angel cake and the strawberries and the peaches and cream,"
+he said.
+
+"Don't!" she pleaded. "Don't! I have to go now."
+
+And when he released her she ran quickly down the stairs, giving him a
+swift, parting smile.
+
+So Frieda was added to the list of his conquests and he pondered over it
+gravely. If Angela could have seen this scene, what a storm there would
+have been! If she ever became conscious of what was going on, what a
+period of wrath there would be! It would be terrible. After her recent
+discovery of his letters he hated to think of that. Still this bliss of
+caressing youth--was it not worth any price? To have a bright, joyous
+girl of eighteen put her arms about you--could you risk too much for it?
+The world said one life, one love. Could he accede to that? Could any
+one woman satisfy him? Could Frieda if he had her? He did not know. He
+did not care to think about it. Only this walking in a garden of
+flowers--how delicious it was. This having a rose to your lips!
+
+Angela saw nothing of this attraction for some time. She was not
+prepared yet to believe, poor little depender on the conventions as she
+understood them, that the world was full of plots and counter-plots,
+snares, pitfalls and gins. The way of the faithful and well-meaning
+woman in marriage should be simple and easy. She should not be harassed
+by uncertainty of affection, infelicities of temper, indifference or
+infidelity. If she worked hard, as Angela was trying to do, trying to be
+a good wife, saving, serving, making a sacrifice of her time and
+services and moods and wishes for her husband's sake, why shouldn't he
+do the same for her? She knew of no double standard of virtue. If she
+had she would not have believed in it. Her parents had raised her to see
+marriage in a different light. Her father was faithful to her mother.
+Eugene's father was faithful to his wife--that was perfectly plain. Her
+brothers-in-law were faithful to her sisters, Eugene's brothers-in-law
+were faithful to his sisters. Why should not Eugene be faithful to her?
+
+So far, of course, she had no evidence to the contrary. He probably was
+faithful and would remain so. He had said so, but this pre-matrimonial
+philandering of his looked very curious. It was an astonishing thing
+that he could have deceived her so. She would never forget it. He was a
+genius to be sure. The world was waiting to hear what he had to say. He
+was a great man and should associate with great men, or, failing that,
+should not want to associate with anyone at all. It was ridiculous for
+him to be running around after silly women. She thought of this and
+decided to do her best to prevent it. The seat of the mighty was in her
+estimation the place for Eugene, with her in the foreground as a
+faithful and conspicuous acolyte, swinging the censer of praise and
+delight.
+
+The days went on and various little meetings--some accidental, some
+premeditated--took place between Eugene and Frieda. There was one
+afternoon when he was at his sister's and she came there to get a
+pattern for her foster-mother from Sylvia. She lingered for over an
+hour, during which time Eugene had opportunities to kiss her a dozen
+times. The beauty of her eyes and her smile haunted him after she was
+gone. There was another time when he saw her at dusk near his boathouse,
+and kissed her in the shadow of the sheltering grape-arbor. In his own
+home there were clandestine moments and in his studio, the barn loft,
+for Frieda made occasion a few times to come to him--a promise to make a
+sketch of her being the excuse. Angela resented this, but she could not
+prevent it. In the main Frieda exhibited that curious patience in love
+which women so customarily exhibit and which a man can never understand.
+She could wait for her own to come to her--for him to find her; while
+he, with that curious avidness of the male in love, burned as a fed fire
+to see her. He was jealous of the little innocent walks she took with
+boys she knew. The fact that it was necessary for her to be away from
+him was a great deprivation. The fact that he was married to Angela was
+a horrible disaster. He would look at Angela, when she was with him,
+preventing him from his freedom in love, with almost calculated hate in
+his eyes. Why had he married her? As for Frieda, when she was near, and
+he could not draw near her, his eyes followed her movements with a
+yearning, devouring glance. He was fairly beside himself with anguish
+under the spell of her beauty. Frieda had no notion of the consuming
+flame she had engendered.
+
+It was a simple thing to walk home with her from the post-office--quite
+accidentally on several occasions. It was a fortuitous thing that Anna
+Roth should invite Angela and himself, as well as his father and mother,
+to her house to dinner. On one occasion when Frieda was visiting at the
+Witla homestead, Angela thought Frieda stepped away from Eugene in a
+curiously disturbed manner when she came into the parlor. She was not
+sure. Frieda hung round him in a good-natured way most of the time when
+various members of the family were present. She wondered if by any
+chance he was making love to her, but she could not prove it. She tried
+to watch them from then on, but Eugene was so subtle, Frieda so
+circumspect, that she never did obtain any direct testimony.
+Nevertheless, before they left Alexandria there was a weeping scene over
+this, hysterical, tempestuous, in which she accused him of making love
+to Frieda, he denying it stoutly.
+
+"If it wasn't for your relatives' sake," she declared, "I would accuse
+her to her face, here before your eyes. She couldn't dare deny it."
+
+"Oh, you're crazy," said Eugene. "You're the most suspicious woman I
+ever knew. Good Lord! Can't I look at a woman any more? This little
+girl! Can't I even be nice to her?"
+
+"Nice to her? Nice to her? I know how you're nice to her. I can see! I
+can feel! Oh, God! Why can't you give me a faithful husband!"
+
+"Oh, cut it out!" demanded Eugene defiantly. "You're always watching. I
+can't turn around but you have your eye on me. I can tell. Well, you go
+ahead and watch. That's all the good it will do you. I'll give you some
+real reason for watching one of these days. You make me tired!"
+
+"Oh, hear how he talks to me," moaned Angela, "and we're only married
+one year! Oh, Eugene, how can you? Have you no pity, no shame? Here in
+your own home, too! Oh! oh! oh!"
+
+To Eugene such hysterics were maddening. He could not understand how
+anyone should want or find it possible to carry on in this fashion. He
+was lying "out of the whole cloth" about Frieda, but Angela didn't know
+and he knew she didn't know. All these tantrums were based on suspicion.
+If she would do this on a mere suspicion, what would she not do when she
+had a proved cause?
+
+Still by her tears she as yet had the power of rousing his sympathies
+and awakening his sense of shame. Her sorrow made him slightly ashamed
+of his conduct or rather sorry, for the tougher nature was constantly
+presenting itself. Her suspicions made the further pursuit of this love
+quest practically impossible. Secretly he already cursed the day he had
+married her, for Frieda's face was ever before him, a haunting lure to
+love and desire. In this hour life looked terribly sad to him. He
+couldn't help feeling that all the perfect things one might seek or find
+were doomed to the searing breath of an inimical fate. Ashes of
+roses--that was all life had to offer. Dead sea fruit, turning to ashes
+upon the lips. Oh, Frieda! Frieda! Oh, youth, youth! That there should
+dance before him for evermore an unattainable desire--the holy grail of
+beauty. Oh life, oh death! Which was really better, waking or sleeping?
+If he could only have Frieda now it would be worth living, but without
+her--
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+The weakness of Eugene was that he was prone in each of these new
+conquests to see for the time being the sum and substance of bliss, to
+rise rapidly in the scale of uncontrollable, exaggerated affection,
+until he felt that here and nowhere else, now and in this particular
+form was ideal happiness. He had been in love with Stella, with
+Margaret, with Ruby, with Angela, with Christina, and now with Frieda,
+quite in this way, and it had taught him nothing as yet concerning love
+except that it was utterly delightful. He wondered at times how it was
+that the formation of a particular face could work this spell. There was
+plain magic in the curl of a lock of hair, the whiteness or roundness of
+a forehead, the shapeliness of a nose or ear, the arched redness of
+full-blown petal lips. The cheek, the chin, the eye--in combination with
+these things--how did they work this witchery? The tragedies to which he
+laid himself open by yielding to these spells--he never stopped to think
+of them.
+
+It is a question whether the human will, of itself alone, ever has cured
+or ever can cure any human weakness. Tendencies are subtle things. They
+are involved in the chemistry of one's being, and those who delve in the
+mysteries of biology frequently find that curious anomaly, a form of
+minute animal life born to be the prey of another form of animal
+life--chemically and physically attracted to its own disaster. Thus, to
+quote Calkins, "some protozoa are apparently limited to special kinds of
+food. The 'slipper-animal' (Paramecium) and the 'bell-animal'
+(Vorticella) live on certain kinds of bacteria, and many others, which
+live upon smaller protozoa, seem to have a marked affinity for certain
+kinds. I have watched one of these creatures (Actinobolus) lie perfectly
+quiet while hundreds of bacteria and smaller kinds of protozoa bumped
+against it, until a certain variety (Halteria grandinella) came near,
+when a minute dart, or 'trochocyst,' attached to a relatively long
+thread, was launched. The victim was invariably hit, and after a short
+struggle was drawn in and devoured. The results of many experiments
+indicate that the apparently _willful_ selection in these cases is the
+inevitable action of definite chemical and physical laws which the
+individual organism can no more change than it can change the course of
+gravitation. The killing dart mentioned above is called out by the
+particular kind of prey with the irresistible attraction of an iron
+filing for a magnet."
+
+Eugene did not know of these curious biologic experiments at this time,
+but he suspected that these attractions were deeper than human will. He
+thought at times that he ought to resist his impulses. At other times he
+asked himself why. If his treasure was in this and he lost it by
+resistance, what had he? A sense of personal purity? It did not appeal
+to him. The respect of his fellow-citizens? He believed that most of his
+fellow-citizens were whited sepulchres. What good did their hypocritical
+respect do him? Justice to others? Others were not concerned, or should
+not be in the natural affinity which might manifest itself between two
+people. That was for them to settle. Besides, there was very little
+justice in the world. As for his wife--well, he had given her his word,
+but he had not done so willingly. Might one swear eternal fealty and
+abide by it when the very essence of nature was lack of fealty,
+inconsiderateness, destruction, change? A gloomy Hamlet to be sure,
+asking "can honor set a leg?"--a subtle Machiavelli believing that might
+made right, sure that it was a matter of careful planning, not ethics
+which brought success in this world, and yet one of the poorest planners
+in it. An anarchistic manifestation of selfishness surely; but his
+additional plea was that he did not make his own mind, nor his emotions,
+nor anything else. And worst of all, he counselled himself that he was
+not seizing anything ruthlessly. He was merely accepting that which was
+thrust temptingly before him by fate.
+
+Hypnotic spells of this character like contagion and fever have their
+period of duration, their beginning, climax and end. It is written that
+love is deathless, but this was not written of the body nor does it
+concern the fevers of desire. The marriage of true minds to which
+Shakespeare would admit no impediment is of a different texture and has
+little sex in it. The friendship of Damon and Pythias was a marriage in
+the best sense, though it concerned two men. The possibilities of
+intellectual union between a man and a woman are quite the same. This is
+deathless in so far as it reflects the spiritual ideals of the
+universe--not more so. All else is illusion of short duration and
+vanishes in thin air.
+
+When the time came for Eugene to leave Alexandria as he had originally
+wanted to do, he was not at all anxious to depart; rather it was an
+occasion of great suffering for him. He could not see any solution to
+the problem which confronted him in connection with Frieda's love for
+him. As a matter of fact, when he thought about it at all he was quite
+sure that she did not understand or appreciate the nature of her
+affection for him or his for her. It had no basis in responsibility. It
+was one of those things born of thin air--sunlight, bright waters, the
+reflection of a bright room--things which are intangible and
+insubstantial. Eugene was not one who, if he thought anything at all
+about it, would persuade a girl to immorality for the mere sake of
+indulgence. His feelings were invariably compounded of finer things,
+love of companionship, love of beauty, a variable sense of the
+consequences which must ensue, not so much to him as to her, though he
+took himself into consideration. If she were not already experienced and
+he had no method of protecting her, if he could not take her as his wife
+or give her the advantages of his presence and financial support,
+secretly or openly, if he could not keep all their transactions a secret
+from the world, he was inclined to hesitate. He did not want to do
+anything rash--as much for her sake as for his. In this case, the fact
+that he could not marry her, that he could not reasonably run away with
+her, seeing that he was mentally sick and of uncertain financial
+condition, the fact that he was surrounded by home conditions which made
+it of the greatest importance that he should conduct himself
+circumspectly, weighed greatly with him. Nevertheless a tragedy could
+easily have resulted here. If Frieda had been of a headstrong,
+unthinking nature; if Angela had been less watchful, morbid, appealing
+in her mood; if the family and town conditions had been less weighty; if
+Eugene had had health and ample means, he would probably have deserted
+Angela, taken Frieda to some European city--he dreamed of Paris in this
+connection--and found himself confronted later by an angry father or a
+growing realization that Frieda's personal charms were not the sum and
+substance of his existence, or both. George Roth, for all he was a
+traveling salesman, was a man of considerable determination. He might
+readily have ended the life of his daughter's betrayer--art reputation
+or no. He worshiped Frieda as the living image of his dead wife, and at
+best he would have been heartbroken.
+
+As it was, there was not much chance of this, for Eugene was not rash.
+He was too philosophic. Conditions might have arisen in which he would
+have shown the most foolhardy bravado, but not in his present state.
+There was not sufficient anguish in his own existence to drive him to
+action. He saw no clear way. So, in June, with Angela he took his
+departure for Blackwood, pretending, to her, outward indifference as to
+his departure, but inwardly feeling as though his whole life were coming
+to nothing.
+
+When he reached Blackwood he was now, naturally, disgusted with the
+whole atmosphere of it. Frieda was not there. Alexandria, from having
+been the most wearisome sidepool of aimless inactivity, had suddenly
+taken on all the characteristics of paradise. The little lakes, the
+quiet streets, the court house square, his sister's home, Frieda's home,
+his own home, had been once more invested for him with the radiance of
+romance--that intangible glory of feeling which can have no existence
+outside the illusion of love. Frieda's face was everywhere in it, her
+form, the look of her eyes. He could see nothing there now save the
+glory of Frieda. It was as though the hard, weary face of a barren
+landscape were suddenly bathed in the soft effulgence of a midnight
+moon.
+
+As for Blackwood, it was as lovely as ever but he could not see it. The
+fact that his attitude had changed toward Angela for the time being made
+all the difference. He did not really hate her--he told himself that.
+She was not any different from that she had been, that was perfectly
+plain. The difference was in him. He really could not be madly in love
+with two people at once. He had entertained joint affections for Angela
+and Ruby, and Angela and Christina, but those were not the dominating
+fevers which this seemed to be. He could not for the time get the face
+of this girl out of his mind. He was sorry for Angela at moments. Then,
+because of her insistence on his presence with her--on her being in his
+company, "following him around" as he put it, he hated her. Dear Heaven!
+if he could only be free without injuring her. If he could only get
+loose. Think, at this moment he might be with Frieda walking in the sun
+somewhere, rowing on the lake at Alexandria, holding her in his arms. He
+would never forget how she looked the first morning she came into his
+barn studio at home--how enticing she was the first night he saw her at
+Sylvia's. What a rotten mess living was, anyhow. And so he sat about in
+the hammock at the Blue homestead, or swung in a swing that old Jotham
+had since put up for Marietta's beaux, or dreamed in a chair in the
+shade of the house, reading. He was dreary and lonely with just one
+ambition in the world--Frieda.
+
+Meanwhile, as might be expected, his health was not getting any better.
+Instead of curing himself of those purely carnal expressions of passion
+which characterized his life with Angela, the latter went on unbroken.
+One would have thought that his passion for Frieda would have
+interrupted this, but the presence of Angela, the comparatively enforced
+contact, her insistence on his attentions, broke down again and again
+the protecting barrier of distaste. Had he been alone, he would have led
+a chaste life until some new and available infatuation seized him. As it
+was there was no refuge either from himself or Angela, and the at times
+almost nauseating relationship went on and on.
+
+Those of the Blue family, who were in the home or near it, were
+delighted to see him. The fact that he had achieved such a great
+success, as the papers had reported, with his first exhibition and had
+not lost ground with the second--a very interesting letter had come from
+M. Charles saying that the Paris pictures would be shown in Paris in
+July--gave them a great estimate of him. Angela was a veritable queen in
+this home atmosphere; and as for Eugene, he was given the privilege of
+all geniuses to do as he pleased. On this occasion Eugene was the centre
+of interest, though he appeared not to be, for his four solid Western
+brothers-in-law gave no indication that they thought he was unusual. He
+was not their type--banker, lawyer, grain merchant and real estate
+dealer--but they felt proud of him just the same. He was different, and
+at the same time natural, genial, modest, inclined to appear far more
+interested in their affairs than he really was. He would listen by the
+hour to the details of their affairs, political, financial,
+agricultural, social. The world was a curious compost to Eugene and he
+was always anxious to find out how other people lived. He loved a good
+story, and while he rarely told one he made a splendid audience for
+those who did. His eyes would sparkle and his whole face light with the
+joy of the humor he felt.
+
+Through all this--the attention he was receiving, the welcome he was
+made to feel, the fact that his art interests were not yet dead (the
+Paris exhibition being the expiring breath of his original burst of
+force), he was nevertheless feeling the downward trend of his affairs
+most keenly. His mind was not right. That was surely true. His money
+affairs were getting worse, not better, for while he could hope for a
+few sales yet (the Paris pictures did not sell in New York) he was not
+certain that this would be the case. This homeward trip had cost him two
+hundred of his seventeen hundred dollars and there would be additional
+expenses if he went to Chicago, as he planned in the fall. He could not
+live a single year on fifteen hundred dollars--scarcely more than six
+months, and he could not paint or illustrate anything new in his present
+state. Additional sales of the pictures of the two original exhibitions
+must be effected in a reasonable length of time or he would find himself
+in hard straits.
+
+Meanwhile, Angela, who had obtained such a high estimate of his future
+by her experience in New York and Paris, was beginning to enjoy herself
+again, for after all, in her judgment, she seemed to be able to manage
+Eugene very well. He might have had some slight understanding with
+Frieda Roth--it couldn't have been much or she would have seen it, she
+thought--but she had managed to break it up. Eugene was cross,
+naturally, but that was due more to her quarreling than anything else.
+These storms of feeling on her part--not always premeditated--seemed
+very essential. Eugene must be made to understand that he was married
+now; that he could not look upon or run after girls as he had in the old
+days. She was well aware that he was considerably younger than she was
+in temperament, inclined to be exceedingly boyish, and this was apt to
+cause trouble anywhere. But if she watched over him, kept his attention
+fixed on her, everything would come out all right. And then there were
+all these other delightful qualities--his looks, his genial manner, his
+reputation, his talent. What a delightful thing it had become to
+announce herself as Mrs. Eugene Witla and how those who knew about him
+sat up. Big people were his friends, artists admired him, common,
+homely, everyday people thought he was nice and considerate and able and
+very worth while. He was generally liked everywhere. What more could one
+want?
+
+Angela knew nothing of his real thoughts, for because of sympathy, a
+secret sense of injustice toward her on his part, a vigorous, morbid
+impression of the injustice of life as a whole, a desire to do things in
+a kindly or at least a secret and not brutal way, he was led to pretend
+at all times that he really cared for her; to pose as being comfortable
+and happy; to lay all his moods to his inability to work. Angela, who
+could not read him clearly, saw nothing of this. He was too subtle for
+her understanding at times. She was living in a fool's paradise; playing
+over a sleeping volcano.
+
+He grew no better and by fall began to get the notion that he could do
+better by living in Chicago. His health would come back to him there
+perhaps. He was terribly tired of Blackwood. The long tree-shaded lawn
+was nothing to him now. The little lake, the stream, the fields that he
+had rejoiced in at first were to a great extent a commonplace. Old
+Jotham was a perpetual source of delight to him with his kindly, stable,
+enduring attitude toward things and his interesting comment on life, and
+Marietta entertained him with her wit, her good nature, her intuitive
+understanding; but he could not be happy just talking to everyday,
+normal, stable people, interesting and worthwhile as they might be. The
+doing of simple things, living a simple life, was just now becoming
+irritating. He must go to London, Paris--do things. He couldn't loaf
+this way. It mattered little that he could not work. He must try. This
+isolation was terrible.
+
+There followed six months spent in Chicago in which he painted not one
+picture that was satisfactory to him, that was not messed into
+nothingness by changes and changes and changes. There were then three
+months in the mountains of Tennessee because someone told him of a
+wonderfully curative spring in a delightful valley where the spring came
+as a dream of color and the expense of living was next to nothing. There
+were four months of summer in southern Kentucky on a ridge where the air
+was cool, and after that five months on the Gulf of Mexico, at Biloxi,
+in Mississippi, because some comfortable people in Kentucky and
+Tennessee told Angela of this delightful winter resort farther South.
+All this time Eugene's money, the fifteen hundred dollars he had when he
+left Blackwood, several sums of two hundred, one hundred and fifty and
+two hundred and fifty, realized from pictures sold in New York and Paris
+during the fall and winter following his Paris exhibition, and two
+hundred which had come some months afterward from a fortuitous sale by
+M. Charles of one of his old New York views, had been largely
+dissipated. He still had five hundred dollars, but with no pictures
+being sold and none painted he was in a bad way financially in so far as
+the future was concerned. He could possibly return to Alexandria with
+Angela and live cheaply there for another six months, but because of the
+Frieda incident both he and she objected to it. Angela was afraid of
+Frieda and was resolved that she would not go there so long as Frieda
+was in the town, and Eugene was ashamed because of the light a return
+would throw on his fading art prospects. Blackwood was out of the
+question to him. They had lived on her parents long enough. If he did
+not get better he must soon give up this art idea entirely, for he could
+not live on trying to paint.
+
+He began to think that he was possessed--obsessed of a devil--and that
+some people were pursued by evil spirits, fated by stars, doomed from
+their birth to failure or accident. How did the astrologer in New York
+know that he was to have four years of bad luck? He had seen three of
+them already. Why did a man who read his palm in Chicago once say that
+his hand showed two periods of disaster, just as the New York astrologer
+had and that he was likely to alter the course of his life radically in
+the middle portion of it? Were there any fixed laws of being? Did any of
+the so-called naturalistic school of philosophers and scientists whom he
+had read know anything at all? They were always talking about the fixed
+laws of the universe--the unalterable laws of chemistry and physics. Why
+didn't chemistry or physics throw some light on his peculiar physical
+condition, on the truthful prediction of the astrologer, on the signs
+and portents which he had come to observe for himself as foretelling
+trouble or good fortune for himself. If his left eye twitched he had
+observed of late he was going to have a quarrel with someone--invariably
+Angela. If he found a penny or any money, he was going to get money; for
+every notification of a sale of a picture with the accompanying check
+had been preceded by the discovery of a coin somewhere: once a penny in
+State Street, Chicago, on a rainy day--M. Charles wrote that a picture
+had been sold in Paris for two hundred; once a three-cent piece of the
+old American issue in the dust of a road in Tennessee--M. Charles wrote
+that one of his old American views had brought one hundred and fifty;
+once a penny in sands by the Gulf in Biloxi--another notification of a
+sale. So it went. He found that when doors squeaked, people were apt to
+get sick in the houses where they were; and a black dog howling in front
+of a house was a sure sign of death. He had seen this with his own eyes,
+this sign which his mother had once told him of as having been verified
+in her experience, in connection with the case of a man who was sick in
+Biloxi. He was sick, and a dog came running along the street and stopped
+in front of this place--a black dog--and the man died. Eugene saw this
+with his own eyes,--that is, the dog and the sick man's death notice.
+The dog howled at four o'clock in the afternoon and the next morning the
+man was dead. He saw the crape on the door. Angela mocked at his
+superstition, but he was convinced. "There are more things in heaven and
+earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Eugene was reaching the point where he had no more money and was
+compelled to think by what process he would continue to make a living in
+the future. Worry and a hypochondriacal despair had reduced his body to
+a comparatively gaunt condition. His eyes had a nervous, apprehensive
+look. He would walk about speculating upon the mysteries of nature,
+wondering how he was to get out of this, what was to become of him, how
+soon, if ever, another picture would be sold, when? Angela, from having
+fancied that his illness was a mere temporary indisposition, had come to
+feel that he might be seriously affected for some time. He was not sick
+physically: he could walk and eat and talk vigorously enough, but he
+could not work and he was worrying, worrying, worrying.
+
+Angela was quite as well aware as Eugene that their finances were in a
+bad way or threatening to become so, though he said nothing at all about
+them. He was ashamed to confess at this day, after their very
+conspicuous beginning in New York, that he was in fear of not doing
+well. How silly--he with all his ability! Surely he would get over this,
+and soon.
+
+Angela's economical upbringing and naturally saving instinct stood her
+in good stead now, for she could market with the greatest care, purchase
+to the best advantage, make every scrap and penny count. She knew how to
+make her own clothes, as Eugene had found out when he first visited
+Blackwood, and was good at designing hats. Although she had thought in
+New York, when Eugene first began to make money, that now she would
+indulge in tailor-made garments and the art of an excellent dressmaker,
+she had never done so. With true frugality she had decided to wait a
+little while, and then Eugene's health having failed she had not the
+chance any more. Fearing the possible long duration of this storm she
+had begun to mend and clean and press and make over whatever seemed to
+require it. Even when Eugene suggested that she get something new she
+would not do it. Her consideration for their future--the difficulty he
+might have in making a living, deterred her.
+
+Eugene noted this, though he said nothing. He was not unaware of the
+fear that she felt, the patience she exhibited, the sacrifice she made
+of her own whims and desires to his, and he was not entirely
+unappreciative. It was becoming very apparent to him that she had no
+life outside his own--no interests. She was his shadow, his alter ego,
+his servant, his anything he wanted her to be. "Little Pigtail" was one
+of his jesting pet names for her because in the West as a boy they had
+always called anyone who ran errands for others a pigtailer. In playing
+"one old cat," if one wanted another to chase the struck balls he would
+say: "You pig-tail for me, Willie, will you?" And Angela was his "little
+pigtail."
+
+There were no further grounds for jealousy during the time, almost two
+years, in which they were wandering around together, for the reason that
+she was always with him, almost his sole companion, and that they did
+not stay long enough in any one place and under sufficiently free social
+conditions to permit him to form those intimacies which might have
+resulted disastrously. Some girls did take his eye--the exceptional in
+youth and physical perfection were always doing that, but he had no
+chance or very little of meeting them socially. They were not living
+with people they knew, were not introduced in the local social worlds,
+which they visited. Eugene could only look at these maidens whom he
+chanced to spy from time to time, and wish that he might know them
+better. It was hard to be tied down to a conventional acceptance of
+matrimony--to pretend that he was interested in beauty only in a
+sociological way. He had to do it before Angela though (and all
+conventional people for that matter), for she objected strenuously to
+the least interest he might manifest in any particular woman. All his
+remarks had to be general and guarded in their character. At the least
+show of feeling or admiration Angela would begin to criticize his choice
+and to show him wherein his admiration was ill-founded. If he were
+especially interested she would attempt to tear his latest ideal to
+pieces. She had no mercy, and he could see plainly enough on what her
+criticism was based. It made him smile but he said nothing. He even
+admired her for her heroic efforts to hold her own, though every victory
+she seemed to win served only to strengthen the bars of his own cage.
+
+It was during this time that he could not help learning and appreciating
+just how eager, patient and genuine was her regard for his material
+welfare. To her he was obviously the greatest man in the world, a great
+painter, a great thinker, a great lover, a great personality every way.
+It didn't make so much difference to her at this time that he wasn't
+making any money. He would sometime, surely, and wasn't she getting it
+all in fame anyhow, now? Why, to be Mrs. Eugene Witla, after what she
+had seen of him in New York and Paris, what more could she want? Wasn't
+it all right for her to rake and scrape now, to make her own clothes and
+hats, save, mend, press and patch? He would come out of all this silly
+feeling about other women once he became a little older, and then he
+would be all right. Anyhow he appeared to love her now; and that was
+something. Because he was lonely, fearsome, uncertain of himself,
+uncertain of the future, he welcomed these unsparing attentions on her
+part, and this deceived her. Who else would give them to him, he
+thought; who else would be so faithful in times like these? He almost
+came to believe that he could love her again, be faithful to her, if he
+could keep out of the range of these other enticing personalities. If
+only he could stamp out this eager desire for other women, their praise
+and their beauty!
+
+But this was more because he was sick and lonely than anything else. If
+he had been restored to health then and there, if prosperity had
+descended on him as he so eagerly dreamed, it would have been the same
+as ever. He was as subtle as nature itself; as changeable as a
+chameleon. But two things were significant and real--two things to which
+he was as true and unvarying as the needle to the pole--his love of the
+beauty of life which was coupled with his desire to express it in color,
+and his love of beauty in the form of the face of a woman, or rather
+that of a girl of eighteen. That blossoming of life in womanhood at
+eighteen!--there was no other thing under the sun like it to him. It was
+like the budding of the trees in spring; the blossoming of flowers in
+the early morning; the odor of roses and dew, the color of bright waters
+and clear jewels. He could not be faithless to that. He could not get
+away from it. It haunted him like a joyous vision, and the fact that the
+charms of Stella and Ruby and Angela and Christina and Frieda in whom it
+had been partially or wholly shadowed forth at one time or another had
+come and gone, made little difference. It remained clear and demanding.
+He could not escape it--the thought; he could not deny it. He was
+haunted by this, day after day, and hour after hour; and when he said to
+himself that he was a fool, and that it would lure him as a
+will-o'-the-wisp to his destruction and that he could find no profit in
+it ultimately, still it would not down. The beauty of youth; the beauty
+of eighteen! To him life without it was a joke, a shabby scramble, a
+work-horse job, with only silly material details like furniture and
+houses and steel cars and stores all involved in a struggle for what? To
+make a habitation for more shabby humanity? Never! To make a habitation
+for beauty? Certainly! What beauty? The beauty of old age?--How silly!
+The beauty of middle age? Nonsense! The beauty of maturity? No! The
+beauty of youth? Yes. The beauty of eighteen. No more and no less. That
+was the standard, and the history of the world proved it. Art,
+literature, romance, history, poetry--if they did not turn on this and
+the lure of this and the wars and sins because of this, what did they
+turn on? He was for beauty. The history of the world justified him. Who
+could deny it?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+From Biloxi, because of the approach of summer when it would be
+unbearably warm there, and because his funds were so low that it was
+necessary to make a decisive move of some kind whether it led to
+complete disaster or not, he decided to return to New York. In storage
+with Kellners (M. Charles had kindly volunteered to take care of them
+for him) were a number of the pictures left over from the original show,
+and nearly all the paintings of the Paris exhibition. The latter had not
+sold well. Eugene's idea was that he could slip into New York quietly,
+take a room in some side street or in Jersey City or Brooklyn where he
+would not be seen, have the pictures in the possession of M. Charles
+returned to him, and see if he could not get some of the minor art
+dealers or speculators of whom he had heard to come and look at them and
+buy them outright. Failing that, he might take them himself, one by one,
+to different dealers here and there and dispose of them. He remembered
+now that Eberhard Zang had, through Norma Whitmore, asked him to come
+and see him. He fancied that, as Kellners had been so interested, and
+the newspaper critics had spoken of him so kindly the smaller dealers
+would be eager to take up with him. Surely they would buy this material.
+It was exceptional--very. Why not?
+
+Eugene forgot or did not know the metaphysical side of prosperity and
+failure. He did not realize that "as a man thinketh so is he," and so
+also is the estimate of the whole world at the time he is thinking of
+himself thus--not as he is but as he thinks he is. The sense of it is
+abroad--by what processes we know not, but so it is.
+
+Eugene's mental state, so depressed, so helpless, so fearsome--a
+rudderless boat in the dark, transmitted itself as an impression, a
+wireless message to all those who knew him or knew of him. His
+breakdown, which had first astonished M. Charles, depressed and then
+weakened the latter's interest in him. Like all other capable,
+successful men in the commercial world M. Charles was for strong
+men--men in the heyday of their success, the zenith of their ability.
+The least variation from this standard of force and interest was
+noticeable to him. If a man was going to fail--going to get sick and
+lose his interest in life or have his viewpoint affected, it might be
+very sad, but there was just one thing to do under such
+circumstances--get away from him. Failures of any kind were dangerous
+things to countenance. One must not have anything to do with them. They
+were very unprofitable. Such people as Temple Boyle and Vincent Beers,
+who had been his instructors in the past and who had heard of him in
+Chicago at the time of his success, Luke Severas, William McConnell,
+Oren Benedict, Hudson Dula, and others wondered what had become of him.
+Why did he not paint any more? He was never seen in the New York haunts
+of art! It was rumored at the time of the Paris exhibition that he was
+going to London to do a similar group of views, but the London
+exhibition never came off. He had told Smite and MacHugh the spring he
+left that he might do Chicago next, but that came to nothing. There was
+no evidence of it. There were rumors that he was very rich, that his art
+had failed him, that he had lost his mind even, and so the art world
+that knew him and was so interested in him no longer cared very much. It
+was too bad but--so thought the rival artists--there was one less
+difficult star to contend with. As for his friends, they were sorry, but
+such was life. He might recover. If not,--well--.
+
+As time went on, one year, another year, another year, the strangeness
+of his suddenly brilliant burst and disappearance became to the talented
+in this field a form of classic memory. He was a man of such promise!
+Why did he not go on painting? There was an occasional mention in
+conversation or in print, but Eugene to all intents and purposes was
+dead.
+
+When he came to New York it was after his capital had been reduced to
+three hundred dollars and he had given Angela one hundred and
+twenty-five of this to take her back to Blackwood and keep her there
+until he could make such arrangements as would permit her to join him.
+After a long discussion they had finally agreed that this would be best,
+for, seeing that he could neither paint nor illustrate, there was no
+certainty as to what he would do. To come here on so little money with
+her was not advisable. She had her home where she was welcome to stay
+for a while anyhow. Meanwhile he figured he could weather any storm
+alone.
+
+The appearance of the metropolis, after somewhat over two years of
+absence during which he had wandered everywhere, was most impressive to
+Eugene. It was a relief after the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee
+and the loneliness of the Biloxi coast, to get back to this swarming
+city where millions were hurrying to and fro, and where one's misery as
+well as one's prosperity was apparently swallowed up in an inconceivable
+mass of life. A subway was being built. The automobile, which only a few
+years before was having a vague, uncertain beginning, was now attaining
+a tremendous vogue. Magnificent cars of new design were everywhere. From
+the ferry-house in Jersey City he could see notable changes in the
+skyline, and a single walk across Twenty-third Street and up Seventh
+Avenue showed him a changing world--great hotels, great apartment
+houses, a tremendous crush of vainglorious life which was moulding the
+city to its desires. It depressed him greatly, for he had always hoped
+to be an integral part of this magnificence and display and now he was
+not--might never be again.
+
+It was still raw and cold, for the spring was just beginning to break,
+and Eugene was compelled to buy a light overcoat, his own imperishable
+great coat having been left behind, and he had no other fit to wear.
+Appearances, he thought, demanded this. He had spent forty of his
+closely-guarded one hundred and seventy-five dollars coming from Biloxi
+to New York, and now an additional fifteen was required for this coat,
+leaving him one hundred and twenty-five dollars with which to begin his
+career anew. He was greatly worried as to the outcome, but curiously
+also he had an abiding subconscious feeling that it could not be utterly
+destructive to him.
+
+He rented a cheap room in a semi-respectable neighborhood in West
+Twenty-fourth Street near Eleventh Avenue solely because he wanted to
+keep out of the run of intellectual life and hide until he could get on
+his feet. It was an old and shabby residence in an old and shabby red
+brick neighborhood such as he had drawn in one of his views, but it was
+not utterly bad. The people were poor but fairly intellectual. He chose
+this particular neighborhood with all its poverty because it was near
+the North River where the great river traffic could be seen, and where,
+because of some open lots in which were stored wagons, his one single
+west window gave him a view of all this life. About the corner in
+Twenty-third Street, in another somewhat decayed residence, was a
+moderate priced restaurant and boarding house. Here he could get a meal
+for twenty-five cents. He cared nothing for the life that was about him.
+It was cheap, poor, from a money point of view, dingy, but he would not
+be here forever he hoped. These people did not know him. Besides the
+number 552 West 24th Street did not sound bad. It might be one of the
+old neighborhoods with which New York was dotted, and which artists were
+inclined to find and occupy.
+
+After he had secured this room from a semi-respectable Irish landlady, a
+dock weigher's wife, he decided to call upon M. Charles. He knew that he
+looked quite respectable as yet, despite his poverty and decline. His
+clothes were good, his overcoat new, his manner brisk and determined.
+But what he could not see was that his face in its thin sallowness, and
+his eyes with their semi-feverish lustre bespoke a mind that was
+harassed by trouble of some kind. He stood outside the office of Kellner
+and Son in Fifth Avenue--a half block from the door, wondering whether
+he should go in, and just what he should say. He had written to M.
+Charles from time to time that his health was bad and that he couldn't
+work--always that he hoped to be better soon. He had always hoped that a
+reply would come that another of his pictures had been sold. One year
+had gone and then two, and now a third was under way and still he was
+not any better. M. Charles would look at him searchingly. He would have
+to bear his gaze unflinchingly. In his present nervous state this was
+difficult and yet he was not without a kind of defiance even now. He
+would force himself back into favor with life sometime.
+
+He finally mustered up his courage and entered and M. Charles greeted
+him warmly.
+
+"This certainly is good,--to see you again. I had almost given up hope
+that you would ever come back to New York. How is your health now? And
+how is Mrs. Witla? It doesn't seem as though it had been three years.
+You're looking excellent. And how is painting going now? Getting to the
+point where you can do something again?"
+
+Eugene felt for the moment as though M. Charles believed him to be in
+excellent condition, whereas that shrewd observer of men was wondering
+what could have worked so great a change. Eugene appeared to be eight
+years older. There were marked wrinkles between his eyes and an air of
+lassitude and weariness. He thought to himself, "Why, this man may
+possibly be done for artistically. Something has gone from him which I
+noted the first time I met him: that fire and intense enthusiasm which
+radiated force after the fashion of an arclight. Now he seems to be
+seeking to draw something in,--to save himself from drowning as it were.
+He is making a voiceless appeal for consideration. What a pity!"
+
+The worst of it all was that in his estimation nothing could be done in
+such a case. You couldn't do anything for an artist who could do nothing
+for himself. His art was gone. The sanest thing for him to do would be
+to quit trying, go at some other form of labor and forget all about it.
+It might be that he would recover, but it was a question. Nervous
+breakdowns were not infrequently permanent.
+
+Eugene noticed something of this in his manner. He couldn't tell exactly
+what it was, but M. Charles seemed more than ordinarily preoccupied,
+careful and distant. He wasn't exactly chilly in his manner, but
+reserved, as though he were afraid he might be asked to do something
+which he could not very well do.
+
+"I noticed that the Paris scenes did not do very well either here or in
+Paris," observed Eugene with an air of nonchalance, as though it were a
+matter of small importance, at the same time hoping that he would have
+some favorable word. "I had the idea that they would take better than
+they did. Still I don't suppose I ought to expect everything to sell.
+The New York ones did all right."
+
+"They did very well indeed, much better than I expected. I didn't think
+as many would be sold as were. They were very new and considerably
+outside the lines of current interest. The Paris pictures, on the other
+hand, were foreign to Americans in the wrong sense. By that I mean they
+weren't to be included in that genre art which comes from abroad, but is
+not based on any locality and is universal in its appeal--thematically
+speaking. Your Paris pictures were, of course, pictures in the best
+sense to those who see art as color and composition and idea, but to the
+ordinary lay mind they were, I take it, merely Paris scenes. You get
+what I mean. In that sense they were foreign, and Paris has been done
+illustratively anyhow. You might have done better with London or
+Chicago. Still you have every reason to congratulate yourself. Your work
+made a distinct impression both here and in France. When you feel able
+to return to it I have no doubt you will find that time has done you no
+harm."
+
+He tried to be polite and entertaining, but he was glad when Eugene went
+away again.
+
+The latter turned out into the street disconsolate. He could see how
+things were. He was down and out for the present and would have to wait.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+The next thing was to see what could be done with the other art dealers
+and the paintings that were left. There were quite a number of them. If
+he could get any reasonable price at all he ought to be able to live
+quite awhile--long enough anyhow to get on his feet again. When they
+came to his quiet room and were unpacked by him in a rather shamefaced
+and disturbed manner and distributed about, they seemed wonderful
+things. Why, if the critics had raved over them and M. Charles had
+thought they were so fine, could they not be sold? Art dealers would
+surely buy them! Still, now that he was on the ground again and could
+see the distinctive art shops from the sidewalks his courage failed him.
+They were not running after pictures. Exceptional as he might be, there
+were artists in plenty--good ones. He could not run to other well known
+art dealers very well for his work had become identified with the house
+of Kellner and Son. Some of the small dealers might buy them but they
+would not buy them all--probably one or two at the most, and that at a
+sacrifice. What a pass to come to!--he, Eugene Witla, who three years
+before had been in the heyday of his approaching prosperity, wondering
+as he stood in the room of a gloomy side-street house how he was going
+to raise money to live through the summer, and how he was going to sell
+the paintings which had seemed the substance of his fortune but two
+years before. He decided that he would ask several of the middle class
+dealers whether they would not come and look at what he had to show. To
+a number of the smaller dealers in Fourth, Sixth, Eighth Avenues and
+elsewhere he would offer to sell several outright when necessity
+pinched. Still he had to raise money soon. Angela could not be left at
+Blackwood indefinitely.
+
+He went to Jacob Bergman, Henry LaRue, Pottle Freres and asked if they
+would be interested to see what he had. Henry Bergman, who was his own
+manager, recalled his name at once. He had seen the exhibition but was
+not eager. He asked curiously how the pictures of the first and second
+exhibitions had sold, how many there were of them, what prices they
+brought. Eugene told him.
+
+"You might bring one or two here and leave them on sale. You know how
+that is. Someone might take a fancy to them. You never can tell."
+
+He explained that his commission was twenty-five per cent, and that he
+would report when a sale was made. He was not interested to come and see
+them. Eugene could select any two pictures he pleased. It was the same
+with Henry LaRue and Pottle Freres, though the latter had never heard of
+him. They asked him to show them one of his pictures. Eugene's pride was
+touched the least bit by this lack of knowledge on their part, though
+seeing how things were going with him he felt as though he might expect
+as much and more.
+
+Other art dealers he did not care to trust with his paintings on sale,
+and he was now ashamed to start carrying them about to the magazines,
+where at least one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty per
+picture might be expected for them, if they were sold at all. He did not
+want the magazine art world to think that he had come to this. His best
+friend was Hudson Dula, and he might no longer be Art Director of
+_Truth_. As a matter of fact Dula was no longer there. Then there were
+Jan Jansen and several others, but they were no doubt thinking of him
+now as a successful painter. It seemed as though his natural pride were
+building insurmountable barriers for him. How was he to live if he could
+not do this and could not paint? He decided on trying the small art
+dealers with a single picture, offering to sell it outright. They might
+not recognize him and so might buy it direct. He could accept, in such
+cases, without much shock to his pride, anything which they might offer,
+if it were not too little.
+
+He tried this one bright morning in May, and though it was not without
+result it spoiled the beautiful day for him. He took one picture, a New
+York scene, and carried it to a third rate art dealer whose place he had
+seen in upper Sixth Avenue, and without saying anything about himself
+asked if he would like to buy it. The proprietor, a small, dark
+individual of Semitic extraction, looked at him curiously and at his
+picture. He could tell from a single look that Eugene was in trouble,
+that he needed money and that he was anxious to sell his picture. He
+thought of course that he would take anything for it and he was not sure
+that he wanted the picture at that. It was not very popular in theme, a
+view of a famous Sixth Avenue restaurant showing behind the track of the
+L road, with a driving rain pouring in between the interstices of light.
+Years after this picture was picked up by a collector from Kansas City
+at an old furniture sale and hung among his gems, but this morning its
+merits were not very much in evidence.
+
+"I see that you occasionally exhibit a painting in your window for sale.
+Do you buy originals?"
+
+"Now and again," said the man indifferently--"not often. What have you?"
+
+"I have an oil here that I painted not so long ago. I occasionally do
+these things. I thought maybe you would like to buy it."
+
+The proprietor stood by indifferently while Eugene untied the string,
+took off the paper and stood the picture up for inspection. It was
+striking enough in its way but it did not appeal to him as being
+popular. "I don't think it's anything that I could sell here," he
+remarked, shrugging his shoulders. "It's good, but we don't have much
+call for pictures of any kind. If it were a straight landscape or a
+marine or a figure of some kind--. Figures sell best. But this--I doubt
+if I could get rid of it. You might leave it on sale if you want to.
+Somebody might like it. I don't think I'd care to buy it."
+
+"I don't care to leave it on sale," replied Eugene irritably. Leave one
+of his pictures in a cheap side-street art store--and that on sale! He
+would not. He wanted to say something cutting in reply but he curbed his
+welling wrath to ask,
+
+"How much do you think it would be worth if you did want it?"
+
+"Oh," replied the proprietor, pursing his lips reflectively, "not more
+than ten dollars. We can't ask much for anything we have on view here.
+The Fifth Avenue stores take all the good trade."
+
+Eugene winced. Ten dollars! Why, what a ridiculous sum! What was the use
+of coming to a place like this anyhow? He could do better dealing with
+the art directors or the better stores. But where were they? Whom could
+he deal with? Where were there any stores much better than this outside
+the large ones which he had already canvassed. He had better keep his
+pictures and go to work now at something else. He only had thirty-five
+of them all told and at this rate he would have just three hundred and
+fifty dollars when they were all gone. What good would that do him? His
+mood and this preliminary experience convinced him that they could not
+be sold for any much greater sum. Fifteen dollars or less would probably
+be offered and he would be no better off at the end. His pictures would
+be gone and he would have nothing. He ought to get something to do and
+save his pictures. But what?
+
+To a man in Eugene's position--he was now thirty-one years of age, with
+no training outside what he had acquired in developing his artistic
+judgment and ability--this proposition of finding something else which
+he could do was very difficult. His mental sickness was, of course, the
+first great bar. It made him appear nervous and discouraged and so more
+or less objectionable to anyone who was looking for vigorous healthy
+manhood in the shape of an employee. In the next place, his look and
+manner had become decidedly that of the artist--refined, retiring,
+subtle. He also had an air at times of finicky standoffishness,
+particularly in the presence of those who appeared to him commonplace or
+who by their look or manner appeared to be attempting to set themselves
+over him. In the last place, he could think of nothing that he really
+wanted to do--the idea that his art ability would come back to him or
+that it ought to serve him in this crisis, haunting him all the time.
+Once he had thought he might like to be an art director; he was
+convinced that he would be a good one. And another time he had thought
+he would like to write, but that was long ago. He had never written
+anything since the Chicago newspaper specials, and several efforts at
+concentrating his mind for this quickly proved to him that writing was
+not for him now. It was hard for him to formulate an intelligent
+consecutive-idea'd letter to Angela. He harked back to his old Chicago
+days and remembering that he had been a collector and a driver of a
+laundry wagon, he decided that he might do something of that sort.
+Getting a position as a street-car conductor or a drygoods clerk
+appealed to him as possibilities. The necessity of doing something
+within regular hours and in a routine way appealed to him as having
+curative properties. How should he get such a thing?
+
+If it had not been for the bedeviled state of his mind this would not
+have been such a difficult matter, for he was physically active enough
+to hold any ordinary position. He might have appealed frankly and simply
+to M. Charles or Isaac Wertheim and through influence obtained something
+which would have tided him over, but he was too sensitive to begin with
+and his present weakness made him all the more fearful and retiring. He
+had but one desire when he thought of doing anything outside his
+creative gift, and that was to slink away from the gaze of men. How
+could he, with his appearance, his reputation, his tastes and
+refinement, hobnob with conductors, drygoods clerks, railroad hands or
+drivers? It wasn't possible--he hadn't the strength. Besides all that
+was a thing of the past, or he thought it was. He had put it behind him
+in his art student days. Now to have to get out and look for a job! How
+could he? He walked the streets for days and days, coming back to his
+room to see if by any chance he could paint yet, writing long, rambling,
+emotional letters to Angela. It was pitiful. In fits of gloom he would
+take out an occasional picture and sell it, parting with it for ten or
+fifteen dollars after he had carried it sometimes for miles. His one
+refuge was in walking, for somehow he could not walk and feel very, very
+bad. The beauty of nature, the activity of people entertained and
+diverted his mind. He would come back to his room some evenings feeling
+as though a great change had come over him, as though he were going to
+do better now; but this did not last long. A little while and he would
+be back in his old mood again. He spent three months this way, drifting,
+before he realized that he must do something--that fall and winter would
+be coming on again in a little while and he would have nothing at all.
+
+In his desperation he first attempted to get an art directorship, but
+two or three interviews with publishers of magazines proved to him
+pretty quickly that positions of this character were not handed out to
+the inexperienced. It required an apprenticeship, just as anything else
+did, and those who had positions in this field elsewhere had the first
+call. His name or appearance did not appear to strike any of these
+gentlemen as either familiar or important in any way. They had heard of
+him as an illustrator and a painter, but his present appearance
+indicated that this was a refuge in ill health which he was seeking, not
+a vigorous, constructive position, and so they would have none of him.
+He next tried at three of the principal publishing houses, but they did
+not require anyone in that capacity. Truth to tell he knew very little
+of the details and responsibilities of the position, though he thought
+he did. After that there was nothing save drygoods stores, street-car
+registration offices, the employment offices of the great railroads and
+factories. He looked at sugar refineries, tobacco factories, express
+offices, railroad freight offices, wondering whether in any of these it
+would be possible for him to obtain a position which would give him a
+salary of ten dollars a week. If he could get that, and any of the
+pictures now on show with Jacob Bergman, Henry LaRue and Pottle Freres
+should be sold, he could get along. He might even live on this with
+Angela if he could sell an occasional picture for ten or fifteen
+dollars. But he was paying seven dollars a week for nothing save food
+and room, and scarcely managing to cling to the one hundred dollars
+which had remained of his original traveling fund after he had paid all
+his opening expenses here in New York. He was afraid to part with all
+his pictures in this way for fear he would be sorry for it after a
+while.
+
+Work is hard to get under the most favorable conditions of health and
+youth and ambition, and the difficulties of obtaining it under
+unfavorable ones need not be insisted on. Imagine if you can the crowds
+of men, forty, fifty, one hundred strong, that wait at the door of every
+drygoods employment office, every street-car registration bureau, on the
+special days set aside for considering applications, at every factory,
+shop or office where an advertisement calling for a certain type of man
+or woman was inserted in the newspapers. On a few occasions that Eugene
+tried or attempted to try, he found himself preceded by peculiar groups
+of individuals who eyed him curiously as he approached, wondering, as he
+thought, whether a man of his type could be coming to apply for a job.
+They seemed radically different from himself to his mind, men with
+little education and a grim consciousness of the difficulties of life;
+young men, vapid looking men, shabby, stale, discouraged types--men who,
+like himself, looked as though they had seen something very much better,
+and men who looked as though they had seen things a great deal worse.
+The evidence which frightened him was the presence of a group of bright,
+healthy, eager looking boys of nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and
+twenty-two who, like himself when he first went to Chicago years before,
+were everywhere he went. When he drew near he invariably found it
+impossible to indicate in any way that he was looking for anything. He
+couldn't. His courage failed him; he felt that he looked too superior;
+self-consciousness and shame overcame him.
+
+He learned now that men rose as early as four o'clock in the morning to
+buy a newspaper and ran quickly to the address mentioned in order to get
+the place at the head of the line, thus getting the first consideration
+as an applicant. He learned that some other men, such as waiters, cooks,
+hotel employees and so on, frequently stayed up all night in order to
+buy a paper at two in the morning, winter or summer, rain or snow, heat
+or cold, and hurry to the promising addresses they might find. He
+learned that the crowds of applicants were apt to become surly or
+sarcastic or contentious as their individual chances were jeopardized by
+ever-increasing numbers. And all this was going on all the time, in
+winter or summer, heat or cold, rain or snow. Pretending interest as a
+spectator, he would sometimes stand and watch, hearing the ribald jests,
+the slurs cast upon life, fortune, individuals in particular and in
+general by those who were wearily or hopelessly waiting. It was a
+horrible picture to him in his present condition. It was like the
+grinding of the millstones, upper and nether. These were the chaff. He
+was a part of the chaff at present, or in danger of becoming so. Life
+was winnowing him out. He might go down, down, and there might never be
+an opportunity for him to rise any more.
+
+Few, if any of us, understand thoroughly the nature of the unconscious
+stratification which takes place in life, the layers and types and
+classes into which it assorts itself and the barriers which these offer
+to a free migration of individuals from one class to another. We take on
+so naturally the material habiliments of our temperaments, necessities
+and opportunities. Priests, doctors, lawyers, merchants, appear to be
+born with their particular mental attitude and likewise the clerk, the
+ditch-digger, the janitor. They have their codes, their guilds and their
+class feelings. And while they may be spiritually closely related, they
+are physically far apart. Eugene, after hunting for a place for a month,
+knew a great deal more about this stratification than he had ever
+dreamed of knowing. He found that he was naturally barred by temperament
+from some things, from others by strength and weight, or rather the lack
+of them; from others, by inexperience; from others, by age; and so on.
+And those who were different from him in any or all of these respects
+were inclined to look at him askance. "You are not as we are," their
+eyes seemed to say; "why do you come here?"
+
+One day he approached a gang of men who were waiting outside a car barn
+and sought to find out where the registration office was. He did not lay
+off his natural manner of superiority--could not, but asked a man near
+him if he knew. It had taken all his courage to do this.
+
+"He wouldn't be after lookin' fer a place as a conductor now, would he?"
+he heard someone say within his hearing. For some reason this remark
+took all his courage away. He went up the wooden stairs to the little
+office where the application blanks were handed out, but did not even
+have the courage to apply for one. He pretended to be looking for
+someone and went out again. Later, before a drygoods superintendent's
+office, he heard a youth remark, "Look what wants to be a clerk." It
+froze him.
+
+It is a question how long this aimless, nervous wandering would have
+continued if it had not been for the accidental recollection of an
+experience which a fellow artist once related to him of a writer who had
+found himself nervously depressed and who, by application to the
+president of a railroad, had secured as a courtesy to the profession
+which he represented so ably a position as an apprentice in a surveying
+corps, being given transportation to a distant section of the country
+and employed at a laborer's wages until he was well. Eugene now thought
+of this as quite an idea for himself. Why it had not occurred to him
+before he did not know. He could apply as an artist--his appearance
+would bear him out, and being able to speak from the vantage point of
+personal ability temporarily embarrassed by ill health, his chances of
+getting something would be so much better. It would not be the same as a
+position which he had secured for himself without fear or favor, but it
+would be a position, different from farming with Angela's father because
+it would command a salary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+This idea of appealing to the president of one of the great railroads
+that entered New York was not so difficult to execute. Eugene dressed
+himself very carefully the next morning, and going to the office of the
+company in Forty-second Street, consulted the list of officers posted in
+one of the halls, and finding the president to be on the third floor,
+ascended. He discovered, after compelling himself by sheer will power to
+enter, that this so-called office was a mere anteroom to a force of
+assistants serving the president, and that no one could see him except
+by appointment.
+
+"You might see his secretary if he isn't busy," suggested the clerk who
+handled his card gingerly.
+
+Eugene was for the moment undetermined what to do but decided that maybe
+the secretary could help him. He asked that his card might be taken to
+him and that no explanation be demanded of him except by the secretary
+in person. The latter came out after a while, an under secretary of
+perhaps twenty-eight years of age, short and stout. He was bland and
+apparently good natured.
+
+"What is it I can do for you?" he asked.
+
+Eugene had been formulating his request in his mind--some method of
+putting it briefly and simply.
+
+"I came up to see Mr. Wilson," he said, "to see if he would not send me
+out as a day-laborer of some kind in connection with some department of
+the road. I am an artist by profession and I am suffering from
+neurasthenia. All the doctors I have consulted have recommended that I
+get a simple, manual position of some kind and work at it until I am
+well. I know of an instance in which Mr. Wilson, assisted, in this way,
+Mr. Savin the author, and I thought he might be willing to interest
+himself in my case."
+
+At the sound of Henry Savin's name the under-secretary pricked up his
+ears. He had, fortunately, read one of his books, and this together with
+Eugene's knowledge of the case, his personal appearance, a certain ring
+of sincerity in what he was saying, caused him to be momentarily
+interested.
+
+"There is no position in connection with any clerical work which the
+president could give you, I am sure," he replied. "All of these things
+are subject to a system of promotion. It might be that he could place
+you with one of the construction gangs in one of the departments under a
+foreman. I don't know. It's very hard work, though. He might consider
+your case." He smiled commiseratingly. "I question whether you're strong
+enough to do anything of that sort. It takes a pretty good man to wield
+a pick or a shovel."
+
+"I don't think I had better worry about that now," replied Eugene in
+return, smiling wearily. "I'll take the work and see if it won't help
+me. I think I need it badly enough."
+
+He was afraid the under-secretary would repent of his suggestion and
+refuse him entirely.
+
+"Can you wait a little while?" asked the latter curiously. He had the
+idea that Eugene was someone of importance, for he had suggested as a
+parting argument that he could give a number of exceptional references.
+
+"Certainly," said Eugene, and the secretary went his way, coming back in
+half an hour to hand him an enveloped letter.
+
+"We have the idea," he said quite frankly waiving any suggestion of the
+president's influence in the matter and speaking for himself and the
+secretary-in-chief, with whom he had agreed that Eugene ought to be
+assisted, "that you had best apply to the engineering department.
+Mr. Hobsen, the chief-engineer, can arrange for you. This letter I think
+will get you what you want."
+
+Eugene's heart bounded. He looked at the superscription and saw it
+addressed to Mr. Woodruff Hobsen, Chief Engineer, and putting it in his
+pocket without stopping to read it, but thanking the under-secretary
+profusely, went out. In the hall at a safe distance he stopped and
+opened it, finding that it spoke of him familiarly as "Mr. Eugene Witla,
+an artist, temporarily incapacitated by neurasthenia," and went on to
+say that he was "desirous of being appointed to some manual toil in some
+construction corps. The president's office recommends this request to
+your favor."
+
+When he read this he knew it meant a position. It roused curious
+feelings as to the nature and value of stratification. As a laborer he
+was nothing: as an artist he could get a position as a laborer. After
+all, his ability as an artist was worth something. It obtained him this
+refuge. He hugged it joyously, and a few moments later handed it to an
+under-secretary in the Chief-Engineer's office. Without being seen by
+anyone in authority he was in return given a letter to Mr. William
+Haverford, "Engineer of Maintenance of Way," a pale, anaemic gentleman of
+perhaps forty years of age, who, as Eugene learned from him when he was
+eventually ushered into his presence a half hour later, was a captain of
+thirteen thousand men. The latter read the letter from the Engineer's
+office curiously. He was struck by Eugene's odd mission and his
+appearance as a man. Artists were queer. This was like one. Eugene
+reminded him of himself a little in his appearance.
+
+"An artist," he said interestedly. "So you want to work as a day
+laborer?" He fixed Eugene with clear, coal-black eyes looking out of a
+long, pear-shaped face. Eugene noticed that his hands were long and thin
+and white and that his high, pale forehead was crowned by a mop of black
+hair.
+
+"Neurasthenia. I've heard a great deal about that of late, but have
+never been troubled that way myself. I find that I derive considerable
+benefit when I am nervous from the use of a rubber exerciser. You have
+seen them perhaps?"
+
+"Yes," Eugene replied, "I have. My case is much too grave for that, I
+think. I have traveled a great deal. But it doesn't seem to do me any
+good. I want work at something manual, I fancy--something at which I
+have to work. Exercise in a room would not help me. I think I need a
+complete change of environment. I will be much obliged if you will place
+me in some capacity."
+
+"Well, this will very likely be it," suggested Mr. Haverford blandly.
+"Working as a day-laborer will certainly not strike you as play. To tell
+you the truth, I don't think you can stand it." He reached for a
+glass-framed map showing the various divisions of the railroad
+stretching from New England to Chicago and St. Louis, and observed
+quietly. "I could send you to a great many places, Pennsylvania, New
+York, Ohio, Michigan, Canada." His finger roved idly about. "I have
+thirteen thousand men in my department and they are scattered far and
+wide."
+
+Eugene marveled. Such a position! Such authority! This pale, dark man
+sitting as an engineer at a switch board directing so large a machine.
+
+"You have a large force," he said simply. Mr. Haverford smiled wanly.
+
+"I think, if you will take my advice, you will not go in a construction
+corps right away. You can hardly do manual labor. There is a little
+carpenter shop which we have at Speonk, not very far outside the city,
+which I should think would answer your needs admirably. A little creek
+joins the Hudson there and it's out on a point of land, the shop is.
+It's summer now, and to put you in a broiling sun with a gang of
+Italians would be a little rough. Take my advice and go here. It will be
+hard enough. After you are broken in and you think you want a change I
+can easily arrange it for you. The money may not make so much difference
+to you but you may as well have it. It will be fifteen cents an hour. I
+will give you a letter to Mr. Litlebrown, our division engineer, and he
+will see that you are properly provided for."
+
+Eugene bowed. Inwardly he smiled at the thought that the money would not
+be acceptable to him. Anything would be acceptable. Perhaps this would
+be best. It was near the city. The description of the little carpenter
+shop out on the neck of land appealed to him. It was, as he found when
+he looked at the map of the immediate division to which this belonged,
+almost within the city limits. He could live in New York--the upper
+portion of it anyhow.
+
+Again there was a letter, this time to Mr. Henry C. Litlebrown, a tall,
+meditative, philosophic man whom Eugene found two days later in the
+division offices at Yonkers, who in turn wrote a letter to Mr. Joseph
+Brooks, Superintendent of Buildings, at Mott Haven, whose secretary
+finally gave Eugene a letter to Mr. Jack Stix, foreman carpenter at
+Speonk. This letter, when presented on a bright Friday afternoon,
+brought him the advice to come Monday at seven A. M., and so Eugene saw
+a career as a day laborer stretching very conspicuously before him.
+
+The "little shop" in question was located in the most charming manner
+possible. If it had been set as a stage scene for his especial artistic
+benefit it could not have been better. On a point of land between the
+river and the main line of the railroad and a little creek, which was
+east of the railroad and which the latter crossed on a trestle to get
+back to the mainland again, it stood, a long, low two-storey structure,
+green as to its roof, red as to its body, full of windows which
+commanded picturesque views of passing yachts and steamers and little
+launches and row-boats anchored safely in the waters of the cove which
+the creek formed. There was a veritable song of labor which arose from
+this shop, for it was filled with planes, lathes and wood-turning
+instruments of various kinds, to say nothing of a great group of
+carpenters who could make desks, chairs, tables, in short, office
+furniture of various kinds, and who kept the company's needs of these
+fittings for its depots and offices well supplied. Each carpenter had a
+bench before a window on the second floor, and in the centre were the
+few necessary machines they were always using, small jig, cross cut,
+band and rip saws, a plane, and four or five lathes. On the ground floor
+was the engine room, the blacksmith's shop, the giant plane, the great
+jig and cross cut saws, and the store room and supply closets. Out in
+the yard were piles of lumber, with tracks in between, and twice every
+day a local freight called "The Dinky" stopped to switch in or take out
+loaded cars of lumber or finished furniture and supplies. Eugene, as he
+approached on the day he presented his letter, stopped to admire the
+neatness of the low board fence which surrounded it all, the beauty of
+the water, the droning sweetness of the saws.
+
+"Why, the work here couldn't be very hard," he thought. He saw
+carpenters looking out of the upper windows, and a couple of men in
+brown overalls and jumpers unloading a car. They were carrying great
+three-by-six joists on their shoulders. Would he be asked to do anything
+like that. He scarcely thought so. Mr. Haverford had distinctly
+indicated in his letter to Mr. Litlebrown that he was to be built up by
+degrees. Carrying great joists did not appeal to him as the right way,
+but he presented his letter. He had previously looked about on the high
+ground which lay to the back of the river and which commanded this point
+of land, to see if he could find a place to board and lodge, but had
+seen nothing. The section was very exclusive, occupied by suburban New
+Yorkers of wealth, and they were not interested in the proposition which
+he had formulated in his own mind, namely his temporary reception
+somewhere as a paying guest. He had visions of a comfortable home
+somewhere now with nice people, for strangely enough the securing of
+this very minor position had impressed him as the beginning of the end
+of his bad luck. He was probably going to get well now, in the course of
+time. If he could only live with some nice family for the summer. In the
+fall if he were improving, and he thought he might be, Angela could come
+on. It might be that one of the dealers, Pottle Freres or Jacob Bergman
+or Henry LaRue would have sold a picture. One hundred and fifty or two
+hundred dollars joined to his salary would go a long way towards making
+their living moderately comfortable. Besides Angela's taste and economy,
+coupled with his own art judgment, could make any little place look
+respectable and attractive.
+
+The problem of finding a room was not so easy. He followed the track
+south to a settlement which was visible from the shop windows a quarter
+of a mile away, and finding nothing which suited his taste as to
+location, returned to Speonk proper and followed the little creek inland
+half a mile. This adventure delighted him for it revealed a semi-circle
+of charming cottages ranged upon a hill slope which had for its
+footstool the little silvery-bosomed stream. Between the stream and the
+hill slope ran a semi-circular road and above that another road. Eugene
+could see at a glance that here was middle class prosperity, smooth
+lawns, bright awnings, flower pots of blue and yellow and green upon the
+porches, doorsteps and verandas. An auto standing in front of one house
+indicated a certain familiarity with the ways of the rich, and a summer
+road house, situated at the intersection of a road leading out from New
+York and the little stream where it was crossed by a bridge, indicated
+that the charms of this village were not unknown to those who came
+touring and seeking for pleasure. The road house itself was hung with
+awnings and one dining balcony out over the water. Eugene's desire was
+fixed on this village at once. He wanted to live here--anywhere in it.
+He walked about under the cool shade of the trees looking at first one
+door yard and then another wishing that he might introduce himself by
+letter and be received. They ought to welcome an artist of his ability
+and refinement and would, he thought, if they knew. His working in a
+furniture factory or for the railroad as a day laborer for his health
+simply added to his picturesque character. In his wanderings he finally
+came upon a Methodist church quaintly built of red brick and grey stone
+trimmings, and the sight of its tall, stained glass windows and square
+fortress-like bell-tower gave him an idea. Why not appeal to the
+minister? He could explain to him what he wanted, show him his
+credentials--for he had with him old letters from editors, publishers
+and art houses--and give him a clear understanding as to why he wanted
+to come here at all. His ill health and distinction ought to appeal to
+this man, and he would probably direct him to some one who would gladly
+have him. At five in the afternoon he knocked at the door and was
+received in the pastor's study--a large still room in which a few flies
+were buzzing in the shaded light. In a few moments the minister himself
+came in--a tall, grey-headed man, severely simple in his attire and with
+the easy air of one who is used to public address. He was about to ask
+what he could do for him when Eugene began with his explanation.
+
+"You don't know me at all. I am a stranger in this section. I am an
+artist by profession and I am coming to Speonk on Monday to work in the
+railroad shop there for my health. I have been suffering from a nervous
+breakdown and am going to try day labor for awhile. I want to find a
+convenient, pleasant place to live, and I thought you might know of
+someone here, or near here, who might be willing to take me in for a
+little while. I can give excellent references. There doesn't appear to
+be anything in the immediate neighborhood of the shop."
+
+"It is rather isolated there," replied the old minister, studying Eugene
+carefully. "I have often wondered how all those men like it, traveling
+so far. None of them live about here." He looked at Eugene solemnly,
+taking in his various characteristics. He was not badly impressed. He
+seemed to be a reserved, thoughtful, dignified young man and decidedly
+artistic. It struck him as very interesting that he should be trying so
+radical a thing as day labor for his nerves.
+
+"Let me see," he said thoughtfully. He sat down in his chair near his
+table and put his hand over his eyes. "I don't think of anyone just at
+the moment. There are plenty of families who have room to take you if
+they would, but I question very much whether they would. In fact I'm
+rather sure they wouldn't. Let me see now."
+
+He thought again.
+
+Eugene studied his big aquiline nose, his shaggy grey eyebrows, his
+thick, crisp, grey hair. Already his mind was sketching him, the desk,
+the dim walls, the whole atmosphere of the room.
+
+"No, no," he said slowly. "I don't think of anyone. There is one
+family--Mrs. Hibberdell. She lives in the--let me see--first, second,
+third, tenth house above here. She has one nephew with her at present, a
+young man of about your age, and I don't think anyone else. I don't know
+that she would consider taking you in, but she might. Her house is quite
+large. She did have her daughter with her at one time, but I'm not sure
+that she's there now. I think not."
+
+He talked as though he were reporting his own thoughts to himself
+audibly.
+
+Eugene pricked up his ears at the mention of a daughter. During all the
+time he had been out of New York he had not, with the exception of
+Frieda, had a single opportunity to talk intimately with any girl.
+Angela had been with him all the time. Here in New York since he had
+been back he had been living under such distressing conditions that he
+had not thought of either youth or love. He had no business to be
+thinking of it now, but this summer air, this tree-shaded village, the
+fact that he had a position, small as it was, on which he could depend
+and which would no doubt benefit him mentally, and that he was somehow
+feeling better about himself because he was going to work, made him feel
+that he might look more interestedly on life again. He was not going to
+die; he was going to get well. Finding this position proved it. And he
+might go to the house now and find some charming girl who would like him
+very much. Angela was away. He was alone. He had again the freedom of
+his youth. If he were only well and working!
+
+He thanked the old minister very politely and went his way, recognizing
+the house by certain details given him by the minister, a double
+balconied veranda, some red rockers, two yellow jardinieres at the
+doorstep, a greyish white picket fence and gate. He walked up smartly
+and rang the bell. A very intelligent woman of perhaps fifty-five or
+sixty with bright grey hair and clear light blue eyes was coming out
+with a book in her hand. Eugene stated his case. She listened with keen
+interest, looking him over the while. His appearance took her fancy, for
+she was of a strong intellectual and literary turn of mind.
+
+"I wouldn't ordinarily consider anything of the kind, but I am alone
+here with my nephew and the house could easily accommodate a dozen. I
+don't want to do anything which will irritate him, but if you will come
+back in the morning I will let you know. It would not disturb me to have
+you about. Do you happen to know of an artist by the name of Deesa?"
+
+"I know him well," replied Eugene. "He's an old friend of mine."
+
+"He is a friend of my daughter's, I think. Have you enquired anywhere
+else here in the village?"
+
+"No," said Eugene.
+
+"That is just as well," she replied.
+
+He took the hint.
+
+So there was no daughter here. Well, what matter? The view was
+beautiful. Of an evening he could sit out here in one of the rocking
+chairs and look at the water. The evening sun, already low in the west
+was burnishing it a bright gold. The outline of the hill on the other
+side was dignified and peaceful. He could sleep and work as a day
+laborer and take life easy for a while. He could get well now and this
+was the way to do it. Day laborer! How fine, how original, how
+interesting. He felt somewhat like a knight-errant reconnoitring a new
+and very strange world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+The matter of securing admission to this house was quickly settled. The
+nephew, a genial, intelligent man of thirty-four, as Eugene discovered
+later, had no objection. It appeared to Eugene that in some way he
+contributed to the support of this house, though Mrs. Hibberdell
+obviously had some money of her own. A charmingly furnished room on the
+second floor adjoining one of the several baths was assigned him, and he
+was at once admitted to the freedom of the house. There were books, a
+piano (but no one to play it), a hammock, a maid-of-all-work, and an
+atmosphere of content and peace. Mrs. Hibberdell, a widow, presumably of
+some years of widowhood, was of that experience and judgment in life
+which gave her intellectual poise. She was not particularly inquisitive
+about anything in connection with him, and so far as he could see from
+surface indications was refined, silent, conservative. She could jest,
+and did, in a subtle understanding way. He told her quite frankly at the
+time he applied that he was married, that his wife was in the West and
+that he expected her to return after his health was somewhat improved.
+She talked with him about art and books and life in general. Music
+appeared to be to her a thing apart. She did not care much for it. The
+nephew, Davis Simpson, was neither literary nor artistic, and apparently
+cared little for music. He was a buyer for one of the larger department
+stores, a slight, dapper, rather dandified type of man, with a lean, not
+thin but tight-muscled face, and a short black mustache, and he appeared
+to be interested only in the humors of character, trade, baseball and
+methods of entertaining himself. The things that pleased Eugene about
+him were that he was clean, simple, direct, good-natured and courteous.
+He had apparently no desire to infringe on anybody's privacy, but was
+fond of stirring up light discussions and interpolating witty remarks.
+He liked also to grow flowers and to fish. The care of a border of
+flowers which glorified a short gravel path in the back yard received
+his especial attention evenings and mornings.
+
+It was a great pleasure for Eugene to come into this atmosphere after
+the storm which had been assailing him for the past three years, and
+particularly for the past ninety days. He was only asked to pay eight
+dollars a week by Mrs. Hibberdell, though he realized that what he was
+obtaining in home atmosphere here was not ordinarily purchasable at any
+price in the public market. The maid saw to it that a little bouquet of
+flowers was put on his dressing table daily. He was given fresh towels
+and linen in ample quantities. The bath was his own. He could sit out on
+the porch of an evening and look at the water uninterrupted or he could
+stay in the library and read. Breakfast and dinner were invariably
+delightful occasions, for though he rose at five-forty-five in order to
+have his bath, breakfast, and be able to walk to the factory and reach
+it by seven, Mrs. Hibberdell was invariably up, as it was her habit to
+rise thus early, had been so for years. She liked it. Eugene in his
+weary mood could scarcely understand this. Davis came to the table some
+few moments before he would be leaving. He invariably had some cheery
+remark to offer, for he was never sullen or gloomy. His affairs,
+whatever they were, did not appear to oppress him. Mrs. Hibberdell would
+talk to Eugene genially about his work, this small, social centre of
+which they were a part and which was called Riverwood, the current
+movements in politics, religion, science and so forth. There were
+references sometimes to her one daughter, who was married and living in
+New York. It appeared that she occasionally visited her mother here.
+Eugene was delighted to think he had been so fortunate as to find this
+place. He hoped to make himself so agreeable that there would be no
+question as to his welcome, and he was not disappointed.
+
+Between themselves Mrs. Hibberdell and Davis discussed him, agreeing
+that he was entirely charming, a good fellow, and well worth having
+about. At the factory where Eugene worked and where the conditions were
+radically different, he made for himself an atmosphere which was almost
+entirely agreeable to him, though he quarreled at times with specific
+details. On the first morning, for instance, he was put to work with two
+men, heavy clods of souls he thought at first, familiarly known about
+the yard as John and Bill. These two, to his artistic eye, appeared
+machines, more mechanical than humanly self-directive. They were of
+medium height, not more than five feet, nine inches tall and weighed
+about one hundred and eighty pounds each. One had a round, poorly
+modeled face very much the shape of an egg, to which was attached a
+heavy yellowish mustache. He had a glass eye, complicated in addition by
+a pair of spectacles which were fastened over his large, protruding red
+ears with steel hooks. He wore a battered brown hat, now a limp
+shapeless mass. His name was Bill Jeffords and he responded sometimes to
+the sobriquet of "One Eye."
+
+The other man was John alias "Jack" Duncan, an individual of the same
+height and build with but slightly more modeling to his face and with
+little if any greater intelligence. He looked somewhat the
+shrewder--Eugene fancied there might be lurking in him somewhere a spark
+of humor, but he was mistaken. Unquestionably in Jeffords there was
+none. Jack Stix, the foreman-carpenter, a tall, angular, ambling man
+with red hair, a red mustache, shifty, uncertain blue eyes and
+noticeably big hands and feet, had suggested to Eugene that he work with
+these men for a little while. It was his idea to "try him out," as he
+told one of the associate foremen who was in charge of a gang of
+Italians working in the yard for the morning, and he was quite equal to
+doing it. He thought Eugene had no business here and might possibly be
+scared off by a little rough work.
+
+"He's up here for his health," he told him. "I don't know where he comes
+from. Mr. Brooks sent him up here with orders to put him on. I want to
+see how he takes to real work for awhile."
+
+"Look out you don't hurt him," suggested the other. "He don't look very
+strong to me."
+
+"He's strong enough to carry a few spiles, I guess. If Jimmy can carry
+'em, he can. I don't intend to keep him at it long."
+
+Eugene knew nothing of this, but when he was told to "come along, new
+man" and shown a pile of round, rough ash trunk cutting six inches in
+diameter and eight feet long, his courage failed him. He was suffered to
+carry some of these to the second floor, how many he did not know.
+
+"Take 'em to Thompson up there in the corner," said Jeffords dully.
+
+Eugene grasped one uncertainly in the middle with his thin, artistic
+hands. He did not know that there were ways of handling lumber just as
+there were ways of handling a brush. He tried to lift it but could not.
+The rough bark scratched his fingers cruelly.
+
+"Yah gotta learn somepin about that before yuh begin, I guess," said
+Jack Duncan, who had been standing by eyeing him narrowly.
+
+Jeffords had gone about some other work.
+
+"I suppose I don't know very much about it," replied Eugene shamefacedly
+stopping and waiting for further instructions.
+
+"Lemme show you a trick," said his associate. "There's tricks in all
+these here trades. Take it by the end this-a-way, and push it along
+until you can stand it up. Stoop down now and put your shoulder right
+next the middle. Gotta pad under your shirt? You oughtta have one. Now
+put your right arm out ahead o'yuh, on the spile. Now you're all right."
+
+Eugene straightened up and the rough post balanced itself evenly but
+crushingly on his shoulder. It appeared to grind his muscles and his
+back and legs ached instantly. He started bravely forward straining to
+appear at ease but within fifty feet he was suffering agony. He walked
+the length of the shop, however, up the stairs and back again to the
+window where Thompson was, his forehead bursting with perspiration and
+his ears red with blood. He fairly staggered as he neared the machine
+and dropped the post heavily.
+
+"Look what you're doin'," said a voice behind him. It was Thompson, the
+lathe worker. "Can't you put that down easy?"
+
+"No, I can't," replied Eugene angrily, his face tinged with a faint
+blush from his extreme exertion. He was astonished and enraged to think
+they should put him to doing work like this, especially since
+Mr. Haverford had told him it would be easy. He suspected at once a plot
+to drive him away. He would have added "these are too damn heavy for
+me," but he restrained himself. He went down stairs wondering how he was
+to get up the others. He fingered about the pole gingerly hoping that
+the time taken this way would ease his pain and give him strength for
+the next one. Finally he picked up another and staggered painfully to
+the loft again. The foreman had his eye on him but said nothing. It
+amused him a little to think Eugene was having such a hard time. It
+wouldn't hurt him for a change, would do him good. "When he gets four
+carried up let him go," he said to Thompson, however, feeling that he
+had best lighten the situation a little. The latter watched Eugene out
+of the tail of his eye noting the grimaces he made and the strain he was
+undergoing, but he merely smiled. When four had been dropped on the
+floor he said: "That'll do for the present," and Eugene, heaving a groan
+of relief, went angrily away. In his nervous, fantastic, imaginative and
+apprehensive frame of mind, he imagined he had been injured for life. He
+feared he had strained a muscle or broken a blood vessel somewhere.
+
+"Good heavens, I can't stand anything like this," he thought. "If the
+work is going to be this hard I'll have to quit. I wonder what they mean
+by treating me this way. I didn't come here to do this."
+
+Visions of days and weeks of back-breaking toil stretched before him. It
+would never do. He couldn't stand it. He saw his old search for work
+coming back, and this frightened him in another direction. "I mustn't
+give up so easily," he counseled himself in spite of his distress. "I
+have to stick this out a little while anyhow." It seemed in this first
+trying hour as though he were between the devil and the deep sea. He
+went slowly down into the yard to find Jeffords and Duncan. They were
+working at a car, one inside receiving lumber to be piled, the other
+bringing it to him.
+
+"Get down, Bill," said John, who was on the ground looking up at his
+partner indifferently. "You get up there, new man. What's your name?"
+
+"Witla," said Eugene.
+
+"Well, my name's Duncan. We'll bring this stuff to you and you pile it."
+
+It was more heavy lumber, as Eugene apprehensively observed, quarter cut
+joists for some building--"four by fours" they called them--but after he
+was shown the art of handling them they were not unmanageable. There
+were methods of sliding and balancing them which relieved him of a great
+quantity of labor. Eugene had not thought to provide himself with gloves
+though, and his hands were being cruelly torn. He stopped once to pick a
+splinter out of his thumb and Jeffords, who was coming up, asked, "Ain't
+cha got no gloves?"
+
+"No," said Eugene, "I didn't think to get any."
+
+"Your hands'll get pretty well bunged up, I'm afraid. Maybe Joseph'll
+let you have his for to-day, you might go in and ask him."
+
+"Where's Joseph?" asked Eugene.
+
+"He's inside there. He's taking from the plane."
+
+Eugene did not understand this quite. He knew what a plane was, had been
+listening to it sing mightily all the morning, the shavings flying as it
+smoothed the boards, but _taking_?
+
+"Where's Joseph?" he asked of the plane driver.
+
+He nodded his head to a tall hump-shouldered boy of perhaps twenty-two.
+He was a big, simple, innocent looking fellow. His face was long and
+narrow, his mouth wide, his eyes a watery blue, his hair a shock of
+brown, loose and wavy, with a good sprinkling of sawdust in it. About
+his waist was a big piece of hemp bagging tied by a grass rope. He wore
+an old faded wool cap with a long visor in order to shield his eyes from
+the flying chips and dust, and when Eugene came in one hand was lifted
+protectingly to shield his eyes. Eugene approached him deprecatingly.
+
+"One of the men out in the yard said that you might have a pair of
+gloves you would lend me for to-day. I'm piling lumber and it's tearing
+my hands. I forgot to get a pair."
+
+"Sure," said Joseph genially waving his hand to the driver to stop.
+"They're over here in my locker. I know what that is. I been there. When
+I come here they rubbed it into me jist as they're doin' to you. Doncher
+mind. You'll come out all right. Up here for your health, are you? It
+ain't always like that. Somedays there ain't most nothin' to do here.
+Then somedays ag'in there's a whole lot. Well, it's good healthy work, I
+can say that. I ain't most never sick. Nice fresh air we git here and
+all that."
+
+He rambled on, fumbling under his bagging apron for his keys, unlocking
+his locker and producing a great pair of old yellow lumber gloves. He
+gave them to Eugene cheerfully and the latter thanked him. He liked
+Eugene at once and Eugene liked him. "A nice fellow that," he said, as
+he went back to his car. "Think of how genially he gave me these.
+Lovely! If only all men were as genial and kindly disposed as this boy,
+how nice the world would be." He put on the gloves and found his work
+instantly easier for he could grasp the joists firmly and without pain.
+He worked on until noon when the whistle blew and he ate a dreary lunch
+sitting by himself on one side, pondering. After one he was called to
+carry shavings, one basket after another back through the blacksmith
+shop to the engine room in the rear where was a big shaving bin. By four
+o'clock he had seen almost all the characters he was going to associate
+with for the time that he stayed there. Harry Fornes, the blacksmith or
+"the village smith," as Eugene came to call him later on, Jimmy Sudds,
+the blacksmith's helper or "maid-of-all-work" as he promptly named him;
+John Peters, the engineer, Malachi Dempsey, the driver of the great
+plane, Joseph Mews and, in addition, carpenters, tin-smiths, plumbers,
+painters, and those few exceptional cabinet makers who passed through
+the lower floor now and then, men who were about the place from time to
+time and away from it at others all of whom took note of Eugene at first
+as a curiosity.
+
+Eugene was himself intensely interested in the men. Harry Fornes and
+Jimmy Sudds attracted him especially. The former was an undersized
+American of distant Irish extraction who was so broad chested, swollen
+armed, square-jawed and generally self-reliant and forceful as to seem a
+minor Titan. He was remarkably industrious, turning out a great deal of
+work and beating a piece of iron with a resounding lick which could be
+heard all about the hills and hollows outside. Jimmy Sudds, his
+assistant, was like his master equally undersized, dirty, gnarled,
+twisted, his teeth showing like a row of yellow snags, his ears standing
+out like small fans, his eye askew, but nevertheless with so genial a
+look in his face as to disarm criticism at once. Every body liked Jimmy
+Sudds because he was honest, single-minded and free of malicious intent.
+His coat was three and his trousers two times too large for him, and his
+shoes were obviously bought at a second-hand store, but he had the vast
+merit of being a picture. Eugene was fascinated with him. He learned
+shortly that Jimmy Sudds truly believed that buffaloes were to be shot
+around Buffalo, New York.
+
+John Peters, the engineer, was another character who fixed his
+attention. John was almost helplessly fat and was known for this reason
+as "Big John." He was a veritable whale of a man. Six feet tall,
+weighing over three hundred pounds and standing these summer days in his
+hot engine room, his shirt off, his suspenders down, his great welts of
+fat showing through his thin cotton undershirt, he looked as though he
+might be suffering, but he was not. John, as Eugene soon found out, did
+not take life emotionally. He stood mostly in his engine room door when
+the shade was there staring out on the glistening water of the river,
+occasionally wishing that he didn't need to work but could lie and sleep
+indefinitely instead.
+
+"Wouldja think them fellers would feel purty good sittin' out there on
+the poop deck of them there yachts smokin' their perfectos?" he once
+asked Eugene, apropos of the magnificent private vessels that passed up
+and down the river.
+
+"I certainly would," laughed Eugene.
+
+"Aw! Haw! That's the life fer yer uncle Dudley. I could do that there
+with any of 'em. Aw! Haw!"
+
+Eugene laughed joyously.
+
+"Yes, that's the life," he said. "We all could stand our share."
+
+Malachi Dempsey, the driver of the great plane, was dull, tight-mouthed,
+silent, more from lack of ideas than anything else, though oyster-wise
+he had learned to recede from all manner of harm by closing his shell
+tightly. He knew no way to avoid earthly harm save by being
+preternaturally silent, and Eugene saw this quickly. He used to stare at
+him for long periods at a time, marvelling at the curiosity his attitude
+presented. Eugene himself, though, was a curiosity to the others, even
+more so than they to him. He did not look like a workingman and could
+not be made to do so. His spirit was too high, his eye too flashing and
+incisive. He smiled at himself carrying basketful after basketful of
+shavings from the planing room, where it rained shavings and from which,
+because of the lack of a shaving blower, they had to be removed back to
+the hot engine room where Big John presided. The latter took a great
+fancy to Eugene, but something after the fashion of a dog for a master.
+He did not have a single idea above his engine, his garden at home, his
+wife, his children and his pipe. These and sleep--lots of it--were his
+joys, his recreations, the totality of his world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+There were many days now, three months all told, in which Eugene
+obtained insight into the workaday world such as he had not previously
+had. It is true he had worked before in somewhat this fashion, but his
+Chicago experience was without the broad philosophic insight which had
+come to him since. Formerly the hierarchies of power in the universe and
+on earth were inexplicable to him--all out of order; but here, where he
+saw by degrees ignorant, almost animal intelligence, being directed by
+greater, shrewder, and at times it seemed to him possibly malicious
+intelligences--he was not quite sure about that--who were so strong that
+the weaker ones must obey them, he began to imagine that in a rough way
+life might possibly be ordered to the best advantage even under this
+system. It was true that men quarreled here with each other as to who
+should be allowed to lead. There was here as elsewhere great seeking for
+the privileges and honors of direction and leadership in such petty
+things as the proper piling of lumber, the planing of boards, the making
+of desks and chairs, and men were grimly jealous of their talents and
+abilities in these respects, but in the main it was the jealousy that
+makes for ordered, intelligent control. All were striving to do the work
+of intelligence, not of unintelligence. Their pride, however ignorant it
+might be, was in the superior, not the inferior. They might complain of
+their work, snarl at each other, snarl at their bosses, but after all it
+was because they were not able or permitted to do the higher work and
+carry out the orders of the higher mind. All were striving to do
+something in a better way, a superior way, and to obtain the honors and
+emoluments that come from doing anything in a superior way. If they were
+not rewarded according to their estimate of their work there was wrath
+and opposition and complaint and self-pity, but the work of the superior
+intelligence was the thing which each in his blind, self-seeking way was
+apparently trying to do.
+
+Because he was not so far out of his troubles that he could be forgetful
+of them, and because he was not at all certain that his talent to paint
+was ever coming back to him, he was not as cheerful at times as he might
+have been; but he managed to conceal it pretty well. This one thought
+with its attendant ills of probable poverty and obscurity were terrible
+to him. Time was slipping away and youth. But when he was not thinking
+of this he was cheerful enough. Besides he had the ability to simulate
+cheerfulness even when he did not feel it. Because he did not
+permanently belong to this world of day labor and because his position
+which had been given him as a favor was moderately secure, he felt
+superior to everything about him. He did not wish to show this feeling
+in any way--was very anxious as a matter of fact to conceal it, but his
+sense of superiority and ultimate indifference to all these petty
+details was an abiding thought with him. He went to and fro carrying a
+basket of shavings, jesting with "the village smith," making friends
+with "Big John," the engineer, with Joseph, Malachi Dempsey, little
+Jimmy Sudds, in fact anyone and everyone who came near him who would be
+friends. He took a pencil one day at the noon hour and made a sketch of
+Harry Fornes, the blacksmith, his arm upraised at the anvil, his helper,
+Jimmy Sudds, standing behind him, the fire glowing in the forge. Fornes,
+who was standing beside him, looking over his shoulder, could scarcely
+believe his eyes.
+
+"Wotcha doin'?" he asked Eugene curiously, looking over his shoulder,
+for it was at the blacksmith's table, in the sun of his window that he
+was sitting, looking out at the water. Eugene had bought a lunch box and
+was carrying with him daily a delectable lunch put up under
+Mrs. Hibberdell's direction. He had eaten his noonday meal and was
+idling, thinking over the beauty of the scene, his peculiar position,
+the curiosities of this shop--anything and everything that came into his
+head.
+
+"Wait a minute," he said genially, for he and the smith were already as
+thick as thieves.
+
+The latter gazed interestedly and finally exclaimed:
+
+"W'y that's me, ain't it?"
+
+"Yep!" said Eugene.
+
+"Wat are you goin' to do with that wen you get through with it?" asked
+the latter avariciously.
+
+"I'm going to give it to you, of course."
+
+"Say, I'm much obliged fer that," replied the smith delightedly. "Gee,
+the wife'll be tickled to see that. You're a artist, ain't cher? I
+hearda them fellers. I never saw one. Gee, that's good, that looks just
+like me, don't it?"
+
+"Something," said Eugene quietly, still working.
+
+The helper came in.
+
+"Watcha' doin'?" he asked.
+
+"He's drawin' a pitcher, ya rube, watchye suppose he's doin'," informed
+the blacksmith authoritatively. "Don't git too close. He's gotta have
+room."
+
+"Aw, whose crowdin'?" asked the helper irritably. He realized at once
+that his superior was trying to shove him in the background, this being
+a momentous occasion. He did not propose that any such thing should
+happen. The blacksmith glared at him irritably but the progress of the
+art work was too exciting to permit of any immediate opportunities for
+hostilities, so Jimmy was allowed to crowd close and see.
+
+"Ho, ho! that's you, ain't it," he asked the smith curiously, indicating
+with a grimy thumb the exact position of that dignitary on the drawing.
+
+"Don't," said the latter, loftily--"sure! He's gotta have room."
+
+"An' there's me. Ho! Ho! Gee, I look swell, don't I? Ho! ho!"
+
+The little helper's tushes were showing joyously--a smile that extended
+far about either side of his face. He was entirely unconscious of the
+rebuke administered by the smith.
+
+"If you're perfectly good, Jimmy," observed Eugene cheerfully still
+working, "I may make a sketch of you, sometime!"
+
+"Na! Will you? Go on! Say, hully chee. Dat'll be fine, won't it? Say,
+ho! ho! De folks at home won't know me. I'd like to have a ting like
+dat, say!"
+
+Eugene smiled. The smith was regretful. This dividing of honors was not
+quite all that it might be. Still his own picture was delightful. It
+looked exactly like the shop. Eugene worked until the whistle blew and
+the belts began to slap and the wheels to whirr. Then he got up.
+
+"There you are, Fornes," he said. "Like it?"
+
+"Gee, it's swell," said the latter and carried it to the locker. He took
+it out after a bit though and hung it up over his bench on the wall
+opposite his forge, for he wanted everyone to see. It was one of the
+most significant events in his life. This sketch was the subject
+immediately of a perfect storm of discussion. Eugene was an
+artist--could draw pictures--that was a revelation in itself. Then this
+picture was so life-like. It looked like Fornes and Sudds and the shop.
+Everyone was interested. Everyone jealous. They could not understand how
+God had favored the smith in this manner. Why hadn't Eugene sketched
+them before he did him? Why didn't he immediately offer to sketch them
+now? Big John came first, tipped off and piloted by Jimmy Sudds.
+
+"Say!" he said his big round eyes popping with surprise. "There's some
+class to that, what? That looks like you, Fornes. Jinged if it don't!
+An' Suddsy! Bless me if there ain't Suddsy. Say, there you are, kid,
+natural as life, damned if you ain't. That's fine. You oughta keep that,
+smith."
+
+"I intend to," said the latter proudly.
+
+Big John went back to his engine room regretfully. Next came Joseph
+Mews, his shoulders humped, his head bobbing like a duck, for he had
+this habit of nodding when he walked.
+
+"Say, wot d'ye thinka that?" he asked. "Ain't that fine. He kin drawr
+jist as good as they do in them there magazines. I see them there things
+in them, now an' then. Ain't that swell? Lookit Suddsy back in there.
+Eh, Suddsy, you're in right, all right. I wisht he'd make a picture o'
+us out there. We're just as good as you people. Wats the matter with us,
+eh?"
+
+"Oh, he ain't goin' to be bothered makin' pitchers of you mokes,"
+replied the smith jestingly. "He only draws real ones. You want to
+remember that, Mews. He's gotta have good people to make sketches of.
+None o' your half-class plane-drivers and jig-saw operators."
+
+"Is that so? Is that so?" replied Joseph contemptuously, his love of
+humor spurred by the slight cast upon his ability. "Well if he was
+lookin' for real ones he made a mistake wen he come here. They're all up
+front. You don't want to forget that, smith. They don't live in no
+blacksmith's shop as I ever seen it."
+
+"Cut it out! Cut it out!" called little Sudds from a position of vantage
+near the door. "Here comes the boss," and Joseph immediately pretended
+to be going to the engine room for a drink. The smith blew up his fire
+as though it were necessary to heat the iron he had laid in the coals.
+Jack Stix came ambling by.
+
+"Who did that?" he asked, stopping after a single general, glance and
+looking at the sketch on the wall.
+
+"Mr. Witla, the new man," replied the smith, reverently.
+
+"Say, that's pretty good, ain't it?" the foreman replied pleasantly. "He
+did that well. He must be an artist."
+
+"I think he is," replied the smith, cautiously. He was always eager to
+curry favor with the boss. He came near to his side and looked over his
+arm. "He done it here today at noon in about a half an hour."
+
+"Say, that's pretty good now," and the foreman went on his way,
+thinking.
+
+If Eugene could do that, why was he here? It must be his run down
+condition, sure enough. And he must be the friend of someone high in
+authority. He had better be civil. Hitherto he had stood in suspicious
+awe of Eugene, not knowing what to make of him. He could not figure out
+just why he was here--a spy possibly. Now he thought that he might be
+mistaken.
+
+"Don't let him work too hard," he told Bill and John. "He ain't any too
+strong yet. He came up here for his health."
+
+He was obeyed in this respect, for there was no gain-saying the wishes
+of a foreman, but this open plea for consideration was the one thing if
+any which could have weakened Eugene's popularity. The men did not like
+the foreman. He would have been stronger at any time in the affections
+of the men if the foreman had been less markedly considerate or against
+him entirely.
+
+******
+
+The days which followed were restful enough though hard, for Eugene
+found that the constant whirl of work which went on here, and of which
+he had naturally to do his share, was beneficial to him. For the first
+time in several years he slept soundly. He would don his suit of blue
+overalls and jumper in the morning a few minutes before the whistle blew
+at seven and from then on until noon, and from one o'clock until six he
+would carry shavings, pile lumber for one or several of the men in the
+yard, load or unload cars, help Big John stoke his boilers, or carry
+chips and shavings from the second floor. He wore an old hat which he
+had found in a closet at Mrs. Hibberdell's, a faded, crumpled memory of
+a soft tan-colored sombrero which he punched jauntily to a peak and wore
+over one ear. He had big new yellow gloves which he kept on his hands
+all day, which were creased and frayed, but plenty good enough for this
+shop and yard. He learned to handle lumber nicely, to pile with skill,
+to "take" for Malachi Dempsey from the plane, to drive the jig-saw, and
+other curious bits. He was tireless in his energy because he was weary
+of thinking and hoped by sheer activity to beat down and overcome his
+notion of artistic inability--to forget that he believed that he
+couldn't paint and so be able to paint again. He had surprised himself
+in these sketches he had made, for his first feeling under the old
+regime would have been that he could not make them. Here, because the
+men were so eager and he was so much applauded, he found it rather easy
+and, strange to say, he thought they were good.
+
+At the home of Mrs. Hibberdell at night he would lay off all his working
+clothes before dinner, take a cold bath and don a new brown suit, which
+because of the assurance of this position he had bought for eighteen
+dollars, ready made. He found it hard to get off to buy anything, for
+his pay ceased (fifteen cents an hour) the moment he left the shop. He
+had put his pictures in storage in New York and could not get off (or at
+least did not want to take the time off) to go and sell any. He found
+that he could leave without question if he wanted no pay, but if he
+wanted pay and had a good reason he could sometimes be excused. His
+appearance about the house and yard after six-thirty in the evening and
+on Sundays was attractive enough. He looked delicate, refined,
+conservative, and, when not talking to someone, rather wistful. He was
+lonely and restless, for he felt terribly out of it. This house was
+lonely. As at Alexandria, before he met Frieda, he was wishing there
+were some girls about. He wondered where Frieda was, what she was doing,
+whether she had married. He hoped not. If life had only given him a girl
+like Frieda--so young, so beautiful! He would sit and gaze at the water
+after dark in the moonlight, for this was his one consolation--the
+beauty of nature--thinking. How lovely it all was! How lovely life
+was,--this village, the summer trees, the shop where he worked, the
+water, Joseph, little Jimmy, Big John, the stars. If he could paint
+again, if he could be in love again. In love! In love! Was there any
+other sensation in the world like that of being in love?
+
+A spring evening, say, some soft sweet odours blowing as they were
+tonight, the dark trees bending down, or the twilight angelically
+silver, hyacinth, orange, some soothing murmurs of the wind; some faint
+chirping of the tree-toads or frogs and then your girl. Dear God! Could
+anything be finer than that? Was anything else in life worth while? Your
+girl, her soft young arms about your neck, her lips to yours in pure
+love, her eyes speaking like twin pools of color here in the night.
+
+So had it been only a little while ago with Frieda. So had it been once
+with Angela. So long ago with Stella! Dear, sweet Stella, how nice she
+was. And now here he was sick and lonely and married and Angela would be
+coming back soon--and--He would get up frequently to shut out these
+thoughts, and either read or walk or go to bed. But he was lonely,
+almost irritably so. There was only one true place of comfort for Eugene
+anywhere and that was in the spring time in love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+It was while he was mooning along in this mood, working, dreaming,
+wishing, that there came, one day to her mother's house at Riverwood,
+Carlotta Wilson--Mrs. Norman Wilson, in the world in which she moved--a
+tall brunette of thirty-two, handsome after the English fashion,
+shapely, graceful, with a knowledge of the world which was not only
+compounded of natural intelligence and a sense of humor, but experiences
+fortunate and unfortunate which had shown her both the showy and the
+seamy sides of life. To begin with she was the wife of a gambler--a
+professional gambler--of that peculiar order which essays the role of a
+gentleman, looks the part, and fleeces unmercifully the unwary partakers
+of their companionship. Carlotta Hibberdell, living with her mother at
+that time in Springfield, Massachusetts, had met him at a local series
+of races, which she was attending with her father and mother, where
+Wilson happened to be accidentally upon another mission. Her father, a
+real estate dealer, and fairly successful at one time, was very much
+interested in racing horses, and owned several of worthy records though
+of no great fame. Norman Wilson had posed as a real estate speculator
+himself, and had handled several fairly successful deals in land, but
+his principal skill and reliance was in gambling. He was familiar with
+all the gambling opportunities of the city, knew a large circle of those
+who liked to gamble, men and women in New York and elsewhere, and his
+luck or skill at times was phenomenal. At other times it was very bad.
+There were periods when he could afford to live in the most expensive
+apartment houses, dine at the best restaurants, visit the most expensive
+country pleasure resorts and otherwise disport himself in the
+companionship of friends. At other times, because of bad luck, he could
+not afford any of these things and though he held to his estate grimly
+had to borrow money to do it. He was somewhat of a fatalist in his
+interpretation of affairs and would hang on with the faith that his luck
+would turn. It did turn invariably, of course, for when difficulties
+began to swarm thick and fast he would think vigorously and would
+usually evolve some idea which served to help him out. His plan was
+always to spin a web like a spider and await the blundering flight of
+some unwary fly.
+
+At the time she married him Carlotta Hibberdell did not know of the
+peculiar tendencies and subtle obsession of her ardent lover. Like all
+men of his type he was suave, persuasive, passionate, eager. There was a
+certain cat-like magnetism about him also which fascinated her. She
+could not understand him at that time and she never did afterwards. The
+license which he subsequently manifested not only with her but with
+others astonished and disgusted her. She found him selfish, domineering,
+outside his own particular field shallow, not at all artistic,
+emotional, or poetic. He was inclined to insist on the last touch of
+material refinement in surroundings (so far as he understood them) when
+he had money, but she found to her regret that he did not understand
+them. In his manner with her and everyone else he was top-lofty,
+superior, condescending. His stilted language at times enraged and at
+other times amused her, and when her original passion passed and she
+began to see through his pretence to his motives and actions she became
+indifferent and then weary. She was too big a woman mentally to quarrel
+with him much. She was too indifferent to life in its totality to really
+care. Her one passion was for an ideal lover of some type, and having
+been thoroughly mistaken in him she looked abroad wondering whether
+there were any ideal men.
+
+Various individuals came to their apartments. There were gamblers, blase
+society men, mining experts, speculators, sometimes with, sometimes
+without a wife. From these and from her husband and her own observation
+she learned of all sorts of scoundrels, mes-alliances, [sic] queer
+manifestations of incompatibility of temper, queer freaks of sex desire.
+Because she was good looking, graceful, easy in her manners, there were
+no end of proposals, overtures, hints and luring innuendos cast in her
+direction. She had long been accustomed to them. Because her husband
+deserted her openly for other women and confessed it in a blase way she
+saw no valid reason for keeping herself from other men. She chose her
+lovers guardedly and with subtle taste, beginning after mature
+deliberation with one who pleased her greatly. She was seeking
+refinement, emotion, understanding coupled with some ability and they
+were not so easy to find. The long record of her liaisons is not for
+this story, but their impress on her character was important.
+
+She was indifferent in her manner at most times and to most people. A
+good jest or story drew from her a hearty laugh. She was not interested
+in books except those of a very exceptional character--the realistic
+school--and these she thought ought not to be permitted except to
+private subscribers, nevertheless she cared for no others. Art was
+fascinating--really great art. She loved the pictures of Rembrandt,
+Frans Hals, Correggio, Titian. And with less discrimination, and more
+from a sensual point of view the nudes of Cabanel, Bouguereau and
+Gerome. To her there was reality in the works of these men, lightened by
+great imagination. Mostly people interested her, the vagaries of their
+minds, the idiosyncrasies of their characters, their lies, their
+subterfuges, their pretences, their fears. She knew that she was a
+dangerous woman and went softly, like a cat, wearing a half-smile not
+unlike that seen on the lips of Monna Lisa, but she did not worry about
+herself. She had too much courage. At the same time she was tolerant,
+generous to a fault, charitable. When someone suggested that she overdid
+the tolerance, she replied, "Why shouldn't I? I live in such a
+magnificent glass house."
+
+The reason for her visit home on this occasion was that her husband had
+practically deserted her for the time being. He was in Chicago for some
+reason principally because the atmosphere in New York was getting too
+hot for him, as she suspected. Because she hated Chicago and was weary
+of his company she refused to go with him. He was furious for he
+suspected her of liaisons, but he could not help himself. She was
+indifferent. Besides she had other resources than those he represented,
+or could get them.
+
+A certain wealthy Jew had been importuning her for years to get a
+divorce in order that he might marry her. His car and his resources were
+at her command but she condescended only the vaguest courtesies. It was
+within the ordinary possibilities of the day for him to call her up and
+ask if he could not come with his car. He had three. She waved most of
+this aside indifferently. "What's the use?" was her pet inquiry. Her
+husband was not without his car at times. She had means to drive when
+she pleased, dress as she liked, and was invited to many interesting
+outings. Her mother knew well of her peculiar attitude, her marital
+troubles, her quarrels and her tendency to flirt. She did her best to
+keep her in check, for she wanted to retain for her the privilege of
+obtaining a divorce and marrying again, the next time successfully.
+Norman Wilson, however, would not readily give her a legal separation
+even though the preponderance of evidence was against him and, if she
+compromised herself, there would be no hope. She half suspected that her
+daughter might already have compromised herself, but she could not be
+sure. Carlotta was too subtle. Norman made open charges in their family
+quarrels, but they were based largely on jealousy. He did not know for
+sure.
+
+Carlotta Wilson had heard of Eugene. She did not know of him by
+reputation, but her mother's guarded remarks in regard to him and his
+presence, the fact that he was an artist, that he was sick and working
+as a laborer for his health aroused her interest. She had intended to
+spend the period of her husband's absence at Narragansett with some
+friends, but before doing so she decided to come home for a few days
+just to see for herself. Instinctively her mother suspected curiosity on
+her part in regard to Eugene. She threw out the remark that he might not
+stay long, in the hope that her daughter might lose interest. His wife
+was coming back. Carlotta discerned this opposition--this desire to keep
+her away. She decided that she would come.
+
+"I don't know that I want to go to Narragansett just now," she told her
+mother. "I'm tired. Norman has just worn my nerves to a frazzle. I think
+I'll come up home for a week or so."
+
+"All right," said her mother, "but do be careful how you act now. This
+Mr. Witla appears to be a very nice man and he's happily married. Don't
+you go casting any looks in his direction. If you do I won't let him
+stay here at all."
+
+"Oh, how you talk," replied Carlotta irritably. "Do give me a little
+credit for something. I'm not going up there to see him. I'm tired, I
+tell you. If you don't want me to come I won't."
+
+"It isn't that, I do want you. But you know how you are. How do you ever
+expect to get free if you don't conduct yourself circumspectly? You know
+that you--"
+
+"Oh, for heaven's sake, I hope you're not going to start that old
+argument again," exclaimed Carlotta defensively. "What's the use
+beginning on that? We've been all over it a thousand times. I can't go
+anywhere or do anything but what you want to fuss. Now I'm not coming up
+there to do anything but rest. Why will you always start in to spoil
+everything?"
+
+"Well now, you know well enough, Carlotta--" reiterated her mother.
+
+"Oh, chuck it. I'll not come. To hell with the house. I'll go to
+Narragansett. You make me tired!"
+
+Her mother looked at her tall daughter, graceful, handsome, her black
+hair parted in rich folds, irritated and yet pleased with her force and
+ability. If she would only be prudent and careful, what a figure she
+might yet become! Her complexion was like old rose-tinted ivory, her
+lips the color of dark raspberries, her eyes bluish grey, wide set,
+large, sympathetic, kindly. What a pity she had not married some big,
+worthy man to begin with. To be tied up to this gambler, even though
+they did live in Central Park West and had a comparatively sumptuous
+apartment, was a wretched thing. Still it was better than poverty or
+scandal, though if she did not take care of herself both might ensue.
+She wanted her to come to Riverwood for she liked her company, but she
+wanted her to behave herself. Perhaps Eugene would save the day. He was
+certainly restrained enough in his manner and remarks. She went back to
+Riverwood, and Carlotta, the quarrel smoothed over, followed her.
+
+Eugene did not see her during the day she arrived, for he was at work;
+and she did not see him as he came in at night. He had on his old peaked
+hat and carried his handsome leather lunch box jauntily in one hand. He
+went to his room, bathed, dressed and then out on the porch to await the
+call of the dinner gong. Mrs. Hibberdell was in her room on the second
+floor and "Cousin Dave," as Carlotta called Simpson, was in the back
+yard. It was a lovely twilight. He was in the midst of deep thoughts
+about the beauty of the scene, his own loneliness, the characters at the
+shop-work, Angela and what not, when the screen door opened and she
+stepped out. She had on a short-sleeved house dress of spotted blue silk
+with yellow lace set about the neck and the ends of the sleeves. Her
+shapely figure, beautifully proportioned to her height, was set in a
+smooth, close fitting corset. Her hair, laid in great braids at the
+back, was caught in a brown spangled net. She carried herself with
+thoughtfulness and simplicity, seeming naturally indifferent.
+
+Eugene rose. "I'm in your way, I think. Won't you have this chair?"
+
+"No, thanks. The one in the corner will do. But I might as well
+introduce myself, since there isn't anyone here to do it. I'm
+Mrs. Wilson, Mrs. Hibberdell's daughter. You're Mr. Witla?"
+
+"Yes, I answer to that," said Eugene, smiling. He was not very much
+impressed at first. She seemed nice and he fancied intelligent--a little
+older than he would have preferred any woman to be who was to interest
+him. She sat down and looked at the water. He took his chair and held
+his peace. He was not even interested to talk to her. She was nice to
+look at, however. Her presence lightened the scene for him.
+
+"I always like to come up here," she volunteered finally. "It's so warm
+in the city these days. I don't think many people know of this place.
+It's out of the beaten track."
+
+"I enjoy it," said Eugene. "It's such a rest for me. I don't know what I
+would have done if your mother hadn't taken me in. It's rather hard to
+find any place, doing what I am."
+
+"You've taken a pretty strenuous way to get health, I should say," she
+observed. "Day labor sounds rough to me. Do you mind it?"
+
+"Not at all. I like it. The work is interesting and not so very hard.
+It's all so new to me, that's what makes it easy. I like the idea of
+being a day laborer and associating with laborers. It's only because I'm
+run down in health that I worry. I don't like to be sick."
+
+"It is bad," she replied, "but this will probably put you on your feet.
+I think we're always inclined to look on our present troubles as the
+worst. I know I am."
+
+"Thanks for the consolation," he said.
+
+She did not look at him and he rocked to and fro silently. Finally the
+dinner gong struck. Mrs. Hibberdell came down stairs and they went in.
+
+The conversation at dinner turned on his work for a few moments and he
+described accurately the personalities of John and Bill and Big John the
+engineer, and little Suddsy and Harry Fornes, the blacksmith. Carlotta
+listened attentively without appearing to, for everything about Eugene
+seemed singular and exceptional to her. She liked his tall, spare body,
+his lean hands, his dark hair and eyes. She liked the idea of his
+dressing as a laboring man in the morning, working all day in the shop,
+and yet appearing so neat and trim at dinner. He was easy in his manner,
+apparently lethargic in his movements and yet she could feel a certain
+swift force that filled the room. It was richer for his presence. She
+understood at a glance that he was an artist, in all probability a good
+one. He said nothing of that, avoided carefully all reference to his
+art, and listened attentively. She felt though as if he were studying
+her and everyone else, and it made her gayer. At the same time she had a
+strong leaning toward him. "What an ideal man to be associated with,"
+was one of her repeated thoughts.
+
+Although she was about the house for ten days and he met her after the
+third morning not only at dinner, which was natural enough, but at
+breakfast (which surprised him a little), he paid not so very much
+attention to her. She was nice, very, but Eugene was thinking of another
+type. He thought she was uncommonly pleasant and considerate and he
+admired her style of dressing and her beauty, studying her with
+interest, wondering what sort of a life she led, for from various bits
+of conversation he overheard not only at table but at other times he
+judged she was fairly well to do. There was an apartment in Central Park
+West, card parties, automobile parties, theatre parties and a general
+sense of people--acquaintances anyhow, who were making money. He heard
+her tell of a mining engineer, Dr. Rowland; of a successful coal-mining
+speculator, Gerald Woods; of a Mrs. Hale who was heavily interested in
+copper mines and apparently very wealthy. "It's a pity Norman couldn't
+connect with something like that and make some real money," he heard her
+say to her mother one evening. He understood that Norman was her husband
+and that he probably would be back soon. So he kept his
+distance--interested and curious but hardly more.
+
+Mrs. Wilson was not so easily baffled, however. A car appeared one
+evening at the door immediately after dinner, a great red touring car,
+and Mrs. Wilson announced easily, "We're going for a little spin after
+dinner, Mr. Witla. Don't you want to come along?"
+
+Eugene had never ridden in an automobile at that time. "I'd be very
+pleased," he said, for the thought of a lonely evening in an empty house
+had sprung up when he saw it appear.
+
+There was a chauffeur in charge--a gallant figure in a brown straw cap
+and tan duster, but Mrs. Wilson manoeuvred for place.
+
+"You sit with the driver, coz," she said to Simpson, and when her mother
+stepped in she followed after, leaving Eugene the place to the right of
+her.
+
+"There must be a coat and cap in the locker," she said to the chauffeur;
+"let Mr. Witla have it."
+
+The latter extracted a spare linen coat and straw cap which Eugene put
+on.
+
+"I like automobiling, don't you?" she said to Eugene good-naturedly.
