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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Adventures of a Widow, by Edgar Fawcett
+
+
+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 Adventures of a Widow
+       A Novel
+
+
+Author: Edgar Fawcett
+
+
+
+Release Date: August 23, 2011  [eBook #37185]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF A WIDOW***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made
+available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/adventuresofwido00fawciala
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ADVENTURES OF A WIDOW
+
+A Novel
+
+by
+
+EDGAR FAWCETT
+
+Author of "A Gentleman of Leisure," "A Hopeless Case," "An Ambitious
+Woman," "Tinkling Cymbals," etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Boston
+James R. Osgood and Company
+1884
+
+Copyright, 1883 and 1884,
+By Edgar Fawcett.
+
+All Rights Reserved.
+
+
+
+
+THE ADVENTURES OF A WIDOW.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+It is not long ago that the last conservative resident of Bond Street,
+proud of his ancient possessorship and no doubt loving the big brick
+structure with arched doorway and dormer windows in which he first saw
+the light, felt himself relentlessly swept from that interesting quarter
+by the stout besom of commerce. Interesting the street really is for all
+to whom old things appeal with any charm. It is characteristic of our
+brilliant New York, however, that few antiquarian feet tread her
+pavements, and that she is too busy with her bustling and thrifty
+present to reflect that she has ever reached it through a noteworthy
+past. Some day it will perhaps be recorded of her that among all cities
+she has been the least preservative of tradition and memorial. The hoary
+antiquity of her transatlantic sisters would seem to have made her
+unduly conscious of her own youth. She has so long looked over seas for
+all her history and romance, that now, when she can safely boast two
+solid centuries of age, the habit yet firmly clings, and she cares as
+little for the annals of her fine and stately growth as though, like
+Troy, she had risen, roof and spire, to the strains of magic melody.
+
+It might be of profit, and surely it would be of pleasure, were she to
+care more for the echoes of those harsh and sometimes tragic sounds that
+have actually blent their serious music with her rise. As it is, she is
+rich in neglected memories; she has tombs that dumbly reproach her
+ignoring eye; she has nooks and purlieus that teem with reminiscence and
+are silent testimonials of her indifference. Her Battery and her Bowling
+Green, each bathed in the tender glamour of Colonial association, lie
+frowned upon by the grim scorn of recent warehouses and jeered at by the
+sarcastic shriek of the neighboring steam-tug. She can easily guide you
+to the modern clamors of her Stock-Exchange; but if you asked her to
+show you the graves of Stuyvesant and Montgomery she might find the task
+a hard one, though thousands of her citizens daily pass and re-pass
+these hallowed spots. Boston, with its gentle ancestral pride, might
+well teach her a lesson in retrospective self-esteem. Her own harbor,
+like that of Boston, has had its "tea-party," and yet one whose
+anniversary now remains a shadow. On Golden Hill, in her own streets,
+the first battle of our Revolution was fought, the first blood in the
+cause of our freedom was spilled; yet while Boston stanchly commemorates
+its later "massacre," what tribute of oratory, essay or song has that
+other momentous contest received? This metropolitan disdain of local
+souvenir can ill excuse itself on the plea of intolerance toward
+provincialism; for if the great cities of Europe are not ashamed to
+admit themselves once barbaric, Hudson in fray or traffic with the
+swarthy Manhattans, or old Van Twiller scowling at the anathemas of
+Bogardus, holds at least a pictorial value and significance.
+
+Bond Street has always been but a brief strip of thoroughfare, running
+at right angles between the Bowery and Broadway. Scarcely more than
+thirty years ago it possessed the quietude and dignity of a patrician
+domain; it was beloved of our Knickerbocker social element; it was the
+tranquil stronghold of caste and exclusiveness. Its births, marriages
+and deaths were all touched with a modest distinction. Extravagance was
+its horror and ostentation its antipathy. The cheer of its
+entertainments would often descend to lemonade and sponge-cake, and
+rarely rise above the luxury of claret-punch and ice-cream. Its belles
+were of demurer type than the brisk-paced ladies of this period, and its
+beaux paid as close heed to the straight line in morals as many of their
+successors now bestow upon it in the matter of hair-parting. Bond Street
+was by no means the sole haunt of the aristocracy, but it was very
+representative, very important, very select. There was even a time when
+to live there at all conferred a certain patent of respectability. It
+was forgiven you that your daughter had married an obscure Smith, or
+that your son had linked his lot with an undesirable Jones, if you had
+once come permanently to dwell there. The whole short, broad street was
+superlatively genteel. Nothing quite describes it like that pregnant
+little word. It dined at two o'clock; it had "tea" at six; its parties
+were held as dissipated if they broke up after midnight; its young men
+"called" on its young women of an evening with ceremonious regularity,
+never at such times donning the evening-coat and the white neck-tie
+which now so widely obtain, but infallibly wearing these on all
+occasions of afternoon festivity with an unconcern of English usage that
+would keenly shock many of their descendants.
+
+But by degrees the old order changed. Commerce pushed northward with
+relentless energy. Its advance still left Bond Street uninvaded, but
+here and there the roomy brick dwellings received distinctly plebeian
+inmates. One night, in this street formerly so dedicated to the calm of
+refinement, a frightful murder occurred. No one who lived in New York at
+that time can fail to remember the Burdell assassination. It was
+surrounded by all the most melodramatic luridness of commission. Its
+victim was a dentist, slaughtered at midnight with many wounds from an
+unknown hand. The mysterious deed shook our whole city with dismay. For
+weeks it was a topic that superseded all others. To search through old
+newspapers of the excited days that followed is to imagine oneself on
+the threshold of a thrilling tale, in which the wrong culprits are
+arraigned and the real offender hides himself behind so impregnable an
+ambush that nothing but a final chapter can overthrow it. Yet in this
+ghastly affair of the stabbed dentist a protracted trial resulted in a
+tame acquittal and no more. The story ended abruptly and midway. It lies
+to-day as alluring material for the writer of harrowing fiction. It
+still retains all the ghastly piquancy of an undiscovered crime.
+
+The vast surrounding populace of New York have long ago learned to
+forget it, but there would be truth in the assertion that Bond Street
+recalls it still. Its garish publicity scared away the last of her
+fine-bred denizens. The retreat was haughty and gradual, but it is now
+absolute. Where Ten Eyck and Van Horn had engraved their names in burly
+letters on sheeny door-plates, you may see at present the flaunting
+signs of a hair-dresser, a beer-seller, a third-rate French
+_restaurateur_, a furrier, a flower-maker, and an intercessor between
+despairing authors and obdurate publishers. The glory of Bond Street has
+departed. Its region has become lamentably "down town." The spoilers
+possess it with undisputed rule. It is in one sense a melancholy ruin,
+in another a sprightly transformation.
+
+But several years before its decadence turned unargued fact (and now we
+near a time that almost verges upon the present), Mr. Hamilton Varick, a
+gentleman well past fifty, brought into perhaps the most spacious
+mansion of the street a bride scarcely eighteen. Mr. Varick had lived
+abroad for many years, chiefly in Paris. He was a tall, spare man, with
+a white jaunty mustache and a black eye full of fire. He was extremely
+rich, and unless remote relations were considered, heirless. It was
+generally held that he had come home to end his days after a life of
+foreign folly and gallantry. This may at first have seemed wholly true,
+but it also occurred that he had chosen to end them in the society of a
+blooming young wife.
+
+His Bond Street house, vacant for years, suddenly felt the embellishing
+spell of the upholsterer. Mr. Varick had meanwhile dropped into the
+abodes of old friends not seen in twenty years, had shaken hands, with a
+characteristic lightsome cordiality, right and left, had beamingly taken
+upon his lap the children of mothers and fathers who were once his
+youthful comrades in dance and rout, had reminded numerous altered
+acquaintances who he was, had been reminded in turn by numerous other
+altered acquaintances who they were, had twisted his white mustache, had
+talked with airy patriotism about getting back to die in one's native
+land, had deplored his long absence from the dear scenes of youth, had
+regretted secretly his transpontine Paris, had murmured his bad, witty
+French _mots_ to whatever matron would hear them, had got himself
+re-made a member of the big, smart Metropolitan Club which he thought a
+mere tiresome sort of parochial tavern when he last left it, and had
+finally amazed everyone by marrying the young and lovely Miss Pauline
+Van Corlear.
+
+Pauline herself had very little to do with the whole arrangement. She
+was the only child of a widowed mother who had long ago designed to
+marry her notably. Mrs. Van Corlear lived upon a very meagre income, and
+had been an invalid since Pauline was eight. But she had educated her
+daughter with a good deal of patient care, and had ultimately, at the
+proper age, relegated her to the chaperonage of a more prosperous
+sister, who had launched her forth into society with due _elan_. Pauline
+was not a good match in the mercenary sense; she was perfectly well
+aware of the fact; she had been brought up to understand it. But she was
+fair to see, and perhaps she understood this a little too well.
+
+New York was then what so many will remember it to have been about
+twelve years ago. The civil war had left few traces of disaster; it was
+the winter of seventy-one. Wall Street was in a hey-day of hazardous
+prosperity; sumptuous balls were given by cliques of the most careful
+entertainers; a number of ladies who had long remained unfashionable,
+yet who had preserved an inherited right to assert social claim when
+they chose, now came to the front. These matrons proved a strong force,
+and resisted in sturdy confederacy all efforts of outsiders to break
+their dainty ranks. They shielded under maternal wings a delightful bevy
+of blooming young maidens, among whom was Pauline Van Corlear.