+"It's so refreshing. If there is any rest from care on this earth it's
+in traveling fast."
+
+"I've never ridden before," replied Eugene simply. Something about the
+way he said it touched her. She felt sorry for him because he appeared
+lonely and gloomy. His indifference to her piqued her curiosity and
+irritated her pride. Why shouldn't he take an interest in her? As they
+sped under leafy lanes, up hill and down dale, she made out his face in
+the starlight. It was pale, reflective, indifferent. "These deep
+thinkers!" she chided him. "It's terrible to be a philosopher." Eugene
+smiled.
+
+When they reached home he went to his room as did all the others to
+theirs. He stepped out into the hall a few minutes later to go to the
+library for a book, and found that her door which he had to pass was
+wide open. She was sitting back in a Morris chair, her feet upon another
+chair, her skirts slightly drawn up revealing a trim foot and ankle. She
+did not stir but looked up and smiled winningly.
+
+"Aren't you tired enough to sleep?" he asked.
+
+"Not quite yet," she smiled.
+
+He went down stairs and turning on a light in the library stood looking
+at a row of books reading the titles. He heard a step and there she was
+looking at the books also.
+
+"Don't you want a bottle of beer?" she asked. "I think there is some in
+the ice box. I forgot that you might be thirsty."
+
+"I really don't care," he said. "I'm not much for drinks of any kind."
+
+"That's not very sociable," she laughed.
+
+"Let's have the beer then," he said.
+
+She threw herself back languidly in one of the big dining room chairs
+when she had brought the drinks and some Swiss cheese and crackers, and
+said: "I think you'll find some cigarettes on the table in the corner if
+you like."
+
+He struck her a match and she puffed her cigarette comfortably. "I
+suppose you find it lonely up here away from all your friends and
+companions," she volunteered.
+
+"Oh, I've been sick so long I scarcely know whether I have any."
+
+He described some of his imaginary ailments and experiences and she
+listened to him attentively. When the beer was gone she asked him if he
+would have more but he said no. After a time because he stirred wearily,
+she got up.
+
+"Your mother will think we're running some sort of a midnight game down
+here," he volunteered.
+
+"Mother can't hear," she said. "Her room is on the third floor and
+besides she doesn't hear very well. Dave don't mind. He knows me well
+enough by now to know that I do as I please."
+
+She stood closer to Eugene but still he did not see. When he moved away
+she put out the lights and followed him to the stairs.
+
+"He's either the most bashful or the most indifferent of men," she
+thought, but she said softly, "Good-night. Pleasant dreams to you," and
+went her way.
+
+Eugene thought of her now as a good fellow, a little gay for a married
+woman, but probably circumspect withal. She was simply being nice to
+him. All this was simply because, as yet, he was not very much
+interested.
+
+There were other incidents. One morning he passed her door. Her mother
+had already gone down to breakfast and there was the spectacle of a
+smooth, shapely arm and shoulder quite bare to his gaze as she lay on
+her pillow apparently unconscious that her door was open. It thrilled
+him as something sensuously beautiful for it was a perfect arm. Another
+time he saw her of an evening just before dinner buttoning her shoes.
+Her dress was pulled three-quarters of the way to her knees and her
+shoulders and arms were bare, for she was still in her corset and short
+skirts. She seemed not to know that he was near. One night after dinner
+he started to whistle something and she went to the piano to keep him
+company. Another time he hummed on the porch and she started the same
+song, singing with him. He drew his chair near the window where there
+was a couch after her mother had retired for the night, and she came and
+threw herself on it. "You don't mind if I lie here?" she said, "I'm
+tired tonight."
+
+"Not at all. I'm glad of your company. I'm lonely."
+
+She lay and stared at him, smiling. He hummed and she sang. "Let me see
+your palm," she said, "I want to learn something." He held it out. She
+fingered it temptingly. Even this did not wake him.
+
+She left for five days because of some necessity in connection with her
+engagements and when she returned he was glad to see her. He had been
+lonesome, and he knew now that she made the house gayer. He greeted her
+genially.
+
+"I'm glad to see you back," he said.
+
+"Are you really?" she replied. "I don't believe it."
+
+"Why not?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, signs, omens and portents. You don't like women very well I fancy."
+
+"Don't I!"
+
+"No, I think not," she replied.
+
+She was charming in a soft grayish green satin. He noticed that her neck
+was beautiful and that her hair looped itself gracefully upon the back
+of it. Her nose was straight and fine, sensitive because of its thin
+partitioning walls. He followed her into the library and they went out
+on the porch. Presently he returned--it was ten o'clock--and she came
+also. Davis had gone to his room, Mrs. Hibberdell to hers.
+
+"I think I'll read," he said, aimlessly.
+
+"Why anything like that?" she jested. "Never read when you can do
+anything else."
+
+"What else can I do?"
+
+"Oh, lots of things. Play cards, tell fortunes, read palms, drink
+beer--" She looked at him wilfully.
+
+He went to his favorite chair near the window, side by side with the
+window-seat couch. She came and threw herself on it.
+
+"Be gallant and fix my pillows for me, will you?" she asked.
+
+"Of course I will," he said.
+
+He took a pillow and raised her head, for she did not deign to move.
+
+"Is that enough?" he inquired.
+
+"One more."
+
+He put his hand under the first pillow and lifted it up. She took hold
+of his free hand to raise herself. When she had it she held it and
+laughed a curious excited laugh. It came over him all at once, the full
+meaning of all the things she had been doing. He dropped the pillow he
+was holding and looked at her steadfastly. She relaxed her hold and
+leaned back, languorous, smiling. He took her left hand, then her right
+and sat down beside her. In a moment he slipped one arm under her waist
+and bending over put his lips to hers. She twined her arms about his
+neck tightly and hugged him close; then looking in his eyes she heaved a
+great sigh.
+
+"You love me, don't you?" he asked.
+
+"I thought you never would," she sighed, and clasped him to her again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+The form of Carlotta Wilson was perfect, her passion eager, her subtlety
+a match for almost any situation. She had deliberately set out to win
+Eugene because he was attractive to her and because, by his early
+indifference, he had piqued her vanity and self-love. She liked him
+though, liked every one of his characteristics, and was as proud of her
+triumph as a child with a new toy. When he had finally slipped his arm
+under her waist she had thrilled with a burning, vibrating thrill
+throughout her frame and when she came to him it was with the eagerness
+of one wild for his caresses. She threw herself on him, kissed him
+sensuously scores of times, whispered her desire and her affection.
+Eugene thought, now that he saw her through the medium of an awakened
+passion, that he had never seen anything more lovely. For the time being
+he forgot Frieda, Angela, his loneliness, the fact that he was working
+in supposed prudent self-restraint to effect his recovery, and gave
+himself up to the full enjoyment of this situation.
+
+Carlotta was tireless in her attentions. Once she saw that he really
+cared, or imagined he did, she dwelt in the atmosphere of her passion
+and affection. There was not a moment that she was not with or thinking
+of Eugene when either was possible. She lay in wait for him at every
+turn, gave him every opportunity which her skill could command. She knew
+the movements of her mother and cousin to the least fraction--could tell
+exactly where they were, how long they were likely to remain, how long
+it would take them to reach a certain door or spot from where they were
+standing. Her step was noiseless, her motions and glances significant
+and interpretative. For a month or thereabouts she guided Eugene through
+the most perilous situations, keeping her arms about him to the last
+possible moment, kissing him silently and swiftly at the most unexpected
+times and in the most unexpected surroundings. Her weary languor, her
+seeming indifference, disappeared, and she was very much alive--except
+in the presence of others. There her old manner remained, intensified
+even, for she was determined to throw a veil of darkness over her mother
+and her cousin's eyes. She succeeded admirably for the time being, for
+she lied to her mother out of the whole cloth, pretending that Eugene
+was nice but a little slow so far as the ways of the world were
+concerned. "He may be a good artist," she volunteered, "but he isn't
+very much of a ladies' man. He hasn't the first trace of gallantry."
+
+Mrs. Hibberdell was glad. At least there would be no disturbance here.
+She feared Carlotta, feared Eugene, but she saw no reason for complaint.
+In her presence all was seemingly formal and at times almost distant.
+She did not like to say to her daughter that she should not come to her
+own home now that Eugene was here, and she did not like to tell him to
+leave. Carlotta said she liked him fairly well, but that was nothing.
+Any married woman might do that. Yet under her very eyes was going
+forward the most disconcerting license. She would have been astounded if
+she had known the manner in which the bath, Carlotta's chamber and
+Eugene's room were being used. The hour never struck when they were
+beyond surveillance but what they were together.
+
+Eugene grew very indifferent in the matter of his work. From getting to
+the point where he was enjoying it because he looked upon it as a form
+of exercise which was benefiting him, and feeling that he might not have
+to work indefinitely if he kept up physical rehabilitation at this pace,
+he grew languid about it and moody over the time he had to give to it.
+Carlotta had the privilege of a certain automobile and besides she could
+afford to hire one of her own. She began by suggesting that he meet her
+at certain places and times for a little spin and this took him away
+from his work a good portion of the time.
+
+"You don't have to work every day, do you?" she asked him one Sunday
+afternoon when they were alone. Simpson and Mrs. Hibberdell had gone out
+for a walk and they were in her room on the second floor. Her mother's
+was on the third.
+
+"I don't have to," he said, "if I don't mind losing the money they pay.
+It's fifteen cents an hour and I need that. I'm not working at my
+regular profession, you must remember."
+
+"Oh, chuck that," she said. "What's fifteen cents an hour? I'll give you
+ten times that to come and be with me."
+
+"No, you won't," he said. "You won't give me anything. We won't go
+anywhere on that basis."
+
+"Oh, Eugene, how you talk. Why won't you?" she asked. "I have lots of
+it--at least lots more than you have just now. And it might as well be
+spent this way as some other. It won't be spent right anyhow--that is
+not for any exceptional purpose. Why shouldn't you have some of it? You
+can pay it back to me."
+
+"I won't do it," said Eugene. "We won't go anywhere on that basis. I'd
+rather go and work. It's all right, though. I can sell a picture maybe.
+I expect to hear any day of something being sold. What is it you want to
+do?"
+
+"I want you to come automobiling with me tomorrow. Ma is going over to
+her sister Ella's in Brooklyn. Has that shop of yours a phone?"
+
+"Sure it has. I don't think you'd better call me up there though."
+
+"Once wouldn't hurt."
+
+"Well, perhaps not. But we'd better not begin that, or at least not make
+a practice of it. These people are very strict. They have to be."
+
+"I know," said Carlotta. "I won't. I was just thinking. I'll let you
+know. You know that river road that runs on the top of the hill over
+there?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You be walking along there tomorrow at one o'clock and I'll pick you
+up. You can come this once, can't you?"
+
+"Sure," said Eugene. "I can come. I was just joking. I can get some
+money." He had still his hundred dollars which he had not used when he
+first started looking for work. He had been clinging to it grimly, but
+now in this lightened atmosphere he thought he might spend some of it.
+He was going to get well. Everything was pointing that way. His luck was
+with him.
+
+"Well, I'll get the car. You don't mind riding in that, do you?"
+
+"No," he said. "I'll wear a good suit to the shop and change over
+there."
+
+She laughed gaily, for his scruples and simplicity amused her.
+
+"You're a prince--my Prince Charming," she said and she flung herself in
+his lap. "Oh, you angel man, heaven-born! I've been waiting for you I
+don't know how long. Wise man! Prince Charming! I love you! I love you!
+I think you're the nicest thing that ever was."
+
+Eugene caressed her gently.
+
+"And you're my wise girl. But we are no good, neither you nor I. You're
+a wastrel and a stray. And I--I hesitate to think what I am."
+
+"What is a wastrel?" she asked. "That's a new one on me. I don't
+remember."
+
+"Something or someone that can be thrown away as useless. A stray is a
+pigeon that won't stay with the flock."
+
+"That's me," said Carlotta, holding out her firm, smooth arms before her
+and grinning mischievously. "I won't stay with any flock. Nix for the
+flocks. I'd rather be off with my wise man. He is nice enough for me.
+He's better nor nine or ten flocks." She was using corrupt English for
+the joy of it. "Just me and you, Prince Charming. Am I your lovely
+wastrel? Do you like strays? Say you do. Listen! Do you like strays?"
+
+Eugene had been turning his head away, saying "scandalous! terrible,
+you're the worst ever," but she stopped his mouth with her lips.
+
+"Do you?"
+
+"This wastrel, yes. This stray," he replied, smoothing her cheek. "Ah,
+you're lovely, Carlotta, you're beautiful. What a wonderful woman you
+are."
+
+She gave herself to him completely.
+
+"Whatever I am, I'm yours, wise man," she went on. "You can have
+anything you want of me, do anything you please with me. You're like an
+opiate to me, Eugene, sweet! You stop my mouth and close my eyes and
+seal my ears. You make me forget everything I suppose I might think now
+and then but I don't want to. I don't want to! And I don't care. I wish
+you were single. I wish I were free. I wish we had an island somewhere
+together. Oh, hell! Life is a wearisome tangle, isn't it? 'Take the cash
+and let the credit go.'"
+
+By this time Carlotta had heard enough of Eugene's life to understand
+what his present condition was. She knew he was sick though not exactly
+why. She thought it was due to overwork. She knew he was out of funds
+except for certain pictures he had on sale, but that he would regain his
+art ability and re-establish himself she did not doubt. She knew
+something of Angela and thought it was all right that she should be away
+from him, but now she wished the separation might be permanent. She went
+into the city and asking about at various art stores learned something
+of Eugene's art history and his great promise. It made him all the more
+fascinating in her eyes. One of his pictures on exhibition at Pottle
+Freres was bought by her after a little while and the money sent to
+Eugene, for she had learned from him how these pictures, any pictures,
+were exhibited on sale and the painter paid, minus the commission, when
+the sale was made. She took good care to make it clear to the manager at
+Pottle Freres that she was doing this so that Eugene could have the
+money and saw to it that the check reached him promptly. If Eugene had
+been alone this check of three hundred dollars would have served to
+bring Angela to him. As it was it gave him funds to disport himself with
+in her company. He did not know that she had been the means of his
+getting it, or to whom the picture had been sold. A fictitious name was
+given. This sale somewhat restored Eugene's faith in his future, for if
+one of his pictures would sell so late in the day for this price, others
+would.
+
+There were days thereafter of the most curious composition. In the
+morning he would leave dressed in his old working suit and carrying his
+lunch box, Carlotta waving him a farewell from her window, or, if he had
+an engagement outside with Carlotta, wearing a good suit, and trusting
+to his overalls and jumper to protect it, working all day with John and
+Bill, or Malachi Dempsey and Joseph--for there was rivalry between these
+two groups as to which should have his company--or leaving the shop
+early and riding with her a part of the time, coming home at night to be
+greeted by Carlotta as though she had not seen him at all. She watched
+for his coming as patiently as a wife and was as eager to see if there
+was anything she could do for him. In the shop Malachi and Joseph or
+John and Bill and sometimes some of the carpenters up stairs would
+complain of a rush of work in order that they might have his assistance
+or presence. Malachi and Joseph could always enter the complaint that
+they were in danger of being hampered by shavings, for the latter were
+constantly piling up in great heaps, beautiful shavings of ash and
+yellow pine and walnut which smelled like resin and frankincense and had
+the shape of girl's curls or dry breakfast food, or rich damp sawdust.
+Or John and Bill would complain that they were being overworked and
+needed someone in the car to receive. Even Big John, the engineer, tried
+to figure out some scheme by which he could utilize Eugene as a fireman,
+but that was impossible; there was no call for any such person. The
+foreman understood well enough what the point was but said nothing,
+placing Eugene with the particular group which seemed to need him most.
+Eugene was genial enough about the matter. Wherever he was was right. He
+liked to be in the cars or on a lumber pile or in the plane room. He
+also liked to stand and talk to Big John or Harry Fornes, his basket
+under his arm--"kidding," as he called it. His progress to and fro was
+marked by endless quips and jests and he was never weary.
+
+When his work was done at night he would hurry home, following the right
+bank of the little stream until he reached a path which led up to the
+street whereon was the Hibberdell house. On his way he would sometimes
+stop and study the water, its peaceful current bearing an occasional
+stick or straw upon its bosom, and contrasting the seeming peace of its
+movement with his own troubled life. The subtlety of nature as expressed
+in water appealed to him. The difference between this idyllic stream
+bank and his shop and all who were of it, struck him forcefully. Malachi
+Dempsey had only the vaguest conception of the beauty of nature. Jack
+Stix was scarcely more artistic than the raw piles of lumber with which
+he dealt. Big John had no knowledge of the rich emotions of love or of
+beauty which troubled Eugene's brain. They lived on another plane,
+apparently.
+
+And at the other end of the stream awaiting him was Carlotta, graceful,
+sophisticated, eager in her regard for him, lukewarm in her interest in
+morals, sybaritic in her moods, representing in a way a world which
+lived upon the fruits of this exploited toil and caring nothing about
+it. If he said anything to Carlotta about the condition of Joseph Mews,
+who carried bundles of wood home to his sister of an evening to help
+save the expense of fuel, she merely smiled. If he talked of the poverty
+of the masses she said, "Don't be doleful, Eugene." She wanted to talk
+of art and luxury and love, or think of them at least. Her love of the
+beauty of nature was keen. There were certain inns they could reach by
+automobile where they could sit and dine and drink a bottle of wine or a
+pitcher of claret cup, and here she would muse on what they would do if
+they were only free. Angela was frequently in Carlotta's thoughts,
+persistently in Eugene's, for he could not help feeling that he was
+doing her a rank injustice.
+
+She had been so patient and affectionate all this long time past, had
+tended him as a mother, waited on him as a servant. Only recently he had
+been writing in most affectionate terms, wishing she were with him. Now
+all that was dead again. It was hard work to write. Everything he said
+seemed a lie and he did not want to say it. He hated to pretend. Still,
+if he did not write Angela would be in a state of mortal agony, he
+thought, and would shortly come to look him up. It was only by writing,
+protesting his affection, explaining why in his judgment it was
+unadvisable for her to come at present, that she could be made to stay
+where she was. And now that he was so infatuated with Carlotta this
+seemed very desirable. He did not delude himself that he would ever be
+able to marry her. He knew that he could not get a divorce, there being
+no grounds, and the injustice to Angela being such a bar to his
+conscience; and as for Carlotta, her future was very uncertain. Norman
+Wilson, for all that he disregarded her at times, did not want to give
+her up. He was writing, threatening to come back to New York if she did
+not come to him, though the fact that she was in her mother's home,
+where he considered her safe, was some consolation to him. Angela was
+begging Eugene to let her come. They would get along, she argued, on
+whatever he got and he would be better off with her than alone. She
+pictured him living in some uncomfortable boarding house where he was
+not half attended to and intensely lonely. Her return meant the leaving
+of this lovely home--for Mrs. Hibberdell had indicated that she would
+not like to keep him and his wife--and so the end of this perfect
+romance with Carlotta. An end to lovely country inns and summer
+balconies where they were dining together! An end to swift tours in her
+automobile, which she guided skilfully herself, avoiding the presence of
+a chauffeur. An end to lovely trysts under trees and by pretty streams
+where he kissed and fondled her and where she lingered joyously in his
+arms!
+
+"If ma could only see us now," she would jest; or,
+
+"Do you suppose Bill and John would recognize you here if they saw you?"
+
+Once she said: "This is better than the engine room, isn't it?"
+
+"You're a bad lot, Carlotta," he would declare, and then would come to
+her lips the enigmatic smile of Monna Lisa.
+
+"You like bad lots, don't you? Strays make fine hunting."
+
+In her own philosophy she was taking the cash and letting the credit go.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+Days like this could not go on forever. The seed of their destruction
+was in their beginning. Eugene was sad. He used to show his mood at
+times and if she asked him what was the matter, would say: "We can't
+keep this thing up much longer. It must come to an end soon."
+
+"You're certainly a gloomy philosopher, Genie," she would say,
+reproachfully, for she had hopes that it could be made to last a long
+while under any circumstances. Eugene had the feeling that no pretence
+would escape Angela's psychology. She was too sensitive to his unspoken
+moods and feelings. She would come soon, willynilly, and then all this
+would be ended. As a matter of fact several things combined to bring
+about change and conclusion.
+
+For one thing Mrs. Hibberdell had been more and more impressed with the
+fact that Carlotta was not merely content to stay but that once having
+come she was fairly determined to remain. She had her own apartment in
+the city, ostensibly closed for the summer, for she had protested that
+it was too hot to live in town when she first proposed going to
+Narragansett. After seeing Eugene she figured out a possible use for it,
+though that use was dangerous, for Norman Wilson might return at any
+time. Nevertheless, they had been there on occasions--this with the
+double effect of deceiving her mother and entertaining Eugene. If she
+could remain away from Riverwood a percentage of the time, she argued
+with Eugene, it would make her stay less suspicious and would not
+jeopardize their joy in companionship. So she did this. At the same time
+she could not stay away from Riverwood entirely, for Eugene was there
+necessarily morning and evening.
+
+Nevertheless, toward the end of August Mrs. Hibberdell was growing
+suspicious. She had seen an automobile entering Central Park once when
+Carlotta had phoned her that she had a sick headache and could not come
+up. It looked to Mrs. Hibberdell, who had gone down town shopping on the
+strength of this ailment and who had phoned Carlotta that she was going
+to call at her apartment in the evening, as though Eugene and Carlotta
+were in it. Eugene had gone to work that morning, which made it seem
+doubtful, but it certainly looked very much like him. Still she did not
+feel sure it was he or Carlotta either. When she came to the latter's
+apartment Carlotta was there, feeling better, but stating that she had
+not been out. Mrs. Hibberdell concluded thoughtfully that she must have
+been mistaken.
+
+Her own room was on the third floor, and several times after all had
+retired and she had come down to the kitchen or dining room or library
+for something, she had heard a peculiar noise as of someone walking
+lightly. She thought it was fancy on her part, for invariably when she
+reached the second floor all was dark and still. Nevertheless she
+wondered whether Eugene and Carlotta could be visiting. Twice, between
+breakfast and the time Eugene departed, she thought she heard Eugene and
+Carlotta whispering on the second floor, but there was no proof.
+Carlotta's readiness to rise for breakfast at six-thirty in order to be
+at the same table with Eugene was peculiar, and her giving up
+Narragansett for Riverwood was most significant. It remained for one
+real discovery to resolve all her suspicions into the substance of fact
+and convict Carlotta of being the most conscienceless of deceivers.
+
+It came about in this fashion. One Sunday morning Davis and
+Mrs. Hibberdell had decided to go automobiling. Eugene and Carlotta were
+invited but had refused, for Carlotta on hearing the discussion several
+days before had warned Eugene and planned to have the day for herself
+and her lover. She cautioned him to pretend the need of making visits
+down town. As for herself she had said she would go, but on the day in
+question did not feel well enough. Davis and Mrs. Hibberdell departed,
+their destination being Long Island. It was an all day tour. After an
+hour their machine broke, however, and after sitting in it two hours
+waiting for repairs--long enough to spoil their plans--they came back by
+trolley. Eugene had not gone down town. He was not even dressed when the
+door opened on the ground floor and Mrs. Hibberdell came in.
+
+"Oh, Carlotta," she called, standing at the foot of the stairs and
+expecting Carlotta to appear from her own room or a sort of lounging and
+sewing room which occupied the front of the house on the second floor
+and where she frequently stayed. Carlotta unfortunately was with Eugene
+and the door to this room was commanded from where Mrs. Hibberdell was
+standing. She did not dare to answer.
+
+"Oh, Carlotta," called her mother again.
+
+The latter's first thought was to go back in the kitchen and look there,
+but on second thoughts she ascended the steps and started for the sewing
+room. Carlotta thought she had entered. In an instant she had seized the
+opportunity to step into the bath which was next to Eugene's room but
+she was scarcely quick enough. Her mother had not gone into the
+room--only opened the door and looked in. She did not see Carlotta step
+out of Eugene's room, but she did see her entering the bath, in
+negligee, and she could scarcely have come from anywhere else. Her own
+door which was between Eugene's room and the sewing room was ten feet
+away. It did not seem possible that she could have come from there: she
+had not had time enough, and anyhow why had she not answered?
+
+The first impulse of Mrs. Hibberdell was to call to her. Her second
+thought was to let the ruse seem successful. She was convinced that
+Eugene was in his room, and a few moments later a monitory cough on his
+part--coughed for a purpose--convinced her.
+
+"Are you in the bath, Carlotta?" she called quietly, after looking into
+Carlotta's room.
+
+"Yes," came the reply, easily enough now. "Did your machine break down?"
+
+A few remarks were exchanged through the door and then Mrs. Hibberdell
+went to her room. She thought over the situation steadily for it greatly
+irritated her. It was not the same as the discovered irregularity of a
+trusted and virtuous daughter. Carlotta had not been led astray. She was
+a grown woman, married, experienced. In every way she knew as much about
+life as her mother--in some respects more. The difference between them
+was in ethical standards and the policy that aligns itself with common
+sense, decency, self preservation, as against its opposite. Carlotta had
+so much to look out for. Her future was in her own hands. Besides,
+Eugene's future, his wife's rights and interests, her mother's home, her
+mother's standards, were things which she ought to respect--ought to
+want to respect. To find her lying as she had been this long time,
+pretending indifference, pretending absence, and no doubt associating
+with Eugene all the while, was disgusting. She was very angry, not so
+much at Eugene, though her respect for him was greatly lowered, artist
+though he was, as at Carlotta. She ought to do better. She ought to be
+ashamed not to guard herself against a man like Eugene, instead of
+luring him on. It was Carlotta's fault, and she determined to reproach
+her bitterly and to break up this wretched alliance at once.
+
+There was an intense and bitter quarrel the next morning, for
+Mrs. Hibberdell decided to hold her peace until Eugene and Davis should
+be out of the house. She wanted to have this out with Carlotta alone,
+and the clash came shortly after breakfast when both the others had
+left. Carlotta had already warned Eugene that something might happen on
+account of this, but under no circumstances was he to admit anything
+unless she told him to. The maid was in the kitchen out of ear shot, and
+Mrs. Hibberdell and Carlotta were in the library when the opening gun
+was fired. In a way Carlotta was prepared, for she fancied her mother
+might have seen other things--what or how much she could not guess. She
+was not without the dignity of a Circe, for she had been through scenes
+like this before. Her own husband had charged her with infidelity more
+than once, and she had been threatened with physical violence by him.
+Her face was pale but calm.
+
+"Now, Carlotta," observed her mother vigorously, "I saw what was going
+on yesterday morning when I came home. You were in Mr. Witla's room with
+your clothes off. I saw you come out. Please don't deny it. I saw you
+come out. Aren't you ashamed of yourself? How can you treat me that way
+after your promise not to do anything out of the way here?"
+
+"You didn't see me come out of his room and I wasn't in there," said
+Carlotta brazenly. Her face was pale, but she was giving a fair
+imitation of righteous surprise. "Why do you make any such statement as
+that?"
+
+"Why, Carlotta Hibberdell, how dare you contradict me; how dare you lie!
+You came out of that room. You know you did. You know that you were in
+there. You know that I saw you. I should think you would be ashamed of
+yourself, slipping about this house like a street girl and your own
+mother in it. Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Have you no sense of
+decency left? Oh, Carlotta, I know you are bad, but why will you come
+here to be so? Why couldn't you let this man alone? He was doing well
+enough. It's a shame, the thing you have done. It's an outrage.
+Mrs. Witla ought to come here and whip you within an inch of your life."
+
+"Oh, how you talk," said Carlotta, irritably. "You make me tired. You
+didn't see me. It's the old story--suspicion. You're always full of
+suspicion. You didn't see me and I wasn't in there. Why do you start a
+fuss for nothing!"
+
+"A fuss! A fuss for nothing--the idea, you evil woman. A fuss for
+nothing. How can you talk that way! I can hardly believe my senses. I
+can hardly believe you would dare to brazenly face me in this way. I saw
+you and now you deny it."
+
+Mrs. Hibberdell had not seen her, but she was convinced that what she
+said was true.
+
+Carlotta brazened it out. "You didn't," she insisted.
+
+Mrs. Hibberdell stared. The effrontery of it took her breath away.
+
+"Carlotta," she exclaimed, "I honestly think you are the worst woman in
+the world. I can't think of you as my daughter--you are too brazen.
+You're the worst because you're calculating. You know what you're doing,
+and you are deliberate in your method of doing it. You're evil-minded.
+You know exactly what you want and you set out deliberately to get it.
+You have done it in this case. You started out to get this man and you
+have succeeded in doing it. You have no sense of shame, no pride, no
+honesty, no honor, no respect for me or anyone else. You do not love
+this man. You know you don't. If you did you would never degrade him and
+yourself and me as you have done. You've simply indulged in another vile
+relationship because you wanted to, and now when you're caught you
+brazen it out. You're evil, Carlotta. You're as low as a woman can be,
+even if you are my daughter."
+
+"It isn't true," said Carlotta. "You're just talking to hear yourself
+talk."
+
+"It is true and you know it," reproved her mother. "You talk about
+Norman. He never did a thing worse in his life than you have done. He
+may be a gambler and immoral and inconsiderate and selfish. What are
+you? Can you stand there and tell me you're any better? Pah! If you only
+had a sense of shame something could be done for you, but you haven't
+any. You're just vile, that's all."
+
+"How you talk, ma," she observed, calmly; "how you carry on, and that on
+a mere suspicion. You didn't see me. I might have been in there but you
+didn't see me and I wasn't. You're making a storm just because you want
+to. I like Mr. Witla. I think he's very nice, but I'm not interested in
+him and I haven't done anything to harm him. You can turn him out if you
+want to. That's none of my affairs. You're simply raging about as usual
+without any facts to go upon."
+
+Carlotta stared at her mother, thinking. She was not greatly disturbed.
+It was pretty bad, no doubt of that, but she was not thinking so much of
+that as of the folly of being found out. Her mother knew for certain,
+though she would not admit to her that she knew. Now all this fine
+summer romance would end--the pleasant convenience of it, anyhow. Eugene
+would be put to the trouble of moving. Her mother might say something
+disagreeable to him. Besides, she knew she was better than Norman
+because she did not associate with the same evil type of people. She was
+not coarse, she was not thick-witted, she was not cruel, she was not a
+user of vile language or an expresser of vile ideas, and Norman was at
+times. She might lie and she might be calculating, but not to anyone's
+disadvantage--she was simply passion driven--boldly so and only toward
+love or romance. "Am I evil?" she often asked herself. Her mother said
+she was evil. Well, she was in one way; but her mother was angry, that
+was all. She did not mean all she said. She would come round. Still
+Carlotta did not propose to admit the truth of her mother's charges or
+to go through this situation without some argument. There were charges
+which her mother was making which were untenable--points which were
+inexcusable.
+
+"Carlotta Hibberdell, you're the most brazen creature I ever knew!
+You're a terrible liar. How can you stand there and look me in the eye
+and say that, when you know that I know? Why lie in addition to
+everything else? Oh! Carlotta, the shame of it. If you only had some
+sense of honor! How can you lie like that? How can you?"
+
+"I'm not lying," declared Carlotta, "and I wish you would quit fussing.
+You didn't see me. You know you didn't. I came out of my room and you
+were in the front room. Why do you say you weren't. You didn't see me.
+Supposing I am a liar. I'm your daughter. I may be vile. I didn't make
+myself so. Certainly I'm not in this instance. Whatever I am I come by
+it honestly. My life hasn't been a bed of roses. Why do you start a
+silly fight? You haven't a thing to go on except suspicion and now you
+want to raise a row. I don't care what you think of me. I'm not guilty
+in this case and you can think what you please. You ought to be ashamed
+to charge me with something of which you are not sure."
+
+She walked to the window and stared out. Her mother shook her head. Such
+effrontery was beyond her. It was like her daughter, though. She took
+after her father and herself. Both were self-willed and determined when
+aroused. At the same time she was sorry for her girl, for Carlotta was a
+capable woman in her way and very much dissatisfied with life.
+
+"I should think you would be ashamed of yourself, Carlotta, whether you
+admit it to me or not," she went on. "The truth is the truth and it must
+hurt you a little. You were in that room. We won't argue that, though.
+You set out deliberately to do this and you have done it. Now what I
+have to say is this: You are going back to your apartment today, and
+Mr. Witla is going to leave here as quick as he can get a room somewhere
+else. You're not going to continue this wretched relationship any longer
+if I can help it. I'm going to write to his wife and to Norman too, if I
+can't do anything else to break this up. You're going to let this man
+alone. You have no right to come between him and Mrs. Witla. It's an
+outrage, and no one but a vile, conscienceless woman would do it. I'm
+not going to say anything to him now, but he's going to leave here and
+so are you. When it's all over you can come back if you want to. I'm
+ashamed for you. I'm ashamed for myself. If it hadn't been for my own
+feelings and those of Davis, I would have ordered you both out of the
+house yesterday and you know it. It's consideration for myself that's
+made me smooth it over as much as I have. He, the vile thing, after all
+the courtesy I have shown him. Still I don't blame him as much as I do
+you, for he would never have looked at you if you hadn't made him. My
+own daughter! My own house! Tch! Tch! Tch!"
+
+There was more conversation--that fulgurous, coruscating reiteration of
+charges. Eugene was no good. Carlotta was vile. Mrs. Hibberdell wouldn't
+have believed it possible if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes. She
+was going to tell Norman if Carlotta didn't reform--over and over, one
+threat after another.
+
+"Well," she said, finally, "you're going to get your things ready and go
+into the city this afternoon. I'm not going to have you here another
+day."
+
+"No I'm not," said Carlotta boldly, pondering over all that had been
+said. It was a terrible ordeal, but she would not go today. "I'm going
+in the morning. I'm not going to pack that fast. It's too late. I'm not
+going to be ordered out of here like a servant."
+
+Her mother groaned, but she gave in. Carlotta could not be made to do
+anything she did not want to do. She went to her room, and presently
+Mrs. Hibberdell heard her singing. She shook her head. Such a
+personality. No wonder Eugene succumbed to her blandishments. What man
+wouldn't?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The sequel of this scene was not to be waited for. At dinner time
+Mrs. Hibberdell announced in the presence of Carlotta and Davis that the
+house was going to be closed up for the present, and very quickly. She
+and Carlotta were going to Narragansett for the month of September and a
+part of October. Eugene, having been forewarned by Carlotta, took it
+with a show of polite surprise. He was sorry. He had spent such a
+pleasant time here. Mrs. Hibberdell could not be sure whether Carlotta
+had told him or not, he seemed so innocent, but she assumed that she had
+and that he like Carlotta was "putting on." She had informed Davis that
+for reasons of her own she wanted to do this. He suspected what they
+were, for he had seen signs and slight demonstrations which convinced
+him that Carlotta and Eugene had reached an understanding. He did not
+consider it anything very much amiss, for Carlotta was a woman of the
+world, her own boss and a "good fellow." She had always been nice to
+him. He did not want to put any obstacles in her way. In addition, he
+liked Eugene. Once he had said to Carlotta jestingly, "Well, his arms
+are almost as long as Norman's--not quite maybe."
+
+"You go to the devil," was her polite reply.
+
+Tonight a storm came up, a brilliant, flashing summer storm. Eugene went
+out on the porch to watch it. Carlotta came also.
+
+"Well, wise man," she said, as the thunder rolled. "It's all over up
+here. Don't let on. I'll see you wherever you go, but this was so nice.
+It was fine to have you near me. Don't get blue, will you? She says she
+may write your wife, but I don't think she will. If she thinks I'm
+behaving, she won't. I'll try and fool her. It's too bad, though. I'm
+crazy about you, Genie."
+
+Now that he was in danger of losing Carlotta, her beauty took on a
+special significance for Eugene. He had come into such close contact
+with her, had seen her under such varied conditions, that he had come to
+feel a profound admiration for not only her beauty but her intellect and
+ability as well. One of his weaknesses was that he was inclined to see
+much more in those he admired than was really there. He endowed them
+with the romance of his own moods--saw in them the ability to do things
+which he only could do. In doing this of course he flattered their
+vanity, aroused their self-confidence, made them feel themselves the
+possessors of latent powers and forces which before him they had only
+dreamed of. Margaret, Ruby, Angela, Christina and Carlotta had all
+gained this feeling from him. They had a better opinion of themselves
+for having known him. Now as he looked at Carlotta he was intensely
+sorry, for she was so calm, so affable, so seemingly efficient and self
+reliant, and such a comfort to him in these days.
+
+"Circe!" he said, "this is too bad. I'm sorry. I'm going to hate to lose
+you."
+
+"You won't lose me," she replied. "You can't. I won't let you. I've
+found you now and I'm going to keep you. This don't mean anything. We
+can find places to meet. Get a place where they have a phone if you can.
+When do you think you'll go?"
+
+"Right away," said Eugene. "I'll take tomorrow morning off and look."
+
+"Poor Eugene," she said sympathetically. "It's too bad. Never mind
+though. Everything will come out right."
+
+She was still not counting on Angela. She thought that even if Angela
+came back, as Eugene told her she would soon, a joint arrangement might
+possibly be made. Angela could be here, but she, Carlotta, could share
+Eugene in some way. She thought she would rather live with him than any
+other man on earth.
+
+It was only about noon the next morning when Eugene had found another
+room, for, in living here so long, he had thought of several methods by
+which he might have obtained a room in the first place. There was
+another church, a library, the postmaster and the ticket agent at Speonk
+who lived in the village. He went first to the postmaster and learned of
+two families, one the home of a civil engineer, where he might be
+welcome, and it was here that he eventually settled. The view was not
+quite so attractive, but it was charming, and he had a good room and
+good meals. He told them that he might not stay long, for his wife was
+coming back soon. The letters from Angela were becoming most
+importunate.
+
+He gathered up his belongings at Mrs. Hibberdell's and took a polite
+departure. After he was gone Mrs. Hibberdell of course changed her mind,
+and Carlotta returned to her apartment in New York. She communicated
+with Eugene not only by phone but by special delivery, and had him meet
+her at a convenient inn the second evening of his departure. She was
+planning some sort of a separate apartment for them, when Eugene
+informed her that Angela was already on her way to New York and that
+nothing could be done at present.
+
+Since Eugene had left her at Biloxi, Angela had spent a most miserable
+period of seven months. She had been grieving her heart out, for she
+imagined him to be most lonely, and at the same time she was regretful
+that she had ever left him. She might as well have been with him. She
+figured afterward that she might have borrowed several hundred dollars
+from one of her brothers, and carried out the fight for his mental
+recovery by his side. Once he had gone she fancied she might have made a
+mistake matrimonially, for he was so impressionable--but his condition
+was such that she did not deem him to be interested in anything save his
+recovery. Besides, his attitude toward her of late had been so
+affectionate and in a way dependent. All her letters since he had left
+had been most tender, speaking of his sorrow at this necessary absence
+and hoping that the time would soon come when they could be together.
+The fact that he was lonely finally decided her and she wrote that she
+was coming whether he wanted her to or not.
+
+Her arrival would have made little difference except that by now he was
+thoroughly weaned away from her again, had obtained a new ideal and was
+interested only to see and be with Carlotta. The latter's easy financial
+state, her nice clothes, her familiarity with comfortable and luxurious
+things--better things than Eugene had ever dreamed of enjoying--her use
+of the automobile, her freedom in the matter of expenditures--taking the
+purchase of champagne and expensive meals as a matter of course--dazzled
+and fascinated him. It was rather an astonishing thing, he thought, to
+have so fine a woman fall in love with him. Besides, her tolerance, her
+indifference to petty conventions, her knowledge of life and literature
+and art--set her in marked contrast to Angela, and in all ways she
+seemed rare and forceful to him. He wished from his heart that he could
+be free and could have her.
+
+Into this peculiar situation Angela precipitated herself one bright
+Saturday afternoon in September. She was dying to see Eugene again. Full
+of grave thoughts for his future, she had come to share it whatever it
+might be. Her one idea was that he was sick and depressed and lonely.
+None of his letters had been cheerful or optimistic, for of course he
+did not dare to confess the pleasure he was having in Carlotta's
+company. In order to keep her away he had to pretend that lack of funds
+made it inadmissible for her to be here. The fact that he was spending,
+and by the time she arrived had spent, nearly the whole of the three
+hundred dollars his picture sold to Carlotta had brought him, had
+troubled him--not unduly, of course, or he would not have done it. He
+had qualms of conscience, severe ones, but they passed with the presence
+of Carlotta or the reading of his letters from Angela.
+
+"I don't know what's the matter with me," he said to himself from time
+to time. "I guess I'm no good." He thought it was a blessing that the
+world could not see him as he was.
+
+One of the particular weaknesses of Eugene's which should be set forth
+here and which will help to illuminate the bases of his conduct was that
+he was troubled with a dual point of view--a condition based upon a
+peculiar power of analysis--self-analysis in particular, which was
+constantly permitting him to tear himself up by the roots in order to
+see how he was getting along. He would daily and hourly when not
+otherwise employed lift the veil from his inner mental processes as he
+might lift the covering from a well, and peer into its depths. What he
+saw was not very inviting and vastly disconcerting, a piece of machinery
+that was not going as a true man should, clock fashion, and
+corresponding in none of its moral characteristics to the recognized
+standard of a man. He had concluded by now, from watching various
+specimens, that sane men were honest, some inherently moral, some
+regulated by a keen sense of duty, and occasionally all of these virtues
+and others were bound up in one man. Angela's father was such an one. M.
+Charles appeared to be another. He had concluded from his association
+with Jerry Mathews, Philip Shotmeyer, Peter MacHugh and Joseph Smite
+that they were all rather decent in respect to morals. He had never seen
+them under temptation but he imagined they were. Such a man as William
+Haverford, the Engineer of Maintenance of Way, and Henry C. Litlebrown,
+the Division Engineer of this immense road, struck him as men who must
+have stuck close to a sense of duty and the conventions of the life they
+represented, working hard all the time, to have attained the positions
+they had. All this whole railroad system which he was watching closely
+from day to day from his little vantage point of connection with it,
+seemed a clear illustration of the need of a sense of duty and
+reliability. All of these men who worked for this company had to be in
+good health, all had to appear at their posts on the tick of the clock,
+all had to perform faithfully the duties assigned them, or there would
+be disasters. Most of them had climbed by long, arduous years of work to
+very modest positions of prominence, as conductors, engineers, foremen,
+division superintendents. Others more gifted or more blessed by fortune
+became division engineers, superintendents, vice-presidents and
+presidents. They were all slow climbers, rigid in their sense of duty,
+tireless in their energy, exact, thoughtful. What was he?
+
+He looked into the well of his being and there he saw nothing but shifty
+and uncertain currents. It was very dark down there. He was not honest,
+he said to himself, except in money matters--he often wondered why. He
+was not truthful. He was not moral. This love of beauty which haunted
+him seemed much more important than anything else in the world, and his
+pursuit of that seemed to fly in the face of everything else which was
+established and important. He found that men everywhere did not think
+much of a man who was crazy after women. They might joke about an
+occasional lapse as an amiable vice or one which could be condoned, but
+they wanted little to do with a man who was overpowered by it. There was
+a case over in the railroad yard at Speonk recently which he had noted,
+of a foreman who had left his wife and gone after some hoyden in White
+Plains, and because of this offense he was promptly discharged. It
+appeared, though, that before this he had occasionally had such lapses
+and that each time he had been discharged, but had been subsequently
+forgiven. This one weakness, and no other, had given him a bad
+reputation among his fellow railroad men--much as that a drunkard might
+have. Big John Peters, the engineer, had expressed it aptly to Eugene
+one day when he told him in confidence that "Ed Bowers would go to hell
+for his hide," the latter being the local expression for women.
+Everybody seemed to pity him, and the man seemed in a way to pity
+himself. He had a hang-dog look when he was re-instated, and yet
+everybody knew that apart from this he was a fairly competent foreman.
+Still it was generally understood that he would never get anywhere.
+
+From that Eugene argued to himself that a man who was cursed with this
+peculiar vice could not get anywhere; that he, if he kept it up, would
+not. It was like drinking and stealing, and the face of the world was
+against it. Very frequently it went hand in hand with those
+things--"birds of a feather" he thought. Still he was cursed with it,
+and he no more than Ed Bowers appeared to be able to conquer it. At
+least he was yielding to it now as he had before. It mattered not that
+the women he chose were exceptionally beautiful and fascinating. They
+were women, and ought he to want them? He had one. He had taken a solemn
+vow to love and cherish her, or at least had gone through the formality
+of such a vow, and here he was running about with Carlotta, as he had
+with Christina and Ruby before her. Was he not always looking for some
+such woman as this? Certainly he was. Had he not far better be seeking
+for wealth, distinction, a reputation for probity, chastity, impeccable
+moral honor? Certainly he had. It was the way to distinction apparently,
+assuming the talent, and here he was doing anything but take that way.
+Conscience was his barrier, a conscience unmodified by cold
+self-interest. Shame upon himself! Shame upon his weak-kneed
+disposition, not to be able to recover from this illusion of beauty.
+Such were some of the thoughts which his moments of introspection
+brought him.
+
+On the other hand, there came over him that other phase of his
+duality--the ability to turn his terrible searchlight of intelligence
+which swept the heavens and the deep as with a great white ray--upon the
+other side of the question. It revealed constantly the inexplicable
+subtleties and seeming injustices of nature. He could not help seeing
+how the big fish fed upon the little ones, the strong were constantly
+using the weak as pawns; the thieves, the grafters, the murderers were
+sometimes allowed to prey on society without let or hindrance. Good was
+not always rewarded--frequently terribly ill-rewarded. Evil was seen to
+flourish beautifully at times. It was all right to say that it would be
+punished, but would it? Carlotta did not think so. She did not think the
+thing she was doing with him was very evil. She had said to him over and
+over that it was an open question, that he was troubled with an
+ingrowing conscience. "I don't think it's so bad," she once told him.
+"It depends somewhat on how you were raised." There was a system
+apparently in society, but also apparently it did not work very well.
+Only fools were held by religion, which in the main was an imposition, a
+graft and a lie. The honest man might be very fine but he wasn't very
+successful. There was a great to-do about morals, but most people were
+immoral or unmoral. Why worry? Look to your health! Don't let a morbid
+conscience get the better of you. Thus she counselled, and he agreed
+with her. For the rest the survival of the fittest was the best. Why
+should he worry? He had talent.
+
+It was thus that Eugene floundered to and fro, and it was in this state,
+brooding and melancholy, that Angela found him on her arrival. He was as
+gay as ever at times, when he was not thinking, but he was very thin and
+hollow-eyed, and Angela fancied that it was overwork and worry which
+kept him in this state. Why had she left him? Poor Eugene! She had clung
+desperately to the money he had given her, and had most of it with her
+ready to be expended now for his care. She was so anxious for his
+recovery and his peace of mind that she was ready to go to work herself
+at anything she could find, in order to make his path more easy. She was
+thinking that fate was terribly unjust to him, and when he had gone to
+sleep beside her the first night she lay awake and cried. Poor Eugene!
+To think he should be tried so by fate. Nevertheless, he should not be
+tortured by anything which she could prevent. She was going to make him
+as comfortable and happy as she could. She set about to find some nice
+little apartment or rooms where they could live in peace and where she
+could cook Eugene's meals for him. She fancied that maybe his food had
+not been exactly right, and when she got him where she could manifest a
+pretence of self-confidence and courage that he would take courage from
+her and grow better. So she set briskly about her task, honeying Eugene
+the while, for she was confident that this above all things was the
+thing he needed. She little suspected what a farce it all appeared to
+him, how mean and contemptible he appeared to himself. He did not care
+to be mean--to rapidly disillusion her and go his way; and yet this dual
+existence sickened him. He could not help but feel that from a great
+many points of view Angela was better than Carlotta. Yet the other woman
+was wider in her outlook, more gracious in her appearance, more
+commanding, more subtle. She was a princess of the world, subtle, deadly
+Machiavellian, but a princess nevertheless. Angela was better described
+by the current and acceptable phrase of the time--a "thoroughly good
+woman," honest, energetic, resourceful, in all things obedient to the
+race spirit and the conventional feelings of the time. He knew that
+society would support her thoroughly and condemn Carlotta, and yet
+Carlotta interested him more. He wished that he might have both and no
+fussing. Then all would be beautiful. So he thought.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+The situation which here presented itself was subject to no such
+gracious and generous development. Angela was the soul of watchfulness,
+insistence on duty, consideration for right conduct and for the
+privileges, opportunities and emoluments which belonged to her as the
+wife of a talented artist, temporarily disabled, it is true, but certain
+to be distinguished in the future. She was deluding herself that this
+recent experience of reverses had probably hardened and sharpened
+Eugene's practical instincts, made him less indifferent to the necessity
+of looking out for himself, given him keener instincts of
+self-protection and economy. He had done very well to live on so little
+she thought, but they were going to do better--they were going to save.
+She was going to give up those silly dreams she had entertained of a
+magnificent studio and hosts of friends, and she was going to start now
+saving a fraction of whatever they made, however small it might be, if
+it were only ten cents a week. If Eugene could only make nine dollars a
+week by working every day, they were going to live on that. He still had
+ninety-seven of the hundred dollars he had brought with him, he told
+her, and this was going in the bank. He did not tell her of the sale of
+one of his pictures and of the subsequent dissipation of the proceeds.
+In the bank, too, they were going to put any money from subsequent sales
+until he was on his feet again. One of these days if they ever made any
+money, they were going to buy a house somewhere in which they could live
+without paying rent. Some of the money in the bank, a very little of it,
+might go for clothes if worst came to worst, but it would not be touched
+unless it was absolutely necessary. She needed clothes now, but that did
+not matter. To Eugene's ninety-seven was added Angela's two hundred and
+twenty-eight which she brought with her, and this total sum of three
+hundred and twenty-five dollars was promptly deposited in the Bank of
+Riverwood.
+
+Angela by personal energy and explanation found four rooms in the house
+of a furniture manufacturer; it had been vacated by a daughter who had
+married, and they were glad to let it to an artist and his wife for
+practically nothing so far as real worth was concerned, for this was a
+private house in a lovely lawn. Twelve dollars per month was the charge.
+Mrs. Witla seemed very charming to Mrs. Desenas, who was the wife of the
+manufacturer, and for her especial benefit a little bedroom on the
+second floor adjoining a bath was turned into a kitchen, with a small
+gas stove, and Angela at once began housekeeping operations on the tiny
+basis necessitated by their income. Some furniture had to be secured,
+for the room was not completely furnished, but Angela by haunting the
+second-hand stores in New York, looking through all the department
+stores, and visiting certain private sales, managed to find a few things
+which she could buy cheaply and which would fit in with the dressing
+table, library table, dining table and one bed which were already
+provided. The necessary curtains for the bath and kitchen windows she
+cut, decorated and hung for herself. She went down to the storage
+company where the unsold and undisplayed portion of Eugene's pictures
+were and brought back seven, which she placed in the general living-room
+and dining-room. All Eugene's clothes, his underwear and socks
+particularly, received her immediate attention, and she soon had his
+rather attenuated wardrobe in good condition. From the local market she
+bought good vegetables and a little meat and made delightful stews,
+ragouts, combinations of eggs and tasty meat juices after the French
+fashion. All her housekeeping art was employed to the utmost to make
+everything look clean and neat, to maintain a bountiful supply of varied
+food on the table and yet to keep the cost down, so that they could not
+only live on nine dollars a week, but set aside a dollar or more of that
+for what Angela called their private bank account. She had a little
+hollow brown jug, calculated to hold fifteen dollars in change, which
+could be opened when full, which she conscientiously endeavored to fill
+and refill. Her one desire was to rehabilitate her husband in the eyes
+of the world--this time to stay--and she was determined to do it.
+
+For another thing, reflection and conversation with one person and
+another had taught her that it was not well for herself or for Eugene
+for her to encourage him in his animal passions. Some woman in Blackwood
+had pointed out a local case of locomotor-ataxia which had resulted from
+lack of self-control, and she had learned that it was believed that many
+other nervous troubles sprang from the same source. Perhaps Eugene's
+had. She had resolved to protect him from himself. She did not believe
+she could be injured, but Eugene was so sensitive, so emotional.
+
+The trouble with the situation was that it was such a sharp change from
+his recent free and to him delightful mode of existence that it was
+almost painful. He could see that everything appeared to be satisfactory
+to her, that she thought all his days had been moral and full of hard
+work. Carlotta's presence in the background was not suspected. Her idea
+was that they would work hard together now along simple, idealistic
+lines to the one end--success for him, and of course, by reflection, for
+her.
+
+Eugene saw the charm of it well enough, but it was only as something
+quite suitable for others. He was an artist. The common laws of
+existence could not reasonably apply to an artist. The latter should
+have intellectual freedom, the privilege of going where he pleased,
+associating with whom he chose. This marriage business was a galling
+yoke, cutting off all rational opportunity for enjoyment, and he was now
+after a brief period of freedom having that yoke heavily adjusted to his
+neck again. Gone were all the fine dreams of pleasure and happiness
+which so recently had been so real--the hope of living with
+Carlotta--the hope of associating with her on easy and natural terms in
+that superior world which she represented. Angela's insistence on the
+thought that he should work every day and bring home nine dollars a
+week, or rather its monthly equivalent, made it necessary for him to
+take sharp care of the little money he had kept out of the remainder of
+the three hundred in order to supply any deficiency which might occur
+from his taking time off. For there was no opportunity now of seeing
+Carlotta of an evening, and it was necessary to take a regular number of
+afternoons or mornings off each week, in order to meet her. He would
+leave the little apartment as usual at a quarter to seven in the
+morning, dressed suitably for possible out-door expeditions, for in
+anticipation of difficulty he had told Angela that it was his custom to
+do this, and sometimes he would go to the factory and sometimes he would
+not. There was a car line which carried him rapidly cityward to a
+rendezvous, and he would either ride or walk with her as the case might
+be. There was constant thought on his and her part of the risk involved,
+but still they persisted. By some stroke of ill or good fortune Norman
+Wilson returned from Chicago, so that Carlotta's movements had to be
+calculated to a nicety, but she did not care. She trusted most to the
+automobiles which she could hire at convenient garages and which would
+carry them rapidly away from the vicinity where they might be seen and
+recognized.
+
+It was a tangled life, difficult and dangerous. There was no peace in
+it, for there is neither peace nor happiness in deception. A burning joy
+at one time was invariably followed by a disturbing remorse afterward.
+There was Carlotta's mother, Norman Wilson, and Angela, to guard
+against, to say nothing of the constant pricking of his own conscience.
+
+It is almost a foregone conclusion in any situation of this kind that it
+cannot endure. The seed of its undoing is in itself. We think that our
+actions when unseen of mortal eyes resolve themselves into nothingness,
+but this is not true. They are woven indefinably into our being, and
+shine forth ultimately as the real self, in spite of all our pretences.
+One could almost accept the Brahmanistic dogma of a psychic body which
+sees and is seen where we dream all to be darkness. There is no other
+supposition on which to explain the facts of intuition. So many
+individuals have it. They know so well without knowing why they know.
+
+Angela had this intuitive power in connection with Eugene. Because of
+her great affection for him she divined or apprehended many things in
+connection with him long before they occurred. Throughout her absence
+from him she had been haunted by the idea that she ought to be with him,
+and now that she was here and the first excitement of contact and
+adjustment was over, she was beginning to be aware of something. Eugene
+was not the same as he had been a little while before he had left her.
+His attitude, in spite of a kindly show of affection, was distant and
+preoccupied. He had no real power of concealing anything. He appeared at
+times--at most times when he was with her--to be lost in a mist of
+speculation. He was lonely and a little love-sick, because under the
+pressure of home affairs Carlotta was not able to see him quite so much.
+At the same time, now that the fall was coming on, he was growing weary
+of the shop at Speonk, for the gray days and slight chill which settled
+upon the earth at times caused the shop windows to be closed and robbed
+the yard of that air of romance which had characterized it when he first
+came there. He could not take his way of an evening along the banks of
+the stream to the arms of Carlotta. The novelty of Big John and Joseph
+Mews and Malachi Dempsey and Little Suddsy had worn off. He was
+beginning now to see also that they were nothing but plain workingmen
+after all, worrying over the fact that they were not getting more than
+fifteen or seventeen and a half cents an hour; jealous of each other and
+their superiors, full of all the frailties and weaknesses to which the
+flesh is heir.
+
+His coming had created a slight diversion for them, for he was very
+strange, but his strangeness was no longer a novelty. They were
+beginning to see him also as a relatively commonplace human being. He
+was an artist, to be sure, but his actions and intentions were not so
+vastly different from those of other men.
+
+A shop of this kind, like any other institution where people are
+compelled by force of circumstances to work together whether the weather
+be fair or foul, or the mood grave or gay, can readily become and
+frequently does become a veritable hell. Human nature is a subtle,
+irritable, irrational thing. It is not so much governed by rules of
+ethics and conditions of understanding as a thing of moods and
+temperament. Eugene could easily see, philosopher that he was, that
+these people would come here enveloped in some mist of home trouble or
+secret illness or grief and would conceive that somehow it was not their
+state of mind but the things around them which were the cause of all
+their woe. Sour looks would breed sour looks in return; a gruff question
+would beget a gruff answer; there were long-standing grudges between one
+man and another, based on nothing more than a grouchy observation at one
+time in the past. He thought by introducing gaiety and persistent, if
+make-believe, geniality that he was tending to obviate and overcome the
+general condition, but this was only relatively true. His own gaiety was
+capable of becoming as much of a weariness to those who were out of the
+spirit of it, as was the sour brutality with which at times he was
+compelled to contend. So he wished that he might arrange to get well and
+get out of here, or at least change his form of work, for it was plain
+to be seen that this condition would not readily improve. His presence
+was a commonplace. His power to entertain and charm was practically
+gone.
+
+This situation, coupled with Angela's spirit of honest conservatism was
+bad, but it was destined to be much worse. From watching him and
+endeavoring to decipher his moods, Angela came to suspect something--she
+could not say what. He did not love her as much as he had. There was a
+coolness in his caresses which was not there when he left her. What
+could have happened, she asked herself. Was it just absence, or what?
+One day when he had returned from an afternoon's outing with Carlotta
+and was holding her in his arms in greeting, she asked him solemnly:
+
+"Do you love me, Honeybun?"
+
+"You know I do," he asseverated, but without any energy, for he could
+not regain his old original feeling for her. There was no trace of it,
+only sympathy, pity, and a kind of sorrow that she was being so badly
+treated after all her efforts.
+
+"No, you don't," she replied, detecting the hollow ring in what he said.
+Her voice was sad, and her eyes showed traces of that wistful despair
+into which she could so readily sink at times.
+
+"Why, yes I do, Angelface," he insisted. "What makes you ask? What's
+come over you?" He was wondering whether she had heard anything or seen
+anything and was concealing her knowledge behind this preliminary
+inquiry.
+
+"Nothing," she replied. "Only you don't love me. I don't know what it
+is. I don't know why. But I can feel it right here," and she laid her
+hand on her heart.
+
+The action was sincere, unstudied. It hurt him, for it was like that of
+a little child.
+
+"Oh, hush! Don't say that," he pleaded. "You know I do. Don't look so
+gloomy. I love you--don't you know I do?" and he kissed her.
+
+"No, no!" said Angela. "I know! You don't. Oh, dear; oh, dear; I feel so
+bad!"
+
+Eugene was dreading another display of the hysteria with which he was
+familiar, but it did not come. She conquered her mood, inasmuch as she
+had no real basis for suspicion, and went about the work of getting him
+his dinner. She was depressed, though, and he was fearful. What if she
+should ever find out!
+
+More days passed. Carlotta called him up at the shop occasionally, for
+there was no phone where he lived, and she would not have risked it if
+there had been. She sent him registered notes to be signed for,
+addressed to Henry Kingsland and directed to the post office at Speonk.
+Eugene was not known there as Witla and easily secured these missives,
+which were usually very guarded in their expressions and concerned
+appointments--the vaguest, most mysterious directions, which he
+understood. They made arrangements largely from meeting to meeting,
+saying, "If I can't keep it Thursday at two it will be Friday at the
+same time; and if not then, Saturday. If anything happens I'll send you
+a registered special." So it went on.
+
+One noontime Eugene walked down to the little post office at Speonk to
+look for a letter, for Carlotta had not been able to meet him the
+previous day and had phoned instead that she would write the following
+day. He found it safely enough, and after glancing at it--it contained
+but few words--decided to tear it up as usual and throw the pieces away.
+A mere expression, "Ashes of Roses," which she sometimes used to
+designate herself, and the superscription, "Oh, Genie!" made it,
+however, inexpressibly dear to him. He thought he would hold it in his
+possession just a little while--a few hours longer. It was enigmatic
+enough to anyone but himself, he thought, even if found. "The bridge,
+two, Wednesday." The bridge referred to was one over the Harlem at
+Morris Heights. He kept the appointment that day as requested, but by
+some necromancy of fate he forgot the letter until he was within his own
+door. Then he took it out, tore it up into four or five pieces quickly,
+put it in his vest pocket, and went upstairs intending at the first
+opportunity to dispose of it.
+
+Meanwhile, Angela, for the first time since they had been living at
+Riverwood, had decided to walk over toward the factory about six o'clock
+and meet Eugene on his way home. She heard him discourse on the
+loveliness of this stream and what a pleasure it was to stroll along its
+banks morning and evening. He was so fond of the smooth water and the
+overhanging leaves! She had walked with him there already on several
+Sundays. When she went this evening she thought what a pleasant surprise
+it would be for him, for she had prepared everything on leaving so that
+his supper would not be delayed when they reached home. She heard the
+whistle blow as she neared the shop, and, standing behind a clump of
+bushes on the thither side of the stream, she waited, expecting to
+pounce out on Eugene with a loving "Boo!" He did not come.
+
+The forty or fifty men who worked here trickled out like a little stream
+of black ants, and then, Eugene not appearing, Angela went over to the
+gate which Joseph Mews in the official capacity of gateman, after the
+whistle blew, was closing.
+
+"Is Mr. Witla here?" asked Angela, peering through the bars at him.
+Eugene had described Joseph so accurately to her that she recognized him
+at sight.
+
+"No, ma'am," replied Joseph, quite taken back by this attractive
+arrival, for good-looking women were not common at the shop gate of the
+factory. "He left four or five hours ago. I think he left at one
+o'clock, if I remember right. He wasn't working with us today. He was
+working out in the yard."
+
+"You don't know where he went, do you?" asked Angela, who was surprised
+at this novel information. Eugene had not said anything about going
+anywhere. Where could he have gone?
+
+"No'm, I don't," replied Joseph volubly. "He sometimes goes off this
+way--quite frequent, ma'am. His wife calls him up--er--now, maybe you're
+his wife."
+
+"I am," said Angela; but she was no longer thinking of what she was
+saying, her words on the instant were becoming mechanical. Eugene going
+away frequently? He had never said anything to her! His wife calling him
+up! Could there be another woman! Instantly all her old suspicions,
+jealousies, fears, awoke, and she was wondering why she had not fixed on
+this fact before. That explained Eugene's indifference, of course. That
+explained his air of abstraction. He wasn't thinking of her, the
+miserable creature! He was thinking of someone else. Still she could not
+be sure, for she had no proof. Two adroit questions elicited the fact
+that no one in the shop had ever seen his wife. He had just gone out. A
+woman had called up.
+
+Angela took her way home amid a whirling fire of conjecture. When she
+reached it Eugene was not there yet, for he sometimes delayed his
+coming, lingering, as he said, to look at the water. It was natural
+enough in an artist. She went upstairs and hung the broad-brimmed straw
+she had worn in the closet, and went into the kitchen to await his
+coming. Experience with him and the nature of her own temperament
+determined her to enact a role of subtlety. She would wait until he
+spoke, pretending that she had not been out. She would ask whether he
+had had a hard day, and see whether he disclosed the fact that he had
+been away from the factory. That would show her positively what he was
+doing and whether he was deliberately deceiving her.
+
+Eugene came up the stairs, gay enough but anxious to deposit the scraps
+of paper where they would not be seen. No opportunity came for Angela
+was there to greet him.
+
+"Did you have a hard job today?" she asked, noting that he made no
+preliminary announcement of any absence.
+
+"Not very," he replied; "no. I don't look tired?"
+
+"No," she said bitterly, but concealing her feelings; she wanted to see
+how thoroughly and deliberately he would lie. "But I thought maybe you
+might have. Did you stop to look at the water tonight?"
+
+"Yes," he replied smoothly. "It's very lovely over there. I never get
+tired of it. The sun on the leaves these days now that they are turning
+yellow is so beautiful. They look a little like stained glass at certain
+angles."
+
+Her first impulse after hearing this was to exclaim, "Why do you lie to
+me, Eugene?" for her temper was fiery, almost uncontrollable at times;
+but she restrained herself. She wanted to find out more--how she did not
+know, but time, if she could only wait a little, would help her. Eugene
+went to the bath, congratulating himself on the ease of his escape--the
+comfortable fact that he was not catechised very much; but in this
+temporary feeling of satisfaction he forgot the scraps of paper in his
+vest pocket--though not for long. He hung his coat and vest on a hook
+and started into the bedroom to get himself a fresh collar and tie.
+While he was in there Angela passed the bathroom door. She was always
+interested in Eugene's clothes, how they were wearing, but tonight there
+were other thoughts in her mind. Hastily and by intuition she went
+through his pockets, finding the torn scraps, then for excuse took his
+coat and vest down to clean certain spots. At the same moment Eugene
+thought of his letter. He came hurrying out to get it, or the pieces,
+rather, but Angela already had them and was looking at them curiously.
+
+"What was that?" she asked, all her suspicious nature on the _qui vive_
+for additional proof. Why should he keep the torn fragments of a letter
+in his pocket? For days she had had a psychic sense of something
+impending. Everything about him seemed strangely to call for
+investigation. Now it was all coming out.
+
+"Nothing," he said nervously. "A memorandum. Throw it in the paper box."
+
+Angela noted the peculiarity of his voice and manner. She was taken by
+the guilty expression of his eyes. Something was wrong. It concerned
+these scraps of paper. Maybe it was in these she would be able to read
+the riddle of his conduct. The woman's name might be in here. Like a
+flash it came to her that she might piece these scraps together, but
+there was another thought equally swift which urged her to pretend
+indifference. That might help her. Pretend now and she would know more
+later. She threw them in the paper box, thinking to piece them together
+at her leisure. Eugene noted her hesitation, her suspicion. He was
+afraid she would do something, what he could not guess. He breathed more
+easily when the papers fluttered into the practically empty box, but he
+was nervous. If they were only burned! He did not think she would
+attempt to put them together, but he was afraid. He would have given
+anything if his sense of romance had not led him into this trap.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+Angela was quick to act upon her thought. No sooner had Eugene entered
+the bath than she gathered up the pieces, threw other bits of paper like
+them in their place and tried quickly to piece them together on the
+ironing board where she was. It was not difficult; the scraps were not
+small. On one triangular bit were the words, "Oh, Genie!" with a colon
+after it; on another the words, "The bridge," and on another "Roses."
+There was no doubt in her mind from this preliminary survey that this
+was a love note, and every nerve in her body tingled to the terrible
+import of it. Could it really be true? Could Eugene have found someone
+else? Was this the cause of his coolness and his hypocritical pretence
+of affection? and of his not wanting her to come to him? Oh, God! Would
+her sufferings never cease! She hurried into the front room, her face
+white, her hand clenching the tell-tale bits, and there set to work to
+complete her task. It did not take her long. In four minutes it was all
+together, and then she saw it all. A love note! From some demon of a
+woman. No doubt of it! Some mysterious woman in the background. "Ashes
+of Roses!" Now God curse her for a siren, a love thief, a hypnotizing
+snake, fascinating men with her evil eyes. And Eugene! The dog! The
+scoundrel! The vile coward! The traitor! Was there no decency, no
+morality, no kindness, no gratitude in his soul? After all her patience,
+all her suffering, all her loneliness, her poverty. To treat her like
+this! Writing that he was sick and lonely and unable to have her with
+him, and at the same time running around with a strange woman. "Ashes of
+Roses!" Oh, curses, curses, curses on her harlot's heart and brain!
+Might God strike her dead for her cynical, brutal seizing upon that
+sacred possession which belonged to another. She wrung her hands
+desperately.
+
+Angela was fairly beside herself. Through her dainty little head ran a
+foaming torrent of rage, hate, envy, sorrow, self-commiseration, brutal
+desire for revenge. If she could only get at this woman! If she could
+only denounce Eugene now to his face! If she could only find them
+together and kill them! How she would like to strike her on the mouth!
+How tear her hair and her eyes out! Something of the forest cat's cruel
+rage shone in her gleaming eyes as she thought of her, for if she could
+have had Carlotta there alone she would have tortured her with hot
+irons, torn her tongue and teeth from their roots, beaten her into
+insensibility and an unrecognizable mass. She was a real tigress now,
+her eyes gleaming, her red lips wet. She would kill her! kill her!! kill
+her!!! As God was judge, she would kill her if she could find her, and
+Eugene and herself. Yes, yes, she would. Better death than this agony of
+suffering. Better a thousand times to be dead with this beast of a woman
+dead beside her and Eugene than to suffer this way. She didn't deserve
+it. Why did God torture her so? Why was she made to bleed at every step
+by this her sacrificial love? Had she not been a good wife? Had she not
+laid every tribute of tenderness, patience, self-abnegation,
+self-sacrifice and virtue on the altar of love? What more could God ask?
+What more could man want? Had she not waited on Eugene in sickness and
+health? She had gone without clothes, gone without friends, hidden
+herself away in Blackwood the seven months while he was here frittering
+away his health and time in love and immorality, and what was her
+reward? In Chicago, in Tennessee, in Mississippi, had she not waited on
+him, sat up with him of nights, walked the floor with him when he was
+nervous, consoled him in his fear of poverty and failure, and here she
+was now, after seven long months of patient waiting and watching--eating
+her lonely heart out--forsaken. Oh, the inconceivable inhumanity of the
+human heart! To think anybody could be so vile, so low, so unkind, so
+cruel! To think that Eugene with his black eyes, his soft hair, his
+smiling face, could be so treacherous, so subtle, so dastardly! Could he
+really be as mean as this note proved him to be? Could he be as brutal,
+as selfish? Was she awake or asleep? Was this a dream? Ah, God! no, no
+it was not a dream. It was a cold, bitter, agonizing reality. And the
+cause of all her suffering was there in the bathroom now shaving
+himself.
+
+For one moment she thought she would go in and strike him where he
+stood. She thought she could tear his heart out, cut him up, but then
+suddenly the picture of him bleeding and dead came to her and she
+recoiled. No, no, she could not do that! Oh, no, not Eugene--and yet and
+yet----
+
+"Oh, God, let me get my hands on that woman!" she said to herself. "Let
+me get my hands on her. I'll kill her, I'll kill her! I'll kill her!"
+
+This torrent of fury and self-pity was still raging in her heart when
+the bathroom knob clicked and Eugene came out. He was in his undershirt,
+trousers and shoes, looking for a clean white shirt. He was very nervous
+over the note which had been thrown in scraps into the box, but looking
+in the kitchen and seeing the pieces still there he was slightly
+reassured. Angela was not there; he could come back and get them when he
+found out where she was. He went on into the bedroom, looking into the
+front room as he did so. She appeared to be at the window waiting for
+him. After all, she was probably not as suspicious as he thought. It was
+his own imagination. He was too nervous and sensitive. Well, he would
+get those pieces now if he could and throw them out of the window.
+Angela should not have a chance to examine them if she wanted to. He
+slipped out into the kitchen, made a quick grab for the little heap, and
+sent the pieces flying. Then he felt much better. He would never bring
+another letter home from anybody, that was a certainty. Fate was too
+much against him.
+
+Angela came out after a bit, for the click of the bathroom knob had
+sobered her a little. Her rage was high, her pulse abnormal, her whole
+being shaken to its roots, but still she realized that she must have
+time to think. She must see who this woman was first. She must have time
+to find her. Eugene mustn't know. Where was she now? Where was this
+bridge? Where did they meet? Where did she live? She wondered for the
+moment why she couldn't think it all out, why it didn't come to her in a
+flash, a revelation. If she could only know!
+
+In a few minutes Eugene came in, clean-shaven, smiling, his equanimity
+and peace of mind fairly well restored. The letter was gone. Angela
+could never know. She might suspect, but this possible burst of jealousy
+had been nipped in the bud. He came over toward her to put his arm round
+her, but she slipped away from him, pretending to need the sugar. He let
+this effort at love making go--the will for the deed, and sat down at
+the snow-white little table, set with tempting dishes and waited to be
+served. The day had been very pleasant, being early in October, and he
+was pleased to see a last lingering ray of light falling on some red and
+yellow leaves. This yard was very beautiful. This little flat, for all
+their poverty, very charming. Angela was neat and trim in a dainty house
+dress of mingled brown and green. A dark blue studio apron shielded her
+bosom and skirt. She was very pale and distraught-looking, but Eugene
+for the time was almost unconscious of it--he was so relieved.
+
+"Are you very tired, Angela?" he finally asked sympathetically.
+
+"Yes, I'm not feeling so well today," she replied.
+
+"What have you been doing, ironing?"
+
+"Oh, yes, and cleaning. I worked on the cupboard."
+
+"You oughtn't to try to do so much," he said cheerfully. "You're not
+strong enough. You think you're a little horse, but you are only a colt.
+Better go slow, hadn't you?"
+
+"I will after I get everything straightened out to suit me," she
+replied.
+
+She was having the struggle of her life to conceal her real feelings.
+Never at any time had she undergone such an ordeal as this. Once in the
+studio, when she discovered those two letters, she thought she was
+suffering--but that, what was that to this? What were her suspicions
+concerning Frieda? What were the lonely longings at home, her grieving
+and worrying over his illness? Nothing, nothing! Now he was actually
+faithless to her. Now she had the evidence. This woman was here. She was
+somewhere in the immediate background. After these years of marriage and
+close companionship he was deceiving her. It was possible that he had
+been with this woman today, yesterday, the day before. The letter was
+not dated. Could it be that she was related to Mrs. Hibberdell? Eugene
+had said that there was a married daughter, but never that she was
+there. If she was there, why should he have moved? He wouldn't have. Was
+it the wife of the man he was last living with? No; she was too homely.
+Angela had seen her. Eugene would never associate with her. If she could
+only know! "Ashes of Roses!" The world went red before her eyes. There
+was no use bursting into a storm now, though. If she could only be calm
+it would be better. If she only had someone to talk to--if there were a
+minister or a bosom friend! She might go to a detective agency. They
+might help her. A detective could trace this woman and Eugene. Did she
+want to do this? It cost money. They were very poor now. Paugh! Why
+should she worry about their poverty, mending her dresses, going without
+hats, going without decent shoes, and he wasting his time and being upon
+some shameless strumpet! If he had money, he would spend it on her.
+Still, he had handed her almost all the money he had brought East with
+him intact. How was that?
+
+All the time Eugene was sitting opposite her eating with fair
+heartiness. If the trouble about the letter had not come out so
+favorably he would have been without appetite, but now he felt at ease.
+Angela said she was not hungry and could not eat. She passed him the
+bread, the butter, the hashed brown potatoes, the tea, and he ate
+cheerfully.
+
+"I think I am going to try and get out of that shop over there," he
+volunteered affably.
+
+"Why?" asked Angela mechanically.
+
+"I'm tired of it. The men are not so interesting to me now. I'm tired of
+them. I think Mr. Haverford will transfer me if I write to him. He said
+he would. I'd rather be outside with some section gang if I could. It's
+going to be very dreary in the shop when they close it up."
+
+"Well, if you're tired you'd better," replied Angela. "Your mind needs
+diversion, I know that. Why don't you write to Mr. Haverford?"
+
+"I will," he said, but he did not immediately. He went into the front
+room and lit the gas eventually, reading a paper, then a book, then
+yawning wearily. Angela came in after a time and sat down pale and
+tired. She went and secured a little workbasket in which were socks
+undarned and other odds and ends and began on those, but she revolted at
+the thought of doing anything for him and put them up. She got out a
+skirt of hers which she was making. Eugene watched her a little while
+lazily, his artistic eye measuring the various dimensions of her
+features. She had a well-balanced face, he finally concluded. He noted
+the effect of the light on her hair--the peculiar hue it gave it--and
+wondered if he could get that in oil. Night scenes were harder than
+those of full daylight. Shadows were so very treacherous. He got up
+finally.
+
+"Well, I'm going to turn in," he said. "I'm tired. I have to get up at
+six. Oh, dear, this darn day labor business gives me a pain. I wish it
+were over."
+
+Angela did not trust herself to speak. She was so full of pain and
+despair that she thought if she spoke she would cry. He went out,
+saying: "Coming soon?" She nodded her head. When he was gone the storm
+burst and she broke into a blinding flood of tears. They were not only
+tears of sorrow, but of rage and helplessness. She went out on a little
+balcony which was there and cried alone, the night lights shining
+wistfully about. After the first storm she began to harden and dry up
+again, for helpless tears were foreign to her in a rage. She dried her
+eyes and became white-faced and desperate as before.
+
+The dog, the scoundrel, the brute, the hound! she thought. How could she
+ever have loved him? How could she love him now? Oh, the horror of life,
+its injustice, its cruelty, its shame! That she should be dragged
+through the mire with a man like this. The pity of it! The shame! If
+this was art, death take it! And yet hate him as she might--hate this
+hellish man-trap who signed herself "Ashes of Roses"--she loved him,
+too. She could not help it. She knew she loved him. Oh, to be crossed by
+two fevers like this! Why might she not die? Why not die, right now?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+The hells of love are bitter and complete. There were days after that
+when she watched him, followed him down the pleasant lane from the house
+to the water's edge, slipping out unceremoniously after he had gone not
+more than eight hundred feet. She watched the bridge at Riverwood at one
+and six, expecting that Eugene and his paramour might meet there. It
+just happened that Carlotta was compelled to leave town for ten days
+with her husband, and so Eugene was safe. On two occasions he went
+downtown--into the heart of the great city, anxious to get a breath of
+the old life that so fascinated him, and Angela followed him only to
+lose track of him quickly. He did nothing evil, however, merely walked,
+wondering what Miriam Finch and Christina Channing and Norma Whitmore
+were doing these days and what they were thinking of him in his long
+absence. Of all the people he had known, he had only seen Norma Whitmore
+once and that was not long after he returned to New York. He had given
+her a garbled explanation of his illness, stated that he was going to
+work now and proposed to come and see her. He did his best to avoid
+observation, however, for he dreaded explaining the reason of his
+non-productive condition. Miriam Finch was almost glad that he had
+failed, since he had treated her so badly. Christina Channing was in
+opera, as he quickly discovered, for he saw her name blazoned one day
+the following November in the newspapers. She was a star of whose talent
+great hopes were entertained, and was interested almost exclusively in
+her career. She was to sing in "Boheme" and "Rigoletto."
+
+Another thing, fortunate for Eugene at this time, was that he changed
+his work. There came to the shop one day an Irish foreman, Timothy
+Deegan, master of a score of "guineas," as he called the Italian day
+laborers who worked for him, who took Eugene's fancy greatly. He was of
+medium height, thick of body and neck, with a cheerful, healthy red
+face, a keen, twinkling gray eye, and stiff, closely cropped gray hair
+and mustache. He had come to lay the foundation for a small dynamo in
+the engine room at Speonk, which was to supply the plant with light in
+case of night work, and a car of his had been backed in, a tool car,
+full of boards, barrows, mortar boards, picks and shovels. Eugene was
+amused and astonished at his insistent, defiant attitude and the brisk
+manner in which he was handing out orders to his men.
+
+"Come, Matt! Come, Jimmie! Get the shovels now! Get the picks!" he heard
+him shout. "Bring some sand here! Bring some stone! Where's the cement
+now? Where's the cement? Jasus Christ! I must have some cement. What
+arre ye all doing? Hurry now, hurry! Bring the cement."
+
+"Well, he knows how to give orders," commented Eugene to Big John, who
+was standing near. "He certainly does," replied the latter.
+
+To himself Eugene observed, hearing only the calls at first, "the Irish
+brute." Later he discovered a subtle twinkle in Deegan's eyes as he
+stood brazenly in the door, looking defiantly about. There was no
+brutality in it, only self-confidence and a hearty Irish insistence on
+the necessity of the hour.
+
+"Well, you're a dandy!" commented Eugene boldly after a time, and
+laughed.
+
+"Ha! ha! ha!" mocked Deegan in return. "If you had to work as harred as
+these men you wouldn't laugh."
+
+"I'm not laughing at them. I'm laughing at you," explained Eugene.
+
+"Laugh," said Deegan. "Shure you're as funny to me as I am to you."
+
+Eugene laughed again. The Irishman agreed with himself that there was
+humor in it. He laughed too. Eugene patted his big rough shoulder with
+his hands and they were friends immediately. It did not take Deegan long
+to find out from Big John why he was there and what he was doing.
+
+"An arrtist!" he commented. "Shewer he'd better be outside than in. The
+loikes of him packin' shavin's and him laughin' at me."
+
+Big John smiled.
+
+"I believe he wants to get outside," he said.
+
+"Why don't he come with me, then? He'd have a foine time workin' with
+the guineas. Shewer 'twould make a man av him--a few months of
+that"--and he pointed to Angelo Esposito shoveling clay.
+
+Big John thought this worth reporting to Eugene. He did not think that
+he wanted to work with the guineas, but he might like to be with Deegan.
+Eugene saw his opportunity. He liked Deegan.
+
+"Would you like to have an artist who's looking for health come and work
+for you, Deegan?" Eugene asked genially. He thought Deegan might refuse,
+but it didn't matter. It was worth the trial.
+
+"Shewer!" replied the latter.
+
+"Will I have to work with the Italians?"
+
+"There'll be plenty av work for ye to do without ever layin' yer hand to
+pick or shovel unless ye want to. Shewer that's no work fer a white man
+to do."
+
+"And what do you call them, Deegan? Aren't they white?"
+
+"Shewer they're naat."
+
+"What are they, then? They're not black."
+
+"Nagurs, of coorse."
+
+"But they're not negroes."
+
+"Will, begad, they're naat white. Any man kin tell that be lookin' at
+thim."
+
+Eugene smiled. He understood at once the solid Irish temperament which
+could draw this hearty conclusion. There was no malice in it. Deegan did
+not underestimate these Italians. He liked his men, but they weren't
+white. He didn't know what they were exactly, but they weren't white. He
+was standing over them a moment later shouting, "Up with it! Up with it!
+Down with it! Down with it!" as though his whole soul were intent on
+driving the last scrap of strength out of these poor underlings, when as
+a matter of fact they were not working very hard at all. His glance was
+roving about in a general way as he yelled and they paid little
+attention to him. Once in a while he would interpolate a "Come, Matt!"
+in a softer key--a key so soft that it was entirely out of keeping with
+his other voice. Eugene saw it all clearly. He understood Deegan.
+
+"I think I'll get Mr. Haverford to transfer me to you, if you'll let me
+come," he said at the close of the day when Deegan was taking off his
+overalls and the "Eyetalians," as he called them, were putting the
+things back in the car.
+
+"Shewer!" said Deegan, impressed by the great name of Haverford. If
+Eugene could accomplish that through such a far-off, wondrous
+personality, he must be a remarkable man himself. "Come along. I'll be
+glad to have ye. Ye can just make out the O. K. blanks and the repoarts
+and watch over the min sich times as I'll naat be there and--well--all
+told, ye'll have enough to keep ye busy."
+
+Eugene smiled. This was a pleasant prospect. Big John had told him
+during the morning that Deegan went up and down the road from Peekskill
+on the main line, Chatham on the Midland Division, and Mt. Kisco on a
+third branch to New York City. He built wells, culverts, coal bins,
+building piers--small brick buildings--anything and everything, in
+short, which a capable foreman-mason ought to be able to build, and in
+addition he was fairly content and happy in his task. Eugene could see
+it. The atmosphere of the man was wholesome. He was like a tonic--a
+revivifying dynamo to this sickly overwrought sentimentalist.
+
+That night he went home to Angela full of the humor and romance of his
+new situation. He liked the idea of it. He wanted to tell her about
+Deegan--to make her laugh. He was destined unfortunately to another kind
+of reception.
+
+For Angela, by this time, had endured the agony of her discovery to the
+breaking point. She had listened to his pretences, knowing them to be
+lies, until she could endure it no longer. In following him she had
+discovered nothing, and the change in his work would make the chase more
+difficult. It was scarcely possible for anyone to follow him, for he
+himself did not know where he would be from day to day. He would be
+here, there, and everywhere. His sense of security as well as of his
+unfairness made him sensitive about being nice in the unimportant
+things. When he thought at all he was ashamed of what he was
+doing--thoroughly ashamed. Like the drunkard he appeared to be mastered
+by his weakness, and the psychology of his attitude is so best
+interpreted. He caressed her sympathetically, for he thought from her
+drawn, weary look that she was verging on some illness. She appeared to
+him to be suffering from worry for him, overwork, or approaching malady.
+
+But Eugene in spite of his unfaithfulness did sympathize with Angela
+greatly. He appreciated her good qualities--her truthfulness, economy,
+devotion and self-sacrifice in all things which related to him. He was
+sorry that his own yearning for freedom crossed with her desire for
+simple-minded devotion on his part. He could not love her as she wanted
+him to, that he knew, and yet he was at times sorry for it, very. He
+would look at her when she was not looking at him, admiring her
+industry, her patience, her pretty figure, her geniality in the face of
+many difficulties, and wish that she could have had a better fate than
+to have met and married him.
+
+Because of these feelings on his part for her he could not bear to see
+her suffer. When she appeared to be ill he could not help drawing near
+to her, wanting to know how she was, endeavoring to make her feel better
+by those sympathetic, emotional demonstrations which he knew meant so
+much to her. On this particular evening, noting the still drawn agony of
+her face, he was moved to insist. "What's the matter with you,
+Angelface, these days? You look so tired. You're not right. What's
+troubling you?"
+
+"Oh, nothing," replied Angela wearily.
+
+"But I know there is," he replied. "You can't be feeling well. What's
+ailing you? You're not like yourself at all. Won't you tell me, sweet?
+What's the trouble?"
+
+He was thinking because Angela said nothing that it must be a real
+physical illness. Any emotional complaint vented itself quickly.
+
+"Why should you care?" she asked cautiously, breaking her self-imposed
+vow of silence. She was thinking that Eugene and this woman, whoever she
+was, were conspiring to defeat her and that they were succeeding. Her
+voice had changed from one of weary resignation to subtle semi-concealed
+complaint and offense, and Eugene noted it. Before she could add any
+more, he had observed, "Why shouldn't I? Why, how you talk! What's the
+matter now?"
+
+Angela really did not intend to go on. Her query was dragged out of her
+by his obvious sympathy. He was sorry for her in some general way. It
+made her pain and wrath all the greater. And his additional inquiry
+irritated her the more.
+
+"Why should you?" she asked weepingly. "You don't want me. You don't
+like me. You pretend sympathy when I look a little bad, but that's all.
+But you don't care for me. If you could get rid of me, you would. That
+is so plain."
+
+"Why, what are you talking about?" he asked, astonished. Had she found
+out anything? Was the incident of the scraps of paper really closed? Had
+anybody been telling her anything about Carlotta? Instantly he was all
+at sea. Still he had to pretend.
+
+"You know I care," he said. "How can you say that?"
+
+"You don't. You know you don't!" she flared up suddenly. "Why do you
+lie? You don't care. Don't touch me. Don't come near me. I'm sick of
+your hypocritical pretences! Oh!" And she straightened up with her
+finger nails cutting into her palms.
+
+Eugene at the first expression of disbelief on her part had laid his
+hand soothingly on her arm. That was why she had jumped away from him.
+Now he drew back, nonplussed, nervous, a little defiant. It was easier
+to combat rage than sorrow; but he did not want to do either.
+
+"What's the matter with you?" he asked, assuming a look of bewildered
+innocence. "What have I done now?"
+
+"What haven't you done, you'd better ask. You dog! You coward!" flared
+Angela. "Leaving me to stay out in Wisconsin while you go running around
+with a shameless woman. Don't deny it! Don't dare to deny it!"--this
+apropos of a protesting movement on the part of Eugene's head--"I know
+all! I know more than I want to know. I know how you've been acting. I
+know what you've been doing. I know how you've been lying to me. You've
+been running around with a low, vile wretch of a woman while I have been
+staying out in Blackwood eating my heart out, that's what you've been
+doing. Dear Angela! Dear Angelface! Dear Madonna Doloroso! Ha! What have
+you been calling her, you lying, hypocritical coward! What names have
+you for her, Hypocrite! Brute! Liar! I know what you've been doing. Oh,
+how well I know! Why was I ever born?--oh, why, why?"
+
+Her voice trailed off in a wail of agony. Eugene stood there astonished
+to the point of inefficiency. He could not think of a single thing to do
+or say. He had no idea upon what evidence she based her complaint. He
+fancied that it must be much more than had been contained in that little
+note which he had torn up. She had not seen that--of that he was
+reasonably sure--or was he? Could she have taken it out of the box while
+he was in the bath and then put it back again? This sounded like it. She
+had looked very bad that night. How much did she know? Where had she
+secured this information? Mrs. Hibberdell? Carlotta? No! Had she seen
+her? Where? When?
+
+"You're talking through your hat," he said aimlessly and largely in
+order to get time. "You're crazy! What's got into you, anyhow? I haven't
+been doing anything of the sort."
+
+"Oh, haven't you!" she sneered. "You haven't been meeting her at bridges
+and road houses and street cars, have you? You liar! You haven't been
+calling her 'Ashes of Roses' and 'River Nymph' and 'Angel Girl.'" Angela
+was making up names and places out of her own mind. "I suppose you used
+some of the pet names on her that you gave to Christina Channing, didn't
+you? She'd like those, the vile strumpet! And you, you dog, pretending
+to me--pretending sympathy, pretending loneliness, pretending sorrow
+that I couldn't be here! A lot you cared what I was doing or thinking or
+suffering. Oh, I hate you, you horrible coward! I hate her! I hope
+something terrible happens to you. If I could get at her now I would
+kill her and you both--and myself. I would! I wish I could die! I wish I
+could die!"
+
+Eugene was beginning to get the measure of his iniquity as Angela
+interpreted it. He could see now how cruelly he had hurt her. He could
+see now how vile what he was doing looked in her eyes. It was bad
+business--running with other women--no doubt of it. It always ended in
+something like this--a terrible storm in which he had to sit by and hear
+himself called brutal names to which there was no legitimate answer. He
+had heard of this in connection with other people, but he had never
+thought it would come to him. And the worst of it was that he was guilty
+and deserving of it. No doubt of that. It lowered him in his own
+estimation. It lowered her in his and her own because she had to fight
+this way. Why did he do it? Why did he drag her into such a situation?
+It was breaking down that sense of pride in himself which was the only
+sustaining power a man had before the gaze of the world. Why did he let
+himself into these situations? Did he really love Carlotta? Did he want
+pleasure enough to endure such abuse as this? This was a terrible scene.
+And where would it end? His nerves were tingling, his brain fairly
+aching. If he could only conquer this desire for another type and be
+faithful, and yet how dreadful that seemed! To confine himself in all
+his thoughts to just Angela! It was not possible. He thought of these
+things, standing there enduring the brunt of this storm. It was a
+terrible ordeal, but it was not wholly reformatory even at that.
+
+"What's the use of your carrying on like that, Angela?" he said grimly,
+after he had listened to all this. "It isn't as bad as you think. I'm
+not a liar, and I'm not a dog! You must have pieced that note I threw in
+the paper box together and read it. When did you do it?"
+
+He was curious about that and about how much she knew. What were her
+intentions in regard to him? What in regard to Carlotta? What would she
+do next?
+
+"When did I do it?" she replied. "When did I do it? What has that to do
+with it? What right have you to ask? Where is this woman, that's what I
+want to know? I want to find her. I want to face her. I want to tell her
+what a wretched beast she is. I'll show her how to come and steal
+another woman's husband. I'll kill her. I'll kill her and I'll kill you,
+too. Do you hear? I'll kill you!" And she advanced on him defiantly,
+blazingly.
+
+Eugene was astounded. He had never seen such rage in any woman. It was
+wonderful, fascinating, something like a great lightning-riven storm.
+Angela was capable of hurling thunderbolts of wrath. He had not known
+that. It raised her in his estimation--made her really more attractive
+than she would otherwise have been, for power, however displayed, is
+fascinating. She was so little, so grim, so determined! It was in its
+way a test of great capability. And he liked her for it even though he
+resented her abuse.
+
+"No, no, Angela," he said sympathetically and with a keen wish to
+alleviate her sorrow. "You would not do anything like that. You
+couldn't!"
+
+"I will! I will!" she declared. "I'll kill her and you, too!"
+
+And then having reached this tremendous height she suddenly broke.
+Eugene's big, sympathetic understanding was after all too much for her.
+His brooding patience in the midst of her wrath, his innate sorrow for
+what he could not or would not help (it was written all over his face),
+his very obvious presentation of the fact by his attitude that he knew
+that she loved him in spite of this, was too much for her. It was like
+beating her hands against a stone. She might kill him and this woman,
+whoever she was, but she would not have changed his attitude toward her,
+and that was what she wanted. A great torrent of heart-breaking sobs
+broke from her, shaking her frame like a reed. She threw her arms and
+head upon the kitchen table, falling to her knees, and cried and cried.
+Eugene stood there contemplating the wreck he had made of her dreams.
+Certainly it was hell, he said to himself; certainly it was. He was a
+liar, as she said, a dog, a scoundrel. Poor little Angela! Well, the
+damage had been done. What could he do now? Anything? Certainly not. Not
+a thing. She was broken--heart-broken. There was no earthly remedy for
+that. Priests might shrive for broken laws, but for a broken heart what
+remedy was there?
+
+"Angela!" he called gently. "Angela! I'm sorry! Don't cry! Angela!!
+Don't cry!"
+
+But she did not hear him. She did not hear anything. Lost in the agony
+of her situation, she could only sob convulsively until it seemed that
+her pretty little frame would break to pieces.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+Eugene's feelings on this occasion were of reasonable duration. It is
+always possible under such circumstances to take the victim of our
+brutalities in our arms and utter a few sympathetic or repentant words.
+The real kindness and repentance which consists in reformation is quite
+another matter. One must see with eyes too pure to behold evil to do
+that. Eugene was not to be reformed by an hour or many hours of agony on
+anyone's part. Angela was well within the range of his sympathetic
+interests. He suffered with her keenly, but not enough to outrun or
+offset his own keen desire for what he considered his spiritual right to
+enjoy beauty. What harm did it do, he would have asked himself, if he
+secretly exchanged affectionate looks and feelings with Carlotta or any
+other woman who fascinated him and in turn was fascinated by him? Could
+an affinity of this character really be called evil? He was not giving
+her any money which Angela ought to have, or very little. He did not
+want to marry her--and she really did not want to marry him, he
+thought--there was no chance of that, anyhow. He wanted to associate
+with her. And what harm did that do Angela? None, if she did not know.
+Of course, if she knew, it was very sad for her and for him. But, if the
+shoe were on the other foot, and Angela was the one who was acting as he
+was acting now he would not care, he thought. He forgot to add that if
+he did not care it would be because he was not in love, and Angela was
+in love. Such reasoning runs in circles. Only it is not reasoning. It is
+sentimental and emotional anarchy. There is no will toward progress in
+it.
+
+When Angela recovered from her first burst of rage and grief it was only
+to continue it further, though not in quite the same vein. There can
+only be one superlative in any field of endeavor. Beyond that may be
+mutterings and thunderings or a shining after-glow, but no second
+superlative. Angela charged him with every weakness and evil tendency,
+only to have him look at her in a solemn way, occasionally saying: "Oh,
+no! You know I'm not as bad as that," or "Why do you abuse me in that
+way? That isn't true," or "Why do you say that?"
+
+"Because it is so, and you know it's so," Angela would declare.
+
+"Listen, Angela," he replied once, with a certain amount of logic,
+"there is no use in brow-beating me in this way. It doesn't do any good
+to call me names. You want me to love you, don't you? That's all that
+you want. You don't want anything else. Will calling me names make me do
+it? If I can't I can't, and if I can I can. How will fighting help
+that?"
+
+She listened to him pitifully, for she knew that her rage was useless,
+or practically so. He was in the position of power. She loved him. That
+was the sad part of it. To think that tears and pleadings and wrath
+might not really avail, after all! He could only love her out of a
+desire that was not self-generated. That was something she was beginning
+to see in a dim way as a grim truth.
+
+Once she folded her hands and sat white and drawn, staring at the floor.
+"Well, I don't know what to do," she declared. "I suppose I ought to
+leave you. If it just weren't for my family! They all think so highly of
+the marriage state. They are so naturally faithful and decent. I suppose
+these qualities have to be born in people. They can't be acquired. You
+would have to be made over."
+
+Eugene knew she would not leave him. He smiled at the superior
+condescension of the last remark, though it was not intended as such by
+her. To think of his being made over after the model Angela and her
+relatives would lay down!
+
+"I don't know where I'd go or what I'd do," she observed. "I can't go
+back to my family. I don't want to go there. I haven't been trained in
+anything except school teaching, and I hate to think of that again. If I
+could only study stenography or book-keeping!" She was talking as much
+to clear her own mind as his. She really did not know what to do.
+
+Eugene listened to this self-demonstrated situation with a shamed face.
+It was hard for him to think of Angela being thrown out on the world as
+a book-keeper or a stenographer. He did not want to see her doing
+anything like that. In a way, he wanted to live with her, if it could be
+done in his way--much as the Mormons might, perhaps. What a lonely life
+hers would be if she were away from him! And she was not suited to it.
+She was not suited to the commercial world--she was too homey, too
+housewifely. He wished he could assure her now that she would not have
+further cause for grief and mean it, but he was like a sick man wishing
+he could do the things a hale man might. There was no self-conviction in
+his thoughts, only the idea that if he tried to do right in this matter
+he might succeed, but he would be unhappy. So he drifted.
+
+In the meanwhile Eugene had taken up his work with Deegan and was going
+through a very curious experience. At the time Deegan had stated that he
+would take him he had written to Haverford, making a polite request for
+transfer, and was immediately informed that his wishes would be granted.
+Haverford remembered Eugene kindly. He hoped he was improving. He
+understood from inquiry of the Superintendent of Buildings that Deegan
+was in need of a capable assistant, anyhow, and that Eugene could well
+serve in that capacity. The foreman was always in trouble about his
+reports. An order was issued to Deegan commanding him to receive Eugene,
+and another to Eugene from the office of the Superintendent of Buildings
+ordering him to report to Deegan. Eugene went, finding him working on
+the problem of constructing a coal bin under the depot at Fords Centre,
+and raising as much storm as ever. He was received with a grin of
+satisfaction.
+
+"So here ye arre. Will, ye're just in time. I want ye to go down to the
+ahffice."
+
+Eugene laughed. "Sure," he said. Deegan was down in a freshly excavated
+hole and his clothes were redolent of the freshly turned earth which
+surrounded him. He had a plumb bob in his hand and a spirit level, but
+he laid them down. Under the neat train shed to which he crawled when
+Eugene appeared and where they stood, he fished from a pocket of his old
+gray coat a soiled and crumpled letter which he carefully unfolded with
+his thick and clumsy fingers. Then he held it up and looked at it
+defiantly.
+
+"I want ye to go to Woodlawn," he continued, "and look after some bolts
+that arre theyer--there's a keg av thim--an' sign the bill fer thim, an'
+ship thim down to me. They're not miny. An' thin I waant ye to go down
+to the ahffice an' take thim this O. K." And here he fished around and
+produced another crumpled slip. "It's nonsinse!" he exclaimed, when he
+saw it. "It's onraisonable! They're aalways yillen fer thim
+O. K. blanks. Ye'd think, begad, I was goin' to steal thim from thim.
+Ye'd think I lived on thim things. O. K. blanks, O. K. blanks. From
+mornin' 'til night O. K. blanks. It's nonsinse! It's onraisonable!"
+And his face flushed a defiant red.
+
+Eugene could see that some infraction of the railroad's rules had
+occurred and that Deegan had been "called down," or "jacked up" about
+it, as the railroad men expressed it. He was in a high state of
+dudgeon--as defiant and pugnacious as his royal Irish temper would
+allow.
+
+"I'll fix it," said Eugene. "That's all right. Leave it to me."
+
+Deegan showed some signs of approaching relief. At last he had a man of
+"intilligence," as he would have expressed it. He flung a parting shot
+though at his superior as Eugene departed.
+
+"Tell thim I'll sign fer thim when I git thim and naat before!" he
+rumbled.
+
+Eugene laughed. He knew no such message would be accepted, but he was
+glad to give Deegan an opportunity to blow off steam. He entered upon
+his new tasks with vim, pleased with the out-of-doors, the sunshine, the
+opportunity for brief trips up and down the road like this. It was
+delightful. He would soon be all right now, that he knew.
+
+He went to Woodlawn and signed for the bolts; went to the office and met
+the chief clerk (delivering the desired O. K. blanks in person) who
+informed him of the chief difficulty in Deegan's life. It appeared that
+there were some twenty-five of these reports to be made out monthly, to
+say nothing of endless O. K. blanks to be filled in with acknowledgments
+of material received. Everything had to be signed for in this way,
+it mattered not whether it was a section of a bridge or a single bolt
+or a pound of putty. If a man could sit down and reel off a graphic report
+of what he was doing, he was the pride of the chief clerk's heart. His
+doing the work properly was taken as a matter of course. Deegan was not
+efficient at this, though he was assisted at times by his wife and all
+three of his children, a boy and two girls. He was constantly in hot
+water.
+
+"My God!" exclaimed the chief clerk, when Eugene explained that Deegan
+had thought that he might leave the bolts at the station where they
+would be safe until he needed them and then sign for them when he took
+them out. He ran his hands distractedly through his hair. "What do you
+think of that?" he exclaimed. "He'll leave them there until he needs
+them, will he? What becomes of my reports? I've got to have those
+O. K.'s. You tell Deegan he ought to know better than that; he's been
+long enough on the road. You tell him that I said that I want a signed
+form for everything consigned to him the moment he learns that it's
+waiting for him. And I want it without fail. Let him go and get it. The
+gall! He's got to come to time about this, or something's going to drop.
+I'm not going to stand it any longer. You'd better help him in this.
+I've got to make out my reports on time."
+
+Eugene agreed that he would. This was his field. He could help Deegan.
+He could be really useful.
+
+Time passed. The weather grew colder, and while the work was interesting
+at first, like all other things it began after a time to grow
+monotonous. It was nice enough when the weather was fine to stand out
+under the trees, where some culvert was being built to bridge a small
+rivulet or some well to supply the freight engines with water, and
+survey the surrounding landscape; but when the weather grew colder it
+was not so nice. Deegan was always interesting. He was forever raising a
+ruction. He lived a life of hard, narrow activity laid among boards,
+wheelbarrows, cement, stone, a life which concerned construction and had
+no particular joy in fruition. The moment a thing was nicely finished
+they had to leave it and go where everything would be torn up again.
+Eugene used to look at the wounded ground, the piles of yellow mud, the
+dirty Italians, clean enough in their spirit, but soiled and gnarled by
+their labor, and wonder how much longer he could stand it. To think that
+he, of all men, should be here working with Deegan and the _guineas_! He
+became lonesome at times--terribly, and sad. He longed for Carlotta,
+longed for a beautiful studio, longed for a luxurious, artistic life. It
+seemed that life had wronged him terribly, and yet he could do nothing
+about it. He had no money-making capacity.
+
+About this time the construction of a rather pretentious machine shop,
+two hundred by two hundred feet and four storeys high was assigned to
+Deegan, largely because of the efficiency which Eugene contributed to
+Deegan's work. Eugene handled his reports and accounts with rapidity and
+precision, and this so soothed the division management that they had an
+opportunity to see Deegan's real worth. The latter was beside himself
+with excitement, anticipating great credit and distinction for the work
+he was now to be permitted to do.
+
+"'Tis the foine time we'll have, Eugene, me bye," he exclaimed, "puttin'
+up that buildin'. 'Tis no culvert we'll be afther buildin' now. Nor no
+coal bin. Wait till the masons come. Then ye'll see somethin'."
+
+Eugene was pleased that their work was progressing so successfully, but
+of course there was no future in it for him. He was lonely and
+disheartened.
+
+Besides, Angela was complaining, and rightfully enough, that they were
+leading a difficult life--and to what end, so far as she was concerned?
+He might recover his health and his art (by reason of his dramatic
+shake-up and changes he appeared to be doing so), but what would that
+avail her? He did not love her. If he became prosperous again it might
+be to forsake her, and at best he could only give her money and position
+if he ever attained these, and how would that help? It was love that she
+wanted--his love. And she did not have that, or only a mere shadow of
+it. He had made up his mind after this last fatal argument that he would
+not pretend to anything he did not feel in regard to her, and this made
+it even harder. She did believe that he sympathized with her in his way,
+but it was an intellectual sympathy and had very little to do with the
+heart. He was sorry for her. Sorry! Sorry! How she hated the thought of
+that! If he could not do any better than that, what was there in all the
+years to come but misery?
+
+A curious fact to be noted about this period was that suspicion had so
+keyed up Angela's perceptions that she could almost tell, and that
+without knowing, when Eugene was with Carlotta or had been. There was
+something about his manner when he came in of an evening, to say nothing
+of those subtler thought waves which passed from him to her when he was
+with Carlotta, which told her instantly where he had been and what he
+had been doing. She would ask him where he had been and he would say:
+"Oh, up to White Plains" or "out to Scarborough," but nearly always when
+he had been with Carlotta she would flare up with, "Yes, I know where
+you've been. You've been out again with that miserable beast of a woman.
+Oh, God will punish her yet! You will be punished! Wait and see."
+
+Tears would flood her eyes and she would berate him roundly.
+
+Eugene stood in profound awe before these subtle outbreaks. He could not
+understand how it was that Angela came to know or suspect so accurately.
+To a certain extent he was a believer in spiritualism and the mysteries
+of a subconscious mind or self. He fancied that there must be some way
+of this subconscious self seeing or apprehending what was going on and
+of communicating its knowledge in the form of fear and suspicion to
+Angela's mind. If the very subtleties of nature were in league against
+him, how was he to continue or profit in this career? Obviously it could
+not be done. He would probably be severely punished for it. He was half
+terrified by the vague suspicion that there might be some laws which
+tended to correct in this way all the abuses in nature. There might be
+much vice and crime going seemingly unpunished, but there might also be
+much correction going on, as the suicides and deaths and cases of
+insanity seemed to attest. Was this true? Was there no escape from the
+results of evil except by abandoning it entirely? He pondered over this
+gravely.
+
+Getting on his feet again financially was not such an easy thing. He had
+been out of touch now so long with things artistic--the magazine world
+and the art agencies--that he felt as if he might not readily be able to
+get in touch again. Besides he was not at all sure of himself. He had
+made sketches of men and things at Speonk, and of Deegan and his gang on
+the road, and of Carlotta and Angela, but he felt that they were weak in
+their import--lacking in the force and feeling which had once
+characterized his work. He thought of trying his hand at newspaper work
+if he could make any sort of a connection--working in some obscure
+newspaper art department until he should feel himself able to do better;
+but he did not feel at all confident that he could get that. His severe
+breakdown had made him afraid of life--made him yearn for the sympathy
+of a woman like Carlotta, or of a larger more hopeful, more tender
+attitude, and he dreaded looking for anything anywhere. Besides he hated
+to spare the time unless he were going to get somewhere. His work was so
+pressing. But he knew he must quit it. He thought about it wearily,
+wishing he were better placed in this world; and finally screwed up his
+courage to leave this work, though it was not until something else was
+quite safely in his hands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+It was only after a considerable lapse of time, when trying to live on
+nine dollars a week and seeing Angela struggle almost hopelessly in her
+determination to live on what he earned and put a little aside, that he
+came to his senses and made a sincere effort to find something better.
+During all this time he had been watching her narrowly, seeing how
+systematically she did all her own house work, even under these adverse
+and trying circumstances, cooking, cleaning, marketing. She made over
+her old clothes, reshaping them so that they would last longer and still
+look stylish. She made her own hats, doing everything in short that she
+could to make the money in the bank hold out until Eugene should be on
+his feet. She was willing that he should take money and buy himself
+clothes when she was not willing to spend it on herself. She was living
+in the hope that somehow he would reform. Consciousness of what she was
+worth to him might some day strike him. Still she did not feel that
+things could ever be quite the same again. She could never forget, and
+neither could he.
+
+The affair between Eugene and Carlotta, because of the various forces
+that were militating against it, was now slowly drawing to a close. It
+had not been able to endure all the storm and stress which followed its
+discovery. For one thing, Carlotta's mother, without telling her
+husband, made him feel that he had good cause to stay about, which made
+it difficult for Carlotta to act. Besides she charged her daughter
+constantly, much as Angela was charging Eugene, with the utmost
+dissoluteness of character and was as constantly putting her on the
+defensive. She was too hedged about to risk a separate apartment, and
+Eugene would not accept money from her to pay for expensive indoor
+entertainment. She wanted to see him but she kept hoping he would get to
+the point where he would have a studio again and she could see him as a
+star in his own field. That would be so much nicer.
+
+By degrees their once exciting engagements began to lapse, and despite
+his grief Eugene was not altogether sorry. To tell the truth, great
+physical discomfort recently had painted his romantic tendencies in a
+very sorry light for him. He thought he saw in a way where they were
+leading him. That there was no money in them was obvious. That the
+affairs of the world were put in the hands of those who were content to
+get their life's happiness out of their management, seemed quite plain.
+Idlers had nothing as a rule, not even the respect of their fellow men.
+The licentious were worn threadbare and disgraced by their ridiculous
+and psychologically diseased propensities. Women and men who indulged in
+these unbridled relations were sickly sentimentalists, as a rule, and
+were thrown out or ignored by all forceful society. One had to be
+strong, eager, determined and abstemious if wealth was to come, and then
+it had to be held by the same qualities. One could not relax. Otherwise
+one became much what he was now, a brooding sentimentalist--diseased in
+mind and body.
+
+So out of love-excitement and poverty and ill health and abuse he was
+coming to see or thought he was this one fact clearly,--namely that he
+must behave himself if he truly wished to succeed. Did he want to? He
+could not say that. But he had to--that was the sad part of it--and
+since apparently he had to, he would do the best he could. It was grim
+but it was essential.
+
+At this time Eugene still retained that rather ultra artistic appearance
+which had characterized his earlier years, but he began to suspect that
+on this score he was a little bizarre and out of keeping with the spirit
+of the times. Certain artists whom he met in times past and recently,
+were quite commercial in their appearance--the very successful ones--and
+he decided that it was because they put the emphasis upon the hard facts
+of life and not upon the romance connected with their work. It impressed
+him and he decided to do likewise, abandoning the flowing tie and the
+rather indiscriminate manner he had of combing his hair, and thereafter
+affected severe simplicity. He still wore a soft hat because he thought
+it became him best, but otherwise he toned himself down greatly. His
+work with Deegan had given him a sharp impression of what hard, earnest
+labor meant. Deegan was nothing but a worker. There was no romance in
+him. He knew nothing about romance. Picks and shovels and mortar boards
+and concrete forms--such was his life, and he never complained. Eugene
+remembered commiserating him once on having to get up at four A. M. in
+order to take a train which would get to work by seven. Darkness and
+cold made no difference to him, however.
+
+"Shewer, I have to be theyre," he had replied with his quizzical Irish
+grin. "They're not payin' me me wages fer lyin' in bed. If ye were to
+get up that way every day fer a year it would make a man of ye!"
+
+"Oh, no," said Eugene teasingly.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Deegan, "it would. An' yere the wan that's needin' it. I
+can tell that by the cut av ye."
+
+Eugene resented this but it stayed by him. Deegan had the habit of
+driving home salutary lessons in regard to work and abstemiousness
+without really meaning to. The two were wholly representative of
+him--just those two things and nothing more.
+
+One day he went down into Printing House Square to see if he could not
+make up his mind to apply at one of the newspaper art departments, when
+he ran into Hudson Dula whom he had not seen for a long while. The
+latter was delighted to see him.
+
+"Why, hello, Witla!" he exclaimed, shocked to see that he was
+exceptionally thin and pale. "Where have you been all these years? I'm
+delighted to see you. What have you been doing? Let's go over here to
+Hahn's and you tell me all about yourself."
+
+"I've been sick, Dula," said Eugene frankly. "I had a severe case of
+nervous breakdown and I've been working on the railroad for a change. I
+tried all sorts of specialists, but they couldn't help me. So I decided
+to go to work by the day and see what that would do. I got all out of
+sorts with myself and I've been pretty near four years getting back. I
+think I am getting better, though. I'm going to knock off on the road
+one of these days and try my hand at painting again. I think I can do
+it."
+
+"Isn't that curious," replied Dula reminiscently, "I was just thinking
+of you the other day and wondering where you were. You know I've quit
+the art director game. _Truth_ failed and I went into the lithographic
+business. I have a small interest in a plant that I'm managing down in
+Bond Street. I wish you'd come in and see me some day."
+
+"I certainly will," said Eugene.
+
+"Now this nervousness of yours," said Dula, as they strolled into the
+restaurant where they were dining. "I have a brother-in-law that was hit
+that way. He's still doctoring around. I'm going to tell him about your
+case. You don't look so bad."
+
+"I'm feeling much better," said Eugene. "I really am but I've had a bad
+spell of it. I'm going to come back in the game, though, I feel sure of
+it. When I do I'll know better how to take care of myself. I over-worked
+on that first burst of pictures."
+
+"I must say that was the best stuff of that kind I ever saw done in this
+country," said Dula. "I saw both your shows, as you remember. They were
+splendid. What became of all those pictures?"
+
+"Oh, some were sold and the rest are in storage," replied Eugene.
+
+"Curious, isn't it," said Dula. "I should have thought all those things
+would have been purchased. They were so new and forceful in treatment.
+You want to pull yourself together and stay pulled. You're going to have
+a great future in that field."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," replied Eugene pessimistically. "It's all right to
+obtain a big reputation, but you can't live on that, you know. Pictures
+don't sell very well over here. I have most of mine left. A grocer with
+one delivery wagon has the best artist that ever lived backed right off
+the board for financial results."
+
+"Not quite as bad as that," said Dula smilingly. "An artist has
+something which a tradesman can never have--you want to remember that.
+His point of view is worth something. He lives in a different world
+spiritually. And then financially you can do well enough--you can live,
+and what more do you want? You're received everywhere. You have what the
+tradesman cannot possibly attain--distinction; and you give the world a
+standard of merit--you will, at least. If I had your ability I would
+never sit about envying any butcher or baker. Why, all the artists know
+you now--the good ones, anyhow. It only remains for you to do more, to
+obtain more. There are lots of things you can do."
+
+"What, for instance?" asked Eugene.
+
+"Why, ceilings, mural decorations. I was saying to someone the other day
+what a mistake it was the Boston Library did not assign some of their
+panels to you. You would make splendid things of them."
+
+"You certainly have a world of faith in me," replied Eugene, tingling
+warmly. It was like a glowing fire to hear this after all the dreary
+days. Then the world still remembered him. He was worth while.
+
+"Do you remember Oren Benedict--you used to know him out in Chicago,
+didn't you?"
+
+"I certainly did," replied Eugene. "I worked with him."
+
+"He's down on the _World_ now, in charge of the art department there.
+He's just gone there." Then as Eugene exclaimed over the curious shifts
+of time, he suddenly added, "Why wouldn't that be a good idea for you?
+You say you're just about to knock off. Why don't you go down and do
+some pen work to get your hand in? It would be a good experience for
+you. Benedict would be glad to put you on, I'm sure."
+
+Dula suspected that Eugene might be out of funds, and this would be an
+easy way for him to slip into something which would lead back to studio
+work. He liked Eugene. He was anxious to see him get along. It flattered
+him to think he had been the first to publish his work in color.
+
+"That isn't a bad idea," said Eugene. "I was really thinking of doing
+something like that if I could. I'll go up and see him maybe today. It
+would be just the thing I need now,--a little preliminary practise. I
+feel rather rusty and uncertain."
+
+"I'll call him up, if you want," said Dula generously. "I know him well.
+He was asking me the other day if I knew one or two exceptional men. You
+wait here a minute."
+
+Eugene leaned back in his chair as Dula left. Could it be that he was
+going to be restored thus easily to something better? He had thought it
+would be so hard. Now this chance was coming to lift him out of his
+sufferings at the right time.
+
+Dula came back. "He says 'Sure,'" he exclaimed. "'Come right down!'
+You'd better go down there this afternoon. That'll be just the thing for
+you. And when you are placed again, come around and see me. Where are
+you living?"
+
+Eugene gave him his address.
+
+"That's right, you're married," he added, when Eugene spoke of himself
+and Angela having a small place. "How is Mrs. Witla? I remember her as a
+very charming woman. Mrs. Dula and I have an apartment in Gramercy
+Place. You didn't know I had tied up, did you? Well, I have. Bring your
+wife and come to see us. We'll be delighted. I'll make a dinner date for
+you two."
+
+Eugene was greatly pleased and elated. He knew Angela would be. They had
+seen nothing of artistic life lately. He hurried down to see Benedict
+and was greeted as an old acquaintance. They had never been very chummy
+but always friendly. Benedict had heard of Eugene's nervous breakdown.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you," he said, after greeting and reminiscences were
+over, "I can't pay very much--fifty dollars is high here just at
+present, and I have just one vacancy now at twenty-five which you can
+have if you want to try your hand. There's a good deal of hurry up about
+at times, but you don't mind that. When I get things straightened out
+here I may have something better."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," replied Eugene cheerfully. "I'm glad to get
+that." (He was very glad indeed.) "And I don't mind the hurry. It will
+be good for a change."
+
+Benedict gave him a friendly handshake in farewell. He was glad to have
+him, for he knew what he could do.
+
+"I don't think I can come before Monday. I have to give a few days'
+notice. Is that all right?"
+
+"I could use you earlier, but Monday will do," said Benedict, and they
+parted genially.
+
+Eugene hurried back home. He was delighted to tell Angela, for this
+would rob their condition of part of its gloom. It was no great comfort
+to him to be starting in as a newspaper artist again at twenty-five
+dollars a week, but it couldn't be helped, and it was better than
+nothing. At least it was putting him back on the track again. He was
+sure to do still better after this. He could hold this newspaper job, he
+felt, and outside that he didn't care very much for the time being; his
+pride had received some severe jolts. It was vastly better than day
+labor, anyway. He hurried up the four flights of stairs to the cheap
+little quarters they occupied, saying when he saw Angela at the gas
+range: "Well, I guess our railroad days are over."
+
+"What's the trouble?" asked Angela apprehensively.
+
+"No trouble," he replied. "I have a better job."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I'm going to be a newspaper artist for a while on the _World_."
+
+"When did you find that out?" she asked, brightening, for she had been
+terribly depressed over their state.
+
+"This afternoon. I'm going to work Monday. Twenty-five dollars will be
+some better than nine, won't it?"
+
+Angela smiled. "It certainly will," she said, and tears of thanksgiving
+filled her eyes.
+
+Eugene knew what those tears stood for. He was anxious to avoid painful
+reminiscences.
+
+"Don't cry," he said. "Things are going to be much better from now on."
+
+"Oh, I hope so, I hope so," she murmured, and he patted her head
+affectionately as it rested on his shoulder.
+
+"There now. Cheer up, girlie, will you! We're going to be all right from
+now on."
+
+Angela smiled through her tears. She set the table, exceedingly
+cheerful.
+
+"That certainly is good news," she laughed afterward. "But we're not
+going to spend any more money for a long while, anyhow. We're going to
+save something. We don't want to get in this hole again."
+
+"No more for mine," replied Eugene gaily, "not if I know my business,"
+and he went into the one little combination parlor, sitting room,
+reception room and general room of all work, to open his evening
+newspaper and whistle. In his excitement he almost forgot his woes over
+Carlotta and the love question in general. He was going to climb again
+in the world and be happy with Angela. He was going to be an artist or a
+business man or something. Look at Hudson Dula. Owning a lithographic
+business and living in Gramercy Place. Could any artist he knew do that?
+Scarcely. He would see about this. He would think this art business
+over. Maybe he could be an art director or a lithographer or something.
+He had often thought while he was with the road that he could be a good
+superintendent of buildings if he could only give it time enough.
+
+Angela, for her part, was wondering what this change really spelled for
+her. Would he behave now? Would he set himself to the task of climbing
+slowly and surely? He was getting along in life. He ought to begin to
+place himself securely in the world if he ever was going to. Her love
+was not the same as it had formerly been. It was crossed with dislike
+and opposition at times, but still she felt that he needed her to help
+him. Poor Eugene--if he only were not cursed with this weakness. Perhaps
+he would overcome it? So she mused.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+The work which Eugene undertook in connection with the art department of
+the _World_ was not different from that which he had done ten years
+before in Chicago. It seemed no less difficult for all his
+experience--more so if anything, for he felt above it these days and
+consequently out of place. He wished at once that he could get something
+which would pay him commensurately with his ability. To sit down among
+mere boys--there were men there as old as himself and older, though, of
+course, he did not pay so much attention to them--was galling. He
+thought Benedict should have had more respect for his talent than to
+have offered him so little, though at the same time he was grateful for
+what he had received. He undertook energetically to carry out all the
+suggestions given him, and surprised his superior with the speed and
+imagination with which he developed everything. He surprised Benedict
+the second day with a splendid imaginative interpretation of "the Black
+Death," which was to accompany a Sunday newspaper article upon the
+modern possibilities of plagues. The latter saw at once that Eugene
+could probably only be retained a very little while at the figure he had
+given him. He had made the mistake of starting him low, thinking that
+Eugene's talent after so severe an illness might be at a very low ebb.
+He did not know, being new to the art directorship of a newspaper, how
+very difficult it was to get increases for those under him. An advance
+of ten dollars to anyone meant earnest representation and an argument
+with the business manager, and to double and treble the salary, which
+should have been done in this case, was out of the question. Six months
+was a reasonable length of time for anyone to wait for an increase--such
+was the dictate of the business management--and in Eugene's case it was
+ridiculous and unfair. However, being still sick and apprehensive, he
+was content to abide by the situation, hoping with returning strength
+and the saving of a little money to put himself right eventually.
+
+Angela, of course, was pleased with the turn of affairs. Having suffered
+so long with only prospects of something worse in store, it was a great
+relief to go to the bank every Tuesday--Eugene was paid on Monday--and
+deposit ten dollars against a rainy day. It was agreed between them that
+they might use six for clothing, which Angela and Eugene very much
+needed, and some slight entertainment. It was not long before Eugene
+began to bring an occasional newspaper artist friend up to dinner, and
+they were invited out. They had gone without much clothing, with
+scarcely a single visit to the theatre, without friends--everything. Now
+the tide began slowly to change; in a little while, because they were
+more free to go to places, they began to encounter people whom they
+knew.
+
+There was six months of the drifting journalistic work, in which as in
+his railroad work he grew more and more restless, and then there came a
+time when he felt as if he could not stand that for another minute. He
+had been raised to thirty-five dollars and then fifty, but it was a
+terrific grind of exaggerated and to him thoroughly meretricious art.
+The only valuable results in connection with it were that for the first
+time in his life he was drawing a moderately secure living salary, and
+that his mind was fully occupied with details which gave him no time to
+think about himself. He was in a large room surrounded by other men who
+were as sharp as knives in their thrusts of wit, and restless and greedy
+in their attitude toward the world. They wanted to live brilliantly,
+just as he did, only they had more self-confidence and in many cases
+that extreme poise which comes of rare good health. They were inclined
+to think he was somewhat of a poseur at first, but later they came to
+like him--all of them. He had a winning smile and his love of a joke, so
+keen, so body-shaking, drew to him all those who had a good story to
+tell.
+
+"Tell that to Witla," was a common phrase about the office and Eugene
+was always listening to someone. He came to lunching with first one and
+then another, then three or four at a time; and by degrees Angela was
+compelled to entertain Eugene and two or three of his friends twice and
+sometimes three times a week. She objected greatly, and there was some
+feeling over that, for she had no maid and she did not think that Eugene
+ought to begin so soon to put the burden of entertainment upon their
+slender income. She wanted him to make these things very formal and by
+appointment, but Eugene would stroll in genially, explaining that he had
+Irving Nelson with him, or Henry Hare, or George Beers, and asking
+nervously at the last minute whether it was all right. Angela would say,
+"Certainly, to be sure," in front of the guests, but when they were
+alone there would be tears and reproaches and firm declarations that she
+would not stand it.
+
+"Well, I won't do it any more," Eugene would apologize. "I forgot, you
+know."
+
+Still he wanted Angela to get a maid and let him bring all who would
+come. It was a great relief to get back into the swing of things and see
+life broadening out once more.
+
+It was not so long after he had grown exceedingly weary of his underpaid
+relationship to the _World_ that he heard of something which promised a
+much better avenue of advancement. Eugene had been hearing for some time
+from one source and another of the development of art in advertising. He
+had read one or two articles on the subject in the smaller magazines,
+had seen from time to time curious and sometimes beautiful series of ads
+run by first one corporation and then another, advertising some product.
+He had always fancied in looking at these things that he could get up a
+notable series on almost any subject, and he wondered who handled these
+things. He asked Benedict one night, going up on the car with him, what
+he knew about it.
+
+"Why so far as I know," said Benedict, "that is coming to be quite a
+business. There is a man out in Chicago, Saljerian, an American
+Syrian--his father was a Syrian, but he was born over here--who has
+built up a tremendous business out of designing series of ads like that
+for big corporations. He got up that Molly Maguire series for the new
+cleaning fluid. I don't think he does any of the work himself. He hires
+artists to do it. Some of the best men, I understand, have done work for
+him. He gets splendid prices. Then some of the big advertising agencies
+are taking up that work. One of them I know. The Summerville Company has
+a big art department in connection with it. They employ fifteen to
+eighteen men all the time, sometimes more. They turn out some
+fine ads, too, to my way of thinking. Do you remember that Korno
+series?"--Benedict was referring to a breakfast food which had been
+advertised by a succession of ten very beautiful and very clever
+pictures.
+
+"Yes," replied Eugene.
+
+"Well, they did that."
+
+Eugene thought of this as a most interesting development. Since the days
+in which he worked on the Alexandria _Appeal_ he had been interested in
+ads. The thought of ad creation took his fancy. It was newer than
+anything else he had encountered recently. He wondered if there would
+not be some chance in that field for him. His paintings were not
+selling. He had not the courage to start a new series. If he could make
+some money first, say ten thousand dollars, so that he could get an
+interest income of say six or seven hundred dollars a year, he might be
+willing to risk art for art's sake. He had suffered too much--poverty
+had scared him so that he was very anxious to lean on a salary or a
+business income for the time being.
+
+It was while he was speculating over this almost daily that there came
+to him one day a young artist who had formerly worked on the _World_--a
+youth by the name of Morgenbau--Adolph Morgenbau--who admired Eugene and
+his work greatly and who had since gone to another paper. He was very
+anxious to tell Eugene something, for he had heard of a change coming in
+the art directorship of the Summerville Company and he fancied for one
+reason and another that Eugene might be glad to know of it. Eugene had
+never looked to Morgenbau like a man who ought to be working in a
+newspaper art department. He was too self-poised, too superior, too
+wise. Morgenbau had conceived the idea that Eugene was destined to make
+a great hit of some kind and with that kindling intuition that sometimes
+saves us whole he was anxious to help Eugene in some way and so gain his
+favor.
+
+"I have something I'd like to tell you, Mr. Witla," he observed.
+
+"Well, what is it?" smiled Eugene.
+
+"Are you going out to lunch?"
+
+"Certainly, come along."
+
+They went out together and Morgenbau communicated to Eugene what he had
+heard--that the Summerfield Company had just dismissed, or parted
+company with, or lost, a very capable director by the name of Freeman,
+and that they were looking for a new man.
+
+"Why don't you apply for that?" asked Morgenbau. "You could hold it.
+You're doing just the sort of work that would make great ads. You know
+how to handle men, too. They like you. All the young fellows around here
+do. Why don't you go and see Mr. Summerfield? He's up in Thirty-fourth
+Street. You might be just the man he's looking for, and then you'd have
+a department of your own."
+
+Eugene looked at this boy, wondering what had put this idea in his head.
+He decided to call up Dula and did so at once, asking him what he
+thought would be the best move to make. The latter did not know
+Summerville [sic], but he knew someone who did.
+
+"I'll tell you what you do, Eugene," he said. "You go and see Baker
+Bates of the Satina Company. That's at the corner of Broadway and Fourth
+Street. We do a big business with the Satina Company, and they do a big
+business with Summerfield. I'll send a letter over to you by a boy and
+you take that. Then I'll call Bates up on the phone, and if he's
+favorable he can speak to Summerfield. He'll want to see you, though."
+
+Eugene was very grateful and eagerly awaited the arrival of the letter.
+He asked Benedict for a little time off and went to Mr. Baker Bates. The
+latter had heard enough from Dula to be friendly. He had been told by
+the latter that Eugene was potentially a great artist, slightly down on
+his luck, but that he was doing exceedingly well where he was and would
+do better in the new place. He was impressed by Eugene's appearance, for
+the latter had changed his style from the semi-artistic to the
+practical. He thought Eugene looked capable. He was certainly pleasant.
+
+"I'll talk to Mr. Summerfield for you," he said, "though I wouldn't put
+much hope in what will come of it if I were you. He's a difficult man
+and it's best not to appear too eager in this matter. If he can be
+induced to send for you it will be much better. You let this rest until
+tomorrow. I'll call him up on another matter and take him out to lunch,
+and then I'll see how he stands and who he has in mind, if he has
+anyone. He may have, you know. If there is a real opening I'll speak of
+you. We'll see."
+
+Eugene went away once more, very grateful. He was thinking that Dula had
+always meant good luck to him. He had taken his first important drawing.
+The pictures he had published for him had brought him the favor of M.
+Charles. Dula had secured him the position that he now had. Would he be
+the cause of his getting this one?
+
+On the way down town on the car he encountered a cross-eyed boy. He had
+understood from someone recently that cross-eyed boys were good
+luck--cross-eyed women bad luck. A thrill of hopeful prognostication
+passed over him. In all likelihood he was going to get this place. If
+this sign came true this time, he would believe in signs. They had come
+true before, but this would be a real test. He stared cheerfully at the
+boy and the latter looked him full in the eyes and grinned.
+
+"That settles it!" said Eugene. "I'm going to get it."
+
+Still he was far from being absolutely sure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+The Summerfield Advertising Agency, of which Mr. Daniel
+C. Summerfield was president, was one of those curious exfoliations or
+efflorescences of the personality of a single individual which is so
+often met with in the business world, and which always means a
+remarkable individual behind them. The ideas, the enthusiasm, the
+strength of Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was all there was to the
+Summerfield Advertising Agency. It was true there was a large force of
+men working for him, advertising canvassers, advertising writers,
+financial accountants, artists, stenographers, book-keepers and the
+like, but they were all as it were an emanation or irradiation of the
+personality of Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield. He was small, wiry,
+black-haired, black-eyed, black-mustached, with an olive complexion and
+even, pleasing, albeit at times wolfish, white teeth which indicated a
+disposition as avid and hungry as a disposition well might be.
+
+Mr. Summerfield had come up into his present state of affluence or
+comparative affluence from the direst poverty and by the directest
+route--his personal efforts. In the State in which he had originated,
+Alabama, his family had been known, in the small circle to which they
+were known at all, as poor white trash. His father had been a rather
+lackadaisical, half-starved cotton planter who had been satisfied with a
+single bale or less of cotton to the acre on the ground which he leased,
+and who drove a lean mule very much the worse for age and wear, up and
+down the furrows of his leaner fields the while he complained of "the
+misery" in his breast. He was afflicted with slow consumption or thought
+he was, which was just as effective, and in addition had hook-worm,
+though that parasitic producer of hopeless tiredness was not yet
+discovered and named.
+
+Daniel Christopher, his eldest son, had been raised with scarcely any
+education, having been put in a cotton mill at the age of seven, but
+nevertheless he soon manifested himself as the brain of the family. For
+four years he worked in the cotton mill, and then, because of his
+unusual brightness, he had been given a place in the printing shop of
+the Wickham Union, where he was so attractive to the slow-going
+proprietor that he soon became foreman of the printing department and
+then manager. He knew nothing of printing or newspapers at the time, but
+the little contact he obtained here soon cleared his vision. He saw
+instantly what the newspaper business was, and decided to enter it.
+Later, as he grew older, he suspected that no one knew very much about
+advertising as yet, or very little, and that he was called by God to
+revise it. With this vision of a still wider field of usefulness in his
+mind, he began at once to prepare himself for it, reading all manner of
+advertising literature and practicing the art of display and effective
+statement. He had been through such bitter things as personal fights
+with those who worked under him, knocking one man down with a heavy iron
+form key; personal altercation with his own father and mother in which
+he frankly told them that they were failures, and that they had better
+let him show them something about regulating their hopeless lives. He
+had quarreled with his younger brothers, trying to dominate them, and
+had succeeded in controlling the youngest, principally for the very good
+reason that he had become foolishly fond of him; this younger brother he
+later introduced into his advertising business. He had religiously saved
+the little he had earned thus far, invested a part of it in the further
+development of the Wickham _Union_, bought his father an eight acre
+farm, which he showed him how to work, and finally decided to come to
+New York to see if he could not connect himself with some important
+advertising concern where he could learn something more about the one
+thing that interested him. He was already married, and he brought his
+young wife with him from the South.
+
+He soon connected himself as a canvasser with one of the great agencies
+and advanced rapidly. He was so smiling, so bland, so insistent, so
+magnetic, that business came to him rapidly. He became the star man in
+this New York concern and Alfred Cookman, who was its owner and manager,
+was soon pondering what he could do to retain him. No individual or
+concern could long retain Daniel C. Summerfield, however, once he
+understood his personal capabilities. In two years he had learned all
+that Alfred Cookman had to teach him and more than he could teach him.
+He knew his customers and what their needs were, and where the lack was
+in the service which Mr. Cookman rendered them. He foresaw the drift
+toward artistic representation of saleable products, and decided to go
+into that side of it. He would start an agency which would render a
+service so complete and dramatic that anyone who could afford to use his
+service would make money.
+
+When Eugene first heard of this agency, the Summerfield concern was six
+years old and rapidly growing. It was already very large and profitable
+and as hard and forceful as its owner. Daniel C. Summerfield, sitting in
+his private office, was absolutely ruthless in his calculations as to
+men. He had studied the life of Napoleon and had come to the conclusion
+that no individual life was important. Mercy was a joke to be eliminated
+from business. Sentiment was silly twaddle. The thing to do was to hire
+men as cheaply as possible, to drive them as vigorously as possible, and
+to dispose of them quickly when they showed signs of weakening under the
+strain. He had already had five art directors in as many years, had
+"hired and fired," as he termed it, innumerable canvassers, ad writers,
+book-keepers, stenographers, artists--getting rid of anyone and everyone
+who showed the least sign of incapacity or inefficiency. The great
+office floor which he maintained was a model of cleanliness, order--one
+might almost say beauty of a commercial sort, but it was the
+cleanliness, order and beauty of a hard, polished and well-oiled
+machine. Daniel C. Summerfield was not much more than that, but he had
+long ago decided that was what he must be in order not to be a failure,
+a fool, and as he called it, "a mark," and he admired himself for being
+so.
+
+When Mr. Baker Bates at Hudson Dula's request went to Mr. Summerfield in
+regard to the rumored vacancy which really existed, the latter was in a
+most receptive frame of mind. He had just come into two very important
+advertising contracts which required a lot of imagination and artistic
+skill to execute, and he had lost his art director because of a row over
+a former contract. It was true that in very many cases--in most cases,
+in fact--his customers had very definite ideas as to what they wanted to
+say and how they wanted to say it, but not always. They were almost
+always open to suggestions as to modifications and improvements, and in
+a number of very important cases they were willing to leave the entire
+theory of procedure to the Summerfield Advertising Company. This called
+for rare good judgment not only in the preparation, but in the placing
+of these ads, and it was in the matter of their preparation--the many
+striking ideas which they should embody--that the judgment and
+assistance of a capable art director of real imagination was most
+valuable.
+
+As has already been said, Mr. Summerfield had had five art directors in
+almost as many years. In each case he had used the Napoleonic method of
+throwing a fresh, unwearied mind into the breach of difficulty, and when
+it wearied or broke under the strain, tossing it briskly out. There was
+no compunction or pity connected with any detail of this method. "I hire
+good men and I pay them good wages," was his favorite comment. "Why
+shouldn't I expect good results?" If he was wearied or angered by
+failure he was prone to exclaim--"These Goddamned cattle of artists!
+What can you expect of them? They don't know anything outside their
+little theory of how things ought to look. They don't know anything
+about life. Why, God damn it, they're like a lot of children. Why should
+anybody pay any attention to what they think? Who cares what they think?
+They give me a pain in the neck." Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was very
+much given to swearing, more as a matter of habit than of foul
+intention, and no picture of him would be complete without the
+interpolation of his favorite expressions.
+
+When Eugene appeared on the horizon as a possible applicant for this
+delightful position, Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was debating with himself
+just what he should do in connection with the two new contracts in
+question. The advertisers were awaiting his suggestions eagerly. One was
+for the nation-wide advertising of a new brand of sugar, the second for
+the international display of ideas in connection with a series of French
+perfumes, the sale of which depended largely upon the beauty with which
+they could be interpreted to the lay mind. The latter were not only to
+be advertised in the United States and Canada, but in Mexico also, and
+the fulfilment of the contracts in either case was dependent upon the
+approval given by the advertisers to the designs for newspaper, car and
+billboard advertising which he should submit. It was a ticklish
+business, worth two hundred thousand dollars in ultimate profits, and
+naturally he was anxious that the man who should sit in the seat of
+authority in his art department should be one of real force and
+talent--a genius if possible, who should, through his ideas, help him
+win his golden harvest.
+
+The right man naturally was hard to find. The last man had been only
+fairly capable. He was dignified, meditative, thoughtful, with
+considerable taste and apprehension as to what the material situation
+required in driving home simple ideas, but he had no great imaginative
+grasp of life. In fact no man who had ever sat in the director's chair
+had ever really suited Mr. Summerfield. According to him they had all
+been weaklings. "Dubs; fakes; hot air artists," were some of his
+descriptions of them. Their problem, however, was a hard one, for they
+had to think very vigorously in connection with any product which he
+might be trying to market, and to offer him endless suggestions as to
+what would be the next best thing for a manufacturer to say or do to
+attract attention to what he had to sell. It might be a catch phrase
+such as "Have You Seen This New Soap?" or "Do You Know Soresda?--It's
+Red." It might be that a novelty in the way of hand or finger, eye or
+mouth was all that was required, carrying some appropriate explanation
+in type. Sometimes, as in the case of very practical products, their
+very practical display in some clear, interesting, attractive way was
+all that was needed. In most cases, though, something radically new was
+required, for it was the theory of Mr. Summerfield that his ads must not
+only arrest the eye, but fix themselves in the memory, and convey a fact
+which was or at least could be made to seem important to the reader. It
+was a struggling with one of the deepest and most interesting phases of
+human psychology.
+
+The last man, Older Freeman, had been of considerable use to him in his
+way. He had collected about him a number of fairly capable artists--men
+temporarily down on their luck--who like Eugene were willing to take a
+working position of this character, and from them he had extracted by
+dint of pleading, cajoling, demonstrating and the like a number of
+interesting ideas. Their working hours were from nine to five-thirty,
+their pay meagre--eighteen to thirty-five, with experts drawing in
+several instances fifty and sixty dollars, and their tasks innumerable
+and really never-ending. Their output was regulated by a tabulated
+record system which kept account of just how much they succeeded in
+accomplishing in a week, and how much it was worth to the concern. The
+ideas on which they worked were more or less products of the brains of
+the art director and his superior, though they occasionally themselves
+made important suggestions, but for their proper execution, the amount
+of time spent on them, the failures sustained, the art director was more
+or less responsible. He could not carry to his employer a poor drawing
+of a good idea, or a poor idea for something which required a superior
+thought, and long hope to retain his position. Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield
+was too shrewd and too exacting. He was really tireless in his energy.
+It was his art director's business, he thought, to get him good ideas
+for good drawings and then to see that they were properly and speedily
+executed.
+
+Anything less than this was sickening failure in the eyes of
+Mr. Summerfield, and he was not at all bashful in expressing himself. As
+a matter of fact, he was at times terribly brutal. "Why the hell do you
+show me a thing like that?" he once exclaimed to Freeman. "Jesus Christ;
+I could hire an ashman and get better results. Why, God damn it, look at
+the drawing of the arm of that woman. Look at her ear. Whose going to
+take a thing like that? It's tame! It's punk! It's a joke! What sort of
+cattle have you got out there working for you, anyhow? Why, if the
+Summerfield Advertising Company can't do better than that I might as
+well shut up the place and go fishing. We'll be a joke in six weeks.
+Don't try to hand me any such God damned tripe as that, Freeman. You
+know better. You ought to know our advertisers wouldn't stand for
+anything like that. Wake up! I'm paying you five thousand a year. How do
+you expect I'm going to get my money back out of any such arrangement as
+that? You're simply wasting my money and your time letting a man draw a
+thing like that. Hell!!"
+
+The art director, whoever he was, having been by degrees initiated into
+the brutalities of the situation, and having--by reason of the time he
+had been employed and the privileges he had permitted himself on account
+of his comfortable and probably never before experienced salary--sold
+himself into bondage to his now fancied necessities, was usually humble
+and tractable under the most galling fire. Where could he go and get
+five thousand dollars a year for his services? How could he live at the
+rate he was living if he lost this place? Art directorships were not
+numerous. Men who could fill them fairly acceptably were not impossible
+to find. If he thought at all and was not a heaven-born genius serene in
+the knowledge of his God-given powers, he was very apt to hesitate, to
+worry, to be humble and to endure a good deal. Most men under similar
+circumstances do the same thing. They think before they fling back into
+the teeth of their oppressors some of the slurs and brutal
+characterizations which so frequently issue therefrom. Most men do.
+Besides there is almost always a high percentage of truth in the charges
+made. Usually the storm is for the betterment of mankind.
+Mr. Summerfield knew this. He knew also the yoke of poverty and the
+bondage of fear which most if not all his men were under. He had no
+compunctions about using these weapons, much as a strong man might use a
+club. He had had a hard life himself. No one had sympathized with him
+very much. Besides you couldn't sympathize and succeed. Better look the
+facts in the face, deal only with infinite capacity, roughly weed out
+the incompetents and proceed along the line of least resistance, in so
+far as your powerful enemies were concerned. Men might theorize and
+theorize until the crack of doom, but this was the way the thing had to
+be done and this was the way he preferred to do it.
+
+Eugene had never heard of any of these facts in connection with the
+Summerfield Company. The idea had been flung at him so quickly he had no
+time to think, and besides if he had had time it would have made no
+difference. A little experience of life had taught him as it teaches
+everyone else to mistrust rumor. He had applied for the place on hearing
+and he was hoping to get it. At noon the day following his visit to
+Mr. Baker Bates, the latter was speaking for him to Mr. Summerfield, but
+only very casually.
+
+"Say," he asked, quite apropos of nothing apparently, for they were
+discussing the chances of his introducing his product into South
+America, "do you ever have need of an art director over in your place?"
+
+"Occasionally," replied Summerfield guardedly, for his impression was
+that Mr. Baker Bates knew very little of art directors or anything else
+in connection with the art side of advertising life. He might have heard
+of his present need and be trying to palm off some friend of his, an
+incompetent, of course, on him. "What makes you ask?"
+
+"Why, Hudson Dula, the manager of the Triple Lithographic Company, was
+telling me of a man who is connected with the _World_ who might make a
+good one for you. I know something of him. He painted some rather
+remarkable views of New York and Paris here a few years ago. Dula tells
+me they were very good."
+
+"Is he young?" interrupted Summerfield, calculating.
+
+"Yes, comparatively. Thirty-one or two, I should say."
+
+"And he wants to be an art director, does he. Where is he?"
+
+"He's down on the _World_, and I understand he wants to get out of
+there. I heard you say last year that you were looking for a man, and I
+thought this might interest you."
+
+"What's he doing down on the _World_?"
+
+"He's been sick, I understand, and is just getting on his feet again."
+
+The explanation sounded sincere enough to Summerfield.
+
+"What's his name?" he asked.
+
+"Witla, Eugene Witla. He had an exhibition at one of the galleries here
+a few years ago."
+
+"I'm afraid of these regular high-brow artists," observed Summerfield
+suspiciously. "They're usually so set up about their art that there's no
+living with them. I have to have someone with hard, practical sense in
+my work. Someone that isn't a plain damn fool. He has to be a good
+manager--a good administrator, mere talent for drawing won't do--though
+he has to have that, or know it when he sees it. You might send this
+fellow around sometime if you know him. I wouldn't mind looking at him.
+I may need a man pretty soon. I'm thinking of making certain changes."
+
+"If I see him I will," said Baker indifferently and dropped the matter.
+Summerfield, however, for some psychological reason was impressed with
+the name. Where had he heard it? Somewhere apparently. Perhaps he had
+better find out something about him.
+
+"If you send him you'd better give him a letter of introduction," he
+added thoughtfully, before Bates should have forgotten the matter. "So
+many people try to get in to see me, and I may forget."
+
+Baker knew at once that Summerfield wished to look at Witla. He dictated
+a letter of introduction that afternoon to his stenographer and mailed
+it to Eugene.
+
+"I find Mr. Summerfield apparently disposed to see you," he wrote. "You
+had better go and see him if you are interested. Present this letter.
+Very truly yours."
+
+Eugene looked at it with astonishment and a sense of foregoneness so far
+as what was to follow. Fate was fixing this for him. He was going to get
+it. How strange life was! Here he was down on the _World_ working for
+fifty dollars a week, and suddenly an art directorship, a thing he had
+thought of for years, was coming to him out of nowhere! Then he decided
+to telephone Mr. Daniel Summerfield, saying that he had a letter from
+Mr. Baker Bates and asking when he could see him. Later he decided to
+waste no time, but to present the letter direct without phoning. At
+three in the afternoon he received permission from Benedict to be away
+from the office between three and five, and at three-thirty he was in
+the anteroom of the general offices of the Summerfield Advertising
+Company, waiting for a much desired permission to enter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+When Eugene called, Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was in no great rush about
+any particular matter, but he had decided in this case as he had in many
+others that it was very important that anyone who wanted anything from
+him should be made to wait. Eugene was made to wait a solid hour before
+he was informed by an underling that he was very sorry but that other
+matters had so detained Mr. Summerfield that it was now impossible for
+him to see him at all this day, but that tomorrow at twelve he would be
+glad to see him. Eugene was finally admitted on the morrow, however, and
+then, at the first glance, Mr. Summerfield liked him. "A man of
+intelligence," he thought, as he leaned back in his chair and stared at
+him. "A man of force. Young still, wide-eyed, quick, clean looking.
+Perhaps I have found someone in this man who will make a good art
+director." He smiled, for Summerfield was always good-natured in his
+opening relationships--usually so in all of them, and took most people
+(his employees and prospective employees particularly) with an air of
+superior but genial condescension.
+
+"Sit down! Sit down!" he exclaimed cheerfully and Eugene did so, looking
+about at the handsomely decorated walls, the floor which was laid with a
+wide, soft, light brown rug, and the mahogany desk, flat-topped, glass
+covered, on which lay handsome ornaments of silver, ivory and bronze.
+This man looked so keen, so dynamic, like a polished Japanese carving,
+hard and smooth.
+
+"Now tell me all about yourself," began Summerfield. "Where do you come
+from? Who are you? What have you done?"
+
+"Hold! Hold!" said Eugene easily and tolerantly. "Not so fast. My
+history isn't so much. The short and simple annals of the poor. I'll
+tell you in two or three sentences."
+
+Summerfield was a little taken back at this abruptness which was
+generated by his own attitude; still he liked it. This was something new
+to him. His applicant wasn't frightened or apparently even nervous so
+far as he could judge. "He is droll," he thought, "sufficiently so--a
+man who has seen a number of things evidently. He is easy in manner,
+too, and kindly."
+
+"Well," he said smilingly, for Eugene's slowness appealed to him. His
+humor was something new in art directors. So far as he could recall, his
+predecessors had never had any to speak of.
+
+"Well, I'm an artist," said Eugene, "working on the _World_. Let's hope
+that don't militate against me very much."
+
+"It don't," said Summerfield.
+
+"And I want to become an art director because I think I'd make a good
+one."
+
+"Why?" asked Summerfield, his even teeth showing amiably.
+
+"Well, because I like to manage men, or I think I do. And they take to
+me."
+
+"You know that?"
+
+"I do. In the next place I know too much about art to want to do the
+little things that I'm doing. I can do bigger things."
+
+"I like that also," applauded Summerfield. He was thinking that Eugene
+was nice and good looking, a little pale and thin to be wholly forceful,
+perhaps, he wasn't sure. His hair a little too long. His manner,
+perhaps, a bit too deliberate. Still he was nice. Why did he wear a soft
+hat? Why did artists always insist on wearing soft hats, most of them?
+It was so ridiculous, so unbusinesslike.
+
+"How much do you get?" he added, "if it's a fair question."
+
+"Less than I'm worth," said Eugene. "Only fifty dollars. But I took it
+as a sort of health cure. I had a nervous breakdown several years
+ago--better now, as Mulvaney used to say--and I don't want to stay at
+that. I'm an art director by temperament, or I think I am. Anyhow, here
+I am."
+
+"You mean," said Summerfield, "you never ran an art department before?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"Know anything about advertising?"
+
+"I used to think so."
+
+"How long ago was that?"
+
+"When I worked on the Alexandria, Illinois, _Daily Appeal_."
+
+Summerfield smiled. He couldn't help it.
+
+"That's almost as important as the Wickham _Union_, I fancy. It sounds
+as if it might have the same wide influence."
+
+"Oh, much more, much more," returned Eugene quietly. "The Alexandria
+_Appeal_ had the largest exclusively country circulation of any county
+south of the Sangamon."
+
+"I see! I see!" replied Summerfield good-humoredly. "It's all day with
+the Wickham _Union_. Well, how was it you came to change your mind?"
+
+"Well, I got a few years older for one thing," said Eugene. "And then I
+decided that I was cut out to be the greatest living artist, and then I
+came to New York, and in the excitement I almost lost the idea."
+
+"I see."
+
+"But I have it again, thank heaven, tied up back of the house, and here
+I am."
+
+"Well, Witla, to tell you the truth you don't look like a real live,
+every day, sure-enough art director, but you might make good. You're not
+quite art-y enough according to the standards that prevail around this
+office. Still I might be willing to take one gosh-awful chance. I
+suppose if I do I'll get stung as usual, but I've been stung so often
+that I ought to be used to it by now. I feel sort of spotted at times
+from the hornets I've hired in the past. But, be that as it may, what do
+you think you could do with a real live art directorship if you had it?"
+
+Eugene mused. This persiflage entertained him. He thought Summerfield
+would hire him now that they were together.
+
+"Oh, I'd draw my salary first and then I'd see that I had the proper
+system of approach so that any one who came to see me would think I was
+the King of England, and then I'd----"
+
+"I was really busy yesterday," interpolated Summerfield apologetically.
+
+"I'm satisfied of that," replied Eugene gaily. "And finally I might
+condescend, if I were coaxed enough, to do a little work."
+
+This speech at once irritated and amused Mr. Summerfield. He liked a man
+of spirit. You could do something with someone who wasn't afraid, even
+if he didn't know so much to begin with. And Eugene knew a good deal, he
+fancied. Besides, his talk was precisely in his own sarcastic,
+semi-humorous vein. Coming from Eugene it did not sound so hard as it
+would have coming from himself, but it had his own gay, bantering
+attitude of mind in it. He believed Eugene could make good. He wanted to
+try him, instanter, anyhow.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you what, Witla," he finally observed. "I don't know
+whether you can run this thing or not--the probabilities are all against
+you as I have said, but you seem to have some ideas or what might be
+made some under my direction, and I think I'll give you a chance. Mind
+you, I haven't much confidence. My personal likes usually prove very
+fatal to me. Still, you're here, and I like your looks and I haven't
+seen anyone else, and so----"
+
+"Thanks," said Eugene.
+
+"Don't thank me. You have a hard job ahead of you if I take you. It's no
+child's play. You'd better come with me first and look over the place,"
+and he led the way out into the great central room where, because it was
+still noon time, there were few people working, but where one could see
+just how imposing this business really was.
+
+"Seventy-two stenographers, book-keepers, canvassers and writers and
+trade-aid people at their desks," he observed with an easy wave of his
+hand, and moved on into the art department, which was in another wing of
+the building where a north and east light could be secured. "Here's
+where you come in," he observed, throwing open the door where thirty-two
+artists' desks and easels were ranged. Eugene was astonished.
+
+"You don't employ that many, do you?" he asked interestedly. Most of the
+men were out to lunch.
+
+"From twenty to twenty-five all the time, sometimes more," he said.
+"Some on the outside. It depends on the condition of business."
+
+"And how much do you pay them, as a rule?"
+
+"Well, that depends. I think I'll give you seventy-five dollars a week
+to begin with, if we come to an understanding. If you make good I'll
+make it a hundred dollars a week inside of three months. It all depends.
+The others we don't pay so much. The business manager can tell you."
+
+Eugene noticed the evasion. His eyes narrowed. Still there was a good
+chance here. Seventy-five dollars was considerably better than fifty and
+it might lead to more. He would be his own boss--a man of some
+consequence. He could not help stiffening with pride a little as he
+looked at the room which Summerfield pointed out to him as his own if he
+came--a room where a large, highly polished oak desk was placed and
+where some of the Summerfield Advertising Company's art products were
+hung on the walls. There was a nice rug on the floor and some
+leather-backed chairs.
+
+"Here's where you will be if you come here," said Summerfield.
+
+Eugene gazed round. Certainly life was looking up. How was he to get
+this place? On what did it depend? His mind was running forward to
+various improvements in his affairs, a better apartment for Angela,
+better clothes for her, more entertainment for both of them, freedom
+from worry over the future; for a little bank account would soon result
+from a place like this.
+
+"Do you do much business a year?" Eugene asked curiously.
+
+"Oh, about two million dollars' worth."
+
+"And you have to make drawings for every ad?"
+
+"Exactly, not one but six or eight sometimes. It depends upon the
+ability of the art director. If he does his work right I save money."
+
+Eugene saw the point.
+
+"What became of the other man?" he asked, noting the name of Older
+Freeman on the door.
+
+"Oh, he quit," said Summerville, "or rather he saw what was coming and
+got out of the way. He was no good. He was too weak. He was turning out
+work here which was a joke--some things had to be done over eight and
+nine times."
+
+Eugene discovered the wrath and difficulties and opposition which went
+with this. Summerfield was a hard man, plainly. He might smile and joke
+now, but anyone who took that chair would hear from him constantly. For
+a moment Eugene felt as though he could not do it, as though he had
+better not try it, and then he thought, "Why shouldn't I? It can't hurt
+me. If worst comes to worst, I have my art to fall back on."
+
+"Well, so it goes," he said. "If I don't make good, the door for mine, I
+suppose?"
+
+"No, no, nothing so easy," chuckled Summerfield; "the coal chute."
+
+Eugene noticed that he champed his teeth like a nervous horse, and that
+he seemed fairly to radiate waves of energy. For himself he winced the
+least bit. This was a grim, fighting atmosphere he was coming into. He
+would have to fight for his life here--no doubt of that.
+
+"Now," said Summerfield, when they were strolling back to his own
+office. "I'll tell you what you might do. I have two propositions, one
+from the Sand Perfume Company and another from the American Crystal
+Sugar Refining Company which may mean big contracts for me if I can
+present them the right line of ideas for advertising. They want to
+advertise. The Sand Company wants suggestions for bottles, labels, car
+ads, newspaper ads, posters, and so on. The American Crystal Company
+wants to sell its sugar in small packages, powdered, grained, cubed,
+hexagoned. We want package forms, labels, posters ads, and so on for
+that. It's a question of how much novelty, simplicity and force we can
+put in the smallest possible space. Now I depend upon my art director to
+tell me something about these things. I don't expect him to do
+everything. I'm here and I'll help him. I have men in the trade aid
+department out there who are wonders at making suggestions along this
+line, but the art director is supposed to help. He's the man who is
+supposed to have the taste and can execute the proposition in its last
+form. Now suppose you take these two ideas and see what you can do with
+them. Bring me some suggestions. If they suit me and I think you have
+the right note, I'll hire you. If not, well then I won't, and no harm
+done. Is that all right?"
+
+"That's all right," said Eugene.
+
+Mr. Summerfield handed him a bundle of papers, catalogues, prospectuses,
+communications. "You can look these over if you want to. Take them along
+and then bring them back."
+
+Eugene rose.
+
+"I'd like to have two or three days for this," he said. "It's a new
+proposition to me. I think I can give you some ideas--I'm not sure.
+Anyhow, I'd like to try."
+
+"Go ahead! Go ahead!" said Summerfield, "the more the merrier. And I'll
+see you any time you're ready. I have a man out there--Freeman's
+assistant--who's running things for me temporarily. Here's luck," and he
+waved his hand indifferently.
+
+Eugene went out. Was there ever such a man, so hard, so cold, so
+practical! It was a new note to him. He was simply astonished, largely
+because he was inexperienced. He had not yet gone up against the
+business world as those who try to do anything in a big way commercially
+must. This man was getting on his nerves already, making him feel that
+he had a tremendous problem before him, making him think that the quiet
+realms of art were merely the backwaters of oblivion. Those who did
+anything, who were out in the front row of effort, were fighters such as
+this man was, raw products of the soil, ruthless, superior, indifferent.
+If only he could be that way, he thought. If he could be strong,
+defiant, commanding, what a thing it would be. Not to wince, not to
+quail, but to stand up firm, square to the world and make people obey.
+Oh, what a splendid vision of empire was here before him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+The designs or suggestions which Eugene offered his prospective employer
+for the advertising of the products of M. Sand et Cie and the American
+Crystal Sugar Refining Company, were peculiar. As has been indicated,
+Eugene had one of those large, effervescent intelligences which when he
+was in good physical condition fairly bubbled ideas. His imaginings,
+without any effort on his part, naturally took all forms and shapes. The
+call of Mr. Summerfield was for street car cards, posters and newspaper
+ads of various sizes, and what he wanted Eugene specifically to supply
+was not so much the lettering or rather wording of the ads as it was
+their artistic form and illustrative point: what one particular
+suggestion in the form of a drawing or design could be made in each case
+which would arrest public attention. Eugene went home and took the sugar
+proposition under consideration first. He did not say anything of what
+he was really doing to Angela, because he did not want to disappoint
+her. He pretended that he was making sketches which he might offer to
+some company for a little money and because it amused him. By the light
+of his green shaded working lamp at home he sketched designs of hands
+holding squares of sugar, either in the fingers or by silver and gold
+sugar tongs, urns piled high with crystalline concoctions, a blue and
+gold after-dinner cup with one lump of the new form on the side against
+a section of snow white table cloth, and things of that character. He
+worked rapidly and with ease until he had some thirty-five suggestions
+on this one proposition alone, and then he turned his attention to the
+matter of the perfumery.
+
+His first thought was that he did not know all the designs of the
+company's bottles, but he originated peculiar and delightful shapes of
+his own, some of which were afterwards adopted by the company. He
+designed boxes and labels to amuse himself and then made various
+still-life compositions such as a box, a bottle, a dainty handkerchief
+and a small white hand all showing in a row. His mind slipped to the
+manufacture of perfume, the growing of flowers, the gathering of
+blossoms, the type of girls and men that might possibly be employed, and
+then he hurried to the great public library the next day to see if he
+could find a book or magazine article which would tell him something
+about it. He found this and several articles on sugar growing and
+refining which gave him new ideas in that direction. He decided that in
+each case he would put a beautifully designed bottle of perfume or a
+handsome package of sugar, say, in the upper right or lower left-hand
+corner of the design, and then for the rest show some scene in the
+process of its manufacture. He began to think of men who could carry out
+his ideas brilliantly if they were not already on his staff, letterers,
+character artists, men with a keen sense of color combination whom he
+might possibly hire cheaply. He thought of Jerry Mathews of the old
+Chicago _Globe_ days--where was he now?--and Philip Shotmeyer, who would
+be almost ideal to work under his direction, for he was a splendid
+letterer, and Henry Hare, still of the _World_, with whom he had
+frequently talked on the subject of ads and posters. Then there was
+young Morgenbau, who was a most excellent character man, looking to him
+for some opportunity, and eight or ten men whose work he had admired in
+the magazines--the best known ones. He decided first to see what could
+be done with the staff that he had, and then to eliminate and fill in as
+rapidly as possible until he had a capable working group. He had already
+caught by contact with Summerfield some of that eager personage's
+ruthlessness and began to manifest it in his own attitude. He was most
+impressionable to things advantageous to himself, and this chance to
+rise to a higher level out of the slough of poverty in which he had so
+greatly suffered nerved him to the utmost effort. In two days he had a
+most impressive mass of material to show his prospective employer, and
+he returned to his presence with considerable confidence. The latter
+looked over his ideas carefully and then began to warm to his attitude
+of mind.
+
+"I should say!" he said generously, "there's some life to this stuff. I
+can see you getting the five thousand a year all right if you keep on.
+You're a little new, but you've caught the drift." And he sat down to
+show him where some improvements from a practical point of view could be
+made.
+
+"Now, professor," he said finally when he was satisfied that Eugene was
+the man he wanted, "you and I might as well call this a deal. It's
+pretty plain to me that you've got something that I want. Some of these
+things are fine. I don't know how you're going to make out as a master
+of men, but you might as well take that desk out there and we'll begin
+right now. I wish you luck. I really do. You're a live wire, I think."
+
+Eugene thrilled with satisfaction. This was the result he wanted. No
+half-hearted commendation, but enthusiastic praise. He must have it. He
+always felt that he could command it. People naturally ran after him. He
+was getting used to it by now--taking it as a matter of course. If he
+hadn't broken down, curse the luck, think where he could have been
+today. He had lost five years and he was not quite well yet, but thank
+God he was getting steadily better, and he would try and hold himself in
+check from now on. The world demanded it.
+
+He went out with Summerfield into the art room and was there introduced
+by him to the various men employed. "Mr. Davis, Mr. Witla; Mr. Hart,
+Mr. Witla; Mr. Clemens, Mr. Witla," so it went, and the staff was soon
+aware of who he was. Summerfield then took him into the next room and
+introduced him to the various heads of departments, the business manager
+who fixed his and his artists' salaries, the cashier who paid him, the
+manager of the ad writing department, the manager of the trade aid
+department, and the head of the stenographic department, a woman. Eugene
+was a little disgusted with what he considered the crassness of these
+people. After the quality of the art atmosphere in which he had moved
+these people seemed to him somewhat raw and voracious, like fish. They
+had no refinement. Their looks and manners were unduly aggressive. He
+resented particularly the fact that one canvasser with whom he shook
+hands wore a bright red tie and had on yellow shoes. The insistence on
+department store models for suits and floor-walker manners pained him.
+
+"To hell with such cattle," he thought, but on the surface he smiled and
+shook hands and said how glad he would be to work with them. Finally
+when all the introductions were over he went back to his own department,
+to take up the work which rushed through here like a living stream,
+pellmell. His own staff was, of course, much more agreeable to him.
+These artists who worked for him interested him, for they were as he
+suspected men very much like himself, in poor health probably, or down
+on their luck and compelled to do this. He called for his assistant,
+Mr. Davis, whom Summerfield had introduced to him as such, and asked him
+to let him see how the work stood.
+
+"Have you a schedule of the work in hand?" he asked easily.
+
+"Yes, sir," said his new attendant.
+
+"Let me see it."
+
+The latter brought what he called his order book and showed him just how
+things worked. Each particular piece of work, or order as it was called,
+was given a number when it came in, the time of its entry marked on the
+slip, the name of the artist to whom it was assigned, the time taken to
+execute it, and so forth. If one artist only put two hours on it and
+another took it and put four, this was noted. If the first drawing was a
+failure and a second begun, the records would show all, the slips and
+errors of the office as well as its speed and capacity. Eugene perceived
+that he must see to it that his men did not make many mistakes.
+
+After this order book had been carefully inspected by him, he rose and
+strolled about among the men to see how they were getting on. He wanted
+to familiarize himself at once with the styles and methods of his men.
+Some were working on clothing ads, some on designs illustrative of the
+beef industry, some on a railroad travel series for the street cars, and
+so forth. Eugene bent over each one graciously, for he wanted to make
+friends with these people and win their confidence. He knew from
+experience how sensitive artists were--how they could be bound by
+feelings of good fellowship. He had a soft, easy, smiling manner which
+he hoped would smooth his way for him. He leaned over this man's
+shoulder and that asking what the point was, how long a piece of work of
+that character ought to take, suggesting where a man appeared to be in
+doubt what he thought would be advisable. He was not at all certain of
+himself--this line of work being so new--but he was hopeful and eager.
+It was a fine sensation, this being a boss, if one could only triumph at
+it. He hoped to help these men to help themselves; to make them make
+good in ways which would bring them and him more money. He wanted more
+money--that five thousand, no less.
+
+"I think you have the right idea there," he said to one pale, anaemic
+worker who looked as though he might have a lot of talent.
+
+The man, whose name was Dillon, responded to the soothing, caressing
+tone of his voice. He liked Eugene's appearance, though he was not at
+all disposed to pass favorable judgment as yet. It was already rumored
+that he had had an exceptional career as an artist. Summerfield had
+attended to that. He looked up and smiled and said, "Do you think so?"
+
+"I certainly do," said Eugene cheerfully. "Try a touch of yellow next to
+that blue. See if you don't like that."
+
+The artist did as requested and squinted at it narrowly. "It helps it a
+lot, don't it," he observed, as though it were his own.
+
+"It certainly does," said Eugene, "that's a good idea," and somehow
+Dillon felt as though he had thought of it. Inside of twenty minutes the
+whole staff was agreeing with itself that he was a nice man to all
+outward appearances and that he might make good. He appeared to be so
+sure. They little knew how perturbed he was inwardly, how anxious he was
+to get all the threads of this in his hand and to see that everything
+came to an ideal fruition. He dreaded the hour when he might have
+something to contend with which was not quite right.
+
+Days passed at this new work and then weeks, and by degrees he grew
+moderately sure of himself and comparatively easy in his seat, though he
+realized that he had not stepped into a bed of roses. He found this a
+most tempestuous office to work in, for Summerfield was, as he expressed
+it, "on the job" early and late, and tireless in his insistence and
+enthusiasm. He came down from his residence in the upper portion of the
+city at eight-fifty in the morning and remained almost invariably until
+six-thirty and seven and not infrequently until eight and nine in the
+evening. He had the inconsiderate habit of keeping such of his staff as
+happened to be working upon the thing in which he was interested until
+all hours of the night; sometimes transferring his deliberations to his
+own home and that without dinner or the proffer of it to those whom he
+made to work. He would talk advertising with one big merchant or another
+until it was time to go home, and would then call in the weary members
+of his staff before they had time to escape and begin a long and
+important discussion of something he wanted done. At times, when
+anything went wrong, he would fly into an insane fury, rave and curse
+and finally, perhaps, discharge the one who was really not to blame.
+There were no end of labored and irritating conferences in which hard
+words and sarcastic references would fly about, for he had no respect
+for the ability or personality of anyone who worked for him. They were
+all more or less machines in his estimation and rather poorly
+constructed ones at that. Their ideas were not good enough unless for
+the time being they happened to be new, or as in Eugene's case
+displaying pronounced talent.
+
+He could not fathom Eugene so readily, for he had never met anyone of
+his kind. He was looking closely in his case, as he was in that of all
+the others, to see if he could not find some weakness in his ideas. He
+had a gleaming, insistent, almost demoniac eye, a habit of chewing
+incessantly and even violently the stub end of a cigar, the habit of
+twitching, getting up and walking about, stirring things on his desk,
+doing anything and everything to give his restless, generative energy a
+chance to escape.
+
+"Now, professor," he would say when Eugene came in and seated himself
+quietly and unobtrusively in some corner, "we have a very difficult
+thing here to solve today. I want to know what you think could be done
+in such and such a case," describing a particular condition.
+
+Eugene would brace himself up and begin to consider, but rumination was
+not what Summerfield wanted from anyone.
+
+"Well, professor! well! well!" he would exclaim.
+
+Eugene would stir irritably. This was so embarrassing--in a way so
+degrading to him.
+
+"Come to life, professor," Summerfield would go on. He seemed to have
+concluded long before that the gad was the most effective commercial
+weapon.
+
+Eugene would then make some polite suggestion, wishing instead that he
+could tell him to go to the devil, but that was not the end of it.
+Before all the old writers, canvassers, trade aid men--sometimes one or
+two of his own artists who might be working upon the particular task in
+question, he would exclaim: "Lord! what a poor suggestion!" or "can't
+you do any better than that, professor?" or "good heavens, I have three
+or four ideas better than that myself." The best he would ever say in
+conference was, "Well, there may be something in that," though
+privately, afterwards, he might possibly express great pleasure. Past
+achievements counted for nothing; that was so plain. One might bring in
+gold and silver all day long; the next day there must be more gold and
+silver and in larger quantities. There was no end to the man's appetite.
+There was no limit to the speed at which he wished to drive his men.
+There was no limit to the venomous commercial idea as an idea.
+Summerfield set an example of nagging and irritating insistence, and he
+urged all his employees to the same policy. The result was a
+bear-garden, a den of prize-fighters, liars, cutthroats and thieves in
+which every man was for himself openly and avowedly and the devil take
+the hindmost.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+Still time went by, and although things did not improve very much in his
+office over the standards which he saw prevailing when he came there, he
+was obviously getting things much better arranged in his private life.
+In the first place Angela's attitude was getting much better. The old
+agony which had possessed her in the days when he was acting so badly
+had modified as day by day she saw him working and conducting himself
+with reasonable circumspection. She did not trust him as yet. She was
+not sure that he had utterly broken with Carlotta Wilson (she had never
+found out who his paramour was), but all the evidence seemed to attest
+it. There was a telephone down stairs in a drug store by which, during
+his days on the _World_, Angela would call him up at any time, and
+whenever she had called him up he was always in the office. He seemed to
+have plenty of time to take her to the theatre if she wished to go, and
+to have no especial desire to avoid her company. He had once told her
+frankly that he did not propose to pretend to love her any more, though
+he did care for her, and this frightened her. In spite of her wrath and
+suffering she cared for him, and she believed that he still sympathized
+with her and might come to care for her again--that he ought to.
+
+She decided to play the role of the affectionate wife whether it was
+true or not, and to hug and kiss him and fuss over him if he would let
+her, just as though nothing had happened. Eugene did not understand
+this. He did not see how Angela could still love him. He thought she
+must hate him, having such just grounds, for having by dint of hard work
+and absence come out of his vast excitement about Carlotta he was
+beginning to feel that he had done her a terrific injustice and to wish
+to make amends. He did not want to love her, he did not feel that he
+could, but he was perfectly willing to behave himself, to try to earn a
+good living, to take her to theatre and opera as opportunity permitted,
+and to build up and renew a social relationship with others which should
+act as a substitute for love. He was beginning to think that there was
+no honest or happy solution to any affair of the heart in the world.
+Most people so far as he could see were unhappily married. It seemed to
+be the lot of mankind to make mistakes in its matrimonial selections. He
+was probably no more unhappy than many others. Let the world wag as it
+would for a time. He would try to make some money now, and restore
+himself in the eyes of the world. Later, life might bring him
+something--who could tell?
+
+In the next place their financial condition, even before he left the
+_World_, was so much better than it had been. By dint of saving and
+scraping, refusing to increase their expenses more than was absolutely
+necessary, Angela had succeeded by the time he left the _World_ in
+laying by over one thousand dollars, and since then it had gone up to
+three thousand. They had relaxed sufficiently so that now they were
+wearing reasonably good clothes, were going out and receiving company
+regularly. It was not possible in their little apartment which they
+still occupied to entertain more than three or four at the outside, and
+two was all that Angela ever cared to consider as either pleasurable or
+comfortable; but they entertained this number frequently. There were
+some slight recoveries of friendship and of the old life--Hudson Dula,
+Jerry Mathews, who had moved to Newark; William McConnell, Philip
+Shotmeyer. MacHugh and Smite were away, one painting in Nova Scotia, the
+other working in Chicago. As for the old art crowd, socialists and
+radicals included, Eugene attempted to avoid them as much as possible.
+He knew nothing of the present whereabouts of Miriam Finch and Norma
+Whitmore. Of Christina Channing he heard much, for she was singing in
+Grand Opera, her pictures displayed in the paper and upon the
+billboards. There were many new friends, principally young newspaper
+artists like Adolph Morgenbau, who took to Eugene and were in a sense
+his disciples.
+
+Angela's relations showed up from time to time, among them David Blue,
+now a sub-lieutenant in the army, with all the army officer's pride of
+place and station. There were women friends of Angela's for whom Eugene
+cared little--Mrs. Desmas, the wife of the furniture manufacturer at
+Riverwood, from whom they had rented their four rooms there;
+Mrs. Wertheim, the wife of the multimillionaire, to whom M. Charles had
+introduced them; Mrs. Link, the wife of the West Point army captain who
+had come to the old Washington Square studio with Marietta and who was
+now stationed at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn; and a Mrs. Juergens, living
+in a neighboring apartment. As long as they were very poor, Angela was
+very careful how she revived acquaintances; but when they began to have
+a little money she decided that she might indulge her predilection and
+so make life less lonesome for herself. She had always been anxious to
+build up solid social connections for Eugene, but as yet she did not see
+how it was to be done.
+
+When Eugene's new connection with the Summerfield company was
+consummated, Angela was greatly astonished and rather delighted to think
+that if he had to work in this practical field for long it was to be
+under such comforting auspices--that is, as a superior and not as an
+underling. Long ago she had come to feel that Eugene would never make
+any money in a commercial way. To see him mounting in this manner was
+curious, but not wholly reassuring. They must save money; that was her
+one cry. They had to move soon, that was very plain, but they mustn't
+spend any more than they had to. She delayed until the attitude of
+Summerfield, upon an accidental visit to their flat, made it
+commercially advisable.
+
+Summerfield was a great admirer of Eugene's artistic ability. He had
+never seen any of his pictures, but he was rather keen to, and once when
+Eugene told him that they were still on display, one or two of them at
+Pottle Freres, Jacob Bergman's and Henry LaRue's, he decided to visit
+these places, but put it off. One night when he was riding uptown on the
+L road with Eugene he decided because he was in a vagrom mood to
+accompany him home and see his pictures there. Eugene did not want this.
+He was chagrined to be compelled to take him into their very little
+apartment, but there was apparently no way of escaping it. He tried to
+persuade him to visit Pottle Freres instead, where one picture was still
+on view, but Summerfield would none of that.
+
+"I don't like you to see this place," finally he said apologetically, as
+they were going up the steps of the five-story apartment house. "We are
+going to get out of here pretty soon. I came here when I worked on the
+road."
+
+Summerfield looked about at the poor neighborhood, the inlet of a canal
+some two blocks east where a series of black coal pockets were and to
+the north where there was flat open country and a railroad yard.
+
+"Why, that's all right," he said, in his direct, practical way. "It
+doesn't make any difference to me. It does to you, though, Witla. You
+know, I believe in spending money, everybody spending money. Nobody gets
+anywhere by saving anything. Pay out! Pay out--that's the idea. I found
+that out for myself long ago. You'd better move when you get a chance
+soon and surround yourself with clever people."
+
+Eugene considered this the easy talk of a man who was successful and
+lucky, but he still thought there was much in it. Summerfield came in
+and viewed the pictures. He liked them, and he liked Angela, though he
+wondered how Eugene ever came to marry her. She was such a quiet little
+home body. Eugene looked more like a Bohemian or a club man now that he
+had been worked upon by Summerfield. The soft hat had long since been
+discarded for a stiff derby, and Eugene's clothes were of the most
+practical business type he could find. He looked more like a young
+merchant than an artist. Summerfield invited them over to dinner at his
+house, refusing to stay to dinner here, and went his way.
+
+Before long, because of his advice they moved. They had practically four
+thousand by now, and because of his salary Angela figured that they
+could increase their living expenses to say two thousand five hundred or
+even three thousand dollars. She wanted Eugene to save two thousand each
+year against the day when he should decide to return to art. They sought
+about together Saturday afternoons and Sundays and finally found a
+charming apartment in Central Park West overlooking the park, where they
+thought they could live and entertain beautifully. It had a large
+dining-room and living-room which when the table was cleared away formed
+one great room. There was a handsomely equipped bathroom, a nice kitchen
+with ample pantry, three bedrooms, one of which Angela turned into a
+sewing room, and a square hall or entry which answered as a temporary
+reception room. There were plenty of closets, gas and electricity,
+elevator service with nicely uniformed elevator men, and a house
+telephone. It was very different from their last place, where they only
+had a long dark hall, stairways to climb, gas only, and no phone. The
+neighborhood, too, was so much better. Here were automobiles and people
+walking in the park or promenading on a Sunday afternoon, and obsequious
+consideration or polite indifference to your affairs from everyone who
+had anything to do with you.
+
+"Well, the tide is certainly turning," said Eugene, as they entered it
+the first day.
+
+He had the apartment redecorated in white and delft-blue and dark blue,
+getting a set of library and dining-room furniture in imitation
+rosewood. He bought a few choice pictures which he had seen at various
+exhibitions to mix with his own, and set a cut-glass bowl in the ceiling
+where formerly the commonplace chandelier had been. There were books
+enough, accumulated during a period of years, to fill the attractive
+white bookcase with its lead-paned doors. Attractive sets of bedroom
+furniture in bird's-eye maple and white enamel were secured, and the
+whole apartment given a very cosy and tasteful appearance. A piano was
+purchased outright and dinner and breakfast sets of Haviland china.
+There were many other dainty accessories, such as rugs, curtains,
+portieres, and so forth, the hanging of which Angela supervised. Here
+they settled down to a comparatively new and attractive life.
+
+Angela had never really forgiven him his indiscretions of the past, his
+radical brutality in the last instance, but she was not holding them up
+insistently against him. There were occasional scenes even yet, the
+echoes of a far-off storm; but as long as they were making money and
+friends were beginning to come back she did not propose to quarrel.
+Eugene was very considerate. He was very, very hard-working. Why should
+she nag him? He would sit by a window overlooking the park at night and
+toil over his sketches and ideas until midnight. He was up and dressed
+by seven, down to his office by eight-thirty, out to lunch at one or
+later, and only back home at eight or nine o'clock at night. Sometimes
+Angela would be cross with him for this, sometimes rail at
+Mr. Summerfield for an inhuman brute, but seeing that the apartment was
+so lovely and that Eugene was getting along so well, how could she
+quarrel? It was for her benefit as much as for his that he appeared to
+be working. He did not think about spending money. He did not seem to
+care. He would work, work, work, until she actually felt sorry for him.
+
+"Certainly Mr. Summerfield ought to like you," she said to him one day,
+half in compliment, half in a rage at a man who would exact so much from
+him. "You're valuable enough to him. I never saw a man who could work
+like you can. Don't you ever want to stop?"
+
+"Don't bother about me, Angelface," he said. "I have to do it. I don't
+mind. It's better than walking the streets and wondering how I'm going
+to get along"--and he fell to his ideas again.
+
+Angela shook her head. Poor Eugene! If ever a man deserved success for
+working, he certainly did. And he was really getting nice again--getting
+conventional. Perhaps it was because he was getting a little older. It
+might turn out that he would become a splendid man, after all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+There came a time, however, when all this excitement and wrath and
+quarreling began to unnerve Eugene and to make him feel that he could
+not indefinitely stand the strain. After all, his was the artistic
+temperament, not that of a commercial or financial genius. He was too
+nervous and restless. For one thing he was first astonished, then
+amused, then embittered by the continual travesty on justice, truth,
+beauty, sympathy, which he saw enacted before his eyes. Life stripped of
+its illusion and its seeming becomes a rather deadly thing to
+contemplate. Because of the ruthless, insistent, inconsiderate attitude
+of this employer, all the employees of this place followed his example,
+and there was neither kindness nor courtesy--nor even raw justice
+anywhere. Eugene was compelled to see himself looked upon from the
+beginning, not so much by his own staff as by the other employees of the
+company, as a man who could not last long. He was disliked forsooth
+because Summerfield displayed some liking for him, and because his
+manners did not coincide exactly with the prevailing standard of the
+office. Summerfield did not intend to allow his interest in Eugene to
+infringe in any way upon his commercial exactions, but this was not
+enough to save or aid Eugene in any way. The others disliked him, some
+because he was a true artist to begin with, because of his rather
+distant air, and because in spite of himself he could not take them all
+as seriously as he should.
+
+Most of them seemed little mannikins to him--little second, third, and
+fourth editions or copies of Summerfield. They all copied that worthy's
+insistent air. They all attempted to imitate his briskness. Like
+children, they were inclined to try to imitate his bitter persiflage and
+be smart; and they demanded, as he said they should, the last ounce of
+consideration and duty from their neighbors. Eugene was too much of a
+philosopher not to take much of this with a grain of salt, but after all
+his position depended on his activity and his ability to get results,
+and it was a pity, he thought, that he could expect neither courtesy nor
+favor from anyone. Departmental chiefs stormed his room daily, demanding
+this, that, and the other work immediately. Artists complained that they
+were not getting enough pay, the business manager railed because
+expenses were not kept low, saying that Eugene might be an improvement
+in the matter of the quality of the results obtained and the speed of
+execution, but that he was lavish in his expenditure. Others cursed
+openly in his presence at times, and about him to his employer, alleging
+that the execution of certain ideas was rotten, or that certain work was
+delayed, or that he was slow or discourteous. There was little in these
+things, as Summerfield well knew from watching Eugene, but he was too
+much a lover of quarrels and excitement as being productive of the best
+results in the long run to wish to interfere. Eugene was soon accused of
+delaying work generally, of having incompetent men (which was true), of
+being slow, of being an artistic snob. He stood it all calmly because of
+his recent experience with poverty, but he was determined to fight
+ultimately. He was no longer, or at least not going to be, he thought,
+the ambling, cowardly, dreaming Witla he had been. He was going to stand
+up, and he did begin to.
+
+"Remember, you are the last word here, Witla," Summerfield had told him
+on one occasion. "If anything goes wrong here, you're to blame. Don't
+make any mistakes. Don't let anyone accuse you falsely. Don't run to me.
+I won't help you."
+
+It was such a ruthless attitude that it shocked Eugene into an attitude
+of defiance. In time he thought he had become a hardened and a changed
+man--aggressive, contentious, bitter.
+
+"They can all go to hell!" he said one day to Summerfield, after a
+terrific row about some delayed pictures, in which one man who was
+animated by personal animosity more than anything else had said hard
+things about him. "The thing that's been stated here isn't so. My work
+is up to and beyond the mark. This individual here"--pointing to the man
+in question--"simply doesn't like me. The next time he comes into my
+room nosing about I'll throw him out. He's a damned fakir, and you know
+it. He lied here today, and you know that."
+
+"Good for you, Witla!" exclaimed Summerfield joyously. The idea of a
+fighting attitude on Eugene's part pleased him. "You're coming to life.
+You'll get somewhere now. You've got the ideas, but if you let these
+wolves run over you they'll do it, and they'll eat you. I can't help it.
+They're all no good. I wouldn't trust a single God-damned man in the
+place!"
+
+So it went. Eugene smiled. Could he ever get used to such a life? Could
+he ever learn to live with such cheap, inconsiderate, indecent little
+pups? Summerfield might like them, but he didn't. This might be a
+marvellous business policy, but he couldn't see it. Somehow it seemed to
+reflect the mental attitude and temperament of Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield
+and nothing more. Human nature ought to be better than that.
+
+It is curious how fortune sometimes binds up the wounds of the past,
+covers over the broken places as with clinging vines, gives to the
+miseries and mental wearinesses of life a look of sweetness and comfort.
+An illusion of perfect joy is sometimes created where still, underneath,
+are cracks and scars. Here were Angela and Eugene living together now,
+beginning to be visited by first one and then the other of those they
+had known in the past, seemingly as happy as though no storm had ever
+beset the calm of their present sailing. Eugene, despite all his woes,
+was interested in this work. He liked to think of himself as the captain
+of a score of men, having a handsome office desk, being hailed as chief
+by obsequious subordinates and invited here and there by Summerfield,
+who still liked him. The work was hard, but it was so much more
+profitable than anything he had ever had before. Angela was happier,
+too, he thought, than she had been in a long time, for she did not need
+to worry about money and his prospects were broadening. Friends were
+coming back to them in a steady stream, and they were creating new ones.
+It was possible to go to a seaside resort occasionally, winter or
+summer, or to entertain three or four friends at dinner. Angela had a
+maid. The meals were served with considerable distinction under her
+supervision. She was flattered to hear nice things said about her
+husband in her presence, for it was whispered abroad in art circles with
+which they were now slightly in touch again that half the effectiveness
+of the Summerfield ads was due to Eugene's talent. It was no shame for
+him to come out now and say where he was, for he was getting a good
+salary and was a department chief. He, or rather the house through him,
+had made several great hits, issuing series of ads which attracted the
+attention of the public generally to the products which they advertised.
+Experts in the advertising world first, and then later the public
+generally, were beginning to wonder who it was that was primarily
+responsible for the hits.
+
+The Summerfield company had not had them during the previous six years
+of its history. There were too many of them coming close together not to
+make a new era in the history of the house. Summerfield, it was
+understood about the office, was becoming a little jealous of Eugene,
+for he could not brook the presence of a man with a reputation; and
+Eugene, with his five thousand dollars in cash in two savings banks,
+with practically two thousand five hundred dollars' worth of tasteful
+furniture in his apartment and with a ten-thousand life-insurance policy
+in favor of Angela, was carrying himself with quite an air. He was not
+feeling so anxious about his future.
+
+Angela noted it. Summerfield also. The latter felt that Eugene was
+beginning to show his artistic superiority in a way which was not
+entirely pleasant. He was coming to have a direct, insistent, sometimes
+dictatorial manner. All the driving Summerfield had done had not
+succeeded in breaking his spirit. Instead, it had developed him. From a
+lean, pale, artistic soul, wearing a soft hat, he had straightened up
+and filled out until now he looked more like a business man than an
+artist, with a derby hat, clothes of the latest cut, a ring of oriental
+design on his middle finger, and pins and ties which reflected the
+prevailing modes.
+
+Eugene's attitude had not as yet changed completely, but it was
+changing. He was not nearly so fearsome as he had been. He was beginning
+to see that he had talents in more directions than one, and to have the
+confidence of this fact. Five thousand dollars in cash, with two or
+three hundred dollars being added monthly, and interest at four per
+cent, being paid upon it, gave him a reserve of self-confidence. He
+began to joke Summerfield himself, for he began to realize that other
+advertising concerns might be glad to have him. Word had been brought to
+him once that the Alfred Cookman Company, of which Summerfield was a
+graduate, was considering making him an offer, and the Twine-Campbell
+Company, the largest in the field, was also interested in what he was
+doing. His own artists, mostly faithful because he had sought to pay
+them well and to help them succeed, had spread his fame greatly.
+According to them, he was the sole cause of all the recent successes
+which had come to the house, which was not true at all.
+
+A number, perhaps the majority, of things recently had started with him;
+but they had been amplified by Summerfield, worked over by the
+ad-writing department, revised by the advertisers themselves, and so on
+and so forth, until notable changes had been effected and success
+achieved. There was no doubt that Eugene was directly responsible for a
+share of this. His presence was inspiring, constructive. He keyed up the
+whole tone of the Summerfield Company merely by being there; but he was
+not all there was to it by many a long step. He realized this himself.
+
+He was not at all offensively egotistic--simply surer, calmer, more
+genial, less easily ruffled; but even this was too much. Summerfield
+wanted a frightened man, and seeing that Eugene might be getting strong
+enough to slip away from him, he began to think how he should either
+circumvent his possible sudden flight, or discredit his fame, so that if
+he did leave he would gain nothing by it. Neither of them was directly
+manifesting any ill-will or indicating his true feelings, but such was
+the situation just the same. The things which Summerfield thought he
+might do were not easy to do under any circumstances. It was
+particularly hard in Eugene's case. The man was beginning to have an
+air. People liked him. Advertisers who met him, the big manufacturers,
+took note of him. They did not understand him as a trade figure, but
+thought he must have real force. One man--a great real estate plunger in
+New York, who saw him once in Summerfield's office--spoke to the latter
+about him.
+
+"That's a most interesting man you have there, that man Witla," he said,
+when they were out to lunch together. "Where does he come from?"
+
+"Oh, the West somewhere!" replied Summerfield evasively. "I don't know.
+I've had so many art directors I don't pay much attention to them."
+
+Winfield (ex-Senator Kenyon C. Winfield, of Brooklyn) perceived a slight
+undercurrent of opposition and belittling. "He looks like a bright
+fellow," he said, intending to drop the subject.
+
+"He is, he is," returned Summerfield; "but like all artists, he's
+flighty. They're the most unstable people in the world. You can't depend
+upon them. Good for one idea today--worth nothing tomorrow--I have to
+handle them like a lot of children. The weather sometimes makes all the
+difference in the world."
+
+Winfield fancied this was true. Artists generally were worth nothing in
+business. Still, he remembered Eugene pleasantly.
+
+As Summerfield talked here, so was it in the office and elsewhere. He
+began to say in the office and out that Eugene was really not doing as
+well as he might, and that in all likelihood he would have to drop him.
+It was sad; but all directors, even the best of them, had their little
+day of ability and usefulness, and then ran to seed. He did not see why
+it was that all these directors failed so, but they did. They never
+really made good in the company. By this method, his own undiminished
+ability was made to stand out free and clear, and Eugene was not able to
+appear as important. No one who knew anything about Eugene, however, at
+this time believed this; but they did believe--in the office--that he
+might lose his position. He was too bright--too much of a leader. They
+felt that this condition could not continue in a one-man concern; and
+this made the work harder, for it bred disloyalty in certain quarters.
+Some of his men were disposed to counsel with the enemy.
+
+But as time passed and in spite of the change of attitude which was
+coming over Summerfield, Eugene became even stronger in his own
+self-esteem. He was not getting vainglorious as yet--merely sure.
+Because of his art work his art connections had revived considerably,
+and he had heard again from such men as Louis Deesa, M. Charles, Luke
+Severas, and others who now knew where he was and wondered why he did
+not come back to painting proper. M. Charles was disgusted. "A great
+error," he said. He always spoke of him to others as a great loss to
+art. Strange to relate, one of his pictures was sold the spring
+following his entry into the Summerfield Company, and another the
+following winter. Each netted him two hundred and fifty dollars, Pottle
+Freres being the agents in one case, Jacob Bergman in the other. These
+sales with their consequent calls for additional canvases to show,
+cheered him greatly. He felt satisfied now that if anything happened to
+him he could go back to his art and that he could make a living, anyhow.
+
+There came a time when he was sent for by Mr. Alfred Cookman, the
+advertising agent for whom Summerfield had worked; but nothing came of
+that, for the latter did not care to pay more than six thousand a year
+and Summerfield had once told Eugene that he would eventually pay him
+ten thousand if he stayed with him. He did not think it was fair to
+leave him just then, and, besides, Cookman's firm had not the force and
+go and prestige which Summerfield had at this time. His real chance came
+some six months later, when one of the publishing houses of Philadelphia
+having an important weekly to market, began looking for an advertising
+manager.
+
+It was the policy of this house to select young men and to select from
+among all the available candidates just the one particular one to suit
+the fancy of the owner and who had a record of successful effort behind
+him. Now Eugene was not any more an advertising manager by experience
+than he was an art director, but having worked for Summerfield for
+nearly two years he had come to know a great deal about advertising, and
+the public thought he knew a great deal more. He knew by now just how
+Summerfield had his business organized. He knew how he specialized his
+forces, giving this line to one and that line to another. He had been
+able to learn by sitting in conferences and consultations what it was
+that advertisers wanted, how they wanted their goods displayed, what
+they wanted said. He had learned that novelty, force and beauty were the
+keynotes and he had to work these elements out under the most galling
+fire so often that he knew how it ought to be done. He knew also about
+commissions, rebates, long-time contracts, and so forth. He had fancied
+more than once that he might run a little advertising business of his
+own to great profit if he only could find an honest and capable business
+manager or partner. Since this person was not forthcoming, he was
+content to bide his time.
+
+But the Kalvin Publishing Company of Philadelphia had heard of him. In
+his search for a man, Obadiah Kalvin, the founder of the company, had
+examined many individuals through agents in Chicago, in St. Louis, in
+Baltimore, Boston, and New York, but he had not yet made up his mind. He
+was slow in his decisions, and always flattered himself that once he
+made a selection he was sure of a good result. He had not heard of
+Eugene until toward the end of his search, but one day in the Union Club
+in Philadelphia, when he was talking to a big advertising agent with
+whom he did considerable business, the latter said:
+
+"I hear you are looking for an advertising manager for your weekly."
+
+"I am," he said.
+
+"I heard of a man the other day who might suit you. He's with the
+Summerfield Company in New York. They've been getting up some very
+striking ads of late, as you may have noticed."
+
+"I think I have seen some of them," replied Kalvin.
+
+"I'm not sure of the man's name--Witla, or Gitla, or some such thing as
+that; but, anyhow, he's over there, and they say he's pretty good. Just
+what he is in the house I don't know. You might look him up."
+
+"Thanks; I will," replied Kalvin. He was really quite grateful, for he
+was not quite satisfied with any of those he had seen or heard of. He
+was an old man, extremely sensitive to ability, wanting to combine force
+with refinement if he could; he was a good Christian, and was running
+Christian, or rather their happy correlatives, decidedly conservative
+publications. When he went back to his office he consulted with his
+business partner, a man named Fredericks, who held but a minor share in
+the company, and asked him if he couldn't find out something about this
+promising individual. Fredericks did so. He called up Cookman, in New
+York, who was delighted to injure his old employee, Summerfield, to the
+extent of taking away his best man if he could. He told Fredericks that
+he thought Eugene was very capable, probably the most capable young man
+in the field, and in all likelihood the man he was looking for--a
+hustler.
+
+"I thought once of hiring him myself here not long ago," he told
+Fredericks. "He has ideas, you can see that."
+
+The next thing was a private letter from Mr. Fredericks to Mr. Witla
+asking if by any chance he could come over to Philadelphia the following
+Saturday afternoon, indicating that there was a business proposition of
+considerable importance which he wished to lay before him.
+
+From the paper on which it was written Eugene could see that there was
+something important in the wind, and laid the matter before Angela. The
+latter's eyes glistened.
+
+"I'd certainly go if I were you," she advised. "He might want to make
+you business manager or art director or something. You can be sure they
+don't intend to offer you less than you're getting now, and
+Mr. Summerfield certainly has not treated you very well, anyhow. You've
+worked like a slave for him, and he's never kept his agreement to raise
+your salary as much as he said he would. It may mean our having to leave
+New York; but that doesn't make any difference for a while. You don't
+intend to stay in this field, anyhow. You only want to stay long enough
+to get a good sound income of your own."
+
+Angela's longing for Eugene's art career was nevertheless being slightly
+stilled these days by the presence and dangled lure of money. It was a
+great thing to be able to go downtown and buy dresses and hats to suit
+the seasons. It was a fine thing to be taken by Eugene Saturday
+afternoons and Sundays in season to Atlantic City, to Spring Lake, and
+Shelter Island.
+
+"I think I will go over," he said; and he wrote Mr. Fredericks a
+favorable reply.
+
+The latter met him at the central station in Philadelphia with his auto
+and took him out to his country place in the Haverford district. On the
+way he talked of everything but business--the state of the weather, the
+condition of the territory through which they were traveling, the day's
+news, the nature and interest of Eugene's present work. When they were
+in the Fredericks house, where they arrived in time for dinner, and
+while they were getting ready for it, Mr. Obadiah Kalvin dropped
+in--ostensibly to see his partner, but really to look at Eugene without
+committing himself. He was introduced to Eugene, and shook hands with
+him cordially. During the meal he talked with Eugene a little, though
+not on business, and Eugene wondered why he had been called. He
+suspected, knowing as he did that Kalvin was the president of the
+company, that the latter was there to look at him. After dinner
+Mr. Kalvin left, and Eugene noted that Mr. Fredericks was then quite
+ready to talk with him.
+
+"The thing that I wanted you to come over and see me about is in regard
+to our weekly and the advertising department. We have a great paper over
+here, as you know," he said. "We are intending to do much more with it
+in the future than we have in the past even. Mr. Kalvin is anxious to
+get just the man to take charge of the advertising department. We have
+been looking for someone for quite a little while. Several people have
+suggested your name, and I'm rather inclined to think that Mr. Kalvin
+would be pleased to see you take it. His visit here today was purely
+accidental, but it was fortunate. He had a chance to look at you, so
+that if I should propose your name he will know just who you are. I
+think you would find this company a fine background for your efforts. We
+have no penny-wise-and-pound-foolish policy over here. We know that any
+successful thing is made by the men behind it, and we are willing to pay
+good money for good men. I don't know what you are getting where you
+are, and I don't care very much. If you are interested I should like to
+talk to Mr. Kalvin about you, and if he is interested I should like to
+bring you two together for a final conference. The salary will be made
+right, you needn't worry about that. Mr. Kalvin isn't a small man. If he
+likes a man--and I think he might like you--he'll offer you what he
+thinks you're worth and you can take it or leave it. I never heard
+anyone complain about the salary he offered."
+
+Eugene listened with extreme self-gratulation. He was thrilling from
+head to toe. This was the message he had been expecting to hear for so
+long. He was getting five thousand now, he had been offered six
+thousand. Mr. Kalvin could do no less than offer him seven or
+eight--possibly ten. He could easily ask seven thousand five hundred.
+
+"I must say," he said innocently, "the proposition sounds attractive to
+me. It's a different kind of thing--somewhat--from what I have been
+doing, but I think I could handle it successfully. Of course, the salary
+will determine the whole thing. I'm not at all badly placed where I am.
+I've just got comfortably settled in New York, and I'm not anxious to
+move. But I would not be opposed to coming. I have no contract with
+Mr. Summerfield. He has never been willing to give me one."
+
+"Well, we are not keen upon contracts ourselves," said Mr. Fredericks.
+"It's not a very strong reed to lean upon, anyhow, as you know. Still a
+contract might be arranged if you wish it. Supposing we talk a little
+further to Mr. Kalvin today. He doesn't live so far from here," and with
+Eugene's consent he went to the phone.
+
+The latter had supposed that the conversation with Mr. Kalvin was
+something which would necessarily have to take place at some future
+date; but from the conversation then and there held over the phone it
+appeared not. Mr. Fredericks explained elaborately over the phone--as
+though it was necessary--that he had been about the work of finding an
+advertising manager for some time, as Mr. Kalvin knew, and that he had
+some difficulty in finding the right man.
+
+"I have been talking to Mr. Witla, whom you met here today, and he is
+interested in what I have been telling him about the _Weekly_. He
+strikes me from my talk with him here as being possibly the man you are
+looking for. I thought that you might like to talk with him further."
+
+Mr. Kalvin evidently signified his assent, for the machine was called
+out and they traveled to his house, perhaps a mile away. On the way
+Eugene's mind was busy with the possibilities of the future. It was all
+so nebulous, this talk of a connection with the famous Kalvin Publishing
+Company; but at the same time it was so significant, so potential. Could
+it be possible that he was going to leave Summerfield, after all, and
+under such advantageous circumstances? It seemed like a dream.
+
+Mr. Kalvin met them in the library of his house, which stood in a
+spacious lawn and which save for the lights in the library was quite
+dark and apparently lonely. And here their conversation was continued.
+He was a quiet man--small, gray-haired, searching in his gaze. He had,
+as Eugene noted, little hands and feet, and appeared as still and
+composed as a pool in dull weather. He said slowly and quietly that he
+was glad that Eugene and Mr. Fredericks had had a talk. He had heard a
+little something of Eugene in the past; not much. He wanted to know what
+Eugene thought of current advertising policies, what he thought of
+certain new developments in advertising method, and so on, at some
+length.
+
+"So you think you might like to come with us," he observed drily toward
+the end, as though Eugene had proposed coming.
+
+"I don't think I would object to coming under certain conditions," he
+replied.
+
+"And what are those conditions?"
+
+"Well, I would rather hear what you have to suggest, Mr. Kalvin. I
+really am not sure that I want to leave where I am. I'm doing pretty
+well as it is."
+
+"Well, you seem a rather likely young man to me," said Mr. Kalvin. "You
+have certain qualities which I think I need. I'll say eight thousand for
+this year, and if everything is satisfactory one year from this time
+I'll make it ten. After that we'll let the future take care of itself."
+
+"Eight thousand! Ten next year!" thought Eugene. The title of
+advertising manager of a great publication! This was certainly a step
+forward!
+
+"Well, that isn't so bad," he said, after a moment's apparent
+reflection. "I'd be willing to take that, I think."
+
+"I thought you would," said Mr. Kalvin, with a dry smile. "Well, you and
+Mr. Fredericks can arrange the rest of the details. Let me wish you good
+luck," and he extended his hand cordially.
+
+Eugene took it.
+
+It did not seem as he rode back in the machine with Mr. Fredericks to
+the latter's house--for he was invited to stay for the night--that it
+could really be true. Eight thousand a year! Was he eventually going to
+become a great business man instead of an artist? He could scarcely
+flatter himself that this was true, but the drift was strange. Eight
+thousand this year! Ten the next if he made good; twelve, fifteen,
+eighteen---- He had heard of such salaries in the advertising field
+alone, and how much more would his investments bring him. He foresaw an
+apartment on Riverside Drive in New York, a house in the country
+perhaps, for he fancied he would not always want to live in the city. An
+automobile of his own, perhaps; a grand piano for Angela; Sheraton or
+Chippendale furniture; friends, fame--what artist's career could compare
+to this? Did any artist he knew enjoy what he was enjoying now, even?
+Why should he worry about being an artist? Did they ever get anywhere?
+Would the approval of posterity let him ride in an automobile now? He
+smiled as he recalled Dula's talk about class superiority--the
+distinction of being an artist, even though poor. Poverty be hanged!
+Posterity could go to the devil! He wanted to live now--not in the
+approval of posterity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+The best positions are not always free from the most disturbing
+difficulties, for great responsibility goes with great opportunity; but
+Eugene went gaily to this new task, for he knew that it could not
+possibly be much more difficult than the one he was leaving. Truly,
+Summerfield had been a terrible man to work for. He had done his best by
+petty nagging, insisting on endless variations, the most frank and
+brutal criticism, to break down Eugene's imperturbable good nature and
+make him feel that he could not reasonably hope to handle the situation
+without Summerfield's co-operation and assistance. But he had only been
+able, by so doing, to bring out Eugene's better resources. His
+self-reliance, coolness under fire, ability to work long and ardently
+even when his heart was scarcely in it, were all strengthened and
+developed.
+
+"Well, luck to you, Witla," he said, when Eugene informed him one
+morning that he was going to leave and wished to give him notice.
+
+"You needn't take me into consideration. I don't want you to stay if
+you're going to go. The quicker the better. These long drawn-out agonies
+over leaving don't interest me. There's nothing in that. Clinch the job
+today if you want it. I'll find someone."
+
+Eugene resented his indifference, but he only smiled a cordial smile in
+reply. "I'll stay a little while if you want me to--one or two weeks--I
+don't want to tie up your work in any way."
+
+"Oh, no, no! You won't tie up my work. On your way, and good luck!"
+
+"The little devil!" thought Eugene; but he shook hands and said he was
+sorry. Summerfield grinned imperturbably. He wound up his affairs
+quickly and got out. "Thank God," he said the day he left, "I'm out of
+that hell hole!" But he came to realize afterward that Summerfield had
+rendered him a great service. He had forced him to do his best and
+utmost, which no one had ever done before. It had told in his character,
+his spiritual make-up, his very appearance. He was no longer timid and
+nervous, but rather bold and determined-looking. He had lost that fear
+of very little things, for he had been sailing through stormy seas.
+Little storms did not--could never again--really frighten him. He had
+learned to fight. That was the one great thing Summerfield had done for
+him.
+
+In the offices of the Kalvin Company it was radically different. Here
+was comparative peace and quiet. Kalvin had not fought his way up by
+clubbing little people through little difficulties, but had devoted
+himself to thinking out a few big things, and letting them because of
+their very bigness and newness make their own way and his. He believed
+in big men, honest men--the biggest and most honest he could find. He
+saw something in Eugene, a tendency toward perfection perhaps which
+attracted him.
+
+The formalities of this new arrangement were soon concluded, and Eugene
+came into his new and beautiful offices, heralded by the word recently
+passed about that he was a most charming man. He was greeted by the
+editor, Townsend Miller, in the most cordial manner. He was met by his
+assembled staff in the most friendly spirit. It quite took Eugene's
+breath away to realize that he was the responsible head of some fifteen
+capable advertising men here in Philadelphia alone, to say nothing of
+eight more in a branch office in Chicago and traveling canvassers in the
+different parts of the country--the far West, the South, the Southwest,
+the Canadian Northwest. His material surroundings were much more
+imposing than they had been with the Summerfield Company. The idea of
+all these men was to follow up business, to lay interesting propositions
+before successful merchants and manufacturers who had not yet tried the
+columns of the _North American Weekly_, to make contracts which should
+be mutually advantageous to the advertiser and the _Weekly_, and to gain
+and retain good-will according to the results rendered. It was no very
+difficult task in connection with the _North American Weekly_ to do
+this, because owing to a novel and appealing editorial policy it was
+already in possession of a circulation of five hundred thousand a week,
+and was rapidly gaining more. It was not difficult, as Eugene soon
+found, to show advertisers in most cases that this was a proposition in
+which worth-while results could be obtained. What with Eugene's
+fertility in suggesting new methods of advertising, his suaveness of
+approach and geniality in laying before the most recalcitrant his very
+desirable schemes, his ability to get ideas and suggestions out of his
+men in conference, he was really in no danger of not being able to hold
+his own, and indeed was destined to make a rather remarkable showing.
+
+Eugene and Angela settled into what might have been deemed a fixed
+attitude of comfort and refinement. Without much inconvenience to
+himself and with little friction among those about, he had succeeded in
+reorganizing his staff along lines which were eminently satisfactory to
+himself. Some men who were formerly with the Summerfield Company were
+now with him. He had brought them because he found he could inculcate in
+them the spirit of sympathetic relationship and good understanding such
+as Kalvin desired. He was not making the progress which Summerfield was
+making with really less means at his command, but then, on the other
+hand, this was a rich company which did not ask or expect any such
+struggle as that which Summerfield had been and was still compelled to
+make for himself. The business ethics of this company were high. It
+believed in clean methods, good salaries, honest service. Kalvin liked
+him, and he had one memorable conversation with Eugene some time after
+he came there--almost a year--which stuck in his memory and did him much
+good. Kalvin saw clearly wherein both his strength and his weakness lay,
+and once said to Fredericks, his business manager: "The one thing I like
+about that man is his readiness with ideas. He always has one, and he's
+the most willing man to try I ever knew. He has imagination. He needs to
+be steadied in the direction of sober thought, so that he doesn't
+promise more than he can fulfil. Outside this I see nothing the matter
+with him."
+
+Fredericks agreed. He liked Eugene also. He did as much as he could to
+make things smooth, but of course Eugene's task was personal and to be
+worked out by him solely. Kalvin said to him when it became necessary to
+raise his salary:
+
+"I've watched your work for a year now and I'm going to keep my word and
+raise your salary. You're a good man. You have many excellent qualities
+which I want and need in the man who sits at that desk; but you have
+also some failings. I don't want you to get offended. A man in my
+position is always like a father who sits at the head of a family, and
+my lieutenants are like my sons. I have to take an interest in them
+because they take an interest in me. Now you've done your work
+well--very well, but you are subject to one fault which may sometime
+lead into trouble. You're a little too enthusiastic. I don't think you
+stop to think enough. You have a lot of ideas. They swarm in your head
+like bees, and sometimes you let them all out at once and they buzz
+around you and confuse you and everyone else connected with you. You
+would really be a better man if you had, not less ideas--I wouldn't say
+that--but better control of them. You want to do too many things at
+once. Go slow. Take your time. You have lots of time. You're young yet.
+Think! If you're in doubt, come down and consult with me. I'm older in
+this business than you are, and I'll help you all I can."
+
+Eugene smiled and said: "I think that's true."
+
+"It is true," said Kalvin; "and now I want to speak of another thing
+which is a little more of a personal matter, and I don't want you to
+take offence, for I'm saying it for your benefit. If I'm any judge of
+men, and I flatter myself sometimes that I am, you're a man whose
+greatest weakness lies--and, mind you, I have no actual evidence to go
+upon, not one scrap--your greatest weakness lies perhaps not so much in
+the direction of women as in a love of luxury generally, of which women
+might become, and usually are, a very conspicuous part."
+
+Eugene flushed the least bit nervously and resentfully, for he thought
+he had conducted himself in the most circumspect manner here--in fact,
+everywhere since the days he had begun to put the Riverwood incident
+behind him.
+
+"Now I suppose you wonder why I say that. Well, I raised two boys, both
+dead now, and one was just a little like you. You have so much
+imagination that it runs not only to ideas in business, but ideas in
+dress and comfort and friends and entertainment. Be careful of the kind
+of people you get in with. Stick to the conservative element. It may be
+hard for you, but it's best for you, materially speaking. You're the
+kind of man, if my observations and intuitions are correct, who is apt
+to be carried away by his ideals of anything--beauty, women, show. Now I
+have no ascetic objections to women, but to you they are dangerous, as
+yet. At bottom, I don't think you have the making of a real cold
+business man in you, but you're a splendid lieutenant. I'll tell you
+frankly I don't think a better man than you has ever sat, or could sit,
+in that chair. You are very exceptional, but your very ability makes you
+an uncertain quantity. You're just on the threshold of your career. This
+additional two thousand dollars is going to open up new opportunities to
+you. Keep cool. Keep out of the hands of clever people. Don't let subtle
+women come near. You're married, and for your sake I hope you love your
+wife. If you don't, pretend to, and stay within the bounds of
+convention. Don't let any scandal ever attach to you. If you do it will
+be absolutely fatal so far as I am concerned. I have had to part with a
+number of excellent men in my time because a little money turned their
+heads and they went wild over some one woman, or many women. Don't you
+be that way. I like you. I'd like to see you get along. Be cold if you
+can. Be careful. Think. That's the best advice I can give you, and I
+wish you luck."
+
+He waved him a dismissal, and Eugene rose. He wondered how this man had
+seen so clearly into his character. It was the truth, and he knew it
+was. His inmost thoughts and feelings were evidently written where this
+man could see them. Fittingly was he president of a great company. He
+could read men.
+
+He went back into his office and decided to take this lesson to heart.
+He must keep cool and sane always. "I guess I've had enough experience
+to know that, though, by now," he said and dismissed the idea from his
+mind.
+
+For this year and the year following, when his salary was raised to
+twelve thousand, Eugene flourished prodigiously. He and Miller became
+better friends than ever. Miller had advertising ideas which were of
+value to Eugene. Eugene had art and editorial ideas which were of value
+to Miller. They were together a great deal at social functions, and were
+sometimes hailed by their companions as the "Kalvin Kids," and the
+"Limelight Twins." Eugene learned to play golf with Miller, though he
+was a slow student and never good, and also tennis. He and Mrs. Miller,
+Angela and Townsend, frequently made a set on their own court or over at
+Miller's. They automobiled and rode a great deal. Eugene met some
+charming women, particularly young ones, at dances, of which he had
+become very fond, and at dinners and receptions. They and the Millers
+were invited to a great many affairs, but by degrees it became apparent
+to him, as it did to Miller and Mrs. Miller, that his presence was much
+more desired by a certain type of smart woman than was that of his wife.
+
+"Oh, he is so clever!" was an observation which might have been heard in
+various quarters. Frequently the compliment stopped there and nothing
+was said of Angela, or later on it would come up that she was not quite
+so nice. Not that she was not charming and worthy and all that, "But you
+know, my dear, she isn't quite so available. You can't use her as you
+can some women."
+
+It was at this time that Angela first conceived the notion seriously
+that a child might have a sobering effect on Eugene. She had, in spite
+of the fact that for some time now they had been well able to support
+one or more, and in spite also of the fact that Eugene's various
+emotional lapses indicated that he needed a sobering weight of some
+kind, steadily objected in her mind to the idea of subjecting herself to
+this ordeal. To tell the truth, aside from the care and worry which
+always, owing to her early experience with her sister's children, had
+been associated in her mind with the presence of them, she was decidedly
+afraid of the result. She had heard her mother say that most girls in
+their infancy showed very clearly whether they were to be good healthy
+mothers or not--whether they were to have children--and her recollection
+was that her mother had once said that she would not have any children.
+She half believed it to be impossible in her case, though she had never
+told this to Eugene, and she had guarded herself jealously against the
+chance of having any.
+
+Now, however, after watching Eugene all these years, seeing the drift of
+his present mood, feeling the influence of prosperity on him, she wished
+sincerely that she might have one, without great danger or discomfort to
+herself, in order that she might influence and control him. He might
+learn to love it. The sense of responsibility involved would have its
+effect. People would look to him to conduct himself soberly under these
+circumstances, and he probably would--he was so subject to public
+opinion now. She thought of this a long time, wondering, for fear and
+annoyance were quite strong influences with her, and she did nothing
+immediately. She listened to various women who talked with her from time
+to time about the child question, and decided that perhaps it was very
+wrong not to have children--at least one or two; that it was very likely
+possible that she could have one, if she wanted to. A Mrs. Sanifore who
+called on her quite frequently in Philadelphia--she met her at the
+Millers'--told her that she was sure she could have one even if she was
+past the usual age for first babies; for she had known so many women who
+had.
+
+"If I were you, Mrs. Witla, I would see a doctor," she suggested one
+day. "He can tell you. I'm sure you can if you want to. They have so
+many ways of dieting and exercising you which make all the difference in
+the world. I'd like to have you come some day and see my doctor, if you
+will."
+
+Angela decided that she would, for curiosity's sake, and in case she
+wished to act in the matter some time; and was informed by the wiseacre
+who examined her that in his opinion there was no doubt that she could.
+She would have to subject herself to a strict regimen. Her muscles would
+have to be softened by some form of manipulation. Otherwise, she was
+apparently in a healthy, normal condition and would suffer no
+intolerable hardship. This pleased and soothed Angela greatly. It gave
+her a club wherewith to strike her lord--a chain wherewith to bind him.
+She did not want to act at once. It was too serious a matter. She wanted
+time to think. But it was pleasant to know that she could do this.
+Unless Eugene sobered down now----
+
+During the time in which he had been working for the Summerfield Company
+and since then for the Kalvin Company here in Philadelphia, Eugene, in
+spite of the large salary he was receiving--more each year--really had
+not saved so much money. Angela had seen to it that some of his earnings
+were invested in Pennsylvania Railroad stock, which seemed to her safe
+enough, and in a plot of ground two hundred by two hundred feet at Upper
+Montclair, New Jersey, near New York, where she and Eugene might some
+day want to live. His business engagements had necessitated considerable
+personal expenditures, his opportunity to enter the Baltusrol Golf Club,
+the Yere Tennis Club, the Philadelphia Country Club, and similar
+organizations had taken annual sums not previously contemplated, and the
+need of having a modest automobile, not a touring car, was obvious. His
+short experience with that served as a lesson, however, for it was found
+to be a terrific expense, entirely disproportionate to his income. After
+paying for endless repairs, salarying a chauffeur wearisomely, and
+meeting with an accident which permanently damaged the looks of his
+machine, he decided to give it up. They could rent autos for all the
+uses they would have. And so that luxury ended there.
+
+It was curious, too, how during this time their Western home relations
+fell rather shadowily into the background. Eugene had not been home now
+for nearly two years, and Angela had seen only David of all her family
+since she had been in Philadelphia. In the fall of their third year
+there Angela's mother died and she returned to Blackwood for a short
+time. The following spring Eugene's father died. Myrtle moved to New
+York; her husband, Frank Bangs, was connected with a western furniture
+company which was maintaining important show rooms in New York. Myrtle
+had broken down nervously and taken up Christian Science, Eugene heard.
+Henry Burgess, Sylvia's husband, had become president of the bank with
+which he had been so long connected, and had sold his father's paper,
+the Alexandria _Appeal_, when the latter suddenly died. Marietta was
+promising to come to Philadelphia next year, in order, as she said, that
+Eugene might get her a rich husband; but Angela informed him privately
+that Marietta was now irrevocably engaged and would, the next year,
+marry a wealthy Wisconsin lumber man. Everyone was delighted to hear
+that Eugene was doing so well, though all regretted the lapse of his
+career as an artist. His fame as an advertising man was growing, and he
+was thought to have considerable weight in the editorial direction of
+the _North American Weekly_. So he flourished.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+It was in the fall of the third year that the most flattering offer of
+any was made him, and that without any seeking on his part, for he was
+convinced that he had found a fairly permanent berth and was happy among
+his associates. Publishing and other trade conditions were at this time
+in a peculiar condition, in which lieutenants of any importance in any
+field might well be called to positions of apparently extraordinary
+prominence and trust. Most of the great organizations of Eugene's day
+were already reaching a point where they were no longer controlled by
+the individuals who had founded and constructed them, but had passed
+into the hands of sons or holding companies, or groups of stockholders,
+few of whom knew much, if anything, of the businesses which they were
+called to engineer and protect.
+
+Hiram C. Colfax was not a publisher at all at heart. He had come into
+control of the Swinton-Scudder-Davis Company by one of those curious
+manipulations of finance which sometimes give the care of sheep into the
+hands of anything but competent or interested shepherds. Colfax was
+sufficiently alert to handle anything in such a way that it would
+eventually make money for him, even if that result were finally attained
+by parting with it. In other words, he was a financier. His father had
+been a New England soap manufacturer, and having accumulated more or
+less radical ideas along with his wealth, had decided to propagandize in
+favor of various causes, the Single Tax theory of Henry George for one,
+Socialism for another, the promotion of reform ideas in politics
+generally. He had tried in various ways to get his ideas before the
+public, but had not succeeded very well. He was not a good speaker, not
+a good writer, simply a good money maker and fairly capable thinker, and
+this irritated him. He thought once of buying or starting a newspaper in
+Boston, but investigation soon showed him that this was a rather
+hazardous undertaking. He next began subsidizing small weeklies which
+should advocate his reforms, but this resulted in little. His interest
+in pamphleteering did bring his name to the attention of Martin W. Davis
+of the Swinton-Scudder-Davis Company, whose imprint on books, magazines
+and weeklies was as common throughout the length and breadth of the land
+as that of Oxford is upon the English bible.
+
+The Swinton-Scudder-Davis Company was in sad financial straits.
+Intellectually, for various reasons, it had run to seed. John Jacob
+Swinton and Owen V. Scudder, the men with book, magazine and true
+literary instincts, were long since dead. Mr. Davis had tried for the
+various heirs and assigns involved to run it intelligently and honestly,
+but intelligence and honesty were of little value in this instance
+without great critical judgment. This he had not. The house had become
+filled with editors, readers, critics, foremen of manufacturing and
+printing departments, business managers, art directors, traveling
+salesmen and so on without end, each of whom might be reasonably
+efficient if left alone, but none of whom worked well together and all
+of whom used up a great deal of money.
+
+The principal literary publication, a magazine of great prestige, was in
+the hands of an old man who had been editor for nearly forty years. A
+weekly was being run by a boy, comparatively, a youth of twenty-nine. A
+second magazine, devoted to adventure fiction, was in the hands of
+another young man of twenty-six, a national critical monthly was in the
+hands of salaried critics of great repute and uncompromising attitude.
+The book department was divided into the hands of a juvenile editor, a
+fiction editor, a scientific and educational editor and so on. It was
+Mr. Davis' task to see that competent overseers were in charge of all
+departments so that they might flourish and work harmoniously under him,
+but he was neither sufficiently wise or forceful to fill the role. He
+was old and was veered about first by one theory and then by another,
+and within the house were rings and cliques. One of the most influential
+of these--the most influential, in fact--was one which was captained and
+led by Florence J. White, an Irish-American, who as business manager
+(and really more than that, general manager under Davis) was in charge
+of the manufacturing and printing departments, and who because of his
+immense budgets for paper, ink, printing, mailing and distribution
+generally, was in practical control of the business.
+
+He it was who with Davis' approval said how much was to be paid for
+paper, ink, composition, press work, and salaries generally. He it was
+who through his henchman, the head of the printing department, arranged
+the working schedules by which the magazines and books were to reach the
+presses, with the practical power to say whether they were to be on time
+or not. He it was who through another superintendent supervised the
+mailing and the stock room, and by reason of his great executive ability
+was coming to have a threatening control over the advertising and
+circulation departments.
+
+The one trouble with White, and this was something which would affect
+any man who should come in through Davis' auspices, was that he knew
+nothing of art, literature, or science, and cared less, his only
+interest being in manufacture. He had risen so rapidly on the executive
+side that his power had outrun his financial means. Davis, the present
+head above him, had no means beyond his own depreciated share. Because
+of poor editorial judgment, the books and magazines were tottering
+through a serious loss of prestige to eventual failure. Something had to
+be done, for at that time the expenditure for three years past had been
+much greater than the receipts.
+
+So Marshall P. Colfax, the father of Hiram Colfax, had been appealed to,
+because of his interest in reform ideas which might be to a certain
+extent looked upon as related to literature, and because he was reported
+to be a man of great wealth. Rumor reported his fortune as being
+anywhere between six and eight millions. The proposition which Davis had
+to put before him was this: that he buy from the various heirs and
+assigns the whole of the stock outside his (Davis') own, which amounted
+to somewhere about sixty-five per cent, and then come in as managing
+director and reorganize the company to suit himself. Davis was old. He
+did not want to trouble himself about the future of this company or risk
+his own independent property. He realized as well as anyone that what
+the company needed was new blood. A receivership at this juncture would
+injure the value of the house imprint very much indeed. White had no
+money, and besides he was so new and different that Davis scarcely
+understood what his ambitions or his true importance might be. There was
+no real intellectual sympathy between them. In the main, he did not like
+White's temperament, and so in considering what might be done for the
+company he passed him by.
+
+Various consultations were held. Colfax was greatly flattered to think
+that this proposition should be brought to his attention at all. He had
+three sons, only one of whom was interested in the soap business. Edward
+and Hiram, the two youngest, wanted nothing to do with it. He thought
+this might be an outlet for the energies of one or both of them,
+preferably Hiram, who was more of an intellectual and scientific turn
+than the others, though his chief interests were financial; and besides
+these books and publications would give him the opportunity which he had
+long been seeking. His personal prestige might be immensely heightened
+thereby. He examined carefully into the financial phases of the
+situation, using his son Hiram, whose financial judgment he had faith
+in, as an accountant and mouthpiece, and finally, after seeing that he
+could secure the stock on a long-time consideration for a very moderate
+valuation--$1,500,000, while it was worth $3,000,000--he had his son
+Hiram elected director and president and proceeded to see what could be
+done with the company.
+
+In this approaching transaction Florence J. White had seen his
+opportunity and seized it. He had realized on sight that Hiram would
+need and possibly appreciate all the information and assistance he could
+get, and being in a position to know he had laid all the facts in
+connection with the house plainly before him. He saw clearly where the
+trouble lay, the warring factions, the lack of editorial judgment, the
+poor financial manipulations. He knew exactly where the stock was and by
+what representations it could be best frightened and made to release
+itself cheaply. He worked vigorously for Hiram because he liked him and
+the latter reciprocated his regard.
+
+"You've been a prince in this transaction, White," he said to that
+individual one day. "You've put things practically in my hands. I'm not
+going to forget it."
+
+"Don't mention it," said White. "It's to my interest to see a real live
+man come in here."
+
+"When I become president, you become vice-president, and that means
+twenty-five thousand a year." White was then getting twelve.
+
+"When I become vice-president nothing will ever happen to your
+interests," returned the other man grimly. White was six feet tall,
+lean, savage, only semi-articulate. Colfax was small, wiry, excitable,
+with enough energy to explode a cartridge by yelling at it. He was
+eager, vainglorious, in many respects brilliant. He wanted to shine in
+the world, and he did not know how to do it as yet exactly.
+
+The two shook hands firmly.
+
+Some three months later Colfax was duly elected director and president,
+and the same meeting that elected him president elected Florence J.
+White vice-president. The latter was for clearing out all the old
+elements and letting in new blood. Colfax was for going slow, until he
+could see for himself what he wanted to do. One or two men were
+eliminated at once, an old circulation man and an old advertising man.
+In six months, while they were still contemplating additional
+changes and looking for new men, Colfax senior died, and the
+Swinton-Scudder-Davis Company, or at least Mr. Colfax's control of it,
+was willed to Hiram. So he sat there, accidentally president, and in
+full charge, wondering how he should make it a great success, and
+Florence J. White was his henchman and sworn ally.
+
+At the time that Colfax first heard of Eugene he had been in charge of
+the Swinton-Scudder-Davis Company (which he was planning to
+reincorporate as "The United Magazines Corporation") for three years. He
+had made a number of changes, some radical, some conservative. He had
+put in an advertising man whom he was now finding unsatisfactory, and
+had made changes in the art and editorial departments which were more
+the result of the suggestions of others, principally of White, than the
+thoughts of his own brain. Martin W. Davis had retired. He was old and
+sick, and unwilling to ruminate in a back-room position. Such men as the
+editor of the _National Review_, _Swinton's Magazine_, and _Scudder's
+Weekly_ were the only figures of importance about the place, and they
+were now of course immensely subsidiary to Hiram Colfax and Florence
+White.