+
+It was a season of amusing conflict. Journalism had not yet learned to
+fling its lime-light of notoriety upon the doings and mis-doings of
+private individuals. Young girls did not wake then, as now, on the
+morning after a ball, to read (or with jealous heart-burning _not_ to
+read) minute descriptions of their toilets on the previous night. The
+"society column" of the New York newspaper was still an unborn
+abomination. Had this not been the case, a great deal of pungent scandal
+might easily have found its way into print. The phalanx of assertive
+matrons roundly declared that they had found society in a deplorable
+condition. The balls, receptions and dinners were all being given by a
+horde of persons without grandfathers. The reigning belles were mostly a
+set of loud, rompish girls, with names that rang unfamiliarly. The good
+old people had nearly all been drowsing inactive during several winters;
+one could hardly discover an Amsterdam, a Spuytenduyvil, a Van
+Schuylkill, among this unpleasant rabble. There had been quite too many
+of these spurious pretenders. Legitimacy must uplift its debased
+standards.
+
+Legitimacy did so, and with a will. Some very fine and spacious mansions
+in districts bordering or approximate to Washington Square were
+hospitably thrown open, besides others of a smarter but less
+time-honored elegance in "up-town" environments. The new set, as it was
+called, carried things by storm. They were for the most part very rich
+people, and they spent their wealth with a lavish freedom that their
+lineage saved from the least charge of vulgarity. No display of money is
+ever considered vulgar when lineage is behind it. If you are unblessed
+with good descent you must air your silver dishes cautiously and heed
+well the multiplicity of your viands; for though your cook possess an
+Olympian palate and your butler be the ex-adherent of a king, the
+accusation of bad taste hangs like a sword of threat in your banquet
+hall.
+
+Among all the winsome _debutantes_ of that season, Pauline Van Corlear
+was the most comely. She had a sparkling wit, too, that was at times
+mercilessly acute. Most of the young friends with whom she had
+simultaneously "come out" were heiresses of no mean consideration; but
+Pauline was so poor that an aunt would present her with a few dozens of
+gloves, a cousin would donate to her five or six fresh gowns, or perhaps
+one still more distant in kinship would supply her with boots and
+bonnets. The girl sensitively shrank, at first, from receiving these
+gifts; but her plaintive, faded mother, with her cough and querulous
+temper, would always eagerly insist upon their acceptance.
+
+"Of course, my dear," Mrs. Van Corlear would say, in her treble pipe of
+a voice, while she rocked to and fro the great chair that bore her
+wasted, shawl-wrapped body--"of course it is quite right that your
+blood-relations should come forward. They all have plenty of money, and
+it would be dreadful if they let you go out looking shabby and forlorn.
+For my part, I'm only surprised that they don't do more."
+
+"I expect nothing from them, mamma," Pauline would say, a little sadly.
+
+"_Expect_, my dear? Of course you don't. But that doesn't alter the
+_obligation_ on their part. Now please do not be obstinate; you know my
+neuralgia always gets worse when you're obstinate. You are very
+pretty--yes, a good deal prettier than Gertie Van Horn or Sallie
+Poughkeepsie, with all their millions--and I haven't a doubt that before
+the winter is over you'll have done something really handsome for
+yourself. If you haven't, it will be your own fault."
+
+Pauline clearly understood that to do something handsome for herself
+meant to marry a rich man. From a tender age she had been brought up to
+believe that this achievement was the goal of all hopes, desires and
+aims. Everybody expected it of her, as she grew prettier and prettier;
+everybody hinted or prophesied it to her long before she "came out." The
+little contracted and conventional world in which it was her misfortune
+to breathe and move, had forever dinned it into her ears until she had
+got to credit it as an article of necessitous faith. There are customs
+of the Orient that shock our Western intelligences when we read of women
+placidly accepting their tyrannies; but no almond-eyed daughter of pasha
+or vizier ever yielded more complaisantly to harem-discipline than
+Pauline now yielded to the cold, commercial spirit of the marriage
+decreed for her.
+
+She was popular in society, notwithstanding her satiric turn. She always
+had a nosegay for the German, and a partner who had pre-engaged her. It
+was not seldom that she went to a ball quite laden with the floral boons
+of male admirers. Among these latter was her third cousin, then a
+gentleman of thirty, named Courtlandt Beekman. Courtlandt had been
+Pauline's friend from childhood. She had always been so fond of him that
+it had never occurred to her to analyze her fondness now, when they met
+under the festal glare of chandeliers instead of in her mother's plain,
+dull sitting-room. Nor had it ever occurred to any of her relations to
+matrimonially warn her against Courtlandt. He was such a nice, quiet
+fellow; naturally he was good to his little cousin; he was good to
+everybody, and now that Pauline had grown up and begun to go to places,
+his devotion took a brotherly form. Of course he was poor, and, if
+sensible, would marry rich. He had been going about for an age in "that
+other set." He knew the Briggs girls and the Snowe girls, and all the
+_parvenu_ people who had been ruling at assemblies and dancing-classes
+during the dark interregnum. Perhaps he would marry a Briggs or a Snowe.
+If he did, it would be quite proper. He was Courtlandt Beekman, and his
+name would sanctify nearly any sort of Philistine bride. But no one ever
+dreamed of suspecting that he might want to marry the cousin, twelve
+years his junior, who had sat on his knee as a school-girl, munching the
+candies he used to bring her and often pelting him with childish
+railleries at the same ungrateful moment.
+
+In person Courtlandt was by no means prepossessing. He had a tall,
+brawny figure, and a long, sallow face, whose unclassic irregularities
+might have seemed dull and heavy but for the brown eyes, lucid and
+variant, that enlivened it. He was a man of few words, but his silences,
+though sometimes important, were never awkward. No one accused him of
+stupidity, but no one had often connected him with the idea of
+cleverness. He produced the impression of being a very close observer,
+you scarcely knew why. Possibly it was because you felt confident that
+his silences were not mentally vacuous. He had gone among the gay
+throngs almost since boyhood; if he had not so persistently mingled with
+ladies (and in the main very sweet and cultured ones, notwithstanding
+the denunciations hurled against "that other set") it is probable that
+he would continuously have merited the title of ungainly and graceless.
+But ease and polish had come to him unavoidably; he was like some
+rough-shapen vessel that has fallen into the hands of the gilder and
+decorator. It would have been hard to pick a flaw in his manners, and
+yet his manners were the last thing that he made you think about. He was
+in constant social demand; his hosts and hostesses forgot how valuable
+to them he really was; he almost stood for that human miracle, a man
+without enemies. He made a kind of becoming background for nearly
+everybody; he had no axe to grind, no ladder to climb, no prize to win;
+he stood neither as debtor nor creditor toward society; he was, in a
+way, society itself. There were very few women who did not enjoy a chat
+with him _a deux_; and in all general conversation, though his attitude
+was chiefly that of listener, the talkers themselves were unaware how
+often they sought the response of his peculiar serious smile, or the
+intelligent gleam of his look.
+
+Pauline had not been greatly troubled, on her advent among the
+merry-makers, with that timidity which is so keen a distress to so many
+callow maids. Bashfulness was not one of her weak points; she had borne
+the complex stare levelled at her in drawing-rooms with excellent
+_aplomb_. Still, she could not help feeling that her kinsman,
+Courtlandt, had comfortably smoothed her path toward an individual and
+secure foothold. Those early intervals, dire to the soul of every novice
+like herself, when male adherence and escort failed through meagreness
+of acquaintanceship, Courtlandt had filled with the supporting relief of
+his presence and his attentions. There had been no _mauvais quart
+d'heure_ in Pauline's evenings; her cousin had loyally saved her from
+even the momentary chagrin of being left without a courtier. Later on,
+his kindly vigilance had become needless; but he was always to be
+trusted, nevertheless, as a safeguard against possible desertion.
+
+The occasion on which Mr. Hamilton Varick first saw Pauline was at a
+ball given in the February of her first season, two full months after
+she had modestly emerged with her little sisterhood of rosebud damsels.
+It was a very beautiful ball, given in a stately and lovely house
+adjacent to the Park, and by a lady now old and wrinkled, who had held
+her own, forty years ago, as a star in our then limited firmament of
+fashion. The dancers, among whom was her fair and smiling granddaughter
+of eighteen, chased the jolly hours in a spacious apartment, brilliant
+with prismatic candelabra and a lustrous floor of waxed wood. The
+rosy-and-white frescoes on the ceiling, the silver-fretted delicacy of
+frieze and cornice, the light, pure blues and pinks of tapestries, the
+airy and buoyant effects in tint and symmetry, made the whole
+quick-moving throng of revellers appear as if the past had let them live
+again out of some long-vanished French court-festival.
+
+"These young people only need powdered heads to make it look as if Louis
+Quinze were entertaining us in dead earnest," said Mr. Varick, with his
+high-keyed, nonchalant voice. He addressed an elderly matron as he
+spoke, but he gave a covert glance at Pauline, to whom he had just
+received, through request, the honor of a presentation.
+
+"I think it would be in very dead earnest if he did," said Pauline,
+speaking up with a gay laugh; and Mr. Varick laughed, too, relishing her
+pert joke. He paid her some gallant compliments as he stood at her side,
+though she thought them stiff and antique in sound, notwithstanding the
+foreign word or phrase that was so apt to tinge them. She found Mr.
+Varick pleasantest when he was asking after her sick mother, and telling
+her what New York gayeties used to be before the beginning of his long
+European absence. He had a tripping, lightsome mode of speech, that
+somehow suited the jaunty upward sweep of his white mustache. He would
+oscillate both hands in a graceful style as he talked. Elegant
+superficiality flowed from him without an effort. It needed no keenness
+to tell that he had been floating buoyantly on the top crest of the
+wave, and well amid its froth, all his life. He made no pretense to
+youth; he would, indeed, poke fun at his own seniority, with a
+relentless and breezy sort of melancholy.