+
+The latter had introduced a rather hard, bitter atmosphere into the
+place. He had been raised under difficult conditions himself in a back
+street in Brooklyn, and had no sympathy with the airs and intellectual
+insipidities which characterized the editorial and literary element
+which filled the place. He had an Irishman's love of organization and
+politics, but far and away above that he had an Irishman's love of
+power. Because of the trick he had scored in winning the favor of Hiram
+Colfax at the time when the tremendous affairs of the concern were in a
+state of transition, he had become immensely ambitious. He wanted to be
+not nominally but actually director of the affairs of this house under
+Colfax, and he saw his way clear to do it by getting editors, art
+directors, department heads and assistants generally who were agreeable
+to him. But unfortunately he could not do this directly, for while
+Colfax cared little about the details of the business his hobby was just
+this one thing--men. Like Obadiah Kalvin, of the Kalvin Publishing
+Company, who, by the way, was now his one great rival, Colfax prided
+himself on his ability to select men. His general idea was that if he
+could find one more man as good as Florence White to take charge of the
+art, editorial and book end of the business, not from the manufacturing
+and commercial, but from the intellectual and spiritual ends--a man with
+ideas who would draw to him authors, editors, scientific writers and
+capable assistants generally--the fortune of the house would be made. He
+thought, sanely enough from some points of view, that this publishing
+world could be divided in this way. White bringing the inside
+manufacturing, purchasing and selling interests to a state of
+perfection; the new man, whoever he might be, bringing the ideas of the
+house and their literary and artistic representation up to such a state
+of efficiency that the whole country would know that it was once more
+powerful and successful. He wanted to be called the foremost publisher
+of his day, and then he could retire gracefully or devote himself to
+other financial matters as he pleased.
+
+He really did not understand Florence J. White as well as he did
+himself. White was a past master at dissembling. He had no desire to see
+any such thing as Colfax was now planning come to pass. He could not do
+the things intellectually and spiritually which Colfax wanted done,
+nevertheless he wanted to be king under this emperor, the real power
+behind the throne, and he did not propose to brook any interference if
+he could help it. It was in his power, having the printing and composing
+room in his hands, to cause any man whom he greatly disliked to suffer
+severely. Forms could be delayed, material lost, complaints lodged as to
+dilatoriness in the matter of meeting schedules, and so on, ad
+infinitum. He had the Irishman's love of chicanery in the matter of
+morals. If he could get at an enemy's record and there was a flaw in it,
+the facts were apt to become mysteriously known at the most inconvenient
+times. He demanded the utmost loyalty of those who worked under him. If
+a man did not know enough instinctively to work intelligently for his
+interests, while at the same time appearing to serve the interests of
+the house at large only, he was soon dismissed on one pretext or
+another. Intelligent department heads, not sure of their own strength
+and seeing which way the wind was blowing, soon lined up in his course.
+Those whom he liked and who did his will prospered. Those whom he
+disliked suffered greatly in their duties, and were forever explaining
+or complaining to Colfax, who was not aware of White's subtlety and who
+therefore thought them incompetent.
+
+Colfax, when he first heard of Eugene, was still cherishing his dream of
+a literary and artistic primate who should rank in power with White. He
+had not found him as yet, for all the men he sincerely admired and
+thought fitted for the position were in business for themselves. He had
+sounded one man after another, but to no satisfactory end. Then it
+became necessary to fill the position of advertising manager with
+someone who would make a conspicuous success of it, and he began to
+sound various authorities. Naturally he looked at the different
+advertising men working for various publications, and quickly came to
+the name of Eugene Witla. The latter was rumored to be making a shining
+success of his work. He was well liked where he was. Two different
+business men told Colfax that they had met him and that he was
+exceptionally clever. A third told him of his record with Summerfield,
+and through a fourth man who knew Eugene, and who was having him to
+lunch at the Hardware Club a few weeks later, Colfax had a chance to
+meet him without appearing to be interested in him in any way.
+
+Not knowing who Colfax was, or rather very little, other than that he
+was president of this great rival publishing concern, Eugene was
+perfectly free and easy in his manner. He was never affected at any
+time, decidedly eager to learn things from anybody and supremely good
+natured.
+
+"So you're Swinton, Scudder and Davis, are you?" he said to Colfax on
+introduction. "That trinity must have shrunk some to get condensed into
+you, but I suppose the power is all there."
+
+"I don't know about that! I don't know about that!" exclaimed Colfax
+electrically. He was always ready like a greyhound to run another a
+race. "They tell me Swinton and Scudder were exceptionally big men. If
+you have as much force as you have length there's nothing the matter
+with you, though."
+
+"Oh, I'm all right," said Eugene, "when I'm by myself. These little men
+worry me, though. They are so darned smart."
+
+Colfax cackled ecstatically. He liked Eugene's looks. The latter's
+manner, easy and not in any way nervous or irritable but coupled with a
+heavenly alertness of eye, took his fancy. It was a fit companion for
+his own terrific energy, and it was not unduly soft or yielding.
+
+"So you're the advertising manager of the _North American_. How'd they
+ever come to tie you down to that?"
+
+"They didn't tie me," said Eugene. "I just lay down. But they put a nice
+fat salary on top of me to keep me there. I wouldn't lie down for
+anything except a salary."
+
+He grinned smartly.
+
+Colfax cackled.
+
+"Well, my boy, it doesn't seem to be hurting your ribs, does it? They've
+not caved in yet. Ha! Ha!--Ha! Ha! They've not, have they? Ha! Ha!"
+
+Eugene studied this little man with great interest. He was taken by his
+sharp, fierce, examining eye. He was so different from Kalvin, who was
+about his size, but so much more quiet, peaceful, dignified. Colfax was
+electric, noisy, insistent, like a pert jack-in-the-box; he seemed to be
+nothing but energy. Eugene thought of him as having an electric body
+coated over with some thin veneer of skin. He seemed as direct as a
+flash of lightning.
+
+"Doing pretty good over there, are you?" he asked. "I've heard a little
+something about you from time to time. Not much. Not much. Just a
+little. Not unfavorable, though. Not unfavorable."
+
+"I hope not," said Eugene easily. He wondered why Colfax was so
+interested in him. The latter kept looking him over much as one might
+examine a prize animal. Their eyes would meet and Colfax's would gleam
+with a savage but friendly fire.
+
+"Well?" said Eugene to him finally.
+
+"I'm just thinking, my boy! I'm just thinking!" he returned, and that
+was all Eugene could get out of him.
+
+It was not long after this very peculiar meeting which stuck in Eugene's
+memory that Colfax invited him over to his house in New York to dinner.
+"I wish," he wrote one day not long after this meeting, "that the next
+time you are in New York you would let me know. I would like to have you
+come to my house to dine. You and I ought to be pretty good friends.
+There are a number of things I would like to talk to you about."
+
+This was written on the paper of the United Magazines Corporation, which
+had just been organized to take over the old company of Swinton, Scudder
+and Davis, and was labeled "The Office of the President."
+
+Eugene thought this was significant. Could Colfax be going to make him
+an offer of some kind? Well, the more the merrier! He was doing very
+well indeed, and liked Mr. Kalvin very much, in fact, all his
+surroundings, but, as an offer was a testimonial to merit and could be
+shown as such, he would not be opposed to receiving it. It might
+strengthen him with Kalvin if it did nothing else. He made an occasion
+to go over, first talking the letter over with Angela, who was simply
+curious about the whole thing. He told her how much interested Colfax
+appeared to be the first time they met and that he fancied it might mean
+an offer from the United Magazines Corporation at some time or other.
+
+"I'm not particularly anxious about it," said Eugene, "but I'd like to
+see what is there."
+
+Angela was not sure that it was wise to bother with it. "It's a big
+firm," she said, "but it isn't bigger than Mr. Kalvin's, and he's been
+mighty nice to you. You'd better not do anything to injure yourself with
+him."
+
+Eugene thought of this. It was sound advice. Still he wanted to hear.
+
+"I won't do anything," he said. "I would like to hear what he has to
+say, though."
+
+A little later he wrote that he was coming on the twentieth and that he
+would be glad to take dinner with Colfax.
+
+The first meeting between Eugene and Colfax had been conclusive so far
+as future friendship was concerned. These two, like Eugene and
+Summerfield, were temperamentally in accord, though Colfax was very much
+superior to Summerfield in his ability to command men.
+
+This night when they met at dinner at Colfax's house the latter was most
+cordial. Colfax had invited him to come to his office, and together they
+went uptown in his automobile. His residence was in upper Fifth Avenue,
+a new, white marble fronted building with great iron gates at the door
+and a splendid entry set with small palms and dwarf cedars. Eugene saw
+at once that this man was living in that intense atmosphere of
+commercial and financial rivalry which makes living in New York so keen.
+You could feel the air of hard, cold order about the place, the
+insistence on perfection of appointment, the compulsion toward material
+display which was held in check only by that sense of fitness, which
+knowledge of current taste and the mode in everything demanded. His
+automobile was very large and very new, the latest model, a great dark
+blue affair which ran as silently as a sewing machine. The footman who
+opened the door was six feet tall, dressed in knee breeches and a
+swallow-tailed coat. The valet was a Japanese, silent, polite,
+attentive. Eugene was introduced to Mrs. Colfax, a most graceful but
+somewhat self-conscious woman. A French maid later presented two
+children, a boy and a girl.
+
+Eugene by now had become used to luxury in various forms, and this house
+was not superior to many he had seen; but it ranked with the best.
+Colfax was most free in it. He threw his overcoat to the valet
+carelessly and tossed his babies in the air by turn, when they were
+presented to him by the French maid. His wife, slightly taller than
+himself, received a resounding smack.
+
+"There, Ceta," he exclaimed (a diminutive for Cecile, as Eugene
+subsequently learned), "how do you like that, eh? Meet Mr. Witla. He's
+an artist and an art director and an advertising manager and----"
+
+"A most humble person," put in Eugene smilingly. "Not half as bad as you
+may think. His report is greatly exaggerated."
+
+Mrs. Colfax smiled sweetly. "I discount much that he says at once," she
+returned. "More later. Won't you come up into the library?"
+
+They ascended together, jesting. Eugene was pleased with what he saw.
+Mrs. Colfax liked him. She excused herself after a little while and
+Colfax talked life in general. "I'm going to show you my house now, and
+after dinner I'm going to talk a little business to you. You interest
+me. I may as well tell you that."
+
+"Well, you interest me, Colfax," said Eugene genially, "I like you."
+
+"You don't like me any more than I like you, that's a sure thing,"
+replied the other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+The results of this evening were most pleasant, but in some ways
+disconcerting. It became perfectly plain that Colfax was anxious to have
+Eugene desert the Kalvin Company and come over to him.
+
+"You people over there," he said to him at one stage of the
+conversation, "have an excellent company, but it doesn't compare with
+this organization which we are revising. Why, what are your two
+publications to our seven? You have one eminently successful one--the
+one you're on--and no book business whatsoever! We have seven
+publications all doing excellently well, and a book business that is
+second to none in the country. You know that. If it hadn't been that the
+business had been horribly mismanaged it would never have come into my
+hands at all. Why, Witla, I want to tell you one little fact in
+connection with that organization which will illustrate everything else
+which might be said in connection with it before I came here! They were
+wasting twenty thousand dollars a year on ink alone. We were publishing
+a hundred absolutely useless books that did not sell enough to pay for
+the cost of printing, let alone the paper, plates, typework and cost of
+distribution. I think it's safe to say we lost over a hundred thousand
+dollars a year that way. The magazines were running down. They haven't
+waked up sufficiently yet to suit me. But I'm looking for men. I'm
+really looking for one man eventually who will take charge of all that
+editorial and art work and make it into something exceptional. He wants
+to be a man who can handle men. If I can get the right man I will even
+include the advertising department, for that really belongs with the
+literary and art sections. It depends on the man."
+
+He looked significantly at Eugene, who sat there stroking his upper lip
+with his hand.
+
+"Well," he said thoughtfully, "that ought to make a very nice place for
+someone. Who have you in mind?"
+
+"No one as yet that I'm absolutely sure of. I have one man in mind who I
+think might come to fill the position after he had had a look about the
+organization and a chance to study its needs a little. It's a hard
+position to hold. It requires a man with imagination, tact, judgment. He
+would have to be a sort of vice-Colfax, for I can't give my attention
+permanently to that business. I don't want to. I have bigger fish to
+fry. But I want someone who will eventually be my other self in these
+departments, who can get along with Florence White and the men under him
+and hold his own in his own world. I want a sort of bi-partisan
+commission down there--each man supreme in his own realm."
+
+"It sounds interesting," said Eugene thoughtfully. "Who's your man?"
+
+"As I say, he isn't quite ready yet, in my judgment, but he is near it,
+and he's the right man! He's in this room now. You're the man I'm
+thinking about, Witla."
+
+"No," said Eugene quietly.
+
+"Yes; you," replied Colfax.
+
+"You flatter me," he said, with a deprecatory wave of his hand. "I'm not
+so sure that he is."
+
+"Oh, yes, he is, if he thinks he is!" replied Colfax emphatically.
+"Opportunity doesn't knock in vain at a real man's door. At least, I
+don't believe it will knock here and not be admitted. Why the
+advertising department of this business alone is worth eighteen thousand
+dollars a year to begin with."
+
+Eugene sat up. He was getting twelve. Could he afford to ignore that
+offer? Could the Kalvin Company afford to pay him that much? They were
+paying him pretty well as it was. Could the Kalvin Company offer him the
+prospects which this company was offering him?
+
+"What is more, I might say," went on Colfax, "the general publishing
+control of this organization--the position of managing publisher, which
+I am going to create and which when you are fitted for it you can have,
+will be worth twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and that oughtn't to
+be so very far away, either."
+
+Eugene turned that over in his mind without saying anything. This offer
+coming so emphatically and definitely at this time actually made him
+nervous and fearsome. It was such a tremendous thing to talk about--the
+literary, art and advertising control of the United Magazines
+Corporation. Who was this man White? What was he like? Would he be able
+to agree with him? This man beside him was so hard, so brilliant, so
+dynamic! He would expect so much.
+
+And then his work with Townsend Miller and under Mr. Kalvin. How much he
+had learned of the editorial game by merely talking and planning with
+those two men! He had got the whole idea of timely topics, of big
+progressive, national forecasts and features, of odd departments and
+interesting pieces of fiction and personality studies, from talking with
+Miller alone. Kalvin had made clear to him what constituted great
+craftsmen. Of course, long before, he had suspected just how it was, but
+in Philadelphia he had sat in conference with Miller and Kalvin, and
+knew. He had practically managed the former's little art department for
+him without paying much attention to it either. Couldn't he really
+handle this greater thing if he tried? If he didn't, someone else would.
+Would the man who would, be so much greater than himself?
+
+"I'm not anxious that you should act hastily," said Colfax soothingly,
+after a little bit, for he saw that Eugene was debating the question
+solemnly and that it was a severe problem for him. "I know how you feel.
+You have gone into the Kalvin Company and you've made good. They've been
+nice to you. It's only natural that they should be. You hate to leave.
+Well, think it over. I won't tempt you beyond your best judgment. Think
+it over. There's a splendid chance here. Just the same, I like you, and
+I think you are the man to get away with it. Come down to my place
+tomorrow and let me show you what we have. I want to show our resources.
+I don't think you know how big this thing really is."
+
+"Yes, I do," replied Eugene, smiling. "It certainly is a fascinating
+proposition. But I can't make up my mind about it now. It's something I
+want to think about. I'd like to take my time, and I'll let you know."
+
+"Take all the time you want, my boy! Take all the time you want!"
+exclaimed Colfax. "I'll wait for you a little while. I'm in no
+life-or-death hurry. This position can't be filled satisfactorily in a
+minute. When you're ready, let me know what you decide. And now let's go
+to the theatre--what do you say?"
+
+The automobile was called, Mrs. Colfax and her guest, Miss Genier,
+appeared. There was an interesting evening in a box, with Eugene talking
+gaily and entertainingly to all, and then an after-theatre bite at
+Sherry's. The next morning, for he stayed all night at Colfax's, they
+visited the United Magazines Corporation building together, and at noon
+Eugene returned to Philadelphia.
+
+His head was fairly seething and ringing with all he had seen and heard.
+Colfax was a great man, he thought, greater in some respects than
+Kalvin. He was more forceful, more enthusiastic, younger--more like
+himself, than Kalvin. He could never fail, he was too rich. He would
+make a success of this great corporation--a tremendous success--and if
+he went he might help make it with him. What a thing that would be! Very
+different from working for a corporation with whose success he had never
+had anything to do. Should he ignore this offer? New York, a true art
+and literary standing; a great executive and social standing; fame;
+money--all these were calling. Why, on eighteen or twenty-five thousand
+he could have a splendid studio apartment of his own, say on Riverside
+Drive; he could entertain magnificently; he could keep an automobile
+without worrying about it. Angela would cease feeling that they had to
+be careful. It would be the apex of lieutenantship for him. Beyond that
+he would take stock in the company, or a business of his own. What a
+long distance he had come from the days when, here as a boy, he had
+walked the streets, wondering where he would find a $3 room, and when as
+an art failure he carried his paintings about and sold them for ten and
+fifteen dollars. Dear Heaven, what peculiar tricks fortune could play!
+
+The discussion with Angela of this proposition led to some additional
+uncertainty, for although she was greatly impressed with what Colfax
+offered, she was afraid Eugene might be making a mistake in leaving
+Kalvin. The latter had been so nice to Eugene. He had never associated
+with him in any intimate way, but he and Angela had been invited to his
+home on several formal occasions, and Eugene had reported that Kalvin
+was constantly giving him good advice. His attitude in the office was
+not critical but analytic and considerate.
+
+"He's been mighty nice to me," Eugene said to her one morning at
+breakfast; "they all have. It's a shame to leave him. And yet, now that
+I look at it, I can see very plainly that there is never going to be the
+field here that there will be with the United Company. They have the
+publications and the book business, and the Kalvin Company hasn't and
+won't have. Kalvin is too old. They're in New York, too; that's one
+thing I like about it. I'd like to live in New York again. Wouldn't
+you?"
+
+"It would be fine," said Angela, who had never really cared for
+Philadelphia and who saw visions of tremendous superiority in this
+situation. Philadelphia had always seemed a little out of the way of
+things after New York and Paris. Only Eugene's good salary and the
+comforts they had experienced here had made it tolerable. "Why don't you
+speak to Mr. Kalvin and tell him just what Mr. Colfax says," she asked.
+"It may be that he'll offer to raise your salary so much that you'll
+want to stay when he hears of this."
+
+"No danger," replied Eugene. "He may raise it a bit, but he never can
+pay me twenty-five thousand dollars a year. There isn't any reason for
+paying it. It takes a corporation like the United to do it. There isn't
+a man in our place gets that, unless it is Fredericks. Besides, I could
+never be anything more here, or much more, than advertising manager.
+Miller has that editorial job sewed up. He ought to have it, too, he's a
+good man. This thing that Colfax offers lets me out into a new field. I
+don't want to be an advertising manager all my days if I can help it!"
+
+"I don't want you to be, either, Eugene," sighed Angela. "It's a shame
+you can't quit entirely and take up your art work. I've always thought
+that if you were to stop now and go to painting you would make a success
+of it. There's nothing the matter with your nerves now. It's just a
+question of whether we want to live more simply for a while and let you
+work at that. I'm sure you'd make a big success of it."
+
+"Art doesn't appeal to me so much as it did once," replied Eugene. "I've
+lived too well and I know a lot more about living than I once did. Where
+could I make twelve thousand a year painting? If I had a hundred
+thousand or a couple of hundred thousand laid aside, it would be a
+different thing, but I haven't. All we have is that Pennsylvania
+Railroad stock and those lots in Montclair eating their merry little
+heads off in taxes, and that Steel common stock. If we go back to New
+York we ought to build on that Montclair property, and rent it if we
+don't want to live in it. If I quit now we wouldn't have more than two
+thousand dollars a year outside of what I could earn, and what sort of a
+life can you live on that?"
+
+Angela saw, disappearing under those circumstances, the rather pleasant
+world of entertainment in which they were disporting themselves. Art
+distinction might be delightful, but would it furnish such a table as
+they were sitting at this morning? Would they have as nice a home and as
+many friends? Art was glorious, but would they have as many rides and
+auto trips as they had now? Would she be able to dress as nicely? It
+took money to produce a variety of clothing--house, street, evening,
+morning and other wear. Hats at thirty-five and forty dollars were not
+in the range of artists' wives, as a rule. Did she want to go back to a
+simpler life for his art's sake? Wouldn't it be better to have him go
+with Mr. Colfax and make $25,000 a year for a while and then have him
+retire?
+
+"You'd better talk to Mr. Kalvin," she counseled. "You'll have to do
+that, anyhow. See what he says. After that you can decide what you must
+do."
+
+Eugene hesitated, but after thinking it all over he decided that he
+would.
+
+One morning not long after, when he met Mr. Kalvin in the main hall on
+the editorial floor, he said, "I'd like to talk to you for a few moments
+some time today alone, Mr. Kalvin, if you can spare me the time."
+
+"Certainly. I'm not busy now," returned the president. "Come right down.
+What is it you want to see me about?"
+
+"Well, I'll tell you," said Eugene, when they had reached the former's
+office and he had closed the door. "I've had an offer that I feel that I
+ought to talk to you about. It's a pretty fascinating proposition and
+it's troubling me. I owe it to you as well as to myself to speak about
+it."
+
+"Yes; what is it?" said Kalvin considerately.
+
+"Mr. Colfax of the United Magazines Corporation came to me not long ago
+and wanted to know if I would not come with him. He offers me eighteen
+thousand dollars a year as advertising manager to begin with, and a
+chance to take charge of all the art and editorial ends as well a
+little later at twenty-five thousand dollars. He calls it the
+managing-publishing end of the business. I've been thinking of it
+seriously, for I've handled the art and advertising ends here and at the
+Summerfield Company, and I have always imagined that I knew something of
+the book and magazine business. I know it's a rather large proposition,
+but I'm not at all sure that I couldn't handle it.".
+
+Mr. Kalvin listened quietly. He saw what Colfax's scheme was and liked
+it as a proposition. It was a good idea, but needed an exceptional man
+for the position. Was Eugene the man? He wasn't sure of that, and yet
+perchance he might be. Colfax, he thought, was a man of excellent
+financial if not publishing judgment. He might, if he could get the
+proper person, make an excellent success of his business. Eugene
+interested him, perhaps more at first flash than he would later. This
+man before him had a most promising appearance. He was clean, quick,
+with an alert mind and eye. He could see how, because of Eugene's
+success here, Colfax was thinking of him being even more exceptional
+than he was. He was a good man, a fine man, under direction. Would
+Colfax have the patience, the interest, the sympathy, to work with and
+understand him?
+
+"Now, let's think about that a little, Witla," he said quietly. "It's a
+flattering offer. You'd be foolish if you didn't give it careful
+consideration. Do you know anything about the organization of that place
+over there?"
+
+"No," replied Eugene, "nothing except what I learned by casually going
+over it with Mr. Colfax."
+
+"Do you know much about Colfax as a man?"
+
+"Very little. I've only met him twice. He's forceful, dramatic, a man
+with lots of ideas. I understand he's very rich, three or four millions,
+someone told me."
+
+Kalvin's hand moved indifferently. "Do you like him?"
+
+"Well, I can't say yet absolutely whether I do or don't. He interests me
+a lot. He's wonderfully dynamic. I'm sure I'm favorably impressed with
+him."
+
+"And he wants to give you charge eventually of all the magazines and
+books, the publishing end?"
+
+"So he says," said Eugene.
+
+"I'd go a little slow if I were saddling myself with that
+responsibility. I'd want to be sure that I knew all about it. You want
+to remember, Witla, that running one department under the direction and
+with the sympathetic assistance and consideration of someone over you is
+very different from running four or five departments on your own
+responsibility and with no one over you except someone who wants
+intelligent guidance from you. Colfax, as I understand him, isn't a
+publisher, either by tendency or training or education. He's a
+financier. He'll want you, if you take that position, to tell him how it
+shall be done. Now, unless you know a great deal about the publishing
+business, you have a difficult task in that. I don't want to appear to
+be throwing cold water on your natural ambition to get up in the world.
+You're entitled to go higher if you can. No one in your circle of
+acquaintances would wish you more luck than I will if you decide to go.
+I want you to think carefully of what you are doing. Where you are here
+you are perfectly safe, or as nearly safe as any man is who behaves
+himself and maintains his natural force and energy can be. It's only
+natural that you should expect more money in the face of this offer, and
+I shall be perfectly willing to give it to you. I intended, as you
+possibly expected, to do somewhat better for you by January. I'll say
+now that if you want to stay here you can have fourteen thousand now and
+possibly sixteen thousand in a year or a year and a half from now. I
+don't want to overload this department with what I consider an undue
+salary. I think sixteen thousand dollars, when it is paid, will be high
+for the work that is done here, but you're a good man and I'm perfectly
+willing to pay it to you.
+
+"The thing for you to do is to make up your mind whether this
+proposition which I now make you is safer and more in accord
+with your desires than the one Mr. Colfax makes you. With him
+your eighteen thousand begins at once. With me sixteen thousand is a
+year away, anyhow. With him you have promise of an outlook which is much
+more glittering than any you can reasonably hope for here, but you want
+to remember that the difficulties will be, of course, proportionately
+greater. You know something about me by now. You still--and don't think
+I want to do him any injustice; I don't--have to learn about Mr. Colfax.
+Now, I'd advise you to think carefully before you act. Study the
+situation over there before you accept it. The United Magazines
+Corporation is a great concern. I have no doubt that under Mr. Colfax's
+management it has a brilliant future in store for it. He is an able man.
+If you finally decide to go, come and tell me and there will be no hard
+feelings one way or the other. If you decide to stay, the new salary
+arrangement goes into effect at once. As a matter of fact, I might as
+well have Mr. Fredericks credit that up to you so that you can say that
+you have drawn that sum here. It won't do you any harm. Then we can run
+along as before. I know it isn't good business as a rule to try and keep
+a man who has been poisoned by a bigger offer, and because I know that
+is the reason why I am only offering you fourteen thousand dollars this
+year. I want to be sure that you are sure that you want to stay. See?"
+
+He smiled.
+
+Eugene arose. "I see," he said. "You are one of the best men I have ever
+known, Mr. Kalvin. You have constantly treated me with more
+consideration than I ever expected to receive anywhere. It has been a
+pleasure and a privilege to work for you. If I stay, it will be because
+I want to because I value your friendship."
+
+"Well," said Kalvin quietly, "that's very nice, I'm sure, and I
+appreciate it. But don't let your friendship for me or your sense of
+gratitude stop you from doing something you think you ought to do. Go
+ahead if you feel like it. I won't feel the least bit angry with you.
+I'll feel sorry, but that's neither here nor there. Life is a constant
+condition of readjustment, and every good business man knows it."
+
+He took Eugene's extended hand.
+
+"Good luck," he said, "whatever you do"--his favorite expression.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+
+The upshot of Eugene's final speculation was that he accepted the offer
+of the United Magazines Corporation and left Mr. Kalvin. Colfax had
+written one day to his house asking him what he thought he would do
+about it. The more he had turned it over in his mind, the more it had
+grown in attraction. The Colfax company was erecting a tremendous
+building, eighteen stories high, in the heart of the middle business
+district in New York near Union Square, to house all their departments.
+Colfax had said at the time Eugene took dinner with him that the
+sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth floors would be devoted to the
+editorial, publication, circulation, art, and advertising departments.
+He had asked Eugene what he had thought would be a good floor
+arrangement, and the latter, with his usual facility for scheming such
+things, had scratched on a piece of paper a tentative layout for the
+various departments. He had put the editorial and art departments on the
+topmost floor, giving the publisher, whoever he might eventually prove
+to be, a commanding position in a central room on the western side of
+the building which overlooked all the city between the Square and Hudson
+River, and showed that magnificent body of water as a panorama for the
+eye to feast upon. He had put the advertising and some overflow
+editorial rooms on the seventeenth floor, and the circulation with its
+attendant mailing and cabinet record rooms on the sixteenth. The
+publisher's and editor's rooms he laid out after an old Flemish scheme
+he had long had in mind, in which green, dark blue, blood-red and black
+walnut shades contrasted richly with the flood of light which would be
+available.
+
+"You might as well do this thing right if you do it at all," he had said
+to Colfax. "Nearly all the editorial offices I have ever seen have been
+the flimsiest makeshifts. A rich-looking editorial, art and advertising
+department would help your company a great deal. It has advertising
+value."
+
+He recalled as he spoke Summerfield's theory that a look of prosperity
+was about the most valuable asset a house could have.
+
+Colfax agreed with him, and said when the time came that he wished
+Eugene would do him the favor to come and look the thing over. "I have
+two good architects on the job," he explained, "but I would rather trust
+your ideas as to how those rooms should be laid out."
+
+When he was considering this final call for a decision he was thinking
+how this floor would look--how rich it would be. Eventually, if he
+succeeded, his office would be the most sumptuous thing in it. He would
+be the most conspicuous figure in the great, new building, apart from
+Colfax himself.
+
+Thoughts of this kind, which ought to have had but very little share in
+any commercial speculation, were nevertheless uppermost in Eugene's
+mind; for he was not a business man--he was primarily an artist, and for
+all his floundering round in the commercial world he remained an artist
+still. His sense of his coming dignity and standing before the world was
+almost greater than his sense of the terrifying responsibility which it
+involved. Colfax was a hard man, he knew, harder even than Summerfield,
+for he talked less and acted more; but this did not sink into Eugene's
+consciousness sufficiently to worry him. He fancied he was a strong man,
+able to hold his own anywhere.
+
+Angela was really not very much opposed to the change, though her
+natural conservatism made her worry and hesitate to approve. It was a
+great step forward if Eugene succeeded, but if he failed it would be
+such a loss.
+
+"Colfax has so much faith in me," he told her. "He's convinced that I
+can do it, and faith like that is a great help. I'd like to try it,
+anyhow. It can't do me any harm. If I think I can't handle the
+publishing proposition I'll stick to the advertising end."
+
+"All right," said Angela, "but I scarcely know what to advise. They've
+been so nice to you over here."
+
+"I'll try it," said Eugene determinedly. "Nothing venture, nothing
+have," and he informed Kalvin the same day.
+
+The latter looked at him solemnly, his keen gray eyes contemplating the
+situation from all points of view. "Well, Eugene," he said, "you're
+shouldering a great responsibility. It's difficult. Think carefully of
+everything that you do. I'm sorry to see you go. Good-bye."
+
+He had the feeling that Eugene was making a mistake--that he would do
+better to rest a while where he was; but persuasion was useless. It
+would only give Eugene the notion that he was more important than he
+was--make matters more difficult in the future.
+
+Kalvin had heard a number of things concerning Colfax recently, and he
+fancied that Eugene might find it hard to deal with him later. The
+general impression was that he was subject to sudden likes and dislikes
+which did not bear the test of time. He was said to be scarcely human
+enough to be the effective head of a great working corporation.
+
+The truth was that this general opinion was quite correct. Colfax was as
+hard as steel but of a smiling and delightful presence to those he
+fancied. Vanity was really his other name, and ambition with him knew no
+bounds. He hoped to make a tremendous success of his life, to be looked
+up to as an imposing financier, and he wanted _men_--only strong men
+about him. Eugene seemed to Colfax to be a strong man, and the day he
+finally communicated with him saying that he thought that he would
+accept his offer but that he wished to talk to him further, Colfax threw
+his hat up in the air, slapped his side partner White on the back, and
+exclaimed: "Whee! Florrie! There's a trick I've scored for this
+corporation. There's a man, unless I am greatly mistaken, will do
+something here. He's young but he's all right. He's got the looks on you
+and me, Florrie, but we can stand that, can't we?"
+
+White eyed him, with a show of joy and satisfaction which was purely
+simulated. He had seen many editors and many advertising men in his
+time. To his judgment they were nearly all lightweights, men who were
+easily satisfied with the little toy wherewith he or anyone might decide
+to gratify their vanity. This was probably another case in point, but if
+a real publisher were coming in here it would not be so well with him.
+He might attempt to crowd in on his authority or at least divide it with
+him. That did not appeal to his personal vanity. It really put a
+stumbling block in his path, for he hoped to rule here some day alone.
+Why was it that Colfax was so eager to have the authority in this house
+divided? Was it because he was somewhat afraid of him? He thought so,
+and he was exceedingly close to the truth when he thought so.
+
+"Florrie's a good lieutenant," Colfax said to himself, "but he needs to
+be counterbalanced here by someone who will represent the refinements
+and that intellectual superiority which the world respects."
+
+He wanted this refinement and intellectual superiority to be popular
+with the public, and to produce results in the shape of increased
+circulation for his magazines and books. These two would then act as
+checks each to the other, thus preventing the house from becoming
+overweighted in either direction. Then he could drive this team as a
+grand master--the man who had selected both, whose ideas they
+represented, and whose judgment they respected. The world of finance and
+trade would know they were nothing without him.
+
+What Eugene thought and what White thought of this prospective situation
+was that the other would naturally be the minor figure, and that he
+under Colfax would be the shining light. Eugene was convinced that the
+house without proper artistic and intellectual dominance was nothing.
+White was convinced that without sane commercial management it was a
+failure and that this was the thing to look to. Money could buy brains.
+
+Colfax introduced Eugene to White on the morning he arrived to take
+charge, for on the previous occasions when he had been there White was
+absent. The two looked at each other and immediately suspended judgment,
+for both were able men. Eugene saw White as an interesting type--tall,
+leathery, swaggering, a back-street bully evolved into the semblance of
+a gentleman. White saw in Eugene a nervous, refined, semi-emotional
+literary and artistic type who had, however, a curious versatility and
+virility not common among those whom he had previously encountered. He
+was exceedingly forceful but not poised. That he could eventually
+undermine him if he could not dominate him he did not doubt. Still he
+was coming in with the backing of Colfax and a great reputation, and it
+might not be easy. Eugene made him feel nervous. He wondered as he
+looked at him whether Colfax would really make him general literary,
+artistic and advertising administrator, or whether he would remain
+simply advertising manager as he now entered. Colfax had not accepted
+Eugene for more than that.
+
+"Here he is, Florrie," Colfax had said of Eugene, in introducing him to
+White. "This is the man I've been talking about. Witla--Mr. White.
+White--Mr. Witla. You two want to get together for the good of this
+house in the future. What do you think of each other?"
+
+Eugene had previously noted the peculiarity of this rowdy, rah! rah!
+attitude on the part of Colfax. He seemed to have no sense of the
+conventions of social address and conference at any time.
+
+"Now, by God," Colfax exclaimed, striking his right fist against his
+left palm, "unless I am greatly mistaken, this house is going to begin
+to move! I'm not positive that I have the man I want, but I think I
+have. White, let's stroll around and introduce him."
+
+White swaggered to the office door.
+
+"Sure," he said quietly. "An exceptional man," he said to himself.
+
+Colfax was almost beside himself with satisfaction, for he was subject
+to emotional flushes which, however, related to self-aggrandizement
+only. He walked with a great stride (little as he was), which was his
+wont when he was feeling particularly satisfied. He talked in a loud
+voice, for he wanted everyone to know that he, Hiram Colfax, was about
+and as forceful as the lord of so great an institution should be. He
+could yell and scream something like a woman in a paroxysm of rage when
+he was thwarted or irritated. Eugene did not know that as yet.
+
+"Here's one of the printing floors," he said to Eugene, throwing open a
+door which revealed a room full of thundering presses of giant size.
+"Where's Dodson, boy? Where's Dodson? Tell him to come here. He's
+foreman of our printing department," he added, turning to Eugene, as the
+printer's devil, who had been working at a press, scurried away to find
+his master. "I told you, I guess, that we have thirty of these presses.
+There are four more floors just like this."
+
+"So you did," replied Eugene. "It certainly is a great concern. I can
+see that the possibilities of a thing like this are almost limitless."
+
+"Limitless--I should say! It depends on what you can do with this," and
+he tapped Eugene's forehead. "If you do your part right, and he does
+his"--turning to White--"there won't be any limit to what this house can
+do. That remains to be seen."
+
+Just then Dodson came bustling up, a shrewd, keen henchman of White's,
+and looked at Eugene curiously.
+
+"Dodson, Mr. Witla, the new advertising manager. He's going to try to
+help pay for all this wasteful presswork you're doing. Witla,
+Mr. Dodson, manager of the printing department."
+
+The two men shook hands. Eugene felt in a way as though he were talking
+to an underling, and did not pay very definite attention to him. Dodson
+resented his attitude somewhat, but gave no sign. His loyalty was to
+White, and he felt himself perfectly safe under that man's supervision.
+
+The next visit was to the composing room where a vast army of men were
+working away at type racks and linotype machines. A short, fat,
+ink-streaked foreman in a green striped apron that looked as though it
+might have been made of bed ticking came forward to greet them
+ingratiatingly. He was plainly nervous at their presence, and withdrew
+his hand when Eugene offered to take it.
+
+"It's too dirty," he said. "I'll take the will for the deed, Mr. Witla."
+
+More explanations and laudations of the extent of the business followed.
+
+Then came the circulation department with its head, a tall dark man who
+looked solemnly at Eugene, uncertain as to what place he was to have in
+the organization and uncertain as to what attitude he should ultimately
+have to take. White was "butting into his affairs," as he told his wife,
+and he did not know where it would end. He had heard rumors to the
+effect that there was to be a new man soon who was to have great
+authority over various departments. Was this he?
+
+There came next the editors of the various magazines, who viewed this
+triumphal procession with more or less contempt, for to them both Colfax
+and White were raw, uncouth upstarts blazoning their material
+superiority in loud-mouthed phrases. Colfax talked too loud and was too
+vainglorious. White was too hard, bitter and unreasoning. They hated
+them both with a secret hate but there was no escaping their domination.
+The need of living salaries held all in obsequious subjection.
+
+"Here's Mr. Marchwood," Colfax said inconsiderately of the editor of the
+_International Review_. "He thinks he's making a wonderful publication
+of that, but we don't know whether he is yet or not."
+
+Eugene winced for Marchwood. He was so calm, so refined, so
+professional.
+
+"I suppose we can only go by the circulation department," he replied
+simply, attracted by Eugene's sympathetic smile.
+
+"That's all! That's all!" exclaimed Colfax.
+
+"That is probably true," said Eugene, "but a good thing ought to be as
+easily circulated as a poor one. At least it's worth trying."
+
+Mr. Marchwood smiled. It was a bit of intellectual kindness in a world
+of cruel comment.
+
+"It's a great institution," said Eugene finally, on reaching the
+president's office again. "I'll begin now and see what I can do."
+
+"Good luck, my boy. Good luck!" said Colfax loudly. "I'm laying great
+stress on what you're going to do, you know."
+
+"Don't lean too hard," returned Eugene. "Remember, I'm just one in a
+great organization."
+
+"I know, I know, but _the one_ is all I need up there--_the one_, see?"
+
+"Yes, yes," laughed Eugene, "cheer up. We'll be able to do a little
+something, I'm sure."
+
+"A great man, that," Colfax declared to White as he went away. "The real
+stuff in that fellow, no flinching there you notice. He knows how to
+think. Now, Florrie, unless I miss my guess you and I are going to get
+somewhere with this thing."
+
+White smiled gloomily, almost cynically. He was not so sure. Eugene was
+pretty good, but he was obviously too independent, too artistic, to be
+really stable and dependable. He would never run to him for advice, but
+he would probably make mistakes. He might lose his head. What must he do
+to offset this new invasion of authority? Discredit him? Certainly. But
+he needn't worry about that. Eugene would do something. He would make
+mistakes of some kind. He felt sure of it. He was almost positive of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+
+The opening days of this their second return to New York were a period
+of great joy to Angela. Unlike that first time when she was returning
+after seven months of loneliness and unhappiness to a sick husband and a
+gloomy outlook, she was now looking forward to what, in spite of her
+previous doubts, was a glorious career of dignity, prosperity and
+abundance. Eugene was such an important man now. His career was so well
+marked and in a way almost certified. They had a good bit of money in
+the bank. Their investments in stocks, on which they obtained a uniform
+rate of interest of about seven per cent., aggregated $30,000. They had
+two lots, two hundred by two hundred, in Montclair, which were said to
+be slowly increasing in value and which Eugene now estimated to be worth
+about six thousand. He was talking about investing what additional money
+he might save in stocks bearing better interest or some sound commercial
+venture. When the proper time came, a little later, he might even
+abandon the publishing field entirely and renew his interest in art. He
+was certainly getting near the possibility of this.
+
+The place which they selected for their residence in New York was in a
+new and very sumptuous studio apartment building on Riverside Drive near
+Seventy-ninth Street, where Eugene had long fancied he would like to
+live. This famous thoroughfare and show place with its restricted park
+atmosphere, its magnificent and commanding view of the lordly Hudson,
+its wondrous woods of color and magnificent sunsets had long taken his
+eye. When he had first come to New York it had been his delight to
+stroll here watching the stream of fashionable equipages pour out
+towards Grant's Tomb and return. He had sat on a park bench many an
+afternoon at this very spot or farther up, and watched the gay company
+of horsemen and horsewomen riding cheerfully by, nodding to their social
+acquaintances, speaking to the park keepers and road scavengers in a
+condescending and superior way, taking their leisure in a comfortable
+fashion and looking idly at the river. It seemed a wonderful world to
+him at that time. Only millionaires could afford to live there, he
+thought--so ignorant was he of the financial tricks of the world. These
+handsomely garbed men in riding coats and breeches; the chic looking
+girls in stiff black hats, trailing black riding skirts, yellow gloved,
+and sporting short whips which looked more like dainty canes than
+anything else, took his fancy greatly. It was his idea at that time that
+this was almost the apex of social glory--to be permitted to ride here
+of an afternoon.
+
+Since then he had come a long way and learned a great deal, but he still
+fancied this street as one of the few perfect expressions of the
+elegance and luxury of metropolitan life, and he wanted to live on it.
+Angela was given authority, after discussion, to see what she could find
+in the way of an apartment of say nine or eleven rooms with two baths or
+more, which should not cost more than three thousand or three thousand
+five hundred. As a matter of fact, a very handsome apartment of nine
+rooms and two baths including a studio room eighteen feet high, forty
+feet long and twenty-two feet wide was found at the now, to them,
+comparatively moderate sum of three thousand two hundred. The chambers
+were beautifully finished in old English oak carved and stained after a
+very pleasing fifteenth century model, and the walls were left to the
+discretion of the incoming tenant. Whatever was desired in the way of
+tapestries, silks or other wall furnishing would be supplied.
+
+Eugene chose green-brown tapestries representing old Rhine Castles for
+his studio, and blue and brown silks for his wall furnishings elsewhere.
+He now realized a long cherished dream of having the great wooden cross
+of brown stained oak, ornamented with a figure of the bleeding Christ,
+which he set in a dark shaded corner behind two immense wax candles set
+in tall heavy bronze candlesticks, the size of small bed posts. These
+when lighted in an otherwise darkened room and flickering ruefully, cast
+a peculiar spell of beauty over the gay throngs which sometimes
+assembled here. A grand piano in old English oak occupied one corner, a
+magnificent music cabinet in French burnt woodwork, stood near by. There
+were a number of carved and fluted high back chairs, a carved easel with
+one of his best pictures displayed, a black marble pedestal bearing a
+yellow stained marble bust of Nero, with his lascivious, degenerate
+face, scowling grimly at the world, and two gold plated candelabra of
+eleven branches each hung upon the north wall.
+
+Two wide, tall windows with storm sashes, which reached from the floor
+to the ceiling, commanded the West view of the Hudson. Outside one was a
+small stone balcony wide enough to accommodate four chairs, which gave a
+beautiful, cool view of the drive. It was shielded by an awning in
+summer and was nine storeys above the ground. Over the water of the more
+or less peaceful stream were the stacks and outlines of a great factory,
+and in the roadstead lay boats always, war vessels, tramp freighters,
+sail boats, and up and down passed the endless traffic of small craft
+always so pleasant to look upon in fair or foul weather. It was a
+beautiful apartment, beautifully finished in which most of their
+furniture, brought from Philadelphia, fitted admirably. It was here that
+at last they settled down to enjoy the fruit of that long struggle and
+comparative victory which brought them so near their much desired
+goal--an indestructible and unchangeable competence which no winds of
+ill fortune could readily destroy.
+
+Eugene was quite beside himself with joy and satisfaction at thus
+finding himself and Angela eventually surrounded by those tokens of
+luxury, comfort and distinction which had so long haunted his brain.
+Most of us go through life with the furniture of our prospective castle
+well outlined in mind, but with never the privilege of seeing it
+realized. We have our pictures, our hangings, our servitors well and
+ably selected. Eugene's were real at last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+
+The affairs of the United Magazines Corporation, so far as the
+advertising, commercial and manufacturing ends at least were concerned,
+were not in such an unfortunate condition by any means as to preclude
+their being quickly restored by tact, good business judgment and hard
+work. Since the accession to power of Florence White in the commercial
+and financial ends, things in that quarter at least had slowly begun to
+take a turn for the better. Although he had no judgment whatsoever as to
+what constituted a timely article, an important book or a saleable art
+feature, he had that peculiar intuition for right methods of
+manufacture, right buying and right selling of stock, right handling of
+labor from the cost and efficiency point of view, which made him a power
+to be reckoned with. He knew a good manufacturing man to employ at
+sight. He knew where books could be sold and how. He knew how to buy
+paper in large quantities and at the cheapest rates, and how to print
+and manufacture at a cost which was as low as could possibly be figured.
+All waste was eliminated. He used his machines to their utmost capacity,
+via a series of schedules which saved an immense amount of waste and
+demanded the least possible help. He was constantly having trouble with
+the labor unions on this score, for they objected to a policy which cut
+out duplication of effort and so eliminated their men. He was an iron
+master, however, coarse, brutal, foul when dealing with them, and they
+feared and respected him.
+
+In the advertising end of the business things had been going rather
+badly, for the reason that the magazines for which this department was
+supposed to get business had not been doing so well editorially. They
+were out of touch with the times to a certain extent--not in advance of
+the feelings and emotions of the period, and so the public was beginning
+to be inclined to look elsewhere for its mental pabulum. They had had
+great circulation and great prestige. That was when they were younger,
+and the original publishers and editors in their prime. Since then days
+of weariness, indifference and confusion had ensued. Only with the
+accession of Colfax to power had hope begun to return. As has been said,
+he was looking for strong men in every quarter of this field, but in
+particular he was looking for one man who would tell him how to govern
+them after he had them. Who was to dream out the things which would
+interest the public in each particular magazine proposition? Who was to
+draw great and successful authors to the book end of the house? Who was
+to inspire the men who were directing the various departments with the
+spirit which would bring public interest and success? Eugene might be
+the man eventually he hoped, but how soon? He was anxious to hurry his
+progress now that he had him.
+
+It was not long after Eugene was seated in his advertising managerial
+chair that he saw how things lay. His men, when he gathered them in
+conference, complained that they were fighting against falling
+circulations.
+
+"You can talk all you want, Mr. Witla," said one of his men gloomily,
+"but circulation and circulation only is the answer. They have to keep
+up the magazines here. All these manufacturers know when they get
+results. We go out and get new business all the time, but we don't keep
+it. We can't keep it. The magazines don't bring results. What are you
+going to do about that?"
+
+"I'll tell you what we are going to do," replied Eugene calmly, "we're
+going to key up the magazines. I understand that a number of changes are
+coming in that direction. They are doing better already. The
+manufacturing department, for one thing, is in splendid shape. I know
+that. In a short time the editorial departments will be. I want you
+people to put up, at this time, the best fight you know how under the
+conditions as they are. I'm not going to make any changes here if I can
+help it. I'm going to show you how it can be done--each one separately.
+I want you to believe that we have the greatest organization in the
+world, and it can be made to sweep everything before it. Take a look at
+Mr. Colfax. Do you think he is ever going to fail? We may, but he
+won't."
+
+The men liked Eugene's manner and confidence. They liked his faith in
+them, and it was not more than ten days before he had won their
+confidence completely. He took home to the hotel where he and Angela
+were stopping temporarily all the magazines, and examined them
+carefully. He took home a number of the latest books issued, and asked
+Angela to read them. He tried to think just what it was each magazine
+should represent, and who and where was the man who would give to each
+its proper life and vigor. At once, for the adventure magazine, he
+thought of a man whom he had met years before who had since been making
+a good deal of a success editing a Sunday newspaper magazine supplement,
+Jack Bezenah. He had started out to be a radical writer, but had tamed
+down and become a most efficient newspaper man. Eugene had met him
+several times in the last few years and each time had been impressed by
+the force and subtlety of his judgment of life. Once he had said to him,
+"Jack, you ought to be editing a magazine of your own."
+
+"I will be, I will be," returned that worthy. Now as he looked at this
+particular proposition Bezenah stuck in his mind as the man who should
+be employed. He had seen the present editor, but he seemed to have no
+force at all.
+
+The weekly needed a man like Townsend Miller--where would he find him?
+The present man's ideas were interesting but not sufficiently general in
+their appeal. Eugene went about among the various editors looking at
+them, ostensibly making their acquaintance, but he was not satisfied
+with any one of them.
+
+He waited to see that his own department was not needing any vast effort
+on his part before he said to Colfax one day:
+
+"Things are not right with your editorial department. I've looked into
+my particular job to see that there is nothing so radically behindhand
+there but what it can be remedied, but your magazines are not right. I
+wish, aside from salary proposition entirely, that you would let me
+begin to make a few changes. You haven't the right sort of people
+upstairs. I'll try not to move too fast, but you couldn't be worse off
+than you are now in some instances."
+
+"I know it!" said Colfax. "I know it! What do you suggest?"
+
+"Simply better men, that's all," replied Eugene. "Better men with newer
+ideas. It may cost you a little more money at present, but it will bring
+you more back in the long run."
+
+"You're right! You're right!" insisted Colfax enthusiastically. "I've
+been waiting for someone whose judgment I thought was worth two whoops
+to come and tell me that for a long time. So far as I'm concerned you
+can take charge right now! The salary that I promised you goes with it.
+I want to tell you something, though! I want to tell you something!
+You're going in there now with full authority, but don't you fall or
+stub your toe or get sick or make any mistakes. If you do, God help you!
+if you do, I'll eat you alive! I'm a good employer, Witla. I'll pay any
+price for good men, within reason, but if I think I'm being done, or
+made a fool of, or a man is making a mistake, then there's no mercy in
+me--not a single bit. I'm a plain, everyday blank, blank, blank" (and he
+used a term so foul that it would not bear repetition in print), "and
+that's all there is to me. Now we understand each other."
+
+Eugene looked at the man in astonishment. There was a hard, cold gleam
+in his blue eyes which he had seen there before. His presence was
+electric--his look demoniac.
+
+"I've had a remark somewhat of that nature made to me before," commented
+Eugene. He was thinking of Summerfield's "the coal shute for yours." He
+had hardly expected to hear so cold and definite a proposition laid down
+so soon after his entry upon his new duties, but here it was, and he had
+to face it. He was sorry for the moment that he had ever left Kalvin.
+
+"I'm not at all afraid of responsibility," replied Eugene grimly. "I'm
+not going to fall down or stub my toe or make any mistakes if I can help
+it. And if I do I won't complain to you."
+
+"Well, I'm only telling you," said Colfax, smiling and good-natured
+again. The cold light was gone. "And I mean it in the best way in the
+world. I'll back you up with all power and authority, but if you fail,
+God help you; I can't."
+
+He went back to his desk and Eugene went upstairs. He felt as though the
+red cap of a cardinal had been put upon his head, and at the same time
+an axe suspended over him. He would have to think carefully of what he
+was doing from now on. He would have to go slow, but he would have to
+go. All power had been given him--all authority. He could go upstairs
+now and discharge everybody in the place. Colfax would back him up, but
+he would have to replace them. And that quickly and effectively. It was
+a trying hour, notable but grim.
+
+His first move was to send for Bezenah. He had not seen him for some
+time, but his stationery which he now had headed "The United Magazines
+Corporation," and in one corner "Office of the Managing Publisher,"
+brought him fast enough. It was a daring thing to do in a way thus to
+style himself managing publisher, when so many able men were concerned
+in the work, but this fact did not disturb him. He was bound and
+determined to begin, and this stationery--the mere engraving of it--was
+as good a way as any of serving notice that he was in the saddle. The
+news flew like wild fire about the building, for there were many in his
+office, even his private stenographer, to carry the news. All the
+editors and assistants wondered what it could mean, but they asked no
+questions, except among themselves. No general announcement had been
+made. On the same stationery he sent for Adolph Morgenbau, who had
+exhibited marked skill at Summerfield's as his assistant, and who had
+since become art editor of _The Sphere_, a magazine of rising
+importance. He thought that Morgenbau might now be fitted to handle the
+art work under him, and he was not mistaken. Morgenbau had developed
+into a man of considerable force and intelligence, and was only too glad
+to be connected with Eugene again. He also talked with various
+advertising men, artists and writers as to just who were the most live
+editorial men in the field at that time, and these he wrote to, asking
+if they would come to see him. One by one they came, for the fact that
+he had come to New York to take charge not only of the advertising but
+the editorial ends of the United Magazines Corporation spread rapidly
+over the city. All those interested in art, writing, editing and
+advertising heard of it. Those who had known something of him in the
+past could scarcely believe their ears. Where did he get the skill?
+
+Eugene stated to Colfax that he deemed it advisable that a general
+announcement be made to the staff that he was in charge. "I have been
+looking about," he said, "and I think I know what I want to do."
+
+The various editors, art directors, advertising men and book workers
+were called to the main office and Colfax announced that he wished to
+make a statement which affected all those present. "Mr. Witla here will
+be in charge of all the publishing ends of this business from now on. I
+am withdrawing from any say in the matter, for I am satisfied that I do
+not know as much about it as he does. I want you all to look to him for
+advice and counsel just as you have to me in the past. Mr. White will
+continue in charge of the manufacturing and distributing end of the
+business. Mr. White and Mr. Witla will work together. That's all I have
+to say."
+
+The company departed, and once more Eugene returned to his office. He
+decided at once to find an advertising man who could work under him and
+run that branch of the business as well as he would. He spent some time
+looking for this man, and finally found him working for the Hays-Rickert
+Company, a man whom he had known something of in the past as an
+exceptional worker. He was a strong, forceful individual of thirty-two,
+Carter Hayes by name, who was very anxious to succeed in his chosen
+work, and who saw a great opportunity here. He did not like Eugene so
+very well--he thought that he was over-estimated--but he decided to work
+for him. The latter put him in at ten thousand a year and then turned
+his attention to his new duties completely.
+
+The editorial and publishing world was entirely new to Eugene from the
+executive side. He did not understand it as well as he did the art and
+advertising worlds, and because it was in a way comparatively new and
+strange to him he made a number of initial mistakes. His first was in
+concluding that all the men about him were more or less weak and
+inefficient, principally because the magazines were weak, when, as a
+matter of fact, there were a number of excellent men whom conditions had
+repressed, and who were only waiting for some slight recognition to be
+of great value. In the next place, he was not clear as to the exact
+policies to be followed in the case of each publication, and he was not
+inclined to listen humbly to those who could tell him. His best plan
+would have been to have gone exceedingly slow, watching the men who were
+in charge, getting their theories and supplementing their efforts with
+genial suggestions. Instead he decided on sweeping changes and not long
+after he had been in charge he began to make them. Marchwood, the editor
+of the _Review_, was removed, as was Gailer of the _Weekly_. The
+editorship of the _Adventure Story Magazine_ was given to Bezenah.
+
+In any organization of this kind, however, great improvements cannot be
+effected in a moment, and weeks and months must elapse before any
+noticeable change can be shown. Instead of throwing the burden of
+responsibility on each of his assistants and leaving it there, making
+occasional criticisms, Eugene undertook to work with each and all of
+them, endeavoring to direct the policy intimately in each particular
+case. It was not easy, and to him at times it was confusing. He had a
+great deal to learn. Still he did have helpful ideas in a score of
+directions daily and these told. The magazines were improved. The first
+issues which were affected by his judgment and those of his men were
+inspected closely by Colfax and White. The latter was particularly
+anxious to see what improvement had been made, and while he could not
+judge well himself, he had the means of getting opinions. Nearly all
+these were favorable, much to his disappointment, for he hoped to find
+things to criticize.
+
+Colfax, who had been watching Eugene's determined air, the energy with
+which he went about his work and the manner in which he freely accepted
+responsibility, came to admire him even more than he had before. He
+liked him socially--his companionship after business hours--and began to
+invite him up to the house to dinner. Unlike Kalvin, on most of these
+occasions he did not take Angela into consideration, for having met her
+he was not so very much impressed with her. She was nice, but not of the
+same coruscating quality as her husband. Mrs. Colfax expressed a
+derogatory opinion, and this also made it difficult. He sincerely wished
+that Eugene were single.
+
+Time passed. As Eugene worked more and more with the various
+propositions which this situation involved, he became more and more at
+his ease. Those who have ever held an executive position of any
+importance know how easy it is, given a certain degree of talent, to
+attract men and women of ability and force according to that talent.
+Like seeks like and those who are looking for advancement in their world
+according to their talents naturally drift to those who are more highly
+placed and who are much like themselves. Advertising men, artists,
+circulation men, editors, book critics, authors and all those who were
+sufficiently in his vein to understand or appreciate him sought him out,
+and by degrees he was compelled to learn to refer all applicants to the
+heads of departments. He was compelled to learn to rely to a certain
+degree on his men, and having learned this he was inclined to go to the
+other extreme and rely too much. In the case of Carter Hayes, in the
+advertising department, he was particularly impressed with the man's
+efficiency, and rested on him heavily for all the details of that work,
+merely inspecting his programs of procedure and advising him in
+difficult situations. The latter appreciated this, for he was egotistic
+to the roots, but it did not develop a sense of loyalty in him. He saw
+in Eugene a man who had risen by some fluke of fortune, and who was
+really not an advertising man at heart. He hoped some day that
+circumstances would bring it about that he could be advertising manager
+in fact, dealing directly with Colfax and White, whom, because of their
+greater financial interest in the business, he considered Eugene's
+superiors, and whom he proposed to court. There were others in the other
+departments who felt the same way.
+
+The one great difficulty with Eugene was that he had no great power of
+commanding the loyalty of his assistants. He had the power of inspiring
+them--of giving them ideas which would be helpful to themselves--but
+these they used, as a rule, merely to further their own interests, to
+cause them to advance to a point where they deemed themselves beyond
+him. Because in his manner he was not hard, distant, bitter, he was
+considered, as a rule, rather easy. The men whom he employed, and he had
+talent for picking men of very exceptional ability, sometimes much
+greater than his own in their particular specialties, looked upon him
+not so much as a superior after a time, as someone who was in their path
+and to whose shoes they might properly aspire. He seemed so good natured
+about the whole work--so easy going. Now and then he took the trouble to
+tell a man that he was getting too officious, but in the main he did not
+care much. Things were going smoothly, the magazines were improving, the
+advertising and circulation departments were showing marked gains, and
+altogether his life seemed to have blossomed out into comparative
+perfection. There were storms and daily difficulties, but they were not
+serious. Colfax advised with him genially when he was in doubt, and
+White pretended a friendship which he did not feel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+
+The trouble with this situation was that it involved more power,
+comfort, ease and luxury than Eugene had ever experienced before, and
+made him a sort of oriental potentate not only among his large company
+of assistants but in his own home. Angela, who had been watching his
+career all these years with curiosity, began to conceive of him at last
+as a genius in every respect--destined to some great pre-eminence, in
+art or finance or the publishing world or all three. She did not relax
+her attitude in regard to his conduct, being more convinced than ever
+that to achieve the dizzy eminence to which he was now so rapidly
+ascending, he must be more circumspect than ever. People were watching
+him so closely now. They were so obsequious to him, but still so
+dangerous. A man in his position must be so careful how he dressed,
+talked, walked.
+
+"Don't make so much fuss," he used to say to her. "For heaven's sake,
+let me alone!" This merely produced more quarrels, for Angela was
+determined to regulate him in spite of his wishes and in his best
+interests.
+
+Grave men and women in various walks of life--art, literature,
+philanthropy, trade, began to seek him out, because in the first place
+he had an understanding mind and because in the next place, which was
+much more important, he had something to give. There are always those in
+all walks of life who are seeking something through those avenues which
+a successful person represents, whatever they may be, and these together
+with those others who are always intensely eager to bask in the
+reflected glory of a rising luminary, make a retinue for every
+successful man. Eugene had his retinue, men and women of his own station
+or beneath it, who would eagerly shake his hand with an "Oh, yes,
+indeed. Managing Publisher of the United Magazines Corporation! Oh, yes,
+yes!" Women particularly were prone to smile, showing him even white
+teeth and regretting that all good looking and successful men were
+married.
+
+In July following his coming from Philadelphia the United Magazines
+Corporation moved into its new building, and then he was installed into
+the most imposing office of his career. A subtle assistant, wishing to
+ingratiate the staff in Eugene's good graces, suggested that a
+collection be taken up for flowers. His room, which was done in white,
+blue and gold with rose wood furniture, to set it apart from the
+prevailing decorative scheme and so make it more impressive, was
+scattered with great bouquets of roses, sweet peas and pinks, in
+beautiful and ornate vases of different colors, countries and schools.
+His great rosewood flat-topped desk, covered with a thick, plate glass
+through which the polished wood shone brightly, was decorated with
+flowers. On the morning of his entry he held an impromptu reception, on
+which occasion he was visited by Colfax and White, who after going to
+look at their new rooms, came to his. A general reception which followed
+some three weeks later, and in which the successful representatives of
+various walks of life in the metropolis took part, drew to the building
+a great crowd, artists, writers, editors, publishers, authors and
+advertising men who saw him in all his glory. On this occasion, Eugene,
+with White and Colfax did the receiving. He was admired at a distance by
+striplings who wondered how he had ever accomplished such great results.
+His rise had been so meteoric. It seemed so impossible that a man who
+had started as an artist should change and become a dominant factor in
+literature and art from a publishing point of view.
+
+In his own home his surroundings were equally showy; he was as much a
+figure as he was in his office. When he was alone with Angela, which was
+not so often, for naturally they did a great deal of entertaining, he
+was a figure even to her. Long ago she had come to think of him as
+someone who would some day dominate in the art world; but to see him an
+imposing factor in the city's commercial life, its principal publishers'
+representative, having a valet and an automobile, riding freely in cabs,
+lunching at the most exclusive restaurants and clubs, and associating
+constantly with someone who was of importance, was a different matter.
+
+She was no longer so sure of herself with him, not so certain of her
+power to control him. They quarreled over little things, but she was not
+so ready to begin these quarrels. He seemed changed now and deeper
+still. She was afraid, even yet, that he might make a mistake and lose
+it all, that the forces of ill will, envy and jealousy which were
+everywhere apparent in life, and which blow about so easily like gusts
+of wind, would work him harm. Eugene was apparently at ease, though he
+was troubled at times for his own safety, when he thought of it, for he
+had no stock in the company, and was as beholden to Colfax as any hall
+boy, but he did not see how he could easily be dispensed with. He was
+_making good_.
+
+Colfax was friendly to him. He was surprised at times to see how badly
+the manufacturing arrangements could go awry, affecting his dates of
+issue, but White invariably had a good excuse. Colfax took him to his
+house in the country, his lodge in the mountains, on short yachting and
+fishing trips, for he liked to talk to him, but he rarely if ever
+invited Angela. He did not seem to think it was necessary to do this,
+and Eugene was afraid to impress the slight upon his attention, much as
+he dreaded the thoughts which Angela must be thinking. It was Eugene
+here and Eugene there, with constant calls of "where are you, old man?"
+from Colfax, who appeared not to want to be away from him.
+
+"Well, old man," he would say, looking him over much as one might a
+blood horse or a pedigree dog, "you're getting on. This new job agrees
+with you. You didn't look like that when you came to me," and he would
+feel the latest suit Eugene might be wearing, or comment on some pin or
+tie he had on, or tell him that his shoes were not as good as he could
+really get, if he wanted to be perfect in dress. Colfax was for grooming
+his new prize much as one might groom a blood horse, and he was always
+telling Eugene little details of social life, the right things to do,
+the right places to be seen, the right places to go, as though Eugene
+knew little or nothing.
+
+"Now when we go down to Mrs. Savage's Friday afternoon, you get a
+Truxton Portmanteau. Have you seen them? Well, there's the thing. Got a
+London coat? Well, you ought to have one. Those servants down there go
+through your things and they size you up accordingly. Nothing less than
+two dollars each goes, and five dollars to the butler, remember that."
+
+He assumed and insisted after a fashion which Eugene resented quite as
+much as he did his persistent ignoring of Angela, but he did not dare
+comment on it. He could see that Colfax was variable, that he could hate
+as well as love, and that he rarely took any intermediate ground. Eugene
+was his favorite now.
+
+"I'll send my car around for you at two Friday," he would say, as though
+Eugene did not keep a car, when he was planning one of his week-end
+excursions. "You be ready."
+
+At two, on that day, Colfax's big blue touring car would come speeding
+up to the entrance of the apartment house and Eugene's valet would carry
+down his bags, golf sticks, tennis racket and the various paraphernalia
+that go with a week-end's entertainment, and off the car would roll. At
+times Angela would be left behind, at times taken, when Eugene could
+arrange it; but he found that he had to be tactful and accede to
+Colfax's indifference mostly. Eugene would always explain to her how it
+was. He was sorry for her in a way, and yet he felt there was some
+justice in the distinction. She was not exactly suited to that topmost
+world in which he was now beginning to move. These people were colder,
+sharper, shrewder, than Angela. They had more of that intense
+sophistication of manner and experience than she could achieve. As a
+matter of fact, Angela had as much grace and more than many of the four
+hundred, but she did lack that quickness of wit or that shallow
+self-sufficiency and assurance which are the almost invariable traits of
+those who shine as members of the smart set. Eugene was able to assume
+this manner whether he felt it or not.
+
+"Oh, that's all right," she would say, "as long as you're doing it for
+business reasons."
+
+She resented it nevertheless, bitterly, for it seemed such an uncalled
+for slur. Colfax had no compunctions in adjusting his companionship to
+suit his moods. He thought Eugene was well suited to this high life. He
+thought Angela was not. He made the distinction roughly and went his
+way.
+
+It was in this manner that Eugene learned a curious fact about the
+social world, and that was that frequently in these highest circles a
+man would be received where his wife would not and vice versa, and that
+nothing very much was thought of it, if it could be managed.
+
+"Oh, is that Birkwood," he heard a young swell once remark, concerning
+an individual in Philadelphia. "Why do they let him in? His wife is
+charming, but he won't do," and once in New York he heard a daughter ask
+her mother, of a certain wife who was announced--her husband being at
+the same table--"who invited her?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," replied her mother; "I didn't. She must have
+come of her own accord."
+
+"She certainly has her nerve with her," replied the daughter--and when
+the wife entered Eugene could see why. She was not good looking and not
+harmoniously and tastefully dressed. It gave Eugene a shock, but in a
+way he could understand. There were no such grounds of complaint against
+Angela. She was attractive and shapely. Her one weakness was that she
+lacked the blase social air. It was too bad, he thought.
+
+In his own home and circle, however, he thought to make up for this by a
+series of entertainments which grew more and more elaborate as time went
+on. At first when he came back from Philadelphia it consisted of a few
+people in to dinner, old friends, for he was not quite sure of himself
+and did not know how many would come to share his new honors with him.
+Eugene had never got over his love for those he had known in his youth.
+He was not snobbish. It was true that now he was taking naturally to
+prosperous people, but the little ones, the old-time ones, he liked for
+old lang syne's sake as well as for themselves. Many came to borrow
+money, for he had associated with many ne'er do wells in his time, but
+many more were attracted by his fame.
+
+Eugene knew intimately and pleasantly most of the artistic and
+intellectual figures of his day. In his home and at his table there
+appeared artists, publishers, grand opera stars, actors and playwrights.
+His large salary, for one thing, his beautiful apartment and its
+location, his magnificent office and his friendly manner all conspired
+to assist him. It was his self-conscious boast that he had not changed.
+He liked nice people, simple people, natural people he said, for these
+were the really great ones, but he could not see how far he had come in
+class selection. Now he naturally gravitated to the wealthy, the
+reputed, the beautiful, the strong and able, for no others interested
+him. He hardly saw them. If he did it was to pity or give alms.
+
+It is difficult to indicate to those who have never come out of poverty
+into luxury, or out of comparative uncouthness into refinement, the veil
+or spell which the latter comes eventually to cast over the
+inexperienced mind, coloring the world anew. Life is apparently
+striving, constantly, to perfect its illusions and to create spells.
+There are, as a matter of fact, nothing but these outside that ultimate
+substance or principle which underlies it all. To those who have come
+out of inharmony, harmony is a spell, and to those who have come out of
+poverty, luxury is a dream of delight. Eugene, being primarily a lover
+of beauty, keenly responsive to all those subtleties of perfection and
+arrangement which ingenuity can devise, was taken vastly by the nature
+of this greater world into which, step by step apparently, he was almost
+insensibly passing. Each new fact which met his eye or soothed his
+sensibilities was quickly adjusted to all that had gone before. It
+seemed to him as though all his life he had naturally belonged to this
+perfect world of which country houses, city mansions, city and country
+clubs, expensive hotels and inns, cars, resorts, beautiful women,
+affected manners, subtlety of appreciation and perfection of appointment
+generally were the inherent concomitants. This was the true heaven--that
+material and spiritual perfection on earth, of which the world was
+dreaming and to which, out of toil, disorder, shabby ideas, mixed
+opinions, non-understanding and all the ill to which the flesh is heir,
+it was constantly aspiring.
+
+Here was no sickness, no weariness apparently, no ill health or untoward
+circumstances. All the troubles, disorders and imperfections of
+existence were here carefully swept aside and one saw only the niceness,
+the health and strength of being. He was more and more impressed as he
+came farther and farther along in the scale of comfort, with the force
+and eagerness with which life seems to minister to the luxury-love of
+the human mind. He learned of so many, to him, lovely things, large,
+wellkept, magnificent country places, scenes of exquisite beauty where
+country clubs, hotels, seaside resorts of all descriptions had been
+placed. He found sport, amusement, exercise, to be tremendously well
+organized and that there were thousands of people who were practically
+devoting their lives to this. Such a state of social ease was not for
+him yet, but he could sit at the pleasures, so amply spread, between his
+hours of work and dream of the time to come when possibly he might do
+nothing at all. Yachting, motoring, golfing, fishing, hunting, riding,
+playing tennis and polo, there were experts in all these fields he
+found. Card playing, dancing, dining, lounging, these seemed to occupy
+many people's days constantly. He could only look in upon it all as upon
+a passing show, but that was better than nothing. It was more than he
+had ever done before. He was beginning to see clearly how the world was
+organized, how far were its reaches of wealth, its depths of poverty.
+From the lowest beggar to the topmost scene--what a distance!
+
+Angela scarcely kept pace with him in all these mental peregrinations.
+It was true that now she went to the best dressmakers only, bought
+charming hats, the most expensive shoes, rode in cabs and her husband's
+auto, but she did not feel about it as he did. It seemed very much like
+a dream to her--like something that had come so suddenly and so
+exuberantly that it could not be permanent. There was running in her
+mind all the time that Eugene was neither a publisher, nor an editor,
+nor a financier at heart, but an artist and that an artist he would
+remain. He might attain great fame and make much money out of his
+adopted profession, but some day in all likelihood he would leave it and
+return to art. He seemed to be making sound investments--at least, they
+seemed sound to her, and their stocks and bank accounts, principally
+convertible stocks, seemed a safe enough margin for the future to
+guarantee peace of mind, but they were not saving so much, after all. It
+was costing them something over eight thousand dollars a year to live,
+and their expenses were constantly growing larger rather than smaller.
+Eugene appeared to become more and more extravagant.
+
+"I think we are doing too much entertaining," Angela had once protested,
+but he waived the complaint aside. "I can't do what I'm doing and not
+entertain. It's building me up. People in our position have to." He
+threw open the doors finally to really remarkable crowds and most of the
+cleverest people in all walks of life--the really exceptionally
+clever--came to eat his meals, to drink his wines, to envy his comfort
+and wish they were in his shoes.
+
+During all this time Eugene and Angela instead of growing closer
+together, were really growing farther and farther apart. She had never
+either forgotten or utterly forgiven that one terrific lapse, and she
+had never believed that Eugene was utterly cured of his hedonistic
+tendencies. Crowds of beautiful women came to Angela's teas, lunches and
+their joint evening parties and receptions. Under Eugene's direction
+they got together interesting programmes, for it was no trouble now for
+him to command musical, theatrical, literary and artistic talent. He
+knew men and women who could make rapid charcoal or crayon sketches of
+people, could do feats in legerdemain, and character representation,
+could sing, dance, play, recite and tell humorous stories in a droll and
+off-hand way. He insisted that only exceptionally beautiful women be
+invited, for he did not care to look at the homely ones, and curiously
+he found dozens, who were not only extremely beautiful, but singers,
+dancers, composers, authors, actors and playwrights in the bargain.
+Nearly all of them were brilliant conversationalists and they helped to
+entertain themselves--made their own entertainment, in fact. His table
+very frequently was a glittering spectacle. One of his "Stunts" as he
+called it was to bundle fifteen or twenty people into three or four
+automobiles after they had lingered in his rooms until three o'clock in
+the morning and motor out to some out-of-town inn for breakfast and "to
+see the sun rise." A small matter like a bill for $75.00 for auto hire
+or thirty-five dollars for a crowd for breakfast did not trouble him. It
+was a glorious sensation to draw forth his purse and remove four or five
+or six yellow backed ten dollar bills, knowing that it made little real
+difference. More money was coming to him from the same source. He could
+send down to the cashier at any time and draw from five hundred to a
+thousand dollars. He always had from one hundred and fifty to three
+hundred dollars in his purse in denominations of five, ten and twenty
+dollar bills. He carried a small check book and most frequently paid by
+check. He liked to assume that he was known and frequently imposed this
+assumption on others.
+
+"Eugene Witla! Eugene Witla! George! he's a nice fellow,"--or "it's
+remarkable how he has come up, isn't it?" "I was at the Witlas' the
+other night. Did you ever see such a beautiful apartment? It's perfect!
+That view!"
+
+People commented on the interesting people he entertained, the clever
+people you met there, the beautiful women, the beautiful view. "And
+Mrs. Witla is so charming."
+
+But down at the bottom of all this talk there was also much envy and
+disparagement and never much enthusiasm for the personality of
+Mrs. Witla. She was not as brilliant as Eugene--or rather the comment
+was divided. Those who liked clever people, show, wit, brilliance, ease,
+liked Eugene and not Angela quite so much. Those who liked sedateness,
+solidity, sincerity, the commoner virtues of faithfulness and effort,
+admired Angela. All saw that she was a faithful handmaiden to her
+husband, that she adored the ground he walked on.
+
+"Such a nice little woman--so homelike. It's curious that he should have
+married her, though, isn't it? They are so different. And yet they
+appear to have lots of things in common, too. It's strange--isn't it?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+
+It was in the course of his final upward progress that Eugene came once
+more into contact with Kenyon C. Winfield, Ex-State Senator of New York,
+President of the Long Island Realty Company, land developer, real estate
+plunger, financier, artist, what not--a man very much of Eugene's own
+type and temperament, who at this time was doing rather remarkable
+things in a land speculative way. Winfield was tall and thin, black
+haired, black eyed, slightly but not offensively hook nosed, dignified,
+gracious, intellectual, magnetic, optimistic. He was forty-eight years
+of age. Winfield was a very fair sample of your man of the world who has
+ideas, dreams, fancies, executive ability, a certain amount of reserve
+and judgment, sufficient to hold his own in this very complicated mortal
+struggle. He was not really a great man, but he was so near it that he
+gave the impression to many of being so. His deep sunken black eyes
+burned with a peculiar lustre, one might almost have fancied a tint of
+red in them. His pale, slightly sunken face had some of the
+characteristics of your polished Mephisto, though not too many. He was
+not at all devilish looking in the true sense of the word, but keen,
+subtle, artistic. His method was to ingratiate himself with men who had
+money in order to get from them the vast sums which he found it
+necessary to borrow to carry out the schemes or rather dreams he was
+constantly generating. His fancies were always too big for his purse,
+but he had such lovely fancies that it was a joy to work with them and
+him.
+
+Primarily Winfield was a real estate speculator, secondarily he was a
+dreamer of dreams and seer of visions. His visions consisted of lovely
+country areas near some city stocked with charming country houses, cut
+up with well paved, tree shaded roads, provided with sewers, gas,
+electricity, suitable railway service, street cars and all the comforts
+of a well organized living district which should be at once retired,
+exclusive, pleasing, conservative and yet bound up tightly with the
+great Metropolitan heart of New York which he so greatly admired.
+Winfield had been born and raised in Brooklyn. He had been a politician,
+orator, insurance dealer, contractor, and so on. He had succeeded in
+organizing various suburban estates--Winfield, Sunnyside, Ruritania, The
+Beeches--little forty, fifty, one hundred and two hundred acre flats
+which with the help of "O. P. M." as he always called other people's
+money he had divided off into blocks, laying out charmingly with trees
+and sometimes a strip of green grass running down the centre, concrete
+sidewalks, a set of noble restrictions, and so forth. Anyone who ever
+came to look at a lot in one of Winfield's perfect suburbs always found
+the choicest piece of property in the centre of this latest burst of
+improvement set aside for the magnificent house which Mr. Kenyon
+C. Winfield, the president of the company, was to build and live in.
+Needless to say they were never built. He had been round the world and
+seen a great many things and places, but Winfield or Sunnyside or
+Ruritania or The Beeches, so the lot buyers in these places were told,
+had been finally selected by him deliberately as the one spot in all the
+world in which he hoped to spend the remainder of his days.
+
+At the time Eugene met him, he was planning Minetta Water on the shores
+of Gravesend Bay, which was the most ambitious of all his projects so
+far. He was being followed financially, by a certain number of Brooklyn
+politicians and financiers who had seen him succeed in small things,
+taking a profit of from three to four hundred per cent, out of ten,
+twenty and thirty acre flats, but for all his brilliance it had been
+slow work. He was now worth between three and four hundred thousand
+dollars and, for the first time in his life, was beginning to feel that
+freedom in financial matters which made him think that he could do
+almost anything. He had met all sorts of people, lawyers, bankers,
+doctors, merchants, the "easy classes" he called them, all with a little
+money to invest, and he had succeeded in luring hundreds of worth-while
+people into his projects. His great dreams had never really been
+realized, however, for he saw visions of a great warehouse and shipping
+system to be established on Jamaica Bay, out of which he was to make
+millions, if it ever came to pass, and also a magnificent summer resort
+of some kind, somewhere, which was not yet clearly evolved in his mind.
+His ads were scattered freely through the newspapers: his signs, or
+rather the signs of his towns, scattered broadcast over Long Island.
+
+Eugene had met him first when he was working with the Summerfield
+Company, but he met him this time quite anew at the home of the W. W.
+Willebrand on the North Shore of Long Island near Hempstead. He had gone
+down there one Saturday afternoon at the invitation of Mrs. Willebrand,
+whom he had met at another house party and with whom he had danced. She
+had been pleased with his gay, vivacious manner and had asked him if he
+wouldn't come. Winfield was here as a guest with his automobile.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Winfield pleasantly. "I recall you very well. You are
+now with the United Magazines Corporation,--I understand--someone was
+telling me--a most prosperous company, I believe. I know Mr. Colfax very
+well. I once spoke to Summerfield about you. A most astonishing fellow,
+that, tremendously able. You were doing that series of sugar plantation
+ads for them or having them done. I think I copied the spirit of those
+things in advertising Ruritania, as you may have noticed. Well, you
+certainly have improved your condition since then. I once tried to tell
+Summerfield that he had an exceptional man in you, but he would have
+nothing of it. He's too much of an egoist. He doesn't know how to work
+with a man on equal terms."
+
+Eugene smiled at the thought of Summerfield.
+
+"An able man," he said simply. "He did a great deal for me."
+
+Winfield liked that. He thought Eugene would criticize him. He liked
+Eugene's genial manner and intelligent, expressive face. It occurred to
+him that when next he wanted to advertise one of his big development
+projects, he would go to Eugene or the man who had done the sugar
+plantation series of pictures and get him to give him the right idea for
+advertising.
+
+Affinity is such a peculiar thing. It draws people so easily, apart from
+volition or consciousness. In a few moments Eugene and Winfield, sitting
+side by side on the veranda, looking at the greenwood before them, the
+long stretch of open sound, dotted with white sails and the dim, distant
+shore of Connecticut, were talking of real estate ventures in general,
+what land was worth, how speculations of this kind turned out, as a
+rule. Winfield was anxious to take Eugene seriously, for he felt drawn
+to him and Eugene studied Winfield's pale face, his thin, immaculate
+hands, his suit of soft, gray cloth. He looked as able as his public
+reputation made him out to be--in fact, he looked better than anything
+he had ever done. Eugene had seen Ruritania and The Beeches. They did
+not impress him vastly as territorial improvements, but they were
+pretty, nevertheless. For middle-class people, they were quite the thing
+he thought.
+
+"I should think it would be a pleasure to you to scheme out a new
+section," he said to him once. "The idea of a virgin piece of land to be
+converted into streets and houses or a village appeals to me immensely.
+The idea of laying it out and sketching houses to fit certain positions,
+suits my temperament exactly. I wish sometimes I had been born an
+architect."
+
+"It is pleasant and if that were all it would be ideal," returned
+Winfield. "The thing is more a matter of financing than anything else.
+You have to raise money for land and improvements. If you make
+exceptional improvements they are expensive. You really can't expect to
+get much, if any, of your money back, until all your work is done. Then
+you have to wait. If you put up houses you can't rent them, for the
+moment you rent them, you can't sell them as new. When you make your
+improvements your taxes go up immediately. If you sell a piece of
+property to a man or woman who isn't exactly in accord with your scheme,
+he or she may put up a house which destroys the value of a whole
+neighborhood for you. You can't fix the details of a design in a
+contract too closely. You can only specify the minimum price the house
+is to cost and the nature of the materials to be used. Some people's
+idea of beauty will vary vastly from others. Taste in sections may
+change. A whole city like New York may suddenly decide that it wants to
+build west when you are figuring on its building east. So--well, all
+these things have to be taken into consideration."
+
+"That sounds logical enough," said Eugene, "but wouldn't the right sort
+of a scheme just naturally draw to itself the right sort of people, if
+it were presented in the right way? Don't you fix the conditions by your
+own attitude?"
+
+"You do, you do," replied Winfield, easily. "If you give the matter
+sufficient care and attention it can be done. The pity is you can be too
+fine at times. I have seen attempts at perfection come to nothing.
+People with taste and tradition and money behind them are not moving
+into new additions and suburbs, as a rule. You are dealing with the new
+rich and financial beginners. Most people strain their resources to the
+breaking point to better their living conditions and they don't always
+know. If they have the money, it doesn't always follow that they have
+the taste to grasp what you are striving for, and if they have the taste
+they haven't the money. They would do better if they could, but they
+can't. A man in my position is like an artist and a teacher and a father
+confessor and financier and everything all rolled into one. When you
+start to be a real estate developer on a big scale you must be these
+things. I have had some successes and some notable failures. Winfield is
+one of the worst. It's disgusting to me now."
+
+"I have always wished I could lay out a seaside resort or a suburb,"
+said Eugene dreamily. "I've never been to but one or two of the resorts
+abroad, but it strikes me that none of the resorts here--certainly none
+near New York--are right. The opportunities are so wonderful. The things
+that have been done are horrible. There is no plan, no detail anywhere."
+
+"My views exactly," said Winfield. "I've been thinking of it for years.
+Some such place could be built, and I suppose if it were done right it
+would be successful. It would be expensive, though, very, and those who
+come in would have a long wait for their money."
+
+"It would be a great opportunity to do something really worth while,
+though," said Eugene. "No one seems to realize how beautiful a thing
+like that could be made."
+
+Winfield said nothing, but the thought stuck in his mind. He was
+dreaming a seaside improvement which should be the most perfect place of
+its kind in the world--a monument to himself if he did it. If Eugene had
+this idea of beauty he might help. At least he might talk to him about
+it when the time came. Perhaps Eugene might have a little money to
+invest. It would take millions to put such a scheme through, but every
+little would help. Besides Eugene might have ideas which should make
+money both for himself and for Winfield. It was worth thinking about. So
+they parted, not to meet again for weeks and months, but they did not
+forget each other.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+THE REVOLT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+It was when Eugene was at the height of his success that a meeting took
+place between himself and a certain Mrs. Emily Dale.
+
+Mrs. Dale was a strikingly beautiful and intelligent widow of
+thirty-eight, the daughter of a well-to-do and somewhat famous New York
+family of Dutch extraction--the widow of an eminent banker of
+considerable wealth who had been killed in an automobile accident near
+Paris some years before. She was the mother of four children, Suzanne,
+eighteen; Kinroy, fifteen; Adele, twelve, and Ninette, nine, but the
+size of her family had in no way affected the subtlety of her social
+personality and the delicacy of her charm and manner. She was tall,
+graceful, willowy, with a wealth of dark hair, which was used in the
+most subtle manner to enhance the beauty of her face. She was calm,
+placid apparently, while really running deep with emotion and fancies,
+with manners which were the perfection of kindly courtesy and good
+breeding and with those airs of superiority which come so naturally to
+those who are raised in a fortunate and exclusive atmosphere.
+
+She did not consider herself passionate in a marked degree, but freely
+admitted to herself that she was vain and coquettish. She was keen and
+observing, with a single eye to the main chance socially, but with a
+genuine love for literature and art and a propensity to write. Eugene
+met her through Colfax, who introduced him to her. He learned from the
+latter that she was rather unfortunate in her marriage except from a
+money point of view, and that her husband's death was no irreparable
+loss. He also learned from the same source that she was a good mother,
+trying to bring up her children in the manner most suitable to their
+station and opportunities. Her husband had been of a much poorer social
+origin than herself, but her own standing was of the very best. She was
+a gay social figure, being invited much, entertaining freely, preferring
+the company of younger men to those of her own age or older and being
+followed ardently by one fortune hunter and another, who saw in her
+beauty, wealth and station, an easy door to the heaven of social
+supremacy.
+
+The Dale home, or homes rather, were in several different places--one at
+Morristown, New Jersey, another on fashionable Grimes Hill on Staten
+Island, a third--a city residence, which at the time Eugene met them,
+was leased for a term of years--was in Sixty-seventh Street, near Fifth
+Avenue in New York City, and a fourth, a small lodge, at Lenox,
+Massachusetts, which was also rented. Shortly after he met her the house
+at Morristown was closed and the lodge at Lenox re-occupied.
+
+For the most part Mrs. Dale preferred to dwell in her ancestral home on
+Staten Island, which, because of its commanding position on what was
+known as Grimes Hill, controlled a magnificent view of the bay and
+harbor of New York. Manhattan, its lower wall of buildings, lay like a
+cloud at the north. The rocking floor of the sea, blue and gray and
+slate black by turn, spread to the east. In the west were visible the
+Kill von Kull with its mass of shipping and the Orange Hills. In a boat
+club at Tompkinsville she had her motor boat, used mostly by her boy; in
+her garage at Grimes Hill, several automobiles. She owned several riding
+horses, retained four family servants permanently and in other ways
+possessed all those niceties of appointment which make up the
+comfortable life of wealth and ease.
+
+The two youngest of her girls were in a fashionable boarding school at
+Tarrytown; the boy, Kinroy, was preparing for Harvard; Suzanne, the
+eldest, was at home, fresh from boarding school experiences, beginning
+to go out socially. Her debut had already been made. Suzanne was a
+peculiar girl, plump, beautiful, moody, with, at times, a dreamy air of
+indifference and a smile that ran like a breath of air over water. Her
+eyes were large, of a vague blue-gray, her lips rosy and arched; her
+cheeks full and pink. She had a crown of light chestnut hair, a body at
+once innocent and voluptuous in its outlines. When she laughed it was a
+rippling gurgle, and her sense of humor was perfect, if not exaggerated.
+One of those naturally wise but as yet vague and formless artistic
+types, which suspect without education, nearly all the subtleties of the
+world, and burst forth full winged and beautiful, but oh, so fragile,
+like a butterfly from its chrysalis, the radiance of morning upon its
+body. Eugene did not see her for a long time after he met Mrs. Dale, but
+when he did, he was greatly impressed with her beauty.
+
+Life sometimes builds an enigma out of common clay, and with a look from
+a twelve-year-old girl, sets a Dante singing. It can make a god of a
+bull, a divinity of an ibis, or a beetle, set up a golden calf to be
+worshipped of the multitude. Paradox! Paradox! In this case an immature
+and yet nearly perfect body held a seemingly poetic and yet utterly
+nebulous appreciation of life--a body so youthful, a soul so fumbling
+that one would ask, How should tragedy lurk in form like this?
+
+A fool?
+
+Not quite, yet so nebulous, so much a dreamer that difficulty might
+readily follow in the wake of any thoughtless deed.
+
+As a matter of fact, favored as she was by nature and fortune, her very
+presence was dangerous--provocative, without thought of being so. If a
+true artist had painted her, synthesizing her spirit with her body, he
+might have done so showing her standing erect on a mountain top, her
+limbs outlined amidst fluttering draperies against the wind, her eyes
+fixed on distant heights, or a falling star. Out of mystery into mystery
+again, so she came and went. Her mind was not unlike a cloud of mist
+through which the morning sun is endeavoring to break, irradiating all
+with its flushes of pink and gold. Again it was like those impearled
+shells of the South Sea, without design yet suggestive of all
+perfections and all beauties. Dreams! dreams!--of clouds, sunsets,
+colors, sounds which a too articulate world would do its best later to
+corrupt. What Dante saw in Beatrice, what Abelard saw in Heloise, Romeo
+in Juliet, so some wondering swain could have seen in her--and suffered
+a like fate.
+
+Eugene encountered Mrs. Dale at a house party on Long Island one
+Saturday afternoon, and their friendship began at once. She was
+introduced to him by Colfax, and because of the latter's brusque,
+jesting spirit was under no illusions as to his social state.
+
+"You needn't look at him closely," he observed gaily, "he's married."
+
+"That simply makes him all the more interesting," she rippled, and
+extended her hand.
+
+Eugene took it. "I'm glad a poor married man can find shelter
+somewhere," he said, smartly.
+
+"You should rejoice," she replied. "It's at once your liberty and your
+protection. Think how safe you are!"
+
+"I know, I know," he said. "All the slings and arrows of Miss Fortune
+hurtling by."
+
+"And you in no danger of being hurt."
+
+He offered her his arm, and they strolled through a window onto a
+veranda.
+
+The day was just the least bit dull for Mrs. Dale. Bridge was in
+progress in the card room, a company of women and girls gambling
+feverishly. Eugene was not good at bridge, not quick enough mentally,
+and Mrs. Dale did not care much for it.
+
+"I have been trying to stir up enough interest to bring to pass a motor
+ride, but it doesn't work," she said. "They all have the gambling fever
+today. Are you as greedy as the others?"
+
+"I'm greedy I assure you, but I can't play. The greediest thing I can do
+is to stay away from the tables. I save most. That sharp Faraday has
+cleaned me and two others out of four hundred dollars. It's astonishing
+the way some people can play. They just look at the cards or make mystic
+signs and the wretched things range themselves in serried ranks to suit
+them. It's a crime. It ought to be a penitentiary offense, particularly
+to beat me. I'm such an inoffensive specimen of the non-bridge playing
+family."
+
+"A burnt child, you know. Stay away. Let's sit here. They can't come out
+here and rob you."
+
+They sat down in green willow chairs, and after a time a servant offered
+them coffee. Mrs. Dale accepted. They drifted conversationally from
+bridge to characters in society--a certain climber by the name of
+Bristow, a man who had made a fortune in trunks--and from him to travel
+and from travel to Mrs. Dale's experiences with fortune hunters. The
+automobile materialized through the intervention of others, but Eugene
+found great satisfaction in this woman's company and sat beside her.
+They talked books, art, magazines, the making of fortunes and
+reputations. Because he was or seemed to be in a position to assist her
+in a literary way she was particularly nice to him. When he was leaving
+she asked, "Where are you in New York?"
+
+"Riverside Drive is our present abode," he said.
+
+"Why don't you bring Mrs. Witla and come down to see us some week-end? I
+usually have a few people there, and the house is roomy. I'll name you a
+special day if you wish."
+
+"Do. We'll be delighted. Mrs. Witla will enjoy it, I'm sure."
+
+Mrs. Dale wrote to Angela ten days later as to a particular date, and in
+this way the social intimacy began.
+
+It was never of a very definite character, though. When Mrs. Dale met
+Angela she liked her quite well as an individual, whatever she may have
+thought of her as a social figure. Neither Eugene nor Angela saw Suzanne
+nor any of the other children on this occasion, all of them being away.
+Eugene admired the view tremendously and hinted at being invited again.
+Mrs. Dale was delighted. She liked him as a man entirely apart from his
+position but particularly because of his publishing station. She was
+ambitious to write. Others had told her that he was the most conspicuous
+of the rising figures in the publishing world. Being friendly with him
+would give her exceptional standing with all his editors. She was only
+too pleased to be gracious to him. He was invited again and a third
+time, with Angela, and it seemed as though they were reaching, or might
+at least reach, something much more definite than a mere social
+acquaintance.
+
+It was about six months after Eugene had first met Mrs. Dale that Angela
+gave a tea, and Eugene, in assisting her to prepare the list of
+invitations, had suggested that those who were to serve the tea and
+cakes should be two exceptionally pretty girls who were accustomed to
+come to the Witla apartment, Florence Reel, the daughter of a well-known
+author of that name and Marjorie Mac Tennan, the daughter of a
+well-known editor, both beautiful and talented, one with singing and the
+other with art ambitions. Angela had seen a picture of Suzanne Dale in
+her mother's room at Daleview on Grimes Hill, and had been particularly
+taken with her girlish charm and beauty.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "if Mrs. Dale would object to having Suzanne come
+and help serve that day. She would like it, I'm sure, there are going to
+be so many clever people here. We haven't seen her, but that doesn't
+matter. It would be a nice way to introduce herself."
+
+"That's a good idea, I should say," observed Eugene judicially. He had
+seen the photo of Suzanne and liked it, though he was not
+over-impressed. Photos to him were usually gross deceivers. He accepted
+them always with reservations. Angela forthwith wrote to Mrs. Dale, who
+agreed. She would be glad to come herself. She had seen the Witla
+apartment, and had been very much pleased with it. The reception day
+came and Angela begged Eugene to come home early.
+
+"I know you don't like to be alone with a whole roomful of people, but
+Mr. Goodrich is coming, and Frederick Allen (one of their friends who
+had taken a fancy to Eugene), Arturo Scalchero is going to sing and
+Bonavita to play." Scalchero was none other than Arthur Skalger, of Port
+Jervis, New Jersey, but he assumed this corruption of his name in Italy
+to help him to success. Bonavita was truly a Spanish pianist of some
+repute who was flattered to be invited to Eugene's home.
+
+"Well, I don't care much about it," replied Eugene. "But I will come."
+
+He frequently felt that afternoon teas and receptions were ridiculous
+affairs, and that he had far better be in his office attending to his
+multitudinous duties. Still he did leave early, and at five-thirty was
+ushered into a great roomful of chattering, gesticulating, laughing
+people. A song by Florence Reel had just been concluded. Like all girls
+of ambition, vivacity and imagination, she took an interest in Eugene,
+for in his smiling face she found a responsive gleam.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Witla!" she exclaimed. "Now here you are and you just missed my
+song. And I wanted you to hear it, too."
+
+"Don't grieve, Florrie," he said familiarly, holding her hand and
+looking momentarily in her eyes. "You're going to sing it again for me.
+I heard part of it as I came up on the elevator." He relinquished her
+hand. "Why, Mrs. Dale! Delighted, I'm sure. So nice of you. And Arturo
+Scalchero--hullo, Skalger, you old frost! Where'd you get the Italian
+name? Bonavita! Fine! Am I going to hear you play? All over? Alas!
+Marjorie Mac Tennan! Gee, but you look sweet! If Mrs. Witla weren't
+watching me, I'd kiss you. Oh, the pretty bonnet! And Frederick Allen!
+My word! What are you trying to grab off, Allen? I'm on to you. No
+bluffs! Nix! Nix! Why, Mrs. Schenck--delighted! Angela, why didn't you
+tell me Mrs. Schenck was coming? I'd have been home at three."
+
+By this time he had reached the east end of the great studio room,
+farthest from the river. Here a tea table was spread with a silver tea
+service, and behind it a girl, oval-faced, radiantly healthy, her full
+lips parted in a ripe smile, her blue-gray eyes talking pleasure and
+satisfaction, her forehead laid about by a silver filigree band, beneath
+which her brown chestnut curls protruded. Her hands, Eugene noted, were
+plump and fair. She stood erect, assured, with the least touch of
+quizzical light in her eye. A white, pink-bordered dress draped her
+girlish figure.
+
+"I don't know," he said easily, "but I wager a guess that this is--that
+this is--this is Suzanne Dale--what?"
+
+"Yes, this is," she replied laughingly. "Can I give you a cup of tea,
+Mr. Witla? I know you are Mr. Witla from ma-ma''s description and the
+way in which you talk to everybody."
+
+"And how do I talk to everybody, may I ask, pleasum?"
+
+"Oh, I can't tell you so easily. I mean, I can't find the words, you
+know. I know how it is, though. Familiarly, I suppose I mean. Will you
+have one lump or two?"
+
+"Three an thou pleasest. Didn't your mother tell me you sang or played?"
+
+"Oh, you mustn't believe anything ma-ma' says about me! She's apt to say
+anything. Tee! Hee! It makes me laugh"--she pronounced it laaf--"to
+think of my playing. My teacher says he would like to strike my
+knuckles. Oh, dear!" (She went into a gale of giggles.) "And sing! Oh,
+dear, dear! That is too good!"
+
+Eugene watched her pretty face intently. Her mouth and nose and eyes
+fascinated him. She was so sweet! He noted the configuration of her lips
+and cheeks and chin. The nose was delicate, beautifully formed, fat, not
+sensitive. The ears were small, the eyes large and wide set, the
+forehead naturally high, but so concealed by curls that it seemed low.
+She had a few freckles and a very small dimple in her chin.
+
+"Now you mustn't laugh like that," he said mock solemnly. "It's very
+serious business, this laughing. In the first place, it's against the
+rules of this apartment. No one is ever, ever, ever supposed to laugh
+here, particularly young ladies who pour tea. Tea, Epictetus well says,
+involves the most serious conceptions of one's privileges and duties. It
+is the high-born prerogative of tea servers to grin occasionally, but
+never, never, never under any circumstances whatsoever----" Suzanne's
+lips were beginning to part ravishingly in anticipation of a burst of
+laughter.
+
+"What's all the excitement about, Witla?" asked Skalger, who had drifted
+to his side. "Why this sudden cessation of progress?"
+
+"Tea, my son, tea!" said Eugene. "Have a cup with me?"
+
+"I will."
+
+"He's trying to tell me, Mr. Skalger, that I should never laaf. I must
+only grin." Her lips parted and she laughed joyously. Eugene laughed
+with her. He could not help it. "Ma-ma' says I giggle all the time. I
+wouldn't do very well here, would I?"
+
+She always pronounced it "ma-ma'."
+
+She turned to Eugene again with big smiling eyes.
+
+"Exceptions, exceptions. I might make exceptions--one exception--but not
+more."
+
+"Why one?" she asked archly.
+
+"Oh, just to hear a natural laugh," he said a little plaintively. "Just
+to hear a real joyous laugh. Can you laugh joyously?"
+
+She giggled again at this, and he was about to tell her how joyously she
+did laugh when Angela called him away to hear Florence Reel, who was
+going to sing again for his especial benefit. He parted from Miss Dale
+reluctantly, for she seemed some delicious figure as delicately colorful
+as Royal Dresden, as perfect in her moods as a spring evening, as soft,
+soulful, enticing as a strain of music heard through the night at a
+distance or over the water. He went over to where Florence Reel was
+standing, listening in a sympathetic melancholy vein to a delightful
+rendering of "The Summer Winds Are Blowing, Blowing." All the while he
+could not help thinking of Suzanne--letting his eyes stray in that
+direction. He talked to Mrs. Dale, to Henrietta Tenmon, to Luke Severas,
+Mr. and Mrs. Dula, Payalei Stone, now a writer of special articles, and
+others, but he couldn't help longing to go back to her. How sweet she
+was! How very delightful! If he could only, once more in his life, have
+the love of a girl like that!
+
+The guests began to depart. Angela and Eugene bustled about the
+farewells. Because of the duties of her daughter, which continued to the
+end, Mrs. Dale stayed, talking to Arthur Skalger. Eugene was in and out
+between the studio and cloak room off the entry way. Now and then he
+caught glimpses of Suzanne demurely standing by her tea cups and
+samovar. For years he had seen nothing so fresh and young as her body.
+She was like a new grown wet white lily pod in the dawn of the year. She
+seemed to have the texture of the water chestnut and the lush, fat
+vegetables of the spring. Her eyes were as clear as water; her skin as
+radiant new ivory. There was no sign of weariness about her, nor any
+care, nor any thought of evil, nor anything except health and happiness.
+"Such a face!" he thought casually in passing. "She is as sweet as any
+girl could be. As radiant as light itself."
+
+Incidentally the personality of Frieda Roth came back, and--long before
+her--Stella Appleton.
+
+"Youth! Youth! What in this world could be finer--more acceptable! Where
+would you find its equal? After all the dust of the streets and the
+spectacle of age and weariness--the crow's feet about people's eyes, the
+wrinkles in their necks, the make-believe of rouge and massage, and
+powder and cosmetics, to see real youth, not of the body but of the soul
+also--the eyes, the smile, the voice, the movements--all young. Why try
+to imitate that miracle? Who could? Who ever had?"
+
+He went on shaking hands, bowing, smiling, laughing, jesting, making
+believe himself, but all the while the miracle of the youth and beauty
+of Suzanne Dale was running in his mind.
+
+"What are you thinking about, Eugene?" asked Angela, coming to the
+window where he had drawn a rocking-chair and was sitting gazing out on
+the silver and lavender and gray of the river surface in the fading
+light. Some belated gulls were still flying about. Across the river the
+great manufactory was sending off a spiral of black smoke from one of
+its tall chimneys. Lamps were beginning to twinkle in its
+hundred-windowed wall. A great siren cry broke from its whistle as six
+o'clock tolled from a neighboring clock tower. It was still late
+February and cold.
+
+"Oh, I was thinking of the beauty of this scene," he said wearily.
+
+Angela did not believe it. She was conscious of something, but they
+never quarreled about what he was thinking nowadays. They had come too
+far along in comfort and solidity. What was it, though, she wondered,
+that he was thinking about?
+
+Suzanne Dale had no particular thought of him. He was nice--pleasant,
+good-looking. Mrs. Witla was quite nice and young.
+
+"Ma-ma," she said, "did you look out of the window at Mr. Witla's?"
+
+"Yes, my dear!"
+
+"Wasn't that a beautiful view?"
+
+"Charming."
+
+"I should think you might like to live on the Drive sometime, ma-ma."
+
+"We may sometime."
+
+Mrs. Dale fell to musing. Certainly Eugene was an attractive man--young,
+brilliant, able. What a mistake all the young men made, marrying so
+early. Here he was successful, introduced to society, attractive, the
+world really before him, and he was married to someone who, though a
+charming little woman, was not up to his possibilities.
+
+"Oh, well," she thought, "so goes the world. Why worry? Everyone must do
+the best they can."
+
+Then she thought of a story she might write along this line and get
+Eugene to publish it in one of his magazines.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+While these various events were occurring the work of the United
+Magazines Corporation had proceeded apace. By the end of the first year
+after Eugene's arrival it had cleared up so many of its editorial and
+advertising troubles that he was no longer greatly worried about them,
+and by the end of the second year it was well on the way toward real
+success. Eugene had become so much of a figure about the place that
+everyone in the great building, in which there were over a thousand
+employed, knew him at sight. The attendants were most courteous and
+obsequious, as much so almost as they were to Colfax and White, though
+the latter with the improvement of the general condition of the company
+had become more dominating and imposing than ever. White with his large
+salary of twenty-five thousand a year and his title of vice-president
+was most anxious that Eugene should not become more powerful than he had
+already. It irritated him greatly to see the airs Eugene gave himself,
+for the latter had little real tact, and instead of dissembling his
+importance before his superiors was inclined to flaunt it. He was
+forever retailing to Colfax some new achievement in the advertising,
+circulation, and editorial fields, and that in White's presence, for he
+did not take the latter very seriously, telling of a new author of
+importance captured for the book department; a new manuscript feature
+secured for one or another of the magazines, a new circulation scheme or
+connection devised, or a new advertising contract of great money value
+manipulated. His presence in Colfax's office was almost invariably a
+signal for congratulation or interest, for he was driving things hard
+and Colfax knew it. White came to hate the sight of him.
+
+"Well, what's the latest great thing you've done?" Colfax said once to
+Eugene jovially in White's presence, for he knew that Eugene was as fond
+of praise as a child and so could be bantered with impunity. White
+concealed a desire to sneer behind a deceptive smile.
+
+"No latest great thing, only Hayes has turned that Hammond Packing
+Company trick. That means eighteen thousand dollars' worth more of new
+business for next year. That'll help a little, won't it?"
+
+"Hayes! Hayes! I'll be switched if I don't think he comes pretty near
+being a better advertising man than you are, Witla. You picked him, I'll
+have to admit that, but he certainly knows all about the game. If
+anything ever happened to you, I think I'd like to keep him right
+there." White pretended not to hear this, but it pleased him. Hayes
+should be aided as much as possible by him.
+
+Eugene's face fell, for this sudden twisting of the thread of interest
+from his to his assistant's achievements damped his enthusiasm. It
+wasn't pleasant to have his inspirational leadership questioned or made
+secondary to the work of those whom he was managing. He had brought all
+these men here and keyed the situation up. Was Colfax going to turn on
+him? "Oh, very well," he said sweetly.
+
+"Don't look so hurt," returned Colfax easily. "I know what you're
+thinking. I'm not going to turn on you. You hired this man. I'm simply
+telling you that if anything should happen to you I'd like to keep him
+right where he is."
+
+Eugene thought this remark over seriously. It was tantamount to serving
+notice on him that he could not discharge Hayes. Colfax did not actually
+so mean it at the moment, though it was the seed of such a thought. He
+simply left the situation open for consideration, and Eugene went away
+thinking what an extremely unfavorable twist this gave to everything. If
+he was to go on finding good men and bringing them in here but could not
+discharge them, and if then, later, they became offensive to him, where
+would he be? Why, if they found that out, as they might through White,
+they could turn on him as lions on a tamer and tear him to pieces! This
+was a bad and unexpected twist to things, and he did not like it.
+
+On the other hand, while it had never occurred to Colfax before in this
+particular connection, for he liked Eugene, it fitted in well with
+certain warnings and suggestions which had been issuing from White who
+was malevolently opposed to Eugene. His success in reorganizing the
+place on the intellectual and artistic sides was too much. Eugene's work
+was giving him a dignity and a security which was entirely
+disproportionate to what he was actually doing and which was threatening
+to overshadow and put in the limbo of indifference that of every other
+person connected with the business. This must be broken. Colfax, for the
+time being, was so wrapped up in what he considered Eugene's shining
+intellectual and commercial qualities that he was beginning to ignore
+White. The latter did not propose that any such condition should
+continue. It was no doubt a rare thing to find a man who could pick good
+men and make the place successful, but what of himself? Colfax was
+naturally very jealous, he knew, and suspicious. He did not want to be
+overshadowed in any way by any of his employees. He did not feel that he
+was, so far. But now White thought it would be a fine thing to stir him
+up on this score if he could--to arouse his jealousy. He knew that
+Colfax did not care so much about the publishing world, though now that
+he was in it, and was seeing that it could be made profitable, he was
+rather gratified by the situation. His wife liked it, for people were
+always talking to her about the United Magazines Corporation, its
+periodicals, its books, its art products and that was flattering. While
+it might not be as profitable as soap and woolens and railway stocks
+with which her husband was identified, it was somewhat more
+distinguished. She wanted him to keep it directly under his thumb and to
+shine by its reflected light.
+
+In looking about for a club wherewith to strike Eugene, White discovered
+this. He sounded Colfax on various occasions by innuendo, and noted his
+sniffing nostrils. If he could first reach Eugene's advertising,
+circulation and editorial men and persuade them to look to him instead
+of to Eugene, he might later reach and control Eugene through Colfax. He
+might humble Eugene by curbing his power, making him see that he, White,
+was still the power behind the throne.
+
+"What do you think of this fellow Witla?" Colfax would ask White from
+time to time, and when these occasions offered he was not slow to drive
+in a wedge.
+
+"He's an able fellow," he said once, apparently most open-mindedly.
+"It's plain that he's doing pretty well with those departments, but I
+think you want to look out for his vanity. He's just the least bit in
+danger of getting a swelled head. You want to remember that he's still
+pretty young for the job he holds (White was eight years older). These
+literary and artistic people are all alike. The one objection that I
+have to them is that they never seem to have any real practical
+judgment. They make splendid second men when well governed, and you can
+do almost anything with them, if you know how to handle them, but you
+have to govern them. This fellow, as I see him, is just the man you
+want. He's picking some good people and he's getting some good results,
+but unless you watch him he's apt to throw them all out of here sometime
+or go away and take them all with him. I shouldn't let him do that if I
+were you. I should let him get just the men you think are right, and
+then I should insist that he keep them. Of course, a man has got to have
+authority in his own department, but it can be carried too far. You're
+treating him pretty liberally, you know."
+
+This sounded very sincere and logical to Colfax, who admired White for
+it, for in spite of the fact that he liked Eugene greatly and went about
+with him a great deal, he did not exactly trust him. The man was in a
+way too brilliant, he thought. He was a little too airy and light on his
+feet.
+
+Under pretext of helping his work and directing his policy without
+actually interfering so that it might eventually prove a failure, White
+was constantly making suggestions. He made suggestions which he told
+Colfax Eugene ought to try in the circulation department. He made
+suggestions which he thought he might find advisable to try in the
+advertising department. He had suggestions, gathered from Heaven knows
+where, for the magazines and books, and these he invariably sent through
+Colfax, taking good care, however, that the various department heads
+knew from what source they had originally emanated. It was his plan to
+speak to Hayes or Gillmore, who was in charge of circulation, or one of
+the editors about some thought that was in his mind and then have that
+same thought come as an order via Eugene. The latter was so anxious to
+make good, so good-natured in his interpretation of suggestions, that it
+did not occur to him, for a long time, that he was being played. The men
+under him, however, realized that something was happening, for White was
+hand and glove with Colfax, and the two were not always in accord with
+Eugene. He was not quite as powerful as White, was the first impression,
+and later the idea got about that Eugene and White did not agree
+temperamentally and that White was the stronger and would win.
+
+It is not possible to go into the long, slow multitudinous incidents and
+details which go to make up office politics, but anyone who has ever
+worked in a large or small organization anywhere will understand. Eugene
+was not a politician. He knew nothing of the delicate art of
+misrepresentation as it was practised by White and those who were of his
+peculiarly subtle mental tendencies. White did not like Eugene, and he
+proposed to have his power curbed. Some of Eugene's editors, after a
+time, began to find it difficult to get things as they wanted them from
+the printing department, and, when they complained, it was explained
+that they were of a disorderly and quarrelsome disposition. Some of his
+advertising men made mistakes in statement or presentation, and
+curiously these errors almost invariably came to light. Eugene found
+that his strong men were most quickly relieved of their difficulties if
+they approached White, but if they came to him it was not quite so easy.
+Instead of ignoring these petty annoyances and going his way about the
+big things, he stopped occasionally to fight these petty battles and
+complaints, and these simply put him in the light of one who was not
+able to maintain profound peace and order in his domain. White was
+always bland, helpful, ready with a suave explanation.
+
+"It's just possible that he may not know how to handle these fellows,
+after all," he said to Colfax, and then if anyone was discharged it was
+a sign of an unstable policy.
+
+Colfax cautioned Eugene occasionally in accordance with White's
+suggestions, but Eugene was now so well aware of what was going on that
+he could see where they came from. He thought once of accusing White
+openly in front of Colfax, but he knew that this would not be of any
+advantage for he had no real evidence to go on. All White's
+protestations to Colfax were to the effect that he was trying to help
+him. So the battle lay.
+
+In the meantime, Eugene, because of this or the thought rather that he
+might not always remain as powerful as he was, having no stock in the
+concern and not being able to buy any, had been interesting himself in a
+proposition which had since been brought to him by Mr. Kenyon C.
+Winfield, who, since that memorable conversation at the home of the
+Willebrands on Long Island, had not forgotten him. Winfield had thought
+of him for a long time in connection with a plan he had of establishing
+on the South Shore of Long Island, some thirty-five miles from New York,
+a magnificent seaside resort which should outrival Palm Beach and the
+better places of Atlantic City, and give to New York, close at hand,
+such a dream of beauty and luxury as would turn the vast tide of
+luxury-loving idlers and successful money grubbers from the former
+resorts to this. Considerable thought had been given by him as to just
+what its principal characteristics should be, but he had not worked it
+out to suit himself exactly, and he thought Eugene might be interested
+from the outlining point of view.
+
+Unfortunately, on the face of it, this was just the sort of scheme which
+made an appeal to Eugene from all points of view, in spite of the fact
+that he already had his hands as full as they could be. Nothing
+interested him quite so much as beauty and luxury in some artistic
+combination. A summer resort of really imposing proportions, with
+hotels, casinos, pagodas, resident sections, club houses, a wide board
+or stone walk along the ocean, and possibly a gambling center which
+should outrival Monte Carlo, had long since occurred to him as something
+which might well spring up near New York. He and Angela had visited Palm
+Beach, Old Point Comfort, Virginia Hot Springs, Newport, Shelter Island,
+Atlantic City, and Tuxedo, and his impressions of what constituted
+luxury and beauty had long since widened to magnificent proportions. He
+liked the interiors of the Chamberlain at Old Point Comfort, and the
+Royal Ponciana at Palm Beach. He had studied with artistic curiosity the
+development of the hotel features at Atlantic City and elsewhere. It had
+occurred to him that a restricted territory might be had out on the
+Atlantic Ocean near Gravesend Bay possibly, which would include among
+other things islands, canals or inland waterways, a mighty sea beach,
+two or three great hotels, a casino for dancing, dining, gambling, a
+great stone or concrete walk to be laid out on a new plan parallel with
+the ocean, and at the back of all these things and between the islands
+and the ocean a magnificent seaside city where the lots should sell at
+so expensive a rate that only the well-to-do could afford to live there.
+His thought was of something so fine that it would attract all the
+prominent pleasure-lovers he had recently met. If they could be made to
+understand that such a place existed; that it was beautiful, showy,
+exclusive in a money sense, they would come there by the thousands.
+
+"Nothing is so profitable as a luxury, if the luxury-loving public want
+it," Colfax had once said to him; and he believed it. He judged this
+truth by the things he had recently seen. People literally spent
+millions to make themselves comfortable. He had seen gardens, lawns,
+walks, pavilions, pergolas, laid out at an expense of thousands and
+hundreds of thousands of dollars, where few would ever see them. In St.
+Louis he had seen a mausoleum built upon the lines of the Taj Mahal, the
+lawn about which was undermined by a steam-heating plant in order that
+the flowers and shrubs displayed there might bloom all winter long. It
+had never occurred to him that the day would come when he would have
+anything to do with such a dream as this or its ultimate fruition, but
+his was the kind of mind that loved to dwell on things of the sort.
+
+The proposition which Winfield now genially laid before him one day was
+simple enough. Winfield had heard that Eugene was making a good deal of
+money, that his salary was twenty-five thousand a year, if not more,
+that he had houses and lots and some nice stock investments, and it
+occurred to him, as it would have to anyone, that Eugene might be able
+to shoulder a comfortable investment in some kind of land speculation,
+particularly if he could see his way to make much more money in the long
+run. The idea Winfield had was as follows: He was going to organize a
+corporation to be known as The Sea Island Development Company, to be
+capitalized at ten million dollars, some two or three hundred thousand
+dollars of which was to be laid down or paid into the treasury at the
+start. Against this latter sum stock to the value of one million
+dollars, or five shares of one hundred dollars par value each, was to be
+issued. That is, whoever laid down one hundred dollars in cash was to
+receive in return three shares of common stock and two of preferred,
+valued at one hundred dollars each, bearing eight per cent. interest.
+This ratio was to be continued until $200,000 in cash was in the
+treasury. Then those who came afterward and were willing to buy were
+only to receive two shares of common and one of preferred, until one
+million in cash was in the treasury. After that the stock was to be sold
+at its face value, or more, as the situation might dictate.
+
+The original sum of two hundred thousands dollars was to go to purchase
+for the corporation an undeveloped tract of land, half swamp, half
+island, and facing the Atlantic Ocean beyond Gravesend Bay, now owned by
+Winfield himself, where a beautiful rolling beach of white sand
+stretched some three miles in length and without flaw or interruption.
+This would clear Winfield of a piece of property which was worth, say
+$60,000, but at present unsaleable, and give him magnificent holdings in
+the new company besides. He proposed to take a mortgage on this and all
+improvements the company might make in order to protect himself. At the
+west end of this tract--inland from the sea--was a beautiful bay, which,
+though shallow, gave access to a series of inlets and a network of
+waterways, embracing nine small islands. These waterways, when dredged,
+would be amply deep enough for yachts and small craft of all
+descriptions, and the first important thought which occurred to Winfield
+was that the mud and sand so dredged could be used to fill in the low,
+marshy levels of soil between them and the sea and so make it all into
+high, dry, and valuable land. The next thing was to devise a beautiful
+scheme of improvement, and it was for this that he wished to talk to
+Eugene.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The matter was not difficult to arrange. Before Winfield had gone ten
+sentences, Eugene began to take the ideas out of his mind.
+
+"I know something of that property," he said, studying a little outline
+map which Winfield had prepared. "I've been out there duck shooting with
+Colfax and some others. It's fine property, there's no doubt of it. How
+much do they want for it?"
+
+"Well, as a matter of fact, I already own it," said Winfield. "It cost
+me sixty thousand dollars five years ago when it was a vast,
+inaccessible swamp. Nothing has been done to it since, but I will turn
+it over to the company for what it is worth now--two hundred thousand
+dollars--and take a mortgage for my protection. Then the company can do
+what it pleases with it; but as president, of course, I should direct
+the line of development. If you want to make a fortune and have fifty
+thousand dollars to spare, here is your chance. This land has increased
+in value from sixty to two hundred thousand dollars in five years. What
+do you fancy it will be worth in ten years from now the way New York is
+growing? It has pretty near four million people now. In twenty-five
+years it is safe to say that there will be fourteen or fifteen millions
+scattered over this territory which lies within twenty-five miles. Of
+course, this is thirty-two miles away on a direct line, but what of it?
+The Long Island Railroad will be glad to put a spur in there which would
+bring this territory within one hour of the city. Think of it--one of
+the finest beaches on the Atlantic Ocean within one hour of New York! I
+expect to interest Mr. Wiltsie, the President of the Long Island, very
+heavily in this property. I come to you now because I think your
+advertising and artistic advice are worth something. You can take it or
+leave it, but before you do anything, I want you to come out and look
+over the property with me."
+
+All told, in stocks, land, free money in the banks, and what he might
+save in a year or two, Eugene had about fifty thousand dollars of good
+hard cash which he could lay his hands on at a pinch. He was well
+satisfied that Winfield was putting before him one of those golden
+opportunities which, prudently managed, would make him a rich man.
+Nevertheless, his fifty thousand was fifty thousand, and he had it.
+Never again, however, once this other thing was under way, if it were
+true, would he have to worry about a position, or whether he would be
+able to maintain his present place in society. One could not possibly
+say what an investment like this might not lead to. Winfield, so he told
+Eugene, expected eventually to clear six or eight million dollars
+himself. He was going to take stock in some of the hotels, casinos, and
+various other enterprises, which would be organized. He could clearly
+see how, later, once this land was properly drained and laid out, it
+would be worth from three to fifteen thousand dollars per lot of one
+hundred by one hundred feet--the smallest portions to be sold. There
+were islands which for clubs or estates should bring splendid returns.
+Think of the leases to yacht and boat clubs alone! The company would own
+all the land.
+
+"I would develop this myself if I had the capital," said Winfield, "but
+I want to see it done on a gigantic scale, and I haven't the means. I
+want something here which will be a monument to me and to all connected
+with it. I am willing to take my chances pro rata with those who now
+enter, and to prove my good faith I am going to buy as many shares as I
+possibly can on the five-for-one basis. You or anyone else can do the
+same thing. What do you think?"
+
+"It's a great idea," said Eugene. "It seems as though a dream which had
+been floating about in the back of my head for years had suddenly come
+to life. I can scarcely believe that it is true, and yet I know that it
+is, and that you will get away with it just as you are outlining it
+here. You want to be very careful how you lay out this property, though.
+You have the chance of a lifetime. For goodness' sake, don't make any
+mistakes! Let's have one resort that will be truly, beautifully right."
+
+"That's precisely the way I feel about it," answered Winfield, "and
+that's why I am talking to you. I want you to come in on this, for I
+think your imagination will be worth something. You can help me lay this
+thing out right and advertise it right."
+
+They talked on about one detail and another until finally Eugene, in
+spite of all his caution, saw his dreams maturing in this particular
+proposition. Fifty thousand dollars invested here would give him two
+thousand five hundred shares--one thousand preferred, and fifteen
+hundred common--whose face value, guaranteed by this magnificent piece
+of property, would be $250,000. Think of it, $250,000--a quarter of a
+million and that subject to a natural increase which might readily carry
+him into the millionaire class! His own brains would be of some value
+here, for Winfield was anxious to have him lay this out, and this would
+bring him in touch with not only one of the best real estate men in the
+city, but would bring him into contact with a whole host of financiers
+in business, people who would certainly become interested in this
+venture. Winfield talked easily of architects, contractors, railroad
+men, presidents of construction companies, all of whom would take stock
+for the business opportunities it would bring to them later and also of
+the many strings to be pulled which later would bring great gains to the
+company and save it from expenditures which would otherwise mean
+millions in outlay. Thus this proposed extension by the Long Island
+which would cost that railroad two hundred thousand dollars would cost
+the Sea Island Company nothing and would bring thousands of lovers of
+beauty there the moment conveniences were established to receive them.
+This was true of hotels to be built. Each would bring business for
+everything else. The company would lease the ground. The great hotel men
+would do their own building according to restrictions and plans laid
+down by the Sea Island Company. The only real expenditure would be for
+streets, sewers, lights, water, walks, trees, and the great one hundred
+foot wide boardwalk with concrete ornaments which would be the finest
+sea stroll in the world. But these could be undertaken by degrees.
+
+Eugene saw it all. It was a vision of empire. "I don't know about this,"
+he said cautiously. "It's a great thing, but I may not have the means to
+dip into it. I want to think it over. Meanwhile, I'll be glad to go out
+there and look over the ground with you."
+
+Winfield could see that he had Eugene fascinated. It would be an easy
+matter to land him once he had his plans perfected. Eugene would be the
+type of man who would build a house and come and live there in the
+summer. He would interest many people whom he knew. He went away feeling
+that he had made a good start, and he was not mistaken.
+
+Eugene talked the matter over with Angela--his one recourse in these
+matters--and as usual she was doubtful, but not entirely opposed. Angela
+had considerable caution, but no great business vision. She could not
+really tell him what he ought to do. Thus far his judgment, or rather
+his moves, had been obviously successful. He had been going up
+apparently because he was valuable as an assistant, not because he was a
+born leader.
+
+"You'll have to judge for yourself, Eugene," Angela finally said. "I
+don't know. It looks fine. You certainly don't want to work for
+Mr. Colfax all your life, and if, as you say, they are beginning to plot
+against you, you had better prepare to get out sometime. We have enough
+now, really, to live on, if you want to return to your art."
+
+Eugene smiled. "My art. My poor old art! A lot I've done to develop my
+art."
+
+"I don't think it needs developing. You have it. I'm sorry sometimes I
+ever let you leave it. We have lived better, but your work hasn't
+counted for as much. What good has it done you outside the money to be a
+successful publisher? You were as famous as you are now before you ever
+started in on this line, and more so. More people know you even now as
+Eugene Witla, the artist, than as Eugene Witla, the magazine man."
+
+Eugene knew this to be so. His art achievements had never forsaken him.
+They had grown in fame always. Pictures that he had sold for two hundred
+and four hundred had gone up to as high as three and four thousand in
+value, and they were still rising. He was occasionally approached by an
+art dealer to know if he never intended to paint any more. In social
+circles it was a constant cry among the elect, "Why don't you paint any
+longer?" "What a shame you ever left the art world!" "Those pictures of
+yours, I can never forget them."
+
+"My dear lady," Eugene once said solemnly, "I can't live by painting
+pictures as I am living by directing magazines. Art is very lovely. I am
+satisfied to believe that I am a great painter. Nevertheless, I made
+little out of it, and since then I have learned to live. It's sad, but
+it's true. If I could see my way to live in half the comfort I am living
+in now and not run the risk of plodding the streets with a picture under
+my arm, I would gladly return to art. The trouble is the world is always
+so delightfully ready to see the other fellow make the sacrifice for art
+or literature's sake. Selah! I won't do it. So there!"
+
+"It's a pity! It's a pity!" said this observer, but Eugene was not
+vastly distressed. Similarly Mrs. Dale had reproached him, for she had
+seen and heard of his work.
+
+"Some time. Some time," he said grandly; "wait."
+
+Now at length this land proposition seemed to clear the way for
+everything. If Eugene embarked upon it, he might gradually come to the
+point at which he could take some official position in connection with
+it. Anyhow, think of a rising income from $250,000! Think of the
+independence, the freedom! Surely then he could paint or travel, or do
+as he pleased.
+
+As a matter of fact, after two automobile rides to the nearest available
+position on the site of the future resort and a careful study of the
+islands and the beach, Eugene devised a scheme which included four
+hotels of varying sizes, one dining and dancing casino, one gambling
+resort after the pattern of Monte Carlo, a summer theatre, a music
+pavilion, three lovely piers, motor and yacht club houses, a park with
+radiating streets, and other streets arranged in concentric rings to
+cross them. There was a grand plaza about which the four hotels were
+ranged, a noble promenade, three miles in length, to begin with, a
+handsome railway station, plots for five thousand summer homes, ranging
+from five to fifteen thousand in price. There were islands for
+residences, islands for clubs, islands for parks. One of the hotels sat
+close to an inlet over which a dining veranda was to be built--stairs
+were to be laid down to the water so that one could step into gondolas
+or launches and be carried quickly to one of the music pavilions on one
+of the islands. Everything that money wanted was to be eventually
+available here, and all was to be gone about slowly but beautifully, so
+that each step would only make more sure each additional step.
+
+Eugene did not enter on this grand scheme until ten men, himself
+included, had pledged themselves to take stock up to $50,000 each.
+Included in these were Mr. Wiltsie, President of the Long Island;
+Mr. Kenyon C. Winfield, and Milton Willebrand, the very wealthy society
+man at whose home he had originally met Winfield. The Sea Island Company
+was then incorporated, and on a series of dates agreed upon between them
+and which were dependent upon a certain amount of work being
+accomplished by each date, the stock was issued to them in
+ten-thousand-dollar lots and then cash taken and deposited in the
+treasury. By the end of two years after Eugene had first been approached
+by Winfield he had a choice collection of gold-colored certificates in
+the Sea Island Realty and Construction Company, which was building the
+now widely heralded seaside resort--"Blue Sea"--which, according to
+those interested, was to be the most perfect resort of its kind in the
+world. His certificates stated that they were worth $250,000, and
+potentially they were. Eugene and Angela looking at them, thinking of
+the initiative and foresight of Mr. Kenyon C. Winfield and the men he
+was associated with, felt sure that some day, and that not so very far
+distant, they would yield their face value and much more.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+It had been while he was first perfecting his undertaking with Winfield
+as to what his relationship to the new Sea Island Construction Company
+was to be that Eugene had been dwelling more and more fondly upon the
+impression which Suzanne Dale had originally made upon him. It was six
+weeks before they met again, and then it was on the occasion of a dance
+that Mrs. Dale was giving in honor of Suzanne that Eugene and Angela
+were invited. Mrs. Dale admired Angela's sterling qualities as a wife,
+and while there might be temperamental and social differences, she did
+not think they were sufficient to warrant any discrimination between
+them, at least not on her part. Angela was a good woman--not a social
+figure at all--but interesting in her way. Mrs. Dale was much more
+interested in Eugene, because in the first place they were very much
+alike temperamentally, and in the next place because Eugene was a
+successful and brilliant person. She liked to see the easy manner in
+which he took life, the air with which he assumed that talent should
+naturally open all doors to him. He was not conscious apparently of any
+inferiority in anything but rather of a splendid superiority. She heard
+it from so many that he was rapidly rising in his publishing world and
+that he was interested in many things, the latest this project to create
+a magnificent summer resort. Winfield was a personal friend of hers. He
+had never attempted to sell her any property, but he had once said that
+he might some day take her Staten Island holdings and divide them up
+into town lots. This was one possibility which tended to make her
+pleasant to him.
+
+The evening in question Eugene and Angela went down to Daleview in their
+automobile. Eugene always admired this district, for it gave him a sense
+of height and scope which was not easily attainable elsewhere about New
+York. It was still late winter and the night was cold but clear. The
+great house with its verandas encased in glass was brightly lit. There
+were a number of people--men and women, whom Eugene had met at various
+places, and quite a number of young people whom he did not know. Angela
+had to be introduced to a great many, and Eugene felt that peculiar
+sensation which he so often experienced of a certain incongruity in his
+matrimonial state. Angela was nice, but to him she was not like these
+other women who carried themselves with such an air. There was a
+statuesqueness and a sufficiency about many of them, to say nothing of
+their superb beauty and sophistication which made him feel, when the
+contrast was forced upon him closely, that he had made a terrible
+mistake. Why had he been so silly as to marry? He could have told Angela
+frankly that he would not at the time, and all would have been well. He
+forgot how badly, emotionally, he had entangled himself. But scenes like
+these made him dreadfully unhappy. Why, his life if he were single would
+now be but beginning!
+
+As he walked round tonight he was glad to be free socially even for a
+few minutes. He was glad that first this person and that took the
+trouble to talk to Angela. It relieved him of the necessity of staying
+near her, for if he neglected her or she felt neglected by others she
+was apt to reproach him. If he did not show her attention, she would
+complain that he was conspicuous in his indifference. If others refused
+to talk to her, it was his place. He should. Eugene objected to this
+necessity with all his soul, but he did not see what he was to do about
+it. As she often said, even if he had made a mistake in marrying her, it
+was his place to stick by her now that he had. A real man would.
+
+One of the things that interested him was the number of beautiful young
+women. He was interested to see how full and complete mentally and
+physically so many girls appeared to be at eighteen. Why, in their
+taste, shrewdness, completeness, they were fit mates for a man of almost
+any age up to forty! Some of them looked so wonderful to him--so fresh
+and ruddy with the fires of ambition and desire burning briskly in their
+veins. Beautiful girls--real flowers, like roses, light and dark. And to
+think the love period was all over for him--completely over!
+
+Suzanne came down with others after a while from some room upstairs, and
+once more Eugene was impressed with her simple, natural, frank,
+good-natured attitude. Her light chestnut-colored hair was tied with a
+wide band of light blue ribbon which matched her eyes and contrasted
+well with her complexion. Again, her dress was some light flimsy thing,
+the color of peach blossoms, girdled with ribbon and edged with flowers
+like a wreath. Soft white sandals held her feet.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Witla!" she said gaily, holding out her smooth white arm on a
+level with her eyes and dropping her hand gracefully. Her red lips were
+parted, showing even white teeth, arching into a radiant smile. Her eyes
+were quite wide as he remembered, with an innocent, surprised look in
+them, which was wholly unconscious with her. If wet roses could outrival
+a maiden in all her freshness, he thought he would like to see it.
+Nothing could equal the beauty of a young woman in her eighteenth or
+nineteenth year.
+
+"Yes, quite, Mr. Witla," he said, beaming. "I thought you had forgotten.
+My, we look charming this evening! We look like roses and cut flowers
+and stained-glass windows and boxes of jewels, and, and, and----"
+
+He pretended to be lost for more words and looked quizzically up at the
+ceiling.
+
+Suzanne began to laugh. Like Eugene, she had a marked sense of the comic
+and the ridiculous. She was not in the least vain, and the idea of being
+like roses and boxes of jewels and stained-glass windows tickled her
+fancy.
+
+"Why, that's quite a collection of things to be, isn't it?" she laughed,
+her lips parted. "I wouldn't mind being all those things if I could,
+particularly the jewels. Mama won't give me any. I can't even get a
+brooch for my throat."
+
+"Mama is real mean, apparently," said Eugene vigorously. "We'll have to
+talk to mama, but she knows, you know, that you don't need any jewels,
+see? She knows that you have something which is just as good, or better.
+But we won't talk about that, will we?"
+
+Suzanne had been afraid that he was going to begin complimenting her,
+but seeing how easily he avoided this course she liked him for it. She
+was a little overawed by his dignity and mental capacity, but attracted
+by his gaiety and lightness of manner.
+
+"Do you know, Mr. Witla," she said, "I believe you like to tease
+people."
+
+"Oh, no!" said Eugene. "Oh, never, never! Nothing like that. How could
+I? Tease people! Far be it from me! That's the very last thing I ever
+think of doing. I always approach people in a very solemn manner and
+tell them the dark sad truth. It's the only way. They need it. The more
+truth I tell the better I feel. And then they like me so much better for
+it."
+
+At the first rush of his quizzical tirade Suzanne's eyes opened
+quaintly, inquiringly. Then she began to smile, and in a moment after he
+ceased she exclaimed: "Oh, ha! ha! Oh, dear! Oh, dear, how you talk!" A
+ripple of laughter spread outward, and Eugene frowned darkly.
+
+"How dare you laugh?" he said. "Don't laugh at me. It's against the
+rules to laugh, anyhow. Don't you remember growing girls should never
+laugh? Solemnity is the first rule of beauty. Never smile. Keep
+perfectly solemn. Look wise. Hence. Therefore. If. And----"
+
+He lifted a finger solemnly, and Suzanne stared. He had fixed her eye
+with his and was admiring her pretty chin and nose and lips, while she
+gazed not knowing what to make of him. He was very different; very much
+like a boy, and yet very much like a solemn, dark master of some kind.
+
+"You almost frighten me," she said.
+
+"Now, now, listen! It's all over. Come to. I'm just a silly-billy. Are
+you going to dance with me this evening?"
+
+"Why, certainly, if you want me to! Oh, that reminds me! We have cards.
+Did you get one?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, they're over here, I think."
+
+She led the way toward the reception hall, and Eugene took from the
+footman who was stationed there two of the little books.
+
+"Let's see," he said, writing, "how greedy dare I be?"
+
+Suzanne made no reply.
+
+"If I take the third and the sixth and the tenth would that be too
+many?"
+
+"No-o," said Suzanne doubtfully.
+
+He wrote in hers and his and then they went back to the drawing-room
+where so many were now moving. "Will you be sure and save me these?"
+
+"Why, certainly," she replied. "To be sure, I will!"
+
+"That's nice of you. And now here comes your mother. Remember, you
+mustn't ever, ever, ever laugh. It's against the rules."
+
+Suzanne went away, thinking. She was pleased at the gaiety of this man
+who seemed so light-hearted and self-sufficient. He seemed like someone
+who took her as a little girl, so different from the boys she knew who
+were solemn in her presence and rather love sick. He was the kind of man
+one could have lots of fun with without subjecting one's self to undue
+attention and having to explain to her mother. Her mother liked him. But
+she soon forgot him in the chatter of other people.
+
+Eugene was thinking again, though, of the indefinable something in the
+spirit of this girl which was attracting him so vigorously. What was it?
+He had seen hundreds of girls in the last few years, all charming, but
+somehow this one---- She seemed so strong, albeit so new and young.
+There was a poise there--a substantial quality in her soul which could
+laugh at life and think no ill of it. That was it or something of it,
+for of course her beauty was impressive, but a courageous optimism was
+shining out through her eyes. It was in her laugh, her mood. She would
+never be afraid.
+
+The dance began after ten, and Eugene danced with first one and then
+another--Angela, Mrs. Dale, Mrs. Stevens, Miss Willy. When the third set
+came he went looking for Suzanne and found her talking to another young
+girl and two society men.
+
+"Mine, you know," he said smilingly.
+
+She came out to him laughing, stretching her arm in a sinuous way, quite
+unconscious of the charming figure she made. She had a way of throwing
+back her head which revealed her neck in beautiful lines. She looked
+into Eugene's eyes simply and unaffectedly, returning his smile with one
+of her own. And when they began to dance he felt as though he had never
+really danced before.
+
+What was it the poet said of the poetry of motion? This was it. This was
+it. This girl could dance wonderfully, sweetly, as a fine voice sings.
+She seemed to move like the air with the sound of the two-step coming
+from an ambush of flowers, and Eugene yielded himself instinctively to
+the charm--the hypnotism of it. He danced and in dancing forgot
+everything except this vision leaning upon his arm and the sweetness of
+it all. Nothing could equal this emotion, he said to himself. It was
+finer than anything he had ever experienced. There was joy in it, pure
+delight, an exquisite sense of harmony; and even while he was
+congratulating himself the music seemed to hurry to a finish. Suzanne
+had looked up curiously into his eyes.
+
+"You like dancing, don't you?" she said.
+
+"I do, but I don't dance well."
+
+"Oh, I think so!" she replied. "You dance so easily."
+
+"It is because of you," he said simply. "You have the soul of the dance
+in you. Most people dance poorly, like myself."
+
+"I don't think so," she said, hanging on to his arm as they walked
+toward a seat. "Oh, there's Kinroy! He has the next with me."
+
+Eugene looked at her brother almost angrily. Why should circumstances
+rob him of her company in this way? Kinroy looked like her--he was very
+handsome for a boy.
+
+"Well, then, I have to give you up. I wish there were more."
+
+He left her only to wait impatiently for the sixth and the tenth. He
+knew it was silly to be interested in her in this way, for nothing could
+come of it. She was a young girl hedged about by all the conventions and
+safeguards which go to make for the perfect upbringing of girlhood. He
+was a man past the period of her interest, watched over by conventions
+and interests also. There could be absolutely nothing between them, and
+yet he longed for her just the same, for just this little sip of the
+nectar of make-believe. For a few minutes in her company, married or
+not, so many years older or not, he could be happy in her company,
+teasing her. That sense of dancing--that sense of perfect harmony with
+beauty--when had he ever experienced that before?
+
+The night went by, and at one he and Angela went home. She had been
+entertained by some young officer in the army stationed at Fort
+Wadsworth who had known her brother David. That had made the evening
+pleasant for her. She commented on Mrs. Dale and Suzanne, what a
+charming hostess the former was and how pretty and gay Suzanne looked,
+but Eugene manifested little interest. He did not want it to appear that
+he had been interested in Suzanne above any of the others.
+
+"Yes, she's very nice," he said. "Rather pretty; but she's like all
+girls at that age. I like to tease them."
+
+Angela wondered whether Eugene had really changed for good. He seemed
+saner in all his talk concerning women. Perhaps large affairs had cured
+him completely, though she could not help feeling that he must be
+charmed and delighted by the beauty of some of the women whom he saw.
+
+Five weeks more went by and then he saw Suzanne one day with her mother
+on Fifth Avenue, coming out of an antique shop. Mrs. Dale explained that
+she was looking after the repair of a rare piece of furniture. Eugene
+and Suzanne were enabled to exchange but a few gay words. Four weeks
+later he met them at the Brentwood Hadleys, in Westchester. Suzanne and
+her mother were enjoying a season of spring riding. Eugene was there for
+only a Saturday afternoon and Sunday. On this occasion he saw her coming
+in at half-past four wearing a divided riding skirt and looking flushed
+and buoyant. Her lovely hair was flowing lightly about her temples.
+
+"Oh, how are you?" she asked, with that same inconsequent air, her hand
+held out to him at a high angle. "I saw you last in Fifth Avenue, didn't
+I? Mama was having her chair fixed. Ha, ha! She's such a slow rider!
+I've left her miles behind. Are you going to be here long?"
+
+"Just today and tomorrow."
+
+He looked at her, pretending gaiety and indifference.
+
+"Is Mrs. Witla here?"
+
+"No, she couldn't come. A relative of hers is in the city."
+
+"I need a bath terribly," said the desire of his eyes, and passed on,
+calling back: "I'll see you again before dinner, very likely."
+
+Eugene sighed.
+
+She came down after an hour, dressed in a flowered organdie, a black
+silk band about her throat, a low collar showing her pretty neck. She
+picked up a magazine, passing a wicker table, and came down the veranda
+where Eugene was sitting alone. Her easy manner interested him, and her
+friendliness. She liked him well enough to be perfectly natural with him
+and to seek him out where he was sitting once she saw he was there.
+
+"Oh, here you are!" she said, and sat down, taking a chair which was
+near him.
+
+"Yes, here I am," he said, and began teasing her as usual, for it was
+the only way in which he knew how to approach her. Suzanne responded
+vivaciously, for Eugene's teasing delighted her. It was the one kind of
+humor she really enjoyed.
+
+"You know, Mr. Witla," she said to him once, "I'm not going to laugh at
+any of your jokes any more. They're all at my expense."
+
+"That makes it all the nicer," he said. "You wouldn't want me to make
+jokes at my expense, would you? That would be a terrible joke."
+
+She laughed and he smiled. They looked at a golden sunset filtering
+through a grove of tender maples. The spring was young and the leaves
+just budding.
+
+"Isn't it lovely tonight?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed, in a mellow, meditative voice, the first ring
+of deep sincerity in it that he ever noticed there.
+
+"Do you like nature?" he asked.
+
+"Do I?" she returned. "I can't get enough of the woods these days. I
+feel so queer sometimes, Mr. Witla. As though I were not really alive at
+all, you know. Just a sound, or a color in the woods."
+
+He stopped and looked at her. The simile caught him quite as any notable
+characteristic in anyone would have caught him. What was the color and
+complexity of this girl's mind? Was she so wise, so artistic and so
+emotional that nature appealed to her in a deep way? Was this wonderful
+charm that he felt the shadow or radiance of something finer still?
+
+"So that's the way it is, is it?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," she said quietly.
+
+He sat and looked at her, and she eyed him as solemnly.
+
+"Why do you look at me so?" she asked.
+
+"Why do you say such curious things?" he answered.
+
+"What did I say?"
+
+"I don't believe you really know. Well, never mind. Let us walk, will
+you? Do you mind? It's still an hour to dinner. I'd like to go over and
+see what's beyond those trees."
+
+They went down a little path bordered with grass and under green budding
+twigs. It came to a stile finally and looked out upon a stony green
+field where some cows were pasturing.
+
+"Oh, the spring! The spring!" exclaimed Eugene, and Suzanne answered:
+"You know, Mr. Witla, I think we must be something alike in some ways.
+That's just the way I feel."
+
+"How do you know how I feel?"
+
+"I can tell by your voice," she said.
+
+"Can you, really?"
+
+"Why, yes. Why shouldn't I?"
+
+"What a strange girl you are!" he said thoughtfully. "I don't think I
+understand you quite."
+
+"Why, why, am I so different from everyone else?"
+
+"Quite, quite," he said; "at least to me. I have never seen anyone quite
+like you before."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+It was after this meeting that vague consciousness came to Suzanne that
+Mr. Witla, as she always thought of him to herself, was just a little
+more than very nice to her. He was so gentle, so meditative, and withal
+so gay when he was near her! He seemed fairly to bubble whenever he came
+into her presence, never to have any cause for depression or gloom such
+as sometimes seized on her when she was alone. He was always
+immaculately dressed, and had great affairs, so her mother said. They
+discussed him once at table at Daleview, and Mrs. Dale said she thought
+he was charming.
+
+"He's one of the nicest fellows that comes here, I think," said Kinroy.
+"I don't like that stick, Woodward."
+
+He was referring to another man of about Eugene's age who admired his
+mother.
+
+"Mrs. Witla is such a queer little woman," said Suzanne. "She's so
+different from Mr. Witla. He's so gay and good-natured, and she's so
+reserved. Is she as old as he is, mama?"
+
+"I don't think so," said Mrs. Dale, who was deceived by Angela's
+apparent youth. "What makes you ask?"
+
+"Oh, I just wondered!" said Suzanne, who was vaguely curious concerning
+things in connection with Eugene.
+
+There were several other meetings, one of which Eugene engineered, once
+when he persuaded Angela to invite Suzanne and her mother to a spring
+night revel they were having at the studio, and the other when he and
+Angela were invited to the Willebrands, where the Dales were also.
+
+Angela was always with him. Mrs. Dale almost always with Suzanne. There
+were a few conversations, but they were merely gay, inconsequent
+make-believe talks, in which Suzanne saw Eugene as one who was forever
+happy. She little discerned the brooding depths of longing that lay
+beneath his gay exterior.
+
+The climax was brought about, however, when one July day after a short
+visit to one of the summer resorts, Angela was taken ill. She had always
+been subject to colds and sore throats, and these peculiar signs, which
+are associated by medical men with latent rheumatism, finally culminated
+in this complaint. Angela had also been pronounced to have a weak heart,
+and this combined with a sudden, severe rheumatic attack completely
+prostrated her. A trained nurse had to be called, and Angela's sister
+Marietta was sent for. Eugene's sister Myrtle, who now lived in New
+York, was asked by him to come over and take charge, and under her
+supervision, pending Marietta's arrival, his household went forward
+smoothly enough. The former, being a full-fledged Christian Scientist,
+having been instantly cured, as she asserted, of a long-standing nervous
+complaint, was for calling a Christian Science practitioner, but Eugene
+would have none of it. He could not believe that there was anything in
+this new religious theory, and thought Angela needed a doctor. He sent
+for a specialist in her complaint. He pronounced that six weeks at the
+least, perhaps two months, must elapse before Angela would be able to
+sit up again.
+
+"Her system is full of rheumatism," said her physician. "She is in a
+very bad way. Rest and quiet, and constant medication will bring her
+round."
+
+Eugene was sorry. He did not want to see her suffer, but her sickness
+did not for one minute alter his mental attitude. In fact, he did not
+see how it could. It did not change their relative mental outlook in any
+way. Their peculiar relationship of guardian and restless ward was quite
+unaffected.
+
+All social functions of every kind were now abandoned and Eugene stayed
+at home every evening, curious to see what the outcome would be. He
+wanted to see how the trained nurse did her work and what the doctor
+thought would be the next step. He had a great deal to do at all times,
+reading, consulting, and many of those who wished to confer with him
+came to the apartment of an evening. All those who knew them socially at
+all intimately called or sent messages of condolence, and among those
+who came were Mrs. Dale and Suzanne. The former because Eugene had been
+so nice to her in a publishing way and was shortly going to bring out
+her first attempt at a novel was most assiduous. She sent flowers and
+came often, proffering the services of Suzanne for any day that the
+nurse might wish to be off duty or Myrtle could not be present. She
+thought Angela might like to have Suzanne read to her. At least the
+offer sounded courteous and was made in good faith.
+
+Suzanne did not come alone at first, but after a time, when Angela had
+been ill four weeks and Eugene had stood the heat of the town apartment
+nightly for the chance of seeing her, she did. Mrs. Dale suggested that
+he should run down to her place over Saturday and Sunday. It was not
+far. They were in close telephone communication. It would rest him.
+
+Eugene, though Angela had suggested it a number of times before, had
+refused to go to any seaside resort or hotel, even for Saturday and
+Sunday, his statement being that he did not care to go alone at this
+time. The truth was he was becoming so interested in Suzanne that he did
+not care to go anywhere save somewhere that he might see her again.
+
+Mrs. Dale's offer was welcome enough, but having dissembled so much he
+had to dissemble more. Mrs. Dale insisted. Angela added her plea. Myrtle
+thought he ought to go. He finally ordered the car to take him down one
+Friday afternoon and leave him. Suzanne was out somewhere, but he sat on
+the veranda and basked in the magnificent view it gave of the lower bay.
+Kinroy and some young friend, together with two girls, were playing
+tennis on one of the courts. Eugene went out to watch them, and
+presently Suzanne returned, ruddy from a walk she had taken to a
+neighbor's house. At the sight of her every nerve in Eugene's body
+tingled--he felt a great exaltation, and it seemed as though she
+responded in kind, for she was particularly gay and laughing.
+
+"They have a four," she called to him, her white duck skirt blowing.
+"Let's you and I get rackets and play single."
+
+"I'm not very good, you know," he said.
+
+"You couldn't be worse than I am," she replied. "I'm so bad Kinroy won't
+let me play in any game with him. Ha, ha!"
+
+"Such being the case----" Eugene said lightly, and followed her to get
+the rackets.
+
+They went to the second court, where they played practically unheeded.
+Every hit was a signal for congratulation on the part of one or the
+other, every miss for a burst of laughter or a jest. Eugene devoured
+Suzanne with his eyes, and she looked at him continually, in wide-eyed
+sweetness, scarcely knowing what she was doing. Her own hilarity on this
+occasion was almost inexplicable to her. It seemed as though she was
+possessed of some spirit of joy which she couldn't control. She
+confessed to him afterward that she had been wildly glad, exalted, and
+played with freedom and abandon, though at the same time she was
+frightened and nervous. To Eugene she was of course ravishing to behold.
+She could not play, as she truly said, but it made no difference. Her
+motions were beautiful.
+
+Mrs. Dale had long admired Eugene's youthful spirit. She watched him now
+from one of the windows, and thought of him much as one might of a boy.
+He and Suzanne looked charming playing together. It occurred to her that
+if he were single he would not make a bad match for her daughter.
+Fortunately he was sane, prudent, charming, more like a guardian to
+Suzanne than anything else. Her friendship for him was rather a healthy
+sign.
+
+After dinner it was proposed by Kinroy that he and his friends and
+Suzanne go to a dance which was being given at a club house, near the
+government fortifications at The Narrows, where they spread out into the
+lower bay. Mrs. Dale, not wishing to exclude Eugene, who was depressed
+at the thought of Suzanne's going and leaving him behind, suggested that
+they all go. She did not care so much for dancing herself, but Suzanne
+had no partner and Kinroy and his friend were very much interested in
+the girls they were taking. A car was called, and they sped to the club
+to find it dimly lighted with Chinese lanterns, and an orchestra playing
+softly in the gloom.
+
+"Now you go ahead and dance," said her mother to Suzanne. "I want to sit
+out here and look at the water a while. I'll watch you through the
+door."
+
+Eugene held out his hand to Suzanne, who took it, and in a moment they
+were whirling round. A kind of madness seized them both, for without a
+word or look they drew close to each other and danced furiously, in a
+clinging ecstasy of joy.
+
+"Oh, how lovely!" Suzanne exclaimed at one turn of the room, where,
+passing an open door, they looked out and saw a full lighted ship
+passing silently by in the distant dark. A sail boat; its one great sail
+enveloped in a shadowy quiet, floated wraith-like, nearer still.
+
+"Do scenes like that appeal to you so?" asked Eugene.
+
+"Oh, do they!" she pulsated. "They take my breath away. This does, too,
+it's so lovely!"
+
+Eugene sighed. He understood now. Never, he said to himself, was the
+soul of an artist so akin to his own and so enveloped in beauty. This
+same thirst for beauty that was in him was in her, and it was pulling
+her to him. Only her soul was so exquisitely set in youth and beauty and
+maidenhood that it overawed and frightened him. It seemed impossible
+that she should ever love him. These eyes, this face of hers--how they
+enchanted him! He was drawn as by a strong cord, and so was she--by an
+immense, terrible magnetism. He had felt it all the afternoon. Keenly.
+He was feeling it intensely now. He pressed her to his bosom, and she
+yielded, yearningly, suiting her motions to his subtlest moods. He
+wanted to exclaim: "Oh, Suzanne! Oh, Suzanne!" but he was afraid. If he
+said anything to her it would frighten her. She did not really dream as
+yet what it all meant.
+
+"You know," he said, when the music stopped, "I'm quite beside myself.
+It's narcotic. I feel like a boy."
+
+"Oh, if they would only go on!" was all she said. And together they went
+out on the veranda, where there were no lights but only chairs and the
+countless stars.
+
+"Well?" said Mrs. Dale.
+
+"I'm afraid you don't love to dance as well as I do?" observed Eugene
+calmly, sitting down beside her.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't, seeing how joyously you do it. I've been watching
+you. You two dance well together. Kinroy, won't you have them bring us
+ices?"
+
+Suzanne had slipped away to the side of her brother's friends. She
+talked to them cheerily the while Eugene watched her, but she was
+intensely conscious of his presence and charm. She tried to think what
+she was doing, but somehow she could not--she could only feel. The music
+struck up again, and for looks' sake he let her dance with her brother's
+friend. The next was his, and the next, for Kinroy preferred to sit out
+one, and his friend also. Suzanne and Eugene danced the major portions
+of the dances together, growing into a wild exaltation, which, however,
+was wordless except for a certain eagerness which might have been read
+into what they said. Their hands spoke when they touched and their eyes
+when they met. Suzanne was intensely shy and fearsome. She was really
+half terrified by what she was doing--afraid lest some word or thought
+would escape Eugene, and she wanted to dwell in the joy of this. He went
+once between two dances, when she was hanging over the rail looking at
+the dark, gurgling water below, and leaned over beside her.
+
+"How wonderful this night is!" he said.
+
+"Yes, yes!" she exclaimed, and looked away.
+
+"Do you wonder at all at the mystery of life?"
+
+"Oh, yes; oh, yes! All the time."
+
+"And you are so young!" he said passionately, intensely.
+
+"Sometimes, you know, Mr. Witla," she sighed, "I do not like to think."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know; I just can't tell you! I can't find words. I don't
+know."
+
+There was an intense pathos in her phrasing which meant everything to
+his understanding. He understood how voiceless a great soul really might
+be, new born without an earth-manufactured vocabulary. It gave him a
+clearer insight into a thought he had had for a long while and that was
+that we came, as Wordsworth expressed it, "trailing clouds of glory."
+But from where? Her soul must be intensely wise--else why his yearning
+to her? But, oh, the pathos of her voicelessness!
+
+They went home in the car, and late that night, while he was sitting on
+the veranda smoking to soothe his fevered brain, there was one other
+scene. The night was intensely warm everywhere except on this hill,
+where a cool breeze was blowing. The ships on the sea and bay were
+many--twinkling little lights--and the stars in the sky were as a great
+army. "See how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of
+bright gold," he quoted to himself. A door opened and Suzanne came out
+of the library, which opened on to the veranda. He had not expected to
+see her again, nor she him. The beauty of the night had drawn her.
+
+"Suzanne!" he said, when the door opened.
+
+She looked at him, poised in uncertainty, her lovely white face glowing
+like a pale phosphorescent light in the dark.
+
+"Isn't it beautiful out here? Come, sit down."
+
+"No," she said. "I mustn't stay. It is so beautiful!" She looked about
+her vaguely, nervously, and then at him. "Oh, that breeze!" She turned
+up her nose and sniffed eagerly.
+
+"The music is still whirling in my head," he said, coming to her. "I
+cannot get over tonight." He spoke softly--almost in a whisper--and
+threw his cigar away. Suzanne's voice was low.
+
+She looked at him and filled her deep broad chest with air. "Oh!" she
+sighed, throwing back her head, her neck curving divinely.
+
+"One more dance," he said, taking her right hand and putting his left
+upon her waist.
+
+She did not retreat from him, but looked half distrait, half entranced
+in his eyes.
+
+"Without music?" she asked. She was almost trembling.
+
+"You are music," he replied, her intense sense of suffocation seizing
+him.
+
+They moved a few paces to the left where there were no windows and where
+no one could see. He drew her close to him and looked into her face, but
+still he did not dare say what he thought. They moved about softly, and
+then she gurgled that soft laugh that had entranced him from the first.
+"What would people think?" she asked.
+
+They walked to the railing, he still holding her hand, and then she
+withdrew it. He was conscious of great danger--of jeopardizing a
+wonderfully blissful relationship, and finally said: "Perhaps we had
+better go."
+
+"Yes," she said. "Ma-ma would be greatly disturbed if she knew this."
+
+She walked ahead of him to the door.
+
+"Good night," she whispered.
+
+"Good night," he sighed.
+
+He went back to his chair and meditated on the course he was pursuing.
+This was a terrible risk. Should he go on? The flower-like face of
+Suzanne came back to him--her supple body, her wondrous grace and
+beauty. "Oh, perhaps not, but what a loss, what a lure to have flaunted
+in front of his eyes! Were there ever thoughts and feelings like these
+in so young a body? Never, never, never, had he seen her like. Never in
+all his experiences had he seen anything so exquisite. She was like the
+budding woods in spring, like little white and blue flowers growing. If
+life now for once would only be kind and give him her!
+
+"Oh, Suzanne, Suzanne!" he breathed to himself, lingering over the name.
+
+For a fourth or a fifth time Eugene was imagining himself to be
+terribly, eagerly, fearsomely in love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+This burst of emotion with its tentative understanding so subtly
+reached, changed radically and completely the whole complexion of life
+for Eugene. Once more now the spirit of youth had returned to him. He
+had been resenting all this while, in spite of his success, the passage
+of time, for he was daily and hourly growing older, and what had he
+really achieved? The more Eugene had looked at life through the medium
+of his experiences, the more it had dawned on him that somehow all
+effort was pointless. To where and what did one attain when one attained
+success? Was it for houses and lands and fine furnishings and friends
+that one was really striving? Was there any such thing as real
+friendship in life, and what were its fruits--intense satisfaction? In
+some few instances, perhaps, but in the main what a sorry jest most
+so-called friendships veiled! How often they were coupled with
+self-interest, self-seeking, self-everything! We associated in
+friendship mostly only with those who were of our own social station. A
+good friend. Did he possess one? An inefficient friend? Would one such
+long be his friend? Life moved in schools of those who could run a
+certain pace, maintain a certain standard of appearances, compel a
+certain grade of respect and efficiency in others. Colfax was his
+friend--for the present. So was Winfield. About him were scores and
+hundreds who were apparently delighted to grasp his hand, but for what?
+His fame? Certainly. His efficiency? Yes. Only by the measure of his
+personal power and strength could he measure his friends--no more.
+
+And as for love--what had he ever had of love before? When he went back
+in his mind, it seemed now that all, each, and every one, had been
+combined in some way with lust and evil thinking. Could he say that he
+had ever been in love truly? Certainly not with Margaret Duff or Ruby
+Kenny or Angela--though that was the nearest he had come to true
+love--or Christina Channing. He had liked all these women very much, as
+he had Carlotta Wilson, but had he ever loved one? Never. Angela had won
+him through his sympathy for her, he told himself now. He had been
+induced to marry out of remorse. And here he was now having lived all
+these years and come all this way without having truly loved. Now,
+behold Suzanne Dale with her perfection of soul and body, and he was
+wild about her--not for lust, but for love. He wanted to be with her, to
+hold her hands, to kiss her lips, to watch her smile; but nothing more.
+It was true her body had its charm. In extremes it would draw him, but
+the beauty of her mind and appearance--there lay the fascination. He was
+heartsick at being compelled to be absent from her, and yet he did not
+know that he would ever be able to attain her at all.
+
+As he thought of his condition, it rather terrified and nauseated him.
+To think, after having known this one hour of wonder and superlative
+bliss, of being compelled to come back into the work-a-day world! Nor
+were things improving at the office of the United Magazines Corporation.
+Instead of growing better, they were growing worse. With the diversity
+of his interests, particularly the interest he held in the Sea Island
+Realty and Construction Company, he was growing rather lackadaisical in
+his attitude toward all magazine interests with which he was connected.
+He had put in strong men wherever he could find them, but these had come
+to be very secure in their places, working without very much regard to
+him since he could not give them very much attention. White and Colfax
+had become intimate with many of them personally. Some of them, such as
+Hayes, the advertising man, the circulation manager, the editor of the
+_International Review_, the editor in charge of books, were so very able
+that, although it was true that Eugene had hired them it was practically
+settled that they could not be removed. Colfax and White had come to
+understand by degrees that Eugene was a person who, however brilliant he
+might be in selecting men, was really not capable of attention to
+detail. He could not bring his mind down to small practical points. If
+he had been an owner, like Colfax, or a practical henchman like White,
+he would have been perfectly safe, but being a natural-born leader, or
+rather organizer, he was, unless he secured control in the beginning,
+rather hopeless and helpless when organization was completed. Others
+could attend to details better than he could. Colfax came to know his
+men and like them. In absences which had become more frequent, as Eugene
+became more secure, and as he took up with Winfield, they had first gone
+to Colfax for advice, and later, in Colfax's absence, to White. The
+latter received them with open arms. Indeed, among themselves, his
+lieutenants frequently discussed Eugene and agreed that in organizing,
+or rather reorganizing the place, he had done his great work. He might
+have been worth twenty-five thousand a year doing that, but hardly as a
+man to sit about and cool his heels after the work was done. White had
+persistently whispered suggestions of Eugene's commercial inefficiency
+for the task he was essaying to Colfax. "He is really trying to do up
+there what you ought to be doing," he told him, "and what you can do
+better. You want to remember that you've learned a lot since you came in
+here, and so has he, only he has become a little less practical and you
+have become more so. These men of his look more to you now than they do
+to him."
+
+Colfax rejoiced in the thought. He liked Eugene, but he liked the idea
+better that his business interests were perfectly safe. He did not like
+to think that any one man was becoming so strong that his going would
+injure him, and this thought for a long time during Eugene's early
+ascendancy had troubled him. The latter had carried himself with such an
+air. Eugene had fancied that Colfax needed to be impressed with his
+importance, and this, in addition to his very thorough work, was one way
+to do it. His manner had grated on Colfax after a time, for he was the
+soul of vainglory himself, and he wanted no other gods in the place
+beside himself. White, on the contrary, was constantly subservient and
+advisory in his manner. It made a great difference.
+
+By degrees, through one process and another, Eugene had lost ground, but
+it was only in a nebulous way as yet, and not in anything tangible. If
+he had never turned his attention to anything else, had never wearied of
+any detail, and kept close to Colfax and to his own staff, he would have
+been safe. As it was, he began now to neglect them more than ever, and
+this could not fail to tell rather disastrously in the long run.
+
+In the first place the prospects in connection with the Sea Island
+Construction Company were apparently growing brighter and brighter. It
+was one of those schemes which would take years and years to develop,
+but it did not look that way at first. Rather it seemed to be showing
+tangible evidences of accomplishment. The first year, after a good deal
+of money had been invested, considerable dredging operations were
+carried out, and dry land appeared in many places--a long stretch of
+good earth to the rear of the main beach whereon hotels and resorts of
+all sorts could be constructed. The boardwalk was started after a model
+prepared by Eugene, and approved--after modification--by the architect
+engaged, and a portion of the future great dining and dancing casinos
+was begun and completed, a beautiful building modeled on a combination
+of the Moorish, Spanish and Old Mission styles. A notable improvement in
+design had been effected in this scheme, for the color of Blue Sea,
+according to Eugene's theory, was to be red, white, yellow, blue, and
+green, done in spirited yet simple outlines. The walls of all buildings
+were to be white and yellow, latticed with green. The roofs, porticos,
+lintels, piers, and steps were to be red, yellow, green, and blue. There
+were to be round, shallow Italian pools of concrete in many of the
+courts and interiors of the houses. The hotels were to be western
+modifications of the Giralda in Spain, each one a size smaller, or
+larger, than the other. Green spear pines and tall cone-shaped poplars
+were to be the prevailing tree decorations. The railroad, as
+Mr. Winfield promised, had already completed its spur and Spanish depot,
+which was beautiful. It looked truly as though Blue Sea would become
+what Winfield said it would become; the seaside resort of America.
+
+The actuality of this progress fascinated Eugene so much that he gave,
+until Suzanne appeared, much more time than he really should have to the
+development of the scheme. As in the days when he first went with
+Summerfield, he worked of nights on exterior and interior layouts, as he
+called them--facades, ground arrangements, island improvements, and so
+on. He went frequently with Winfield and his architect in his auto to
+see how Blue Sea was getting on and to visit monied men, who might be
+interested. He drew up plans for ads and booklets, making romantic
+sketches and originating catch lines.
+
+In the next place, after Suzanne appeared, he began to pay attention
+almost exclusively in his thoughts to her. He could not get her out of
+his head night or day. She haunted his thoughts in the office, at home,
+and in his dreams. He began actually to burn with a strange fever, which
+gave him no rest. When would he see her again? When would he see her
+again? When would he see her again? He could see her only as he danced
+with her at the boat club, as he sat with her in the swing at Daleview.
+It was a wild, aching desire which gave him no peace any more than any
+other fever of the brain ever does.
+
+Once, not long after he and she had danced at the boat club together,
+she came with her mother to see how Angela was, and Eugene had a chance
+to say a few words to her in the studio, for they came after five in the
+afternoon when he was at home. Suzanne gazed at him wide-eyed, scarcely
+knowing what to think, though she was fascinated. He asked her eagerly
+where she had been, where she was going to be.
+
+"Why," she said gracefully, her pretty lips parted, "we're going to
+Bentwood Hadley's tomorrow. We'll be there for a week, I fancy. Maybe
+longer."
+
+"Have you thought of me much, Suzanne?"
+
+"Yes, yes! But you mustn't, Mr. Witla. No, no. I don't know what to
+think."
+
+"If I came to Bentwood Hadleys, would you be glad?"
+
+"Oh, yes," she said hesitatingly, "but you mustn't come."
+
+Eugene was there that week-end. It wasn't difficult to manage.
+
+"I'm awfully tired," he wrote to Mrs. Hadley. "Why don't you invite me
+out?"
+
+"Come!" came a telegram, and he went.
+
+On this occasion, he was more fortunate than ever. Suzanne was there,
+out riding when he came, but, as he learned from Mrs. Hadley, there was
+a dance on at a neighboring country club. Suzanne with a number of
+others was going. Mrs. Dale decided to go, and invited Eugene. He seized
+the offer, for he knew he would get a chance to dance with his ideal.
+When they were going in to dinner, he met Suzanne in the hall.
+
+"I am going with you," he said eagerly. "Save a few dances for me."
+
+"Yes," she said, inhaling her breath in a gasp.
+
+They went, and he initialled her card in five places.
+
+"We must be careful," she pleaded. "Ma-ma won't like it."
+
+He saw by this that she was beginning to understand, and would plot with
+him. Why was he luring her on? Why did she let him?
+
+When he slipped his arm about her in the first dance he said, "At last!"
+And then: "I have waited for this so long."
+
+Suzanne made no reply.
+
+"Look at me, Suzanne," he pleaded.
+
+"I can't," she said.
+
+"Oh, look at me," he urged, "once, please. Look in my eyes."
+
+"No, no," she begged, "I can't."
+
+"Oh, Suzanne," he exclaimed, "I am crazy about you. I am mad. I have
+lost all reason. Your face is like a flower to me. Your eyes--I can't
+tell you about your eyes. Look at me!"
+
+"No," she pleaded.
+
+"It seems as though the days will never end in which I do not see you. I
+wait and wait. Suzanne, do I seem like a silly fool to you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I am counted sharp and able. They tell me I am brilliant. You are the
+most perfect thing that I have ever known. I think of you awake and
+asleep. I could paint a thousand pictures of you. My art seems to come
+back to me through you. If I live I will paint you in a hundred ways.
+Have you ever seen the Rossetti woman?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He painted a hundred portraits of her. I shall paint a thousand of
+you."
+
+She lifted her eyes to look at him shyly, wonderingly, drawn by this
+terrific passion. His own blazed into hers. "Oh, look at me again," he
+whispered, when she dropped them under the fire of his glance.
+
+"I can't," she pleaded.
+
+"Oh, yes, once more."
+
+She lifted her eyes and it seemed as though their souls would blend. He
+felt dizzy, and Suzanne reeled.
+
+"Do you love me, Suzanne?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know," she trembled.
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+"Don't ask me now."
+
+The music ceased and Suzanne was gone.
+
+He did not see her until much later, for she slipped away to think. Her
+soul was stirred as with a raging storm. It seemed as though her very
+soul was being torn up. She was tremulous, tumultuous, unsettled,
+yearning, eager. She came back after a time and they danced again, but
+she was calmer apparently. They went out on a balcony, and he contrived
+to say a few words there.
+
+"You mustn't," she pleaded. "I think we are being watched."
+
+He left her, and on the way home in the auto he whispered: "I shall be
+on the west veranda tonight. Will you come?"
+
+"I don't know, I'll try."
+
+He walked leisurely to that place later when all was still, and sat down
+to wait. Gradually the great house quieted. It was one and one-thirty,
+and then nearly two before the door opened. A figure slipped out, the
+lovely form of Suzanne, dressed as she had been at the ball, a veil of
+lace over her hair.
+
+"I'm so afraid," she said, "I scarcely know what I am doing. Are you
+sure no one will see us?"
+
+"Let us walk down the path to the field." It was the same way they had
+taken in the early spring when he had met her here before. In the west
+hung low a waning moon, yellow, sickle shaped, very large because of the
+hour.
+
+"Do you remember when we were here before?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I loved you then. Did you care for me?"
+
+"No."
+
+They walked on under the trees, he holding her hand.
+
+"Oh, this night, this night," he said, the strain of his intense emotion
+wearying him.
+
+They came out from under the trees at the end of the path. There was a
+sense of August dryness in the air. It was warm, sensuous. About were
+the sounds of insects, faint bumblings, cracklings. A tree toad chirped,
+or a bird cried.
+
+"Come to me, Suzanne," he said at last when they emerged into the full
+light of the moon at the end of the path and paused. "Come to me." He
+slipped his arm about her.
+
+"No," she said. "No."
+
+"Look at me, Suzanne," he pleaded; "I want to tell you how much I love
+you. Oh, I have no words. It seems ridiculous to try to tell you. Tell
+me that you love me, Suzanne. Tell me now. I am crazy with love of you.
+Tell me."
+
+"No," she said, "I can't."
+
+"Kiss me!"
+
+"No!"
+
+He drew her to him and turned her face up by her chin in spite of her.
+"Open your eyes," he pleaded. "Oh, God! That this should come to me! Now
+I could die. Life can hold no more. Oh, Flower Face! Oh, Silver Feet!
+Oh, Myrtle Bloom! Divine Fire! How perfect you are. How perfect! And to
+think you love me!"
+
+He kissed her eagerly.
+
+"Kiss me, Suzanne. Tell me that you love me. Tell me. Oh, how I love
+that name, Suzanne. Whisper to me you love me."
+
+"No."
+
+"But you do."
+
+"No."
+
+"Look at me, Suzanne. Flower face. Myrtle Bloom. For God's sake, look at
+me! You love me."
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, yes," she sobbed of a sudden, throwing her arm around his
+neck. "Oh, yes, yes."
+
+"Don't cry," he pleaded. "Oh, sweet, don't cry. I am mad for love of
+you, mad. Kiss me now, one kiss. I am staking my soul on your love. Kiss
+me!"
+
+He pressed his lips to hers, but she burst away, terror-stricken.
+
+"Oh, I am so frightened," she exclaimed all at once. "Oh, what shall I
+do? I am so afraid. Oh, please, please. Something terrifies me.
+Something scares me. Oh, what am I going to do? Let me go back."
+
+She was white and trembling. Her hands were nervously clasping and
+unclasping.
+
+Eugene smoothed her arm soothingly. "Be still, Suzanne," he said. "Be
+still. I shall say no more. You are all right. I have frightened you. We
+will go back. Be calm. You are all right."
+
+He recovered his own poise with an effort because of her obvious terror,
+and led her back under the trees. To reassure her he drew his cigar case
+from his pocket and pretended to select a cigar. When he saw her
+calming, he put it back.
+
+"Are you quieter now, sweet?" he asked, tenderly.
+
+"Yes, but let us go back."
+
+"Listen. I will only go as far as the edge. You go alone. I will watch
+you safely to the door."
+
+"Yes," she said peacefully.
+
+"And you really love me, Suzanne?"
+
+"Oh, yes, but don't speak of it. Not tonight. You will frighten me
+again. Let us go back."
+
+They strolled on. Then he said: "One kiss, sweet, in parting. One. Life
+has opened anew for me. You are the solvent of my whole being. You are
+making me over into something different. I feel as though I had never
+lived until now. Oh, this experience! It is such a wonderful thing to
+have done--to have lived through, to have changed as I have changed. You
+have changed me so completely, made me over into the artist again. From
+now on I can paint again. I can paint you." He scarcely knew what he was
+saying. He felt as though he were revealing himself to himself as in an
+apocalyptic vision.
+
+She let him kiss her, but she was too frightened and wrought to even
+breathe right. She was intense, emotional, strange. She did not really
+understand what it was that he was talking about.
+
+"Tomorrow," he said, "at the wood's edge. Tomorrow. Sweet dreams. I
+shall never know peace any more without your love."
+
+And he watched her eagerly, sadly, bitterly, ecstatically, as she walked
+lightly from him, disappearing like a shadow through the dark and silent
+door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+It would be impossible to describe even in so detailed an account as
+this the subtleties, vagaries, beauties and terrors of the emotions
+which seized upon him, and which by degrees began also to possess
+Suzanne, once he became wholly infatuated with her. Mrs. Dale, was,
+after a social fashion, one of Eugene's best friends. She had since she
+had first come to know him spread his fame far and wide as an immensely
+clever publisher and editor, an artist of the greatest power, and a man
+of lovely and delightful ideas and personal worth. He knew from various
+conversations with her that Suzanne was the apple of her eye. He had
+heard her talk, had, in fact, discussed with her the difficulties of
+rearing a simple mannered, innocent-minded girl in present day society.
+She had confided to him that it had been her policy to give Suzanne the
+widest liberty consistent with good-breeding and current social
+theories. She did not want to make her bold or unduly self-reliant, and
+yet she wanted her to be free and natural. Suzanne, she was convinced,
+from long observation and many frank conversations, was innately honest,
+truthful and clean-minded. She did not understand her exactly, for what
+mother can clearly understand any child; but she thought she read her
+well enough to know that she was in some indeterminate way forceful and
+able, like her father, and that she would naturally gravitate to what
+was worth while in life.
+
+Had she any talent? Mrs. Dale really did not know. The girl had vague
+yearnings toward something which was anything but social in its quality.
+She did not care anything at all for most of the young men and women she
+met. She went about a great deal, but it was to ride and drive. Games of
+chance did not interest her. Drawing-room conversations were amusing to
+her, but not gripping. She liked interesting characters, able books,
+striking pictures. She had been particularly impressed with those of
+Eugene's; she had seen and had told her mother that they were wonderful.
+She loved poetry of high order, and was possessed of a boundless
+appetite for the ridiculous and the comic. An unexpected faux pas was
+apt to throw her into uncontrollable fits of laughter and the funny page
+selections of the current newspaper artists, when she could obtain them,
+amused her intensely. She was a student of character, and of her own
+mother, and was beginning to see clearly what were the motives that were
+prompting her mother in her attitude toward herself, quite as clearly as
+that person did herself and better. At bottom she was more talented than
+her mother, but in a different way. She was not, as yet, as
+self-controlled, or as understanding of current theories and beliefs as
+her mother, but she was artistic, emotional, excitable, in an
+intellectual way, and capable of high flights of fancy and of intense
+and fine appreciations. Her really sensuous beauty was nothing to her.
+She did not value it highly. She knew she was beautiful, and that men
+and boys were apt to go wild about her, but she did not care. They must
+not be so silly, she thought. She did not attempt to attract them in any
+way. On the contrary, she avoided every occasion of possible
+provocation. Her mother had told her plainly how susceptible men were,
+how little their promises meant, how careful she must be of her looks
+and actions. In consequence, she went her way as gaily and yet as
+inoffensively as she could, trying to avoid the sadness of entrancing
+anyone hopelessly and wondering what her career was to be. Then Eugene
+appeared.
+
+With his arrival, Suzanne had almost unconsciously entered upon a new
+phase of her existence. She had seen all sorts of men in society, but
+those who were exclusively social were exceedingly wearisome to her. She
+had heard her mother say that it was an important thing to marry money
+and some man of high social standing, but who this man was to be and
+what he was to be like she did not know. She did not look upon the
+typical society men she had encountered as answering suitably to the
+term high. She had seen some celebrated wealthy men of influential
+families, but they did not appear to her really human enough to be
+considered. Most of them were cold, self-opinionated, ultra-artificial
+to her easy, poetic spirit. In the realms of real distinction were many
+men whom the papers constantly talked about, financiers, politicians,
+authors, editors, scientists, some of whom were in society, she
+understood, but most of whom were not. She had met a few of them as a
+girl might. Most of those she met, or saw, were old and cold and paid no
+attention to her whatever. Eugene had appeared trailing an atmosphere of
+distinction and acknowledged ability and he was young. He was good
+looking, too--laughing and gay. It seemed almost impossible at first to
+her that one so young and smiling should be so able, as her mother said.
+Afterwards, when she came to know him, she began to feel that he was
+more than able; that he could do anything he pleased. She had visited
+him once in his office, accompanied by her mother, and she had been
+vastly impressed by the great building, its artistic finish, Eugene's
+palatial surroundings. Surely he was the most remarkable young man she
+had ever known. Then came his incandescent attentions to her, his
+glowing, radiant presence and then----
+
+Eugene speculated deeply on how he should proceed. All at once, after
+this night, the whole problem of his life came before him. He was
+married; he was highly placed socially, better than he had ever been
+before. He was connected closely with Colfax, so closely that he feared
+him, for Colfax, in spite of certain emotional vagaries of which Eugene
+knew, was intensely conventional. Whatever he did was managed in the
+most offhand way and with no intention of allowing his home life to be
+affected or disrupted. Winfield, whom also Mrs. Dale knew, was also
+conventional to outward appearances. He had a mistress, but she was held
+tightly in check, he understood. Eugene had seen her at the new casino,
+or a portion of it, the East Wing, recently erected at Blue Sea, and he
+had been greatly impressed with her beauty. She was smart, daring,
+dashing. Eugene looked at her then, wondering if the time would ever
+come when he could dare an intimacy of that character. So many married
+men did. Would he ever attempt it and succeed?
+
+Now that he had met Suzanne, however, he had a different notion of all
+this, and it had come over him all at once. Heretofore in his dreams, he
+had fancied he might strike up an emotional relationship somewhere which
+would be something like Winfield's towards Miss De Kalb, as she was
+known, and so satisfy the weary longing that was in him for something
+new and delightful in the way of a sympathetic relationship with beauty.
+Since seeing Suzanne, he wanted nothing of this, but only some
+readjustment or rearrangement of his life whereby he could have Suzanne
+and Suzanne only. Suzanne! Suzanne! Oh, that dream of beauty. How was he
+to obtain her, how free his life of all save a beautiful relationship
+with her? He could live with her forever and ever. He could, he could!
+Oh, this vision, this dream!
+
+It was the Sunday following the dance that Suzanne and Eugene managed to
+devise another day together, which, though, it was one of those
+semi-accidental, semi-voiceless, but nevertheless not wholly thoughtless
+coincidences which sometimes come about without being wholly agreed upon
+or understood in the beginning, was nevertheless seized upon by them,
+accepted silently and semi-consciously, semi-unconsciously worked out
+together. Had they not been very strongly drawn to each other by now,
+this would not have happened at all. But they enjoyed it none the less.
+To begin with, Mrs. Dale was suffering from a sick headache the morning
+after. In the next place, Kinroy suggested to his friends to go for a
+lark to South Beach, which was one of the poorest and scrubbiest of all
+the beaches on Staten Island. In the next place, Mrs. Dale suggested
+that Suzanne be allowed to go and that perhaps Eugene would be amused.
+She rather trusted him as a guide and mentor.
+
+Eugene said calmly that he did not object. He was eager to be anywhere
+alone with Suzanne, and he fancied that some opportunity would present
+itself whereby once they were there, they could be together, but he did
+not want to show it. Once more the car was called and they departed,
+being let off at one end of a silly panorama which stretched its shabby
+length for a mile along the shore. The chauffeur took the car back to
+the house, it being agreed that they could reach him by phone. The party
+started down the plank walk, but almost immediately, because of
+different interests, divided. Eugene and Suzanne stopped to shoot at a
+shooting gallery. Next they stopped at a cane rack to ring canes.
+Anything was delightful to Eugene which gave him an opportunity to
+observe his inamorata, to see her pretty face, her smile, and to hear
+her heavenly voice. She rung a cane for him. Every gesture of hers was
+perfection; every look a thrill of delight. He was walking in some
+elysian realm which had nothing to do with the tawdry evidence of life
+about him.
+
+They followed the boardwalk southward, after a ride in the Devil's
+Whirlpool, for by now Suzanne was caught in the persuasive subtlety of
+his emotion and could no more do as her honest judgment would have
+dictated than she could have flown. It needed some shock, some discovery
+to show her whither she was drifting and this was absent. They came to a
+new dance hall, where a few servant girls and their sweethearts were
+dancing, and for a lark Eugene proposed that they should enter. They
+danced together again, and though the surroundings were so poor and the
+music wretched, Eugene was in heaven.
+
+"Let's run away and go to the Terra-Marine," he suggested, thinking of a
+hotel farther south along the shore. "It is so pleasant there. This is
+all so cheap."
+
+"Where is it?" asked Suzanne.
+
+"Oh, about three miles south of here. We could almost walk there."
+
+He looked down the long hot beach, but changed his mind.
+
+"I don't mind this," said Suzanne. "It's so very bad that it's good, you
+know. I like to see how these people enjoy themselves."
+
+"But it is _so_ bad," argued Eugene. "I wish I had your live, healthy
+attitude toward things. Still we won't go if you don't want to."
+
+Suzanne paused, thinking. Should she run away with him? The others would
+be looking for them. No doubt they were already wondering where they had
+gone. Still it didn't make so much difference. Her mother trusted her
+with Eugene. They could go.
+
+"Well," she said finally, "I don't care. Let's."
+
+"What will the others think?" he said doubtfully.
+
+"Oh, they won't mind," she said. "When they're ready, they'll call the
+car. They know that I am with you. They know that I can get the car when
+I want it. Mama won't mind."
+
+Eugene led the way back to a train which ran to Hugenot, their
+destination. He was beside himself with the idea of a day all alone with
+Suzanne. He did not stay to consider or give ear to a thought concerning
+Angela at home or how Mrs. Dale would view it. Nothing would come of it.
+It was not an outrageous adventure. They took the train south, and in a
+little while were in another world, on the veranda of a hotel that
+overlooked the sea. There were numerous autos of idlers like themselves
+in a court before the hotel. There was a great grassy lawn with swings
+covered by striped awnings of red and blue and green, and beyond that a
+pier with many little white launches anchored near. The sea was as
+smooth as glass and great steamers rode in the distance trailing lovely
+plumes of smoke. The sun was blazing hot, brilliant, but here on the
+cool porch waiters were serving pleasure lovers with food and drink. A
+quartette of negroes were singing. Suzanne and Eugene seated themselves
+in rockers at first to view the perfect day and later went down and sat
+in a swing. Unthinkingly, without words, these two were gradually
+gravitating toward each other under some spell which had no relationship
+to everyday life. Suzanne looked at him in the double seated swing where
+they sat facing each other and they smiled or jested aimlessly, voicing
+nothing of all the upward welling deep that was stirring within.
+
+"Was there ever such a day?" said Eugene finally, and in a voice that
+was filled with extreme yearning. "See that steamer out there. It looks
+like a little toy."
+
+"Yes," said Suzanne with a little gasp. She inhaled her breath as she
+pronounced this word which gave it an airy breathlessness which had a
+touch of demure pathos in it. "Oh, it is perfect."
+
+"Your hair," he said. "You don't know how nice you look. You fit this
+scene exactly."
+
+"Don't speak of me," she pleaded. "I look so tousled. The wind in the
+train blew my hair so I ought to go the ladies' dressing room and hunt
+up a maid."
+
+"Stay here," said Eugene. "Don't go. It is all so lovely."
+
+"I won't now. I wish we might always sit here. You, just as you are
+there, and I here."
+
+"Did you ever read the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you remember the lines 'Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst
+not leave'?"
+
+"Yes, yes," she answered ecstatically.
+
+ "'Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss
+   Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
+   She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
+   For ever wilt thou love and she be fair.'"
+
+"Don't, don't," she pleaded.
+
+He understood. The pathos of that great thought was too much for her. It
+hurt her as it did him. What a mind!
+
+They rocked and swung idly, he pushing with his feet at times in which
+labor she joined him. They strolled up the beach and sat down on a green
+clump of grass overlooking the sea. Idlers approached and passed. He
+laid his arm to her waist and held her hand, but something in her mood
+stayed him from any expression. Through dinner at the hotel it was the
+same and on the way to the train, for she wanted to walk through the
+dark. Under some tall trees, though, in the rich moonlight prevailing,
+he pressed her hand.
+
+"Oh, Suzanne," he said.
+
+"No, no," she breathed, drawing back.
+
+"Oh, Suzanne," he repeated, "may I tell you?"
+
+"No, no," she answered. "Don't speak to me. Please don't. Let's just
+walk. You and I."
+
+He hushed, for her voice, though sad and fearsome, was imperious. He
+could not do less than obey this mood.
+
+They went to a little country farmhouse which ranged along the track in
+lieu of a depot, and sang a quaint air from some old-time comic opera.
+
+"Do you remember the first time when you came to play tennis with me?"
+he asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you know I felt a strange vibration before your coming and all
+during your playing. Did you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What is that, Suzanne?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Don't you want to know?"
+
+"No, no, Mr. Witla, not now."
+
+"Mr. Witla?"
+
+"It must be so."
+
+"Oh, Suzanne!"
+
+"Let's just think," she pleaded, "it is so beautiful."
+
+They came to a station near Daleview, and walked over. On the way he
+slipped his arm about her waist, but, oh, so lightly.
+
+"Suzanne," he asked, with a terrible yearning ache in his heart, "do you
+blame me? Can you?"
+
+"Don't ask me," she pleaded, "not now. No, no."
+
+He tried to press her a little more closely.
+
+"Not now. I don't blame you."
+
+He stopped as they neared the lawn and entered the house with a jesting
+air. Explanations about mixing in the crowd and getting lost were easy.
+Mrs. Dale smiled good naturedly. Suzanne went to her room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Having involved himself thus far, seized upon and made his own this
+perfect flower of life, Eugene had but one thought, and that was to
+retain it. Now, of a sudden, had fallen from him all the weariness of
+years. To be in love again. To be involved in such a love, so wonderful,
+so perfect, so exquisite, it did not seem that life could really be so
+gracious as to have yielded him so much. What did it all mean, his
+upward rise during all these years? There had been seemingly but one
+triumph after another since the bitter days in Riverwood and after. The
+_World_, Summerfield's, The Kalvin Company, The United Magazine
+Corporation, Winfield, his beautiful apartment on the drive. Surely the
+gods were good. What did they mean? To give him fame, fortune and
+Suzanne into the bargain? Could such a thing really be? How could it be
+worked out? Would fate conspire and assist him so that he could be free
+of Angela--or----
+
+The thought of Angela to him in these days was a great pain. At bottom
+Eugene really did not dislike her, he never had. Years of living with
+her had produced an understanding and a relationship as strong and as
+keen as it might well be in some respects. Angela had always fancied
+since the Riverwood days that she really did not love Eugene truly any
+more--could not, that he was too self-centered and selfish; but this on
+her part was more of an illusion than a reality. She did care for him in
+an unselfish way from one point of view, in that she would sacrifice
+everything to his interests. From another point of view it was wholly
+selfish, for she wanted him to sacrifice everything for her in return.
+This he was not willing to do and had never been. He considered that his
+life was a larger thing than could be encompassed by any single
+matrimonial relationship. He wanted freedom of action and companionship,
+but he was afraid of Angela, afraid of society, in a way afraid of
+himself and what positive liberty might do to him. He felt sorry for
+Angela--for the intense suffering she would endure if he forced her in
+some way to release him--and at the same time he felt sorry for himself.
+The lure of beauty had never for one moment during all these years of
+upward mounting effort been stilled.
+
+It is curious how things seem to conspire at times to produce a climax.
+One would think that tragedies like plants and flowers are planted as
+seeds and grow by various means and aids to a terrible maturity. Roses
+of hell are some lives, and they shine with all the lustre of infernal
+fires.
+
+In the first place Eugene now began to neglect his office work
+thoroughly, for he could not fix his mind upon it any more than he could
+upon the affairs of the Sea Island Company, or upon his own home and
+Angela's illness. The morning after his South Beach experience with
+Suzanne and her curious reticence, he saw her for a little while upon
+the veranda of Daleview. She was not seemingly depressed, or at least,
+not noticeably so, and yet there was a gravity about her which indicated
+that a marked impression of some kind had been made upon her soul. She
+looked at him with wide frank eyes as she came out to him purposely to
+tell him that she was going with her mother and some friends to
+Tarrytown for the day.
+
+"I have to go," she said. "Mamma has arranged it by phone."
+
+"Then I won't see you any more here?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you love me, Suzanne?"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes," she declared, and walked wearily to an angle of the wall
+where they could not be seen.
+
+He followed her quickly, cautiously.
+
+"Kiss me," he said, and she put her lips to his in a distraught
+frightened way. Then she turned and walked briskly off and he admired
+the robust swinging of her body. She was not tall, like himself, or
+small like Angela, but middle sized, full bodied, vigorous. He imagined
+now that she had a powerful soul in her, capable of great things, full
+of courage and strength. Once she was a little older, she would be very
+forceful and full of strong, direct thought.
+
+He did not see her again for nearly ten days, and by that time he was
+nearly desperate. He was wondering all the time how he was to arrange
+this. He could not go on in this haphazard way, seeing her occasionally.
+Why she might leave town for the fall a little later and then what would
+he do? If her mother heard she would take her off to Europe and then
+would Suzanne forget? What a tragedy that would be! No, before that
+should happen, he would run away with her. He would realize all his
+investments and get away. He could not live without her. He must have
+her at any cost. What did the United Magazine Corporation amount to,
+anyway? He was tired of that work. Angela might have the Sea Island
+Realty Company's stock, if he could not dispose of it advantageously, or
+if he could, he would make provision for her out of what he should
+receive. He had some ready money--a few thousand dollars. This and his
+art--he could still paint--would sustain them. He would go to England
+with Suzanne, or to France. They would be happy if she really loved him
+and he thought she did. All this old life could go its way. It was a
+dreary thing, anyhow, without love. These were his first thoughts.
+
+Later, he came to have different ones, but this was after he had talked
+to Suzanne again. It was a difficult matter to arrange. In a fit of
+desperation he called up Daleview one day, and asked if Miss Suzanne
+Dale was there. A servant answered, and in answer to the "who shall I
+say" he gave the name of a young man that he knew Suzanne knew. When she
+answered he said: "Listen, Suzanne! Can you hear very well?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you recognize my voice?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Please don't pronounce my name, will you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Suzanne, I am crazy to see you. It has been ten days now. Are you going
+to be in town long?"
+
+"I don't know. I think so."
+
+"If anyone comes near you, Suzanne, simply hang up the receiver, and I
+will understand."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"If I came anywhere near your house in a car, could you come out and see
+me?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Oh, Suzanne!"
+
+"I'm not sure. I'll try. What time?"
+
+"Do you know where the old fort road is, at Crystal Lake, just below
+you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you know where the ice house is near the road there?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Could you come there?"
+
+"What time?"
+
+"At eleven tomorrow morning or two this afternoon or three."
+
+"I might at two today."
+
+"Oh, thank you for that. I'll wait for you, anyhow."
+
+"All right. Good-bye."
+
+And she hung up the receiver.
+
+Eugene rejoiced at the fortunate outcome of this effort without thinking
+at first of the capable manner in which she had handled the situation.
+Truly he said afterwards she must be very courageous to think so
+directly and act so quickly, for it must have been very trying to her.
+This love of his was so new. Her position was so very difficult. And
+yet, on this first call when she had been suddenly put in touch with
+him, she had shown no signs of trepidation. Her voice had been firm and
+even, much more so than his, for he was nervously excited. She had taken
+in the situation at once and fallen into the ruse quite readily. Was she
+as simple as she seemed? Yes and no. She was simply capable, he thought
+and her capability had acted through her simplicity instantly.
+
+At two the same day Eugene was there. He gave as an excuse to his
+secretary that he was going out for a business conference with a
+well-known author whose book he wished to obtain, and, calling a closed
+auto, but one not his own, journeyed to the rendezvous. He asked the man
+to drive down the road, making runs of half a mile to and fro while he
+sat in the shade of a clump of trees out of view of the road. Presently
+Suzanne came, bright and fresh as the morning, beautiful in a light
+purple walking costume of masterly design. She had on a large soft
+brimmed hat with long feathers of the same shade which became her
+exquisitely. She walked with an air of grace and freedom, and yet when
+he looked into her eyes, he saw a touch of trouble there.
+
+"At last?" he said signaling her and smiling. "Come in here. My car is
+just up the road. Don't you think we had better get in? It's closed. We
+might be seen. How long can you stay?"
+
+He took her in his arms and kissed her eagerly while she explained that
+she could not stay long. She had said she was going to the library,
+which her mother had endowed, for a book. She must be there by half past
+three or four at the least.
+
+"Oh, we can talk a great deal by then," he said gaily. "Here comes the
+car. Let's get in."
+
+He looked cautiously about, hailed it, and they stepped in quickly as it
+drew up.
+
+"Perth Amboy," said Eugene, and they were off at high speed.
+
+Once in the car all was perfect, for they could not be seen. He drew the
+shades partially and took her in his arms.
+
+"Oh, Suzanne," he said, "how long it has seemed. How very long. Do you
+love me?"
+
+"Yes, you know I do."
+
+"Suzanne, how shall we arrange this? Are you going away soon? I must see
+you oftener."
+
+"I don't know," she said. "I don't know what mama is thinking of doing.
+I know she wants to go up to Lenox in the fall."
+
+"Oh, Pshaw!" commented Eugene wearily.
+
+"Listen, Mr. Witla," said Suzanne thoughtfully. "You know we are running
+a terrible risk. What if Mrs. Witla should find out, or mama? It would
+be terrible."
+
+"I know it," said Eugene. "I suppose I ought not to be acting in this
+way. But, oh, Suzanne, I am wild about you. I am not myself any longer.
+I don't know what I am. I only know that I love you, love you, love
+you!"
+
+He gathered her in his arms and kissed her ecstatically. "How sweet you
+look. How beautiful you are. Oh, flower face! Myrtle Bloom! Angel Eyes!
+Divine Fire!" He hugged her in a long silent embrace, the while the car
+sped on.
+
+"But what about us?" she asked, wide-eyed. "You know we are running a
+terrible risk. I was just thinking this morning when you called me up.
+It's dangerous, you know."
+
+"Are you becoming sorry, Suzanne?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+"You know I do."
+
+"Then you will help me figure this out?"
+
+"I want to. But listen, Mr. Witla, now listen to me. I want to tell you
+something." She was very solemn and quaint and sweet in this mood.
+
+"I will listen to anything, baby mine, but don't call me Mr. Witla. Call
+me Eugene, will you?"
+
+"Well, now, listen to me, Mr.--Mr.--Eugene."
+
+"Not Mr. Eugene, just Eugene. Now say it. Eugene," he quoted his own
+name to her.
+
+"Now listen to me, Mr.--now, listen to me, Eugene," she at last forced
+herself to say, and Eugene stopped her lips with his mouth.
+
+"There," he said.
+
+"Now listen to me," she went on urgently, "you know I am afraid mama
+will be terribly angry if she finds this out."
+
+"Oh, will she?" interrupted Eugene jocosely.
+
+Suzanne paid no attention to him.
+
+"We have to be very careful. She likes you so much now that if she
+doesn't come across anything direct, she will never think of anything.
+She was talking about you only this morning."
+
+"What was she saying?"
+
+"Oh, what a nice man you are, and how able you are."
+
+"Oh, nothing like that," replied Eugene jestingly.
+
+"Yes, she did. And I think Mrs. Witla likes me. I can meet you sometimes
+when I'm there, but we must be so careful. I mustn't stay out long
+today. I want to think things out, too. You know I'm having a real hard
+time thinking about this."
+
+Eugene smiled. Her innocence was so delightful to him, so naive.
+
+"What do you mean by thinking things out, Suzanne?" asked Eugene
+curiously. He was interested in the workings of her young mind, which
+seemed so fresh and wonderful to him. It was so delightful to find this
+paragon of beauty so responsive, so affectionate and helpful and withal
+so thoughtful. She was somewhat like a delightful toy to him, and he
+held her as reverently in awe as though she were a priceless vase.
+
+"You know I want to think what I'm doing. I have to. It seems so
+terrible to me at times and yet you know, you know----"
+
+"I know what?" he asked, when she paused.
+
+"I don't know why I shouldn't if I want to--if I love you."
+
+Eugene looked at her curiously. This attempt at analysis of life,
+particularly in relation to so trying and daring a situation as this,
+astonished him. He had fancied Suzanne more or less thoughtless and
+harmless as yet, big potentially, but uncertain and vague. Here she was
+thinking about this most difficult problem almost more directly than he
+was and apparently with more courage. He was astounded, but more than
+that, intensely interested. What had become of her terrific fright of
+ten days before? What was it she was thinking about exactly?
+
+"What a curious girl you are," he said.
+
+"Why am I?" she asked.
+
+"Because you are. I didn't think you could think so keenly yet. I
+thought you would some day. But, how have you reasoned this out?"
+
+"Did you ever read 'Anna Karenina'?" she asked him meditatively.
+
+"Yes," he said, wondering that she should have read it at her age.
+
+"What did you think of that?"
+
+"Oh, it shows what happens, as a rule, when you fly in the face of
+convention," he said easily, wondering at the ability of her brain.
+
+"Do you think things must happen that way?"
+
+"No, I don't think they must happen that way. There are lots of cases
+where people do go against the conventions and succeed. I don't know. It
+appears to be all a matter of time and chance. Some do and some don't.
+If you are strong enough or clever enough to 'get away with it,' as they
+say, you will. If you aren't, you won't. What makes you ask?"
+
+"Well," she said, pausing, her lips parted, her eyes fixed on the floor,
+"I was thinking that it needn't necessarily be like that, do you think?
+It could be different?"
+
+"Yes, it could be," he said thoughtfully, wondering if it really could.
+
+"Because if it couldn't," she went on, "the price would be too high. It
+isn't worth while."
+
+"You mean, you mean," he said, looking at her, "that you would." He was
+thinking that she was deliberately contemplating making a sacrifice of
+herself for him. Something in her thoughtful, self-debating, meditative
+manner made him think so.
+
+Suzanne looked out of the window and slowly nodded her head. "Yes," she
+said, solemnly, "if it could be arranged. Why not? I don't see why."
+
+Her face was a perfect blossom of beauty, as she spoke. Eugene wondered
+whether he was waking or sleeping. Suzanne reasoning so! Suzanne reading
+"Anna Karenina" and philosophizing so! Basing a course of action on
+theorizing in connection with books and life, and in the face of such
+terrible evidence as "Anna Karenina" presented to the contrary of this
+proposition. Would wonders ever cease?
+
+"You know," she said after a time, "I think mama wouldn't mind, Eugene.
+She likes you. I've heard her say so lots of times. Besides I've heard
+her talk this way about other people. She thinks people oughtn't to
+marry unless they love each other very much. I don't think she thinks
+it's necessary for people to marry at all unless they want to. We might
+live together if we wished, you know."
+
+Eugene himself had heard Mrs. Dale question the marriage system, but
+only in a philosophic way. He did not take much stock in her social
+maunderings. He did not know what she might be privately saying to
+Suzanne, but he did not believe it could be very radical, or at least
+seriously so.
+
+"Don't you take any stock in what your mother says, Suzanne," he
+observed, studying her pretty face. "She doesn't mean it, at least, she
+doesn't mean it as far as you are concerned. She's merely talking. If
+she thought anything were going to happen to you, she'd change her mind
+pretty quick."
+
+"No, I don't think so," replied Suzanne thoughtfully. "You know, I think
+I know mama better than she knows herself. She always talks of me as a
+little girl, but I can rule her in lots of things. I've done it."
+
+Eugene stared at Suzanne in amazement. He could scarcely believe his
+ears. She was beginning so early to think so deeply on the social and
+executive sides of life. Why should her mind be trying to dominate her
+mother's?
+
+"Suzanne," he observed, "you must be careful what you do or say. Don't
+rush into talking of this pellmell. It's dangerous. I love you, but we
+shall have to go slow. If Mrs. Witla should learn of this, she would be
+crazy. If your mother should suspect, she would take you away to Europe
+somewhere, very likely. Then I wouldn't get to see you at all."
+
+"Oh, no, she wouldn't," replied Suzanne determinedly. "You know, I know
+mama better than you think I do. I can rule her, I tell you. I know I
+can. I've done it."
+
+She tossed her head in an exquisitely pretty way which upset Eugene's
+reasoning faculties. He could not think and look at her.
+
+"Suzanne," he said, drawing her to him. "You are exquisite, extreme, the
+last word in womanhood for me. To think of your reasoning so--you,
+Suzanne."
+
+"Why, why," she asked, with pretty parted lips and uplifted eyebrows,
+"why shouldn't I think?"
+
+"Oh, yes, certainly, we all do, but not so deeply, necessarily, Flower
+Face."
+
+"Well, we must think now," she said simply.
+
+"Yes, we must think now," he replied; "would you really share a studio
+with me if I were to take one? I don't know of any other way quite at
+present."
+
+"I would, if I knew how to manage it," she replied. "Mama is queer.
+She's so watchful. She thinks I'm a child and you know I am not at all.
+I don't understand mama. She talks one thing and does another. I would
+rather do and not talk. Don't you think so?" He stared. "Still, I think
+I can fix it. Leave it to me."
+
+"And if you can you'll come to me?"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes," exclaimed Suzanne ecstatically, turning to him all at
+once and catching his face between her hands. "Oh!"--she looked into his
+eyes and dreamed.
+
+"But we must be careful," he cautioned. "We musn't do anything rash."
+
+"I won't," said Suzanne.
+
+"And I won't, of course," he replied.
+
+They paused again while he watched her.
+
+"I might make friends with Mrs. Witla," she observed, after a time. "She
+likes me, doesn't she?"
+
+"Yes," said Eugene.
+
+"Mama doesn't object to my going up there, and I could let you know."
+
+"That's all right. Do that," said Eugene. "Oh, please do, if you can.
+Did you notice whose name I used today?"
+
+"Yes," she said. "You know Mr. Witla, Eugene, I thought you might call
+me up?"
+
+"Did you?" he asked, smiling.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You give me courage, Suzanne," he said, drawing close to her. "You're
+so confident, so apparently carefree. The world hasn't touched your
+spirit."
+
+"When I'm away from you, though, I'm not so courageous," she replied.
+"I've been thinking terrible things. I get frightened sometimes."
+
+"But you mustn't, sweet, I need you so. Oh, how I need you."
+
+She looked at him, and for the first time smoothed his hair with her
+hand.
+
+"You know, Eugene, you're just like a boy to me."
+
+"Do I seem so?" he asked, comforted greatly.
+
+"I couldn't love you as I do if you weren't."
+
+He drew her to him again and kissed her anew.
+
+"Can't we repeat these rides every few days?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, if I'm here, maybe."
+
+"It's all right to call you up if I use another name?"
+
+"Yes, I think so."
+
+"Let's choose new names for each, so that we'll know who's calling. You
+shall be Jenny Lind and I Allan Poe." Then they fell to ardent
+love-making until the time came when they had to return. For him, so far
+as work was concerned, the afternoon was gone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+There followed now a series of meetings contrived with difficulty,
+fraught with danger, destructive of his peace of mind, of his recently
+acquired sense of moral and commercial responsibility, of the sense of
+singleness of purpose and interest in his editorial and publishing
+world, which had helped him so much recently. The meetings nevertheless
+were full of such intense bliss for him that it seemed as though he were
+a thousand times repaid for all the subtlety and folly he was
+practicing. There were times when he came to the ice house in a hired
+car, others when she notified him by phone or note to his office of
+times when she was coming in to town to stay. He took her in his car one
+afternoon to Blue Sea when he was sure no one would encounter him. He
+persuaded Suzanne to carry a heavy veil, which could be adjusted at odd
+moments. Another time--several, in fact she came to the apartment in
+Riverside Drive, ostensibly to see how Mrs. Witla was getting along, but
+really, of course, to see Eugene. Suzanne did not really care so much
+for Angela, although she did not dislike her. She thought she was an
+interesting woman, though perhaps not a happy mate for Eugene. The
+latter had told her not so much that he was unhappy as that he was out
+of love. He loved her now, Suzanne, and only her.
+
+The problem as to where this relationship was to lead to was complicated
+by another problem, which Eugene knew nothing of, but which was
+exceedingly important. For Angela, following the career of Eugene with
+extreme pleasure and satisfaction on the commercial side, and fear and
+distrust on the social and emotional sides, had finally decided to risk
+the uncertain outcome of a child in connection with Eugene and herself,
+and to give him something which would steady his life and make him
+realize his responsibilities and offer him something gladdening besides
+social entertainment and the lure of beauty in youth. She had never
+forgotten the advice which Mrs. Sanifore and her physician had given her
+in Philadelphia, nor had she ever ceased her cogitations as to what the
+probable effect of a child would be. Eugene needed something of this
+sort to balance him. His position in the world was too tenuous, his
+temperament too variable. A child--a little girl, she hoped, for he
+always liked little girls and made much of them--would quiet him. If she
+could only have a little girl now!
+
+Some two months before her illness, while Eugene was becoming, all
+unsuspected by her, so frenzied about Suzanne, she had relaxed, or
+rather abandoned, her old-time precautions entirely, and had recently
+begun to suspect that her fears, or hopes, or both, were about to be
+realized. Owing to her subsequent illness and its effect on her heart,
+she was not very happy now. She was naturally very uncertain as to the
+outcome as well as to how Eugene would take it. He had never expressed a
+desire for a child, but she had no thought of telling him as yet, for
+she wanted to be absolutely sure. If she were not correct in her
+suspicions, and got well, he would attempt to dissuade her for the
+future. If she were, he could not help himself. Like all women in that
+condition, she was beginning to long for sympathy and consideration and
+to note more keenly the drift of Eugene's mind toward a world which did
+not very much concern her. His interest in Suzanne had puzzled her a
+little, though she was not greatly troubled about her because Mrs. Dale
+appeared to be so thoughtful about her daughter. Times were changing.
+Eugene had been going out much alone. A child would help. It was high
+time it came.
+
+When Suzanne had started coming with her mother, Angela thought nothing
+of it; but on the several occasions when Suzanne called during her
+illness, and Eugene had been present, she felt as though there might
+easily spring up something between them. Suzanne was so charming. Once
+as she lay thinking after Suzanne had left the room to go into the
+studio for a few moments, she heard Eugene jesting with her and laughing
+keenly. Suzanne's laugh, or gurgling giggle, was most infectious. It was
+so easy, too, for Eugene to make her laugh, for his type of jesting was
+to her the essence of fun. It seemed to her that there was something
+almost overgay in the way they carried on. On each occasion when she was
+present, Eugene proposed that he take Suzanne home in his car, and this
+set her thinking.
+
+There came a time when, Angela being well enough from her rheumatic
+attack, Eugene invited a famous singer, a tenor, who had a charming
+repertoire of songs, to come to his apartment and sing. He had met him
+at a social affair in Brooklyn with which Winfield had something to do.
+A number of people were invited--Mrs. Dale, Suzanne, and Kinroy, among
+others; but Mrs. Dale could not come, and as Suzanne had an appointment
+for the next morning, Sunday, in the city, she decided to stay at the
+Witlas. This pleased Eugene immensely. He had bought a sketching book
+which he had begun to fill with sketches of Suzanne from memory and
+these he wanted to show her. Besides, he wanted her to hear this
+singer's beautiful voice.
+
+The company was interesting. Kinroy brought Suzanne early and left.
+Eugene and Suzanne, after she had exchanged greetings with Angela, sat
+out on the little stone balcony overlooking the river and exchanged
+loving thoughts. He was constantly holding her hand when no one was
+looking and stealing kisses. After a time the company began to arrive,
+and finally the singer himself. The trained nurse, with Eugene's
+assistance, helped Angela forward, who listened enraptured to the songs.
+Suzanne and Eugene, swept by the charm of some of them, looked at each
+other with that burning gaze which love alone understands. To Eugene
+Suzanne's face was a perfect flower of hypnotic influence. He could
+scarcely keep his eyes off her for a moment at a time. The singer
+ceased, the company departed. Angela was left crying over the beauty of
+"The Erlking," the last song rendered. She went back to her room, and
+Suzanne ostensibly departed for hers. She came out to say a few final
+words to Mrs. Witla, then came through the studio to go to her own room
+again. Eugene was there waiting. He caught her in his arms, kissing her
+silently. They pretended to strike up a conventional conversation, and
+he invited her to sit out on the stone balcony for a few last moments.
+The moon was so beautiful over the river.
+
+"Don't!" she said, when he gathered her in his arms, in the shadow of
+the night outside. "She might come."
+
+"No," he said eagerly.
+
+They listened, but there was no sound. He began an easy pretence to
+talk, the while stroking her pretty arm, which was bare. Insanity over
+her beauty, the loveliness of the night, the charm of the music, had put
+him beside himself. He drew her into his arms in spite of her protest,
+only to have Angela suddenly appear at the other end of the room where
+the door was. There was no concealing anything she saw. She came rapidly
+forward, even as Suzanne jumped up, a sickening rage in her heart, a
+sense of her personal condition strong in her mind, a sense of something
+terrible and climacteric in the very air, but she was still too ill to
+risk a great demonstration or to declare herself fully. It seemed now
+once more the whole world had fallen about her ears, for because of her
+plans and in spite of all her suspicions, she had not been ready to
+believe that Eugene would really trespass again. She had come to
+surprise him, if possible, but she had not actually expected to, had
+hoped not to. Here was this beautiful girl, the victim of his wiles, and
+here was she involved by her own planning, while Eugene, shame-faced,
+she supposed, stood by ready to have this ridiculous liaison nipped in
+the bud. She did not propose to expose herself to Suzanne if she could
+help it, but sorrow for herself, shame for him, pity for Suzanne in a
+way, the desire to preserve the shell of appearances, which was now,
+after this, so utterly empty for her though so important for the child,
+caused her to swell with her old-time rage, and yet to hold it in check.
+Six years before she would have raged to his face, but time had softened
+her in this respect. She did not see the value of brutal words.
+
+"Suzanne," she said, standing erect in the filtered gloom of the room
+which was still irradiated by the light of the moon in the west, "how
+could you! I thought so much better of you."
+
+Her face, thinned by her long illness and her brooding over her present
+condition, was still beautiful in a spiritual way. She wore a pale
+yellow and white flowered dressing gown of filmy, lacy texture, and her
+long hair, done in braids by the nurse, was hanging down her back like
+the Gretchen she was to him years before. Her hands were thin and pale,
+but artistic, and her face drawn in all the wearisome agony of a mater
+dolorosa.
+
+"Why, why," exclaimed Suzanne, terribly shaken out of her natural fine
+poise for the moment but not forgetful of the dominating thought in her
+mind, "I love him; that's why, Mrs. Witla."
+
+"Oh, no, you don't! you only think you love him, as so many women have
+before you, Suzanne," said Angela frozenly, the thought of the coming
+child always with her. If she had only told him before! "Oh, shame, in
+my house, and you a young, supposedly innocent girl! What do you suppose
+your mother would think if I should call her up and tell her now? Or
+your brother? You knew he was a married man. I might excuse you if it
+weren't for that if you hadn't known me and hadn't accepted my
+hospitality. As for him, there is no need of my talking to him. This is
+an old story with him, Suzanne. He has done this with other women before
+you, and he will do it with other women after you. It is one of the
+things I have to bear for having married a man of so-called talent.
+Don't think, Suzanne, when you tell me you love him, that you tell me
+anything new. I have heard that story before from other women. You are
+not the first, and you will not be the last."
+
+Suzanne looked at Eugene inquiringly, vaguely, helplessly, wondering if
+all this were so.
+
+Eugene hardened under Angela's cutting accusation, but he was not at all
+sure at first what he ought to do. He wondered for the moment whether he
+ought not to abandon Suzanne and fall back into his old state, dreary as
+it might seem to him; but the sight of her pretty face, the sound of
+Angela's cutting voice, determined him quickly. "Angela," he began,
+recovering his composure the while Suzanne contemplated him, "why do you
+talk that way? You know that what you say isn't true. There was one
+other woman. I will tell Suzanne about her. There were several before I
+married you. I will tell her about them. But my life is a shell, and you
+know it. This apartment is a shell. Absolutely it means nothing at all
+to me. There has been no love between us, certainly not on my part, for
+years, and you know that. You have practically confessed to me from time
+to time that you do not care for me. I haven't deceived this girl. I am
+glad to tell her now how things stand."
+
+"How things stand! How things stand!" exclaimed Angela, blazing and
+forgetting herself for the moment. "Will you tell her what an excellent,
+faithful husband you have made me? Will you tell her how honestly you
+have kept your word pledged to me at the altar? Will you tell her how I
+have worked and sacrificed for you through all these years? How I have
+been repaid by just such things as this? I'm sorry for you, Suzanne,
+more than anything else," went on Angela, wondering whether she should
+tell Eugene here and now of her condition but fearing he would not
+believe it. It seemed so much like melodrama. "You are just a silly
+little girl duped by an expert man, who thinks he loves you for a little
+while, but who really doesn't. He will get over it. Tell me frankly what
+do you expect to get out of it all? You can't marry him. I won't give
+him a divorce. I can't, as he will know later, and he has no grounds for
+obtaining one. Do you expect to be his mistress? You have no hope of
+ever being anything else. Isn't that a nice ambition for a girl of your
+standing? And you are supposed to be virtuous! Oh, I am ashamed of you,
+if you are not! I am sorry for your mother. I am astonished to think
+that you would so belittle yourself."
+
+Suzanne had heard the "I can't," but she really did not know how to
+interpret it. It had never occurred to her that there could ever be a
+child here to complicate matters. Eugene told her that he was unhappy,
+that there was nothing between him and Angela and never could be.
+
+"But I love him, Mrs. Witla," said Suzanne simply and rather
+dramatically. She was tense, erect, pale and decidedly beautiful. It was
+a great problem to have so quickly laid upon her shoulders.
+
+"Don't talk nonsense, Suzanne!" said Angela angrily and desperately.
+"Don't deceive yourself and stick to a silly pose. You are acting now.
+You're talking as you think you ought to talk, as you have seen people
+talk in plays. This is my husband. You are in my home. Come, get your
+things. I will call up your mother and tell her how things stand, and
+she will send her auto for you."
+
+"Oh, no," said Suzanne, "you can't do that! I can't go back there, if
+you tell her. I must go out in the world and get something to do until I
+can straighten out my own affairs. I won't be able to go home any more.
+Oh, what shall I do?"
+
+"Be calm, Suzanne," said Eugene determinedly, taking her hand and
+looking at Angela defiantly. "She isn't going to call up your mother,
+and she isn't going to tell your mother. You are going to stay here, as
+you intended, and tomorrow you are going where you thought you were
+going."
+
+"Oh, no, she isn't!" said Angela angrily, starting for the phone. "She
+is going home. I'm going to call her mother."
+
+Suzanne stirred nervously. Eugene put his hand in hers to reassure her.
+
+"Oh, no, you aren't," he said determinedly. "She isn't going home, and
+you are not going to touch that phone. If you do, a number of things are
+going to happen, and they are going to happen quick."
+
+He moved between her and the telephone receiver, which hung in the hall
+outside the studio and toward which she was edging.
+
+Angela paused at the ominous note in his voice, the determined quality
+of his attitude. She was surprised and amazed at the almost rough manner
+in which he put her aside. He had taken Suzanne's hand, he, her husband,
+and was begging her to be calm.
+
+"Oh, Eugene," said Angela desperately, frightened and horrified, her
+anger half melted in her fears, "you don't know what you are doing!
+Suzanne doesn't. She won't want anything to do with you when she does.
+Young as she is, she will have too much womanhood."
+
+"What are you talking about?" asked Eugene desperately. He had no idea
+of what Angela was driving at, not the faintest suspicion. "What are you
+talking about?" he repeated grimly.
+
+"Let me say just one word to you alone, not here before Suzanne, just
+one, and then perhaps you will be willing to let her go home tonight."
+
+Angela was subtle in this, a little bit wicked. She was not using her
+advantage in exactly the right spirit.
+
+"What is it?" demanded Eugene sourly, expecting some trick. He had so
+long gnawed at the chains which bound him that the thought of any
+additional lengths which might be forged irritated him greatly. "Why
+can't you tell it here? What difference can it make?"
+
+"It ought to make all the difference in the world. Let me say it to you
+alone."
+
+Suzanne, who wondered what it could be, walked away. She was wondering
+what it was that Angela had to tell. The latter's manner was not exactly
+suggestive of the weighty secret she bore. When Suzanne was gone, Angela
+whispered to him.
+
+"It's a lie!" said Eugene vigorously, desperately, hopelessly. "It's
+something you've trumped up for the occasion. It's just like you to say
+that, to do it! Pah! I don't believe it. It's a lie! It's a lie! You
+know it's a lie!"
+
+"It's the truth!" said Angela angrily, pathetically, outraged in her
+every nerve and thought by the reception which this fact had received,
+and desperate to think that the announcement of a coming child by him
+should be received in this manner under such circumstances that it
+should be forced from her as a last resort, only to be received with
+derision and scorn. "It's the truth, and you ought to be ashamed to say
+that to me. What can I expect from a man, though, who would introduce
+another woman into his own home as you have tonight?" To think that she
+should be reduced to such a situation as this so suddenly! It was
+impossible to argue it with him here. She was ashamed now that she had
+introduced it at this time. He would not believe her, anyhow now, she
+saw that. It only enraged him and her. He was too wild. This seemed to
+infuriate him--to condemn her in his mind as a trickster and a sharper,
+someone who was using unfair means to hold him. He almost jumped away
+from her in disgust, and she realized that she had struck an awful blow
+which apparently, to him, had some elements of unfairness in it.
+
+"Won't you have the decency after this to send her away?" she pleaded
+aloud, angrily, eagerly, bitterly.
+
+Eugene was absolutely in a fury of feeling. If ever he thoroughly hated
+and despised Angela, he did so at that moment. To think that she should
+have done anything like this! To think that she should have complicated
+this problem of weariness of her with a thing like this! How cheap it
+was, how shabby! It showed the measure of the woman, to bring a child
+into the world, regardless of the interests of the child, in order to
+hold him against his will. Damn! Hell! God damn such a complicated,
+rotten world! No, she was lying. She could not hold him that way. It was
+a horrible, low, vile trick. He would have nothing to do with her. He
+would show her. He would leave her. He would show her that this sort of
+thing would not work with him. It was like every other petty thing she
+had ever done. Never, never, never, would he let this stand in the way.
+Oh, what a mean, cruel, wretched thing to do!
+
+Suzanne came back while they were arguing. She half suspected what it
+was all about, but she did not dare to act or think clearly. The events
+of this night were too numerous, too complicated. Eugene had said so
+forcibly it was a lie whatever it was, that she half believed him. That
+was a sign surely of the little affection that existed between him and
+Angela. Angela was not crying. Her face was hard, white, drawn.
+
+"I can't stay here," said Suzanne dramatically to Eugene. "I will go
+somewhere. I had better go to a hotel for the night. Will you call a
+car?"
+
+"Listen to me, Suzanne," said Eugene vigorously and determinedly. "You
+love me, don't you?"
+
+"You know I do," she replied.
+
+Angela stirred sneeringly.
+
+"Then you will stay here. I want you to pay no attention to anything she
+may say or declare. She has told me a lie tonight. I know why. Don't let
+her deceive you. Go to your room and your bed. I want to talk to you
+tomorrow. There is no need of your leaving tonight. There is plenty of
+room here. It's silly. You're here now--stay."
+
+"But I don't think I'd better stay," said Suzanne nervously.
+
+Eugene took her hand reassuringly.
+
+"Listen to me," he began.
+
+"But she won't stay," said Angela.
+
+"But she will," said Eugene; "and if she don't stay, she goes with me. I
+will take her home."
+
+"Oh, no, you won't!" replied Angela.
+
+"Listen," said Eugene angrily. "This isn't six years ago, but now. I'm
+master of this situation, and she stays here. She stays here, or she
+goes with me and you look to the future as best you may. I love her. I'm
+not going to give her up, and if you want to make trouble, begin now.
+The house comes down on your head, not mine."
+
+"Oh!" said Angela, half terrified, "what do I hear?"
+
+"Just that. Now you go to your room. Suzanne will go to hers. I will go
+to mine. We will not have any more fighting here tonight. The jig is up.
+The die is cast. I'm through. Suzanne comes to me, if she will."
+
+Angela walked to her room through the studio, stricken by the turn
+things had taken, horrified by the thoughts in her mind, unable to
+convince Eugene, unable to depose Suzanne, her throat dry and hot, her
+hands shaking, her heart beating fitfully; she felt as if her brain
+would burst, her heart break actually, not emotionally. She thought
+Eugene had gone crazy, and yet now, for the first time in her married
+life, she realized what a terrible mistake she had made in always trying
+to drive him. It hadn't worked tonight, her rage, her domineering,
+critical attitude. It had failed her completely, and also this scheme,
+this beautiful plan, this trump card on which she had placed so much
+reliance for a happy life, this child which she had hoped to play so
+effectively. He didn't believe her. He wouldn't even admit its
+possibility. He didn't admire her for it. He despised her! He looked on
+it as a trick. Oh, what an unfortunate thing it had been to mention it!
+And yet Suzanne must understand, she must know, she would never
+countenance anything like this. But what would he do? He was positively
+livid with rage. What fine auspices these were under which to usher a
+child into the world! She stared feverishly before her, and finally
+began to cry hopelessly.
+
+Eugene stood in the hall beside Suzanne after she had gone. His face was
+drawn, his eyes hunted, his hair tousled. He looked grim and determined
+in his way, stronger than he had ever looked before.
+
+"Suzanne," he said, taking the latter by her two arms and staring into
+her eyes, "she has told me a lie, a lie, a cold, mean, cruel lie. She'll
+tell it you shortly. She says she is with child by me. It isn't so. She
+couldn't have one. If she did, it would kill her. She would have had one
+long ago if she could have. I know her. She thinks this will frighten
+me. She thinks it will drive you away. Will it? It's a lie, do you hear
+me, whatever she says. It's a lie, and she knows it. Ough!" He dropped
+her left arm and pulled at his neck. "I can't stand this. You won't
+leave me. You won't believe her, will you?"
+
+Suzanne stared into his distraught face, his handsome, desperate,
+significant eyes. She saw the woe there, the agony, and was sympathetic.
+He seemed wonderfully worthy of love, unhappy, unfortunately pursued;
+and yet she was frightened. Still she had promised to love him.
+
+"No," she said fixedly, her eyes speaking a dramatic confidence.
+
+"You won't leave here tonight?"
+
+"No."
+
+She smoothed his cheek with her hand.
+
+"You will come and walk with me in the morning? I have to talk with
+you."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Don't be afraid. Just lock your door if you are. She won't bother you.
+She won't do anything. She is afraid of me. She may want to talk with
+you, but I am close by. Do you still love me?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Will you come to me if I can arrange it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Even in the face of what she says?"
+
+"Yes; I don't believe her. I believe you. What difference could it make,
+anyhow? You don't love her."
+
+"No," he said; "no, no, no! I never have." He drew her into his arms
+wearily, relievedly. "Oh, Flower Face," he said, "don't give me up!
+Don't grieve. Try not to, anyhow. I have been bad, as she says, but I
+love you. I love you, and I will stake all on that. If all this must
+fall about our heads, then let it fall. I love you."
+
+Suzanne stroked his cheek with her hands nervously. She was deathly
+pale, frightened, but somehow courageous through it all. She caught
+strength from his love.
+
+"I love you," she said.
+
+"Yes," he replied. "You won't give me up?"
+
+"No, I won't," she said, not really understanding the depth of her own
+mood. "I will be true."
+
+"Things will be better tomorrow," he said, somewhat more quietly. "We
+will be calmer. We will walk and talk. You won't leave without me?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Please don't; for I love you, and we must talk and plan."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+The introduction of this astonishing fact in connection with Angela was
+so unexpected, so morally diverting and peculiar that though Eugene
+denied it, half believed she was lying, he was harassed by the thought
+that she might be telling the truth. It was so unfair, though, was all
+he could think, so unkind! It never occurred to him that it was
+accidental, as indeed it was not, but only that it was a trick, sharp,
+cunning, ill-timed for him, just the thing calculated to blast his
+career and tie him down to the old regime when he wanted most to be
+free. A new life was dawning for him now. For the first time in his life
+he was to have a woman after his own heart, so young, so beautiful, so
+intellectual, so artistic! With Suzanne by his side, he was about to
+plumb the depths of all the joys of living. Without her, life was to be
+dark and dreary, and here was Angela coming forward at the critical
+moment disrupting this dream as best she could by the introduction of a
+child that she did not want, and all to hold him against his will. If
+ever he hated her for trickery and sharp dealing, he did so now. What
+would the effect on Suzanne be? How would he convince her that it was a
+trick? She must understand; she would. She would not let this miserable
+piece of chicanery stand between him and her. He turned in his bed
+wearily after he had gone to it, but he could not sleep. He had to say
+something, do something. So he arose, slipped on a dressing gown, and
+went to Angela's room.
+
+That distraught soul, for all her determination and fighting capacity,
+was enduring for the second time in her life the fires of hell. To think
+that in spite of all her work, her dreams, this recent effort to bring
+about peace and happiness, perhaps at the expense of her own life, she
+was compelled to witness a scene like this. Eugene was trying to get
+free. He was obviously determined to do so. This scandalous
+relationship, when had it begun? Would her effort to hold him fail? It
+looked that way, and yet surely Suzanne, when she knew, when she
+understood, would leave him. Any woman would.
+
+Her head ached, her hands were hot, she fancied she might be suffering a
+terrible nightmare, she was so sick and weak; but, no, this was her
+room. A little while ago she was sitting in her husband's studio,
+surrounded by friends, the object of much solicitude, Eugene apparently
+considerate and thoughtful of her, a beautiful programme being rendered
+for their special benefit. Now she was lying here in her room, a
+despised wife, an outcast from affection and happiness, the victim of
+some horrible sorcery of fate whereby another woman stood in her place
+in Eugene's affection. To see Suzanne, proud in her young beauty,
+confronting her with bold eyes, holding her husband's hand, saying in
+what seemed to her to be brutal, or insane, or silly melodramatic
+make-believe, "But I love him, Mrs. Witla," was maddening. Oh, God! Oh,
+God! Would her tortures never cease? Must all her beautiful dreams come
+to nothing? Would Eugene leave her, as he so violently said a little
+while ago? She had never seen him like this. It was terrible to see him
+so determined, so cold and brutal. His voice had actually been harsh and
+guttural, something she had never known before in him.