+
+"Did you ever hear of a French poet named Francois Villon," he said to
+Pauline, dropping into a seat at her side that some departure had just
+left vacant. "No, I dare say you've not. He was a dreadful chap--a kind
+of _polisson_, as we say, but he wrote the most charming ballads; I
+believe he was hanged afterward, or ought to have been--I forget which.
+One of his songs had a sad little refrain that ran thus: '_Ou sont les
+neiges d'antan?_'--'Where are the snows of last year?' you know. Well,
+mademoiselle--no, Miss Pauline, I mean--that line runs in my head
+to-night. _Ca me gene_--it bothers me. I want to have the good things of
+youth back again. I come home to New York, and find my snow all melted.
+Everything is changed. I feel like a ghost--a merry old ghost, however.
+_Tenez_--just wait a bit. Do you think those nice young gentlemen will
+have anything to say to you after they have seen you a little longer in
+my company? I'm sure I have frightened four or five of them away.
+They're asking each other, now, who is that old _epouvantail_--what is
+the word?--scarecrow. Ah! _voila_--here comes one much bolder than the
+rest. I will have mercy on him--and retire. But before my _depart_ I
+have a favor to request of you. You will give mamma my compliments? You
+will tell her that I shall do myself the honor of calling upon her?
+Thanks, very much. We shall be ghosts together, poor mamma and I; you
+need not be _chez vous_ when I call, unless you are quite willing--that
+is, if you are afraid of ghosts."
+
+"Oh, I'm not," laughed Pauline. "I don't believe in them, Mr. Varick."
+
+"That is delightful for you to say!" her companion exclaimed. "It means
+that you will listen for a little while to our spectral conversation and
+not find it too _ennuyeuse_. How very kind of you! Ah! we old fellows
+are sometimes very grateful for a few crumbs of kindness!"
+
+"You can have a whole loaf from me, if you want," said Pauline, with an
+air of girlish diversion.
+
+Not long afterward she declared to her cousin, Courtlandt: "I like the
+old gentleman ever so much, Court. He's a refreshing change. You New
+York men are all cut after the same pattern."
+
+"I'm afraid he's cut with a rather crooked scissors," said Courtlandt,
+who indulged in a sly epigram oftener than he got either credit or
+discredit for doing.
+
+"Oh," said Pauline, as if slowly understanding. "You mean he is
+_French_, I suppose."
+
+"Quite French, they report."
+
+Mr. Varick made his promised visit upon Pauline and her mother sooner
+than either of them expected. Mrs. Van Corlear was rather more ill than
+usual, on the day he appeared, and almost the full burden of the ensuing
+conversation fell upon her daughter.
+
+The next evening, at the opera, he dropped into a certain box where
+Pauline was seated with her aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie. On the following
+day Pauline received, anonymously, an immense basket of exquisite
+flowers. Twice again Mr. Varick called upon her mother, in the charmless
+upstairs sitting-room of their boarding house. As it chanced, Pauline
+was not at home either time.
+
+An evening or two afterward she returned at about eleven o'clock from a
+theatre party, to find that her mother had not yet retired. Mrs. Van
+Corlear's usual bed-time was a very exact ten o'clock.
+
+The mother and daughter talked for a little while together in low tones.
+When Pauline went into her own chamber that night, her face was pale and
+her heart was beating.
+
+At a great afternoon reception which took place two days later,
+Courtlandt, who made his appearance after five o'clock, coming up town
+from the law-office in which he managed by hard work to clear a yearly
+two thousand dollars or so, said to his cousin, with a sharpened and
+rather inquisitive look:
+
+"What's the matter? You don't seem to be in good spirits."
+
+Pauline looked at him steadily for a moment. It was a great crush, and
+people were babbling all about them. "There's something I want to speak
+of," the girl presently said, in a lingering way.
+
+A kind of chill stole through Courtlandt's veins at this,--he did not
+know why; he always afterward had a lurking credence in the truth of
+presentments.
+
+"What is it?" he asked.
+
+Pauline told him what it was. He grew white as he listened, and a
+glitter crept into his eyes, and brightened there.
+
+"You're not going to _do_ it?" he said, when she had finished.
+
+She made no answer. She had some flowers knotted in the bosom of her
+walking dress, and she now looked down at them. They were not the
+flowers Mr. Varick had sent; they were a bunch bestowed by Courtlandt
+himself at a little informal dance of the previous evening, where the
+cotillon had had one pretty floral figure. She regarded their petals
+through a mist of unshed tears, now, though her cousin did not know it.
+
+He repeated his question, bending nearer. It seemed to him as if the sun
+in heaven must have stopped moving until she made her answer.
+
+"You know what mamma is, Court," she faltered.
+
+"Yes, I do. She has very false views of many things. But you have not.
+You can't be sold without your own consent."
+
+"Let us go away from here together," she murmured. "These rooms are so
+hot and crowded that I can hardly breathe in them."
+
+He gave her his arm, and they pushed their way forth into a neighboring
+hall through one of the broad yet choked doorways.
+
+Outside, in Fifth Avenue, the February twilight had just begun to
+deepen. The air was mild though damp; a sudden spell of clemency had
+enthralled the weather, and the snow, banked in crisp pallor along the
+edge of either sidewalk, would soon shrink and turn sodden. At the far
+terminus of every western street burned a haze of dreamy gold light
+where the sun had just dropped from view, but overhead the sky had that
+treacherous tint of vernal amethyst which is so often a delusive snare
+to the imprudent truster of our mutable winters. Against this vapory
+mildness of color the house-tops loomed sharp and dark; a humid wind
+blew straight from the south; big and small sleighs were darting along,
+with the high, sweet carillons of their bells now loud and now low;
+through the pavements that Courtlandt and Pauline were treading, great
+black spots of dampness had slipped their cold ooze, to tell of the thaw
+that lay beneath. Yesterday the sky had been a livid and frosty azure,
+and the sweep of the arctic blast had had the cut of a blade in it;
+to-day the city was steeped in a languor of so abrupt a coming that you
+felt its peril while you owned its charm. Courtlandt broke the silence
+that had followed their exit. He spoke as if the words forced themselves
+between his shut teeth.
+
+"I can't believe that you really mean to do it," he said, watching
+Pauline's face as she moved onward, looking neither to right nor left.
+"It would be horrible of you! He is over sixty if he's a day, besides
+having been mixed up in more than one scandal with women over there in
+Paris. I think it must be all a joke on your part. If it is, I wish for
+God's sake that you'd tell me so, Pauline!"
+
+"It isn't," she said. She turned her face to his, then, letting him see
+how pale and sad it was. "I must do it, Court," she went on. "It's like
+a sort of fate, forcing and dragging me. I had no business to mention
+mamma in the matter, I suppose. She couldn't _make_ me consent, of
+course, although, if I did not, her lamentations would take a most
+distracting form for the next year or two. No; it's not she; it's
+myself. I don't live in a world where people hold very high views of
+matrimony. And I hate the life I'm living now. The other would be
+independence, even if bought at a dear price. And how many girls would
+envy me my chance? What am I at present but a mere pensioner on my
+wealthy relatives? I can't stay in; I've started with the whirl, and I
+can't stop. Everybody whom I know is dancing along at the same pace. If
+I declined invitations; if I didn't do as all the other girls are doing;
+if I said 'No, I'm poor and can't afford it,'--then mamma would begin
+tuning her harp and sending up her wail. And I should be bored to death,
+besides." Here Pauline gave a hollow laugh, and slightly threw back her
+head. "Good Heavens!" she continued, "there's nothing strange in it.
+I've been brought up to expect it; I knew it would probably come, and I
+was taught, prepared, warned, to regard it when it did come in only one
+way. If he hadn't been old he might have been shocking. What a piercing
+pertinence there is to my case in that little proverb, 'Beggars mustn't
+be choosers!' I'm a beggar, you know: ask Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie if
+she doesn't think I am. And _he's_ quite the reverse of shocking, truly.
+His hair may be rather white, but his teeth are extremely so, and I
+think they're indigenous, aboriginal; I hope if they're not he will
+never tell me, anyway."
+
+She gave another laugh, as mirthless as if the spectre of herself had
+framed it. She had turned her face away from him again, and slightly
+quickened her walk.
+
+"You mean, then, that your mind is really made up!" said Courtlandt,
+with an ire, a fierceness, that she had never seen in him before. "You
+mean that for a little riches, a little power, you'll turn marriage,
+that should be a holy usage, into this wicked mockery?"
+
+Pauline bit her lip. Such a speech as this from her equanimous cousin
+was literally without precedent. She felt stung and guilty as she said,
+with cool defiance,--
+
+"Who holds marriage as a holy usage? I've never seen anyone who did."
+
+"I do!" he asseverated, with clouding face. "You do, too, Pauline in
+your heart."
+
+"I haven't any heart. They're not worn nowadays. They're out of
+fashion. We carry purses instead--when we can."
+
+"I think I will tell Mr. Varick you said that," he answered, measuring
+each word grimly.
+
+"Oh, do!" Pauline exclaimed. A weary and mournful bravado filled her
+tones. "How he would laugh! Do you fancy he thinks I care a button for
+him? Why, nearly the first sentence he spoke to mamma on this weighty
+subject concerned the number of yearly thousands he was willing to
+settle upon me."
+
+"So, it is all arranged?"
+
+"It only awaits your approval."
+
+"It can only get my contempt!"
+
+"That is too bad. I thought you would anticipate some of the charming
+little dinners I intend to give. He has dreadful attacks of the gout, I
+have learned, and sometimes I'll ask you to preside with me in his
+vacant chair. That is, if you"--
+
+But he would hear no more. He turned on his heel and left her. He
+bitterly told himself that her heart was ice, and not worth wasting a
+thought upon. But he wasted a good many that night, and days afterward.
+
+Whether ice or not, it was a very heavy heart as Pauline went homeward.
+Just in proportion as the excuses for her conduct were ready on her
+lips, so they were futile to appease her conscience.
+
+And yet she exulted in one justifying circumstance, as she herself named
+it. "If I _loved_ anybody--Court, or anybody else," she reflected, "I
+never _could_ do it! But I don't. It's going to make a great personage
+of me. I want to find out how it feels to be a great personage. I want
+to try the new sensation of not wearing charity gloves...." She had
+almost a paroxysm of nervous tears, alone in her own room, a little
+later. That evening Mr. Varick once more presented himself....
+
+At about eleven o'clock he jumped into a cab which he had kept waiting
+an interminable time, and lighted a very fragrant cigar as he was being
+driven off.
+
+"_Elle est belle a faire peur_," he muttered aloud. And the next moment
+a thought passed through his mind which would resemble this, if put into
+English, though he always thought in French:--
+
+"I will write to Madeleine to-morrow, and send her ten thousand francs.
+That will end everything--and if the gout spares me five years longer I
+shan't see Paris while it does."
+
+He had not by any means come home to die. He had said so because it had
+a neat sound, throwing a perfume of sentiment about his return. And he
+was always fond of the perfume of sentiment. In reality he had come home
+to look after his affairs, which had grown burdensomely prosperous, and
+then sail back with all the decorous haste allowable.
+
+Perhaps he had come home with a few other trifling motives. But of every
+conceivable motive, he had _not_ come with one. That one was--to marry.
+And yet he had to-night arranged his alliance (satisfactorily on both
+sides, it was to be hoped) with Miss Pauline Van Corlear.
+
+He leaned back in the dimness of the speeding cab, and reflected upon
+it. His reflections made him laugh, and as he laughed his lip curled up
+below his white mustache and showed his white teeth, with the good, dark
+cigar between them--the teeth of which Pauline had said that if they
+were false she did not wish to know it.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+The marriage was a quiet one, and took place in the early following
+spring. Pauline made a very lovely bride, but as this comment is
+delivered upon a most ample percentage of all the brides in Christendom,
+it is scarcely worth being recorded. The whole important constituency of
+her kindred were graciously pleased at the match, with a single
+exception. This was Courtlandt Beekman, who managed to be absent in
+Washington at the time of the wedding. Pauline's presents were superb;
+the Poughkeepsies, Amsterdams, and all the rest, came forth in expensive
+sanction of the nuptials. After a brief Southern tour the wedded pair
+took up their abode in the newly appointed Bond Street mansion. Mrs. Van
+Corlear, already ensconced there, welcomed them with as beaming a smile
+as her invalid state would permit. Pauline, as she kissed her, wondered
+if those same bloodless lips would ever have any further excuse for
+querulous complaint. It was pathetic to note the old lady's gratified
+quiver while her thin hand was gallantly imprinted, as well, by the
+kiss of her new son-in-law. She had surely reached the goal of all her
+earthly hopes. She had a silken chair to rock in, and a maid as her
+special attendant, and a doctor to be as devoted and exorbitant as he
+chose. Her neuralgia, her asthma, her rheumatism, her thousand and one
+ailments, were henceforth to wreak their dolorous inflictions among the
+most comfortable and sumptuous surroundings. And yet, as if in mockery
+of her new facilities for being the truly aristocratic invalid, this
+poor lady, after a few weeks of the most encouraging opportunity,
+forsook all its commodious temptations and quietly died in her bed of a
+sudden heart-seizure.
+
+On the occasion of her death Pauline's husband, who had thus far been
+scrupulously polite, made a remark which struck his wife as brutal, and
+roused her resentment. He was a good deal more brutal, in a glacial,
+exasperating way, as Pauline's anger manifested itself. But shortly
+after the funeral he was prostrated by a sharp attack of his gout,
+during which Pauline nursed him with forgiving assiduity.
+
+The young wife was now in deep mourning. Her husband's attack had been
+almost fatal. His recovery was slow, and a voyage to Europe was urgently
+recommended by his physicians. They sailed in latter June. Courtlandt
+was among those who saw Pauline off in the steamer. He looked, while
+taking her hand in farewell, as if he felt very sorry for her. Pauline
+seemed in excellent spirits; her black dress became her; she was so
+blonde that you saw the gold hair before you marked the funereal garb;
+and then she had her smile very ready, which had always won nearly
+everybody. Perhaps only Courtlandt, in his wise, grave taciturnity, saw
+just how factitious the smile was.
+
+Mr. Varick quite recovered from this attack. Pauline's letters said so.
+They had soon left London, near which the Cunarder had brought them, and
+gone to Paris; Mr. Varick was feeling so much better from the voyage,
+and had always felt so at home in Paris. For several months afterward
+Pauline's letters were sent over-sea in the most desultory and irregular
+fashion. And what they contained by no means pleased their recipients.
+She appeared to tell nothing about herself; she was always writing of
+the city. As if one couldn't read of the Tuileries and Notre Dame in a
+thousand books! As if one hadn't been there oneself! Why did she not
+write _how they were getting on together_? That was the one imperative
+stimulus for curiosity among all Pauline's friends and kindred--how
+they were getting on together. All, we should add, except Courtlandt,
+who seemed to manifest no curiosity of whatever sort. Of course one
+could not write and ask her, point blank! What was one to do? Did
+rambling essays upon the pleasures of a trip to Versailles, or the
+recreation of a glimpse of Fontainebleau, mean that Mr. Varick had or
+had not broken loose in a mettlesome manner from his latter-day
+matrimonial traces?
+
+"We are prepared for anything, you know," Mrs. Poughkeepsie, Pauline's
+aunt and former patron, had once rather effusively said to Courtlandt.
+"Now that Hamilton Varick is well, he might be larking over there to any
+dreadful extent. And Pauline, from sheer pride, mightn't be willing to
+tell us."
+
+"Very cruel of her, certainly," Courtlandt had responded, laconic and
+not a little sarcastic as well.
+
+But as months went by, Pauline's correspondents forgot, in the
+absorption engendered by more national incentives for gossip, the
+unsatisfactory tone of her letters. Once, however, Pauline wrote that
+she wished very much to return, but that her husband preferred remaining
+in Paris.
+
+"He won't come back!" immediately rose the cry on this side of the
+water. "He's keeping her over there against her will! How perfectly
+horrible! Well, she deserves it for marrying a _vieux galant_ like that!
+Poor Pauline! With her looks she might have married somebody of
+respectable age. But she wouldn't wait. She was so crazy to make her
+market, poor girl! It's to be hoped that he doesn't beat her, or
+anything of that frightful sort!"
+
+One auditor of these friendly allusions would smile at them with furtive
+but pardonable scorn. This auditor was Courtlandt; and he remembered how
+the same compassionate declaimers had been the first to applaud
+Pauline's astounding betrothal.
+
+After two years of absence on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Varick, certain
+rumors drifted to America. This or that person had seen them in Paris.
+Pauline was still pretty as ever, but living quite retired. It was said
+she had taken to books and general mental improvement. No one ever saw
+her with her husband. She never alluded to him in any way. There were
+queer stories about his goings on. It was hard to verify them; Paris was
+so big, and so many men were always doing such funny things there.
+
+The conclave on these shores heard and sympathetically shuddered. The
+"new set" had now healed all its old feuds. New York society was in a
+condition of amicably cemented factions. The Briggs girls and the Snowe
+girls had married more or less loftily, and had proved to the Amsterdams
+and others that they were worthy of peaceable affiliation. "Poor Pauline
+Varick" began to be a phrase, though a somewhat rare one, for without
+anybody actually wakening to the fact, she had been living abroad four
+whole years. And then, without the least warning, came the news that she
+was a widow.
+
+She was universally expected home, then, after the tidings that her
+husband was positively dead had been confirmed beyond the slightest
+doubt. But perhaps for this reason Pauline chose to remain abroad
+another year. When she did return her widowhood was an established fact.
+Her New York _clientele_ had grown used to it. Mr. Varick had left her
+all his fortune; she was a very wealthy young widow. Aggressive queries
+respecting his death, or his deportment during the foreign sojourn that
+preceded his death, were now quite out of order. She had buried him, as
+she had married him, decently and legally. He slept in Pere la Chaise,
+by his own _ante mortem_ request. No matter what sort of a life he had
+led her; it was nobody's business. She returned home, two years later,
+to take a high place and hold a high head. Those merciful intervening
+years shielded her from a multitude of stealthy interrogatories. She did
+not care to be questioned much regarding her European past as the wife
+of Mr. Varick, and she soon contrived to make it plain that she did not.
+There was no dissentient voice in the verdict that she had greatly
+changed. And in a physical sense no one could deny that she had changed
+for the better.
+
+Her figure, which had before been quite too thin despite its pliant
+grace, was now rounded into soft and charming curves. Her gray eyes
+sparkled less often, but they glowed with a steadier light for perhaps
+this reason; they looked as if more of life's earnest actualities had
+been reflected in them. Her face, with its chiselled features all
+blending to produce so high-bred and refined an expression, rarely broke
+into a smile now, but some unexplained fascination lay in its acquired
+seriousness, that made the smile of brighter quality and deeper import
+when it really came. She wore her copious and shining hair in a heavy
+knot behind, and let it ripple naturally toward either pure temple,
+instead of having it bush low down over her forehead in a misty turmoil,
+as previously. Her movements, her walk, her gestures, all retained the
+volatile briskness and freedom they had possessed of old; there was not
+even the first matronly hint about her air, and yet it was more
+self-poised, more emphatic, more womanly.