+
+She trembled as she thought, and then great flashes of rage swept her
+only to be replaced by rushes of fear. She was in such a terrific
+position. The woman was with him, young, defiant, beautiful. She had
+heard him call to her, had heard them talking. Once she thought that now
+would be the time to murder him, Suzanne, herself, the coming life and
+end it all; but at this critical moment, having been sick and having
+grown so much older, with this problem of the coming life before her,
+she had no chart to go by. She tried to console herself with the thought
+that he must abandon his course, that he would when the true force of
+what she had revealed had had time to sink home; but it had not had time
+yet. Would it before he did anything rash? Would it before he had
+completely compromised himself and Suzanne? Judging from her talk and
+his, he had not as yet, or she thought not. What was he going to do?
+What was he going to do?
+
+Angela feared as she lay there that in spite of her revelation he might
+really leave her immediately. There might readily spring a terrible
+public scandal out of all this. The mockery of their lives laid bare;
+the fate of the child jeopardized; Eugene, Suzanne, and herself
+disgraced, though she had little thought for Suzanne. Suzanne might get
+him, after all. She might accidentally be just hard and cold enough. The
+world might possibly forgive him. She herself might die! What an end,
+after all her dreams of something bigger, better, surer! Oh, the pity,
+the agony of this! The terror and horror of a wrecked life!
+
+And then Eugene came into the room.
+
+He was haggard, stormy-eyed, thoughtful, melancholy, as he entered. He
+stood in the doorway first, intent, then clicked a little night-lamp
+button which threw on a very small incandescent light near the head of
+Angela's bed, and then sat down in a rocking-chair which the nurse had
+placed near the medicine table. Angela had so much improved that no
+night nurse was needed--only a twelve-hour one.
+
+"Well," he said solemnly but coldly, when he saw her pale, distraught,
+much of her old, youthful beauty still with her, "you think you have
+scored a splendid trick, don't you? You think you have sprung a trap? I
+simply came in here to tell you that you haven't--that you have only
+seen the beginning of the end. You say you are going to have a child. I
+don't believe it. It's a lie, and you know it's a lie. You saw that
+there was an end coming to all this state of weariness some time, and
+this is your answer. Well, you've played one trick too many, and you've
+played it in vain. You lose. I win this time. I'm going to be free now,
+I want to say to you, and I am going to be free if I have to turn
+everything upside down. I don't care if there were seventeen prospective
+children instead of one. It's a lie, in the first place; but if it
+isn't, it's a trick, and I'm not going to be tricked any longer. I've
+had all I want of domination and trickery and cheap ideas. I'm through
+now, do you hear me? I'm through."
+
+He felt his forehead with a nervous hand. His head ached, he was half
+sick. This was such a dreary pit to find himself in, this pit of
+matrimony, chained by a domineering wife and a trickily manoeuvred
+child. His child! What a mockery at this stage of his life! How he hated
+the thought of that sort of thing, how cheap it all seemed!
+
+Angela, who was wide-eyed, flushed, exhausted, lying staring on her
+pillow, asked in a weary, indifferent voice: "What do you want me to do,
+Eugene, leave you?"
+
+"I'll tell you, Angela," he said sepulchrally, "I don't know what I want
+you to do just at this moment. The old life is all over. It's as dead as
+dead can be. For eleven or twelve years now I have lived with you,
+knowing all the while that I was living a lie. I have never really loved
+you since we were married. You know that. I may have loved you in the
+beginning, yes, I did, and at Blackwood, but that was a long, long while
+ago. I never should have married you. It was a mistake, but I did, and
+I've paid for it, inch by inch. You have, too. You have insisted all
+along that I ought to love you. You have browbeaten and abused me for
+something I could no more do than I could fly. Now, at this last minute,
+you introduce a child to hold me. I know why you have done it. You
+imagine that in some way you have been appointed by God to be my mentor
+and guardian. Well, I tell you now that you haven't. It's all over. If
+there were fifty children, it's all over. Suzanne isn't going to believe
+any such cheap story as that, and if she did she wouldn't leave me. She
+knows why you do it. All the days of weariness are over for me, all the
+days of being afraid. I'm not an ordinary man, and I'm not going to live
+an ordinary life. You have always insisted on holding me down to the
+little, cheap conventions as you have understood them. Out in Wisconsin,
+out in Blackwood. Nothing doing. It's all over from now on. Everything's
+over. This house, my job, my real estate deal--everything. I don't care
+what your condition is. I love this girl in there, and I'm going to have
+her. Do you hear me? I love her, and I'm going to have her. She's mine.
+She suits me. I love her, and no power under God is going to stay me.
+Now you think this child proposition you have fixed up is going to stay
+me, but you are going to find out that it can't, that it won't. It's a
+trick, and I know it, and you know it. It's too late. It might have last
+year, or two years ago, or three, but it won't work now. You have played
+your last card. That girl in there belongs to me, and I'm going to have
+her."
+
+Again he smoothed his face in a weary way, pausing to sway the least bit
+in his chair. His teeth were set, his eyes hard. Consciously he realized
+that it was a terrible situation that confronted him, hard to wrestle
+with.
+
+Angela gazed at him with the eyes of one who is not quite sure that she
+even sees aright. She knew that Eugene had developed. He had become
+stronger, more urgent, more defiant, during all these years in which he
+had been going upward. He was no more like the Eugene who had clung to
+her for companionship in the dark days at Biloxi and elsewhere than a
+child is like a grown man. He was harder, easier in his manner, more
+indifferent, and yet, until now, there had never been a want of traces
+of the old Eugene. What had become of them so suddenly? Why was he so
+raging, so bitter? This girl, this foolish, silly, selfish girl, with
+her Circe gift of beauty, by tolerance of his suit, by yielding, perhaps
+by throwing herself at Eugene's head, had done this thing. She had drawn
+him away from her in spite of the fact that they had appeared to be
+happily mated. Suzanne did not know that they were not. In this mood he
+might actually leave her, even as she was, with child. It depended on
+the girl. Unless she could influence her, unless she could bring
+pressure to bear in some way, Eugene might readily be lost to her, and
+then what a tragedy! She could not afford to have him go now. Why, in
+six months----! She shivered at the thought of all the misery a
+separation would entail. His position, their child, society, this
+apartment. Dear God, it would drive her crazy if he were to desert her
+now!
+
+"Oh, Eugene," she said quite sadly and without any wrath in her voice at
+this moment, for she was too torn, terrified and disheveled in spirit to
+feel anything save a haunting sense of fear, "you don't know what a
+terrible mistake you are making. I did do this thing on purpose, Eugene.
+It is true. Long ago in Philadelphia with Mrs. Sanifore I went to a
+physician to see if it were possible that I might have a child. You know
+that I always thought that I couldn't. Well, he told me that I could. I
+went because I thought that you needed something like that, Eugene, to
+balance you. I knew you didn't want one. I thought you would be angry
+when I told you. I didn't act on it for a long while. I didn't want one
+myself. I hoped that it might be a little girl if ever there was one,
+because I know that you like little girls. It seems silly now in the
+face of what has happened tonight. I see what a mistake I have made. I
+see what the mistake is, but I didn't mean it evilly, Eugene. I didn't.
+I wanted to hold you, to bind you to me in some way, to help you. Do you
+utterly blame me, Eugene? I'm your wife, you know."
+
+He stirred irritably, and she paused, scarcely knowing how to go on. She
+could see how terribly irritated he was, how sick at heart, and yet she
+resented this attitude on his part. It was so hard to endure when all
+along she had fancied that she had so many just claims on him, moral,
+social, other claims, which he dare not ignore. Here she was now, sick,
+weary, pleading with him for something that ought justly be hers--and
+this coming child's!
+
+"Oh, Eugene," she said quite sadly, and still without any wrath in her
+voice, "please think before you make a mistake. You don't really love
+this girl, you only think you do. You think she is beautiful and good
+and sweet and you are going to tear everything up and leave me, but you
+don't love her, and you are going to find it out. You don't love anyone,
+Eugene. You can't. You are too selfish. If you had any real love in you,
+some of it would have come out to me, for I have tried to be all that a
+good wife should be, but it has been all in vain. I've known you haven't
+liked me all these years. I've seen it in your eyes, Eugene. You have
+never come very close to me as a lover should unless you had to or you
+couldn't avoid me. You have been cold and indifferent, and now that I
+look back I see that it has made me so. I have been cold and hard. I've
+tried to steel myself to match what I thought was your steeliness, and
+now I see what it has done for me. I'm sorry. But as for her, you don't
+love her and you won't. She's too young. She hasn't any ideas that agree
+with yours. You think she's soft and gentle, and yet big and wise, but
+do you think if she had been that she could have stood up there as she
+did tonight and looked me in the eyes--me, your wife--and told me that
+she loved you--you, my husband? Do you think if she had any shame she
+would be in there now knowing what she does, for I suppose you have told
+her? What kind of a girl is that, anyway? You call her good? Good! Would
+a good girl do anything like that?"
+
+"What is the use of arguing by appearances?" asked Eugene, who had
+interrupted her with exclamations of opposition and bitter comments all
+through the previous address. "The situation is one which makes anything
+look bad. She didn't intend to be put in a position where she would have
+to tell you that she loved me. She didn't come here to let me make love
+to her in this apartment. I made love to her. She's in love with me, and
+I made her love me. I didn't know of this other thing. If I had, it
+wouldn't have made any difference. However, let that be as it will. So
+it is. I'm in love with her, and that's all there is to it."
+
+Angela stared at the wall. She was half propped up on a pillow, and had
+no courage now to speak of and no fighting strength.
+
+"I know what it is with you, Eugene," she said, after a time; "it's the
+yoke that galls. It isn't me only; it's anyone. It's marriage. You don't
+want to be married. It would be the same with any woman who might ever
+have loved and married you, or with any number of children. You would
+want to get rid of her and them. It's the yoke that galls you, Eugene.
+You want your freedom, and you won't be satisfied until you have it. A
+child wouldn't make any difference. I can see that now."
+
+"I want my freedom," he exclaimed bitterly and inconsiderately, "and,
+what's more, I'm going to have it! I don't care. I'm sick of lying and
+pretending, sick of common little piffling notions of what you consider
+right and wrong. For eleven or twelve years now I have stood it. I have
+sat with you every morning at breakfast and every evening at dinner,
+most of the time when I didn't want to. I have listened to your theories
+of life when I didn't believe a word of what you said, and didn't care
+anything about what you thought. I've done it because I thought I ought
+to do it so as not to hurt your feelings, but I'm through with all that.
+What have I had? Spying on me, opposition, searching my pockets for
+letters, complaining if I dared to stay out a single evening and did not
+give an account of myself.
+
+"Why didn't you leave me after that affair at Riverdale? Why do you hang
+on to me when I don't love you? One'd think I was prisoner and you my
+keeper. Good Christ! When I think of it, it makes me sick! Well, there's
+no use worrying over that any more. It's all over. It's all beautifully
+over, and I'm done with it. I'm going to live a life of my own
+hereafter. I'm going to carve out some sort of a career that suits me.
+I'm going to live with someone that I can really love, and that's the
+end of it. Now you run and do anything you want to."
+
+He was like a young horse that had broken rein and that thinks that by
+rearing and plunging he shall become forever free. He was thinking of
+green fields and delightful pastures. He was free now, in spite of what
+she had told him. This night had made him so, and he was going to remain
+free. Suzanne would stand by him, he felt it. He was going to make it
+perfectly plain to Angela that never again, come what may, would things
+be as they were.
+
+"Yes, Eugene," she replied sadly, after listening to his protestations
+on this score, "I think that you do want your freedom, now that I see
+you. I'm beginning to see what it means to you. But I have made such a
+terrible mistake. Are you thinking about me at all? What shall I do? It
+is true that there will be a child unless I die. I may die. I'm afraid
+of that, or I was. I am not now. The only reason I would care to live
+would be to take care of it. I didn't think I was going to be ill with
+rheumatism. I didn't think my heart was going to be affected in this
+way. I didn't think that you were going to do as you have done, but now
+that you have, nothing matters. Oh," she said sadly, hot tears welling
+to her eyes, "it is all such a mistake! If I only hadn't done this!"
+
+Eugene stared at the floor. He wasn't softened one bit. He did not think
+she was going to die--no such luck! He was thinking that this merely
+complicated things, or that she might be acting, but that it could not
+stand in his way. Why had she tried to trick him in this way? It was her
+fault. Now she was crying, but that was the old hypocrisy of emotion
+that she had used so often. He did not intend to desert her absolutely.
+She would have plenty to live on. Merely he did not propose to live with
+her, if he could help it, or only nominally, anyhow. The major portion
+of his time should be given to Suzanne.
+
+"I don't care what it costs," he said finally. "I don't propose to live
+with you. I didn't ask you to have a child. It was none of my doing.
+You're not going to be deserted financially, but I'm not going to live
+with you."
+
+He stirred again, and Angela stared hot-cheeked. The hardness of the man
+enraged her for the moment. She did not believe that she would starve,
+but their improving surroundings, their home, their social position,
+would be broken up completely.
+
+"Yes, yes. I understand," she pleaded, with an effort at controlling
+herself, "but I am not the only one to be considered. Are you thinking
+of Mrs. Dale, and what she may do and say? She isn't going to let you
+take Suzanne if she knows it, without doing something about it. She is
+an able woman. She loves Suzanne, however self-willed she may be. She
+likes you now, but how long do you think she is going to like you when
+she learns what you want to do with her daughter? What are you going to
+do with her? You can't marry her under a year even if I were willing to
+give you a divorce. You could scarcely get a divorce in that time."
+
+"I'm going to live with her, that's what I'm going to do," declared
+Eugene. "She loves me, she's willing to take me just as I am. She
+doesn't need marriage ceremonies and rings and vows and chains. She
+doesn't believe in them. As long as I love her, all right. When I cease
+to love her, she doesn't want me any more. Some difference in that,
+isn't there?" he added bitterly. "It doesn't sound exactly like
+Blackwood, does it?"
+
+Angela bridled. His taunts were cruel.
+
+"She says that, Eugene," she replied quietly, "but she hasn't had time
+to think. You've hypnotized her for the moment. She's fascinated. When
+she stops to think later, if she has any sense, any pride---- But, oh,
+why should I talk, you won't listen. You won't think." Then she added:
+"But what do you propose to do about Mrs. Dale? Don't you suppose she
+will fight you, even if I do not? I wish you would stop and think,
+Eugene. This is a terrible thing you are doing."
+
+"Think! Think!" he exclaimed savagely and bitterly. "As though I had not
+been thinking all these years. Think! Hell! I haven't done anything but
+think. I've thought until the soul within me is sick. I've thought until
+I wish to God I could stop. I've thought about Mrs. Dale. Don't you
+worry about her. I'll settle this matter with her later. Just now I want
+to convince you of what I am going to do. I'm going to have Suzanne, and
+you're not going to stop me."
+
+"Oh, Eugene," sighed Angela, "if something would only make you see! It
+is partially my fault. I have been hard and suspicious and jealous, but
+you have given me some cause to be, don't you think? I see now that I
+have made a mistake. I have been too hard and too jealous, but I could
+reform if you would let me try." (She was thinking now of living, not
+dying.) "I know I could. You have so much to lose. Is this change worth
+it? You know so well how the world looks at these things. Why, even if
+you should obtain your freedom from me under the circumstances, what do
+you suppose the world would think? You couldn't desert your child. Why
+not wait and see what happens? I might die. There have been such cases.
+Then you would be free to do as you pleased. That is only a little way
+off."
+
+It was a specious plea, calculated to hold him; but he saw through it.
+
+"Nothing doing!" he exclaimed, in the slang of the day. "I know all
+about that. I know what you're thinking. In the first place, I don't
+believe you are in the condition you say you are. In the next place,
+you're not going to die. I don't propose to wait to be free. I know you,
+and I've no faith in you. What I do needn't affect your condition.
+You're not going to starve. No one need know, unless you start a row
+about it. Suzanne and I can arrange this between ourselves. I know what
+you're thinking, but you're not going to interfere. If you do, I'll
+smash everything in sight--you, this apartment, my job----" He clenched
+his hands desperately, determinedly.
+
+Angela's hands were tingling with nervous pains while Eugene talked. Her
+eyes ached and her heart fluttered. She could not understand this dark,
+determined man, so savage and so resolute in his manner. Was this Eugene
+who was always moving about quietly when he was near her, getting angry
+at times, but always feeling sorry and apologizing? She had boasted to
+some of her friends, and particularly to Marietta, in a friendly,
+jesting way that she could wind Eugene around her little finger. He was
+so easy-going in the main, so quiet. Here he was a raging demon almost,
+possessed of an evil spirit of desire and tearing up his and hers and
+Suzanne's life for that matter, by the roots. She did not care for
+Suzanne, though, now, or Mrs. Dale. Her own blighted life, and Eugene's,
+looming so straight ahead of her terrified her.
+
+"What do you suppose Mr. Colfax will do when he hears of this?" she
+asked desperately, hoping to frighten him.
+
+"I don't care a damn what Mr. Colfax will or can do!" he replied
+sententiously. "I don't care a damn what anybody does or says or thinks.
+I love Suzanne Dale. She loves me. She wants me. There's an end of that.
+I'm going to her now. You stay me if you can."
+
+Suzanne Dale! Suzanne Dale! How that name enraged and frightened Angela!
+Never before had she witnessed quite so clearly the power of beauty.
+Suzanne Dale was young and beautiful. She was looking at her only
+tonight thinking how fascinating she was--how fair her face--and here
+was Eugene bewitched by it, completely undone. Oh, the terror of beauty!
+The terror of social life generally! Why had she entertained? Why become
+friendly with the Dales? But then there were other personalities, almost
+as lovely and quite as young--Marjorie McLennan, Florence Reel,
+Henrietta Tenman, Annette Kean. It might have been any one of these. She
+couldn't have been expected to shut out all young women from Eugene's
+life. No; it was Eugene. It was his attitude toward life. His craze
+about the beautiful, particularly in women. She could see it now. He
+really was not strong enough. Beauty would always upset him at critical
+moments. She had seen it in relation to herself--the beauty of her form,
+which he admired so, or had admired. "God," she prayed silently, "give
+me wisdom now. Give me strength. I don't deserve it, but help me. Help
+me to save him. Help me to save myself."
+
+"Oh, Eugene," she said aloud, hopelessly, "I wish you would stop and
+think. I wish you would let Suzanne go her way in the morning, and you
+stay sane and calm. I won't care about myself. I can forgive and forget.
+I'll promise you I'll never mention it. If a child comes, I'll do my
+best not to let it annoy you. I'll try yet not to have one. It may not
+be too late. I'll change from this day forth. Oh!" She began to cry.
+
+"No! By God!" he said, getting up. "No! No! No! I'm through now. I'm
+through! I've had enough of fake hysterics and tears. Tears one minute,
+and wrath and hate the next. Subtlety! Subtlety! Subtlety! Nothing
+doing. You've been master and jailer long enough. It's my turn now. I'll
+do a little jailing and task-setting for a change. I'm in the saddle,
+and I'm going to stay there. You can cry if you want to, you can do what
+you please about the child. I'm through. I'm tired, and I'm going to
+bed, but this thing is going to stand just as it does. I'm through, and
+that's all there is to it."
+
+He strode out of the room angrily and fiercely, but nevertheless, when
+he reached it, he sat in his own room, which was on the other side of
+the studio from Angelas, and did not sleep. His mind was on fire with
+the thought of Suzanne; he thought of the old order which had been so
+quickly and so terribly broken. Now, if he could remain master, and he
+could, he proposed to take Suzanne. She would come to him, secretly no
+doubt, if necessary. They would open a studio, a second establishment.
+Angela might not give him a divorce. If what she said was true, she
+couldn't. He wouldn't want her to, but he fancied from this conversation
+that she was so afraid of him that she would not stir up any trouble.
+There was nothing she could really do. He was in the saddle truly, and
+would stay there. He would take Suzanne, would provide amply for Angela,
+would visit all those lovely public resorts he had so frequently seen,
+and he and Suzanne would be happy together.
+
+Suzanne! Suzanne! Oh, how beautiful she was! And to think how nobly and
+courageously she had stood by him tonight. How she had slipped her hand
+into his so sweetly and had said, "But I love him, Mrs. Witla." Yes, she
+loved him. No doubt of that. She was young, exquisite, beautifully
+rounded in her budding emotion and feeling. She was going to develop
+into a wonderful woman, a real one. And she was so young. What a pity it
+was he was not free now! Well, wait, this would right all things, and,
+meanwhile, he would have her. He must talk to Suzanne. He must tell her
+how things stood. Poor little Suzanne! There she was in her room
+wondering what was to become of her, and here was he. Well, he couldn't
+go to her tonight. It did not look right, and, besides, Angela might
+fight still. But tomorrow! Tomorrow! Oh, tomorrow he would walk and talk
+with her, and they would plan. Tomorrow he would show her just what he
+wanted to do and find out what she could do.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+This night passed without additional scenes, though as it stood it was
+the most astonishing and tremendous in all Eugene's experience. He had,
+not up to the time Angela walked into the room, really expected anything
+so dramatic and climacteric to happen, though what he did expect was
+never really very clear to him. At times as he lay and thought now he
+fancied that he might eventually have to give Suzanne up, though how, or
+when, or why, he could not say. He was literally crazed by her, and
+could not think that such a thing could really be. At other moments he
+fancied that powers outside of this visible life, the life attested by
+the five senses, had arranged this beautiful finish to his career for
+him so that he might be perfectly happy. All his life he had fancied
+that he was leading a more or less fated life, principally more. He
+thought that his art was a gift, that he had in a way been sent to
+revolutionize art in America, or carry it one step farther forward and
+that nature was thus constantly sending its apostles or special
+representatives over whom it kept watch and in whom it was well pleased.
+At other times he fancied he might be the sport or toy of untoward and
+malicious powers, such as those which surrounded and accomplished
+Macbeth's tragic end, and which might be intending to make an
+illustration of him. As he looked at life at times, it seemed to do this
+with certain people. The fates lied. Lovely, blandishing lures were held
+out only to lead men to destruction. He had seen other men who seemed to
+have been undone in this way. Was he to be so treated?
+
+Angela's unexpected and peculiar announcement made it look that way.
+Still he did not believe it. Life had sent Suzanne across his path for a
+purpose. The fates or powers had seen he was miserable and unhappy.
+Being a favorite child of Heaven, he was to be rewarded for his
+sufferings by having her. She was here now--quickly, forcefully thrust
+into his arms, so to speak, so that perhaps he might have her all the
+more quickly. How silly it seemed to him now to have brought her into
+his own apartment to make love to her and get caught, and yet how
+fortunate, too, the hand of fate! No doubt it was intended. Anyhow, the
+shame to him, the shame to Angela and Suzanne, the terrific moments and
+hours that each was enduring now--these were things which were
+unfortunately involved in any necessarily great readjustment. It was
+probable that it had to come about this way. It was better so than to go
+on living an unhappy life. He was really fitted for something better, he
+thought--a great career. He would have to adjust this thing with Angela
+in some way now, either leave her, or make some arrangement whereby he
+could enjoy the company of Suzanne uninterrupted. There must be no
+interference. He did not propose to give her up. The child might come.
+Well and good. He would provide for it, that would be all. He recalled
+now the conversation he had had with Suzanne in which she had said that
+she would live with him if she could. The time had come. Their plan for
+a studio should now be put into effect. It must be secret. Angela would
+not care. She could not help herself. If only the events of this night
+did not terrorize Suzanne into retracing her steps! He had not explained
+to her how he was to get rid of Angela apart from what she had heard
+this night. She was thinking, he knew, that they could go on loving each
+other in this tentative fashion, occupying a studio together, perhaps,
+not caring what the world thought, not caring what her mother thought,
+ignoring her brother and sister and Angela, and being happy with Eugene
+only. He had never tried to disillusion her. He was not thinking clearly
+himself. He was rushing forward in an aimless way, desiring the
+companionship of her beautiful mind and body. Now he saw he must act or
+lose her. He must convince her in the face of what Angela had said, or
+let her go. She would probably be willing to come to him rather than
+leave him entirely. He must talk, explain, make her understand just what
+a trick this all was.
+
+Angela had not slept, but lay staring at the ceiling in the dark, her
+eyes a study in despair. When morning came they were none of them
+further along in their conclusions than they were the night before, save
+to know, each separately and distinctly, that a great tragedy or change
+was at hand. Suzanne had thought and thought, or tried to, but the
+impulse of blood and passion in her were Eugeneward and she could only
+see the situation from their own point of view. She loved him, she
+thought--must love him, since he was so ready to sacrifice so much for
+her; yet at the same time there was a strange, disconcerting nebulosity
+about her which, had Eugene fully realized it at this moment, would have
+terrified him. In her state, which was one of wondering delight at the
+beauty of life and love--a fatalistic security in the thought that joy
+was to come to her throughout life--much joy. She could not see the
+grimness of Eugene's position. She could not understand the agony of a
+soul that had never really tasted supreme bliss in love, and had wanted,
+however foolishly, the accessories of wealth, and had never had them.
+Terrorized lest after the first sip of so wonderful a joy it should be
+removed forever, Eugene was tingling in the dark of his own
+room--tingling and yet reaching, almost with outstretched hands, to the
+splendor of the life that was seemingly before him. Suzanne, however, to
+whom life had given so much, was resting in a kind of still ease, like
+that which might fill a drowsy poppyland of joy where all the pleasures
+had been attained and were being tasted at leisure. Life at its worst to
+her was not so bad. Witness this storm which had been quelled in part by
+Eugene and was like to blow over as nothing at all. Things came round of
+their own accord in time, if one let them. She had always felt so sure
+that whatever happened no ill would befall her, and here she was courted
+and protected by Eugene even in his own home!
+
+In this situation, therefore, she was not grieving either for Eugene,
+for Angela, or for herself. She could not. Some dispositions are so.
+Eugene was able to take care of himself and her and Angela financially,
+she thought. She was really looking forward to that better day when this
+misalliance should be broken up, and Eugene and presumably Angela would
+be really happier. She wanted Eugene to be much happier, and Angela, for
+that matter--and through her, if possible, since Eugene's happiness
+seemed to depend on her. But unlike Eugene, she was already thinking
+that she could live well enough without him, if it must be. She did not
+want to. She felt that her greatest happiness would be in repaying him
+for past ills and pains; but if they must part for a time, for instance,
+it would not make so much difference. Time would bring them together.
+But if it didn't---- But it would. Why think otherwise? But how
+wonderful it was that her beauty, her mere physical beauty, which seemed
+unimportant to her, made him so wild. She could not know of the actual
+physical pain gnawing at his vitals, but it was so plain that he was
+madly stricken with her. His whole face and his burning black eyes
+riveted on her in intense delight and almost agony proved it. Was she so
+beautiful? Surely not! Yet he yearned over her so. And it was so
+delightful.
+
+She arose at dawn and began silently to dress, thinking that she might
+take a walk, leaving a note for Eugene as to where to come and find her
+if he could. She had one appointment for the day. Later she would have
+to go home, but things would come out all right. Since Eugene had
+compelled Angela to relinquish her determination to inform her mother,
+all must be well. They would meet, she and Eugene. She would leave her
+home and be his and they would go anywhere, anywhere Eugene desired,
+only she would prefer to persuade her mother to see things from her
+point of view and later countenance some understanding between them
+here. Because of Angela's and Eugene's position here, she preferred
+this. Because of her youth and her poetic, erratic conception of life,
+she assumed that she could overcome her mother and that she and Eugene
+could live together somewhere in peace. Her friends might either be
+unaware of the situation, or they could be told, some of them, and they
+might countenance it because it was so beautiful and natural!
+
+Eugene heard her stirring after a time, and rose and went to her room
+and knocked. When she opened the door almost fully dressed a thrill of
+pain passed over his heart, for he thought that she had been intending
+to slip away without seeing him any more--so little they really knew
+each other. But as she stood there, a little cool or still or sober from
+much thought and the peculiar nature of her position, she seemed more
+beautiful than ever.
+
+"You're not going, are you?" he asked, as she looked up at him with
+inquiring eyes.
+
+"I thought I'd go for a walk."
+
+"Without me?"
+
+"I intended to see you, if I could, or leave a note for you to come to
+me. I thought you would."
+
+"Will you wait for me?" he asked, feeling as though he must hold her
+close forever in order to live. "Just a little bit. I want to change my
+clothes." He took her in his arms.
+
+"Yes," she said softly.
+
+"You won't go without me?"
+
+"No. Why do you ask?"
+
+"Oh, I love you so!" he replied, and pushed her head back and looked
+yearningly into her eyes.
+
+She took his tired face between her hands and studied his eyes. She was
+so enrapt by him now in this first burst of affection that she could see
+nothing but him. He seemed so beautiful, so hungry! It did not matter to
+her now that she was in the home of his wife or that his love was
+complicated with so much that was apparently evil. She loved him. She
+had thought all night about him, not sleeping. Being so young, it was
+hard for her to reason clearly as yet, but somehow it seemed to her that
+he was very unhappily placed, terribly ill-mated, and that he needed
+her. He was so fine, so clean, so capable! If he did not want Angela,
+why should she want him? She would not be suffering for anything save
+his company, and why should she want to hold him? She, Suzanne, would
+not, if she were in Angela's place. If there were a child, would that
+make any real difference? He did not love her.
+
+"Don't worry about me," she said reassuringly. "I love you. Don't you
+know I do? I have to talk to you. We have to talk. How is Mrs. Witla?"
+
+She was thinking about what Mrs. Witla would do, whether she would call
+up her mother, whether her struggle to have Eugene would begin at once.
+
+"Oh, she's about the same!" he said wearily. "We've had a long argument.
+I've told her just what I propose to do, but I'll tell you about that
+later."
+
+He went away to change his clothes, and then stepped into Angela's room.
+
+"I'm going to walk with Suzanne," he said dominantly, when he was ready.
+
+"All right," said Angela, who was so tired she could have fainted. "Will
+you be back for dinner?"
+
+"I don't know," he replied. "What difference does it make?"
+
+"Only this: that the maid and cook need not stay unless you are coming.
+I want nothing."
+
+"When will the nurse be here?"
+
+"At seven."
+
+"Well, you can prepare dinner, if you wish," he said. "I will try and be
+back by four."
+
+He walked toward the studio where Suzanne was, and found her waiting,
+white-faced, slightly hollow-eyed, but strong and confident. Now, as so
+often before, he noticed that spirit of self-sufficiency and reliance
+about her young body which had impressed him so forcibly and
+delightfully in the past. She was a wonderful girl, this Suzanne, full
+of grit and ability, although raised under what might have been deemed
+enervating circumstances. Her statement, made under pressure the night
+before, that she must go to a hotel and not go home until she could
+straighten out her affairs, had impressed him greatly. Why had she
+thought of going out in the world to work for herself unless there were
+something really fine about her? She was heir to a fortune under her
+father's will, he had heard her mother say once. This morning her glance
+was so assured. He did not use the phone to call a car, but strolled out
+into the drive with her walking along the stone wall which commanded the
+river northward toward Grant's Tomb. It occurred to him that they might
+go to Claremont Inn for breakfast, and afterwards take a car
+somewhere--he did not know quite where. Suzanne might be recognized. So
+might he.
+
+"What shall we do, sweet?" he asked, as the cool morning air brushed
+their faces. It was a glorious day.
+
+"I don't care," replied Suzanne. "I promised to be at the Almerdings
+some time today, but I didn't say when. They won't think anything of it
+if I don't get there till after dinner. Will Mrs. Witla call up mama?"
+
+"I don't think so. In fact, I'm sure she won't." He was thinking of his
+last conversation with Angela, when she said she would do nothing. "Is
+your mother likely to call you up?"
+
+"I think not. Mama doesn't usually bother when she knows where I am
+going. If she does, they'll simply say I haven't come yet. Will
+Mrs. Witla tell her, if she calls up there?"
+
+"I think not," he said. "No, I'm sure she won't. Angela wants time to
+think. She isn't going to do anything. She told me that this morning.
+She's going to wait until she sees what I am going to do. It all depends
+now on how we play our cards."
+
+He strolled on, looking at the river and holding Suzanne's hand. It was
+only a quarter to seven and the drive was comparatively empty.
+
+"If she tells mama, it will make things very bad," said Suzanne
+thoughtfully. "Do you really think she won't?"
+
+"I'm sure she won't. I'm positive. She doesn't want to do anything yet.
+It's too dangerous. I think she thinks that maybe I will come round. Oh,
+what a life I've led! It seems like a dream, now that I have your love.
+You are so different, so generous! Your attitude is so unselfish! To
+have been ruled all these years in every little thing. This last trick
+of hers!"
+
+He shook his head woefully. Suzanne looked at his weary face, her own as
+fresh as the morning.
+
+"Oh, if I might only have had you to begin with!" he added.
+
+"Listen, Eugene," said Suzanne. "You know I feel sorry for Mrs. Witla.
+We shouldn't have done what we did last night, but you made me. You know
+you will never listen to me, until it's too late. You're so headstrong!
+I don't want you to leave Mrs. Witla unless you want to. You needn't for
+me. I don't want to marry you; not now, anyhow. I'd rather just give
+myself to you, if you want me to. I want time though, to think and plan.
+If mama should hear today, there would be a terrible time. If we have
+time to think, we may bring her round. I don't care anything about what
+Mrs. Witla told you last night. I don't want you to leave her. If we
+could just arrange some way. It's mama, you know."
+
+She swung his hand softly in hers, pressing his fingers. She was deep in
+thought, for her mother presented a real problem.
+
+"You know," she went on, "mama isn't narrow. She doesn't believe much in
+marriage unless it's ideal. Mrs. Witla's condition wouldn't make so much
+difference if only the child were here. I've been thinking about that.
+Mama might sanction some arrangement if she thought it would make me
+happy and there was no scandal. But I'll have to have time to talk to
+her. It can't be done right away."
+
+Eugene listened to this with considerable surprise, as he did to
+everything Suzanne volunteered. She seemed to have been thinking about
+these questions a long time. She was not free with her opinions. She
+hesitated and halted between words and in her cogitations, but when they
+were out this was what they came to. He wondered how sound they were.
+
+"Suzanne," he said, "you take my breath away! How you think! Do you know
+what you're talking about? Do you know your mother at all well?"
+
+"Mama? Oh, yes, I think I understand mama. You know she's very peculiar.
+Mama is literary and romantic. She talks a great deal about liberty, but
+I don't take in everything she says. I think mama is different from most
+women--she's exceptional. She likes me, not so much as a daughter as a
+person. She's anxious about me. You know, I think I'm stronger than
+mama. I think I could dominate her if I tried. She leans on me now a
+lot, and she can't make me do anything unless I want to. I can make her
+come to my way of thinking, I believe. I have, lots of times. That's
+what makes me think I might now, if I have time. It will take time to
+get her to do what I want."
+
+"How much time?" asked Eugene thoughtfully.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Three months. Six months. I can't tell. I would like
+to try, though."
+
+"And if you can't, then what?"
+
+"Why, then--why, then I'll defy her, that's all. I'm not sure, you know.
+But I think I can."
+
+"And if you can't?"
+
+"But I can. I'm sure I can." She tossed her head gaily.
+
+"And come to me?"
+
+"And come to you."
+
+They were near One Hundredth Street, under the trees. There was a lone
+man some distance away, walking from them. Eugene caught Suzanne in his
+arms and implanted a kiss upon her mouth. "Oh, you divinity!" he
+exclaimed. "Helen! Circe!"
+
+"No," she replied, with smiling eyes. "No, not here. Wait till we get a
+car."
+
+"Shall we go to Claremont?"
+
+"I'm not hungry."
+
+"Then we might as well call a car and ride."
+
+They hunted a garage and sped northward, the wonderful wind of the
+morning cooling and refreshing their fevered senses. Both he and Suzanne
+were naturally depressed at moments, at other moments preternaturally
+gay, for he was varying between joy and fear, and she was buoying him
+up. Her attitude was calmer, surer, braver, than his. She was like a
+strong mother to him.
+
+"You know," he said, "I don't know what to think at times. I haven't any
+particular charge against Mrs. Witla except that I don't love her. I
+have been so unhappy. What do you think of cases of this kind, Suzanne?
+You heard what she said about me."
+
+"Yes, I heard."
+
+"It all comes from that. I don't love her. I never have really from the
+beginning. What do you think where there is no love? It is true, part of
+what she said. I have been in love with other women, but it has always
+been because I have been longing for some sort of temperament that was
+congenial to me. I have, Suzanne, too, since I have been married. I
+can't say that I was really in love with Carlotta Wilson, but I did like
+her. She was very much like myself. The other was a girl somewhat like
+you. Not so wise. That was years ago. Oh, I could tell you why! I love
+youth. I love beauty. I want someone who is my companion mentally. You
+are that, Suzanne, and yet see what a hell it is creating. Do you think
+it is so bad where I am so very unhappy? Tell me, what do you think?"
+
+"Why, why," said Suzanne, "I don't think anyone ought to stick by a bad
+bargain, Eugene."
+
+"Just what do you mean by that, Suzanne?"
+
+"Well, you say you don't love her. You're not happy with her. I
+shouldn't think it would be good for her or you to have you stay with
+her. She can live. I wouldn't want you to stay with me if you didn't
+love me. I wouldn't want you at all if you didn't. I wouldn't want to
+stay with you if I didn't love you, and I wouldn't. I think marriage
+ought to be a happy bargain, and if it isn't you oughtn't to try to stay
+together just because you thought you could stay together once."
+
+"What if there were children?"
+
+"Well, that might be different. Even then, one or the other could take
+them, wouldn't you think? The children needn't be made very unhappy in
+such a case."
+
+Eugene looked at Suzanne's lovely face. It seemed so strange to hear her
+reasoning so solemnly--this girl!
+
+"But you heard what she said about me, Suzanne, and about her
+condition?"
+
+"I know," she said. "I've thought about it. I don't see that it makes so
+very much difference. You can take care of her."
+
+"You love me just as much?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Even if all she says is true?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why, Suzanne?"
+
+"Well, all her charges concerned years gone by, and that isn't now. And
+I know you love me now. I don't care about the past. You know, Eugene, I
+don't care anything about the future, either. I want you to love me only
+so long as you want to love me. When you are tired of me, I want you to
+leave me. I wouldn't want you to live with me if you didn't love me. I
+wouldn't want to live with you if I didn't love you."
+
+Eugene looked into her face, astonished, pleased, invigorated, and
+heartened by this philosophy. It was so like Suzanne, he thought. She
+seemed to have reached definite and effective conclusions so early. Her
+young mind seemed a solvent for all life's difficulties.
+
+"Oh, you wonderful girl!" he said. "You know you are wiser than I am,
+stronger. I draw to you, Suzanne, like a cold man to a fire. You are so
+kindly, so temperate, so understanding!"
+
+They rode on toward Tarrytown and Scarborough, and on the way Eugene
+told Suzanne some of his plans. He was willing not to leave Angela, if
+that was agreeable to her. He was willing to maintain this outward show,
+if that was satisfactory. The only point was, could he stay and have
+her, too? He did not understand quite how she could want to share him
+with anybody, but he could not fathom her from any point of view, and he
+was fascinated. She seemed the dearest, the subtlest, the strangest and
+most lovable girl. He tried to find out by what process she proposed to
+overcome the objections of her mother, but Suzanne seemed to have no
+plans save that of her ability to gradually get the upper hand mentally
+and dominate her. "You know," she said at one point, "I have money
+coming to me. Papa set aside two hundred thousand dollars for each of us
+children when we should come of age, and I am of age now. It is to be
+held in trust, but I shall have twelve thousand or maybe more from that.
+We can use that. I am of age now, and I have never said anything about
+it. Mama has managed all these things."
+
+Here was another thought which heartened Eugene. With Suzanne he would
+have this additional income, which might be used whatever else might
+betide. If only Angela could be made to accept his conditions and
+Suzanne could win in her contest with her mother all would be well. His
+position need not be jeopardized. Mrs. Dale need hear nothing of it at
+present. He and Suzanne could go on associating in this way until an
+understanding had been reached. It was all like a delightful courtship
+which was to bloom into a still more delightful marriage.
+
+The day passed in assurances of affection. Suzanne told Eugene of a book
+she had read in French, "The Blue Bird." The allegory touched Eugene to
+the quick--its quest for happiness, and he named Suzanne then and there
+"The Blue Bird." She made him stop the car and go back to get her an
+exquisite lavender-hued blossom growing wild on a tall stalk which she
+saw in a field as they sped by. Eugene objected genially, because it was
+beyond a wire fence and set among thorns, but she said, "Yes, now, you
+must. You know you must obey me now. I am going to begin to train you
+now. You've been spoiled. You're a bad boy. Mama says that. I am going
+to reform you."
+
+"A sweet time you'll have, Flower Face! I'm a bad lot. Have you noticed
+that?"
+
+"A little."
+
+"And you still like me?"
+
+"I don't mind. I think I can change you by loving you."
+
+Eugene went gladly. He plucked the magnificent bloom and handed it to
+her "as a sceptre," he said. "It looks like you, you know," he added.
+"It's regal."
+
+Suzanne accepted the compliment without thought of its flattering
+import. She loved Eugene, and words had scarcely any meaning to her. She
+was as happy as a child and as wise in many things as a woman twice her
+years. She was as foolish as Eugene over the beauty of nature, dwelling
+in an ecstasy upon morning and evening skies, the feel of winds and the
+sigh of leaves. The beauties of nature at every turn caught her eye, and
+she spoke to him of things she felt in such a simple way that he was
+entranced.
+
+Once when they had left the car and were walking about the grounds of an
+inn, she found that one of her silk stockings had worn through at the
+heel. She lifted up her foot and looked at it meditatively. "Now, if I
+had some ink I could fix that up so quickly," she said, laughing.
+
+"What would you do?" he asked.
+
+"I would black it," she replied, referring to her pink heel, "or you
+could paint it."
+
+He laughed and she giggled. It was these little, idle simplicities which
+amused and fascinated him.
+
+"Suzanne," he said dramatically at this time, "you are taking me back
+into fairyland."
+
+"I want to make you happy," she said, "as happy as I am."
+
+"If I could be! If I only could be!"
+
+"Wait," she said; "be cheerful. Don't worry. Everything will come out
+all right. I know it will. Things always come right for me. I want you
+and you will come to me. You will have me just as I will have you. Oh,
+it is all so beautiful!"
+
+She squeezed his hand in an ecstasy of delight and then gave him her
+lips.
+
+"What if someone should see?" he asked.
+
+"I don't care! I don't care!" she cried. "I love you!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+After dining joyously, these two returned to the city. Suzanne, as she
+neared New York proper, was nervous as to what Angela might have done,
+for she wanted, in case Angela told her mother, to be present, in order
+to defend herself. She had reached a rather logical conclusion for her,
+and that was, in case her mother objected too vigorously, to elope with
+Eugene. She wanted to see just how her mother would take the
+intelligence in order that she might see clearly what to do. Previously
+she had the feeling that she could persuade her mother not to interfere,
+even in the face of all that had been revealed. Nevertheless, she was
+nervous, and her fears were bred to a certain extent by Eugene's
+attitude.
+
+In spite of all his bravado, he really did not feel at all secure. He
+was not afraid of what he might lose materially so much as he was of
+losing Suzanne. The thought of the coming child had not affected them at
+all as yet. He could see clearly that conditions might come about
+whereby he could not have her, but they were not in evidence as yet.
+Besides, Angela might be lying. Still at odd moments his conscience
+troubled him, for in the midst of his intense satisfaction, his keenest
+thrills of joy, he could see Angela lying in bed, the thought of her
+wretched future before her, the thought of the coming life troubling
+her, or he could hear the echo of some of the pleas she had made. It was
+useless to attempt to shut them out. This was a terrible ordeal he was
+undergoing, a ruthless thing he was doing. All the laws of life and
+public sentiment were against him. If the world knew, it would accuse
+him bitterly. He could not forget that. He despaired at moments of ever
+being able to solve the tangle in which he had involved himself, and yet
+he was determined to go on. He proposed accompanying Suzanne to her
+friends, the Almerdings, but she changed her mind and decided to go
+home. "I want to see whether mama has heard anything," she insisted.
+
+Eugene had to escort her to Staten Island and then order the chauffeur
+to put on speed so as to reach Riverside by four. He was somewhat
+remorseful, but he argued that his love-life was so long over, in so far
+as Angela was concerned, that it could not really make so very much
+difference. Since Suzanne wanted to wait a little time and proceed
+slowly, it was not going to be as bad for Angela as he had anticipated.
+He was going to give her a choice of going her way and leaving him
+entirely, either now, or after the child was born, giving her the half
+of his property, stocks, ready money, and anything else that might be
+divisible, and all the furniture, or staying and tacitly ignoring the
+whole thing. She would know what he was going to do, to maintain a
+separate menage, or secret rendezvous for Suzanne. He proposed since
+Suzanne was so generous not to debate this point, but to insist. He must
+have her, and Angela must yield, choosing only her conditions.
+
+When he came to the house, a great change had come over Angela. In the
+morning when he left she was hard and bitter in her mood. This afternoon
+she was, albeit extremely sad, more soft and melting than he had ever
+seen her. Her hard spirit was temporarily broken, but in addition she
+had tried to resign herself to the inevitable and to look upon it as the
+will of God. Perhaps she had been, as Eugene had often accused her of
+being, hard and cold. Perhaps she had held him in too tight leading
+strings. She had meant it for the best. She had tried to pray for light
+and guidance, and after a while something softly sad, like a
+benediction, settled upon her. She must not fight any more, she thought.
+She must yield. God would guide her. Her smile, kindly and wan, when
+Eugene entered the room, took him unawares.
+
+Her explanation of her mood, her prayers, her willingness to give him up
+if need be, even in the face of what was coming to her, moved him more
+than anything that had ever passed between them. He sat opposite her at
+dinner, looking at her thin hands and face, and her sad eyes, trying to
+be cheerful and considerate, and then, going back into her room and
+hearing her say she would do whatever he deemed best, burst into tears.
+He cried from an excess of involuntary and uncontrolled emotion. He
+hardly knew why he cried, but the sadness of everything--life, the
+tangle of human emotions, the proximity of death to all, old age,
+Suzanne, Angela, all--touched him, and he shook as though he would rend
+his sides. Angela, in turn, was astonished and grieved for him. She
+could scarcely believe her eyes. Was he repenting? "Come to me, Eugene!"
+she pleaded. "Oh, I'm so sorry! _Are you as much in love as that?_ Oh,
+dear, dear, if I could only do something! Don't cry like that, Eugene.
+If it means so much to you, I will give you up. It tears my heart to
+hear you. Oh, dear, please don't cry."
+
+He laid his head on his knees and shook, then seeing her getting up,
+came over to the bed to prevent her.
+
+"No, no," he said, "it will pass. I can't help it. I'm sorry for you.
+I'm sorry for myself. I'm sorry for life. God will punish me for this. I
+can't help it, but you are a good woman."
+
+He laid his head down beside her and sobbed, great, aching sobs. After a
+time he recovered himself, only to find that he had given Angela courage
+anew. She would think now that his love might be recovered since he had
+seemed so sympathetic; that Suzanne might be displaced. He knew that
+could not be, and so he was sorry that he had cried.
+
+They went on from that to discussion, to argument, to ill-feeling, to
+sympathetic agreement again by degrees, only to fall out anew. Angela
+could not resign herself to the thought of giving him up. Eugene could
+not see that he was called upon to do anything, save divide their joint
+possessions. He was most anxious to have nothing to do with Angela
+anymore in any way. He might live in the same house, but that would be
+all. He was going to have Suzanne. He was going to live for her only. He
+threatened Angela with dire consequences if she tried to interfere in
+any way. If she communicated with Mrs. Dale, or said anything to
+Suzanne, or attempted to injure him commercially, he would leave her.
+
+"Here is the situation," he would insist. "You can maintain it as I say,
+or break it. If you break it, you lose me and everything that I
+represent. If you maintain it, I will stay here. I think I will. I am
+perfectly willing to keep up appearances, but I want my freedom."
+
+Angela thought and thought of this. She thought once of sending for
+Mrs. Dale and communicating with her secretly, urging her to get Suzanne
+out of the way without forewarning either the girl or Eugene, but she
+did not do this. It was the one thing she should have done and a thing
+Mrs. Dale would have agreed to, but fear and confusion deterred her. The
+next thing was to write or talk to Suzanne, and because she mistrusted
+her mood in Suzanne's presence she decided to write. She lay in bed on
+Monday when Eugene was away at the office and composed a long letter in
+which she practically gave the history of Eugene's life reiterating her
+own condition and stating what she thought Eugene ought to do.
+
+"How can you think, Suzanne," she asked in one place, "that he will be
+true to you when he can ignore me, in this condition? He has not been
+true to anyone else. Are you going to throw your life away? Your station
+is assured now. What can he add to you that you have not already? If you
+take him, it is sure to become known. You are the one who will be
+injured, not he. Men recover from these things, particularly from an
+infatuation of this character, and the world thinks nothing of it; but
+the world will not forgive you. You will be 'a bad woman' after this,
+irretrievably so if a child is born. You think you love him. Do you
+really love him this much? Read this and stop and think. Think of his
+character. I am used to him. I made my mistakes in the beginning, and it
+is too late for me to change. The world can give me nothing. I may have
+sorrow and disgust, but at least I shall not be an outcast and our
+friends and the world will not be scandalized. But you--you have
+everything before you. Some man will come to you whom you will love and
+who will not ask and willingly make a sacrifice of you. Oh, I beg you to
+think! You do not need him. After all, sorry as I am to confess it, I
+do. It is as I tell you. Can you really afford to ignore this appeal?"
+
+Suzanne read this and was greatly shocked. Angela painted him in a
+wretched light, as fickle, deceitful, dishonest in his relations with
+women. She debated this matter in her own room, for it could not help
+but give her pause. After a time, Eugene's face came back to her,
+however, his beautiful mind, the atmosphere of delight and perfection
+that seemed to envelop all that surrounded him. It was as though Eugene
+were a mirage of beauty, so soft, so sweet, so delightful! Oh, to be
+with him; to hear his beautiful voice; to feel his intense caresses!
+What could life offer her equal to that? And, besides, he needed her.
+She decided to talk it out with him, show him the letter, and then
+decide.
+
+Eugene came in a day or two, having phoned Monday and Tuesday mornings.
+He made a rendezvous of the ice house, and then appeared as eager and
+smiling as ever. Since returning to the office and seeing no immediate
+sign of a destructive attitude on Angela's part, he had recovered his
+courage. He was hopeful of a perfect denouement to all this--of a studio
+and his lovely Suzanne. When they were seated in the auto, she
+immediately produced Angela's letter and handed it to him without
+comment. Eugene read it quietly.
+
+He was greatly shocked at what he read, for he thought that Angela was
+more kindly disposed toward him. Still he knew it to be true, all of it,
+though he was not sure that Suzanne would suffer from his attentions.
+The fates might be kind. They might be happy together. Anyhow, he wanted
+her now.
+
+"Well," he said, giving it back, "what of it? Do you believe all she
+says?"
+
+"It may be so, but somehow when I am with you I don't seem to care. When
+I am away from you, it's different. I'm not so sure."
+
+"You can't tell whether I am as good as you think I am?"
+
+"I don't know what to think. I suppose all she says about you is true.
+I'm not sure. When you're away, it's different. When you are here, I
+feel as though everything must come out right. I love you so. Oh, I know
+it will!" She threw her arms around him.
+
+"Then the letter doesn't really make any difference?"
+
+"No."
+
+She looked at him with big round eyes, and it was the old story, bliss
+in affection without thought. They rode miles, stopped at an inn for
+something to eat--Mrs. Dale was away for the day--looked at the sea
+where the return road skirted it, and kissed and kissed each other.
+Suzanne grew so ecstatic that she could see exactly how it was all
+coming out.
+
+"Now you leave it to me," she said. "I will sound mama. If she is at all
+logical, I think I can convince her. I would so much rather do it that
+way. I hate deception. I would rather just tell her, and then, if I have
+to, defy her. I don't think I shall have to, though. She can't do
+anything."
+
+"I don't know about that," said Eugene cautiously. He had come to have
+great respect for Suzanne's courage, and he was rather relying on
+Mrs. Dale's regard for him to stay her from any desperate course, but he
+did not see how their end was to be achieved.
+
+He was for entering on an illicit relationship after a time without
+saying anything at all. He was in no hurry, for his feeling for Suzanne
+was not purely physical, though he wanted her. Because of her strange
+reading and philosophy, she was defying the world. She insisted that she
+did not see how it would hurt her.
+
+"But, my dear, you don't know life," said Eugene. "It will hurt you. It
+will grind you to pieces in all places outside of New York. This is the
+Metropolis. It is a world city. Things are not quite the same here, but
+you will have to pretend, anyhow. It is so much easier."
+
+"Can you protect me?" she asked significantly, referring to the
+condition Angela pleaded. "I wouldn't want--I couldn't, you know, not
+yet, not yet."
+
+"I understand," he said. "Yes, I can, absolutely."
+
+"Well, I want to think about it," she said again. "I prefer so much to
+be honest about it. I would so much rather just tell mama, and then go
+and do it. It would be so much nicer. My life is my own to do with as I
+please. It doesn't concern anybody, not even mama. You know, if I want
+to waste it, I may, only I don't think that I am doing so. I want to
+live as I choose. I don't want to get married yet."
+
+Eugene listened to her with the feeling that this was the most curious
+experience of his life. He had never heard, never seen, never
+experienced anything like it. The case of Christina Channing was
+different. She had her art to consider. Suzanne had nothing of the sort.
+She had a lovely home, a social future, money, the chance of a happy,
+stable, normal life. This was love surely, and yet he was quite at sea.
+Still so many favorable things had happened, consciously favorable, that
+he was ready to believe that all this was intended for his benefit by a
+kind, governing providence.
+
+Angela had practically given in already. Why not Suzanne's mother?
+Angela would not tell her anything. Mrs. Dale was not any stronger than
+Angela apparently. Suzanne might be able to control her as she said. If
+she was so determined to try, could he really stop her? She was
+headstrong in a way and wilful, but developing rapidly and reasoning
+tremendously. Perhaps she could do this thing. Who could tell? They came
+flying back along lovely lanes where the trees almost swept their faces,
+past green stretches of marsh where the wind stirred in ripples the tall
+green cat grass, past pretty farm yards, with children and ducks in the
+foreground, beautiful mansions, playing children, sauntering laborers.
+All the while they were reassuring each other, vowing perfect affection,
+holding each other close. Suzanne, as Angela had, loved to take Eugene's
+face between her hands and look into his eyes.
+
+"Look at me," she said once when he had dolefully commented upon the
+possibility of change. "Look straight into my eyes. What do you see?"
+
+"Courage and determination," he said.
+
+"What else?"
+
+"Love."
+
+"Do you think I will change?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Surely?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, look at me straight, Eugene. I won't. I won't, do you hear? I'm
+yours until you don't want me anymore. Now will you be happy?"
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"And when we get our studio," she went on.
+
+"When we get our studio," he said, "we'll furnish it perfectly, and
+entertain a little after a while, maybe. You'll be my lovely Suzanne, my
+Flower Face, my Myrtle Blossom. Helen, Circe, Dianeme."
+
+"I'll be your week-end bride," she laughed, "your odd or even girl,
+whichever way the days fall."
+
+"If it only comes true," he exclaimed when they parted. "If it only
+does."
+
+"Wait and see," she said. "Now you wait and see."
+
+The days passed and Suzanne began what she called her campaign. Her
+first move was to begin to talk about the marriage question at the
+dinner table, or whenever she and her mother were alone, and to sound
+her on this important question, putting her pronouncements on record.
+Mrs. Dale was one of those empirical thinkers who love to philosophize
+generally, but who make no specific application of anything to their own
+affairs. On this marriage question she held most liberal and philosophic
+views for all outside her own immediate family. It was her idea, outside
+her own family, of course, that if a girl having reached maturity, and
+what she considered a sound intellectual majority, and who was not by
+then satisfied with the condition which matrimony offered, if she loved
+no man desperately enough to want to marry him and could arrange some
+way whereby she could satisfy her craving for love without jeopardizing
+her reputation, that was her lookout. So far as Mrs. Dale was concerned,
+she had no particular objection. She knew women in society, who, having
+made unfortunate marriages, or marriages of convenience, sustained some
+such relationship to men whom they admired. There was a subtle, under
+the surface understanding outside the society circles of the most rigid
+morality in regard to this, and there was the fast set, of which she was
+at times a welcome member, which laughed at the severe conventions of
+the older school. One must be careful--very. One must not be caught.
+But, otherwise, well, every person's life was a law unto him or herself.
+
+Suzanne never figured in any of these theories, for Suzanne was a
+beautiful girl, capable of an exalted alliance, and her daughter. She
+did not care to marry her off to any wretched possessor of great wealth
+or title, solely for wealth's or title's sake, but she was hoping that
+some eligible young man of excellent social standing or wealth, or real
+personal ability, such, for instance, as Eugene possessed, would come
+along and marry Suzanne. There would be a grand wedding at a church of
+some prominence,--St. Bartholomew's, very likely; a splendid wedding
+dinner, oceans of presents, a beautiful honeymoon. She used to look at
+Suzanne and think what a delightful mother she would make. She was so
+young, robust, vigorous, able, and in a quiet way, passionate. She could
+tell when she danced how eagerly she took life. The young man would
+come. It would not be long. These lovely springtimes would do their work
+one of these days. As it was, there were a score of men already who
+would have given an eye to attract Suzanne's attention, but Suzanne
+would none of them. She seemed shy, coy, elusive, but above all, shy.
+Her mother had no idea of the iron will all this concealed any more than
+she had of the hard anarchic, unsocial thoughts that were surging in her
+daughter's brain.
+
+"Do you think a girl ought to marry at all, mama?" Suzanne asked her one
+evening when they were alone together, "if she doesn't regard marriage
+as a condition she could endure all her days?"
+
+"No-o," replied her mother. "What makes you ask?"
+
+"Well, you see so much trouble among married people that we know.
+They're not very happy together. Wouldn't it be better if a person just
+stayed single, and if they found someone that they could really love,
+well, they needn't necessarily marry to be happy, need they?"
+
+"What have you been reading lately, Suzanne?" asked her mother, looking
+up with a touch of surprise in her eyes.
+
+"Nothing lately. What makes you ask?" said Suzanne wisely, noting the
+change in her mother's voice.
+
+"With whom have you been talking?"
+
+"Why, what difference does that make, mama? I've heard you express
+precisely the same views?"
+
+"Quite so. I may have. But don't you think you're rather young to be
+thinking of things like that? I don't say all that I think when I'm
+arguing things philosophically. There are conditions which govern
+everything. If it were impossible for a girl to marry well, or if looks
+or lack of money interfered,--there are plenty of reasons--a thing like
+that might possibly be excusable, but why should you be thinking of
+that?"
+
+"Why, it doesn't necessarily follow, mama, that because I am good
+looking, or have a little money, or am socially eligible, that I should
+want to get married. I may not want to get married at all. I see just as
+well as you do how things are with most people. Why shouldn't I? Do I
+have to keep away from every man, then?"
+
+"Why, Suzanne! I never heard you argue like this before. You must have
+been talking with someone or reading some outre book of late. I wish you
+wouldn't. You are too young and too good looking to entertain any such
+ideas. Why, you can have nearly any young man you wish. Surely you can
+find someone with whom you can live happily or with whom you would be
+willing to try. It's time enough to think about the other things when
+you've tried and failed. At least you can give yourself ample time to
+learn something about life before you begin to talk such nonsense.
+You're too young. Why it's ridiculous."
+
+"Mama," said Suzanne, with the least touch of temper, "I wish you
+wouldn't talk to me like that. I'm not a child any more. I'm a woman. I
+think like a woman--not like a girl. You forget that I have a mind of my
+own and some thoughts. I may not want to get married. I don't think I
+do. Certainly not to any of the silly creatures that are running after
+me now. Why shouldn't I take some man in an independent way, if I wish?
+Other women have before me. Even if they hadn't, it would be no reason
+why I shouldn't. My life is my own."
+
+"Suzanne Dale!" exclaimed her mother, rising, a thrill of terror passing
+along her heartstrings. "What are you talking about? Are you basing
+these ideas on anything I have said in the past? Then certainly my
+chickens are coming home to roost early. You are in no position to
+consider whether you want to get married or not. You have seen
+practically nothing of men. Why should you reach any such conclusions
+now? For goodness' sake, Suzanne, don't begin so early to meditate on
+these terrible things. Give yourself a few years in which to see the
+world. I don't ask you to marry, but you may meet some man whom you
+could love very much, and who would love you. If you were to go and
+throw yourself away under some such silly theory as you entertain now,
+without stopping to see, or waiting for life to show you what it has in
+store, what will you have to offer him. Suzanne, Suzanne"--Suzanne was
+turning impatiently to a window--"you frighten me! There isn't, there
+couldn't be. Oh, Suzanne, I beg of you, be careful what you think, what
+you say, what you do! I can't know all your thoughts, no mother can,
+but, oh, if you will stop and think, and wait a while!"
+
+She looked at Suzanne who walked to a mirror and began to fix a bow in
+her hair.
+
+"Mama," she said calmly. "Really, you amuse me. When you are out with
+people at dinner, you talk one way, and when you are here with me, you
+talk another. I haven't done anything desperate yet. I don't know what I
+may want to do. I'm not a child any more, mama. Please remember that.
+I'm a woman grown, and I certainly can lay out my life for myself. I'm
+sure I don't want to do what you are doing--talk one thing and do
+another."
+
+Mrs. Dale recoiled intensely from this stab. Suzanne had suddenly
+developed in the line of her argument a note of determination, frank
+force and serenity of logic which appalled her. Where had the girl got
+all this? With whom had she been associating? She went over in her mind
+the girls and men she had met and known. Who were her intimate
+companions?--Vera Almerding; Lizette Woodworth; Cora TenEyck--a half
+dozen girls who were smart and clever and socially experienced. Were
+they talking such things among themselves? Was there some man or men
+unduly close to them? There was one remedy for all this. It must be
+acted on quickly if Suzanne were going to fall in with and imbibe any
+such ideas as these. Travel--two or three years of incessant travel with
+her, which would cover this dangerous period in which girls were so
+susceptible to undue influence was the necessary thing. Oh, her own
+miserable tongue! Her silly ideas! No doubt all she said was true.
+Generally it was so. But Suzanne! Her Suzanne, never! She would take her
+away while she had time, to grow older and wiser through experience.
+Never would she be permitted to stay here where girls and men were
+talking and advocating any such things. She would scan Suzanne's
+literature more closely from now on. She would viser her friendships.
+What a pity that so lovely a girl must be corrupted by such wretched,
+unsocial, anarchistic notions. Why, what would become of her girl? Where
+would she be? Dear Heaven!
+
+She looked down in the social abyss yawning at her feet and recoiled
+with horror.
+
+Never, never, never! Suzanne should be saved from herself, from all such
+ideas now and at once.
+
+And she began to think how she could introduce the idea of travel easily
+and nicely. She must lure Suzanne to go without alarming her--without
+making her think that she was bringing pressure to bear. But from now on
+there must be a new order established. She must talk differently; she
+must act differently. Suzanne and all her children must be protected
+against themselves and others also. That was the lesson which this
+conversation taught her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Eugene and Angela had been quarreling between themselves most bitterly;
+at other times Angela was attempting to appeal to his sense of justice
+and fair play, if not his old-time affection, in the subtlest of ways.
+She was completely thrown out of her old methods of calculation, and
+having lost those had really no traditions on which to proceed. Eugene
+had always heretofore apparently feared her wrath; now he cared nothing
+for that. He had been subject, in times past, to a certain extent to
+those alluring blandishments which the married will understand well
+enough, but these were as ashes. Her charms meant nothing to him. She
+had hoped that the thought of a coming child would move him, but no, it
+was apparently without avail. Suzanne seemed a monster to her now since
+she did not desert him, and Eugene a raving maniac almost, and yet she
+could see how human and natural it all was. He was hypnotized,
+possessed. He had one thought, Suzanne, Suzanne, and he would fight her
+at every turn for that. He told her so. He told her of her letter to
+Suzanne, and the fact that he had read and destroyed it. It did not help
+her cause at all. She knew that she had decried him. He stood his ground
+solidly, awaiting the will of Suzanne, and he saw Suzanne frequently,
+telling her that he had won completely, and that the fulfilment of their
+desires now depended upon her.
+
+As has been said, Suzanne was not without passion. The longer she
+associated with Eugene, the more eager she became for that joyous
+fulfilment which his words, his looks, his emotions indicated. In her
+foolish, girlish way, she had built up a fancy which was capable of
+realization only by the most ruthless and desperate conduct. Her theory
+of telling her mother and overcoming her by argument or defiance was
+really vain, for it could not be settled so easily, or so quickly.
+Because of her mother's appeal to her in this first conversation, she
+fancied she had won a substantial victory. Her mother was subject to her
+control and could not defeat her in argument. By the latter token she
+felt she was certain to win. Besides, she was counting heavily on her
+mother's regard for Eugene and her deep affection for herself. Hitherto,
+her mother had really refused her nothing.
+
+The fact that Eugene did not take her outright at this time,--postponing
+until a more imperative occasion an adjustment of the difficulties which
+must necessarily flow from their attempted union without marriage--was
+due to the fact that he was not as desperate or as courageous as he
+appeared to be. He wanted her, but he was a little afraid of Suzanne
+herself. She was doubtful, anxious to wait, anxious to plan things her
+own way. He was not truly ruthless ever, but good natured and easy
+going. He was no subtle schemer and planner, but rather an easy natured
+soul, who drifted here and there with all the tides and favorable or
+unfavorable winds of circumstance. He might have been ruthless if he had
+been eager enough for any one particular thing on this earth, money,
+fame, affection, but at bottom, he really did not care as much as he
+thought he did. Anything was really worth fighting for if you had to
+have it, but it was not worth fighting for to the bitter end, if you
+could possibly get along without it. Besides, there was nothing really
+one could not do without, if one were obliged. He might long intensely,
+but he could survive. He was more absorbed in this desire than in
+anything else in his history, but he was not willing to be hard and
+grasping.
+
+On the other hand, Suzanne was willing to be taken, but needed to be
+pressed or compelled. She imagined in a vague way that she wanted to
+wait and adjust things in her own way, but she was merely dreaming,
+procrastinating because he was procrastinating. If he had but compelled
+her at once she would have been happy, but he was sadly in need of that
+desperate energy that acts first and thinks afterward. Like Hamlet, he
+was too fond of cogitating, too anxious to seek the less desperate way,
+and in doing this was jeopardizing that ideal bliss for which he was
+willing to toss away all the material advantages which he had thus far
+gained.
+
+When Mrs. Dale quite casually within a few days began to suggest that
+they leave New York for the fall and winter, she, Suzanne and Kinroy,
+and visit first England, then Southern France and then Egypt, Suzanne
+immediately detected something intentional about it, or at best a very
+malicious plan on the part of fate to destroy her happiness. She had
+been conjecturing how, temporarily, she could avoid distant and long
+drawn out engagements which her mother not infrequently accepted for
+herself and Suzanne outside New York, but she had not formulated a plan.
+Mrs. Dale was very popular and much liked. This easy suggestion, made
+with considerable assurance by her mother, and as though it would be
+just the thing, frightened and then irritated Suzanne. Why should her
+mother think of it just at this time?
+
+"I don't want to go to Europe," she said warily. "We were over there
+only three years ago. I'd rather stay over here this winter and see
+what's going on in New York."
+
+"But this trip will be so delightful, Suzanne," her mother insisted.
+"The Camerons are to be at Callendar in Scotland for the fall. They have
+taken a cottage there. I had a note from Louise, Tuesday. I thought we
+might run up there and see them and then go to the Isle of Wight."
+
+"I don't care to go, mama," replied Suzanne determinedly. "We're settled
+here comfortably. Why do you always want to be running off somewhere?"
+
+"Why, I'm not running--how you talk, Suzanne! I never heard you object
+very much to going anywhere before. I should think Egypt and the Riviera
+would interest you very much. You haven't been to either of these
+places."
+
+"I know they're delightful, but I don't care to go this fall. I'd rather
+stay here. Why should you suddenly decide that you want to go away for a
+year?"
+
+"I haven't suddenly decided," insisted her mother. "I've been thinking
+of it for some time, as you know. Haven't I said that we would spend a
+winter in Europe soon? The last time I mentioned it, you were very keen
+for it."
+
+"Oh, I know, mama, but that was nearly a year ago. I don't want to go
+now. I would rather stay here."
+
+"Why would you? More of your friends go away than remain. I think a
+particularly large number of them are going this winter."
+
+"Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho!" laughed Suzanne. "A particularly large number. How you
+exaggerate, mama, when you want anything. You always amuse me. It's a
+particularly large number now, just because you want to go," and she
+laughed again.
+
+Suzanne's defiance irritated her mother. Why should she suddenly take
+this notion to stay here? It must be this group of girls she was in
+with, and yet, Suzanne appeared to have so few intimate girl friends.
+The Almerdings were not going to stay in town all the winter. They were
+here now because of a fire at their country place, but it would only be
+for a little while. Neither were the TenEycks. It couldn't be that
+Suzanne was interested in some man. The only person she cared much about
+was Eugene Witla, and he was married and only friendly in a brotherly,
+guardian-like way.
+
+"Now, Suzanne," she said determinedly, "I'm not going to have you talk
+nonsense. This trip will be a delightful thing for you once you have
+started. It's useless for you to let a silly notion like not wanting to
+go stand in your way. You are just at the time when you ought to travel.
+Now you had better begin to prepare yourself, for we're going."
+
+"Oh, no, I'm not, mama," said Suzanne. "Why, you talk as though I were a
+very little girl. I don't want to go this fall and I'm not going. You
+may go if you want to, but I'm not going."
+
+"Why, Suzanne Dale!" exclaimed her mother. "Whatever has come over you?
+Of course you'll go. Where would you stay if I went? Do you think I
+would walk off and leave you? Have I ever before?"
+
+"You did when I was at boarding school," interrupted Suzanne.
+
+"That was a different matter. Then you were under proper supervision.
+Mrs. Hill was answerable to me for your care. Here you would be alone.
+What do you think I would be doing?"
+
+"There you go, mama, talking as though I was a little girl again. Will
+you please remember that I am nearly nineteen? I know how to look after
+myself. Besides, there are plenty of people with whom I might stay if I
+chose."
+
+"Suzanne Dale, you talk like one possessed. I'll listen to nothing of
+the sort. You are my daughter, and as such, subject to my guardianship.
+Of what are you thinking? What have you been reading? There's some silly
+thing at the bottom of all this. I'll not go away and leave you and you
+will come with me. I should think that after all these years of devotion
+on my part, you would take my feelings into consideration. How can you
+stand there and argue with me in this way?"
+
+"Arguing, mama?" asked Suzanne loftily. "I'm not arguing. I'm just not
+going. I have my reasons for not wanting to go, and I'm not going,
+that's all! Now you may go if you want to."
+
+Mrs. Dale looked into Suzanne's eyes and saw for the first time a gleam
+of real defiance in them. What had brought this about? Why was her
+daughter so set--of a sudden, so stubborn and hard? Fear, anger,
+astonishment, mingled equally in her feelings.
+
+"What do you mean by reasons?" asked her mother. "What reasons have
+you?"
+
+"A very good one," said Suzanne quietly, twisting it to the singular.
+
+"Well, what is it then, pray?"
+
+Suzanne debated swiftly and yet a little vaguely in her own mind. She
+had hoped for a longer process of philosophic discussion in which to
+entrap her mother into some moral and intellectual position from which
+she could not well recede, and by reason of which she would have to
+grant her the license she desired. From one remark and another dropped
+in this and the preceding conversation, she realized that her mother had
+no logical arrangement in her mind whereby she included her in her
+philosophical calculations at all. She might favor any and every theory
+and conclusion under the sun, but it would mean nothing in connection
+with Suzanne. The only thing that remained, therefore, was to defy her,
+or run away, and Suzanne did not want to do the latter. She was of age.
+She could adjust her own affairs. She had money. Her mental point of
+view was as good and sound as her mother's. As a matter of fact, the
+latter's attitude, in view of Suzanne's recent experience and feelings,
+seemed weak and futile. What did her mother know of life any more than
+she? They were both in the world, and Suzanne felt herself to be the
+stronger--the sounder of the two. Why not tell her now and defy her. She
+would win. She must. She could dominate her mother, and this was the
+time to do it.
+
+"Because I want to stay near the man I love," she finally volunteered
+quietly.
+
+Mrs. Dale's hand, which had been elevated to a position of gesticulation
+before her, dropped limp, involuntarily, to her side. Her mouth opened
+the least bit. She stared in a surprised, anguished, semi-foolish way.
+
+"The man you love, Suzanne?" she asked, swept completely from her
+moorings, and lost upon a boundless sea. "Who is he?"
+
+"Mr. Witla, mama--Eugene. I love him and he loves me. Don't stare, mama.
+Mrs. Witla knows. She is willing that we should have each other. We love
+each other. I am going to stay here where I can be near him. He needs
+me."
+
+"Eugene Witla!" exclaimed her mother, breathless, a look of horror in
+her eyes, cold fright in her tense hands. "You love Eugene Witla? a
+married man! He loves you! Are you talking to me? Eugene Witla!! You
+love him! Why I can't believe this. I'm not in my right mind. Suzanne
+Dale, don't stand there! Don't look at me like that! Are you telling me,
+your mother? Tell me it isn't so! Tell me it isn't so before you drive
+me mad! Oh, great Heavens, what am I coming to? What have I done? Eugene
+Witla of all men! Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!"
+
+"Why do you carry on so, mama?" asked Suzanne calmly. She had expected
+some such scene as this--not quite so intense, so hysterical, but
+something like it, and was, in a way, prepared for it. A selfish love
+was her animating, governing impulse--a love also that stilled self, and
+put aside as nothing all the world and its rules. Suzanne really did not
+know what she was doing. She was hypnotized by the sense of perfection
+in her lover, the beauty of their love. Not practical facts but the
+beauty of the summer, the feel of cool winds, the glory of skies and
+sunlight and moonlight, were in her mind. Eugene's arms about her, his
+lips to hers, meant more than all the world beside. "I love him. Of
+course, I love him. What is there so strange about that?"
+
+"What is strange? Are you in your right mind? Oh, my poor, dear little
+girl! My Suzanne! Oh, that villain! That scoundrel! To come into my
+house and make love to you, my darling child! How should you know? How
+could I expect you to understand? Oh, Suzanne! for my sake, for the love
+of Heaven, hush! Never breathe it! Never say that terrible thing to me
+again! Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!!! That I should live to see this!
+My child! My Suzanne! My lovely, beautiful Suzanne! I shall die unless I
+can stop this! I shall die! I shall die!"
+
+Suzanne stared at her mother quite astonished at the violent emotion
+into which she had cast her. Her pretty eyes were open wide, her
+eyebrows elevated, her lips parted sweetly. She was a picture of intense
+classic beauty, chiseled, peaceful, self-possessed. Her brow was as
+smooth as marble, her lips as arched as though they had never known one
+emotion outside joy. Her look was of a quizzical, slightly amused, but
+not supercilious character which made her more striking than ever if
+possible.
+
+"Why, mama! You think I am a child, don't you? All that I say to you is
+true. I love Eugene. He loves me. I am going to live with him as soon as
+it can be quietly arranged. I wanted to tell you because I don't want to
+do anything secretly, but I propose to do it. I wish you wouldn't insist
+on looking on me as a baby, mama. I know what I am doing. I have thought
+it all out this long time."
+
+"Thought it all out!" pondered Mrs. Dale. "Going to live with him when
+it can be arranged! Is she talking of living with a man without a
+wedding ceremony being performed? With a man already married! Is the
+child stark mad? Something has turned her brain. Surely something has.
+This is not my Suzanne--my dear, lovely, entrancing Suzanne."
+
+To Suzanne she exclaimed aloud:
+
+"Are you talking of living with this, with this, oh, I don't dare to
+name him. I'll die if I don't get this matter straightened out; of
+living without a marriage ceremony and without his being divorced? I
+can't believe that I am awake. I can't! I can't!"
+
+"Certainly I am," replied Suzanne. "It is all arranged between us.
+Mrs. Witla knows. She has given her consent. I expect you to give yours,
+if you desire me to stay here, mama."
+
+"Give my consent! As God is my witness! Am I alive? Is this my daughter
+talking to me? Am I in this room here with you? I." She stopped, her
+mouth wide open. "If it weren't so horribly tragic, I should laugh. I
+will! I will become hysterical! My brain is whirling like a wheel now.
+Suzanne Dale, you are insane. You are madly, foolishly insane. If you do
+not hush and cease this terrible palaver, I will have you locked up. I
+will have an inquiry made into your sanity. This is the wildest, most
+horrible, most unimaginable thing ever proposed to a mother. To think
+that I should have lived with you eighteen long years, carried you in my
+arms, nursed you at my breast and then have you stand here and tell me
+that you will go and live unsanctioned with a man who has a good true
+woman now living as his wife. This is the most astounding thing I have
+ever heard of. It is unbelievable. You will not do it. You will no more
+do it than you will fly. I will kill him! I will kill you! I would
+rather see you dead at my feet this minute than to even think that you
+could have stood there and proposed such a thing to me. It will never
+be! It will never be! I will give you poison first. I will do anything,
+everything, but you shall never see this man again. If he dares to cross
+this threshold, I will kill him at sight. I love you. I think you are a
+wonderful girl, but this thing shall never be. And don't you dare to
+attempt to dissuade me. I will kill you, I tell you. I would rather see
+you dead a thousand times. To think! To think! To think! Oh, that beast!
+That villain! that unconscionable cur! To think that he should come into
+my house after all my courtesy to him and do this thing to me. Wait! He
+has position, he has distinction. I will drive him out of New York. I
+will ruin him. I will make it impossible for him to show his face among
+decent people. Wait and see!"
+
+Her face was white, her hands clenched, her teeth set. She had a keen,
+savage beauty, much like that of a tigress when it shows its teeth. Her
+eyes were hard and cruel and flashing. Suzanne had never imagined her
+mother capable of such a burst of rage as this.
+
+"Why, mama," she said calmly and quite unmoved, "you talk as though you
+ruled my life completely. You would like to make me feel, I suppose,
+that I do not dare to do what I choose. I do, mama. My life is my own,
+not yours. You cannot frighten me. I have made up my mind what I am
+going to do in this matter, and I am going to do it. You cannot stop me.
+You might as well not try. If I don't do it now, I will later. I love
+Eugene. I am going to live with him. If you won't let me I will go away,
+but I propose to live with him, and you might as well stop now trying to
+frighten me, for you can't."
+
+"Frighten you! Frighten you! Suzanne Dale, you haven't the faintest,
+weakest conception of what you are talking about, or of what I mean to
+do. If a breath of this--the faintest intimation of your intention were
+to get abroad, you would be socially ostracized. Do you realize that you
+would not have a friend left in the world--that all the people you now
+know and are friendly with would go across the street to avoid you? If
+you didn't have independent means, you couldn't even get a position in
+an ordinary shop. Going to live with him? You are going to die first,
+right here in my charge and in my arms. I love you too much not to kill
+you. I would a thousand times rather die with you myself. You are not
+going to see that man any more, not once, and if he dares to show his
+face here, I will kill him. I have said it. I mean it. Now you provoke
+me to action if you dare."
+
+Suzanne merely smiled. "How you talk, mama. You make me laugh."
+
+Mrs. Dale stared.
+
+"Oh, Suzanne! Suzanne!" she suddenly exclaimed. "Before it is too late,
+before I learn to hate you, before you break my heart, come to my arms
+and tell me that you are sorry--that it is all over--that it is all a
+vile, dark, hateful dream. Oh, my Suzanne! My Suzanne!"
+
+"No, mama, no. Don't come near, don't touch me," said Suzanne, drawing
+back. "You haven't any idea of what you are talking about, of what I am,
+or what I mean to do. You don't understand me. You never did, mama. You
+have always looked down on me in some superior way as though you knew a
+great deal and I very little. It isn't that way at all. It isn't true. I
+know what I am about. I know what I am doing. I love Mr. Witla, and I am
+going to live with him. Mrs. Witla understands. She knows how it is. You
+will. I don't care anything at all about what people think. I don't care
+what any society friends do. They are not making my life. They are all
+just as narrow and selfish as they can be, anyhow. Love is something
+different from that. You don't understand me. I love Eugene, and he is
+going to have me, and I am going to have him. If you want to try to
+wreck my life and his, you may, but it won't make any difference. I will
+have him, anyhow. We might just as well quit talking about it now."
+
+"Quit talking about it? Quit talking about it? Indeed, I haven't even
+begun talking yet. I am just trying to collect my wits, that's all. You
+are raging in insanity. This thing will never be. It will nev-er be. You
+are just a poor, deluded slip of girl, whom I have failed to watch
+sufficiently. From now on, I will do my duty by you, if God spares me.
+You need me. Oh, how you need me. Poor little Suzanne!"
+
+"Oh, hush, mama! Stop the hysteria," interrupted Suzanne.
+
+"I will call up Mr. Colfax. I will call up Mr. Winfield. I will have him
+discharged. I will expose him in the newspapers. The scoundrel, the
+villain, the thief! Oh, that I should have lived to see this day. That I
+should have lived to have seen this day!"
+
+"That's right, mama," said Suzanne, wearily. "Go on. You are just
+talking, you know, and I know that you are. You cannot change me.
+Talking cannot. It is silly to rave like this, I think. Why won't you be
+quiet? We may talk, but needn't scream."
+
+Mrs. Dale put her hands to her temples. Her brain seemed to be whirling.
+
+"Never mind, now," she said. "Never mind. I must have time to think. But
+this thing you are thinking will never be. It never will be. Oh! Oh!"
+and she turned sobbing to the window.
+
+Suzanne merely stared. What a peculiar thing emotions were in
+people--their emotions over morals. Here was her mother, weeping, and
+she was looking upon the thing her mother was crying about as the most
+essential and delightful and desirable thing. Certainly life was
+revealing itself to her rapidly these days. Did she really love Eugene
+so much? Yes, yes, yes, indeed. A thousand times yes. This was not a
+tearful emotion for her, but a great, consuming, embracing joy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+For hours that night, until one, two, and three o'clock in the morning;
+from five, six and seven on until noon and night of the next day, and
+the next day after that and the fourth day and the fifth day, the storm
+continued. It was a terrible, siege, heart burning, heart breaking,
+brain racking; Mrs. Dale lost weight rapidly. The color left her cheeks,
+a haggard look settled in her eyes. She was terrified, nonplussed,
+driven to extremities for means wherewith to overcome Suzanne's
+opposition and suddenly but terribly developed will. No one would have
+dreamed that this quiet, sweet-mannered, introspective girl could be so
+positive, convinced and unbending when in action. She was as a fluid
+body that has become adamant. She was a creature made of iron, a girl
+with a heart of stone; nothing moved her--her mother's tears, her
+threats of social ostracism, of final destruction, of physical and moral
+destruction for Eugene and herself, her threats of public exposure in
+the newspapers, of incarceration in an asylum. Suzanne had watched her
+mother a long time and concluded that she loved to talk imposingly in an
+easy, philosophic, at times pompous, way, but that really there was very
+little in what she said. She did not believe that her mother had true
+courage--that she would risk incarcerating her in an asylum, or exposing
+Eugene to her own disadvantage, let alone poisoning or killing her. Her
+mother loved her. She would rage terribly for a time this way, then she
+would give in. It was Suzanne's plan to wear her down, to stand her
+ground firmly until her mother wearied and broke under the strain. Then
+she would begin to say a few words for Eugene, and eventually by much
+arguing and blustering, her mother would come round. Eugene would be
+admitted to the family councils again. He and Suzanne would argue it all
+out together in her mother's presence. They would probably agree to
+disagree in a secret way, but she would get Eugene and he her. Oh, the
+wonder of that joyous denouement. It was so near now, and all for a
+little courageous fighting. She would fight, fight until her mother
+broke, and then--Oh, Eugene, Eugene!
+
+Mrs. Dale was not to be so easily overcome as Suzanne imagined. Haggard
+and worn as she was, she was far from yielding. There was an actual
+physical conflict between them once when Suzanne, in the height of an
+argument, decided that she would call up Eugene on the phone and ask him
+to come down and help her settle the discussion. Mrs. Dale was
+determined that she should not. The servants were in the house
+listening, unable to catch at first the drift of the situation, but
+knowing almost by intuition that there was a desperate discussion going
+on. Suzanne decided to go down to the library where the phone was.
+Mrs. Dale put her back to the door and attempted to deter her. Suzanne
+tried to open it by pulling. Her mother unloosed her hands desperately,
+but it was very difficult, Suzanne was so strong.
+
+"For shame," she said. "For shame! To make your mother contest with you.
+Oh, the degradation"--the while she was struggling. Finally, angry,
+hysteric tears coursed involuntarily down her cheeks and Suzanne was
+moved at last. It was so obvious that this was real bitter heart-burning
+on her mother's part. Her hair was shaken loose on one side--her sleeve
+torn.
+
+"Oh, my goodness! my goodness!" Mrs Dale gasped at last, throwing
+herself in a chair and sobbing bitterly. "I shall never lift my head
+again. I shall never lift my head again."
+
+Suzanne looked at her somewhat sorrowfully. "I'm sorry, mama," she said,
+"but you have brought it all on yourself. I needn't call him now. He
+will call me and I will answer. It all comes from your trying to rule me
+in your way. You won't realize that I am a personality also, quite as
+much as you are. I have my life to live. It is mine to do with as I
+please. You are not going to prevent me in the long run. You might just
+as well stop fighting with me now. I don't want to quarrel with you. I
+don't want to argue, but I am a grown woman, mama. Why don't you listen
+to reason? Why don't you let me show you how I feel about this? Two
+people loving each other have a right to be with each other. It isn't
+anyone else's concern."
+
+"Anyone else's concern! Anyone else's concern!" replied her mother
+viciously. "What nonsense. What silly, love-sick drivel. If you had any
+idea of life, of how the world is organized, you would laugh at
+yourself. Ten years from now, one year even, you will begin to see what
+a terrible mistake you are trying to make. You will scarcely believe
+that you could have done or said what you are doing and saying now.
+Anyone else's concern! Oh, Merciful Heaven! Will nothing put even a
+suggestion of the wild, foolish, reckless character of the thing you are
+trying to do in your mind?"
+
+"But I love him, mama," said Suzanne.
+
+"Love! Love! You talk about love," said her mother bitterly and
+hysterically. "What do you know about it? Do you think he can be loving
+you when he wants to come here and take you out of a good home and a
+virtuous social condition and wreck your life, and bring you down into
+the mire, your life and mine, and that of your sisters and brother for
+ever and ever? What does he know of love? What do you? Think of Adele
+and Ninette and Kinroy. Have you no regard for them? Where is your love
+for me and for them? Oh, I have been so afraid that Kinroy might hear
+something of this. He would go and kill him. I know he would. I couldn't
+prevent it. Oh, the shame, the scandal, the wreck, it would involve us
+all in. Have you no conscience, Suzanne; no heart?"
+
+Suzanne stared before her calmly. The thought of Kinroy moved her a
+little. He might kill Eugene--she couldn't tell--he was a courageous
+boy. Still there was no need for any killing, or exposure, or excitement
+of any kind if her mother would only behave herself. What difference did
+it make to her, or Kinroy, or anybody anywhere what she did? Why
+couldn't she if she wanted to? The risk was on her head. She was
+willing. She couldn't see what harm it would do.
+
+She expressed this thought to her mother once who answered in an
+impassioned plea for her to look at the facts. "How many evil women of
+the kind and character you would like to make of yourself, do you know?
+How many would you like to know? How many do you suppose there are in
+good society? Look at this situation from Mrs. Witla's point of view.
+How would you like to be in her place? How would you like to be in mine?
+Suppose you were Mrs. Witla and Mrs. Witla were the other woman. What
+then?"
+
+"I would let him go," said Suzanne.
+
+"Yes! Yes! Yes! You would let him go. You might, but how would you feel?
+How would anyone feel? Can't you see the shame in all this, the
+disgrace? Have you no comprehension at all? No feeling?"
+
+"Oh, how you talk, mama. How silly you talk. You don't know the facts.
+Mrs. Witla doesn't love him any more. She told me so. She has written me
+so. I had the letter and gave it back to Eugene. He doesn't care for
+her. She knows it. She knows he cares for me. What difference does it
+make if she doesn't love him. He's entitled to love somebody. Now I love
+him. I want him. He wants me. Why shouldn't we have each other?"
+
+In spite of all her threats, Mrs. Dale was not without subsidiary
+thoughts of what any public move on her part would certainly, not
+probably, but immediately involve. Eugene was well known. To kill him,
+which was really very far from her thoughts, in any save a very secret
+way, would create a tremendous sensation and involve no end of
+examination, discussion, excited publicity. To expose him to either
+Colfax or Winfield meant in reality exposing Suzanne to them, and
+possibly to members of her own social set, for these men were of it, and
+might talk. Eugene's resignation would cause comment. If he left,
+Suzanne might run away with him--then what? There was the thought on her
+part that the least discussion or whisper of this to anybody might
+produce the most disastrous results. What capital the so-called "Yellow"
+newspapers would make out of a story of this character. How they would
+gloat over the details. It was a most terrible and dangerous situation,
+and yet it was plain that something had to be done and that immediately.
+What?
+
+In this crisis it occurred to her that several things might be done and
+that without great danger of irremediable consequences if she could only
+have a little time in which Suzanne would promise to remain quiescent
+and do so. If she could get her to say that she would do nothing for ten
+days or five days all might be well for them. She could go to see
+Angela, Eugene, Mr. Colfax, if necessary. To leave Suzanne in order to
+go on these various errands, she had to obtain Suzanne's word, which she
+knew she could respect absolutely, that she would make no move of any
+kind until the time was up. Under pretense that Suzanne herself needed
+time to think, or should take it, she pleaded and pleaded until finally
+the girl, on condition that she be allowed to phone to Eugene and state
+how things stood, consented. Eugene had called her up on the second day
+after the quarrel began and had been informed by the butler, at
+Mrs. Dale's request, that she was out of town. He called the second day,
+and got the same answer. He wrote to her and Mrs. Dale hid the letter,
+but on the fourth day, Suzanne called him up and explained. The moment
+she did so, he was sorry that she had been so hasty in telling her
+mother, terribly so, but there was nothing to be done now save to stand
+by his guns. He was ready in a grim way to rise or fall so long as, in
+doing either, he should obtain his heart's desire.
+
+"Shall I come and help you argue?" he asked.
+
+"No, not for five days. I have given my word."
+
+"Shall I see you?"
+
+"No, not for five days, Eugene."
+
+"Mayn't I even call you up?"
+
+"No, not for five days. After that, yes."
+
+"All right, Flower Face--Divine Fire. I'll obey. I'm yours to command.
+But, oh, sweet, it's a long time."
+
+"I know, but it will pass."
+
+"And you won't change?"
+
+"No."
+
+"They can't make you?"
+
+"No, you know they can't, dearest. Why do you ask?"
+
+"Oh, I can't help feeling a little fearful, sweet. You are so young, so
+new to love."
+
+"I won't change. I won't change. I don't need to swear. I won't."
+
+"Very well, then, Myrtle Bloom."
+
+She hung up the receiver, and Mrs. Dale knew now that her greatest
+struggle was before her.
+
+Her several contemplated moves consisted first, in going to see
+Mrs. Witla, unknown to Suzanne and Eugene, learning what she knew of how
+things were and what she would advise.
+
+This really did no good, unless the fact that it fomented anew the rage
+and grief of Angela, and gave Mrs. Dale additional material wherewith to
+belabor Eugene, could be said to be of advantage. Angela, who had been
+arguing and pleading with Eugene all this time, endeavoring by one
+thought and another to awaken him to a sense of the enormity of the
+offense he was contemplating, was practically in despair. She had
+reached the point where she had become rather savage again, and he also.
+In spite of her condition, in spite of all she could say, he was cold
+and bitter, so insistent that he was through with the old order that he
+made her angry. Instead of leaving him, as she might have done, trusting
+to time to alter his attitude, or to teach her the wisdom of releasing
+him entirely, she preferred to cling to him, for there was still
+affection left. She was used to him, he was the father of her coming
+child, unwelcome as it was. He represented her social position to her,
+her station in the world. Why should she leave him? Then, too, there was
+this fear of the outcome, which would come over her like a child. She
+might die. What would become of the child?
+
+"You know, Mrs. Dale," she said at one point significantly, "I don't
+hold Suzanne absolutely guiltless. She is old enough to know better. She
+has been out in society long enough to know that a married man is sacred
+property to another woman."
+
+"I know, I know," replied Mrs. Dale resentfully, but cautiously, "but
+Suzanne is so young. You really don't know how much of a child she is.
+And she has this silly, idealistic, emotional disposition. I suspected
+something of it, but I did not know it was so strong. I'm sure I don't
+know where she gets it. Her father was most practical. But she was all
+right until your husband persuaded her."
+
+"That may be all true," went on Angela, "but she is not guiltless. I
+know Eugene. He is weak, but he will not follow where he is not led, and
+no girl need be tempted unless she wants to."
+
+"Suzanne is so young," again pleaded Mrs. Dale.
+
+"Well, I'm sure if she knew Mr. Witla's record accurately," went on
+Angela foolishly, "she wouldn't want him. I have written her. She ought
+to know. He isn't honest and he isn't moral as this thing shows. If this
+were the first time he had fallen in love with another woman, I could
+forgive him, but it isn't. He did something quite as bad six or seven
+years ago, and only two years before that there was another woman. He
+wouldn't be faithful to Suzanne if he had her. It would be a case of
+blazing affection for a little while, and then he would tire and cast
+her aside. Why, you can tell what sort of a man he is when he would
+propose to me, as he did here, that I should let him maintain a separate
+establishment for Suzanne and say nothing of it. The idea!"
+
+Mrs. Dale clicked her lips significantly. She considered Angela foolish
+for talking in this way, but it could not be helped now. Possibly Eugene
+had made a mistake in marrying her. This did not excuse him, however, in
+her eyes for wanting to take Suzanne under the conditions he proposed.
+If he were free, it would be an entirely different matter. His standing,
+his mind, his manners, were not objectionable, though he was not to the
+manner born.
+
+Mrs. Dale went away toward evening, greatly nonplussed by what she had
+seen and heard, but convinced that no possible good could come of the
+situation. Angela would never give him a divorce. Eugene was not a fit
+man morally for her daughter, anyhow. There was great scandal on the
+verge of exposure here in which her beloved daughter would be
+irretrievably smirched. In her desperation, she decided, if she could do
+no better, she would try to dissuade Eugene from seeing Suzanne until he
+could obtain a divorce, in which case, to avoid something worse, she
+would agree to a marriage, but this was only to be a lip promise. The
+one thing she wanted to do was to get Suzanne to give him up entirely.
+If Suzanne could be spirited away, or dissuaded from throwing herself
+away on Eugene, that would be the thing. Still, she proposed to see what
+a conversation with Eugene would do.
+
+The next morning as he was sitting in his office wondering what the
+delay of five days portended, and what Suzanne was doing, as well as
+trying to fix his mind on the multitudinous details which required his
+constant attention, and were now being rather markedly neglected, the
+card of Mrs. Emily Dale was laid on his table, and a few moments later,
+after his secretary had been dismissed, and word given that no one else
+was to be allowed to enter, Mrs. Dale was shown in.
+
+She was pale and weary, but exquisitely dressed in a greenish blue silk
+and picture hat of black straw and feathers. She looked quite young and
+handsome herself, not too old for Eugene, and indeed once she had
+fancied he might well fall in love with her. What her thoughts were at
+that time, she was not now willing to recall, for they had involved the
+probable desertion or divorce, or death of Angela, and Eugene's
+passionate infatuation for her. All that was over now, of course, and in
+the excitement and distress, almost completely obliterated. Eugene had
+not forgotten that he had had similar sensations or imaginations at the
+time, and that Mrs. Dale had always drawn to him in a sympathetic and
+friendly way. Here she was, though, this morning coming upon a desperate
+mission no doubt, and he would have to contend with her as best he
+could.
+
+The conversation opened by his looking into her set face as she
+approached and smiling blandly, though it was something of an effort.
+"Well," he said, in quite a business like way, "what can I do for you?"
+
+"You villain," she exclaimed melodramatically, "my daughter has told me
+all."
+
+"Yes, Suzanne phoned me that she told you," he replied, in a
+conciliatory tone.
+
+"Yes," she said in a low, tense voice, "and I ought to kill you where
+you stand. To think that I should have ever harbored such a monster as
+you in my home and near my dear, innocent daughter. It seems incredible
+now. I can't believe it. That you should dare. And you with a dear,
+sweet wife at home, sick and in the condition she is in. I should think
+if you had any manhood at all any sense of shame! When I think of that
+poor, dear little woman, and what you have been doing, or trying to
+do--if it weren't for the scandal you would never leave this office
+alive."
+
+"Oh, bother! Don't talk rot, Mrs. Dale," said Eugene quietly, though
+irritably. He did not care for her melodramatic attitude. "The dear,
+darling little woman you speak of is not as badly off as you think, and
+I don't think she needs as much of your sympathy as you are so anxious
+to give. She is pretty well able to take care of herself, sick as she
+is. As for killing me, you or anyone else, well that wouldn't be such a
+bad idea. I'm not so much in love with life. This is not fifty years
+ago, though, but the nineteenth century, and this is New York City. I
+love Suzanne. She loves me. We want each other desperately. Now, an
+arrangement can be made which will not interfere with you in any way,
+and which will adjust things for us. Suzanne is anxious to make that
+arrangement. It is as much her proposition as it is mine. Why should you
+be so vastly disturbed? You know a great deal about life."
+
+"Why should I be disturbed? Why should I? Can you sit in this office,
+you a man in charge of all this vast public work, and ask me in cold
+blood why I should be disturbed? And my daughter's very life at stake.
+Why should I be disturbed and my daughter only out of her short dresses
+a little while ago and practically innocent of the world. You dare to
+tell me that she proposed! Oh, you impervious scoundrel! To think I
+could be so mistaken in any human being. You, with your bland manners
+and your inconsistent talk of happy family life. I might have
+understood, though, when I saw you so often without your wife. I should
+have known. I did, God help me! but I didn't act upon it. I was taken by
+your bland, gentlemanly attitude. I don't blame poor, dear little
+Suzanne. I blame you, you utterly deceiving villain and myself for being
+so silly. I am being justly rewarded, however."
+
+Eugene merely looked at her and drummed with his fingers.
+
+"But I did not come here to bandy words with you," she went on. "I came
+to say that you must never see my daughter again, or speak of her, or
+appear where she might chance to be, though she won't be where you may
+appear, if I have my way, for you won't have a chance to appear anywhere
+in decent society very much longer. I shall go, unless you agree here
+and now never to see or communicate with her any more, to Mr. Colfax,
+whom I know personally, as you are aware, and lay the whole matter
+before him. I'm sure with what I know now of your record, and what you
+have attempted to do in connection with my daughter, and the condition
+of your wife, that he will not require your services very much longer. I
+shall go to Mr. Winfield, who is also an old friend, and lay the matter
+before him. Privately you will be drummed out of society and my daughter
+will be none the worse for it. She is so very young that when the facts
+are known, you are the only one who will bear the odium of this. Your
+wife has given me your wretched record only yesterday. You would like to
+make my Suzanne your fourth or fifth. Well, you will not. I will show
+you something you have not previously known. You are dealing with a
+desperate mother. Defy me if you dare. I demand that you write your
+farewell to Suzanne here and now, and let me take it to her."
+
+Eugene smiled sardonically. Mrs. Dale's reference to Angela made him
+bitter. She had been there and Angela had talked of him--his past to
+her. What a mean thing to do. After all, Angela was his wife. Only the
+morning before, she had been appealing to him on the grounds of love,
+and she had not told him of Mrs. Dale's visit. Love! Love! What sort of
+love was this? He had done enough for her to make her generous in a
+crisis like this, even if she did not want to be.
+
+"Write you a statement of release to Suzanne?" he observed, his lips
+curling--"how silly. Of course, I won't. And as for your threat to run
+to Mr. Colfax, I have heard that before from Mrs. Witla. There is the
+door. His office is twelve flights down. I'll call a boy, if you wish.
+You tell it to Mr. Colfax and see how much farther it goes before you
+are much older. Run to Mr. Winfield also. A lot I care about him or
+Mr. Colfax. If you want a grand, interesting discussion of this thing,
+just begin. It will go far and wide, I assure you. I love your daughter.
+I'm desperate about her. I'm literally crazy about her"--he got up--"she
+loves me, or I think she does. Anyhow, I'm banking all on that thought.
+My life from the point of view of affection has been a failure. I have
+never really been in love before, but I am crazy about Suzanne Dale. I
+am wild about her. If you had any sympathy for an unhappy, sympathetic,
+emotional mortal, who has never yet been satisfied in a woman, you would
+give her to me. I love her. I love her. By God!"--he banged the desk
+with his fist--"I will do anything for her. If she will come to me,
+Colfax can have his position, Winfield can have his Blue Sea
+Corporation. You can have her money, if she wants to give it to you. I
+can make a living abroad by my art, and I will. Other Americans have
+done it before me. I love her! I love her! Do you hear me? I love her,
+and what's more, I'm going to have her! You can't stop me. You haven't
+the brains; you haven't the strength; you haven't the resources to match
+that girl. She's brighter than you are. She's stronger, she's finer.
+She's finer than the whole current day conception of society and life.
+She loves me and she wants to give herself to me, willingly, freely,
+joyously. Match that in your petty society circles if you can. Society!
+You say you will have me drummed out of it, will you? A lot I care about
+your society. Hacks, mental light weights, money grubbers, gamblers,
+thieves, leeches--a fine lot! To see you sitting there and talking to me
+with your grand air makes me laugh. A lot I care for you. I was thinking
+of another kind of woman when I met you, not a narrow, conventional
+fool. I thought I saw one in you. I did, didn't I--not? You are like all
+the rest, a narrow, petty slavish follower after fashion and convention.
+Well," he snapped his fingers in her face, "go on and do your worst. I
+will get Suzanne in the long run. She will come to me. She will dominate
+you. Run to Colfax! Run to Winfield! I will get her just the same. She's
+mine. She belongs to me. She is big enough for me. The Gods have given
+her to me, and I will have her if I have to smash you and your home and
+myself and everyone else connected with me. I'll have her! I'll have
+her! She is mine! She is mine!" He lifted a tense hand. "Now you run and
+do anything you want to. Thank God, I've found one woman who knows how
+to live and love. She's mine!"
+
+Mrs. Dale stared at him in amazement, scarcely believing her ears. Was
+he crazy? Was he really so much in love? Had Suzanne turned his brain?
+What an astonishing thing. She had never seen him anything like
+this--never imagined him capable of anything like it. He was always so
+quiet, smiling, bland, witty. Here he was dramatic, impassioned, fiery,
+hungry. There was a terrible light in his eyes and he was desperate. He
+must be in love.
+
+"Oh, why will you do this to me?" she whimpered all at once. The terror
+of his mood conveying itself to her for the moment, and arousing a
+sympathy which she had not previously felt. "Why will you come into my
+home and attempt to destroy it? There are lots of women who will love
+you. There are lots more suited to your years and temperament than
+Suzanne. She doesn't understand you. She doesn't understand herself. She
+is just young, and foolish and hypnotized. You have hypnotized her. Oh,
+why will you do this to me? You are so much older than her, so much more
+schooled in life. Why not give her up? I don't want to go to Mr. Colfax.
+I don't want to speak to Mr. Winfield. I will, if I have to, but I don't
+want to. I have always thought so well of you. I know you are not an
+ordinary man. Restore my respect for you, my confidence in you. I can
+forgive, if I can't forget. You may not be happily married. I am sorry
+for you. I don't want to do anything desperate. I only want to save
+poor, little Suzanne. Oh, please! please! I love her so. I don't think
+you understand how I feel. You may be in love, but you ought to be
+willing to consider others. True love would. I know that she is hard and
+wilful and desperate now, but she will change if you will help her. Why,
+if you really love her, if you have any sympathy for me or regard for
+her future, or your own, you will renounce your schemes and release her.
+Tell her you made a mistake. Write to her now. Tell her you can't do
+this and not socially ruin her and me and yourself, and so you won't do
+it. Tell her that you have decided to wait until time has made you a
+free man, if that is to be, and then let her have a chance of seeing if
+she will not be happy in a normal life. You don't want to ruin her at
+this age, do you? She is so young, so innocent. Oh, if you have any
+judgment of life at all, any regard, any consideration, anything, I beg
+of you; I beg as her mother, for I love her. Oh!" Tears came into her
+eyes again and she cried weakly in her handkerchief.
+
+Eugene stared at her. What was he doing? Where was he going? Was he
+really as bad as he appeared to be here? Was he possessed? Was he really
+so hard-hearted? Through her grief and Angela's and the threats
+concerning Colfax and Winfield, he caught a glimpse of the real heart of
+the situation. It was as if there had been a great flash of lightning
+illuminating a black landscape. He saw sympathetically, sorrow, folly, a
+number of things that were involved, and then the next moment, it was
+gone. Suzanne's face came back, smooth, classic, chiseled, perfectly
+modeled, her beauty like a tightened bow; her eyes, her lips, her hair,
+the gaiety and buoyancy of her motions and her smile. Give her up! Give
+up Suzanne and that dream of the studio, and of joyous, continuous,
+delicious companionship? Did Suzanne want him to? What had she said over
+the phone? No! No! No! Quit now, and her clinging to him. No! No! No!
+Never!! He would fight first. He would go down fighting. Never! Never!
+Never!
+
+His brain seethed.
+
+"I can't do it," he said, getting up again, for he had sat down after
+his previous tirade. "I can't do it. You are asking something that is
+utterly impossible. It can never be done. God help me, I'm insane, I'm
+wild over her. Go and do anything you want to, but I must have her and I
+will. She's mine! She's mine! She's mine!"
+
+His thin, lean hands clenched and he clicked his teeth.
+
+"Mine, mine, mine!" he muttered, and one would have thought him a
+villain in a cheap melodrama.
+
+Mrs. Dale shook her head.
+
+"God help us both!" she said. "You shall never, never have her. You are
+not worthy of her. You are not right in your mind. I will fight you with
+all the means in my power. I am desperate! I am wealthy. I know how to
+fight. You shall not have her. Now we will see which will win." She rose
+to go and Eugene followed her.
+
+"Go ahead," he said calmly, "but in the end you lose. Suzanne comes to
+me. I know it. I feel it. I may lose many other things, but I get her.
+She's mine."
+
+"Oh," sighed Mrs. Dale wearily, half believing him and moving towards
+the door. "Is this your last word?"
+
+"It is positively."
+
+"Then I must be going."
+
+"Good-bye," he said solemnly.
+
+"Good-bye," she answered, white faced, her eyes staring.
+
+She went out and Eugene took up the telephone; but he remembered that
+Suzanne had warned him not to call, but to depend on her. So he put it
+down again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+The fire and pathos of Mrs. Dale's appeal should have given Eugene
+pause. He thought once of going after her and making a further appeal,
+saying that he would try and get a divorce eventually and marry Suzanne,
+but he remembered that peculiar insistency of Suzanne on the fact that
+she did not want to get married. Somehow, somewhere, somewhy, she had
+formulated this peculiar ideal or attitude, which whatever the world
+might think of it, was possible of execution, providing he and she were
+tactful enough. It was not such a wild thing for two people to want to
+come together in this way, if they chose, he thought. Why was it? Heaven
+could witness there were enough illicit and peculiar relationships in
+this world to prevent society from becoming excited about one more,
+particularly when it was to be conducted in so circumspect and subtle a
+way. He and Suzanne did not intend to blazon their relationship to the
+world. As a distinguished artist, not active, but acknowledged and
+accomplished, he was entitled to a studio life. He and Suzanne could
+meet there. Nothing would be thought of it. Why had she insisted on
+telling her mother? It could all have been done without that. There was
+another peculiar ideal of hers, her determination to tell the truth
+under all circumstances. And yet she had really not told it. She had
+deceived her mother a long time about him simply by saying nothing. Was
+this some untoward trick of fate's, merely devised to harm him? Surely
+not. And yet Suzanne's headstrong determination seemed almost a fatal
+mistake now. He sat down brooding over it. Was this a terrific blunder?
+Would he be sorry? All his life was in the balance. Should he turn back?
+
+No! No! No! Never! It was not to be. He must go on. He must! He must! So
+he brooded.
+
+The next of Mrs. Dale's resources was not quite so unavailing as the
+others, though it was almost so. She had sent for Dr. Latson Woolley,
+her family physician--an old school practitioner of great repute, of
+rigid honor and rather Christian principles himself, but also of a wide
+intellectual and moral discernment, so far as others were concerned.
+
+"Well, Mrs. Dale," he observed, when he was ushered into her presence in
+the library on the ground floor, and extending his hand cordially,
+though wearily, "what can I do for you this morning?"
+
+"Oh, Dr. Woolley," she began directly, "I am in so much trouble. It
+isn't a case of sickness. I wish it were. It is something so much worse.
+I have sent for you because I know I can rely on your judgment and
+sympathy. It concerns my daughter, Suzanne."
+
+"Yes, yes," he grunted, in a rather crusty voice, for his vocal cords
+were old, and his eyes looked out from under shaggy, gray eyebrows which
+somehow bespoke a world of silent observation. "What's the matter with
+her? What has she done now that she ought not to do?"
+
+"Oh, doctor," exclaimed Mrs. Dale nervously, for the experiences of the
+last few days had almost completely dispelled her normal composure, "I
+don't know how to tell you, really. I don't know how to begin. Suzanne,
+my dear precious Suzanne, in whom I have placed so much faith and
+reliance has, has----"
+
+"Well, tell me," interrupted Dr. Woolley laconically.
+
+When she had told him the whole story, and answered some of his incisive
+questions, he said:
+
+"Well, I am thinking you have a good deal to be grateful for. She might
+have yielded without your knowledge and told you afterwards--or not at
+all."
+
+"Not at all. Oh, doctor! My Suzanne!"
+
+"Mrs. Dale, I looked after you and your mother before you and Suzanne. I
+know something about human nature and your family characteristics. Your
+husband was a very determined man, as you will remember. Suzanne may
+have some of his traits in her. She is a very young girl, you want to
+remember, very robust and vigorous. How old is this Witla man?"
+
+"About thirty-eight or nine, doctor."
+
+"Um! I suspected as much. The fatal age. It's a wonder you came through
+that period as safely as you did. You're nearly forty, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes, doctor, but you're the only one that knows it."
+
+"I know, I know. It's the fatal age. You say he is in charge of the
+United Magazines Corporation. I have probably heard of him. I know of
+Mr. Colfax of that company. Is he very emotional in his temperament?"
+
+"I had never thought so before this."
+
+"Well, he probably is. Thirty-eight to thirty-nine and eighteen or
+nineteen--bad combination. Where is Suzanne?"
+
+"Upstairs in her room, I fancy."
+
+"It might not be a bad thing if I talked to her myself a little, though
+I don't believe it will do any good."
+
+Mrs. Dale disappeared and was gone for nearly three-quarters of an hour.
+Suzanne was stubborn, irritable, and to all preliminary entreaties
+insisted that she would not. Why should her mother call in outsiders,
+particularly Dr. Woolley, whom she knew and liked. She suspected at once
+when her mother said Dr. Woolley wanted to see her that it had something
+to do with her case, and demanded to know why. Finally, after much
+pleading, she consented to come down, though it was with the intention
+of showing her mother how ridiculous all her excitement was.
+
+The old doctor who had been meditating upon the inexplicable tangle,
+chemical and physical, of life--the blowing hither and thither of
+diseases, affections, emotions and hates of all kinds, looked up
+quizzically as Suzanne entered.
+
+"Well, Suzanne," he said genially, rising and walking slowly toward her,
+"I'm glad to see you again. How are you this morning?"
+
+"Pretty well, doctor, how are you?"
+
+"Oh, as you see, as you see, a little older and a little fussier,
+Suzanne, making other people's troubles my own. Your mother tells me you
+have fallen in love. That's an interesting thing to do, isn't it?"
+
+"You know, doctor," said Suzanne defiantly, "I told mama that I don't
+care to discuss this, and I don't think she has any right to try to make
+me. I don't want to and I won't. I think it is all in rather poor
+taste."
+
+"Poor taste, Suzanne?" asked Mrs. Dale. "Do you call our discussion of
+what you want to do poor taste, when the world will think that what you
+want to do is terrible when you do it?"
+
+"I told you, mama, that I was not coming down here to discuss this
+thing, and I'm not!" said Suzanne, turning to her mother and ignoring
+Dr. Woolley. "I'm not going to stay. I don't want to offend Dr. Woolley,
+but I'm not going to stay and have you argue this all over again."