+
+"I really must move out of this dreadful Bond Street," she said to
+Courtlandt, rather early in the conversation which took place between
+them on the day of their first meeting. "I think I could endure it for
+some time longer if that immense tailor-shop had not gone up there at
+the Broadway corner, where such a lovely, drowsy old mansion used to
+stand. Yes, I must let myself be compliantly swept further up town.
+There is a kind of Franco-German tavern just across the way that
+advertises a 'regular dinner'--whatever that is--from twelve o'clock
+till three, every day, at twenty-five cents."
+
+"I see you haven't forgotten our national currency," said Courtlandt,
+with one of his inscrutable dispositions of countenance.
+
+Pauline tossed her head in a somewhat French way. "I have forgotten very
+little about my own country," she said.
+
+"You are glad to get back to it, then?"
+
+"Yes, very. I want to take a new view of it with my new eyes."
+
+"You got a new pair of eyes in Europe?"
+
+"I got an older pair." She looked at him earnestly for a moment. "Tell
+me, Court," she went on, "how is it that I find you still unmarried?"
+
+He shifted in his chair, crossing his legs. "Oh," he said, "no nice girl
+has made me an offer."
+
+Pauline laughed. "As if she'd be nice if she had! Do you remember how
+they used to say you would marry in the other set? Is there another set
+now?"
+
+"There is a number of fresh ones. New York is getting bigger every day,
+you know. Young men are being graduated from college, young girls from
+seminaries. I forget just what special set you mean that you expected me
+to marry into."
+
+"No, you don't!" cried Pauline, with soft positiveness. She somehow felt
+herself getting quietly back into the old easy terms with Courtlandt.
+His sobriety, that never echoed her gay moods, yet always seemed to
+follow and enjoy them, had re-addressed her like a familiar though
+alienated friend. "You recollect perfectly how Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie
+used to lift that Roman nose of hers and declare that she would never
+allow her Sallie to know those fast Briggs and Snowe girls, who had got
+out because society had been neglected by all the real gentry in town
+for a space of at least five years?"
+
+Courtlandt gave one of his slow nods. "Oh, yes, I recollect. Aunt
+Cynthia was quite wrong. She's pulled in her horns since then. The
+Briggses and the Snowes were much too clever for her. They were always
+awfully well-mannered girls, too, besides being so jolly. They needed
+her, and they coolly made use of her, and of a good many revived leaders
+like her, besides. Most of the good men like them; that was their strong
+point. It was all very well to say they hadn't had ancestors who knew
+Canal Street when it was a canal, and shot deer on Twenty-Third Street;
+but that wouldn't do at all. No matter how their parents had made their
+money, they knew how to spend it like swells, and they had pushed
+themselves into power and were not to be elbowed out. The whole fight
+soon died a natural death. They and their supporters are nearly all
+married now and married pretty well."
+
+"And you didn't marry one of them, Court?"
+
+Courtlandt gave a slight, dry cough. "I'm under the impression,
+Pauline," he said, "that I did not."
+
+"How long ago it all seems!" she murmured, drooping her blond head and
+fingering with one hand at a button on the front of her black dress.
+"It's only four years, and yet I fancy it to be a century." She raised
+her head. "Then the Knickerbockers, as we used to call them, no longer
+rule?"
+
+Courtlandt laughed gravely. "I don't know that they ever did," he
+answered.
+
+"Well, they used to give those dancing-classes, you know, where nobody
+was ever admitted unless he or she had some sort of patrician claim.
+Don't you recollect how Mrs. Schenectady, when she gave Lily a Delmonico
+Blue-Room party (do they have Delmonico Blue-Room parties, now?),
+instructed old Grace Church Brown to challenge at the Fourteenth Street
+entrance (where he would always wait as a stern horror for the coachmen
+of the arriving and departing carriages) anybody who did not present a
+certain mysterious little card at the sacred threshold?"
+
+"Oh, yes," returned Courtlandt ruminatively.
+
+"And how," continued Pauline, "that democratic Mrs. Vanderhoff happened
+to bring, on this same evening, some foreign gentleman who had dined
+with her, and whom she meant to present with an apologetic flourish to
+the Schenectadys, when suddenly the corpulent sentinel, Brown, desired
+from her escort the mysterious card, and finding it not to be
+forthcoming sent a messenger upstairs? And how Mr. Schenectady presently
+appeared and informed Mrs. Vanderhoff, with a cool snobbery which had
+something sublime about it, that he was exceedingly sorry, but the rule
+had been passed regarding the admission of any non-invited guest to his
+entertainment?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I remember it all," said Courtlandt. "Schenectady behaved like
+a cad. Nobody is half so strict, nowadays, nor half so grossly uncivil.
+You'll find society very much changed, if you go out. You'll see people
+whose names you never heard before. I sometimes think there's nothing
+required to make one's self a great swell nowadays except three
+possessions, all metallic--gold, silver, and brass."
+
+"How amusing!" said Pauline. "And yet," she suddenly added, with a swift
+shake of the head, "I'm sure it will never amuse _me_! No, Court, I have
+grown a very different person from the ignorant girl you once saw me!"
+She lowered her voice here, and regarded him with a tender yet
+impressive fixity. "When I look back upon it all now, and think how I
+used to hold the code of living which those people adopt as something
+that I must respect and even reverence, I can scarcely believe that the
+whole absurd comedy did not happen in some other planet. You don't know
+how much I've been through since you met me last. I'm not referring to
+my husband. It isn't pleasant for me to talk about _that_ part of the
+past. I wouldn't say even this much to any one except you; but now that
+I have said it, I'll say more, and tell you that I endured a good deal
+of solid trial, solid humiliation, solid heart-burning.... There, let us
+turn that page over, you and myself, and never exchange another word on
+the subject. You were perfectly right; the thing I did _was_ horrible,
+and I've bought my yards of sackcloth, my bushels of ashes. If it were
+to do over again, I'd rather beg, starve, die in the very gutter.
+There's no exaggeration, here; I have grown to look on this human
+destiny of ours with such utterly changed vision--I've so broadened in a
+mental and moral sense, that my very identity of the past seems as if it
+were something I'd moulted, like the old feathers of a bird. Feathers
+make a happy simile; I was lighter than a feather, then--as light as
+thistledown. I had no principles; I merely had caprices. I had no
+opinions of my own; other people's were handed to me and I blindly
+accepted them. My chief vice, which was vanity, I mistook for the virtue
+of self-respect, and kept it carefully polished, like a little
+pocket-mirror to look at one's face in. I was goaded by an actually
+sordid avarice, and I flattered myself that it was a healthy matrimonial
+ambition. I swung round in a petty orbit no larger than a saucer's rim,
+and imagined it to have the scope of a star's. I chattered gossip with
+fops of both sexes, and called it conversation. I bounced and panted
+through the German for two hours of a night, and declared it to be
+enjoyment. I climbed up to the summit of a glaring yellow-wheeled drag
+and sat beside some man whose limited wit was entirely engrossed by the
+feat of driving four horses at once; and because poor people stopped to
+sigh, and silly ones to envy, and sensible ones to pity, as we rumbled
+up the Avenue in brazen ostentation, I considered myself an elect and
+exceptional being. Of course I must have had some kind of a better
+nature lying comatose behind all this placid tolerance of frivolity.
+Otherwise the change never would have come; for the finest seed will
+fail if the soil is entirely barren."
+
+"You have taken a new departure, with a vengeance," said Courtlandt. He
+spoke in his usual tranquil style. He considered the sketch Pauline had
+just drawn of her former self very exaggerated and prejudiced. He had
+his own idea of what she used to be. He was observing her with an
+excessive keenness of scrutiny, now, underneath his reposeful demeanor.
+But he aired none of his contradictory beliefs. It is possible that he
+had never had a downright argument with any fellow-creature in his life.
+Somehow the brief sentence which he had just spoken produced the
+impression of his having said a great deal more than this. It was always
+thus with the man; by reason of some unique value in his silence any
+terse variation of it took a reflected worth.
+
+Pauline's hands were folded in her lap; she was looking down at them
+with a musing air. She continued to speak without lifting her gaze.
+"Yes," she went on, "the reformatory impulse must have been latent all
+that time. I can't tell just what quickened it into its present
+activity. But I am sure, now, that it will last as long as I do."
+
+"What are the wonders it is going to accomplish?"
+
+"Don't satirize it," she exclaimed, looking up at him with a start. "It
+is a power for good."
+
+"I hope so," he said.
+
+"_I_ know so! Courtlandt, I've come back home to live after my own
+fashion. I've come back with an idea, a theory. Of course a good many
+people will laugh at me. I expect a certain amount of ridicule. But I
+shall despise it so heartily that it will not make me swerve a single
+inch. I intend to be very social--yes, enormously so. My drawing-rooms
+shall be the resort of as many friends as I can bring together--but all
+of a certain kind."
+
+"Pray, of what kind?"
+
+"You shall soon see. They are to be men and women of intellectual
+calibre; they are to be workers and not drones; they are to be thinkers,
+writers, artists, poets, scholars. They can come, if they please, in
+abnormal coats and unconventional gowns; I sha'n't care for that. They
+can be as poor as church mice, as unsuccessful as talent nearly always
+is, as quaint in manner as genius incessantly shows itself." Here
+Pauline rose, and made a few eloquent little gestures with both hands,
+while she moved about the room in a way that suggested the hostess
+receiving imaginary guests. "I mean to organize a _salon_," she
+continued--"a veritable _salon_. I mean to wage a vigorous crusade
+against the aimless flippancy of modern society. I've an enthusiasm for
+my new undertaking. Wait till you see how valiantly I shall carry it
+out."