+
+She turned to go.
+
+"There, there, Mrs. Dale, don't interrupt," observed Dr. Woolley,
+holding Suzanne by the very tone of his voice. "I think myself that very
+little is to be gained by argument. Suzanne is convinced that what she
+is planning to do is to her best interest. It may be. We can't always
+tell. I think the best thing that could be discussed, if anything at all
+in this matter can be discussed, is the matter of time. It is my opinion
+that before doing this thing that Suzanne wants to do, and which may be
+all right, for all I know, it would be best if she would take a little
+time. I know nothing of Mr. Witla. He may be a most able and worthy man.
+Suzanne ought to give herself a little time to think, though. I should
+say three months, or six months. A great many after effects hang on this
+decision, as you know," he said, turning to Suzanne. "It may involve
+responsibilities you are not quite ready to shoulder. You are only
+eighteen or nineteen, you know. You might have to give up dancing and
+society, and travel, and a great many things, and devote yourself to
+being a mother and ministering to your husband's needs. You expect to
+live with him permanently, don't you?"
+
+"I don't want to discuss this, Dr. Woolley."
+
+"But you do expect that, don't you?"
+
+"Only as long as we love each other."
+
+"Um, well, you might love him for some little time yet. You rather
+expect to do that, don't you?"
+
+"Why, yes, but what is the good of this, anyhow? My mind is made up."
+
+"Just the matter of thinking," said Dr. Woolley, very soothingly and in
+a voice which disarmed Suzanne and held her. "Just a little time in
+which to be absolutely sure. Your mother is anxious not to have you do
+it at all. You, as I understand it, want to do this thing right away.
+Your mother loves you, and at bottom, in spite of this little
+difference, I know you love her. It just occurred to me that for the
+sake of good feeling all around, you might like to strike a balance. You
+might be willing to take, say six months, or a year and think about it.
+Mr. Witla would probably not object. You won't be any the less
+delightful to him at the end of that time, and as for your mother, she
+would feel a great deal better if she thought that, after all, what you
+decided to do you had done after mature deliberation."
+
+"Yes," exclaimed Mrs. Dale, impulsively, "do take time to think,
+Suzanne. A year won't hurt you."
+
+"No," said Suzanne unguardedly. "It is all a matter of whether I want to
+or not. I don't want to."
+
+"Precisely. Still this is something you might take into consideration.
+The situation from all outside points of view is serious. I haven't said
+so, but I feel that you would be making a great mistake. Still, that is
+only my opinion. You are entitled to yours. I know how you feel about
+it, but the public is not likely to feel quite the same. The public is a
+wearisome thing, Suzanne, but we have to take it into consideration."
+
+Suzanne stared stubbornly and wearily at her tormentors. Their logic did
+not appeal to her at all. She was thinking of Eugene and her plan. It
+could be worked. What did she care about the world? During all this
+talk, she drew nearer and nearer the door and finally opened it.
+
+"Well, that is all," said Dr. Woolley, when he saw she was determined to
+go. "Good morning, Suzanne. I am glad to have seen you again."
+
+"Good morning, Dr. Woolley," she replied.
+
+She went out and Mrs. Dale wrung her hands. "I wish I knew what was to
+be done," she exclaimed, gazing at her counselor.
+
+Dr. Woolley brooded over the folly of undesired human counsel.
+
+"There is no need for excitement," he observed after a time. "It is
+obvious to me that if she is handled rightly, she will wait. She is in a
+state of high strung opposition and emotion for some reason at present.
+You have driven her too hard. Relax. Let her think this thing out for
+herself. Counsel for delay, but don't irritate. You cannot control her
+by driving. She has too stern a will. Tears won't help. Emotion seems a
+little silly to her. Ask her to think, or better yet, let her think and
+plead only for delay. If you could get her away for two or three weeks
+or months, off by herself undisturbed by your pleadings and uninfluenced
+by his--if she would ask him of her own accord to let her alone for that
+time, all will be well. I don't think she will ever go to him. She
+thinks she will, but I have the feeling that she won't. However, be
+calm. If you can, get her to go away."
+
+"Would it be possible to lock her up in some sanatorium or asylum,
+doctor, until she has had time to think?"
+
+"All things are possible, but I should say it would be the most
+inadvisable thing you could do. Force accomplishes nothing in these
+cases."
+
+"I know, but suppose she won't listen to reason?"
+
+"You really haven't come to that bridge yet. You haven't talked calmly
+to her yet. You are quarreling with her. There is very little in that.
+You will simply grow further and further apart."
+
+"How practical you are, doctor," observed Mrs. Dale, in a mollified and
+complimentary vein.
+
+"Not practical, but intuitional. If I were practical, I would never have
+taken up medicine."
+
+He walked to the door, his old body sinking in somewhat upon itself. His
+old, gray eyes twinkled slightly as he turned.
+
+"You were in love once, Mrs. Dale," he said.
+
+"Yes," she replied.
+
+"You remember how you felt then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Be reasonable. Remember your own sensations--your own attitude. You
+probably weren't crossed in your affair. She is. She has made a mistake.
+Be patient. Be calm. We want to stop it and no doubt can. Do unto others
+as you would be done by."
+
+He ambled shufflingly across the piazza and down the wide steps to his
+car.
+
+"Mama," she said, when after Dr. Woolley had gone her mother came to her
+room to see if she might not be in a mellower mood, and to plead with
+her further for delay, "it seems to me you are making a ridiculous mess
+of all this. Why should you go and tell Dr. Woolley about me! I will
+never forgive you for that. Mama, you have done something I never
+thought you would do. I thought you had more pride--more individuality."
+
+One should have seen Suzanne, in her spacious boudoir, her back to her
+oval mirrored dressing table, her face fronting her mother, to
+understand her fascination for Eugene. It was a lovely, sunny, many
+windowed chamber, and Suzanne in a white and blue morning dress was in
+charming accord with the gay atmosphere of the room.
+
+"Well, Suzanne, you know," she said, rather despondently, "I just
+couldn't help it. I had to go to someone. I am quite alone apart from
+you and Kinroy and the children"--she referred to Adele and Ninette as
+the children when talking to either Suzanne or Kinroy--"and I didn't
+want to say anything to them. You have been my only confidant up to now,
+and since you have turned against me----"
+
+"I haven't turned against you, mama."
+
+"Oh, yes you have. Let's not talk about it, Suzanne. You have broken my
+heart. You are killing me. I just had to go to someone. We have known
+Dr. Woolley so long. He is so good and kind."
+
+"Oh, I know, mama, but what good will it do? How can anything he might
+say help matters? He isn't going to change me. You're only telling it to
+somebody who oughtn't to know anything about it."
+
+"But I thought he might influence you," pleaded Mrs. Dale. "I thought
+you would listen to him. Oh, dear, oh, dear. I'm so tired of it all. I
+wish I were dead. I wish I had never lived to see this."
+
+"Now there you go, mama," said Suzanne confidently. "I can't see why you
+are so distressed about what I am going to do. It is my life that I am
+planning to arrange, not yours. I have to live my life, mama, not you."
+
+"Oh, yes, but it is just that that distresses me. What will it be after
+you do this--after you throw it away? Oh, if you could only see what you
+are contemplating doing--what a wretched thing it will be when it is all
+over with. You will never live with him--he is too old for you, too
+fickle, too insincere. He will not care for you after a little while,
+and then there you will be, unmarried, possibly with a child on your
+hands, a social outcast! Where will you go?"
+
+"Mama," said Suzanne calmly, her lips parted in a rosy, baby way, "I
+have thought of all this. I see how it is. But I think you and everybody
+else make too much ado about these things. You think of everything that
+could happen, but it doesn't all happen that way. People do these
+things, I'm sure, and nothing much is thought of it."
+
+"Yes, in books," put in Mrs. Dale. "I know where you get all this from.
+It's your reading."
+
+"Anyhow, I'm going to. I have made up my mind," added Suzanne. "I have
+decided that by September fifteenth I will go to Mr. Witla, and you
+might just as well make up your mind to it now." This was August tenth.
+
+"Suzanne," said her mother, staring at her, "I never imagined you could
+talk in this way to me. You will do nothing of the kind. How can you be
+so hard? I did not know that you had such a terrible will in you.
+Doesn't anything I have said about Adele and Ninette or Kinroy appeal to
+you? Have you no heart in you? Why don't you wait, as Dr. Woolley
+suggests, six months or a year? Why do you talk about jumping into this
+without giving yourself time to think? It is such a wild, rash
+experiment. You haven't thought anything about it, you haven't had
+time."
+
+"Oh, yes, I have, mama!" replied Suzanne. "I've thought a great deal
+about it. I'm fully convinced. I want to do it then because I told
+Eugene that I would not keep him waiting long; and I won't. I want to go
+to him. That will make a clear two months since we first talked of
+this."
+
+Mrs. Dale winced. She had no idea of yielding to her daughter, or
+letting her do this, but this definite conclusion as to the time brought
+matters finally to a head. Her daughter was out of her mind, that was
+all. It gave her not any too much time to turn round in. She must get
+Suzanne out of the city--out of the country, if possible, or lock her
+up, and she must do it without antagonizing her too much.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Mrs. Dale's next step in this struggle was to tell Kinroy, who wanted,
+of course, in a fit of boyish chivalry, to go immediately and kill
+Eugene. This was prevented by Mrs. Dale, who had more control over him
+than she had over Suzanne, pointing out to him what a terrifically
+destructive scandal would ensue and urging subtlety and patience. Kinroy
+had a sincere affection for his sisters, particularly Suzanne and Adele,
+and he wanted to protect all of them. He decided in a pompous, ultra
+chivalrous spirit that he must help his mother plan, and together they
+talked of chloroforming her some night, of carrying her thus, as a sick
+girl, in a private car to Maine or the Adirondacks or somewhere in
+Canada.
+
+It would be useless to follow all these strategic details in their
+order. There were, after the five days agreed upon by Suzanne, attempted
+phone messages by Eugene, which were frustrated by Kinroy, who was now
+fulfilling the role of private detective. Suzanne resolved to have
+Eugene summoned to the house for a discussion, but to this her mother
+objected. She felt that additional meetings would simply strengthen
+their bond of union. Kinroy wrote to Eugene of his own accord that he
+knew all, and that if he attempted to come near the place he would kill
+him at sight. Suzanne, finding herself blocked and detained by her
+mother, wrote Eugene a letter which Elizabeth, her maid, secretly
+conveyed to the mail for her, telling him how things stood. Her mother
+had told Dr. Woolley and Kinroy. She had decided that September
+fifteenth was the time she would leave home, unless their companionship
+was quietly sanctioned. Kinroy had threatened to kill him to her, but
+she did not think he had anything to fear. Kinroy was just excited. Her
+mother wanted her to go to Europe for six months and think it over, but
+this she would not do. She was not going to leave the city, and he need
+not fear, if he did not hear anything for a few days at a time, that
+anything was wrong with her. They must wait until the storm subsided a
+little. "I shall be here, but perhaps it is best for you not to try to
+see me just now. When the time comes, I will come to you, and if I get a
+chance, I will see you before."
+
+Eugene was both pained and surprised at the turn things had taken, but
+still encouraged to hope for the best by the attitude Suzanne took
+toward it all. Her courage strengthened him. She was calm, so
+purposeful! What a treasure she was!
+
+So began a series of daily love notes for a few days, until Suzanne
+advised him to cease. There were constant arguments between her, her
+mother and Kinroy. Because she was being so obviously frustrated, she
+began to grow bitter and hard, and short contradictory phrases passed
+between her and her mother, principally originating in Suzanne.
+
+"No, no, no!" was her constantly reiterated statement. "I won't do it!
+What of it? It's silly! Let me alone! I won't talk!" So it went.
+
+Mrs. Dale was planning hourly how to abduct her. Chloroforming and
+secret removal after the fashion she had in her mind was not so easy of
+accomplishment. It was such a desperate thing to do to Suzanne. She was
+afraid she might die under its influence. It could not be administered
+without a doctor. The servants would think it strange. She fancied there
+were whispered suspicions already. Finally she thought of pretending to
+agree with Suzanne, removing all barriers, and asking her to come to
+Albany to confer with her guardian, or rather the legal representative
+of the Marquardt Trust Company, which held her share of her father the
+late Westfield Dale's estate in trust for her, in regard to some
+property in western New York, which belonged to her. Mrs. Dale decided
+to pretend to be obliged to go to Albany in order to have Suzanne sign a
+waiver of right to any share in her mother's private estate, after
+which, supposedly, she would give Suzanne her freedom, having also
+disinherited her in her will. Suzanne, according to this scheme, was
+then to come back to New York and go her way and her mother was not to
+see her any more.
+
+To make this more effective, Kinroy was sent to tell her of her mother's
+plan and beg her for her own and her family's sake not to let the final
+separation come about. Mrs. Dale changed her manner. Kinroy acted his
+part so effectively that what with her mother's resigned look and
+indifferent method of address, Suzanne was partly deceived. She imagined
+her mother had experienced a complete change of heart and might be going
+to do what Kinroy said.
+
+"No," she replied to Kinroy's pleadings, "I don't care whether she cuts
+me off. I'll be very glad to sign the papers. If she wants me to go
+away, I'll go. I think she has acted very foolishly through all this,
+and so have you."
+
+"I wish you wouldn't let her do that," observed Kinroy, who was rather
+exulting over the satisfactory manner in which this bait was being
+swallowed. "Mama is broken hearted. She wants you to stay here, to wait
+six months or a year before you do anything at all, but if you won't,
+she's going to ask you to do this. I've tried to persuade her not to.
+I'd hate like anything to see you go. Won't you change your mind?"
+
+"I told you I wouldn't, Kinroy. Don't ask me."
+
+Kinroy went back to his mother and reported that Suzanne was stubborn as
+ever, but that the trick would in all probability work. She would go
+aboard the train thinking she was going to Albany. Once aboard, inside a
+closed car, she would scarcely suspect until the next morning, and then
+they would be far in the Adirondack Mountains.
+
+The scheme worked in part. Her mother, as had Kinroy, went through this
+prearranged scene as well as though she were on the stage. Suzanne
+fancied she saw her freedom near at hand. Only a travelling bag was
+packed, and Suzanne went willingly enough into the auto and the train,
+only stipulating one thing--that she be allowed to call up Eugene and
+explain. Both Kinroy and her mother objected, but, when finally she
+refused flatly to go without, they acceded. She called him up at the
+office--it was four o'clock in the afternoon, and they were leaving at
+five-thirty--and told him. He fancied at once it was a ruse, and told
+her so, but she thought not. Mrs. Dale had never lied to her before,
+neither had her brother. Their words were as bonds.
+
+"Eugene says this is a trap, mama," said Suzanne, turning from the phone
+to her mother, who was near by. "Is it?"
+
+"You know it isn't," replied her mother, lying unblushingly.
+
+"If it is, it will come to nothing," she replied, and Eugene heard her.
+He was strengthened into acquiescence by the tone of her voice. Surely
+she was a wonderful girl--a master of men and women in her way.
+
+"Very well, if you think it's all right," said Eugene; "but I'll be very
+lonely. I've been so already. I shall be more so, Flower Face, unless I
+see you soon. Oh, if the time were only up!"
+
+"It will be, Eugene," she replied, "in a very few days now. I'll be back
+Thursday, and then you can come down and see me."
+
+"Thursday afternoon?"
+
+"Yes. We're to be back Thursday morning."
+
+She finally hung up the receiver and they entered the automobile and an
+hour later the train.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+It was a Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec express, and it ran without
+stopping to Albany. By the time it was nearing the latter place Suzanne
+was going to bed--and because it was a private car--Mrs. Dale explained
+that the president of the road had lent it to her--no announcement of
+its arrival, which would have aroused Suzanne, was made by the porter.
+When it stopped there shortly after ten o'clock it was the last car at
+the south end of the train, and you could hear voices calling, but just
+what it was was not possible to say. Suzanne, who had already gone to
+bed, fancied it might be Poughkeepsie or some wayside station. Her
+mother's statement was that since they arrived so late, the car would be
+switched to a siding, and they would stay aboard until morning.
+Nevertheless, she and Kinroy were alert to prevent any untoward
+demonstration or decision on Suzanne's part, and so, as the train went
+on, she slept soundly until Burlington in the far northern part of
+Vermont was reached the next morning. When she awoke and saw that the
+train was still speeding on, she wondered vaguely but not clearly what
+it could mean. There were mountains about, or rather tall, pine-covered
+hills, mountain streams were passed on high trestles and sections of
+burned woodlands were passed where forest fires had left lonely, sad
+charred stretches of tree trunks towering high in the air. Suddenly it
+occurred to Suzanne that this was peculiar, and she came out of the bath
+to ask why.
+
+"Where are we, mama?" she asked. Mrs. Dale was leaning back in a
+comfortable willow chair reading, or pretending to read a book. Kinroy
+was out on the observation platform for a moment. He came back though
+shortly, for he was nervous as to what Suzanne would do when she
+discovered her whereabouts. A hamper of food had been put aboard the
+night before, unknown to Suzanne, and Mrs. Dale was going shortly to
+serve breakfast. She had not risked a maid on this journey.
+
+"I don't know," replied her mother indifferently, looking out at a
+stretch of burnt woods.
+
+"I thought we were to be in Albany a little after midnight?" said
+Suzanne.
+
+"So we were," replied Mrs. Dale, preparing to confess. Kinroy came back
+into the car.
+
+"Well, then," said Suzanne, pausing, looking first out of the windows
+and then fixedly at her mother. It came to her as she saw the unsettled,
+somewhat nervous expression in her mother's face and eyes and in
+Kinroy's that this was a trick and that she was being taken
+somewhere--where?--against her will.
+
+"This is a trick, mama," she said to her mother grandly. "You have lied
+to me--you and Kinroy. We are not going to Albany at all. Where are we
+going?"
+
+"I don't want to tell you now, Suzanne," replied Mrs. Dale quietly.
+"Have your bath and we'll talk about it afterwards. It doesn't matter.
+We're going up into Canada, if you want to know. We are nearly there
+now. You'll know fast enough when we get there."
+
+"Mama," replied Suzanne, "this is a despicable trick! You are going to
+be sorry for this. You have lied to me--you and Kinroy. I see it now. I
+might have known, but I didn't believe you would lie to me, mama. I
+can't do anything just now, I see that very plainly. But when the time
+comes, you are going to be sorry. You can't control me this way. You
+ought to know better. You yourself are going to take me back to New
+York." And she fixed her mother with a steady look which betokened a
+mastership which her mother felt nervously and wearily she might
+eventually be compelled to acknowledge.
+
+"Now, Suzanne, what's the use of talking that way?" pleaded Kinroy.
+"Mama is almost crazy, as it is. She couldn't think of any other way or
+thing to do."
+
+"You hush, Kinroy," replied Suzanne. "I don't care to talk to you. You
+have lied to me, and that is more than I ever did to you. Mama, I am
+astonished at you," she returned to her mother. "My mother lying to me!
+Very well, mama. You have things in your hands today. I will have them
+in mine later. You have taken just the wrong course. Now you wait and
+see."
+
+Mrs. Dale winced and quailed. This girl was the most unterrified,
+determined fighter she had ever known. She wondered where she got her
+courage--from her late husband, probably. She could actually feel the
+quietness, grit, lack of fear, which had grown up in her during the last
+few weeks under the provocation which antagonism had provided. "Please
+don't talk that way, Suzanne," she pleaded. "I have done it all for your
+own good. You know I have. Why will you torture me? You know I won't
+give you up to that man. I won't. I'll move heaven and earth first. I'll
+die in this struggle, but I won't give you up."
+
+"Then you'll die, mama, for I'm going to do what I said. You can take me
+to where this car stops, but you can't take me out of it. I'm going back
+to New York. Now, a lot you have accomplished, haven't you?"
+
+"Suzanne, I am convinced almost that you are out of your mind. You have
+almost driven me out of mine, but I am still sane enough to see what is
+right."
+
+"Mama, I don't propose to talk to you any more, or to Kinroy. You can
+take me back to New York, or you can leave me, but you will not get me
+out of this car. I am done with listening to nonsense and pretences. You
+have lied to me once. You will not get a chance to do it again."
+
+"I don't care, Suzanne," replied her mother, as the train sped swiftly
+along. "You have forced me to do this. It is your own attitude that is
+causing all the trouble. If you would be reasonable and take some time
+to think this all over, you would not be where you are now. I won't let
+you do this thing that you want to do. You can stay in the car if you
+wish, but you cannot be taken back to New York without money. I will
+speak to the station agent about that."
+
+Suzanne thought of this. She had no money, no clothes, other than those
+she had on. She was in a strange country and not so very used to
+travelling alone. She had really gone to very few places in times past
+by herself. It took the edge off her determination to resist, but she
+was not conquered by any means.
+
+"How are you going to get back?" asked her mother, after a time, when
+Suzanne paid no attention to her. "You have no money. Surely, Suzanne,
+you are not going to make a scene? I only want you to come up here for a
+few weeks so that you will have time to think away from that man. I
+don't want you to go to him on September the fifteenth. I just won't let
+you do that. Why won't you be reasonable? You can have a pleasant time
+up here. You like to ride. You are welcome to do that. I will ride with
+you. You can invite some of your friends up here, if you choose. I will
+send for your clothes. Only stay here a while and think over what you
+are going to do."
+
+Suzanne refused to talk. She was thinking what she could do. Eugene was
+back in New York. He would expect her Thursday.
+
+"Yes, Suzanne," put in Kinroy. "Why not take ma's advice? She's trying
+to do the best thing by you. This is a terrible thing you are trying to
+do. Why not listen to common sense and stay up here three or four
+months?"
+
+"Don't talk like a parrot, Kinroy! I'm hearing all this from mama."
+
+When her mother reproached her, she said: "Oh, hush, mama, I don't care
+to hear anything more. I won't do anything of the sort. You lied to me.
+You said you were going to Albany. You brought me out here under a
+pretence. Now you can take me back. I won't go to any lodge. I won't go
+anywhere, except to New York. You might just as well not argue with me."
+
+The train rolled on. Breakfast was served. The private car was switched
+to the tracks of the Canadian Pacific at Montreal. Her mother's pleas
+continued. Suzanne refused to eat. She sat and looked out of the window,
+meditating over this strange denouement. Where was Eugene? What was he
+doing? What would he think when she did not come back? She was not
+enraged at her mother. She was merely contemptuous of her. This trick
+irritated and disgusted her. She was not thinking of Eugene in any wild
+way, but merely that she would get back to him. She conceived of him
+much as she did of herself though her conception of her real self was
+still vague as strong, patient, resourceful, able to live without her a
+little while if he had to. She was eager to see him, but really more
+eager that he should see her if he wanted to. What a creature he must
+take her mother to be!
+
+By noon they had reached Juinata, by two o'clock they were fifty miles
+west of Quebec. At first, Suzanne thought she would not eat at all to
+spite her mother. Later she reasoned that that was silly and ate. She
+made it exceedingly unpleasant for them by her manner, and they realized
+that by bringing her away from New York they had merely transferred
+their troubles. Her spirit was not broken as yet. It filled the car with
+a disturbing vibration.
+
+"Suzanne," questioned her mother at one point, "won't you talk to me?
+Won't you see I'm trying to do this for your own good? I want to give
+you time to think. I really don't want to coerce you, but you must see."
+
+Suzanne merely stared out of the window at the green fields speeding by.
+
+"Suzanne! Don't you see this will never do? Can't you see how terrible
+it all is?"
+
+"Mama, I want you to let me alone. You have done what you thought was
+the right thing to do. Now let me alone. You lied to me, mama. I don't
+want to talk to you. I want you to take me back to New York. You have
+nothing else to do. Don't try to explain. You haven't any explanation."
+
+Mrs. Dale's spirit fairly raged, but it was impotent in the presence of
+this her daughter. She could do nothing.
+
+Still more hours, and at one small town Suzanne decided to get off, but
+both Mrs. Dale and Kinroy offered actual physical opposition. They felt
+intensely silly and ashamed, though, for they could not break the spirit
+of the girl. She ignored their minds--their mental attitude in the most
+contemptuous way. Mrs. Dale cried. Then her face hardened. Then she
+pleaded. Her daughter merely looked loftily away.
+
+At Three Rivers Suzanne stayed in the car and refused to move. Mrs. Dale
+pleaded, threatened to call aid, stated that she would charge her with
+insanity. It was all without avail. The car was uncoupled after the
+conductor had asked Mrs. Dale if she did not intend to leave it. She was
+beside herself, frantic with rage, shame, baffled opposition.
+
+"I think you are terrible!" she exclaimed to Suzanne. "You are a little
+demon. We will live in this car, then. We will see."
+
+She knew that this could not be, for the car was only leased for the
+outward trip and had to be returned the next day.
+
+The car was pushed on to a siding.
+
+"I beg of you, Suzanne. Please don't make a mockery of us. This is
+terrible. What will people think?"
+
+"I don't care what they think," said Suzanne.
+
+"But you can't stay here."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can!"
+
+"Come, get off, please do. We won't stay up here indefinitely. I'll take
+you back. Promise me to stay a month and I'll give you my solemn word
+I'll take you back at the end of that time. I'm getting sick of this. I
+can't stand it. Do what you like after that. Only stay a month now."
+
+"No, mama," replied Suzanne. "No, you won't. You lied to me. You're
+lying to me now, just as you did before."
+
+"I swear to you I'm not. I lied that once, but I was frantic. Oh,
+Suzanne, please, please. Be reasonable. Have some consideration. I will
+take you back, but wait for some clothes to arrive. We can't go this
+way."
+
+She sent Kinroy for the station master, to whom was explained the need
+of a carriage to take them to Mont Cecile and also for a doctor--this
+was Mrs. Dale's latest thought--to whom she proposed to accuse Suzanne
+of insanity. Help to remove her was to be called. She told this to
+Suzanne, who simply glared at her.
+
+"Get the doctor, mama," she said. "We will see if I have to go that way.
+But you will rue every step of this. You will be thoroughly sorry for
+every silly step you have taken."
+
+When the carriage arrived, Suzanne refused to get out. The country
+driver, a French habitant, reported its presence at the car. Kinroy
+tried to soothe his sister by saying that he would help straighten
+matters out if she would only go peacefully.
+
+"I'll tell you, Susie, if it isn't all arranged to suit you within a
+month, and you still want to go back, I'll send you the money. I have to
+go back tomorrow, or next day for ma, but I'll give you my word. In
+fact, I'll persuade mother to bring you back in two weeks. You know I
+never lied to you before. I never will again. Please come. Let's go over
+there. We can be comfortable, anyhow."
+
+Mrs. Dale had leased the lodge from the Cathcarts by phone. It was all
+furnished--ready to live in--even wood fires prepared for lighting in
+the fireplaces. It had hot and cold water controlled by a hot-water
+furnace system; acetylene gas, a supply of staples in the kitchen. The
+service to take care of it was to be called together by the caretaker,
+who could be reached by phone from the depot. Mrs. Dale had already
+communicated with him by the time the carriage arrived. The roads were
+so poor that the use of an automobile was impossible. The station agent,
+seeing a fat fee in sight, was most obliging.
+
+Suzanne listened to Kinroy, but she did not believe him. She did not
+believe anyone now, save Eugene, and he was nowhere near to advise her.
+Still, since she was without money and they were threatening to call a
+doctor, she thought it might be best perhaps to go peacefully. Her
+mother was most distracted. Her face was white and thin and nervous, and
+Kinroy was apparently strained to the breaking point.
+
+"Do you promise me faithfully," she asked her mother, who had begun her
+pleadings anew, corroborating Kinroy in a way, "that you will take me
+back to New York in two weeks if I promise to stay that long? This was
+still within the date in which she had promised to go to Witla, and as
+long as she got back by that time, she really did not care, provided she
+could write to her lover. It was a silly arbitrary thing for her mother
+to have done, but it could be endured. Her mother, seeing no reasonable
+way to obtain peace, promised. If she could only keep her there two
+weeks quietly, perhaps that would help. Suzanne could think here under
+different conditions. New York was so exciting. Out at this lodge all
+would be still. There was more argument, and, finally, Suzanne agreed to
+enter the hack, and they drove over toward Mont Cecile and the
+Cathcarts' Lodge, now vacant and lonely, which was known as
+"While-a-Way."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+The Cathcart Lodge, a long, two-story affair, half-way up a fine covered
+mountain slope, was one of those summer conveniences of the rich,
+situated just near enough to the primeval wilds to give one a sense of
+the unexplored and dangerous in raw nature, and yet near enough to the
+comforts of civilization, as represented by the cities of Quebec and
+Montreal, to make one feel secure in the possession of those material
+joys, otherwise so easily interrupted. It was full of great rooms
+tastefully furnished with simple summery things--willow chairs, box
+window-seats, structural book shelves, great open fireplaces, surmounted
+by handsome mantels, outward swinging leaded casements, settees,
+pillow-strewn rustic couches, great fur rugs and robes and things of
+that character. The walls were ornamented with trophies of the
+chase--antlers, raw fox skins, mounted loons and eagles, skins of bears
+and other animals. This year the Cathcarts were elsewhere, and the lodge
+was to be had by a woman of Mrs. Dale's standing for the asking.
+
+When they reached While-a-Way, the caretaker, Pierre, an old habitant of
+musty log-hut origin, who spoke broken English and was dressed in
+earth-brown khaki over Heaven knows what combination of clothes beneath,
+had lighted the fires and was bestirring himself about warming the house
+generally with the furnaces. His wife, a small, broad-skirted,
+solid-bodied woman, was in the kitchen preparing something to eat. There
+was plenty of meat to be had from the larder of the habitant himself, to
+say nothing of flour, butter, and the like. A girl to serve was called
+from the family of a neighboring trapper. She had worked in the lodge as
+maid to the Cathcarts. They settled down to make themselves comfortable,
+but the old discussion continued. There was no cessation to it, and
+through it all, actually, Suzanne was having her way.
+
+Meanwhile, Eugene back in New York was expecting word from Suzanne on
+Thursday, and none came. He called up the house only to learn that
+Mrs. Dale was out of the city and was not expected back soon. Friday
+came, and no word; and Saturday. He tried a registered letter "for
+personal delivery only, return signature demanded" but it came back
+marked "not there." Then he realized that his suspicions were correct
+and that Suzanne had fallen into a trap. He grew gloomy, fearful,
+impatient and nervous by turn, and all at the same time. He drummed on
+his desk at the office, tried almost in vain to fix his mind on the
+scores of details which were ever before him, wandered aimlessly about
+the streets at times, thinking. He was asked for his opinion on art
+plans, and books, and advertising and circulation propositions, but he
+could not fix his mind closely on what was being said.
+
+"The chief has certainly got something on his mind which is troubling
+him these days," said Carter Hayes, the advertising man, to the
+circulation head. "He's not himself. I don't believe he hears what I'm
+telling him."
+
+"I've noticed that," replied the latter. They were in the reception room
+outside Eugene's door, and strolled arm in arm down the richly carpeted
+hall to the elevator. "There's certainly something wrong. He ought to
+take a rest. He's trying to do too much."
+
+Hayes did not believe Eugene was trying to do too much. In the last four
+or five months it had been almost impossible to get near him. He came
+down at ten or ten-thirty in the morning, left frequently at two and
+three, had lunch engagements which had nothing to do with office work,
+and at night went into the social world to dinner or elsewhere, where he
+could not be found. Colfax had sent for him on a number of occasions
+when he was not present, and on several other occasions, when he had
+called on his floor and at his office, Eugene was out. It did not strike
+him as anything to complain of--Eugene had a right to be about--but as
+inadvisable, in the managing publisher's own interest. He knew that he
+had a vast number of things to take care of. It would take an
+exceptionally efficient man to manage them and not give all his time to
+them. He would not have thought this if Eugene had been a partner with
+himself, as were other men in other ventures in which he was interested,
+but not being so, he could not help viewing him as an employee, one who
+ought to give all his time to his work.
+
+White never asked anything much save the privilege of working, and was
+always about the place, alert, earnest at his particular duties, not
+haughty, but calm and absolutely efficient in every way. He was never
+weary of consulting with Colfax, whereas Eugene was indifferent, not at
+all desirous of running to him with every little proposition, but
+preferring to act on his own initiative, and carrying himself constantly
+with very much of an air.
+
+In other ways there were other things which were and had been militating
+against him. By degrees it had come to be rumored about the office that
+Eugene was interested in the Blue Sea or Sea Island Development and
+Construction Company, of which there was a good deal of talk about the
+city, particularly in financial and social circles. Colfax had heard of
+the corporation. He had been interested in the scheme because it
+promised so much in the way of luxury. Not much of the panoramic whole
+so beautifully depicted in the colored insets of a thirty-two-page
+literary prospectus fathered by Eugene was as yet accomplished, but
+there was enough to indicate that it was going to be a great thing.
+Already somewhat over a mile and a quarter of the great sea walk and
+wall were in place. A dining and dancing pavilion had been built, and
+one of the smaller hotels--all in accordance with the original
+architectural scheme. There were a number of houses--something like
+twenty or thirty on plots one hundred and fifty by one hundred and fifty
+feet, built in the most ornate fashion on ground which had formerly been
+wet marsh grown high with grass. Three or four islands had been filled
+in and the club house of a minor yacht club had been constructed, but
+still the Sea Island Development Company had a long way to go before
+even a third of its total perfection would be in sight.
+
+Eugene did not know the drift of the company's financial affairs, except
+in a general way. He had tried to keep out of it so far as public notice
+of him was concerned, though he was constantly lunching with Winfield,
+Willebrand, and others, and endeavoring to direct as much attention to
+the wonders and prospects of the new resort as was possible for him to
+do. It was an easy thing for him to say to one person and another whom
+he met that Blue Sea was rapidly becoming the most perfect thing in the
+way of a summer resort that he had ever seen, and this did good; so did
+the comments of all the other people who were interested in it, but it
+did not make it anything of a success as yet. As a matter of fact, the
+true success of Blue Sea depended on the investment of much more than
+the original ten millions for which it had been capitalized. It depended
+on a truly solid growth, which could not be rapid.
+
+The news which came to the United Magazines Corporation and eventually
+to Colfax and White was that Eugene was heavily interested in this
+venture, that he was secretary or held some other office in connection
+with it, and that he was giving a great deal of his time to its
+development, which might better be employed in furthering the interests
+of the United Magazines Corporation.
+
+"What do you think of that?" asked Colfax of White, on hearing the news
+one morning. It had come through the head of the printing department
+under White, who had mentioned it to Colfax in White's presence by the
+latter's directions.
+
+"It's just what I've been telling you all along," said the latter
+blandly. "He isn't interested in this business any more than he is in
+any other. He's using it as a stepping-stone, and when he's through with
+it, good-bye. Now that's all right from his point of view. Every man has
+a right to climb up, but it isn't so good from yours. You'd be better
+off if you had a man who wanted to stay here. You'd be better off really
+if you were handling it yourself. You may not want to do that, but with
+what you know now you can get someone who will work under you quite
+well. That's the one satisfactory thing about it--you really can get
+along without him if it comes right down to it now. With a good man in
+there, it can be handled from your office."
+
+It was about this time that the most ardent phase of Eugene's love
+affair with Suzanne began. All through the spring and summer Eugene had
+been busy with thoughts of Suzanne, ways of meeting her, pleasurable
+rides with her, thinking of things she had done and said. As a rule now,
+his thoughts were very far from the interests of his position, and in
+the main it bored him greatly. He began to wish earnestly that his
+investment in the Sea Island Corporation would show some tangible return
+in the way of interest, so that he could have means to turn round with.
+It struck him after Angela's discovery of his intrigue with Suzanne as a
+most unfortunate thing that he had tied up all his means in this Blue
+Sea investment. If it had been fated that he was to go on living with
+Angela, it would have been all right. Then he could have waited in
+patience and thought nothing of it. Now it simply meant that if he
+wanted to realize it, it would all be tied up in the courts, or most
+likely so, for Angela could sue him; and at any rate he would wish to
+make reasonable provision for her, and that would require legal
+adjustment. Apart from this investment, he had nothing now save his
+salary, and that was not accumulating fast enough to do him much good in
+case Mrs. Dale went to Colfax soon, and the latter broke with him. He
+wondered if Colfax really would break with him. Would he ask him to give
+up Suzanne, or simply force him to resign? He had noticed that for some
+time Colfax had not been as cordial to and as enthusiastic about him as
+he had formerly been, but this might be due to other things besides
+opposition. Moreover, it was natural for them to become a little tired
+of each other. They did not go about so much together, and when they did
+Colfax was not as high-flown and boyish in his spirits as he had
+formerly been. Eugene fancied it was White who was caballing against
+him, but he thought if Colfax was going to change, he was going to
+change, and there was no help for it. There were no grounds, he fancied,
+in so far as the affairs of the corporation were concerned. His work was
+successful.
+
+The storm broke one day out of a clear sky, in so far as the office was
+concerned, but not until there had been much heartache and misery in
+various directions--with the Dales, with Angela, and with Eugene
+himself.
+
+Suzanne's action was the lightning bolt which precipitated the storm. It
+could only come from that quarter. Eugene was frantic to hear from her,
+and for the first time in his life began to experience those
+excruciating and gnawing pangs which are the concomitants of uncertain
+and distraught love. It manifested itself in an actual pain in his
+vitals--in the region of the solar plexus, or what is commonly known as
+the pit of the stomach. He suffered there very much, quite as the
+Spartan boy may have done who was gnawed by the fox concealed under his
+belt. He would wonder where Suzanne was, what she was doing, and then,
+being unable to work, would call his car and ride, or take his hat and
+walk. It did him no good to ride, for the agony was in sitting still. At
+night he would go home and sit by one or the other of his studio
+windows, principally out on the little stone balcony, and watch the
+changing panorama of the Hudson, yearning and wondering where she was.
+Would he ever see her again? Would he be able to win this battle if he
+did? Oh, her beautiful face, her lovely voice, her exquisite lips and
+eyes, the marvel of her touch and beautiful fancy!
+
+He tried to compose poetry to her, and wrote a series of sonnets to his
+beloved, which were not at all bad. He worked on his sketch book of
+pencil portraits of Suzanne seeking a hundred significant and delightful
+expressions and positions, which could afterwards be elaborated into his
+gallery of paintings of her, which he proposed to paint at some time. It
+did not matter to him that Angela was about, though he had the
+graciousness to conceal these things from her. He was ashamed, in a way,
+of his treatment of her, and yet the sight of her now was not so much
+pitiable as objectionable and unsatisfactory. Why had he married her? He
+kept asking himself that.
+
+They sat in the studio one night. Angela's face was a picture of
+despair, for the horror of her situation was only by degrees coming to
+her, and she said, seeing him so moody and despondent:
+
+"Eugene, don't you think you can get over this? You say Suzanne has been
+spirited away. Why not let her go? Think of your career, Eugene. Think
+of me. What will become of me? You can get over it, if you try. Surely
+you won't throw me down after all the years I have been with you. Think
+how I have tried. I have been a pretty good wife to you, haven't I? I
+haven't annoyed you so terribly much, have I? Oh, I feel all the time as
+though we were on the brink of some terrible catastrophe! If only I
+could do something; if only I could say something! I know I have been
+hard and irritable at times, but that is all over now. I am a changed
+woman. I would never be that way any more."
+
+"It can't be done, Angela," he replied calmly. "It can't be done. I
+don't love you. I've told you that. I don't want to live with you. I
+can't. I want to get free in some way, either by divorce, or a quiet
+separation, and go my way. I'm not happy. I never will be as long as I
+am here. I want my freedom and then I will decide what I want to do."
+
+Angela shook her head and sighed. She could scarcely believe that this
+was she wandering around in her own apartment wondering what she was
+going to do in connection with her own husband. Marietta had gone back
+to Wisconsin before the storm broke. Myrtle was in New York, but she
+hated to confess to her. She did not dare to write to any member of her
+own family but Marietta, and she did not want to confess to her.
+Marietta had fancied while she was here that they were getting along
+nicely. She had fits of crying, which alternated with fits of anger, but
+the latter were growing weak. Fear, despondency, and grief were becoming
+uppermost in her soul again--the fear and despondency that had weighed
+her down in those lonely days before she married Eugene, the grief that
+she was now actually and finally to lose the one man whom, in spite of
+everything, she loved still.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+It was three days later when he was at his office that a telegram came
+from Mrs. Dale, which read, "I depend on you, on the honor of a
+gentleman, to ignore any message which may come from my daughter until I
+see you."
+
+Eugene was puzzled, but fancied that there must be a desperate quarrel
+on between Suzanne and her mother, wherever they were, and that it was
+probable that he would hear from her now. It was his first inkling as to
+her whereabouts, for the telegram was sent off from Three Rivers, in
+Canada, and he fancied they must be near there somewhere. The place of
+despatch did him no good from a material point of view, for he could
+neither write nor pursue Suzanne on the strength of this. He would not
+know where to find her. He could only wait, conscious that she was
+having a struggle, perhaps as severe, or possibly more so, than his own.
+He wandered about with this telegram in his pocket wondering when he
+should hear--what a day should bring forth, and all those who came in
+contact with him noticed that there was something wrong.
+
+Colfax saw him, and asked: "What's the matter, old man? You're not
+looking as chipper as you might." He fancied it might be something in
+connection with the Blue Sea Corporation. He had heard, after he had
+learned that Eugene was in it, that it would take much more money than
+had been invested to date to make it a really successful seaside
+proposition according to the original outlines, and that it would be
+years before it could possibly yield an adequate return. If Eugene had
+put much money in it, he had probably lost it or tied it up in a most
+unsatisfactory way. Well, it served him right for trifling with things
+he knew nothing about.
+
+"Oh, nothing," replied Eugene abstractedly. "I'm all right. I'm just a
+little run down physically. I'll come round."
+
+"You'd better take a month or so off and brace up, if you're not in
+shape."
+
+"Oh, not at all! Not now, anyhow."
+
+It occurred to Eugene that he might use the time to advantage a little
+later and that he would claim it.
+
+They proceeded to business, but Colfax noticed that Eugene's eyes were
+specially hollow and weary and that he was noticeably restless. He
+wondered whether he might be going to break down physically.
+
+Suzanne had drifted along peacefully enough considering the nature of
+the feeling between her and her mother at this time. After a few days of
+desultory discussion, however, along the lines now so familiar, she
+began to see that her mother had no intention of terminating their stay
+at the time agreed upon, particularly since their return to New York
+meant, so far as Suzanne was concerned, her immediate departure to
+Witla. Mrs. Dale began at first to plead for additional delay, and later
+that Suzanne should agree not to go to New York but to Lenox for a
+season. It was cold up here already now, though there were still spells
+of bright warm summery or autumn weather between ten and four in the
+day, and sometimes in the evening. The nights usually were cold.
+Mrs. Dale would gladly have welcomed a compromise, for it was terribly
+lonely, just herself and Suzanne--after the gaieties of New York. Four
+days before the time of her proposed departure, Mrs. Dale was still
+obdurate or parleying in a diplomatic way, and Suzanne, disgusted, made
+the threat which caused Mrs. Dale to wire distractedly to Eugene. Later,
+she composed the following, which she gave to Gabrielle:
+
+"Dear Eugene--
+
+If you love me, come and get me. I have told mama that if she did not
+keep her word to return with me to New York by the fifteenth, I would
+write to you and she is still obstinate. I am at the Cathcart Lodge,
+While-a-Way, eighteen miles north of Three Rivers, here in Canada.
+Anyone can show you. I will be here when you come. Do not try to write
+to me as I am afraid I should not get it. But I will be at the Lodge.
+
+   "With love,
+
+      "Suzanne."
+
+Eugene had never before received a love appeal, nor indeed any such
+appeal from any woman in his life.
+
+This letter reached him thirty-six hours after the telegram arrived, and
+set him to planning at once. The hour had struck. He must act. Perhaps
+this old world was now behind him forever. Could he really get Suzanne,
+if he went to Canada to find her? How was she surrounded? He thrilled
+with delight when he realized that it was Suzanne who was calling him
+and that he was going to find her. "If you love me, come and get me."
+
+Would he?
+
+Watch!
+
+He called for his car, telephoned his valet to pack his bag and bring it
+to the Grand Central Station, first ascertaining for himself the time of
+departure, asked to talk to Angela, who had gone to Myrtle's apartment
+in upper Seventh Avenue, ready at last to confess her woes to Eugene's
+sister. Her condition did not appeal to Eugene in this situation. The
+inevitable result, which he thought of frequently, was still far away.
+He notified Colfax that he was going to take a few days rest, went to
+the bank where he had over four thousand dollars on deposit, and drew it
+all. He then went to a ticket office and purchased a one-way ticket,
+uncertain where his actions would take him once he saw Suzanne. He tried
+once more to get Angela, intending boldly to tell her that he was going
+to seek Suzanne, and to tell her not to worry, that he would communicate
+with her, but she had not returned. Curiously, through all this, he was
+intensely sorry for her, and wondered how she would take it, if he did
+not return. How would the child be arranged for? He felt he must go.
+Angela was heartsick, he knew that, and frightened. Still he could not
+resist this call. He could not resist anything in connection with this
+love affair. He was like a man possessed of a devil or wandering in a
+dream. He knew that his whole career was at stake, but it did not make
+any difference. He must get her. The whole world could go hang if he
+could only obtain her--her, the beautiful, the perfect!
+
+At five-thirty the train departed, and then he sat as it rolled
+northward speculating on what he was to do when he got there. If Three
+Rivers were much of a place, he could probably hire an automobile. He
+could leave it some distance from the lodge and then see if he could not
+approach unobserved and signal Suzanne. If she were about, she would no
+doubt be on the lookout. At a sign she would run to him. They would
+hurry to the automobile. The pursuit might quickly follow, but he would
+arrange it so that his pursuers would not know which railroad station he
+was going to. Quebec was the nearest big city, he found by studying the
+map, though he might return to Montreal and New York or Buffalo, if he
+chose to go west he would see how the train ran.
+
+It is curious what vagaries the human mind is subject to, under
+conditions of this kind. Up to the time of Eugene's arrival in Three
+Rivers and after, he had no plan of campaign, or of future conduct
+beyond that of obtaining Suzanne. He did not know that he would return
+to New York--he did not know that he would not. If Suzanne wished, and
+it were best, and they could, they would go to England from Montreal, or
+France. If necessary, they could go to Portland and sail. Mrs. Dale, on
+the evidence that he had Suzanne and that of her own free will and
+volition, might yield and say nothing, in which case he could return to
+New York and resume his position. This courageous stand on his part if
+he had only followed it might have solved the whole problem quickly. It
+might have been the sword that would have cut the Gordian Knot. On the
+train was a heavy black-bearded man, which was always good luck to him.
+At Three Rivers, when he dismounted from the train, he found a
+horseshoe, which was also a lucky sign. He did not stop to think what he
+would do if he really lost his position and had to live on the sum he
+had with him. He was really not thinking logically. He was dreaming. He
+fancied that he would get Suzanne and have his salary, and that somehow
+things would be much as they were. Of such is the logic of dreams.
+
+When he arrived at Three Rivers, of course the conditions were not what
+he anticipated. It is true that at times, after a long continued period
+of dry weather, the roads were passable for automobiles, at least as far
+as While-a-Way, but the weather had not recently been entirely dry.
+There had been a short period of cold rain and the roads were
+practically impassable, save for horses and carryalls. There was a
+carryall which went as far as St. Jacques, four miles from While-a-Way,
+where the driver told him he could get a horse, if he wanted one. The
+owner of this hack line had a stable there.
+
+This was gratifying to him, and he decided to make arrangements for two
+horses at St. Jacques, which he would take to within a reasonable
+distance of the lodge and tie in some spot where they would not be seen.
+Then he could consider the situation and signal Suzanne; if she were
+there on the lookout. How dramatic the end would be! How happy they
+would be flying together! Judge then his astonishment on reaching St.
+Jacques to find Mrs. Dale waiting for him. Word had been telephoned by
+her faithful representative, the station agent at Three Rivers, that a
+man of Eugene's description had arrived and departed for While-a-Way.
+Before this a telegram had come from New York from Kinroy to the effect
+that Eugene had gone somewhere. His daily habits since Mrs. Dale had
+gone away had been under observation. Kinroy, on his return, had called
+at the United Magazines Corporation and asked if Eugene was in the city.
+Heretofore he had been reported in. When on this day he was reported as
+having gone, Kinroy called up Angela to inquire. She also stated that he
+had left the city. He then wired his mother and she, calculating the
+time of his arrival, and hearing from the station agent of his taking
+the carryall, had gone down to meet him. She had decided to fight every
+inch of the way with all the strategy at her command. She did not want
+to kill him--had not really the courage to do that--but she still hoped
+to dissuade him. She had not been able to bring herself to resort to
+guards and detectives as yet. He could not be as hard as he looked and
+acted. Suzanne was bedeviling him by her support and communications. She
+had not been able to govern there, she saw. Her only hope was to talk
+him out of it, or into an additional delay. If necessary, they would all
+go back to New York together and she would appeal to Colfax and
+Winfield. She hoped they would persuade him to reason. Anyhow, she would
+never leave Suzanne for one moment until this thing had been settled in
+her favor, or brutally against her.
+
+When Eugene appeared she greeted him with her old social smile and
+called to him affably: "Come, get in."
+
+He looked at her grimly and obeyed, but changed his manner when he saw
+that she was really kindly in her tone and greeted her sociably.
+
+"How have you been?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, quite well, thank you!"
+
+"And how is Suzanne?"
+
+"All right, I fancy. She isn't here, you know."
+
+"Where is she?" asked Eugene, his face a study in defeat.
+
+"She went with some friends to visit Quebec for ten days. Then she is
+going from there to New York. I don't expect to see her here any more."
+
+Eugene choked with a sense of repugnance to her airy taradiddles. He did
+not believe what she was saying--saw at once that she was fencing with
+him.
+
+"That's a lie," he said roughly, "and it's out of the whole cloth! She's
+here, and you know it. Anyhow, I am going to see for myself."
+
+"How polite you are!" she laughed diplomatically. "That isn't the way
+you usually talk. Anyhow, she isn't here. You'll find that out, if you
+insist. I wouldn't advise you to insist, for I've sent for counsel since
+I heard you were coming, and you will find detectives as well as guards
+waiting to receive you. She isn't here, though, even at that, and you
+might just as well turn round and go back. I will drive you over to
+Three Rivers, if you wish. Why not be reasonable, now, and avoid a
+scene? She isn't here. You couldn't have her if she were. The people I
+have employed will prevent that. If you make trouble, you will simply be
+arrested and then the newspapers will have it. Why not be reasonable
+now, Mr. Witla, and go on back? You have everything to lose. There is a
+train through Three Rivers from Quebec for New York at eleven tonight.
+We can make it. Don't you want to do that? I will agree, if you come to
+your senses now, and cause me no trouble here, to bring Suzanne back to
+New York within a month. I won't let you have her unless you get a
+divorce and straighten things out with your wife, but if you can do that
+within six months, or a year, and she still wants you, you can have her.
+I will promise in writing to withdraw all objection, and see that her
+full share of her property comes to her uncontested. I will help you and
+her socially all I can. You know I am not without influence."
+
+"I want to see her first," replied Eugene grimly and disbelievingly.
+
+"I won't say that I will forget everything," went on Mrs. Dale, ignoring
+his interpolated remark. "I can't--but I will pretend to. You can have
+the use of my country place at Lenox. I will buy out the lease at
+Morristown, or the New York House, and you can live in either place. I
+will set aside a sum of money for your wife, if you wish. That may help
+you obtain your release. Surely you do not want to take her under the
+illegal condition which you propose, when you can have her outright in
+this brilliant manner by waiting a little while. She says she does not
+want to get married, but that is silly talk, based on nothing except
+erratic reading. She does, or she will, the moment she comes to think
+about it seriously. Why not help her? Why not go back now and let me
+bring her to New York a little later and then we will talk this all
+over. I shall be very glad to have you in my family. You are a brilliant
+man. I have always liked you. Why not be reasonable? Come now and let's
+drive over to Three Rivers and you take the train back to New York, will
+you?"
+
+While Mrs. Dale had been talking, Eugene had been surveying her calmly.
+What a clever talker she was! How she could lie! He did not believe her.
+He did not believe one word that she said. She was fighting to keep him
+from Suzanne, why he could readily understand. Suzanne was somewhere,
+here, he fancied, though, as in the case of her recent trip to Albany,
+she might have been spirited away.
+
+"Absurd!" said Eugene easily, defiantly, indifferently. "I'll not do
+anything of the sort. In the first place, I don't believe you. If you
+are so anxious to be nice to me, let me see her, and then you can say
+all this in front of her. I've come up here to see her, and I'm going
+to. She's here. I know she is. You needn't lie. You needn't talk. I know
+she's here. Now I'm going to see her, if I have to stay here a month and
+search."
+
+Mrs. Dale stirred nervously. She knew that Eugene was desperate. She
+knew that Suzanne had written to him. Talk might be useless. Strategy
+might not avail, but she could not help using it.
+
+"Listen to me," she said excitedly. "I tell you Suzanne is not here.
+She's gone. There are guards up there--lots of them. They know who you
+are. They have your description. They have orders to kill you, if you
+try to break in. Kinroy is there. He is desperate. I have been having a
+struggle to prevent his killing you already. The place is watched. We
+are watched at this moment. Won't you be reasonable? You can't see her.
+She's gone. Why make all this fuss? Why take your life in your hands?"
+
+"Don't talk," said Eugene. "You're lying. I can see it in your face.
+Besides, my life is nothing. I am not afraid. Why talk? She's here. I'm
+going to see her."
+
+He stared before him and Mrs. Dale ruminated as to what she was to do.
+There were no guards or detectives, as she said. Kinroy was not there.
+Suzanne was not away. This was all palaver, as Eugene suspected, for she
+was too anxious to avoid publicity to give any grounds for it, before
+she was absolutely driven.
+
+It was a rather halcyon evening after some days of exceeding chill. A
+bright moon was coming up in the east, already discernible in the
+twilight, but which later would shine brilliantly. It was not cold but
+really pleasantly warm, and the rough road along which they were driving
+was richly odorous. Eugene was not unconscious of its beauty, but
+depressed by the possibility of Suzanne's absence.
+
+"Oh, do be generous," pleaded Mrs. Dale, who feared that once they saw
+each other, reason would disappear. Suzanne would demand, as she had
+been continually demanding, to be taken back to New York. Eugene with or
+without Suzanne's consent or plea, would ignore her overtures of
+compromise and there would be immediate departure or defiant union here.
+She thought she would kill them if need be, but in the face of Eugene's
+defiant persistence on one side, and Suzanne's on the other, her courage
+was failing. She was frightened by the daring of this man. "I will keep
+my word," she observed distractedly. "Honestly she isn't here. She's in
+Quebec, I tell you. Wait a month. I will bring her back then. We will
+arrange things together. Why can't you be generous?"
+
+"I could be," said Eugene, who was considering all the brilliant
+prospects which her proposal involved and being moved by them, "but I
+can't believe you. You're not telling me the truth. You didn't tell the
+truth to Suzanne when you took her from New York. That was a trick, and
+this is another. I know she isn't away. She's right up there in the
+lodge, wherever it is. You take me to her and then we will talk this
+thing out together. By the way, where are you going?"
+
+Mrs. Dale had turned into a bypath or half-formed road closely lined
+with small trees and looking as though it might be a woodchoppers' path.
+
+"To the lodge."
+
+"I don't believe it," replied Eugene, who was intensely suspicious.
+"This isn't a main road to any such place as that."
+
+"I tell you it is."
+
+Mrs. Dale was nearing the precincts of the lodge and wanted more time to
+talk and plead.
+
+"Well," said Eugene, "you can go this way if you want to. I'm going to
+get out and walk. You can't throw me off by driving me around in some
+general way. I'm going to stay here a week, a month, two months, if
+necessary, but I'm not going back without seeing Suzanne. She's here,
+and I know it. I'll go up alone and find her. I'm not afraid of your
+guards."
+
+He jumped out and Mrs. Dale gave up in despair. "Wait," she pleaded.
+"It's over two miles yet. I'll take you there. She isn't home tonight,
+anyhow. She's over at the cottage of the caretaker. Oh, why won't you be
+reasonable? I'll bring her to New York, I tell you. Are you going to
+throw aside all those fine prospects and wreck your life and hers and
+mine? Oh, if Mr. Dale were only alive! If I had a man on whom I could
+rely! Come, get in, and I'll drive you up there, but promise me you
+won't ask to see her tonight. She isn't there, anyway. She's over at the
+caretaker's. Oh, dear, if only something would happen to solve this!"
+
+"I thought you said she was in Quebec?"
+
+"I only said that to gain time. I'm so unstrung. It wasn't true, but she
+isn't at the lodge, truly. She's away tonight. I can't let you stay
+there. Let me take you back to St. Jacques and you can stay with old
+Pierre Gaine. You can come up in the morning. The servants will think it
+so strange. I promise you you shall see Suzanne. I give you my word."
+
+"Your word. Why, Mrs. Dale, you're going around in a ring! I can't
+believe anything you say," replied Eugene calmly. He was very much
+collected and elated now since he knew that Suzanne was here. He was
+going to see her--he felt it. He had Mrs. Dale badly worsted, and he
+proposed to drive her until, in the presence of Suzanne, he and his
+beloved dictated terms.
+
+"I'm going there tonight and you are going to bring her to me. If she
+isn't there, you know where to find her. She's here, and I'm going to
+see her tonight. We'll talk of all this you're proposing in front of
+her. It's silly to twist things around this way. The girl is with me,
+and you know it. She's mine. You can't control her. Now we two will talk
+to you together."
+
+He sat back in the light vehicle and began to hum a tune. The moon was
+getting clearer.
+
+"Promise me just one thing," urged Mrs. Dale despairingly. "Promise me
+that you will urge Suzanne to accept my proposition. A few months won't
+hurt. You can see her in New York as usual. Go about getting a divorce.
+You are the only one who has any influence with her. I admit it. She
+won't believe me. She won't listen to me. You tell her. Your future is
+in it. Persuade her to wait. Persuade her to stay up here or at Lenox
+for a little while and then come down. She will obey you. She will
+believe anything you say. I have lied. I have lied terribly all through
+this, but you can't blame me. Put yourself in my place. Think of my
+position. Please use your influence. I will do all that I say and more."
+
+"Will you bring Suzanne to me tonight?"
+
+"Yes, if you promise."
+
+"Will you bring her to me tonight, promise or no promise? I don't want
+to say anything to you which I can't say in front of her."
+
+"Won't you promise me that you will accept my proposition and urge her
+to?"
+
+"I think I will, but I won't say. I want her to hear what you have to
+say. I think I will."
+
+Mrs. Dale shook her head despondently.
+
+"You might as well acquiesce," went on Eugene. "I'm going to see her
+anyhow, whether you will or no. She's there, and I'll find her if I have
+to search the house room by room. She can hear my voice."
+
+He was carrying things with a high hand.
+
+"Well," replied Mrs. Dale, "I suppose I must. Please don't let on to the
+servants. Pretend you're my guest. Let me take you back to St. Jacques
+tonight, after you see her. Don't stay with her more than half an hour."
+
+She was absolutely frightened out of her wits at this terrific
+denouement.
+
+Eugene sat grimly congratulating himself as they jogged on in the
+moonlight. He actually squeezed her arm cheerfully and told her not to
+be so despairing--that all would come out all right. They would talk to
+Suzanne. He would see what she would have to say.
+
+"You stay here," she said, as they reached a little wooded knoll in a
+bend of the road--a high spot commanding a vast stretch of territory now
+lit by a glistening northern moon. "I'll go right inside and get her. I
+don't know whether she's there, but if she isn't, she's over at the
+caretaker's, and we'll go over there. I don't want the servants to see
+you meet her. Please don't be demonstrative. Oh, be careful!"
+
+Eugene smiled. How excited she was! How pointless, after all her
+threats! So this was victory. What a fight he had made! Here he was
+outside this beautiful lodge, the lights of which he could see gleaming
+like yellow gold through the silvery shadows. The air was full of field
+fragrances. You could smell the dewy earth, soon to be hard and covered
+deep in snow. There was still a bird's voice here and there and faint
+stirrings of the wind in the leaves. "On such a night," came back
+Shakespeare's lines. How fitting that Suzanne should come to him under
+such conditions! Oh, the wonder of this romance--the beauty of it! From
+the very beginning it had been set about with perfections of scenery and
+material environment. Obviously, nature had intended this as the
+crowning event of his life. Life recognized him as a genius--the fates
+it was heaping posies in his lap, laying a crown of victory upon his
+brow.
+
+He waited while Mrs. Dale went to the lodge, and then after a time, true
+enough, there appeared in the distance the swinging, buoyant, girlish
+form of Suzanne. She was plump, healthful, vigorous. He could detect her
+in the shadows under the trees and behind her a little way Mrs. Dale.
+Suzanne came eagerly on--youthful, buoyant, dancing, determined,
+beautiful. Her skirts were swinging about her body in ripples as she
+strode. She looked all Eugene had ever thought her. Hebe--a young Diana,
+a Venus at nineteen. Her lips were parted in a welcoming smile as she
+drew near and her eyes were as placid as those dull opals which still
+burn with a hidden lustre of gold and flame.
+
+She held out her arms to him as she came, running the last few steps.
+
+"Suzanne!" called her mother. "For shame!"
+
+"Hush, mama!" declared Suzanne defiantly. "I don't care. I don't care.
+It's your fault. You shouldn't have lied to me. He wouldn't have come if
+I hadn't sent for him. I'm going back to New York. I told you I was."
+
+She did not say, "Oh, Eugene!" as she came close, but gathered his face
+in her hands and looked eagerly into his eyes. His burned into hers. She
+stepped back and opened wide her arms only to fold them tightly about
+him.
+
+"At last! At last!" he said, kissing her feverishly. "Oh, Suzanne! Oh,
+Flower Face!"
+
+"I knew you would come," she said. "I told her you would. I'll go back
+with you."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Eugene. "Oh, this wonderful night! This wonderful
+climax! Oh, to have you in my arms again!"
+
+Mrs. Dale stood by, white, intense. To think a daughter of hers should
+act like this, confound her so, make her a helpless spectator of her
+iniquity. What an astounding, terrible, impossible thing!
+
+"Suzanne!" she cried. "Oh, that I should have lived to see this day!"
+
+"I told you, mama, that you would regret bringing me up here," declared
+Suzanne. "I told you I would write to him. I knew you would come," she
+said to Eugene, and she squeezed his hand affectionately.
+
+Eugene inhaled a deep breath and stared at her. The night, the stars
+swung around him in a gorgeous orbit. Thus it was to be victorious. It
+was too beautiful, too wonderful! To think he should have triumphed in
+this way! Could any other man anywhere ever have enjoyed such a victory?
+
+"Oh, Suzanne," he said eagerly, "this is like a dream; it's like heaven!
+I can scarcely believe I am alive."
+
+"Yes, yes," she replied, "it is beautiful, perfect!" And together they
+strolled away from her mother, hand in hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+The flaw in this situation was that Eugene, after getting Suzanne in his
+arms once more, had no particular solution to offer. Instead of at once
+outlining an open or secret scheme of escape, or taking her by main
+force and walking off with her, as she more than half expected him to
+do, here he was repeating to her what her mother had told him, and
+instead of saying "Come!" he was asking her advice.
+
+"This is what your mother proposed to me just now, Suzanne," he began,
+and entered upon a full explanation. It was a vision of empire to him.
+
+"I said to her," he said, speaking of her mother, who was near by, "that
+I would decide nothing. She wanted me to say that I would do this, but I
+insisted that it must be left to you. If you want to go back to New
+York, we will go, tonight or tomorrow. If you want to accept this plan
+of your mother's, it's all right, so far as I am concerned. I would
+rather have you now, but if I can see you, I am willing to wait."
+
+He was calm now, logical, foolishly speculative. Suzanne wondered at
+this. She had no advice to offer. She had expected some dramatic climax,
+but since it had not come about, she had to be content. The truth was
+that she had been swept along by her desire to be with Eugene. It had
+seemed to her in the beginning that it was not possible for him to get a
+divorce. It had seemed also from her reading and youthful philosophizing
+that it was really not necessary. She did not want to be mean to Angela.
+She did not want Eugene to mortify her by openly leaving her. She had
+fancied since Eugene had said that Angela was not satisfactory to him
+and that there was no real love between them, that Angela really did not
+care she had practically admitted as much in her letter--that it would
+not make so much difference if she shared him with her. What was he
+explaining now--a new theory as to what they were to do? She thought he
+was coming for her to take her away like a god, whereas here he was
+presenting a new theory to her in anything but a god-like way. It was
+confusing. She did not know how it was that Eugene did not want to leave
+at once.
+
+"Well, I don't know whatever you think," she said. "If you want me to
+stay here another month----"
+
+"No, no!" exclaimed Eugene quickly, conscious of a flaw in the
+arrangement, and anxious to make it seem right. "I didn't mean that. Not
+that. I want you to come back with me now, if possible, tonight, only I
+wanted to tell you this. Your mother seems sincere. It seems a shame if
+we can keep friends with her and still have our way, not to do so. I
+don't want to do any greater harm than I can help unless you are
+perfectly willing and----" He hesitated over his own thoughts.
+
+At this moment Suzanne could scarcely have told what she felt. The crux
+of the situation was being put to her for her decision, and it should
+not be. She was not strong enough, not experienced enough. Eugene should
+decide, and whatever he decided would be right.
+
+The truth was that after getting her in his arms again, and that in the
+presence of her mother, Eugene did not feel that he was quite so much
+the victor as he had imagined, or that the whole problem of his life was
+solved. He could not very well ignore, he thought, what Mrs. Dale had to
+offer, if she was offering it seriously. She had said to him just before
+he came into the presence of Suzanne that unless he accepted these terms
+she would go on fighting--that she would telegraph to Colfax and ask him
+to come up here. Although Eugene had drawn his money and was ready to
+fly if he could, still the thought of Colfax and the desire to keep his
+present state of social security and gain all Mrs. Dale had to offer
+besides were deterrents. He hesitated. Wasn't there some way to smooth
+everything out?
+
+"I don't want you to decide finally," he said, "but what do you think?"
+
+Suzanne was in a simmering, nebulous state, and could not think. Eugene
+was here. This was Arcady and the moon was high.
+
+It was beautiful to have him with her again. It was wonderful to feel
+his caresses. But he was not flying with her. They were not defying the
+world; they were not doing what she fancied they would be doing, rushing
+to victory, and that was what she had sent for him for. Mrs. Dale was
+going to help Eugene get a divorce, so she said. She was going to help
+subsidize Angela, if necessary. Suzanne was going to get married, and
+actually settle down after a time. What a curious thought. Why that was
+not what she had wanted to do. She had wanted to flout convention in
+some way; to do original things as she had planned, as she had dreamed.
+It might be disastrous, but she did not think so. Her mother would have
+yielded. Why was Eugene compromising? It was curious. Such thoughts as
+these formulated in her mind at this time were the most disastrous
+things that could happen to their romance. Union should have followed
+his presence. Flight should have been a portion of it. As it was she was
+in his arms, but she was turning over vague, nebulous thoughts.
+Something--a pale mist before an otherwise brilliant moon; a bit of
+spindrift; a speck of cloud, no bigger than a man's hand that might
+possibly portend something and might not, had come over the situation.
+Eugene was as desirable as ever, but he was not flying with her. They
+were talking about going back to New York afterwards, but they were not
+going together at once. How was that?
+
+"Do you think mama can really damage you with Mr. Colfax?" she asked
+curiously at one point, after Eugene had mentioned her mother's threat.
+
+"I don't know," he replied solemnly. "Yes, I think she could. I don't
+know what he'd do, though. It doesn't matter much one way or the other,"
+he added. Suzanne puzzled.
+
+"Well, if you want to wait, it's all right," she said. "I want to do
+whatever you think best. I don't want you to lose your position. If you
+think we ought to wait, we will."
+
+"Not if I'm not to be with you regularly," replied Eugene, who was
+wavering. He was not your true champion of victory--your administrative
+leader. Foolishly he was spelling over an arrangement whereby he could
+eat his cake and have it--see Suzanne, drive with her, dance with her,
+all but live with her in New York until such time as the actual union
+could be arranged secretly or openly. Mrs. Dale was promising to receive
+him as a son, but she was merely plotting for time--time to think, act,
+permit Suzanne, under argument, to come to her senses. Time would solve
+everything, she thought, and tonight as she hung about, keeping close
+and overhearing some of Eugene's remarks, she felt relieved. Either he
+was coming to his senses and beginning to regret his folly or he was
+being deluded by her lies. If she could keep him and Suzanne apart one
+more week, and get to New York herself, she would go to Colfax now, and
+to Winfield, and see if they could not be induced to use their good
+offices. Eugene must be broken. He was erratic, insane. Her lies were
+apparently plausible enough to gain her this delay, and that was all she
+wanted.
+
+"Well, I don't know. Whatever you think," said Suzanne again, after a
+time between embraces and kisses, "do you want me to come back with you
+tomorrow, or----"
+
+"Yes, yes," he replied quickly and vigorously, "tomorrow, only we must
+try and argue your mother into the right frame of mind. She feels that
+she has lost now since we are together, and we must keep her in that
+mind. She talks compromise and that's just what we want. If she is
+willing to have us make some arrangement, why not? I would be willing to
+let things rest for a week or so, just to give her a chance if she
+wishes. If she doesn't change then we can act. You could come as far as
+Lenox for a week, and then come on."
+
+He talked like one who had won a great victory, whereas he had really
+suffered a great defeat. He was not taking Suzanne.
+
+Suzanne brooded. It was not what she expected--but----
+
+"Yes," she said, after a time.
+
+"Will you return with me tomorrow?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"As far as Lenox or New York?"
+
+"We'll see what mama says. If you can agree with her--anything you
+want--I am willing."
+
+After a time Eugene and Suzanne parted for the night. It was agreed that
+they should see each other in the morning, that they should go back as
+far as Lenox together. Mrs. Dale was to help Eugene get a divorce. It
+was a delightfully affectionate and satisfactory situation, but somehow
+Eugene felt that he was not handling it right. He went to bed in one
+part of the house--Suzanne in another--Mrs. Dale, fearful and watchful,
+staying near by, but there was no need. He was not desperate. He went to
+sleep thinking that the near future was going to adjust everything for
+him nicely, and that he and Suzanne were eventually going to get
+married.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+The next day, after wavering whether they would not spend a few days
+here in billing and cooing and listening to Mrs. Dale's veiled pleas as
+to what the servants might think, or what they might know already or
+suspect from what the station master at Three Rivers might say, they
+decided to return, Eugene to New York, Suzanne to Lenox. All the way
+back to Albany, Eugene and Suzanne sat together in one seat in the
+Pullman like two children rejoicing in each other's company. Mrs. Dale
+sat one seat away, turning over her promises and pondering whether,
+after all, she had not yet better go at once and try to end all by an
+appeal to Colfax, or whether she had better wait a little while and see
+if the affair might not die down of its own accord.
+
+At Albany the following morning, Suzanne and Mrs. Dale transferred to
+the Boston and Albany, Eugene going on to New York. He went to the
+office feeling much relieved, and later in the day to his apartment.
+Angela, who had been under a terrific strain, stared at him as if he
+were a ghost, or one come back to life from the dead. She had not known
+where he had gone. She had not known whether he would ever come back.
+There was no use in reproaching him--she had realized that long since.
+The best she could do was to make an appeal. She waited until after
+dinner, at which they had discussed the mere commonplaces of life, and
+then came to his room, where he was unpacking.
+
+"Did you go to find Suzanne?" she asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Is she with you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Oh, Eugene, do you know where I have spent the last three days?" she
+asked.
+
+He did not answer.
+
+"On my knees. On my knees," she declared, "asking God to save you from
+yourself."
+
+"Don't talk rot, Angela," he returned coldly. "You know how I feel about
+this thing. How much worse am I now than I was before? I tried to get
+you on the phone to tell you. I went to find her and bring her back, and
+I did as far as Lenox. I am going to win this fight. I am going to get
+Suzanne, either legally or otherwise. If you want to give me a divorce,
+you can. I will provide amply for you. If you don't I'm going to take
+her, anyhow. That's understood between me and her. Now what's the use of
+hysterics?"
+
+Angela looked at him tearfully. Could this be the Eugene she had known?
+In each scene with him, after each plea, or through it, she came to this
+adamantine wall. Was he really so frantic about this girl? Was he going
+to do what he said? He outlined to her quite calmly his plans as
+recently revised, and at one point Angela, speaking of Mrs. Dale,
+interrupted him--"she will never give her up to you--you will see. You
+think she will. She says she will. She is only fooling you. She is
+fighting for time. Think what you are doing. You can't win."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can," said Eugene, "I practically have already. She will
+come to me."
+
+"She may, she may, but at what a cost. Look at me, Eugene. Am I not
+enough? I am still good looking. You have declared to me time and again
+that I have a beautiful form. See, see"--she tore open her dressing gown
+and the robe de nuit, in which she had come in. She had arranged this
+scene, especially thought it out, and hoped it would move him. "Am I not
+enough? Am I not still all that you desire?"
+
+Eugene turned his head away in disgust--wearily--sick of their
+melodramatic appeals. This was the last role Angela should have played.
+It was the most ineffectual, the least appropriate at the moment. It was
+dramatic, striking, but totally ineffective under the circumstances.
+
+"It's useless acting in that way to me, Angela," he said. "I'm no longer
+to be moved in that way by you. All marital affection between us is
+dead--terribly so. Why plead to me with something that has no appeal. I
+can't help it. It's dead. Now what are we going to do about it?"
+
+Once more Angela turned wearily. Although she was nerve worn and
+despairing, she was still fascinated by the tragedy which was being
+played out under her eyes. Would nothing make him see?
+
+They went their separate ways for the night, and the next day he was at
+his desk again. Word came from Suzanne that she was still in Lenox, and
+then that her mother had gone to Boston for a day or two on a visit. The
+fifth day Colfax stepped into his office, and, hailing him pleasantly,
+sat down.
+
+"Well, how are things with you, old man?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, about the same," said Eugene. "I can't complain."
+
+"Everything going all right with you?"
+
+"Yes, moderately so."
+
+"People don't usually butt in on you here when I'm here, do they?" he
+asked curiously.
+
+"I've given orders against anything like that, but I'll make it doubly
+sure in this case," said Eugene, alert at once. Could Colfax be going to
+talk to him about anything in connection with his case? He paled a
+little.
+
+Colfax looked out of the window at the distant panorama of the Hudson.
+He took out a cigar, and cut the end, but did not light it.
+
+"I asked you about not being interrupted," he began thoughtfully,
+"because I have a little something I want to talk to you about, which I
+would rather no one else heard. Mrs. Dale came to me the other day," he
+said quietly. Eugene started at the mention of her name and paled still
+more, but gave no other outward sign. "And she told me a long story
+about something that you were trying to do in connection with her
+daughter--run away with her, or go and live with her without a license
+or a divorce, or desert your wife, or something to that effect, which I
+didn't pay much attention to, but which I have to talk to you about just
+the same. Now, I never like to meddle with a man's personal affairs. I
+don't think that they concern me. I don't think they concern this
+business, except in so far as they may affect it unfavorably, but I
+would like to know if it is true. Is it?"
+
+"Yes," said Eugene.
+
+"Mrs. Dale is an old friend of mine. I've known her for years. I know
+Mrs. Witla, of course, but not quite in the same way. I haven't seen as
+much of her as I have of you. I didn't know that you were unhappily
+married, but that is neither here nor there. The point is, that she
+seems to be on the verge of making a great scandal out of this--she
+seems a little distracted to me--and I thought I'd better come up and
+have a little talk with you before anything serious really happened. You
+know it would be a rather damaging thing to this business if any scandal
+were started in connection with you just at present."
+
+He paused, expecting some protest or explanation, but Eugene merely held
+his peace. He was tense, pale, harried. So she had gone to Colfax, after
+all. Instead of going to Boston; instead of keeping her word, she had
+come down here to New York and gone to Colfax. Had she told him the full
+story? Very likely Colfax, in spite of all his smooth words, would be
+inclined to sympathize with her. What must he think of him? He was
+rather conservative in a social way. Mrs. Dale could be of service to
+him in her world in one way and another. He had never seen Colfax quite
+so cool and deliberate as he was now. He seemed to be trying to maintain
+an exceedingly judicial and impartial tone, which was not
+characteristic.
+
+"You have always been an interesting study to me, Witla, ever since I
+first met you," he went on, after a time. "You're a genius, I fancy, if
+there ever was one, but like all geniuses you are afflicted with
+tendencies which are erratic. I used to think for a little while that
+maybe you sat down and planned the things which you have carried through
+so successfully, but I have since concluded that you don't. You attract
+some forms of force and order. Also, I think you have various other
+faculties--it would be hard for me to say just what they are. One is
+vision. I know you have that. Another is appreciation of ability. I know
+you have that. I have seen you pick some exceptional people. You plan in
+a way, but you don't plan logically or deliberately, unless I am greatly
+mistaken. The matter of this Dale girl now is an interesting case in
+point, I think."
+
+"Let's not talk of her," said Eugene frigidly and bridling slightly.
+Suzanne was a sore point with him. A dangerous subject. Colfax saw it.
+"That's something I can't talk about very well."
+
+"Well, we won't," put in the other calmly, "but the point can be
+established in other ways. You'll admit, I think, that you haven't been
+planning very well in connection with this present situation, for if you
+had been, you would see that in doing what you have been doing you have
+been riding straight for a fall. If you were going to take the girl, and
+she was willing, as she appears to be, you should have taken her without
+her mother's knowledge, old man. She might have been able to adjust
+things afterward. If not, you would have had her, and I suppose you
+would have been willing to suffer the consequences, if you had been
+caught. As it is, you have let Mrs. Dale in on it, and she has powerful
+friends. You can't ignore her. I can't. She is in a fighting mood, and
+it looks as though she were going to bring considerable pressure to bear
+to make you let go."
+
+He paused again, waiting to see if Eugene would say something, but the
+latter made no comment.
+
+"I want to ask one question, and I don't want you to take any offense at
+it, for I don't mean anything by it, but it will help to clear this
+matter up in my own mind, and probably in yours later, if you will. Have
+you had anything to do in a compromising way with Miss----?"
+
+"No," said Eugene before he could finish.
+
+"How long has this fight been going on?"
+
+"Oh, about four weeks, or a little less."
+
+Colfax bit at the end of his cigar.
+
+"You have powerful enemies here, you know, Witla. Your rule hasn't been
+very lenient. One of the things I have noticed about you is your utter
+inability to play politics. You have picked men who would be very glad
+to have your shoes, if they could. If they could get the details of this
+predicament, your situation wouldn't be tenable more than fifteen
+minutes. You know that, of course. In spite of anything I might do you
+would have to resign. You couldn't maintain yourself here. I couldn't
+let you. You haven't thought of that in this connection, I suppose. No
+man in love does. I know just how you feel. From having seen Mrs. Witla,
+I can tell in a way just what the trouble is. You have been reined in
+too close. You haven't been master in your own home. It's irritated you.
+Life has appeared to be a failure. You have lost your chance, or thought
+you had on this matrimonial game, and it's made you restless. I know
+this girl. She's beautiful. But just as I say, old man, you haven't
+counted the cost--you haven't calculated right--you haven't planned. If
+anything could prove to me what I have always faintly suspected about
+you, it is this: You don't plan carefully enough----" and he looked out
+of the window.
+
+Eugene sat staring at the floor. He couldn't make out just what it was
+that Colfax intended to do about it. He was calmer in his thinking than
+he had ever seen him before--less dramatic. As a rule, Colfax yelled
+things--demonstrated, performed--made excited motions. This morning, he
+was slow, thoughtful, possibly emotional.
+
+"In spite of the fact that I like you personally, Witla--and every man
+owes a little something to friendship--it can't be worked out in
+business, though--I have been slowly coming to the conclusion that
+perhaps, after all, you aren't just the ideal man for this place. You're
+too emotional, I fancy--too erratic. White has been trying to tell me
+that for a long time, but I wouldn't believe it. I'm not taking his
+judgment now. I don't know that I would ever have acted on that feeling
+or idea, if this thing hadn't come up. I don't know that I am going to
+do so finally, but it strikes me that you are in a very ticklish
+position--one rather dangerous to this house, and you know that this
+house could never brook a scandal. Why the newspapers would never get
+over it. It would do us infinite harm. I think, viewing it all in all,
+that you had better take a year off and see if you can't straighten this
+out quietly. I don't think you had better try to take this girl unless
+you can get a divorce and marry her, and I don't think you had better
+try to get a divorce unless you can do it quietly. I mean so far as your
+position here is concerned only. Apart from that, you can do what you
+please. But remember! a scandal would affect your usefulness here. If
+things can be patched up, well and good. If not, well then they can't.
+If this thing gets talked about much, you know that there will be no
+hope of your coming back here. I don't suppose you would be willing to
+give her up?"
+
+"No," said Eugene.
+
+"I thought as much. I know just how you take a thing of this kind. It
+hits your type hard. Can you get a divorce from Mrs. Witla?"
+
+"I'm not so sure," said Eugene. "I haven't any suitable grounds. We
+simply don't agree, that's all--my life has been a hollow shell."
+
+"Well," said Colfax, "it's a bad mix up all around. I know how you feel
+about the girl. She's very beautiful. She's just the sort to bring about
+a situation of this kind. I don't want to tell you what to do. You are
+your own best judge, but if you will take my advice, you won't try to
+live with her without first marrying her. A man in your position can't
+afford to do it. You're too much in the public eye. You know you have
+become fairly conspicuous in New York during the last few years, don't
+you?"
+
+"Yes," said Eugene. "I thought I had arranged that matter with
+Mrs. Dale."
+
+"It appears not. She tells me that you are trying to persuade her
+daughter to live with you; that you have no means of obtaining a divorce
+within a reasonable time; that your wife is in a--pardon me, and that
+you insist on associating with her daughter, meanwhile, which isn't
+possible, according to her. I'm inclined to think she's right. It's
+hard, but it can't be helped. She says that you say that if you are not
+allowed to do that, you will take her and live with her."
+
+He paused again. "Will you?"
+
+"Yes," said Eugene.
+
+Colfax twisted slowly in his chair and looked out of the window. What a
+man! What a curious thing love was! "When is it," he asked finally,
+"that you think you might do this?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I'm all tangled up now. I'll have to think."
+
+Colfax meditated.
+
+"It's a peculiar business. Few people would understand this as well as I
+do. Few people would understand you, Witla, as I do. You haven't
+calculated right, old man, and you'll have to pay the price. We all do.
+I can't let you stay here. I wish I could, but I can't. You'll have to
+take a year off and think this thing out. If nothing happens--if no
+scandal arises--well, I won't say what I'll do. I might make a berth for
+you here somewhere--not exactly in the same position, perhaps, but
+somewhere. I'll have to think about that. Meanwhile"--he stopped and
+thought again.
+
+Eugene was seeing clearly how it was with him. All this talk about
+coming back meant nothing. The thing that was apparent in Colfax's mind
+was that he would have to go, and the reason that he would have to go
+was not Mrs. Dale or Suzanne, or the moral issue involved, but the fact
+that he had lost Colfax's confidence in him. Somehow, through White,
+through Mrs. Dale, through his own actions day in and day out, Colfax
+had come to the conclusion that he was erratic, uncertain, and, for that
+reason, nothing else, he was being dispensed with now. It was
+Suzanne--it was fate, his own unfortunate temperament. He brooded
+pathetically, and then he said: "When do you want this to happen?"
+
+"Oh, any time, the quicker, the better, if a public scandal is to grow
+out of it. If you want you can take your time, three weeks, a month, six
+weeks. You had better make it a matter of health and resign for your own
+good.--I mean the looks of the thing. That won't make any difference in
+my subsequent conclusions. This place is arranged so well now, that it
+can run nicely for a year without much trouble. We might fix this up
+again--it depends----"
+
+Eugene wished he had not added the last hypocritical phrase.
+
+He shook hands and went to the door and Eugene strolled to the window.
+Here was all the solid foundation knocked from under him at one fell
+stroke, as if by a cannon. He had lost this truly magnificent position,
+$25,000 a year. Where would he get another like it? Who else--what other
+company could pay any such salary? How could he maintain the Riverside
+Drive apartment now, unless he married Suzanne? How could he have his
+automobile--his valet? Colfax said nothing about continuing his
+income--why should he? He really owed him nothing. He had been
+exceedingly well paid--better paid than he would have been anywhere
+else.
+
+He regretted his fanciful dreams about Blue Sea--his silly enthusiasm in
+tying up all his money in that. Would Mrs. Dale go to Winfield? Would
+her talk do him any real harm there? Winfield had always been a good
+friend to him, had manifested a high regard. This charge, this talk of
+abduction. What a pity it all was. It might change Winfield's attitude,
+and still why should it? He had women; no wife, however. He hadn't, as
+Colfax said, planned this thing quite right. That was plain now. His
+shimmering world of dreams was beginning to fade like an evening sky. It
+might be that he had been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp, after all. Could
+this really be possible? Could it be?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+One would have thought that this terrific blow would have given Eugene
+pause in a way, and it did. It frightened him. Mrs. Dale had gone to
+Colfax in order to persuade him to use his influence to make Eugene
+behave himself, and, having done so much, she was actually prepared to
+go further. She was considering some scheme whereby she could blacken
+Eugene, have his true character become known without in any way
+involving Suzanne. Having been relentlessly pursued and harried by
+Eugene, she was now as relentless in her own attitude. She wanted him to
+let go now, entirely, if she could, not to see Suzanne any more and she
+went, first to Winfield, and then back to Lenox with the hope of
+preventing any further communication, or at least action on Suzanne's
+part, or Eugene's possible presence there.
+
+In so far as her visit to Winfield was concerned, it did not amount to
+so much morally or emotionally in that quarter, for Winfield did not
+feel that he was called upon to act in the matter. He was not Eugene's
+guardian, nor yet a public censor of morals. He waived the whole
+question grandly to one side, though in a way he was glad to know of it,
+for it gave him an advantage over Eugene. He was sorry for him a
+little--what man would not be? Nevertheless, in his thoughts of
+reorganizing the Blue Sea Corporation, he did not feel so bad over what
+might become of Eugene's interests. When the latter approached him, as
+he did some time afterward, with the idea that he might be able to
+dispose of his holdings, he saw no way to do it. The company was really
+not in good shape. More money would have to be put in. All the treasury
+stock would have to be quickly disposed of, or a reorganization would
+have to be effected. The best that could be promised under these
+circumstances was that Eugene's holdings might be exchanged for a
+fraction of their value in a new issue by a new group of directors. So
+Eugene saw the end of his dreams in that direction looming up quite
+clearly.
+
+When he saw what Mrs. Dale had done, he saw also that it was necessary
+to communicate the situation clearly to Suzanne. The whole thing pulled
+him up short, and he began to wonder what was to become of him. With his
+twenty-five thousand a year in salary cut off, his prospect of an
+independent fortune in Blue Sea annihilated, the old life closed to him
+for want of cash, for who can go about in society without money? he saw
+that he was in danger of complete social and commercial extinction. If
+by any chance a discussion of the moral relation between him and Suzanne
+arose, his unconscionable attitude toward Angela, if White heard of it
+for instance, what would become of him? The latter would spread the fact
+far and wide. It would be the talk of the town, in the publishing world
+at least. It would close every publishing house in the city to him. He
+did not believe Colfax would talk. He fancied that Mrs. Dale had not,
+after all, spoken to Winfield, but if she had, how much further would it
+go? Would White hear of it through Colfax? Would he keep it a secret if
+he knew? Never! The folly of what he had been doing began to dawn upon
+him dimly. What was it that he had been doing? He felt like a man who
+had been cast into a deep sleep by a powerful opiate and was now slowly
+waking to a dim wondering sense of where he was. He was in New York. He
+had no position. He had little ready money--perhaps five or six thousand
+all told. He had the love of Suzanne, but her mother was still fighting
+him, and he had Angela on his hands, undivorced. How was he to arrange
+things now? How could he think of going back to her? Never!
+
+He sat down and composed the following letter to Suzanne, which he
+thought would make clear to her just how things stood and give her an
+opportunity to retract if she wished, for he thought he owed that much
+to her now:
+
+"Flower Face:
+
+I had a talk with Mr. Colfax this morning and what I feared might happen
+has happened. Your mother, instead of going to Boston as you thought,
+came to New York and saw him and, I fancy, my friend Winfield, too. She
+cannot do me any harm in that direction, for my relationship with that
+company does not depend on a salary, or a fixed income of any kind, but
+she has done me infinite harm here. Frankly, I have lost my position. I
+do not believe that would have come about except for other pressure with
+which she had nothing to do, but her charges and complaints, coming on
+top of opposition here on the part of someone else, has done what she
+couldn't have done alone. Flower Face, do you know what that means? I
+told you once that I had tied up all my spare cash in Blue Sea, which I
+hoped would come to so much. It may, but the cutting off my salary here
+means great changes for me there, unless I can make some other business
+engagement immediately. I shall probably have to give up my apartment in
+Riverside Drive and my automobile, and in other ways trim my sails to
+meet the bad weather. It means that if you come to me, we should have to
+live on what I can earn as an artist unless I should decide and be able
+to find something else. When I came to Canada for you, I had some such
+idea in mind, but since this thing has actually happened, you may think
+differently. If nothing happens to my Blue Sea investment, there may be
+an independent fortune some day in that. I can't tell, but that is a
+long way off, and meanwhile, there is only this, and I don't know what
+else your mother may do to my reputation. She appears to be in a very
+savage frame of mind. You heard what she said at While-a-Way. She has
+evidently gone back on that completely.
+
+"Flower Face, I lay this all before you so that you may see how things
+are. If you come to me it may be in the face of a faded reputation. You
+must realize that there is a great difference between Eugene Witla,
+Managing Publisher of the United Magazines Corporation, and Eugene
+Witla, Artist. I have been very reckless and defiant in my love for you.
+Because you are so lovely--the most perfect thing that I have ever
+known, I have laid all on the altar of my affection. I would do it
+again, gladly--a thousand times. Before you came, my life was a gloomy
+thing. I thought I was living, but I knew in my heart that it was all a
+dusty shell--a lie. Then you came, and oh, how I have lived! The nights,
+the days of beautiful fancy. Shall I ever forget White Wood, or Blue
+Sea, or Briarcliff, or that wonderful first day at South Beach? Little
+girl, our ways have been the ways of perfectness and peace. This has
+been an intensely desperate thing to do, but for my sake, I am not
+sorry. I have been dreaming a wonderfully sweet and perfect dream. It
+may be when you know all and see how things stand, and stop and think,
+as I now ask you to do, you may be sorry and want to change your mind.
+Don't hesitate to do so if you feel that way. You know I told you to
+think calmly long ago before you told your mother. This is a bold,
+original thing we have been planning. It is not to be expected that the
+world would see it as we have. It is quite to be expected that trouble
+would follow in the wake of it, but it seemed possible to me, and still
+seems so. If you want to come to me, say so. If you want me to come to
+you, speak the word. We will go to England or Italy, and I will try my
+hand at painting again. I can do that I am sure. Or, we can stay here,
+and I can see if some engagement cannot be had.
+
+"You want to remember, though, that your mother may not have finished
+fighting. She may go to much greater lengths than she has gone. You
+thought you might control her, but it seems not. I thought we had won in
+Canada, but it appears not. If she attempts to restrain you from using
+your share of your father's estate, she may be able to cause you trouble
+there. If she attempts to incarcerate you, she might be successful. I
+wish I could talk to you. Can't I see you at Lenox? Are you coming home
+next week? We ought to think and plan and act now if at all. Don't let
+any consideration for me stand in your way, though, if you are doubtful.
+Remember that conditions are different now. Your whole future hangs on
+your decision. I should have talked this way long ago, perhaps, but I
+did not think your mother could do what she has succeeded in doing. I
+did not think my financial standing would play any part in it.
+
+"Flower Face, this is the day of real trial for me. I am unhappy, but
+only at the possible prospect of losing you. Nothing of all these other
+things really matters. With you, everything would be perfect, whatever
+my condition might be. Without you, it will be as dark as night. The
+decision is in your hands and you must act. Whatever you decide, that I
+will do. Don't, as I say, let consideration for me stand in the way. You
+are young. You have a social career before you. After all, I am twice
+your age. I talk thus sanely because if you come to me now, I want you
+to understand clearly how you come.
+
+"Oh, I wonder sometimes if you really understand. I wonder if I have
+been dreaming a dream. You are so beautiful. You have been such an
+inspiration to me. Has this been a lure--a will-o'-the wisp? I wonder. I
+wonder. And yet I love you, love you, love you. A thousand kisses,
+Divine Fire, and I wait for your word.
+
+   "Eugene."
+
+Suzanne read this letter at Lenox, and for the first time in her life
+she began to think and ponder seriously. What had she been doing? What
+was Eugene doing? This denouement frightened her. Her mother was more
+purposeful than she imagined. To think of her going to Colfax--of her
+lying and turning so in her moods. She had not thought this possible of
+her mother. Had not thought it possible that Eugene could lose his
+position. He had always seemed so powerful to her; so much a law unto
+himself. Once when they were out in an automobile together, he had asked
+her why she loved him, and she said, "because you are a genius and can
+do anything you please."
+
+"Oh, no," he answered, "nothing like that. I can't really do very much
+of anything. You just have an exaggerated notion of me."
+
+"Oh, no, I haven't," she replied. "You can paint, and you can
+write"--she was judging by some of the booklets about Blue Sea and
+verses about herself and clippings of articles done in his old Chicago
+newspaper days, which he showed her once in a scrapbook in his
+apartment--"and you can run that office, and you were an advertising
+manager and an art director."
+
+She lifted up her face and looked into his eyes admiringly.
+
+"My, what a list of accomplishments!" he replied. "Well whom the gods
+would destroy they first make mad." He kissed her.
+
+"And you love so beautifully," she added by way of climax.
+
+Since then, she had thought of this often, but now, somehow, it received
+a severe setback. He was not quite so powerful. He could not prevent her
+mother from doing this, and could she really conquer her mother?
+Whatever Suzanne might think of her deceit, she was moving Heaven and
+earth to prevent this. Was she wholly wrong? After that climacteric
+night at St. Jacques, when somehow the expected did not happen, Suzanne
+had been thinking. Did she really want to leave home, and go with
+Eugene? Did she want to fight her mother in regard to her estate? She
+might have to do that. Her original idea had been that she and Eugene
+would meet in some lovely studio, and that she would keep her own home,
+and he would have his. It was something very different, this talk of
+poverty, and not having an automobile, and being far away from home.
+Still she loved him. Maybe she could force her mother to terms yet.
+
+There were more struggles in the two or three succeeding days, in which
+the guardian of the estate--Mr. Herbert Pitcairn, of the Marquardt Trust
+Company, and, once more, Dr. Woolley, were called in to argue with her.
+Suzanne, unable to make up her mind, listened to her mother's insidious
+plea, that if she would wait a year, and then say she really wanted him,
+she could have him; listened to Mr. Pitcairn tell her mother that he
+believed any court would on application adjudge her incompetent and tie
+up her estate; heard Dr. Woolley say in her presence to her mother that
+he did not deem a commission in lunacy advisable, but if her mother
+insisted, no doubt a judge would adjudge her insane, if no more than to
+prevent this unhallowed consummation. Suzanne became frightened. Her
+iron nerve, after Eugene's letter, was weakening. She was terribly
+incensed against her mother, but she began now for the first time to
+think what her friends would think. Supposing her mother did lock her
+up. Where would they think she was? All these days and weeks of strain,
+which had worn her mother threadbare had told something on her own
+strength, or rather nerve. It was too intense, and she began to wonder
+whether they had not better do as Eugene suggested, and wait a little
+while. He had agreed up at St. Jacques to wait, if she were willing.
+Only the provision was that they were to see each other. Now her mother
+had changed front again, pleading danger, undue influence, that she
+ought to have at least a year of her old kind of life undisturbed to see
+whether she really cared.
+
+"How can you tell?" she insisted to Suzanne, in spite of the girl's
+desire not to talk. "You have been swept into this, and you haven't
+given yourself time to think. A year won't hurt. What harm will it do
+you or him?"
+
+"But, mama," asked Suzanne over and over at different times, and in
+different places, "why did you go and tell Mr. Colfax? What a mean,
+cruel thing that was to do!"
+
+"Because I think he needs something like that to make him pause and
+think. He isn't going to starve. He is a man of talent. He needs
+something like that to bring him to his senses. Mr. Colfax hasn't
+discharged him. He told me he wouldn't. He said he would make him take a
+year off and think about it, and that's just what he has done. It won't
+hurt him. I don't care if it does. Look at the way he has made me
+suffer."
+
+She felt exceedingly bitter toward Eugene, and was rejoicing that at
+last she was beginning to have her innings.
+
+"Mama," said Suzanne, "I am never going to forgive you for this. You are
+acting horribly--I will wait, but it will come to the same thing in the
+end. I am going to have him."
+
+"I don't care what you do after a year," said Mrs. Dale cheerfully and
+subtly. "If you will just wait that long and give yourself time to think
+and still want to marry him, you can do so. He can probably get a
+divorce in that time, anyhow." She did not mean what she was saying, but
+any argument was good for the situation, if it delayed matters.
+
+"But I don't know that I want to marry him," insisted Suzanne, doggedly,
+harking back to her original idea. "That isn't my theory of it."
+
+"Oh, well," replied Mrs. Dale complaisantly, "you will know better what
+to think of that after a year. I don't want to coerce you, but I'm not
+going to have our home and happiness broken up in this way without
+turning a hand, and without your stopping to think about it. You owe it
+to me--to all these years I have cared for you, to show me some
+consideration. A year won't hurt you. It won't hurt him. You will find
+out then whether he really loves you or not. This may just be a passing
+fancy. He has had other women before you. He may have others after you.
+He may go back to Mrs. Witla. It doesn't make any difference what he
+tells you. You ought to test him before you break up his home and mine.
+If he really loves you, he will agree readily enough. Do this for me,
+Suzanne, and I will never cross your path any more. If you will wait a
+year you can do anything you choose. I can only hope you won't go to him
+without going as his wife, but if you insist, I will hush the matter up
+as best I can. Write to him and tell him that you have decided that you
+both ought to wait a year. You don't need to see him any more. It will
+just stir things all up afresh. If you don't see him, but just write, it
+will be better for him, too. He won't feel so badly as he will if you
+see him again and go all over the ground once more."
+
+Mrs. Dale was terribly afraid of Eugene's influence, but she could not
+accomplish this.
+
+"I won't do that," said Suzanne, "I won't do it. I'm going back to New
+York, that's all there is about it!" Mrs. Dale finally yielded that
+much. She had to.
+
+There was a letter from Suzanne after three days, saying that she
+couldn't answer his letter in full, but that she was coming back to New
+York and would see him, and subsequently a meeting between Suzanne and
+Eugene at Daleview in her mother's presence--Dr. Woolley and
+Mr. Pitcairn were in another part of the house at the time--in which the
+proposals were gone over anew.
+
+Eugene had motored down after Mrs. Dale's demands had been put before
+him in the gloomiest and yet more feverish frame of mind in which he had
+ever been,--gloomy because of heavy forebodings of evil and his own dark
+financial condition--while inspirited at other moments by thoughts of
+some splendid, eager revolt on the part of Suzanne, of her rushing to
+him, defying all, declaring herself violently and convincingly, and so
+coming off a victor with him. His faith in her love was still so great.
+
+The night was one of those cold October ones with a steely sky and a
+sickle moon, harbinger of frost, newly seen in the west, and pointed
+stars thickening overhead. As he sat in his car on the Staten Island
+ferry boat, he could see a long line of southward bound ducks, homing to
+those reedy marshes which Bryant had in mind when he wrote "To a
+Waterfowl." They were honking as they went, their faint "quacks" coming
+back on the thin air and making him feel desperately lonely and bereft.
+When he reached Daleview, speeding past October trees, and entered the
+great drawing-room where a fire was blazing and where once in spring he
+had danced with Suzanne, his heart leaped up, for he was to see her, and
+the mere sight of her was as a tonic to his fevered body--a cool drink
+to a thirsting man.
+
+Mrs. Dale stared at Eugene defiantly when he came, but Suzanne welcomed
+him to her embrace. "Oh!" she exclaimed, holding him close for a few
+moments and breathing feverishly. There was complete silence for a time.
+
+"Mama insists, Eugene," she said after a time, "that we ought to wait a
+year, and I think since there is such a fuss about it, that perhaps it
+might be just as well. We may have been just a little hasty, don't you
+think? I have told mama what I think about her action in going to
+Mr. Colfax, but she doesn't seem to care. She is threatening now to have
+me adjudged insane. A year won't make any real difference since I am
+coming to you, anyhow, will it? But I thought I ought to tell you this
+in person, to ask you about it"--she paused, looking into his eyes.
+
+"I thought we settled all this up in St. Jacques?" said Eugene, turning
+to Mrs. Dale, but experiencing a sinking sensation of fear.
+
+"We did, all except the matter of not seeing her. I think it is highly
+inadvisable that you two should be together. It isn't possible the way
+things stand. People will talk. Your wife's condition has to be
+adjusted. You can't be running around with her and a child coming to
+you. I want Suzanne to go away for a year where she can be calm and
+think it all out, and I want you to let her. If she still insists that
+she wants you after that, and will not listen to the logic of the
+situation in regard to marriage, then I propose to wash my hands of the
+whole thing. She may have her inheritance. She may have you if she wants
+you. If you have come to your senses by that time, as I hope you will
+have, you will get a divorce, or go back to Mrs. Witla, or do whatever
+you do in a sensible way."
+
+She did not want to incense Eugene here, but she was very bitter.
+
+Eugene merely frowned.
+
+"Is this your decision, Suzanne, too?" he asked wearily.
+
+"I think mama is terrible, Eugene," replied Suzanne evasively, or
+perhaps as a reply to her mother. "You and I have planned our lives, and
+we will work them out. We have been a little selfish, now that I think
+of it. I think a year won't do any harm, perhaps, if it will stop all
+this fussing. I can wait, if you can."
+
+An inexpressible sense of despair fell upon Eugene at the sound of this,
+a sadness so deep that he could scarcely speak. He could not believe
+that it was really Suzanne who was saying that to him. Willing to wait a
+year! She who had declared so defiantly that she would not. It would do
+no harm? To think that life, fate, her mother were triumphing over him
+in this fashion, after all. What then was the significance of the
+black-bearded men he had seen so often of late? Why had he been finding
+horseshoes? Was fate such a liar? Did life in its dark, subtle chambers
+lay lures and traps for men? His position gone, his Blue Sea venture
+involved in an indefinite delay out of which might come nothing, Suzanne
+going for a whole year, perhaps for ever, most likely so, for what could
+not her mother do with her in a whole year, having her alone? Angela
+alienated--a child approaching. What a climax!
+
+"Is this really your decision, Suzanne?" he asked, sadly, a mist of woe
+clouding his whole being.
+
+"I think it ought to be, perhaps, Eugene," she replied, still evasively.
+"It's very trying. I will be faithful to you, though. I promise you that
+I will not change. Don't you think we can wait a year? We can, can't
+we?"
+
+"A whole year without seeing you, Suzanne?"
+
+"Yes, it will pass, Eugene."
+
+"A whole year?"
+
+"Yes, Eugene."
+
+"I have nothing more to say, Mrs. Dale," he said, turning to her mother
+solemnly, a sombre, gloomy light in his eye, his heart hardening towards
+Suzanne for the moment. To think she should treat him so--throw him
+down, as he phrased it. Well, such was life. "You win," he added. "It
+has been a terrible experience for me. A terrible passion. I love this
+girl. I love her with my whole heart. Sometimes I have vaguely suspected
+that she might not know."
+
+He turned to Suzanne, and for the first time he thought that he did not
+see there that true understanding which he had fancied had been there
+all the time. Could fate have been lying to him also in this? Was he
+mistaken in this, and had he been following a phantom lure of beauty?
+Was Suzanne but another trap to drag him down to his old nothingness?
+God! The prediction of the Astrologer of a second period of defeat after
+seven or eight years came back.
+
+"Oh, Suzanne!" he said, simply and unconsciously dramatic. "Do you
+really love me?"
+
+"Yes, Eugene," she replied.
+
+"Really?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He held out his arms and she came, but for the life of him he could not
+dispel this terrible doubt. It took the joy out of his kiss--as if he
+had been dreaming a dream of something perfect in his arms and had
+awaked to find it nothing--as if life had sent him a Judas in the shape
+of a girl to betray him.
+
+"Do let us end this, Mr. Witla," said Mrs. Dale coldly, "there is
+nothing to be gained by delaying. Let us end it for a year, and then
+talk."
+
+"Oh, Suzanne," he continued, as mournful as a passing bell, "come to the
+door with me."
+
+"No, the servants are there," put in Mrs. Dale. "Please make your
+farewells here."
+
+"Mama," said Suzanne angrily and defiantly, moved by the pity of it, "I
+won't have you talk this way. Leave the room, or I shall go to the door
+with him and further. Leave us, please."
+
+Mrs. Dale went out.
+
+"Oh, Flower Face," said Eugene pathetically, "I can't believe it. I
+can't. I can't! This has been managed wrong. I should have taken you
+long ago. So it is to end this way. A year, a whole year, and how much
+longer?"
+
+"Only a year," she insisted. "Only a year, believe me, can't you? I
+won't change, I won't!"
+
+He shook his head, and Suzanne as before took his face in her hands. She
+kissed his cheeks, his lips, his hair.
+
+"Believe me, Eugene. I seem cold. You don't know what I have gone
+through. It is nothing but trouble everywhere. Let us wait a year. I
+promise you I will come to you. I swear. One year. Can't we wait one
+year?"
+
+"A year," he said. "A year. I can't believe it. Where will we all be in
+a year? Oh, Flower Face, Myrtle Bloom, Divine Fire. I can't stand this.
+I can't. It's too much. I'm the one who is paying now. Yes, I pay."
+
+He took her face and looked at it, all its soft, enticing features, her
+eyes, her lips, her cheeks, her hair.
+
+"I thought, I thought," he murmured.
+
+Suzanne only stroked the back of his head with her hands.
+
+"Well, if I must, I must," he said.
+
+He turned away, turned back to embrace her, turned again and then,
+without looking back, walked out into the hall. Mrs. Dale was there
+waiting.
+
+"Good night, Mrs. Dale," he said gloomily.
+
+"Good night, Mr. Witla," she replied frigidly, but with a sense of
+something tragic in her victory at that.
+
+He took his hat and walked out.
+
+Outside the bright October stars were in evidence by millions. The Bay
+and Harbor of New York were as wonderfully lit as on that night when
+Suzanne came to him after the evening at Fort Wadsworth on her own
+porch. He recalled the spring odours, the wonderful feel of youth and
+love--the hope that was springing then. Now, it was five or six months
+later, and all that romance was gone. Suzanne, sweet voice, accomplished
+shape, light whisper, delicate touch. Gone. All gone--
+
+  "Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
+   Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
+   Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
+   Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise."
+
+Gone were those bright days in which they had ridden together, dined
+together, walked in sylvan places beside their car. A little way from
+here he first played tennis with her. A little way from here he had come
+so often to meet her clandestinely. Now she was gone--gone.
+
+He had come in his car, but he really did not want it. Life was
+accursed. His own was a failure. To think that all his fine dreams
+should crumble this way. Shortly he would have no car, no home on
+Riverside Drive, no position, no anything.
+
+"God, I can't stand this!" he exclaimed, and a little later--"By God, I
+can't! I can't!"
+
+He dismissed his car at the Battery, telling his chauffeur to take it to
+the garage, and walking gloomily through all the tall dark streets of
+lower New York. Here was Broadway where he had often been with Colfax
+and Winfield. Here was this great world of finance around Wall Street in
+which he had vaguely hoped to shine. Now these buildings were high and
+silent--receding from him in a way. Overhead were the clear bright
+stars, cool and refreshing, but without meaning to him now. How was he
+to settle it? How adjust it? A year! She would never come back--never!
+It was all gone. A bright cloud faded. A mirage dissolved into its
+native nothingness. Position, distinction, love, home--where were they?
+Yet a little while and all these things would be as though they had
+never been. Hell! Damn! Curse the brooding fates that could thus plot to
+destroy him!
+
+Back in her room in Daleview Suzanne had locked herself in. She was not
+without a growing sense of the tragedy of it. She stared at the floor,
+recalled his face.
+
+"Oh, oh," she said, and for the first time in her life felt as though
+she could cry from a great heartache--but she could not.
+
+And in Riverside Drive was another woman brooding, lonely, despondently,
+desperately, over the nature of the tragedy that was upon her. How were
+things to be adjusted? How was she to be saved? Oh! oh! her life, her
+child! If Eugene could be made to understand! If he could only be made
+to see!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+During the weeks which followed Colfax's talk with him, and Suzanne's
+decision, which amounted practically to a dismissal, Eugene tried to
+wind up his affairs at the United Magazines Corporation, as well as
+straighten out his relationship with Angela. It was no easy task. Colfax
+helped him considerably by suggesting that he should say he was going
+abroad for the company, for the time being, and should make it appear
+imperative that he go at once. Eugene called in his department heads,
+and told them what Colfax suggested, but added that his own interests
+elsewhere, of which they knew, or suspected, were now so involved that
+he might possibly not return, or only for a little while at best. He put
+forward an air of great sufficiency and self-satisfaction, considering
+the difficulties he was encountering, and the thing passed off as a
+great wonder, but with no suspicion of any immediate misfortune
+attaching to him. As a matter of fact, it was assumed that he was
+destined to a much higher estate--the control of his private interests.
+
+In his talk with Angela he made it perfectly plain that he was going to
+leave her. He would not make any pretence about this. She ought to know.
+He had lost his position; he was not going to Suzanne soon; he wanted
+her to leave him, or he would leave her. She should go to Wisconsin or
+Europe or anywhere, for the time being, and leave him to fight this
+thing out alone. He was not indispensable to her in her condition. There
+were nurses she could hire--maternity hospitals where she could stay. He
+would be willing to pay for that. He would never live with her any more,
+if he could help it--he did not want to. The sight of her in the face of
+his longing for Suzanne would be a wretched commentary--a reproach and a
+sore shame. No, he would leave her and perhaps, possibly, sometime when
+she obtained more real fighting courage, Suzanne might come to him. She
+ought to. Angela might die. Yes, brutal as it may seem, he thought this.
+She might die, and then--and then---- No thought of the child that might
+possibly live, even if she died, held him. He could not understand that,
+could not grasp it as yet. It was a mere abstraction.
+
+Eugene took a room in an apartment house in Kingsbridge, where he was
+not known for the time being, and where he was not likely to be seen.
+Then there was witnessed that dreary spectacle of a man whose life has
+apparently come down in a heap, whose notions, emotions, tendencies and
+feelings are confused and disappointed by some untoward result. If
+Eugene had been ten or fifteen years older, the result might have been
+suicide. A shade of difference in temperament might have resulted in
+death, murder, anything. As it was, he sat blankly at times among the
+ruins of his dreams speculating on what Suzanne was doing, on what
+Angela was doing, on what people were saying and thinking, on how he
+could gather up the broken pieces of his life and make anything out of
+them at all.
+
+The one saving element in it all was his natural desire to work, which,
+although it did not manifest itself at first, by degrees later on began
+to come back. He must do something, if it was not anything more than to
+try to paint again. He could not be running around looking for a
+position. There was nothing for him in connection with Blue Sea. He had
+to work to support Angela, of whom he was now free, if he did not want
+to be mean; and as he viewed it all in the light of what had happened,
+he realized that he had been bad enough. She had not been
+temperamentally suited to him, but she had tried to be. Fundamentally it
+was not her fault. How was he to work and live and be anything at all
+from now on?
+
+There were long arguments over this situation between him and
+Angela--pleas, tears, a crashing downward of everything which was worth
+while in life to Angela, and then, in spite of her pathetic situation,
+separation. Because it was November and the landlord had heard of
+Eugene's financial straits, or rather reverse of fortune, it was
+possible to relinquish the lease, which had several years to run, and
+the apartment was given up. Angela, distraught, scarcely knew which way
+to turn. It was one of those pitiless, scandalous situations in life
+which sicken us of humanity. She ran helplessly to Eugene's sister,
+Myrtle, who first tried to conceal the scandal and tragedy from her
+husband, but afterward confessed and deliberated as to what should be
+done. Frank Bangs, who was a practical man, as well as firm believer in
+Christian Science because of his wife's to him miraculous healing from a
+tumor several years before, endeavored to apply his understanding of the
+divine science--the omnipresence of good to this situation.
+
+"There is no use worrying about it, Myrtle," he said to his wife, who,
+in spite of her faith, was temporarily shaken and frightened by the
+calamities which seemingly had overtaken her brother. "It's another
+evidence of the workings of mortal mind. It is real enough in its idea
+of itself, but nothing in God's grace. It will come out all right, if we
+think right. Angela can go to a maternity hospital for the time being,
+or whenever she's ready. We may be able to persuade Eugene to do the
+right thing."