+
+"Am I to understand," said Courtlandt, without the vestige of a smile,
+"that you mean to begin by cutting all your former friends?"
+
+She glanced at him as if with a suspicion of further satire. But his
+sedate mien appeared to reassure her. "Cutting them?" she repeated. "No;
+of course not."
+
+"But you will not invite them to your _salon_?"
+
+She tossed her head again. "They would be quite out of place there. They
+are not in earnest about anything. Everybody whom I shall have must be
+in earnest. I intend to lay great stress upon that one requirement. It
+is to be a passport of admission. My apartments are to be at once easy
+and difficult of entrance. I shall not object to the so-called
+aristocratic class, although if any applicant shall solicit my notice
+who is undoubtedly a member of this class, I shall in a certain way hold
+the fact as disqualifying; it shall be remembered against him; if I
+admit him at all I shall do so in spite of it and not because of it.--Is
+my meaning quite clear on this point?"
+
+"Oh, excessively," said Courtlandt; "you could not have made it more so.
+All ladies and gentlemen are to be received under protest."
+
+He let one of his odd, rare laughs go with the last sentence, and for
+this reason Pauline merely gave him a magnificent frown instead of
+visiting upon him more wrathful reprimand. At the same time she said:
+"It's a subject, Court, on which I am unprepared for trivial levity. If
+you can't treat it with respect I prefer that you should warn me in
+time, and I will reserve all further explanations of my project."
+
+He gave a slight, ambiguous cough. "If I seem disrespectful you must lay
+it to my ignorance."
+
+"I should be inclined to do that without your previous instructions."
+Here she regarded him with a commiseration that he thought delicious; it
+was so palpably genuine; she so grandly overlooked the solemn roguery
+that ambuscaded itself behind his humility.
+
+"You see," he went on, "I haven't learned the vocabulary of radicalism,
+so to speak. I think I know the fellows you propose to have; they wear
+long hair, quite often, and big cloaks instead of top-coats, and collars
+low enough in the neck to show a good deal of wind-pipe. As for the
+women, they"--
+
+"It is perfectly immaterial to me how any of them may dress!" she
+interrupted, with majestic disapproval. "I ought to be very sorry for
+you, Courtlandt, and I am. You're clever enough not to let yourself
+rust, like this, all your days. I don't believe you've ever read one of
+the works of the great modern English thinkers. You're sluggishly
+satisfied to go jogging along in the same old ruts that humanity has
+worn deep for centuries. Of course you never had, and never will have,
+the least spark of enthusiasm. You're naturally lethargic; if a person
+stuck a pin into you I don't believe you would jump. But all this is no
+reason why you shouldn't try and live up to the splendid advancements of
+your age. When my constituents are gathered about me--when I have fairly
+begun my good work of centralizing and inspiriting my little band of
+sympathizers--when I have defined in a practical way my intended
+opposition to the vanities and falsities of existing creeds and tenets,
+why, then, I will let you mingle with my assemblages and learn for
+yourself how you've been wasting both time and opportunity."
+
+"That is extremely good of you," murmured Courtlandt imperturbably. "I
+supposed your doors were to be closed upon me for good and all."
+
+"Oh, no. I shall insist, indeed, that you drop in upon us very often. I
+shall need your presence. You are to be my connecting link, as it were."
+
+"How very pleasant! You have just told me that I was benighted. Now I
+find myself a connecting link."
+
+"Between culture and the absence of it. I have no objection to your
+letting the giddy and whimsical folk perceive what a vast deal they are
+deprived of. Besides, I should like you to be my first conversion--a
+sort of bridge by which other converts may cross over into the happy
+land."
+
+"You are still most kind. I believe that bridges are usually wooden. No
+doubt you feel that you have made a wise selection of your material. May
+I be allowed to venture another question?"
+
+"Yes--if it is not too impudent."
+
+She was watching him with her head a little on one side, now, and a
+smile struggling forth from her would-be serious lips. She was
+recollecting how much she had always liked him, and considering how much
+she would surely like him hereafter, in this renewal of their old
+half-cousinly and half-flirtatious intimacy. She was thinking what deeps
+of characteristic drollery slept in him--with what a quiet, funny sort
+of martyrdom he had borne her little girlish despotisms, before that
+sudden marriage had wrought so sharp a rupture of their relations, and
+how often he had forced her into unwilling laughter by the slow and
+almost sleepy humor with which he had successfully parried some of her
+most vigorous attacks.
+
+"I merely wanted to ask you," he now said, "where all these
+extraordinary individuals are to be found."
+
+"Ah, that is an important question, certainly," she said, with a solemn
+inclination--or at least the semblance of one. "I intend to collect
+them."
+
+"Good gracious! You speak of them as if they were minerals or mummies
+that you were going to get together for a museum. I have no doubt that
+they will be curiosities, by the bye."
+
+"I am afraid _you_ will find them so."
+
+"Are they to be imported?"
+
+"Oh, no. That will not be necessary."
+
+"I see; they're domestic products."
+
+"Quite so. In this great city--filled with so much energy, so much
+re-action against the narrow feudalisms of Europe--I am very certain of
+finding them." She paused for a moment, and seemed to employ a tacit
+interval for the accumulation of what she next said. "I shall not be
+entirely unassisted in my search, either."
+
+A cunning twinkle became manifest in the brown eyes of her listener. He
+drew a long breath. "Ah! now we get at the root of the matter. There's a
+confederate--an accomplice, so to speak."
+
+"I prefer that you should not allude to my assistant in so rude a style.
+Especially as, in the first place, you have never met him, and, in the
+second, he is a person of the most remarkable gifts."
+
+"Is there any objection to my asking his name? Or is it still a dark
+mystery?"
+
+She laughed at this, as if she thought it highly diverting. "My dear
+cousin," she exclaimed, "how absurd you can be at a pinch! What on earth
+should make the name of Mr. Kindelon a dark mystery?"
+
+"Um-m-m. Somebody you met abroad, then?"
+
+"Somebody I met on the steamer, while returning."
+
+"I see. An Englishman?"
+
+"A gentleman of Irish birth. He has lived in New York for a number of
+years. He knows a great many of the intellectual people here. He has
+promised to help me in my efforts. He will be of great value."
+
+Courtlandt rose. "So are your spoons, Pauline," he said rather gruffly,
+not at all liking the present drift of the information. "Take my advice,
+and lock them up when you give your first _salon_."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Pauline had not been long in her native city again before she made the
+discovery that a great deal was now socially expected of her. The news
+of her return spread abroad with a rapidity more suggestive of bad than
+of good tidings; her old acquaintances, male and female, flocked to the
+Bond Street house with a most loyal promptitude. The ladies came in
+glossy _coupes_ and dignified coaches, not seldom looking about them
+with _dilletante_ surprise at the mercantile glare and tarnish of this
+once neat and seemly crossway, as they mounted Mrs. Varick's antiquated
+stoop. Most of them were now married; they had made their market, as
+Pauline's deceased mother would have said, and it is written of them
+with no wanton harshness that they had in very few cases permitted
+sentiment to enact the part of salesman. There is something about the
+fineness of our republican ideals (however practice may have
+determinedly lowered and soiled them) that makes the mere worldly view
+of marriage a special provocation to the moralist. Regarded as a
+convenient mutual barter in Europe, there it somehow shocks far less;
+the wrong of the grizzled bridegroom winning the young, loveless, but
+acquiescent bride bears a historic stamp; we recall, perhaps, that they
+have always believed in that kind of savagery over there; it is as old
+as their weird turrets and their grim torture-chambers. But with
+ourselves, who broke loose, in theory at least, from a good many tough
+bigotries, the sacredness of the marriage state presents a much more
+meagre excuse for violation. It was not that the husbands of Pauline's
+wedded friends were in any remembered instance grizzled, however; they
+were indeed, with few exceptions, by many years the juniors of her own
+dead veteran spouse; but the influences attendant upon their unions with
+this or that maiden had first concerned the question of money as a
+primary and sovereign force, and next that of name, prestige, or
+prospective elevation. These young brides had for the most part sworn a
+much more sincere fidelity to the carriages in which they now rode, and
+the pretty or imposing houses in which they dwelt, than to the
+important, though not indispensable, human attachments of such prized
+commodities.
+
+Pauline found them all strongly monotonous; she could ill realize that
+their educated simpers and their regimental sort of commonplace had ever
+been potent to interest her. One had to pay out such a small bit of line
+in order to sound them; one's plummet so soon struck bottom, as it were.
+She found herself silently marvelling at the serenity of their
+contentment; no matter how gilded were the cages in which they made
+their decorous little trills, what elegance of filigree could atone for
+the absence of space and the paucity of perches?
+
+The men whom she had once known and now re-met pleased her better. They
+had, in this respect, the advantage of their sex. Even when she
+condemned them most heartily as shallow and fatuous, their detected
+admiration of her beauty or of their pleasure in her company won for
+them the grace of a pardoning afterthought. They were still bachelors,
+and some of them more maturely handsome bachelors than when she had last
+looked upon them. They had niceties and felicities of attitude, of
+intonation, of tailoring, of boot or glove, to which, without confessing
+it, she was still in a degree susceptible.
+
+But she did not encourage them. They were not of her new world; she had
+got quite beyond them. She flattered herself that she always affected
+them as being gazed down upon from rather chilly heights. She insisted
+on telling herself that they were much more difficult to talk with than
+she really found them. This was one of the necessities of her
+conversion; they must not prove agreeable any longer; it was
+inconsequent, untenable, that they should receive from her anything but
+a merely hypocritic courtesy. She wanted her contempt for the class of
+which they were members to be in every way logical, and so manufactured
+premises to suit its desired integrity. Meanwhile she was much more
+entertaining than she knew, and treated Courtlandt, one day, with quite
+a shocked sternness for having informed her that these male visitors had
+passed upon her some very admiring criticisms.