+
+Angela was persuaded to consult a Christian Science practitioner, and
+Myrtle went to the woman who had cured her and begged her to use her
+influence, or rather her knowledge of science to effect a rehabilitation
+for her brother. She was told that this could not be done without his
+wish, but that she would pray for him. If he could be persuaded to come
+of his own accord, seeking spiritual guidance or divine aid, it would be
+a different matter. In spite of his errors, and to her they seemed
+palpable and terrible enough at present, her faith would not allow her
+to reproach him, and besides she loved him. He was a strong man, she
+said, always strange. He and Angela might not have been well mated. But
+all could be righted in _Science_. There was a dreary period of packing
+and storing for Angela, in which she stood about amid the ruins of her
+previous comfort and distinction and cried over the things that had
+seemed so lovely to her. Here were all Eugene's things, his paintings,
+his canes, his pipes, his clothes. She cried over a handsome silk
+dressing gown in which he had been wont to lounge about--it smacked so
+much, curiously, of older and happier days. There were hard, cold and
+determined conferences also in which some of Angela's old fighting,
+ruling spirit would come back, but not for long. She was beaten now, and
+she knew it--wrecked. The roar of a cold and threatening sea was in her
+ears.
+
+It should be said here that at one time Suzanne truly imagined she loved
+Eugene. It must be remembered, however, that she was moved to affection
+for him by the wonder of a personality that was hypnotic to her. There
+was something about the personality of Eugene that was subversive of
+conventionality. He approached, apparently a lamb of conventional
+feelings and appearances; whereas, inwardly, he was a ravening wolf of
+indifference to convention. All the organized modes and methods of life
+were a joke to him. He saw through to something that was not material
+life at all, but spiritual, or say immaterial, of which all material
+things were a shadow. What did the great forces of life care whether
+this system which was maintained here with so much show and fuss was
+really maintained at all or not? How could they care? He once stood in a
+morgue and saw human bodies apparently dissolving into a kind of
+chemical mush and he had said to himself then how ridiculous it was to
+assume that life meant anything much to the forces which were doing
+these things. Great chemical and physical forces were at work, which
+permitted, accidentally, perhaps, some little shadow-play, which would
+soon pass. But, oh, its presence--how sweet it was!
+
+Naturally Suzanne was cast down for the time being, for she was capable
+of suffering just as Eugene was. But having given her word to wait, she
+decided to stick to that, although she had not stuck to her other. She
+was between nineteen and twenty now--Eugene was nearing forty. Life
+could still soothe her in spite of herself. In Eugene's case it could
+only hurt the more. Mrs. Dale went abroad with Suzanne and the other
+children, visiting with people who could not possibly have heard, or
+ever would except in a vague, uncertain way for that matter. If it
+became evident, as she thought it might, that there was to be a scandal,
+Mrs. Dale proposed to say that Eugene had attempted to establish an
+insidious hold on her child in defiance of reason and honor, and that
+she had promptly broken it up, shielding Suzanne, almost without the
+latter's knowledge. It was plausible enough.
+
+What was he to do now? how live? was his constant thought. Go into a
+wee, small apartment in some back street with Angela, where he and she,
+if he decided to stay with her, could find a pretty outlook for a little
+money and live? Never. Admit that he had lost Suzanne for a year at
+least, if not permanently, in this suddenly brusque way? Impossible. Go
+and confess that he had made a mistake, which he still did not feel to
+be true? or that he was sorry and would like to patch things up as
+before? Never. He was not sorry. He did not propose to live with Angela
+in the old way any more. He was sick of her, or rather of that
+atmosphere of repression and convention in which he had spent so many
+years. He was sick of the idea of having a child thrust on him against
+his will. He would not do it. She had no business to put herself in this
+position. He would die first. His insurance was paid up to date. He had
+carried during the last five years a policy for something over eighteen
+thousand in her favor, and if he died she would get that. He wished he
+might. It would be some atonement for the hard knocks which fate had
+recently given her, but he did not wish to live with her any more.
+Never, never, child or no child. Go back to the apartment after this
+night--how could he? If he did, he must pretend that nothing had
+happened--at least, nothing untoward between him and Suzanne. She might
+come back. Might! Might! Ah, the mockery of it--to leave him in this way
+when she really could have come to him--should have--oh, the bitterness
+of this thrust of fate!
+
+There was a day when the furniture was sent away and Angela went to live
+with Myrtle for the time being. There was another tearful hour when she
+left New York to visit her sister Marietta at Racine, where they now
+were, intending to tell her before she came away, as a profound secret,
+the terrible tragedy which had overtaken her. Eugene went to the train
+with her, but with no desire to be there. Angela's one thought, in all
+this, was that somehow time would effect a reconciliation. If she could
+just wait long enough; if she could keep her peace and live and not die,
+and not give him a divorce, he might eventually recover his sanity and
+come to think of her as at least worth living with. The child might do
+it, its coming would be something that would affect him surely. He was
+bound to see her through it. She told herself she was willing and
+delighted to go through this ordeal, if only it brought him back to her.
+This child--what a reception it was to receive, unwanted, dishonored
+before its arrival, ignored; if by any chance she should die, what would
+he do about it? Surely he would not desert it. Already in her nervous,
+melancholy way, she was yearning toward it.
+
+"Tell me," she said to Eugene one day, when they were alternately
+quarreling and planning, "if the baby comes, and I--and I--die, you
+won't absolutely desert it? You'll take it, won't you?"
+
+"I'll take it," he replied. "Don't worry. I'm not an absolute dog. I
+didn't want it. It's a trick on your part, but I'll take it. I don't
+want you to die. You know that."
+
+Angela thought if she lived that she would be willing to go through a
+period of poverty and depression with him again, if only she could live
+to see him sane and moral and even semi-successful. The baby might do
+it. He had never had a child. And much as he disliked the idea now,
+still, when it was here, he might change his mind. If only she could get
+through that ordeal. She was so old--her muscles so set. Meanwhile she
+consulted a lawyer, a doctor, a fortune teller, an astrologer and the
+Christian Science practitioner to whom Myrtle had recommended her. It
+was an aimless, ridiculous combination, but she was badly torn up, and
+any port seemed worth while in this storm.
+
+The doctor told her that her muscles were rather set, but with the
+regimen he prescribed, he was satisfied she would be all right. The
+astrologer told her that she and Eugene were fated for this storm by the
+stars--Eugene, particularly, and that he might recover, in which case,
+he would be successful again in a measure. As for herself, he shook his
+head. Yes, she would be all right. He was lying. The fortune teller laid
+the cards to see if Eugene would ever marry Suzanne, and Angela was
+momentarily gratified to learn that she would never enter his life--this
+from a semi-cadaverous, but richly dressed and bejeweled lady whose
+ante-room was filled with women whose troubles were of the heart, the
+loss of money, the enmity of rivals, or the dangers of childbirth. The
+Christian Science practitioner declared all to be divine
+mind--omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient good, and that evil could not
+exist in it--only the illusion of it. "It is real enough to those who
+give it their faith and believe," said the counselor, "but without
+substance or meaning to those who know themselves to be a perfect,
+indestructible reflection of an idea in God. God is a principle. When
+the nature of that principle is realized and yourself as a part of it,
+evil falls away as the troublesome dream that it is. It has no reality."
+She assured her that no evil could befall her in the true understanding
+of Science. God is love.
+
+The lawyer told her, after listening to a heated story of Eugene's
+misconduct, that under the laws of the State of New York, in which these
+misdeeds were committed, she was not entitled to anything more than a
+very small fraction of her husband's estate, if he had any. Two years
+was the shortest time in which a divorce could be secured. He would
+advise her to sue if she could establish a suitable condition of
+affluence on Eugene's part, not otherwise. Then he charged her
+twenty-five dollars for this advice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+To those who have followed a routine or system of living in this
+world--who have, by slow degrees and persistent effort, built up a
+series of habits, tastes, refinements, emotions and methods of conduct,
+and have, in addition, achieved a certain distinction and position, so
+that they have said to one "Go!" and he goes, and to another "Come!" and
+he comes, who have enjoyed without stint or reserve, let or hindrance,
+those joys of perfect freedom of action, and that ease and deliberation
+which comes with the presence of comparative wealth, social position,
+and comforts, the narrowing that comes with the lack of means, the fear
+of public opinion, or the shame of public disclosure, is one of the most
+pathetic, discouraging and terrifying things that can be imagined. These
+are the hours that try men's souls. The man who sits in a seat of the
+mighty and observes a world that is ruled by a superior power, a
+superior force of which he by some miraculous generosity of fate has
+been chosen apparently as a glittering instrument, has no conception of
+the feelings of the man who, cast out of his dignities and emoluments,
+sits in the dark places of the world among the ashes of his splendor and
+meditates upon the glory of his bygone days. There is a pathos here
+which passes the conception of the average man. The prophets of the Old
+Testament discerned it clearly enough, for they were forever pronouncing
+the fate of those whose follies were in opposition to the course of
+righteousness and who were made examples of by a beneficent and yet
+awful power. "Thus saith the Lord: Because thou hast lifted thyself up
+against the God of Heaven, and they have brought the vessels of His
+house before thee, and thou and thy Lords, thy wives and concubines,
+have drank wine in them, and thou hast praised the gods of silver and
+gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone ... God hath numbered thy Kingdom
+and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting; thy
+Kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians."
+
+Eugene was in a minor way an exemplification of this seeming course of
+righteousness. His Kingdom, small as it was, was truly at an end. Our
+social life is so organized, so closely knit upon a warp of instinct,
+that we almost always instinctively flee that which does not accord with
+custom, usage, preconceived notions and tendencies--those various things
+which we in our littleness of vision conceive to be dominant. Who does
+not run from the man who may because of his deeds be condemned of that
+portion of the public which we chance to respect? Walk he ever so
+proudly, carry himself with what circumspectness he may, at the first
+breath of suspicion all are off--friends, relations, business
+acquaintances, the whole social fabric in toto. "Unclean!" is the cry.
+"Unclean! Unclean!" And it does not matter how inwardly shabby we may
+be, what whited sepulchres shining to the sun, we run quickly. It seems
+a tribute to that providence which shapes our ends, which continues
+perfect in tendency however vilely we may overlay its brightness with
+the rust of our mortal corruption, however imitative we may be.
+
+Angela had gone home by now to see her father, who was now quite old and
+feeble, and also down to Alexandria to see Eugene's mother, who was also
+badly deteriorated in health.
+
+"I keep hoping against hope that your attitude will change toward me,"
+wrote Angela. "Let me hear from you if you will from time to time. It
+can't make any difference in your course. A word won't hurt, and I am so
+lonely. Oh, Eugene, if I could only die--if I only could!" No word as to
+the true state of things was given at either place. Angela pretended
+that Eugene had long been sick of his commercial career and was, owing
+to untoward conditions in the Colfax Company, glad to return to his art
+for a period. He might come home, but he was very busy. So she lied. But
+she wrote Myrtle fully of her hopes and, more particularly, her fears.
+
+There were a number of conferences between Eugene and Myrtle, for the
+latter, because of their early companionship, was very fond of him. His
+traits, the innocent ones, were as sweet to her as when they were boy
+and girl together. She sought him out in his lovely room at Kingsbridge.
+
+"Why don't you come and stay with us, Eugene?" she pleaded. "We have a
+comfortable apartment. You can have that big room next to ours. It has a
+nice view. Frank likes you. We have listened to Angela, and I think you
+are wrong, but you are my brother, and I want you to come. Everything is
+coming out right. God will straighten it out. Frank and I are praying
+for you. There is no evil, you know, according to the way we think.
+Now"--and she smiled her old-time girlish smile--"don't stay up here
+alone. Wouldn't you rather be with me?"
+
+"Oh, I'd like to be there well enough, Myrtle, but I can't do it now. I
+don't want to. I have to think. I want to be alone. I haven't settled
+what I want to do. I think I will try my hand at some pictures. I have a
+little money and all the time I want now. I see there are some nice
+houses over there on the hill that might have a room with a north window
+that would serve as a studio. I want to think this thing out first. I
+don't know what I'll do."
+
+He had now that new pain in his groin, which had come to him first when
+her mother first carried Suzanne off to Canada and he was afraid that he
+should never see her any more. It was a real pain, sharp, physical, like
+a cut with a knife. He wondered how it was that it could be physical and
+down there. His eyes hurt him and his finger tips. Wasn't that queer,
+too?
+
+"Why don't you go and see a Christian Science practitioner?" asked
+Myrtle. "It won't do you any harm. You don't need to believe. Let me get
+you the book and you can read it. See if you don't think there is
+something in it. There you go smiling sarcastically, but, Eugene, I
+can't tell you what it hasn't done for us. It's done everything--that's
+just all. I'm a different person from what I was five years ago, and so
+is Frank. You know how sick I was?"
+
+"Yes, I know."
+
+"Why don't you go and see Mrs. Johns? You needn't tell her anything
+unless you want to. She has performed some perfectly wonderful cures."
+
+"What can Mrs. Johns do for me?" asked Eugene bitterly, his lip set in
+an ironic mould. "Cure me of gloom? Make my heart cease to ache? What's
+the use of talking? I ought to quit the whole thing." He stared at the
+floor.
+
+"She can't, but God can. Oh, Eugene, I know how you feel! Please go. It
+can't do you any harm. I'll bring you the book tomorrow. Will you read
+it if I bring it to you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Oh, Eugene, please for my sake."
+
+"What good will it do? I don't believe in it. I can't. I'm too
+intelligent to take any stock in that rot."
+
+"Eugene, how you talk! You'll change your mind some time. I know how you
+think. But read it anyhow. Will you please? Promise me you will. I
+shouldn't ask. It isn't the way, but I want you to look into it. Go and
+see Mrs. Johns."
+
+Eugene refused. Of asinine things this seemed the silliest. Christian
+Science! Christian rot! He knew what to do. His conscience was dictating
+that he give up Suzanne and return to Angela in her hour of need--to his
+coming child, for the time being anyhow, but this awful lure of beauty,
+of personality, of love--how it tugged at his soul! Oh, those days with
+Suzanne in the pretty watering and dining places about New York, those
+hours of bliss when she looked so beautiful! How could he get over that?
+How give up the memory? She was so sweet. Her beauty so rare. Every
+thought of her hurt. It hurt so badly that most of the time he dared not
+think--must, perforce, walk or work or stir restlessly about agonized
+for fear he should think too much. Oh, life; oh, hell!
+
+The intrusion of Christian Science into his purview just now was due, of
+course, to the belief in and enthusiasm for that religious idea on the
+part of Myrtle and her husband. As at Lourdes and St. Anne de Beau Pre
+and other miracle-working centres, where hope and desire and religious
+enthusiasm for the efficacious intervention of a superior and
+non-malicious force intervenes, there had occurred in her case an actual
+cure from a very difficult and complicated physical ailment. She had
+been suffering from a tumor, nervous insomnia, indigestion, constipation
+and a host of allied ills, which had apparently refused to yield to
+ordinary medical treatment. She was in a very bad way mentally and
+physically at the time the Christian Science textbook, "Science and
+Health, with Key to the Scriptures," by Mrs. Eddy, was put into her
+hands. While attempting to read it in a hopeless, helpless spirit, she
+was instantly cured--that is, the idea that she was well took possession
+of her, and not long after she really was so. She threw all her
+medicines, of which there was quite a store, into the garbage pail,
+eschewed doctors, began to read the Christian Science literature, and
+attend the Christian Science church nearest her apartment, and was soon
+involved in its subtle metaphysical interpretation of mortal life. Into
+this faith, her husband, who loved her very much, had followed, for what
+was good enough for her and would cure her was good enough for him. He
+soon seized on its spiritual significance with great vigor and became,
+if anything, a better exponent and interpreter of the significant
+thought than was she herself.
+
+Those who know anything of Christian Science know that its main tenet is
+that God is a principle, not a personality understandable or conceivable
+from the mortal or sensory side of life (which latter is an illusion),
+and that man (spiritually speaking) in His image and likeness. Man is
+not God or any part of Him. He is an idea in God, and, as such, as
+perfect and indestructible and undisturbably harmonious as an idea in
+God or principle must be. To those not metaphysically inclined, this is
+usually dark and without significance, but to those spiritually or
+metaphysically minded it comes as a great light. Matter becomes a
+built-up set or combination of illusions, which may have evolved or not
+as one chooses, but which unquestionably have been built up from nothing
+or an invisible, intangible idea, and have no significance beyond the
+faith or credence, which those who are at base spiritual give them. Deny
+them--know them to be what they are--and they are gone.
+
+To Eugene, who at this time was in a great state of mental
+doldrums--blue, dispirited, disheartened, inclined to see only evil and
+destructive forces--this might well come with peculiar significance, if
+it came at all. He was one of those men who from their birth are
+metaphysically inclined. All his life he had been speculating on the
+subtleties of mortal existence, reading Spencer, Kant, Spinoza, at odd
+moments, and particularly such men as Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lord
+Avebury, Alfred Russel Wallace, and latterly Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir
+William Crookes, trying to find out by the inductive, naturalistic
+method just what life was. He had secured inklings at times, he thought,
+by reading such things as Emerson's "Oversoul," "The Meditations of
+Marcus Aurelius," and Plato. God was a spirit, he thought, as Christ had
+said to the woman at the well in Samaria, but whether this spirit
+concerned itself with mortal affairs, where was so much suffering and
+contention, was another matter. Personally he had never believed so--or
+been at all sure. He had always been moved by the Sermon on the Mount;
+the beauty of Christ's attitude toward the troubles of the world, the
+wonder of the faith of the old prophets in insisting that God is God,
+that there are no other Gods before him, and that he would repay
+iniquity with disfavor. Whether he did or not was an open question with
+him. This question of sin had always puzzled him--original sin. Were
+there laws which ante-dated human experience, which were in God--The
+Word--before it was made flesh? If so, what were these laws? Did they
+concern matrimony--some spiritual union which was older than life
+itself? Did they concern stealing? What was stealing outside of life?
+Where was it before man began? Or did it only begin with man?
+Ridiculous! It must relate to something in chemistry and physics, which
+had worked out in life. A sociologist--a great professor in one of the
+colleges had once told him that he did not believe in success or
+failure, sin, or a sense of self-righteousness except as they were
+related to built-up instincts in the race--instincts related solely to
+the self-preservation and the evolution of the race. Beyond that was
+nothing. Spiritual morality? Bah! He knew nothing about it.
+
+Such rank agnosticism could not but have had its weight with Eugene. He
+was a doubter ever. All life, as I have said before, went to pieces
+under his scalpel, and he could not put it together again logically,
+once he had it cut up. People talked about the sanctity of marriage,
+but, heavens, marriage was an evolution! He knew that. Someone had
+written a two-volume treatise on it--"The History of Human Marriage," or
+something like that and in it animals were shown to have mated only for
+so long as it took to rear the young, to get them to the point at which
+they could take care of themselves. And wasn't this really what was at
+the basis of modern marriage? He had read in this history, if he
+recalled aright, that the only reason marriage had come to be looked
+upon as sacred, and for life, was the length of time it took to rear the
+human young. It took so long that the parents were old, safely so,
+before the children were launched into the world. Then why separate?
+
+But it was the duty of everybody to raise children.
+
+Ah! there had been the trouble. He had been bothered by that. The home
+centered around that. Children! Race reproduction! Pulling this wagon of
+evolution! Was every man who did not inevitably damned? Was the race
+spirit against him? Look at the men and women who didn't--who couldn't.
+Thousands and thousands. And those who did always thought those who
+didn't were wrong. The whole American spirit he had always felt to be
+intensely set in this direction--the idea of having children and rearing
+them, a conservative work-a-day spirit. Look at his father. And yet
+other men were so shrewd that they preyed on this spirit, moving
+factories to where this race spirit was the most active, so that they
+could hire the children cheaply, and nothing happened to them, or did
+something happen?
+
+However, Myrtle continued to plead with him to look into this new
+interpretation of the Scriptures, claiming that it was true, that it
+would bring him into an understanding of spirit which would
+drive away all these mortal ills, that it was above all mortal
+conception--spiritual over all, and so he thought about that. She told
+him that if it was right that he should cease to live with Angela, it
+would come to pass, and that if it was not, it would not; but anyhow and
+in any event in this truth there would be peace and happiness to him. He
+should do what was right ("seek ye first the Kingdom of God"), and then
+all these things would be added unto him.
+
+And it seemed terribly silly at first to Eugene for him to be listening
+at all to any such talk, but later it was not so much so. There were
+long arguments and appeals, breakfast and dinner, or Sunday dinners at
+Myrtle's apartment, arguments with Bangs and Myrtle concerning every
+phase of the Science teaching, some visits to the Wednesday experience
+and testimony meetings of their church, at which Eugene heard statements
+concerning marvelous cures which he could scarcely believe, and so on.
+So long as the testimonies confined themselves to complaints which might
+be due to nervous imagination, he was satisfied that their cures were
+possibly due to religious enthusiasm, which dispelled their belief in
+something which they did not have, but when they were cured of cancer,
+consumption, locomotor-ataxia, goitres, shortened limbs, hernia--he did
+not wish to say they were liars, they seemed too sincere to do that, but
+he fancied they were simply mistaken. How could they, or this belief, or
+whatever it was, cure cancer? Good Lord! He went on disbelieving in this
+way, and refusing also to read the book until one Wednesday evening when
+he happened to be at the Fourth Church of Christ Scientist in New York
+that a man stood up beside him in his own pew and said:
+
+"I wish to testify to the love and mercy of God in my case, for I was
+hopelessly afflicted not so very long ago and one of the vilest men I
+think it is possible to be. I was raised in a family where the Bible was
+read night and morning--my father was a hidebound Presbyterian--and I
+was so sickened by the manner in which it was forced down my throat and
+the inconsistencies which I thought I saw existing between Christian
+principle and practice, even in my own home, that I said to myself I
+would conform as long as I was in my father's house and eating his
+bread, but when I got out I would do as I pleased. I was in my father's
+house after that a number of years, until I was seventeen, and then I
+went to a large city, Cincinnati, but the moment I was away and free I
+threw aside all my so-called religious training and set out to do what I
+thought was the most pleasant and gratifying thing for me to do. I
+wanted to drink, and I did, though I was really never a very successful
+drinker." Eugene smiled. "I wanted to gamble, and I did, but I was never
+a very clever gambler. Still I did gamble a bit. My great weakness was
+women, and here I hope none will be offended, I know they will not be,
+for there may be others who need my testimony badly. I pursued women as
+I would any other lure. They were really all that I desired--their
+bodies. My lust was terrible. It was such a dominant thought with me
+that I could not look at any good-looking woman except, as the Bible
+says, to lust after her. I was vile. I became diseased. I was carried
+into the First Church of Christ Scientist in Chicago, after I had spent
+all my money and five years of my time on physicians and specialists,
+suffering from locomotor ataxia, dropsy and kidney disease. I had
+previously been healed of some other things by ordinary medicine.
+
+"If there is anyone within the sound of my voice who is afflicted as I
+was, I want him to listen to me.
+
+"I want to say to you tonight that I am a well man--not well physically
+only, but well mentally, and, what is better yet, in so far as I can see
+the truth, spiritually. I was healed after six months' treatment by a
+Christian Science practitioner in Chicago, who took my case on my
+appealing to her, and I stand before you absolutely sound and whole. God
+is good."
+
+He sat down.
+
+While he had been talking Eugene had been studying him closely,
+observing every line of his features. He was tall, lean, sandy-haired
+and sandy-bearded. He was not bad-looking, with long straight nose,
+clear blue eyes, a light pinkish color to his complexion, and a sense of
+vigor and health about him. The thing that Eugene noted most was that he
+was calm, cool, serene, vital. He said exactly what he wanted to say,
+and he said it vigorously. His voice was clear and with good carrying
+power. His clothes were shapely, new, well made. He was no beggar or
+tramp, but a man of some profession--an engineer, very likely. Eugene
+wished that he might talk to him, and yet he felt ashamed. Somehow this
+man's case paralleled his own; not exactly, but closely. He personally
+was never diseased, but how often he had looked after a perfectly
+charming woman to lust after her! Was the thing that this man was saying
+really true? Could he be lying? How ridiculous! Could he be mistaken?
+_This man?_ Impossible! He was too strong, too keen, too sincere, too
+earnest, to be either of these things. Still--But this testimony might
+have been given for his benefit, some strange helpful power--that kindly
+fate that had always pursued him might be trying to reach him here.
+Could it be? He felt a little strange about it, as he had when he saw
+the black-bearded man entering the train that took him to Three Rivers,
+the time he went at the call of Suzanne, as he did when horseshoes were
+laid before him by supernatural forces to warn him of coming prosperity.
+He went home thinking, and that night he seriously tried to read
+"Science and Health" for the first time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+Those who have ever tried to read that very peculiar and, to many, very
+significant document know what an apparent jumble of contradictions and
+metaphysical balderdash it appears to be. The statement concerning the
+rapid multiplication and increased violence of diseases since the flood,
+which appears in the introduction is enough to shock any believer in
+definite, material, established natural science, and when Eugene came
+upon this in the outset, it irritated him, of course, greatly. Why
+should anybody make such a silly statement as this? Everybody knew that
+there had never been a flood. Why quote a myth as a fact? It irritated
+and from a critical point of view amused him. Then he came upon what he
+deemed to be a jumble of confusion in regard to matter and spirit. The
+author talked of the evidences of the five physical senses as being
+worthless, and yet was constantly referring to and using similes based
+upon those evidences to illustrate her spiritual meanings. He threw the
+book down a number of times, for the Biblical references irritated him.
+He did not believe in the Bible. The very word Christianity was a
+sickening jest, as sickening as it had been to the man in the church. To
+say that the miracles of Christ could be repeated today could not be
+serious. Still the man had testified. Wasn't that so? A certain vein of
+sincerity running through it all--that profound evidence of
+faith and sympathy which are the characteristics of all sincere
+reformers--appealed to him. Some little thoughts here and there--a
+profound acceptance of the spiritual understanding of Jesus, which he
+himself accepted, stayed with him. One sentence or paragraph somehow
+stuck in his mind, because he himself was of a metaphysical turn----
+
+"Become conscious for a single moment that life and intelligence are
+purely spiritual, neither in nor of matter, and the body will then utter
+no complaints. If suffering from a belief in sickness, you will find
+yourself suddenly well. Sorrow is turned into joy when the body is
+controlled by spiritual life and love."
+
+"God is a spirit," he recalled Jesus as saying. "They that worship Him
+must worship in spirit and in truth."
+
+"You will find yourself suddenly well," thought Eugene. "Sorrow is
+turned into joy."
+
+"Sorrow. What kind of sorrow? Love sorrow? This probably meant the end
+of earthly love; that that too was mortal."
+
+He read on, discovering that Scientists believed in the immaculate
+conception of the Virgin Mary, which struck him as silly; also that they
+believed in the ultimate abolition of marriage as representing a mortal
+illusion of self-creation and perpetuation, and of course the having of
+children through the agency of the sexes, also the dematerialization of
+the body--its chemicalization into its native spirituality, wherein
+there can be neither sin, sickness, disease, decay nor death, were a
+part of their belief or understanding. It seemed to him to be a wild
+claim, and yet at the time, because of his natural metaphysical turn, it
+accorded with his sense of the mystery of life.
+
+It should be remembered as a factor in this reading that Eugene was
+particularly fitted by temperament--introspective, imaginative,
+psychical--and by a momentarily despairing attitude, in which any straw
+was worth grasping at which promised relief from sorrow, despair and
+defeat, to make a study of this apparently radical theory of human
+existence. He had heard a great deal of Christian Science, seeing its
+churches built, its adherents multiplying, particularly in New York, and
+enthusiastically claiming freedom from every human ill. Idle, without
+entertainment or diversion and intensely introspective, it was natural
+that these curious statements should arrest him.
+
+He was not unaware, also, from past reading and scientific speculation,
+that Carlyle had once said that "matter itself--the outer world of
+matter, was either nothing, or else a product due to man's mind"
+(Carlyle's Journal, from Froude's Life of Carlyle), and that Kant had
+held the whole universe to be something in the eye or mind--neither more
+nor less than a thought. Marcus Aurelius, he recalled, had said
+somewhere in his meditations that the soul of the universe was kind and
+merciful; that it had no evil in it, and was not harmed by evil. This
+latter thought stuck in his mind as peculiar because it was so
+diametrically opposed to his own feelings that the universe, the spirit
+of it that is, was subtle, cruel, crafty, and malicious. He wondered how
+a man who could come to be Emperor of Rome could have thought otherwise.
+Christ's Sermon on the Mount had always appealed to him as the lovely
+speculations of an idealist who had no real knowledge of life. Yet he
+had always wondered why "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,
+where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and
+steal" had thrilled him as something so beautiful that it must be true
+"For where your treasure is there will your heart be also." Keats had
+said "beauty is truth--truth beauty," and still another "truth is what
+is."
+
+"And what is?" he had asked himself in answer to that.
+
+"Beauty," was his reply to himself, for life at bottom, in spite of all
+its teeming terrors, was beautiful.
+
+Only those of a metaphysical or natural religious turn of mind would
+care to follow the slow process of attempted alteration, which took
+place during the series of months which followed Angela's departure for
+Racine, her return to New York at Myrtle's solicitation, the time she
+spent in the maternity hospital, whither she was escorted on her arrival
+by Eugene and after. These are the deeps of being which only the more
+able intellectually essay, but Eugene wandered in them far and wide.
+There were long talks with Myrtle and Bangs--arguments upon all phases
+of mortal thought, real and unreal, with which Angela's situation had
+nothing to do. Eugene frankly confessed that he did not love her--that
+he did not want to live with her. He insisted that he could scarcely
+live without Suzanne. There was the taking up and reading or re-reading
+of odd philosophic and religious volumes, for he had nothing else to do.
+He did not care at first to go and sit with Angela, sorry as he was for
+her. He read or re-read Kent's "History of the Hebrews"; Weiniger's "Sex
+and Character"; Carl Snyder's "The World Machine"; Muzzey's "Spiritual
+Heroes"; Johnston's translation of "Bhagavad Ghita"; Emerson's essay on
+the Oversoul, and Huxley's "Science and Hebrew Tradition" and "Science
+and Christian Tradition." He learned from these things some curious
+facts which relate to religion, which he had either not known before or
+forgotten, i.e., that the Jews were almost the only race or nation which
+developed a consecutive line of religious thinkers or prophets; that
+their ideal was first and last a single God or Divinity, tribal at
+first, but later on universal, whose scope and significance were widened
+until He embraced the whole universe--was, in fact, the Universe--a
+governing principle--one God, however, belief in whom, His power to
+heal, to build up and overthrow had never been relinquished.
+
+The Old Testament was full of that. Was that. The old prophets, he
+learned to his astonishment, were little more than whirling dervishes
+when they are first encountered historically, working themselves up into
+wild transports and frenzies, lying on the ground and writhing, cutting
+themselves as the Persian zealots do to this day in their feast of the
+tenth month and resorting to the most curious devices for nurturing
+their fanatic spirit, but always setting forth something that was
+astonishingly spiritual and great. They usually frequented the holy
+places and were to be distinguished by their wild looks and queer
+clothing. Isaiah eschewed clothing for three years (Is. 22, 21);
+Jeremiah appeared in the streets of the capital (according to Muzzey)
+with a wooden yoke on his neck, saying, "Thus shalt Juda's neck be bent
+under bondage to the Babylonian" (Jer. 27; 2 ff); Zedekiah came to King
+Ahab, wearing horns of iron like a steer, and saying, "Thus shalt thou
+push the Syrians" (1 Kings 22, 11). The prophet was called mad because
+he acted like a madman. Elisha dashed in on the gruff captain, Jehu, in
+his camp and broke a vial of oil on his head, saying, "Thus saith the
+Lord God of Israel, I have made thee king over the people of the Lord";
+then he opened the door and fled. Somehow, though these things seemed
+wild, yet they accorded with Eugene's sense of prophecy. They were not
+cheap but great--wildly dramatic, like the word of a Lord God might be.
+Another thing that fascinated him was to find that the evolutionary
+hypothesis did not after all shut out a conception of a ruling,
+ordaining Divinity, as he had supposed, for he came across several
+things in the papers which, now that he was thinking about this so
+keenly, held him spellbound. One was quoted from a biological work by a
+man named George M. Gould, and read:
+
+"Life reaches control of physical forces by the cell-mechanism, and, so
+far as we know, by it solely." From reading Mrs. Eddy and arguing with
+Bangs, Eugene was not prepared to admit this, but he was fascinated to
+see how it led ultimately to an acknowledgment of an active Divinity
+which shapes our ends. "No organic molecule shows any evidence of
+intellect, design or purpose. It is the product solely of mathematically
+determinate and invariable physical forces. Life becomes conscious of
+itself through specialized cellular activity, and human personality,
+therefore, can only be a unity of greater differentiations of function,
+a higher and fuller incarnation than the single cell incarnation. Life,
+or God, is in the cell.... (And everywhere outside of it, quite as
+active and more so, perhaps, Eugene reserved mentally.) The cell's
+intelligence is His. (From reading Mrs. Eddy, Eugene could not quite
+agree with this. According to her, it was an illusion.) The human
+personality is also at last Himself and only Himself.... If you wish to
+say 'Biologos' or God instead of Life, I heartily agree, and we are face
+to face with the sublime fact of biology. The cell is God's instrument
+and mediator in materiality; it is the mechanism of incarnation, the
+word made flesh and dwelling among us."
+
+The other was a quotation in a Sunday newspaper from some man who
+appeared to be a working physicist of the time--Edgar Lucien Larkin:
+
+"With the discovery and recent perfection of the new ultra-violet light
+microscope and the companion apparatus, the microphotographic camera,
+with rapidly moving, sensitive films, it seems that the extreme limit of
+vision of the human eye has been reached. Inorganic and organic
+particles have been seen, and these so minute that (the smallest)
+objects visible in the most powerful old-style instruments are as huge
+chunks in comparison. An active microscopic universe as wonderful as the
+sidereal universe, the stellar structure, has been revealed. This
+complexity actually exists; but exploration has scarcely commenced.
+Within a hundred years, devoted to this research, the micro-universe may
+be partially understood. Laws of micro-movements may be detected and
+published in textbooks like those of the gigantic universe suns and
+their concentric planets and moons. I cannot look into these minute
+moving and living deeps without instantly believing that they are
+mental--every motion is controlled by mind. The longer I look at the
+amazing things, the deeper is this conviction. This micro-universe is
+rooted and grounded in a mental base. Positively and without hope of
+overthrow, this assertion is made--the flying particles know where to
+go. Coarse particles, those visible in old-time microscopes, when
+suspended in liquids, were observed to be in rapid motion, darting to
+all geometrical directions with high speed. But the ultra-violet
+microscope reveals moving trillions of far smaller bodies, and these
+rush on geometric lines and cutout angles with the most incredible
+speed, specific for each kind and type."
+
+What were the angles? Eugene asked himself. Who made them? Who or what
+arranged the geometric lines? The "Divine Mind" of Mrs. Eddy? Had this
+woman really found the truth? He pondered this, reading on, and then one
+day in a paper he came upon this reflection in regard to the universe
+and its government by Alfred Russel Wallace, which interested him as a
+proof that there might be, as Jesus said and as Mrs. Eddy contended, a
+Divine Mind or central thought in which there was no evil intent, but
+only good. The quotation was: "Life is that power which, from air and
+water and the substances dissolved therein, builds up organized and
+highly complex structures possessing definite forms and functions; these
+are presented in a continuous state of decay and repair by internal
+circulation of fluids and gases; they reproduce their like, go through
+various phases of youth, maturity and age, die and quickly decompose
+into their constituent elements. They thus form continuous series of
+similar individuals and so long as external conditions render their
+existence possible seem to possess a potential immortality.
+
+"It is very necessary to presuppose some vast intelligence, some
+pervading spirit, to explain the guidance of the lower forces in
+accordance with the preordained system of evolution we see prevailing.
+Nothing less will do....
+
+"If, however, we go as far as this, we must go further.... We have a
+perfect right, on logical and scientific grounds, to see in all the
+infinitely varied products of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, which
+we alone can make use of, a preparation for ourselves, to assist in our
+mental development, and to fit us for a progressively higher state of
+existence as spiritual beings.
+
+" ... It seems only logical to assume that the vast, the infinite chasm
+between ourselves and the Deity, is to some extent occupied by an almost
+infinite series of grades of beings, each successive grade having higher
+and higher powers in regard to the origination, the development and the
+control of the universe.
+
+" ... There may have been a vast system of co-operation of such grades
+of beings, from a very high grade of power and intelligence down to
+those unconscious or almost unconscious cell souls posited by
+Haeckel....
+
+"I can imagine the ... Infinite Being, foreseeing and determining the
+broad outlines of a universe....
+
+"He might, for instance, impress a sufficient number of his highest
+angels to create by their will power the primal universe of ether, with
+all those inherent properties and forces necessary for what was to
+follow. Using this as a vehicle, the next subordinate association of
+angels would so act upon the ether as to develop from it, in suitable
+masses and at suitable distances, the various elements of matter, which,
+under the influence of such laws and forces as gravitation, heat, and
+electricity, would thenceforth begin to form those vast systems of
+nebulae and suns which constitute our stellar universe.
+
+"Then we may imagine these hosts of angels, to whom a thousand years are
+as one day, watching the development of this vast system of suns and
+planets until some one or more of them combined in itself all those
+conditions of size, of elementary constitution, of atmosphere, of mass
+of water and requisite distance from its source of heat as to insure a
+stability of constitution and uniformity of temperature for a given
+minimum of millions of years, or of ages, as would be required for the
+full development of a life world from amoeba to man, with a surplus
+of a few hundreds of millions for his adequate development.
+
+"We are led, therefore, to postulate a body of what we may term
+organizing spirits, who would be charged with the duty of so influencing
+the myriads of cell souls as to carry out their part of the work with
+accuracy and certainty....
+
+"At successive stages of the development of the life world, more and
+perhaps higher intelligences might be required to direct the main lines
+of variation in definite directions, in accordance with the general
+design to be worked out, and to guard against a break in the particular
+line, which alone could lead ultimately to the production of the human
+form.
+
+"This speculative suggestion, I venture to hope, will appeal to some of
+my readers as the very best approximation we are now able to formulate
+as to the deeper, the most fundamental causes of matter and force of
+life and consciousness, and of man himself, at his best, already a
+little lower than the angels, and, like them, destined to a permanent
+progressive existence in a world of spirit."
+
+This very peculiar and apparently progressive statement in regard to the
+conclusion which naturalistic science had revealed in regard to the
+universe struck Eugene as pretty fair confirmation of Mrs. Eddy's
+contention that all was mind and its infinite variety and that the only
+difference between her and the British scientific naturalists was that
+they contended for an ordered hierarchy which could only rule and
+manifest itself according to its own ordered or self-imposed laws, which
+they could perceive or detect, whereas, she contended for a governing
+spirit which was everywhere and would act through ordered laws and
+powers of its own arrangement. God was a principle like a rule in
+mathematics--two times two is four, for instance--and was as manifest
+daily and hourly and momentarily in a hall bedroom as in the circling
+motions of suns and systems. God was a principle. He grasped that now. A
+principle could be and was of course anywhere and everywhere at one and
+the same time. One could not imagine a place for instance where two
+times two would not be four, or where that rule would not be. So,
+likewise with the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent mind of God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+The most dangerous thing to possess a man to the extent of dominating
+him is an idea. It can and does ride him to destruction. Eugene's idea
+of the perfection of eighteen was one of the most dangerous things in
+his nature. In a way, combined with the inability of Angela to command
+his interest and loyalty, it had been his undoing up to this date. A
+religious idea followed in a narrow sense would have diverted this
+other, but it also might have destroyed him, if he had been able to
+follow it. Fortunately the theory he was now interesting himself in was
+not a narrow dogmatic one in any sense, but religion in its large
+aspects, a comprehensive resume and spiritual co-ordination of the
+metaphysical speculation of the time, which was worthy of anyone's
+intelligent inquiry. Christian Science as a cult or religion was shunned
+by current religions and religionists as something outre, impossible,
+uncanny--as necromancy, imagination, hypnotism, mesmerism,
+spiritism--everything, in short, that it was not, and little, if
+anything, that it really was. Mrs. Eddy had formulated or rather
+restated a fact that was to be found in the sacred writings of India; in
+the Hebrew testaments, old and new; in Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, St.
+Augustine, Emerson, and Carlyle. The one variation notable between her
+and the moderns was that her _ruling unity_ was not malicious, as Eugene
+and many others fancied, but helpful. Her _unity_ was a _unity_ of love.
+God was everything but the father of evil, which according to her was an
+illusion--neither fact nor substance--sound and fury, signifying
+nothing.
+
+It must be remembered that during all the time Eugene was doing this
+painful and religious speculation he was living in the extreme northern
+portion of the city, working desultorily at some paintings which he
+thought he might sell, visiting Angela occasionally, safely hidden away
+in the maternity hospital at One Hundred and Tenth Street, thinking
+hourly and momentarily of Suzanne, and wondering if, by any chance, he
+should ever see her any more. His mind had been so inflamed by the
+beauty and the disposition of this girl that he was really not normal
+any longer. He needed some shock, some catastrophe greater than any he
+had previously experienced to bring him to his senses. The loss of his
+position had done something. The loss of Suzanne had only heightened his
+affection for her. The condition of Angela had given him pause, for it
+was an interesting question what would become of her. "If she would only
+die!" he said to himself, for we have the happy faculty of hating most
+joyously on this earth the thing we have wronged the most. He could
+scarcely go and see her, so obsessed was he with the idea that she was a
+handicap to his career. The idea of her introducing a child into his
+life only made him savage. Now, if she should die, he would have the
+child to care for and Suzanne, because of it, might never come to him.
+
+His one idea at this time was not to be observed too much, or rather not
+at all, for he considered himself to be in great disfavor, and only
+likely to do himself injury by a public appearance--a fact which was
+more in his own mind than anywhere else. If he had not believed it, it
+would not have been true. For this reason he had selected this quiet
+neighborhood where the line of current city traffic was as nothing, for
+here he could brood in peace. The family that he lived with knew nothing
+about him. Winter was setting in. Because of the cold and snow and high
+winds, he was not likely to see many people hereabouts--particularly
+those celebrities who had known him in the past. There was a great deal
+of correspondence that followed him from his old address, for his name
+had been used on many committees, he was in "Who's Who," and he had many
+friends less distinguished than those whose companionship would have
+required the expenditure of much money who would have been glad to look
+him up. He ignored all invitations, however; refused to indicate by
+return mail where he was for the present; walked largely at night; read,
+painted, or sat and brooded during the day. He was thinking all the time
+of Suzanne and how disastrously fate had trapped him apparently through
+her. He was thinking that she might come back, that she ought. Lovely,
+hurtful pictures came to him of re-encounters with her in which she
+would rush into his arms, never to part, from him any more. Angela, in
+her room at the hospital, received little thought from him. She was
+there. She was receiving expert medical attention. He was paying all the
+bills. Her serious time had not yet really come. Myrtle was seeing her.
+He caught glimpses of himself at times as a cruel, hard intellect
+driving the most serviceable thing his life had known from him with
+blows, but somehow it seemed justifiable. Angela was not suited to him.
+Why could she not live away from him? Christian Science set aside
+marriage entirely as a human illusion, conflicting with the
+indestructible unity of the individual with God. Why shouldn't she let
+him go?
+
+He wrote poems to Suzanne, and read much poetry that he found in an old
+trunkful of books in the house where he was living. He would read again
+and again the sonnet beginning, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's
+eyes"--that cry out of a darkness that seemed to be like his own. He
+bought a book of verse by Yeats, and seemed to hear his own voice saying
+of Suzanne,
+
+  "Why should I blame her that she filled my days
+   With misery ...
+
+He was not quite as bad as he was when he had broken down eight years
+before, but he was very bad. His mind was once more riveted upon the
+uncertainty of life, its changes, its follies. He was studying those
+things only which deal with the abstrusities of nature, and this began
+to breed again a morbid fear of life itself. Myrtle was greatly
+distressed about him. She worried lest he might lose his mind.
+
+"Why don't you go to see a practitioner, Eugene?" she begged of him one
+day. "You will get help--really you will. You think you won't, but you
+will. There is something about them--I don't know what. They are
+spiritually at rest. You will feel better. Do go."
+
+"Oh, why do you bother me, Myrtle? Please don't. I don't want to go. I
+think there is something in the idea metaphysically speaking, but why
+should I go to a practitioner? God is as near me as He is anyone, if
+there is a God."
+
+Myrtle wrung her hands, and because she felt so badly more than anything
+else, he finally decided to go. There might be something hypnotic or
+physically contagious about these people--some old alchemy of the mortal
+body, which could reach and soothe him. He believed in hypnotism,
+hypnotic suggestion, etc. He finally called up one practitioner, an old
+lady highly recommended by Myrtle and others, who lived farther south on
+Broadway, somewhere in the neighborhood of Myrtle's home. Mrs. Althea
+Johns was her name--a woman who had performed wonderful cures. Why
+should he, Eugene Witla, he asked himself as he took up the receiver,
+why should he, Eugene Witla, ex-managing publisher of the United
+Magazines Corporation, ex-artist (in a way, he felt that he was no
+longer an artist in the best sense) be going to a woman in Christian
+Science to be healed of what? Gloom? Yes. Failure? Yes. Heartache? Yes.
+His evil tendencies in regard to women, such as the stranger who had sat
+beside him had testified to? Yes. How strange! And yet he was curious.
+It interested him a little to speculate as to whether this could really
+be done. Could he be healed of failure? Could this pain of longing be
+made to cease? Did he want it to cease? No; certainly not! He wanted
+Suzanne. Myrtle's idea, he knew, was that somehow this treatment would
+reunite him and Angela and make him forget Suzanne, but he knew that
+could not be. He was going, but he was going because he was unhappy and
+idle and aimless. He was going because he really did not know what else
+to do.
+
+The apartment of Mrs. Johns--Mrs. Althea Johns--was in an apartment
+house of conventional design, of which there were in New York hundreds
+upon hundreds at the time. There was a spacious areaway between two
+wings of cream-colored pressed brick leading back to an entrance way
+which was protected by a handsome wrought-iron door on either side of
+which was placed an electric lamp support of handsome design, holding
+lovely cream-colored globes, shedding a soft lustre. Inside was the
+usual lobby, elevator, uniformed negro elevator man, indifferent and
+impertinent, and the telephone switchboard. The building was seven
+storeys high. Eugene went one snowy, blustery January night. The great
+wet flakes were spinning in huge whirls and the streets were covered
+with a soft, slushy carpet of snow. He was interested, as usual, in
+spite of his gloom, in the picture of beauty the world presented--the
+city wrapped in a handsome mantle of white. Here were cars rumbling,
+people hunched in great coats facing the driving wind. He liked the
+snow, the flakes, this wonder of material living. It eased his mind of
+his misery and made him think of painting again. Mrs. Johns was on the
+seventh floor. Eugene knocked and was admitted by a maid. He was shown
+to a waiting room, for he was a little ahead of his time, and there were
+others--healthy-looking men and women, who did not appear to have an
+ache or pain--ahead of him. Was not this a sign, he thought as he sat
+down, that this was something which dealt with imaginary ills? Then why
+had the man he had heard in the church beside him testified so forcibly
+and sincerely to his healing? Well, he would wait and see. He did not
+see what it could do for him now. He had to work. He sat there in one
+corner, his hands folded and braced under his chin, thinking. The room
+was not artistic but rather nondescript, the furniture cheap or rather
+tasteless in design. Didn't Divine Mind know any better than to present
+its representatives in such a guise as this? Could a person called to
+assist in representing the majesty of God on earth be left so
+unintelligent artistically as to live in a house like this? Surely this
+was a poor manifestation of Divinity, but----
+
+Mrs. Johns came--a short, stout, homely woman, gray, wrinkled, dowdy in
+her clothing, a small wen on one side of her mouth, a nose slightly too
+big to be pleasing--all mortal deficiencies as to appearance highly
+emphasized, and looking like an old print of Mrs. Micawber that he had
+seen somewhere. She had on a black skirt good as to material, but
+shapeless, commonplace, and a dark blue-gray waist. Her eye was clear
+and gray though, he noticed, and she had a pleasing smile.
+
+"This is Mr. Witla, I believe," she said, coming across the room to him,
+for he had got into a corner near the window, and speaking with an
+accent which sounded a little Scotch. "I'm so glad to see you. Won't you
+come in?" she said, giving him precedence over some others because of
+his appointment, and re-crossed the room preceding him down the hall to
+her practice room. She stood to one side to take his hand as he passed.
+
+He touched it gingerly.
+
+So this was Mrs. Johns, he thought, as he entered, looking about him.
+Bangs and Myrtle had insisted that she had performed wonderful cures--or
+rather that Divine Mind had, through her. Her hands were wrinkled, her
+face old. Why didn't she make herself young if she could perform these
+wonderful cures? Why was this room so mussy? It was actually stuffy with
+chromos and etchings of the Christ and Bible scenes on the walls, a
+cheap red carpet or rug on the floor, inartistic leather-covered chairs,
+a table or desk too full of books, a pale picture of Mrs. Eddy and silly
+mottoes of which he was sick and tired hung here and there. People were
+such hacks when it came to the art of living. How could they pretend to
+a sense of Divinity who knew nothing of life? He was weary and the room
+here offended him. Mrs. Johns did. Besides, her voice was slightly
+falsetto. Could _she_ cure cancer? and consumption? and all other
+horrible human ills, as Myrtle insisted she had? He didn't believe it.
+
+He sat down wearily and yet contentiously in the chair she pointed out
+to him and stared at her while she quietly seated herself opposite him
+looking at him with kindly, smiling eyes.
+
+"And now," she said easily, "what does God's child think is the matter
+with him?"
+
+Eugene stirred irritably.
+
+"God's child," he thought; "what cant!" What right had he to claim to be
+a child of God? What was the use of beginning that way? It was silly, so
+asinine. Why not ask plainly what was the matter with him? Still he
+answered:
+
+"Oh, a number of things. So many that I am pretty sure they can never be
+remedied."
+
+"As bad as that? Surely not. It is good to know, anyhow, that nothing is
+impossible to God. We can believe that, anyhow, can't we?" she replied,
+smiling. "You believe in God, or a ruling power, don't you?"
+
+"I don't know whether I do or not. In the main, I guess I do. I'm sure I
+ought to. Yes, I guess I do."
+
+"Is He a malicious God to you?"
+
+"I have always thought so," he replied, thinking of Angela.
+
+"Mortal mind! Mortal mind!" she asseverated to herself. "What delusions
+will it not harbor!"
+
+And then to him:
+
+"One has to be cured almost against one's will to know that God is a God
+of love. So you believe you are sinful, do you, and that He is
+malicious? It is not necessary that you should tell me how. We are all
+alike in the mortal state. I would like to call your attention to
+Isaiah's words, 'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white
+as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.'"
+
+Eugene had not heard this quotation for years. It was only a dim thing
+in his memory. It flashed out simply now and appealed, as had all these
+Hebraic bursts of prophetic imagery in the past. Mrs. Johns, for all her
+wen and her big nose and dowdy clothes, was a little better for having
+been able to quote this so aptly. It raised her in his estimation. It
+showed a vigorous mind, at least a tactful mind.
+
+"Can you cure sorrow?" he asked grimly and with a touch of sarcasm in
+his voice. "Can you cure heartache or fear?"
+
+"I can do nothing of myself," she said, perceiving his mood. "All things
+are possible to God, however. If you believe in a Supreme Intelligence,
+He will cure you. St. Paul says 'I can do all things through Christ
+which strengtheneth me.' Have you read Mrs. Eddy's book?"
+
+"Most of it. I'm still reading it."
+
+"Do you understand it?"
+
+"No, not quite. It seems a bundle of contradictions to me."
+
+"To those who are first coming into Science it nearly always seems so.
+But don't let that worry you. You would like to be cured of your
+troubles. St. Paul says, 'For the wisdom of this world is foolishness
+with God.' 'The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise--that they are
+vain.' Do not think of me as a woman, or as having had anything to do
+with this. I would rather have you think of me as St. Paul describes
+anyone who works for truth--'Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as
+though God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye
+reconciled to God.'"
+
+"You know your Bible, don't you?" said Eugene.
+
+"It is the only knowledge I have," she replied.
+
+There followed one of those peculiar religious demonstrations so common
+in Christian Science--so peculiar to the uninitiated--in which she asked
+Eugene to fix his mind in meditation on the Lord's prayer. "Never mind
+if it seems pointless to you now. You have come here seeking aid. You
+are God's perfect image and likeness. He will not send you away
+empty-handed. Let me read you first, though, this one psalm, which I
+think is always so helpful to the beginner." She opened her Bible, which
+was on the table near her, and began:
+
+"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most high shall abide under
+the shadow of the Almighty.
+
+"I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; my God; in him
+will I trust.
+
+"Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the
+noisome pestilence.
+
+"He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou
+trust: his truth shall be thy shield and thy buckler.
+
+"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow
+that flieth by day. Nor for the pestilence that walketh in the darkness;
+nor for destruction that wasteth at noonday.
+
+"A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand;
+but it shall not come nigh thee.
+
+"Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the
+wicked.
+
+"Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most
+High, thy habitation; There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any
+plague come nigh thy dwelling.
+
+"For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy
+ways.
+
+"They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against
+a stone.
+
+"Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the
+dragon shalt thou trample under foot.
+
+"Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him. I
+will set him on high, because he hath known my name.
+
+"He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in
+trouble. I will deliver him and honor him.
+
+"With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation."
+
+During this most exquisite pronunciamento of Divine favor Eugene was
+sitting with his eyes closed, his thoughts wandering over all his recent
+ills. For the first time in years, he was trying to fix his mind upon an
+all-wise, omnipresent, omnipotent generosity. It was hard and he could
+not reconcile the beauty of this expression of Divine favor with the
+nature of the world as he knew it. What was the use of saying, "They
+shall bear thee up in their hands lest thou dash thy foot against a
+stone," when he had seen Angela and himself suffering so much recently?
+Wasn't he dwelling in the secret place of the Most High when he was
+alive? How could one get out of it? Still---- "Because he hath set his
+love on me--therefore will I deliver him." Was that the answer? Was
+Angela's love set on him? Was his own? Might not all their woes have
+sprung from that?
+
+"He shall call upon me and I shall answer. I will deliver him in
+trouble. I will deliver him and honor him."
+
+Had he ever really called on _Him_? Had Angela? Hadn't they been left in
+the slough of their own despond? Still Angela was not suited to him. Why
+did not God straighten that out? He didn't want to live with her.
+
+He wandered through this philosophically, critically, until Mrs. Johns
+stopped. What, he asked himself, if, in spite of all his doubts, this
+seeming clamor and reality and pain and care were an illusion? Angela
+was suffering. So were many other people. How could this thing be true?
+Did not these facts exclude the possibility of illusion? Could they
+possibly be a part of it?
+
+"Now we are going to try to realize that we are God's perfect children,"
+she said, stopping and looking at him. "We think we are so big and
+strong and real. We are real enough, but only as a thought in God--that
+is all. No harm can happen to us there--no evil can come nigh us. For
+God is infinite, all power, all life. Truth, Love, over all, and all."
+
+She closed her eyes and began, as she said, to try to realize for him
+the perfectness of his spirit in God. Eugene sat there trying to think
+of the Lord's prayer, but in reality thinking of the room, the cheap
+prints, the homely furniture, her ugliness, the curiousness of his being
+there. He, Eugene Witla, being prayed for! What would Angela think? Why
+was this woman old, if spirit could do all these other things? Why
+didn't she make herself beautiful? What was it she was doing now? Was
+this hypnotism, mesmerism, she was practicing? He remembered where
+Mrs. Eddy had especially said that these were not to be practiced--could
+not be in Science. No, she was no doubt sincere. She looked it--talked
+it. She believed in this beneficent spirit. Would it aid as the psalm
+said? Would it heal this ache? Would it make him not want Suzanne ever
+any more? Perhaps that was evil? Yes, no doubt it was. Still---- Perhaps
+he had better fix his mind on the Lord's Prayer. Divinity could aid him
+if it would. Certainly it could. No doubt of it. There was nothing
+impossible to this vast force ruling the universe. Look at the
+telephone, wireless telegraphy. How about the stars and sun? "He shall
+give his angels charge over thee."
+
+"Now," said Mrs. Johns, after some fifteen minutes of silent meditation
+had passed and she opened her eyes smilingly--"we are going to see
+whether we are not going to be better. We are going to feel better,
+because we are going to do better, and because we are going to realize
+that nothing can hurt an idea in God. All the rest is illusions. It
+cannot hold us, for it is not real. Think good--God--and you are good.
+Think evil and you are evil, but it has no reality outside your own
+thought. Remember that." She talked to him as though he was a little
+child.
+
+He went out into the snowy night where the wind was whirling the snow in
+picturesque whirls, buttoning his coat about him. The cars were running
+up Broadway as usual. Taxicabs were scuttling by. There were people
+forging their way through the snow, that ever-present company of a great
+city. There were arc lights burning clearly blue through the flying
+flakes. He wondered as he walked whether this would do him any good.
+Mrs. Eddy insisted that all these were unreal, he thought--that mortal
+mind had evolved something which was not in accord with spirit--mortal
+mind "a liar and the father of it," he recalled that quotation. Could it
+be so? Was evil unreal? Was misery only a belief? Could he come out of
+his sense of fear and shame and once more face the world? He boarded a
+car to go north. At Kingsbridge he made his way thoughtfully to his
+room. How could life ever be restored to him as it had been? He was
+really forty years of age. He sat down in his chair near his lamp and
+took up his book, "Science and Health," and opened it aimlessly. Then he
+thought for curiosity's sake he would see where he had opened it--what
+the particular page or paragraph his eye fell on had to say to him. He
+was still intensely superstitious. He looked, and here was this
+paragraph growing under his eyes:
+
+"When mortal man blends his thoughts of existence with the spiritual,
+and works only as God works, he will no longer grope in the dark and
+cling to earth because he has not tasted heaven. Carnal beliefs defraud
+us. They make man an involuntary hypocrite--producing evil when he would
+create good, forming deformity when he would outline grace and beauty,
+injuring those whom he would bless. He becomes a general mis-creator,
+who believes he is a semi-God. His touch turns hope to dust, the dust we
+all have trod. He might say in Bible language, 'The good that I would, I
+do not, but evil, which I would not, I do.'"
+
+He closed the book and meditated. He wished he might realize this thing
+if this were so. Still he did not want to become a religionist--a
+religious enthusiast. How silly they were. He picked up his daily
+paper--the _Evening Post_--and there on an inside page quoted in an
+obscure corner was a passage from a poem by the late Francis Thompson,
+entitled "The Hound of Heaven." It began:
+
+  "I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
+   I fled Him, down the arches of the years ...
+
+The ending moved him strangely:
+
+   Still with unhurrying chase,
+   And unperturbed face
+   Deliberate speed, majestic instancy
+   Came on the following Feet,
+   And a voice above their beat--
+  "Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."
+
+Did this man really believe this? Was it so?
+
+He turned back to his book and read on, and by degrees he came half to
+believe that sin and evil and sickness might possibly be illusions--that
+they could be cured by aligning one's self intellectually and
+spiritually with this Divine Principle. He wasn't sure. This terrible
+sense of wrong. Could he give up Suzanne? Did he want to? No!
+
+He got up and went to the window and looked out. The snow was still
+blowing.
+
+"Give her up! Give her up!" And Angela in such a precarious condition.
+What a devil of a hole he was in, anyway! Well, he would go and see her
+in the morning. He would at least be kind. He would see her through this
+thing. He lay down and tried to sleep, but somehow sleep never came to
+him right any more. He was too wearied, too distressed, too wrought up.
+[S]till he slept a little, and that was all he could hope for in these
+days.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+It was while he was in this state, some two months later, that the great
+event, so far as Angela was concerned, came about, and in it, of
+necessity, he was compelled to take part. Angela was in her room, cosily
+and hygienically furnished, overlooking the cathedral grounds at
+Morningside Heights, and speculating hourly what her fate was to be. She
+had never wholly recovered from the severe attack of rheumatism which
+she had endured the preceding summer and, because of her worries since,
+in her present condition was pale and weak though she was not ill. The
+head visiting obstetrical surgeon, Dr. Lambert, a lean, gray man of
+sixty-five years of age, with grizzled cheeks, whose curly gray hair,
+wide, humped nose and keen gray eyes told of the energy and insight and
+ability that had placed him where he was, took a slight passing fancy to
+her, for she seemed to him one of those plain, patient little women
+whose lives are laid in sacrificial lines. He liked her brisk,
+practical, cheery disposition in the face of her condition, which was
+serious, and which was so noticeable to strangers. Angela had naturally
+a bright, cheery face, when she was not depressed or quarrelsome. It was
+the outward sign of her ability to say witty and clever things, and she
+had never lost the desire to have things done efficiently and
+intelligently about her wherever she was. The nurse, Miss De Sale, a
+solid, phlegmatic person of thirty-five, admired her spunk and courage
+and took a great fancy to her also because she was lightsome, buoyant
+and hopeful in the face of what was really a very serious situation. The
+general impression of the head operating surgeon, the house surgeon and
+the nurse was that her heart was weak and that her kidneys might be
+affected by her condition. Angela had somehow concluded after talks with
+Myrtle that Christian Science, as demonstrated by its practitioners,
+might help her through this crisis, though she had no real faith in it.
+Eugene would come round, she thought, also, for Myrtle was having
+him treated absently, and he was trying to read the book, she
+said. There would be a reconciliation between them when the baby
+came--because--because---- Well, because children were so winning!
+Eugene was really not hard-hearted--he was just infatuated. He had been
+ensnared by a siren. He would get over it.
+
+Miss De Sale let her hair down in braids, Gretchen style, and fastened
+great pink bows of ribbon in them. As her condition became more
+involved, only the lightest morning gowns were given her--soft,
+comfortable things in which she sat about speculating practically about
+the future. She had changed from a lean shapeliness to a swollen,
+somewhat uncomely object, but she made the best of a bad situation.
+Eugene saw her and felt sorry. It was the end of winter now, with snow
+blowing gaily or fiercely about the windows, and the park grounds
+opposite were snow-white. She could see the leafless line of sentinel
+poplars that bordered the upper edges of Morningside. She was calm,
+patient, hopeful, while the old obstetrician shook his head gravely to
+the house surgeon.
+
+"We shall have to be very careful. I shall take charge of the actual
+birth myself. See if you can't build up her strength. We can only hope
+that the head is small."
+
+Angela's littleness and courage appealed to him. For once in a great
+many cases he really felt sorry.
+
+The house surgeon did as directed. Angela was given specially prepared
+food and drink. She was fed frequently. She was made to keep perfectly
+quiet.
+
+"Her heart," the house surgeon reported to his superior, "I don't like
+that. It's weak and irregular. I think there's a slight lesion."
+
+"We can only hope for the best," said the other solemnly. "We'll try and
+do without ether."
+
+Eugene in his peculiar mental state was not capable of realizing the
+pathos of all this. He was alienated temperamentally and emotionally.
+Thinking that he cared for his wife dearly, the nurse and the house
+surgeon were for not warning him. They did not want to frighten him. He
+asked several times whether he could be present during the delivery, but
+they stated that it would be dangerous and trying. The nurse asked
+Angela if she had not better advise him to stay away. Angela did, but
+Eugene felt that in spite of his alienation, she needed him. Besides, he
+was curious. He thought Angela would stand it better if he were near,
+and now that the ordeal was drawing nigh, he was beginning to understand
+how desperate it might be and to think it was only fair that he should
+assist her. Some of the old pathetic charm of her littleness was coming
+back to him. She might not live. She would have to suffer much. She had
+meant no real evil to him--only to hold him. Oh, the bitterness and the
+pathos of this welter of earthly emotions. Why should they be so
+tangled?
+
+The time drew very near, and Angela was beginning to suffer severe
+pains. Those wonderful processes of the all-mother, which bind the
+coming life in a cradle of muscles and ligaments were practically
+completed and were now relaxing their tendencies in one direction to
+enforce them in another. Angela suffered at times severely from
+straining ligaments. Her hands were clenched desperately, her face would
+become deathly pale. She would cry. Eugene was with her on a number of
+these occasions and it drove home to his consciousness the subtlety and
+terror of this great scheme of reproduction, which took all women to the
+door of the grave, in order that this mortal scheme of things might be
+continued. He began to think that there might be something in the
+assertion of the Christian Science leaders that it was a lie and an
+illusion, a terrible fitful fever outside the rational consciousness of
+God. He went to the library one day and got down a book on obstetrics,
+which covered the principles and practice of surgical delivery. He saw
+there scores of pictures drawn very carefully of the child in various
+positions in the womb--all the strange, peculiar, flower-like positions
+it could take, folded in upon itself like a little half-formed petal.
+The pictures were attractive, some of them beautiful, practical as they
+were. They appealed to his fancy. They showed the coming baby perfect,
+but so small, its head now in one position, now in another, its little
+arms twisted about in odd places, but always delightfully, suggestively
+appealing. From reading here and there in the volume, he learned that
+the great difficulty was the head--the delivery of that. It appeared
+that no other difficulty really confronted the obstetrician. How was
+that to be got out? If the head were large, the mother old, the walls of
+the peritoneal cavity tight or hard, a natural delivery might be
+impossible. There were whole chapters on Craniotomy, Cephalotripsy,
+which in plain English means crushing the head with an instrument....
+
+One chapter was devoted to the Caesarian operation, with a description of
+its tremendous difficulties and a long disquisition on the ethics of
+killing the child to save the mother, or the mother to save the child
+with their relative values to society indicated. Think of it--a surgeon
+sitting in the seat of judge and executioner at the critical moment! Ah,
+life with its petty laws did not extend here. Here we came back to the
+conscience of man which Mrs. Eddy maintained was a reflection of
+immanent mind. If God were good, He would speak through that--He was
+speaking through it. This surgeon referred to that inmost consciousness
+of supreme moral law, which alone could guide the practitioner in this
+dreadful hour.
+
+Then he told of what implements were necessary, how many assistants
+(two), how many nurses (four), the kinds of bandages, needles, silk and
+catgut thread, knives, clamp dilators, rubber gloves. He showed how the
+cut was to be made--when, where. Eugene closed the book, frightened. He
+got up and walked out in the air, a desire to hurry up to Angela
+impelling him. She was weak, he knew that. She had complained of her
+heart. Her muscles were probably set. Supposing these problems, any one
+of them, should come in connection with her. He did not wish her to die.
+
+He had said he had--yes, but he did not want to be a murderer. No, no!
+Angela had been good to him. She had worked for him. Why, God damn it,
+she had actually suffered for him in times past. He had treated her
+badly, very badly, and now in her pathetic little way she had put
+herself in this terrific position. It was her fault, to be sure it was.
+She had been trying as she always had to hold him against his will, but
+then could he really blame her? It wasn't a crime for her to want him to
+love her. They were just mis-mated. He had tried to be kind in marrying
+her, and he hadn't been kind at all. It had merely produced unrest,
+dissatisfaction, unhappiness for him and for her, and now this--this
+danger of death through pain, a weak heart, defective kidneys, a
+Caesarian operation. Why, she couldn't stand anything like that. There
+was no use talking about it. She wasn't strong enough--she was too old.
+
+He thought of Christian Science practitioners, of how they might save
+her--of some eminent surgeon who would know how without the knife. How?
+How? If these Christian Scientists could only _think_ her through a
+thing like this--he wouldn't be sorry. He would be glad, for her sake,
+if not his own. He might give up Suzanne--he might--he might. Oh, why
+should that thought intrude on him now?
+
+When he reached the hospital it was three o'clock in the afternoon, and
+he had been there for a little while in the morning when she was
+comparatively all right. She was much worse. The straining pains in her
+side which she had complained of were worse and her face was alternately
+flushed and pale, sometimes convulsed a little. Myrtle was there talking
+with her, and Eugene stood about nervously, wondering what he should
+do--what he could do. Angela saw his worry. In spite of her own
+condition she was sorry for him. She knew that this would cause him
+pain, for he was not hard-hearted, and it was his first sign of
+relenting. She smiled at him, thinking that maybe he would come round
+and change his attitude entirely. Myrtle kept reassuring her that all
+would be well with her. The nurse said to her and to the house doctor
+who came in, a young man of twenty-eight, with keen, quizzical eyes,
+whose sandy hair and ruddy complexion bespoke a fighting disposition,
+that she was doing nicely.
+
+"No bearing down pains?" he asked, smiling at Angela, his even white
+teeth showing in two gleaming rows.
+
+"I don't know what kind they are, doctor," she replied. "I've had all
+kinds."
+
+"You'll know them fast enough," he replied, mock cheerfully. "They're
+not like any other kind."
+
+He went away and Eugene followed him.
+
+"How is she doing?" he asked, when they were out in the hall.
+
+"Well enough, considering. She's not very strong, you know. I have an
+idea she is going to be all right. Dr. Lambert will be here in a little
+while. You had better talk to him."
+
+The house surgeon did not want to lie. He thought Eugene ought to be
+told. Dr. Lambert was of the same opinion, but he wanted to wait until
+the last, until he could judge approximately correctly.
+
+He came at five, when it was already dark outside, and looked at Angela
+with his grave, kindly eyes. He felt her pulse, listened to her heart
+with his stethoscope.
+
+"Do you think I shall be all right, doctor?" asked Angela faintly.
+
+"To be sure, to be sure," he replied softly. "Little woman, big
+courage." He smoothed her hand.
+
+He walked out and Eugene followed him.
+
+"Well, doctor," he said. For the first time for months Eugene was
+thinking of something besides his lost fortune and Suzanne.
+
+"I think it advisable to tell you, Mr. Witla," said the old surgeon,
+"that your wife is in a serious condition. I don't want to alarm you
+unnecessarily--it may all come out very satisfactorily. I have no
+positive reason to be sure that it will not. She is pretty old to have a
+child. Her muscles are set. The principal thing we have to fear in her
+case is some untoward complication with her kidneys. There is always
+difficulty in the delivery of the head in women of her age. It may be
+necessary to sacrifice the child. I can't be sure. The Caesarian
+operation is something I never care to think about. It is rarely used,
+and it isn't always successful. Every care that can be taken will be
+taken. I should like to have you understand the conditions. Your consent
+will be asked before any serious steps are taken. Your decision will
+have to be quick, however, when the time comes."
+
+"I can tell you now, doctor, what my decision will be," said Eugene
+realizing fully the gravity of the situation. For the time being, his
+old force and dignity were restored. "Save her life if you can by any
+means that you can. I have no other wish."
+
+"Thanks," said the surgeon. "We will do the best we can."
+
+There were hours after that when Eugene, sitting by Angela, saw her
+endure pain which he never dreamed it was possible for any human being
+to endure. He saw her draw herself up rigid time and again, the color
+leaving her face, the perspiration breaking out on her forehead only to
+relax and flush and groan without really crying out. He saw, strange to
+relate, that she was no baby like himself, whimpering over every little
+ill, but a representative of some great creative force which gave her
+power at once to suffer greatly and to endure greatly. She could not
+smile any more. That was not possible. She was in a welter of suffering,
+unbroken, astonishing. Myrtle had gone home to her dinner, but promised
+to return later. Miss De Sale came, bringing another nurse, and while
+Eugene was out of the room, Angela was prepared for the final ordeal.
+She was arrayed in the usual open back hospital slip and white linen
+leggings. Under Doctor Lambert's orders an operating table was got ready
+in the operating room on the top floor and a wheel table stationed
+outside the door, ready to remove her if necessary. He had left word
+that at the first evidence of the genuine childbearing pain, which the
+nurse understood so well, he was to be called. The house surgeon was to
+be in immediate charge of the case.
+
+Eugene wondered in this final hour at the mechanical, practical,
+business-like manner in which all these tragedies--the hospital was full
+of women--were taken. Miss De Sale went about her duties calm, smiling,
+changing the pillows occasionally for Angela, straightening the
+disordered bedclothes, adjusting the window curtains, fixing her own
+lace cap or apron before the mirror which was attached to the dresser,
+or before the one that was set in the closet door, and doing other
+little things without number. She took no interest in Eugene's tense
+attitude, or Myrtle's when she was there, but went in and out, talking,
+jesting with other nurses, doing whatever she had to do quite
+undisturbed.
+
+"Isn't there anything that can be done to relieve her of this pain?"
+Eugene asked wearily at one point. His own nerves were torn. "She can't
+stand anything like that. She hasn't the strength."
+
+She shook her head placidly. "There isn't a thing that anyone can do. We
+can't give her an opiate. It stops the process. She just has to bear it.
+All women do."
+
+"All women," thought Eugene. Good God! Did all women go through a siege
+like this every time a child was born? There were two billion people on
+the earth now. Had there been two billion such scenes? Had he come this
+way?--Angela? every child? What a terrible mistake she had made--so
+unnecessary, so foolish. It was too late now, though, to speculate
+concerning this. She was suffering. She was agonizing.
+
+The house surgeon came back after a time to look at her condition, but
+was not at all alarmed apparently. He nodded his head rather
+reassuringly to Miss De Sale, who stood beside him. "I think she's doing
+all right," he said.
+
+"I think so, too," she replied.
+
+Eugene wondered how they could say this. She was suffering horribly.
+
+"I'm going into Ward A for an hour," said the doctor. "If any change
+comes you can get me there."
+
+"What change could come," asked Eugene of himself, "any worse than had
+already appeared?" He was thinking of the drawings, though, he had seen
+in the book--wondering if Angela would have to be assisted in some of
+the grim, mechanical ways indicated there. They illustrated to him the
+deadly possibilities of what might follow.
+
+About midnight the expected change, which Eugene in agonized sympathy
+was awaiting, arrived. Myrtle had not returned. She had been waiting to
+hear from Eugene. Although Angela had been groaning before, pulling
+herself tense at times, twisting in an aimless, unhappy fashion, now she
+seemed to spring up and fall as though she had fainted. A shriek
+accompanied the movement, and then another and another. He rushed to the
+door, but the nurse was there to meet him.
+
+"It's here," she said quietly. She went to a phone outside and called
+for Dr. Willets. A second nurse from some other room came in and stood
+beside her. In spite of the knotted cords on Angela's face, the swollen
+veins, the purple hue, they were calm. Eugene could scarcely believe it,
+but he made an intense effort to appear calm himself. So this was
+childbirth!
+
+In a few moments Dr. Willets came in. He also was calm, business like,
+energetic. He was dressed in a black suit and white linen jacket, but
+took that off, leaving the room as he did so, and returned with his
+sleeves rolled up and his body incased in a long white apron, such as
+Eugene had seen butchers wear. He went over to Angela and began working
+with her, saying something to the nurse beside him which Eugene did not
+hear. He could not look--he dared not at first.
+
+At the fourth or fifth convulsive shriek, a second doctor came in, a
+young man of Willets' age, and dressed as he was, who also took his
+place beside him. Eugene had never seen him before. "Is it a case of
+forceps?" he asked.
+
+"I can't tell," said the other. "Dr. Lambert is handling this
+personally. He ought to be here by now."
+
+There was a step in the hall and the senior physician or obstetrician
+had entered. In the lower hall he had removed his great coat and fur
+gloves. He was dressed in his street clothes, but after looking at
+Angela, feeling her heart and temples, he went out and changed his coat
+for an apron, like the others. His sleeves were rolled up, but he did
+not immediately do anything but watch the house surgeon, whose hands
+were bloody.
+
+"Can't they give her chloroform?" asked Eugene, to whom no one was
+paying any attention, of Miss De Sale.
+
+She scarcely heard, but shook her head. She was busy dancing attendance
+on her very far removed superiors, the physicians.
+
+"I would advise you to leave the room," said Dr. Lambert to Eugene,
+coming over near him. "You can do nothing here. You will be of no
+assistance whatsoever. You may be in the way."
+
+Eugene left, but it was only to pace agonizedly up and down the hall. He
+thought of all the things that had passed between him and Angela--the
+years--the struggles. All at once he thought of Myrtle, and decided to
+call her up--she wanted to be there. Then he decided for the moment he
+would not. She could do nothing. Then he thought of the Christian
+Science practitioner. Myrtle could get her to give Angela absent
+treatment. Anything, anything--it was a shame that she should suffer so.
+
+"Myrtle," he said nervously over the phone, when he reached her, "this
+is Eugene. Angela is suffering terribly. The birth is on. Can't you get
+Mrs. Johns to help her? It's terrible!"
+
+"Certainly, Eugene. I'll come right down. Don't worry."
+
+He hung up the receiver and walked up and down the hall again. He could
+hear mumbled voices--he could hear muffled screams. A nurse, not Miss De
+Sale, came out and wheeled in the operating table.
+
+"Are they going to operate?" he asked feverishly. "I'm Mr. Witla."
+
+"I don't think so. I don't know. Dr. Lambert wants her to be taken to
+the operating room in case it is necessary."
+
+They wheeled her out after a few moments and on to the elevator which
+led to the floor above. Her face was slightly covered while she was
+being so transferred, and those who were around prevented him from
+seeing just how it was with her, but because of her stillness, he
+wondered, and the nurse said that a very slight temporary opiate had
+been administered--not enough to affect the operation, if it were found
+necessary. Eugene stood by dumbly, terrified. He stood in the hall,
+outside the operating room, half afraid to enter. The head surgeon's
+warning came back to him, and, anyhow, what good could he do? He walked
+far down the dim-lit length of the hall before him, wondering, and
+looked out on a space where was nothing but snow. In the distance a long
+lighted train was winding about a high trestle like a golden serpent.
+There were automobiles honking and pedestrians laboring along in the
+snow. What a tangle life was, he thought. What a pity. Here a little
+while ago, he wanted Angela to die, and now,--God Almighty, that was her
+voice groaning! He would be punished for his evil thoughts--yes, he
+would. His sins, all these terrible deeds would be coming home to him.
+They were coming home to him now. What a tragedy his career was! What a
+failure! Hot tears welled up into his eyes, his lower lip trembled, not
+for himself, but for Angela. He was so sorry all at once. He shut it all
+back. No, by God, he wouldn't cry! What good were tears? It was for
+Angela his pain was, and tears would not help her now.
+
+Thoughts of Suzanne came to him--Mrs. Dale, Colfax, but he shut them
+out. If they could see him now! Then another muffled scream and he
+walked quickly back. He couldn't stand this.
+
+He didn't go in, however. Instead he listened intently, hearing
+something which sounded like gurgling, choking breathing. Was that
+Angela?
+
+"The low forceps"--it was Dr. Lambert's voice.
+
+"The high forceps." It was his voice again. Something clinked like metal
+in a bowl.
+
+"It can't be done this way, I'm afraid," it was Dr. Lambert's voice
+again. "We'll have to operate. I hate to do it, too."
+
+A nurse came out to see if Eugene were near. "You had better go down
+into the waiting room, Mr. Witla," she cautioned. "They'll be bringing
+her out pretty soon. It won't be long now."
+
+"No," he said all at once, "I want to see for myself." He walked into
+the room where Angela was now lying on the operating table in the centre
+of the room. A six-globed electrolier blazed close overhead. At her head
+was Dr. Willets, administering the anaesthetic. On the right side was Dr.
+Lambert, his hands encased in rubber gloves, bloody, totally unconscious
+of Eugene, holding a scalpel. One of the two nurses was near Angela's
+feet, officiating at a little table of knives, bowls, water, sponges,
+bandages. On the left of the table was Miss De Sale. Her hands were
+arranging some cloths at the side of Angela's body. At her side,
+opposite Dr. Lambert, was another surgeon whom Eugene did not know.
+Angela was breathing stertorously. She appeared to be unconscious. Her
+face was covered with cloths and a rubber mouth piece or cone. Eugene
+cut his palms with his nails.
+
+So they have to operate, after all, he thought. She is as bad as that.
+The Caesarian operation. Then they couldn't even get the child from her
+by killing it. Seventy-five per cent. of the cases recorded were
+successful, so the book said, but how many cases were not recorded. Was
+Dr. Lambert a great surgeon? Could Angela stand ether--with her weak
+heart?
+
+He stood there looking at this wonderful picture while Dr. Lambert
+quickly washed his hands. He saw him take a small gleaming steel
+knife--bright as polished silver. The old man's hands were encased in
+rubber gloves, which looked bluish white under the light. Angela's
+exposed flesh was the color of a candle. He bent over her.
+
+"Keep her breathing normal if you can," he said to the young doctor. "If
+she wakes give her ether. Doctor, you'd better look after the arteries."
+
+He cut softly a little cut just below the centre of the abdomen
+apparently, and Eugene saw little trickling streams of blood spring
+where his blade touched. It did not seem a great cut. A nurse was
+sponging away the blood as fast as it flowed. As he cut again, the
+membrane that underlies the muscles of the abdomen and protects the
+intestines seemed to spring into view.
+
+"I don't want to cut too much," said the surgeon calmly--almost as
+though he were talking to himself. "These intestines are apt to become
+unmanageable. If you just lift up the ends, doctor. That's right. The
+sponge, Miss Wood. Now, if we can just cut here enough"--he was cutting
+again like an honest carpenter or cabinet worker.
+
+He dropped the knife he held into Miss Wood's bowl of water. He reached
+into the bleeding, wound, constantly sponged by the nurse, exposing
+something. What was that? Eugene's heart jerked. He was reaching down
+now in there with his middle finger--his fore and middle fingers
+afterwards, and saying, "I don't find the leg. Let's see. Ah, yes. Here
+we have it!"
+
+"Can I move the head a little for you, doctor?" It was the young doctor
+at his left talking.
+
+"Careful! Careful! It's bent under in the region of the coccyx. I have
+it now, though. Slowly, doctor, look out for the placenta."
+
+Something was coming up out of this horrible cavity, which was trickling
+with blood from the cut. It was queer a little foot, a leg, a body, a
+head.
+
+"As God is my judge," said Eugene to himself, his eyes brimming again.
+
+"The placenta, doctor. Look after the peritoneum, Miss Wood. It's alive,
+all right. How is her pulse, Miss De Sale?"
+
+"A little weak, doctor."
+
+"Use less ether. There, now we have it! We'll put that back. Sponge.
+We'll have to sew this afterwards, Willets. I won't trust this to heal
+alone. Some surgeons think it will, but I mistrust her recuperative
+power. Three or four stitches, anyhow."
+
+They were working like carpenters, cabinet workers, electricians. Angela
+might have been a lay figure for all they seemed to care. And yet there
+was a tenseness here, a great hurry through slow sure motion. "The less
+haste, the more speed," popped into Eugene's mind--the old saw. He
+stared as if this were all a dream--a nightmare. It might have been a
+great picture like Rembrandt's "The Night Watch." One young doctor, the
+one he did not know, was holding aloft a purple object by the foot. It
+might have been a skinned rabbit, but Eugene's horrified eyes realized
+that it was his child--Angela's child--the thing all this horrible
+struggle and suffering was about. It was discolored, impossible, a myth,
+a monster. He could scarcely believe his eyes, and yet the doctor was
+striking it on the back with his hand, looking at it curiously. At the
+same moment came a faint cry--not a cry, either--only a faint, queer
+sound.
+
+"She's awfully little, but I guess she'll make out." It was Dr. Willets
+talking of the baby. Angela's baby. Now the nurse had it. That was
+Angela's flesh they had been cutting. That was Angela's wound they were
+sewing. This wasn't life. It was a nightmare. He was insane and being
+bedeviled by spirits.
+
+"Now, doctor, I guess that will keep. The blankets, Miss De Sale. You
+can take her away."
+
+They were doing lots of things to Angela, fastening bandages about her,
+removing the cone from her mouth, changing her position back to one of
+lying flat, preparing to bathe her, moving her to the rolling table,
+wheeling her out while she moaned unconscious under ether.
+
+Eugene could scarcely stand the sickening, stertorous breathing. It was
+such a strange sound to come from her--as if her unconscious soul were
+crying. And the child was crying, too, healthily.
+
+"Oh, God, what a life, what a life!" he thought. To think that things
+should have to come this way. Death, incisions! unconsciousness! pain!
+Could she live? Would she? And now he was a father.
+
+He turned and there was the nurse holding this littlest girl on a white
+gauze blanket or cushion. She was doing something to it--rubbing oil on
+it. It was a pink child now, like any other baby.
+
+"That isn't so bad, is it?" she asked consolingly. She wanted to restore
+Eugene to a sense of the commonplace. He was so distracted looking.
+
+Eugene stared at it. A strange feeling came over him. Something went up
+and down his body from head to toe, doing something to him. It was a
+nervous, titillating, pinching feeling. He touched the child. He looked
+at its hands, its face. It looked like Angela. Yes, it did. It was his
+child. It was hers. Would she live? Would he do better? Oh, God, to have
+this thrust at him now, and yet it was his child. How could he? Poor
+little thing. If Angela died--if Angela died, he would have this and
+nothing else, this little girl out of all her long, dramatic struggle.
+If she died, came this. To do what to him? To guide? To strengthen? To
+change? He could not say. Only, somehow, in spite of himself, it was
+beginning to appeal to him. It was the child of a storm. And Angela, so
+near him now--would she ever live to see it? There she was unconscious,
+numb, horribly cut. Dr. Lambert was taking a last look at her before
+leaving.
+
+"Do you think she will live, doctor?" he asked the great surgeon
+feverishly. The latter looked grave.
+
+"I can't say. I can't say. Her strength isn't all that it ought to be.
+Her heart and kidneys make a bad combination. However, it was a last
+chance. We had to take it. I'm sorry. I'm glad we were able to save the
+child. The nurse will give her the best of care."
+
+He went out into his practical world as a laborer leaves his work. So
+may we all. Eugene went over and stood by Angela. He was tremendously
+sorry for the long years of mistrust that had brought this about. He was
+ashamed of himself, of life--of its strange tangles. She was so little,
+so pale, so worn. Yes, he had done this. He had brought her here by his
+lying, his instability, his uncertain temperament. It was fairly murder
+from one point of view, and up to this last hour he had scarcely
+relented. But life had done things to him, too. Now, now---- Oh, hell,
+Oh, God damn! If she would only recover, he would try and do better.
+Yes, he would. It sounded so silly coming from him, but he would try.
+Love wasn't worth the agony it cost. Let it go. Let it go. He could
+live. Truly there were hierarchies and powers, as Alfred Russel Wallace
+pointed out. There was a God somewhere. He was on His throne. These
+large, dark, immutable forces, they were not for nothing. If she would
+only not die, he would try--he would behave. He would! he would!
+
+He gazed at her, but she looked so weak, so pale now he did not think
+she could come round.
+
+"Don't you want to come home with me, Eugene?" said Myrtle, who had come
+back some time before, at his elbow. "We can't do anything here now! The
+nurse says she may not become conscious for several hours. The baby is
+all right in their care."
+
+The baby! the baby! He had forgotten it, forgotten Myrtle. He was
+thinking of the long dark tragedy of his life--the miasma of it.
+
+"Yes," he said wearily. It was nearly morning. He went out and got into
+a taxi and went to his sister's home, but in spite of his weariness, he
+could scarcely sleep. He rolled feverishly.
+
+In the morning he was up again, early, anxious to go back and see how
+Angela was--and the child.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+The trouble with Angela's system, in addition to a weak heart, was that
+it was complicated at the time of her delivery by that peculiar
+manifestation of nervous distortion or convulsions known as eclampsia.
+Once in every five hundred cases (or at least such was the statistical
+calculation at the time), some such malady occurred to reduce the number
+of the newborn. In every two such terminations one mother also died, no
+matter what the anticipatory preparations were on the part of the most
+skilled surgeons. Though not caused by, it was diagnosed by, certain
+kidney changes. What Eugene had been spared while he was out in the hall
+was the sight of Angela staring, her mouth pulled to one side in a
+horrible grimace, her body bent back, canoe shape, the arms flexed, the
+fingers and thumbs bending over each other to and fro, in and out,
+slowly, not unlike a mechanical figure that is running down. Stupor and
+unconsciousness had immediately followed, and unless the child had been
+immediately brought into the world and the womb emptied, she and it
+would have died a horrible death. As it was she had no real strength to
+fight her way back to life and health. A Christian Science practitioner
+was trying to "realize her identity with good" for her, but she had no
+faith before and no consciousness now. She came to long enough to vomit
+terribly, and then sank into a fever. In it she talked of Eugene. She
+was in Blackwood, evidently, and wanted him to come back to her. He held
+her hand and cried, for he knew that there was never any recompense for
+that pain. What a dog he had been! He bit his lip and stared out of the
+window.
+
+Once he said: "Oh, I'm no damned good! I should have died!"
+
+That whole day passed without consciousness, and most of the night. At
+two in the morning Angela woke and asked to see the baby. The nurse
+brought it. Eugene held her hand. It was put down beside her, and she
+cried for joy, but it was a weak, soundless cry. Eugene cried also.
+
+"It's a girl, isn't it?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," said Eugene, and then, after a pause, "Angela, I want to tell you
+something. I'm so sorry, I'm ashamed. I want you to get well. I'll do
+better. Really I will." At the same time he was wondering, almost
+subconsciously, whether he would or no. Wouldn't it be all the same if
+she were really well--or worse?
+
+She caressed his hand. "Don't cry," she said, "I'll be all right. I'm
+going to get well. We'll both do better. It's as much my fault as yours.
+I've been too hard." She worked at his fingers, but he only choked. His
+vocal cords hurt him.
+
+"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry," he finally managed to say.
+
+The child was taken away after a little while and Angela was feverish
+again. She grew very weak, so weak that although she was conscious
+later, she could not speak. She tried to make some signs. Eugene, the
+nurse, Myrtle, understood. The baby. It was brought and held up before
+her. She smiled a weak, yearning smile and looked at Eugene. "I'll take
+care of her," he said, bending over her. He swore a great oath to
+himself. He would be decent--he would be clean henceforth and for ever.
+The child was put beside her for a little while, but she could not move.
+She sank steadily and died.
+
+Eugene sat by the bed holding his head in his hands. So, he had his
+wish. She was really dead. Now he had been taught what it was to fly in
+the face of conscience, instinct, immutable law. He sat there an hour
+while Myrtle begged him to come away.
+
+"Please, Eugene!" she said. "Please!"
+
+"No, no," he replied. "Where shall I go? I am well enough here."
+
+After a time he did go, however, wondering how he would adjust his life
+from now on. Who would take care of of----
+
+"Angela" came the name to his mind. Yes, he would call her "Angela." He
+had heard someone say she was going to have pale yellow hair.
+
+******
+
+The rest of this story is a record of philosophic doubt and speculation
+and a gradual return to normality, his kind of normality--the artistic
+normality of which he was capable. He would--he thought--never again be
+the maundering sentimentalist and enthusiast, imagining perfection in
+every beautiful woman that he saw. Yet there was a period when, had
+Suzanne returned suddenly, all would have been as before between them,
+and even more so, despite his tremulousness of spirit, his speculative
+interest in Christian Science as a way out possibly, his sense of
+brutality, almost murder, in the case of Angela--for, the old attraction
+still gnawed at his vitals. Although he had Angela, junior, now to look
+after, and in a way to divert him,--a child whom he came speedily to
+delight in--his fortune to restore, and a sense of responsibility to
+that abstract thing, society or public opinion as represented by those
+he knew or who knew him, still there was this ache and this
+non-controllable sense of adventure which freedom to contract a new
+matrimonial alliance or build his life on the plan he schemed with
+Suzanne gave him. Suzanne! Suzanne!--how her face, her gestures, her
+voice, haunted him. Not Angela, for all the pathos of her tragic ending,
+but Suzanne. He thought of Angela often--those last hours in the
+hospital, her last commanding look which meant "please look after our
+child," and whenever he did so his vocal cords tightened as under the
+grip of a hand and his eyes threatened to overflow, but even so, and
+even then, that undertow, that mystic cord that seemed to pull from his
+solar plexus outward, was to Suzanne and to her only. Suzanne! Suzanne!
+Around her hair, the thought of her smile, her indescribable presence,
+was built all that substance of romance which he had hoped to enjoy and
+which now, in absence and probably final separation, glowed with a
+radiance which no doubt the reality could never have had.
+
+"We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded
+with a sleep." We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and only of
+dreams are our keen, stinging realities compounded. Nothing else is so
+moving, so vital, so painful as a dream.
+
+For a time that first spring and summer, while Myrtle looked after
+little Angela and Eugene went to live with her and her husband, he
+visited his old Christian Science practitioner, Mrs. Johns. He had not
+been much impressed with the result in Angela's case, but Myrtle
+explained the difficulty of the situation in a plausible way. He was in
+a terrific state of depression, and it was while he was so that Myrtle
+persuaded him to go again. She insisted that Mrs. Johns would overcome
+his morbid gloom, anyhow, and make him feel better. "You want to come
+out of this, Eugene," she pleaded. "You will never do anything until you
+do. You are a big man. Life isn't over. It's just begun. You're going to
+get well and strong again. Don't worry. Everything that is is for the
+best."
+
+He went once, quarreling with himself for doing so, for in spite of his
+great shocks, or rather because of them, he had no faith in religious
+conclusions of any kind. Angela had not been saved. Why should he?
+
+Still the metaphysical urge was something--it was so hard to suffer
+spiritually and not believe there was some way out. At times he hated
+Suzanne for her indifference. If ever she came back he would show her.
+There would be no feeble urgings and pleadings the next time. She had
+led him into this trap, knowing well what she was doing--for she was
+wise enough--and then had lightly deserted him. Was that the action of a
+large spirit? he asked himself. Would the wonderful something he thought
+he saw there be capable of that? Ah, those hours at Daleview--that one
+stinging encounter in Canada!--the night she danced with him so
+wonderfully!
+
+During a period of nearly three years all the vagaries and alterations
+which can possibly afflict a groping and morbid mind were his. He went
+from what might be described as _almost_ a belief in Christian Science
+to almost a belief that a devil ruled the world, a Gargantuan
+Brobdingnagian Mountebank, who plotted tragedy for all ideals and
+rejoiced in swine and dullards and a grunting, sweating, beefy
+immorality. By degrees his God, if he could have been said to have had
+one in his consciousness, sank back into a dual personality or a
+compound of good and evil--the most ideal and ascetic good, as well as
+the most fantastic and swinish evil. His God, for a time at least, was a
+God of storms and horrors as well as of serenities and perfections. He
+then reached a state not of abnegation, but of philosophic
+open-mindedness or agnosticism. He came to know that he did not know
+what to believe. All apparently was permitted, nothing fixed. Perhaps
+life loved only change, equation, drama, laughter. When in moments of
+private speculation or social argument he was prone to condemn it
+loudest, he realized that at worst and at best it was beautiful,
+artistic, gay, that, however, he might age, groan, complain, withdraw,
+wither, still, in spite of him, this large thing which he at once loved
+and detested was sparkling on. He might quarrel, but it did not care; he
+might fail or die, but it could not. He was negligible--but, oh, the
+sting and delight of its inner shrines and favorable illusions.
+
+And curiously, for a time, even while he was changing in this way, he
+went back to see Mrs. Johns, principally because he liked her. She
+seemed to be a motherly soul to him, contributing some of the old
+atmosphere he had enjoyed in his own home in Alexandria. This woman,
+from working constantly in the esoteric depths, which Mrs. Eddy's book
+suggests, demonstrating for herself, as she thought, through her belief
+in or understanding of, the oneness of the universe (its non-malicious,
+affectionate control, the non-existence of fear, pain, disease, and
+death itself), had become so grounded in her faith that evil positively
+did not exist save in the belief of mortals, that at times she almost
+convinced Eugene that it was so. He speculated long and deeply along
+these lines with her. He had come to lean on her in his misery quite as
+a boy might on his mother.
+
+The universe to her was, as Mrs. Eddy said, spiritual, not material, and
+no wretched condition, however seemingly powerful, could hold against
+the truth--could gainsay divine harmony. God was good. All that is, is
+God. Hence all that is, is good or it is an illusion. It could not be
+otherwise. She looked at Eugene's case, as she had at many a similar
+one, being sure, in her earnest way, that she, by realizing his ultimate
+fundamental spirituality, could bring him out of his illusions, and make
+him see the real spirituality of things, in which the world of flesh and
+desire had no part.
+
+"Beloved," she loved to quote to him, "now are we the sons of God, and
+it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall
+appear"--(and she explained that _he_ was this universal spirit of
+perfection of which we are a part)--"we shall be like him; for we shall
+see him as He is."
+
+"And every man that has this hope in him purifieth himself even as He is
+pure."
+
+She once explained to him that this did not mean that the man must
+purify himself by some hopeless moral struggle, or emaciating
+abstinance, but rather that the fact that he had this hope of something
+better in him, would fortify him in spite of himself.
+
+"You laugh at me," she said to him one day, "but I tell you you are a
+child of God. There is a divine spark in you. It must come out. I know
+it will. All this other thing will fall away as a bad dream. It has no
+reality."
+
+She even went so far in a sweet motherly way as to sing hymns to him,
+and now, strange to relate, her thin voice was no longer irritating to
+him, and her spirit made her seemingly beautiful in his eyes. He did not
+try to adjust the curiosities and anomalies of material defects in so
+far as she was concerned. The fact that her rooms were anything but
+artistically perfect; that her body was shapeless, or comparatively so,
+when contrasted with that standard of which he had always been so
+conscious; the fact that whales were accounted by her in some weird way
+as spiritual, and bugs and torturesome insects of all kinds as
+emanations of mortal mind, did not trouble him at all. There was
+something in this thought of a spiritual universe--of a kindly universe,
+if you sought to make it so, which pleased him. The five senses
+certainly could not indicate the totality of things; beyond them must
+lie depths upon depths of wonder and power. Why might not this act? Why
+might it not be good? That book that he had once read--"The World
+Machine"--had indicated this planetary life as being infinitesimally
+small; that from the point of view of infinity it was not even
+thinkable--and yet here it appeared to be so large. Why might it not be,
+as Carlyle had said, a state of mind, and as such, so easily
+dissolvable. These thoughts grew by degrees, in force, in power.
+
+At the same time he was beginning to go out again a little. A chance
+meeting with M. Charles, who grasped his hand warmly and wanted to know
+where he was and what he was doing, revived his old art fever. M.
+Charles suggested, with an air of extreme interest, that he should get
+up another exhibition along whatever line he chose.
+
+"You!" he said, with a touch of heartening sympathy, and yet with a glow
+of fine corrective scorn, for he considered Eugene as an artist only,
+and a very great one at that. "You,--Eugene Witla--an editor--a
+publisher! Pah! You--who could have all the art lovers of the world at
+your feet in a few years if you chose--you who could do more for
+American art in your life time than anyone I know, wasting your time art
+directing, art editing--publishing! Pouf! Aren't you really ashamed of
+yourself? But it isn't too late. Come now--a fine exhibition! What do
+you say to an exhibition of some kind next January or February, in the
+full swing of the season? Everybody's interested then. I will give you
+our largest gallery. How is that? What do you say?" he glowed in a
+peculiarly Frenchy way,--half commanding, half inspiring or exhorting.
+
+"If I can," said Eugene quietly, with a deprecating wave of the hand,
+and a faint line of self-scorn about the corners of his mouth. "It may
+be too late."
+
+"'Too late! Too late!' What nonsense! Do you say that to me? If you can!
+If you can! Well, I give you up! You with your velvet textures and sure
+lines. It is too much. It is unbelievable!"
+
+He raised his hands, eyes, and eye-brows in Gallic despair. He shrugged
+his shoulders, waiting to see a change of expression in Eugene.
+
+"Very good!" said Eugene, when he heard this. "Only I can't promise
+anything. We will see." And he wrote out his address.
+
+This started him once more. The Frenchman, who had often heard him
+spoken of and had sold all his earlier pictures, was convinced that
+there was money in him--if not here then abroad--money and some repute
+for himself as his sponsor. Some American artists must be
+encouraged--some _must_ rise. Why not Eugene? Here was one who really
+deserved it.
+
+So Eugene worked, painting swiftly, feverishly, brilliantly--with a
+feeling half the time that his old art force had deserted him for
+ever--everything that came into his mind. Taking a north lighted room
+near Myrtle he essayed portraits of her and her husband, of her and baby
+Angela, making arrangements which were classically simple. Then he chose
+models from the streets,--laborers, washerwomen, drunkards--characters
+all, destroying canvases frequently, but, on the whole, making steady
+progress. He had a strange fever for painting life as he saw it, for
+indicating it with exact portraits of itself, strange, grim
+presentations of its vagaries, futilities, commonplaces, drolleries,
+brutalities. The mental, fuzzy-wuzzy maunderings and meanderings of the
+mob fascinated him. The paradox of a decaying drunkard placed against
+the vivid persistence of life gripped his fancy. Somehow it suggested
+himself hanging on, fighting on, accusing nature, and it gave him great
+courage to do it. This picture eventually sold for eighteen thousand
+dollars, a record price.
+
+In the meantime his lost dream in the shape of Suzanne was traveling
+abroad with her mother--in England, Scotland, France, Egypt, Italy,
+Greece. Aroused by the astonishing storm which her sudden and uncertain
+fascination had brought on, she was now so shaken and troubled by the
+disasters which had seemed to flow to Eugene in her wake, that she
+really did not know what to do or think. She was still too young, too
+nebulous. She was strong enough in body and mind, but very uncertain
+philosophically and morally--a dreamer and opportunist. Her mother,
+fearful of some headstrong, destructive outburst in which her shrewdest
+calculations would prove of no avail, was most anxious to be civil,
+loving, courteous, politic anything to avoid a disturbing re-encounter
+with the facts of the past, or a sudden departure on the part of
+Suzanne, which she hourly feared. What was she to do? Anything Suzanne
+wanted--her least whim, her moods in dress, pleasure, travel,
+friendship, were most assiduously catered to. Would she like to go here?
+would she like to see that? would this amuse her? would that be
+pleasant? And Suzanne, seeing always what her mother's motives were, and
+troubled by the pain and disgrace she had brought on Eugene, was
+uncertain now as to whether her conduct had been right or not. She
+puzzled over it continually.
+
+More terrifying, however, was the thought which came to her occasionally
+as to whether she had really loved Eugene at all or not. Was this not a
+passing fancy? Had there not been some chemistry of the blood, causing
+her to make a fool of herself, without having any real basis in
+intellectual rapprochement. Was Eugene truly the one man with whom she
+could have been happy? Was he not too adoring, too headstrong, too
+foolish and mistaken in his calculations? Was he the able person she had
+really fancied him to be? Would she not have come to dislike him--to
+hate him even--in a short space of time? Could they have been truly,
+permanently happy? Would she not be more interested in one who was
+sharp, defiant, indifferent--one whom she could be compelled to adore
+and fight for rather than one who was constantly adoring her and needing
+her sympathy? A strong, solid, courageous man--was not such a one her
+ideal, after all? And could Eugene be said to be that? These and other
+questions tormented her constantly.
+
+It is strange, but life is constantly presenting these pathetic
+paradoxes--these astounding blunders which temperament and blood moods
+bring about and reason and circumstance and convention condemn. The
+dreams of man are one thing--his capacity to realize them another. At
+either pole are the accidents of supreme failure and supreme
+success--the supreme failure of an Abelard for instance, the supreme
+success of a Napoleon, enthroned at Paris. But, oh, the endless failures
+for one success.
+
+But in this instance it cannot be said that Suzanne had definitely
+concluded that she did not love him. Far from it. Although the cleverest
+devices were resorted to by Mrs. Dale to bring her into contact with
+younger and to her--now--more interesting personalities, Suzanne--very
+much of an introspective dreamer and quiet spectator herself, was not to
+be swiftly deluded by love again--if she had been deluded. She had half
+decided to study men from now on, and use them, if need be, waiting for
+the time when some act, of Eugene's, perhaps, or some other personality,
+might decide for her. The strange, destructive spell of her beauty began
+to interest her, for now she knew that she really was beautiful. She
+looked in her mirror very frequently now--at the artistry of a curl, the
+curve of her chin, her cheek, her arm. If ever she went back to Eugene
+how well she would repay him for his agony. But would she? Could she?
+Would he have not recovered his sanity and be able to snap his fingers
+in her face and smile superciliously? For, after all, no doubt he was a
+wonderful man and would shine as something somewhere soon again. And
+when he did--what would he think of her--her silence, her desertion, her
+moral cowardice?
+
+"After all, I am not of much account," she said to herself. "But what he
+thought of me!--that wild fever--that was wonderful! Really he was
+wonderful!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+The denouement of all this, as much as ever could be, was still two
+years off. By that time Suzanne was considerably more sobered, somewhat
+more intellectually cultivated, a little cooler--not colder exactly--and
+somewhat more critical. Men, when it came to her type of beauty, were a
+little too suggestive of their amorousness. After Eugene their proffers
+of passion, adoration, undying love, were not so significant.
+
+But one day in New York on Fifth Avenue, there was a re-encounter. She
+was shopping with her mother, but their ways, for a moment, were
+divided. By now Eugene was once more in complete possession of his
+faculties. The old ache had subsided to a dim but colorful mirage of
+beauty that was always in his eye. Often he had thought what he would do
+if he saw Suzanne again--what say, if anything. Would he smile, bow--and
+if there were an answering light in her eye, begin his old courtship all
+over, or would he find her changed, cold, indifferent? Would he be
+indifferent, sneering? It would be hard on him, perhaps, afterwards, but
+it would pay her out and serve her right. If she really cared, she ought
+to be made to suffer for being a waxy fool and tool in the hands of her
+mother. He did not know that she had heard of his wife's death--the
+birth of his child--and that she had composed and destroyed five
+different letters, being afraid of reprisal, indifference, scorn.
+
+She had heard of his rise to fame as an artist once more, for the
+exhibition had finally come about, and with it great praise, generous
+acknowledgments of his ability--artists admired him most of all.
+They thought him strange, eccentric, but great. M. Charles had
+suggested to a great bank director that his new bank in the
+financial district be decorated by Eugene alone, which was
+eventually done--nine great panels in which he expressed deeply some of
+his feeling for life. At Washington, in two of the great public
+buildings and in three state capitols were tall, glowing panels also of
+his energetic dreaming,--a brooding suggestion of beauty that never was
+on land or sea. Here and there in them you might have been struck by a
+face--an arm, a cheek, an eye. If you had ever known Suzanne as she was
+you would have known the basis--the fugitive spirit at the bottom of all
+these things.
+
+But in spite of that he now hated her--or told himself that he did.
+Under the heel of his intellectuality was the face, the beauty that he
+adored. He despised and yet loved it. Life had played him a vile
+trick--love--thus to frenzy his reason and then to turn him out as mad.
+Now, never again, should love affect him, and yet the beauty of woman
+was still his great lure--only he was the master.
+
+And then one day Suzanne appeared.
+
+He scarcely recognized her, so sudden it was and so quickly ended. She
+was crossing Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. He was coming out of a
+jeweler's, with a birthday ring for little Angela. Then the eyes of this
+girl, a pale look--a flash of something wonderful that he remembered and
+then----
+
+He stared curiously--not quite sure.
+
+"He does not even recognize me," thought Suzanne, "or he hates me now.
+Oh!--all in five years!"
+
+"It is she, I believe," he said to himself, "though I am not quite sure.
+Well, if it is she can go to the devil!" His mouth hardened. "I will cut
+her as she deserves to be cut," he thought. "She shall never know that I
+care."
+
+And so they passed,--never to meet in this world--each always wishing,
+each defying, each folding a wraith of beauty to the heart.
+
+
+
+
+L'ENVOI
+
+
+There appears to be in metaphysics a basis, or no basis, according as
+the temperament and the experience of each shall incline him, for
+ethical or spiritual ease or peace. Life sinks into the unknowable at
+every turn and only the temporary or historical scene remains as a
+guide,--and that passes also. It may seem rather beside the mark that
+Eugene in his moral and physical depression should have inclined to
+various religious abstrusities for a time, but life does such things in
+a storm. They constituted a refuge from himself, from his doubts and
+despairs as religious thought always does.
+
+If I were personally to define religion I would say that it is a bandage
+that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance; an
+envelope to pocket him from the unescapable and unstable illimitable. We
+seek to think of things as permanent and see them so. Religion gives
+life a habitation and a name apparently--though it is an illusion. So we
+are brought back to time and space and illimitable mind--as what? And we
+shall always stand before them attributing to them all those things
+which we cannot know.
+
+Yet the need for religion is impermanent, like all else in life. As the
+soul regains its health, it becomes prone to the old illusions. Again
+women entered his life--never believe otherwise--drawn, perhaps, by a
+certain wistfulness and loneliness in Eugene, who though quieted by
+tragedy for a little while was once more moving in the world. He saw
+their approach with more skepticism, and yet not unmoved--women who came
+through the drawing rooms to which he was invited, wives and daughters
+who sought to interest him in themselves and would scarcely take no for
+an answer; women of the stage--women artists, poetasters, "varietists,"
+critics, dreamers. From the many approaches, letters and meetings, some
+few relationships resulted, ending as others had ended. Was he not
+changed, then? Not much--no. Only hardened intellectually and
+emotionally--tempered for life and work. There were scenes, too, violent
+ones, tears, separations, renouncements, cold meetings--with little
+Angela always to one side in Myrtle's care as a stay and consolation.
+
+In Eugene one saw an artist who, pagan to the core, enjoyed reading the
+Bible for its artistry of expression, and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
+Spinoza and James for the mystery of things which they suggested. In his
+child he found a charming personality and a study as well--one whom he
+could brood over with affectionate interest at times, seeing already
+something of himself and something of Angela, and wondering at the
+outcome. What would she be like? Would art have any interest for her?
+She was so daring, gay, self-willed, he thought.
+
+"You've a Tartar on your hands," Myrtle once said to him, and he smiled
+as he replied:
+
+"Just the same I'll see if I can't keep up with her."
+
+One of his occasional thoughts was that if he and Angela, junior, came
+to understand each other thoroughly, and she did not marry too soon, he
+could build a charming home around her. Perhaps her husband might not
+object to living with them.
+
+The last scene of all may be taken from his studio in Montclair, where
+with Myrtle and her husband as resident housekeepers and Angela as his
+diversion he was living and working. He was sitting in front of his
+fireplace one night reading, when a thought in some history recalled to
+his mind a paragraph somewhere in Spencer's astonishing chapters on "the
+unknowable" in his "Facts and Comments," and he arose to see if he could
+find it. Rummaging around in his books he extracted the volume and
+reread it, with a kind of smack of intellectual agreement, for it suited
+his mood in regard to life and his own mental state in particular.
+Because it was so peculiarly related to his own viewpoint I quote it:
+
+"Beyond the reach of our intelligence as are the mysteries of the
+objects known by our senses, those presented in this universal matrix
+are, if we may say so, still further beyond the reach of our
+intelligence, for whereas, those of the one kind may be, and are,
+thought of by many as explicable on the hypothesis of creation, and by
+the rest on the hypothesis of evolution, those of the other kind cannot
+by either be regarded as thus explicable. Theist and Agnostic must agree
+in recognizing the properties of Space as inherent, eternal,
+uncreated--as anteceding all creation, if creation has taken place.
+Hence, could we penetrate the mysteries of existence, there would still
+remain more transcendent mysteries. That which can be thought of as
+neither made nor evolved presents us with facts the origin of which is
+even more remote from conceivability than is the origin of the facts
+presented by visible and tangible things.... The thought of this blank
+form of existence which, explored in all directions as far as eye can
+reach, has, beyond that, an unexplored region compared with which the
+part imagination has traversed is but infinitesimal--the thought of a
+space, compared with which our immeasurable sidereal system dwindles to
+a point, is a thought too overwhelming to be dwelt upon. Of late years
+the consciousness that without origin or cause, infinite space has ever
+existed and must ever exist produces in me a feeling from which I
+shrink."
+
+"Well," said Eugene, turning as he thought he heard a slight noise,
+"that is certainly the sanest interpretation of the limitations of human
+thought I have ever read"--and then seeing the tiny Angela enter, clad
+in a baggy little sleeping suit which was not unrelated to a Harlequin
+costume, he smiled, for he knew her wheedling, shifty moods and tricks.
+
+"Now what are you coming in here for?" he asked, with mock severity.
+"You know you oughn't to be up so late. If Auntie Myrtle catches you!"
+
+"But I can't sleep, Daddy," she replied trickily, anxious to be with him
+a little while longer before the fire, and tripping coaxingly across the
+floor. "Won't you take me?"
+
+"Yes, I know all about your not being able to sleep, you scamp. You're
+coming in here to be cuddled. You beat it!"
+
+"Oh, no, Daddy!"
+
+"All right, then, come here." And he gathered her up in his arms and
+reseated himself by the fire. "Now you go to sleep or back you go to
+bed."
+
+She snuggled down, her yellow head in his crook'd elbow while he looked
+at her cheek, recalling the storm in which she had arrived.
+
+"Little flower girl," he said. "Sweet little kiddie."
+
+His offspring made no reply. Presently he carried her asleep to her
+couch, tucked her in, and, coming back, went out on the brown lawn,
+where a late November wind rustled in the still clinging brown leaves.
+Overhead were the star--Orion's majestic belt and those mystic
+constellations that make Dippers, Bears, and that remote cloudy
+formation known as the Milky Way.
+
+"Where in all this--in substance," he thought, rubbing his hand through
+his hair, "is Angela? Where in substance will be that which is me? What
+a sweet welter life is--how rich, how tender, how grim, how like a
+colorful symphony."
+
+Great art dreams welled up into his soul as he viewed the sparkling
+deeps of space.
+
+"The sound of the wind--how fine it is tonight," he thought.
+
+Then he went quietly in and closed the door.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The "Genius", by Theodore Dreiser
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