+
+"I have done my best to behave civilly," she declared. "I was in my own
+house, you know, when they called. But I cannot understand how they can
+possibly _like_ me as they no doubt used to do! I would much rather have
+you bring me quite a contrary opinion, in fact."
+
+"If you say so," returned Courtlandt, with his inimitable repose, "I
+will assure them of their mistake and request that they correct it."
+
+Pauline employed no self-deception whatever in the acknowledgment of
+her real feelings toward Courtlandt. She cherished for him what she
+liked to tell herself was an inimical friendliness. In the old days he
+had never asked her to marry him, and yet it had been plain to her that
+under favoring conditions he might have made her this proposal. She was
+nearly certain that he no longer regarded her with a trace of the former
+tenderness. On her own side she liked him so heartily, notwithstanding
+frequent antagonisms, that the purely amicable nature of this fondness
+blurred any conception of him in the potential light of a lover.
+
+But, indeed, Pauline had resolutely closed her eyes against the
+possibility of ever again receiving amorous declaration or devotion. She
+had had quite enough of marriage. Her days of sentiment were past. True,
+they had never actually been, but the phantasmal equivalent for them had
+been, and she now determined upon not replacing this by a more
+accentuated experience. Her path toward middle life was very clearly
+mapped out in her imagination; it was to be strewn with nicely sifted
+gravel and bordered by formally clipped foliage. And it was to be very
+straight, very direct; there should be no bend in it that came upon a
+grove with sculptured Cupid and rustic lounge. The "marble muses,
+looking peace" might gleam now and then through its enskirting boskage,
+but that should be all. Pauline had read and studied with a good deal of
+fidelity, both during her marriage and after her widowhood. She had gone
+into the acquisition of knowledge and the development of thought as some
+women go into the intoxication of a nervine. Her methods had been
+amateurish and desultory; she had not been taught, she had learned, and
+hence learned ill. "The modern thinkers," as she called them, delighted
+her with their liberality, their iconoclasm. She was in just that
+receptive mood to be made an extremist by their doctrines, the best of
+which so sensibly warn us against extremes. Her husband's memory, for
+the sake of decency if for no other reason, deserved the reticence which
+she had shown concerning it. He had revealed to her a hollow nature
+whose void was choked with vice, like some of those declivities in
+neglected fields, where the weed and the brier run riot. The pathos of
+her position, in a foreign land, with a lord whose daily routine of
+misconduct left her solitary for hours, while inviting her, had she so
+chosen, to imitate a course of almost parallel license, was finally a
+cogent incentive toward that change which ensued. The whole falsity of
+the educational system which had resulted in her detested marriage was
+slowly laid bare to her eyes by this shocking and salient example of it.
+
+There was something piteous, and yet humorous as well, in her present
+intellectual state. She was a young leader in the cause of culture,
+without a following. She believed firmly in herself, and yet deceived
+herself. Much in the world that it was now her fixed principle to shun
+and reprobate, she liked and clung to. These points of attraction were
+mostly superficialities, it is true, like the fashion of clothes or the
+conventionalism of accepted social customs. But even these she had more
+than half persuaded herself that she despised, and when she observed
+them in others they too often blinded her to attractions of a less
+flimsy sort. She had verged upon a sanguine and florid fanaticism, and
+was wholly unconscious of her peril. Some of Courtlandt's sober comments
+might effectually have warned her, if it had not been for a marked
+contrary influence. This was represented by the gentleman whom we have
+already heard her name as Mr. Kindelon.
+
+She had been presented to him on the steamer during her recent homeward
+voyage, by an acquaintance who knew little enough regarding his
+antecedents. But Ralph Kindelon had been at once very frank with her.
+This was the most prominent trait that usually disclosed itself in him
+on a first acquaintance; he always managed to impress you by his
+frankness. He had a large head set on a large frame of splendid, virile
+proportions. His muscular limbs were moulded superbly; his big hands and
+feet had the same harmony of contour, despite their size; his grace of
+movement was extraordinary, considering his height and weight; the noble
+girth and solidity of chest struck you as you stood close to him--men
+found it so substantially, women so protectively, human. A kind of
+warmth seemed to diffuse itself from his bodily nearness, as if the
+pulse of his blood must be on some exceptionally liberal scale. But for
+those whom he really fascinated his real fascinations lay elsewhere. You
+met them in the pair of facile dimples that gave genial emphasis to his
+sunny smile; in the crisp, coarse curl of his blue-black hair, which
+receded at either temple, and drooped centrally over a broad, full brow;
+in the sensuous, ample, ruddy mouth, which so often showed teeth of
+perfect shape and unflawed purity, and was shaded by a mustache tending
+to chestnut in shade, with each strong crinkled hair of it rippling away
+to the smooth-sloping cheeks; and lastly in the violet-tinted Irish
+eyes, whose deep-black lashes had a beautiful length and gloss.
+
+Kindelon spoke with a decided brogue. It was no mere Celtic accent; it
+was the pure and original parlance of his native island, though shorn of
+those ungrammatical horrors with which we are prone by habit to
+associate it. His English was Irish, as one of his own countrymen might
+have said, but it was very choice and true English, nevertheless. Well
+as he spoke it, he spoke it immoderately, even exorbitantly, when the
+mood was upon him, and the mood was upon him, in a loquacious sense,
+with considerable pertinacity. He was the sort of man concerning whom
+you might have said, after hearing him talk three minutes or so, that he
+talked too much; but if you had listened to him five minutes longer,
+your modified opinion would probably have been that he scarcely talked
+too much for so good a talker.
+
+It has been chronicled of him that he was extremely frank. Before he had
+enlivened during more than an hour, for Pauline, the awful tedium of an
+Atlantic voyage in winter, she discovered herself to be in a measure
+posted concerning his personal biography. His parents had been farmers
+in his native Ireland, and he was the fourth of a family of eleven
+children. At the age of twelve years a certain benevolent baronet, whose
+tenant his father was, had sent him to school in Dublin with a view
+toward training and encouraging a natural and already renowned
+precocity. At school he had done well until seventeen, and at seventeen
+he had suddenly found himself thrown on the world, through the death of
+his patron. After that he had revisited his somewhat distant home for a
+brief term, and soon afterward had taken passage for America, aided by
+the funds of an admiring kinsman. He had even then developed evidence of
+what we call a knack for writing. After severe hardships on these
+shores, he had drifted into an editorial office in the capacity of
+printer. This had been a godsend to him, and it had fallen from the
+skies of Chicago, not New York. But New York had ultimately proved the
+theatre of those triumphs which were brilliant indeed compared with the
+humdrum humility of his more Western pursuits. Here he had written
+articles on many different subjects for the local journals; he had
+served in almost every drudging department of reportorial work; he had
+risen, fallen, risen, and at last risen once and for all, durably and
+honorably, as an associate-editor in a popular and prominent New York
+journal. He told Pauline the name of his journal--the New York
+"Asteroid"--and she remembered having heard of it. He laughed his
+affluent, mellow laugh at this statement, as though it were the most
+amusing thing in the world to find an American who had only "heard of"
+the New York "Asteroid."
+
+In a political sense, and moreover in all senses, he was a zealous
+liberal. How he had managed to scrape together so remarkable an amount
+of knowledge was a mystery to himself. Everything that he knew had been
+literally "scraped together;" the phrase could not be apter than when
+applied to his mental store of facts. He read with an almost phenomenal
+swiftness, and his exquisite memory retained whatever touched it with a
+perfection like that of some marvellously sensitive photographic agent.
+He never forgot a face, a book, a conversation. He hardly forgot a
+single one of his newspaper articles, and their name was legion. His
+powers just stopped short of genius, but they distinctly stopped there.
+He did many things well--many things, in truth, which for a man so
+hazardously educated it was surprising that he did at all. But he did
+nothing superlatively well. It was the old story of that fatal facility
+possessed by numbers of his own countrymen who have migrated to these
+shores. Perhaps the one quality that he lacked was a reflective
+patience--and this is declared of his brains alone, having no reference
+to his moral parts. He leaped upon subjects, and devoured them, so to
+speak. It never occurred to him that there is a cerebral digestion,
+which, if we neglect its demands, inevitably entails upon us a sort of
+dyspeptic vengeance. In crushing the fruit with too greedy a speed we
+get to have a blunted taste for its finer flavor.
+
+Within certain very decided limits he had thus far made an easy conquest
+of Pauline. She had never before met any one whom he remotely resembled.
+In the old days she would have shrank from him as being unpatrician;
+now, his fleet speech, his entire lack of repose, his careless,
+unmodish, though scrupulously clean dress, all had for her an appealing
+and individual charm. After parting on the arrival in New York, she and
+Kindelon had soon re-met. He bore the change from oceanic surroundings
+admirably in Pauline's eyes. With characteristic candor he told her that
+he had come back from the recent visit to his old parents in Ireland
+(Pauline knowing all about this visit, of course) to find himself
+wofully poor. She was wondering whether he would resent the offer of a
+loan if she made him one, when he suddenly surprised her by a statement
+with regard to "present funds," that certainly bore no suggestion of
+poverty. The truth was, he lacked all proper appreciation of the value
+of money. Economy was an unknown virtue with him; to have was to spend;
+he was incapable of saving; no financial to-morrow existed for him, and
+by his careless and often profuse charities he showed the same absence
+of caution as that which marked all other daily expenditures.
+
+In her immediate purchase of a new residence she consulted with him, and
+allowed herself to be guided by his counsels. This event brought them
+more closely together for many days than they would otherwise have been.
+His artistic feeling and his excellent taste were soon a fresh surprise
+to her. "I begin to think," she said to him one day, "that there is
+nothing you do not know."
+
+He laughed his blithe, bass laugh. "Oh," he said, "I know a lot of
+things in a loose, haphazard way. We newspaper men can't escape general
+information, Mrs. Varick. We breathe it in, naturally, and in spite of
+ourselves."
+
+"But tell me," Pauline now asked, "are these other people to whom I
+shall soon be presented as clever as you are?"
+
+He looked at her with merriment twinkling in his light-tinted eyes.
+"They're a good deal cleverer--some of them," he replied. "They could
+give me points and beat me, as we say in billiards."
+
+"You make me very anxious to know them."
+
+"When you talk like that I feel as if I might be tempted to postpone all
+introductions indefinitely," he responded. He spoke with sudden
+seriousness, and she felt that mere gallantry had not lain at the root
+of this answer.
+
+As a matter of course, Kindelon and Courtlandt soon met each other in
+Pauline's drawing-room. Courtlandt was quite as quiet as usual, and the
+Irishman perhaps rather unwontedly voluble. Pauline thought she had
+never heard her new friend talk better. He made his departure before her
+cousin, and when he had gone Pauline said, with candid enthusiasm:
+
+"Isn't he a wonderful man?"
+
+"Wonderful?" repeated Courtlandt, a trifle drowsily.
+
+She gave him a keen look, and bristled visibly while she did so.
+"Certainly!" she declared. "No other word just expresses him. I didn't
+observe you very closely, Court," she went on, "but I took it for
+granted that you were being highly interested. I can't imagine your
+_not_ being."
+
+"He gave me a kind of singing in the ears," said Courtlandt. "I've got
+it yet. He makes me think of one of those factories where there's a
+violent hubbub all the time, so that you have to speak loud if you want
+to be heard."
+
+Pauline was up in arms, then. "I never listened to a more scandalously
+unjust criticism!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean to tell me, unblushingly,
+that you do not think him a _very_ extraordinary person?"
+
+"Oh, very," said her cousin.
+
+Pauline gave an exasperated sigh. "I am so used to you," she said, "that
+I should never even be surprised by you. But you need not pretend that
+you can have any except one _truthful_ opinion about Mr. Kindelon."
+
+"I haven't," was the reply. "He's what they call a smart newspaper man.
+A Bohemian chap, you know. They're nearly all of them just like that.
+They can talk you deaf, dumb, and blind, if you only give them a
+chance."
+
+"I don't think the dumbness required any great effort, as far as _you_
+were concerned!" declared Pauline, with sarcastic belligerence.
+
+She never really quarrelled with Courtlandt, because his impregnable
+stolidity made such a result next to impossible. But she was now so
+annoyed by her cousin's slighting comments upon Kindelon that her
+treatment was touched with a decided coolness for days afterward.
+
+Meanwhile her aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, had undergone considerable
+discomforting surprise. Mrs. Poughkeepsie had been prepared to find
+Pauline changed, but by no means changed in her present way. On hearing
+her niece express certain very downright opinions with regard to the
+life which she was bent upon hereafter living, this lady at first
+revealed amazement and afterward positive alarm.
+
+"But my dear Pauline," she said, "you cannot possibly mean that you
+intend to get yourself talked about?"
+
+"Talked about, Aunt Cynthia? I don't quite catch your drift, really."
+
+"Let me be plainer, then. If you remain out of society, that is one
+thing. I scarcely went anywhere, as you know, for ten years after my
+husband's death--not, indeed, until Sallie had grown up and was ready to
+come out. There is no objection, surely, against closing one's doors
+upon the world, provided one desires to do so--although I should say
+that such a step, Pauline, at your age, and after two full years of
+widowhood, was decidedly a mistake. Still"--
+
+"Pardon me, Aunt Cynthia," Pauline here broke in. "Nothing is further
+from my wish than to close my doors upon the world. On the contrary, I
+want to open them very wide indeed."
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie lifted in shocked manner both her fair, plump, dimpled
+hands. She was a stout lady, with that imposing, dowager-like effect of
+_embonpoint_ which accompanies a naturally tall and majestic stature.
+Her type had never in girlhood been a very feminine one, and it now
+bordered upon masculinity. Her eyes were hard, calm and dark; her
+arching nose expressed the most serene self-reliance. She was indeed a
+person with no doubts; she had, in her way, settled the universe. All
+her creeds were crystallized, and each, metaphorically, was kept in
+cotton, as though it were a sort of family diamond. She had been a Miss
+Schenectady, of the elder, wealthy and more conspicuous branch; it was a
+most notable thing to have been such a Miss Schenectady. She had married
+a millionaire, and also a Poughkeepsie; this, moreover, was something
+very important and fine. She had so distinct a "position" that her
+remaining out of active participation in social pursuits made no
+difference whatever as regarded her right to appear and rule whenever
+she so chose; it had only been necessary for her to lift her spear,
+when Miss Sallie required her chaperonage, and the Snowes and Briggses
+had perforce to tremble. And this fact, too, she held as a precious,
+delectable prerogative.
+
+In not a few other respects she was satisfied regarding herself. There
+was nothing, for that matter, which concerned herself in any real way,
+about which she did not feel wholly satisfied. Her environment in her
+own opinion was of the best, and doubtless in the opinion of a good many
+of her adherents also. From the necklace of ancestral brilliants which
+she now wore, sparkling at ball or dinner, on her generous and creamy
+neck, to the comfortably-cushioned pew in Grace Church, where two good
+generations of Poughkeepsies had devoutly sat through many years of
+Sundays, she silently valued and eulogized the gifts which fate had
+bestowed upon her.
+
+Pauline's present attitude seemed to her something monstrous. It had not
+seemed monstrous that her niece should give the bloom and vital purity
+of a sweet maidenhood to a man weighted with years and almost decrepid
+from past excesses. But that she should seek any other circle of
+acquaintance except one sanctioned by the immitigable laws of caste,
+struck her as a bewildering misdemeanor.
+
+"My dear Pauline," she now exclaimed, "you fill me with a positive fear!
+Of course, if you shut your doors to the right people you open them to
+the wrong ones. You have got some strange idea abroad, which you are now
+determined to carry out--to _exploiter_, my dear! With your very large
+income there is hardly any dreadful imprudence which you may not commit.
+There is no use in telling me that the people whom one knows are not
+worth knowing. If you have got into that curious vein of thought you
+have no remedy for it except to refrain from all entertaining and all
+acceptance of courtesies. But I beg, Pauline, that you will hesitate
+before you store up for yourself the material of ugly future repentance.
+Sallie and I have accepted the Effinghams' box at the opera to-night.
+Those poor Effinghams have been stricken by the death of their father;
+it was so sudden--he was sitting in his library and literally fell
+dead--he must certainly have left two millions, but of course that has
+nothing to do with their bereavement, and it was so kind of them to
+remember us. They know that I have always wanted a proscenium, and that
+there are no prosceniums, now, to be had for love or money. I have sent
+our box in the horse-shoe to cousin Kate Ten Eyck; she is so wretchedly
+cramped in her purse, you know, and still has Lulu on her hands, and
+will be so grateful--as indeed she wrote me quite gushingly that she
+_was_, this very afternoon. Now, Pauline, won't you go with us, my
+dear?"
+
+Pauline went. A noted _prima donna_ sang, lured by an immense nightly
+reward to disclose her vocal splendors before American audiences. But
+her encompassment, as is so apt to be the case here, was pitiably
+mediocre. She sang with a presentable contralto, a passable baritone, an
+effete basso, and an almost despicable tenor. The chorus was
+anachronistic in costume, sorry in voice, and mournfully undrilled. But
+the _diva_ was so comprehensively talented that she carried the whole
+performance. At the same time there were those among her hearers who
+lamented that her transcendent ability should be burlesqued by so shabby
+and impotent a surrounding. The engagement of this famous lady was
+meanwhile one of those sad operatic facts for which the American people
+have found, during years past, no remedy and no preventive. The fault,
+of course, lies with themselves. When they are sufficiently numerous as
+true lovers of music they will refuse their countenance to even a great
+singer except with creditable artistic and scenic support.
+
+Pauline sat in the Effinghams' spacious proscenium-box, between Mrs.
+Poughkeepsie and her daughter. Sallie Poughkeepsie was a large girl,
+with her mother's nose, her mother's serenity, her mother's promise of
+corpulent matronhood. She had immense prospects; it was reported that
+she had refused at least twenty eligible matrimonial offers while
+waiting for the parental nod of approval, which had not yet come.
+
+During the first _entr'acte_ a little throng of admirers entered the
+box. Some of these Pauline knew; others had appeared, as it were, after
+her time. One was an Englishman, and she presently became presented to
+him as the Earl of Glenartney. The title struck her as beautiful,
+appealing to her sense of the romantic and picturesque; but she wondered
+that it had done so when she subsequently bent a closer gaze upon the
+receding forehead, flaccid mouth and lank frame of the Earl himself. He
+had certainly as much hard prose about his appearance as poetry in his
+name. Mrs. Poughkeepsie beamed upon him in a sort of sidelong way all
+the time that he conversed with Sallie. A magnate of bountiful
+shirt-bosom and haughty profile claimed her full heed, but she failed to
+bestow it entirely; the presence of this unmarried Scotch peer at her
+child's elbow was too stirring an incident; her usual equanimity was in
+a delightful flutter; ambition had already begun its insidious whispers,
+for the Earl was known to be still a bachelor.
+
+Pauline, who read her aunt so thoroughly, felt the mockery of this
+maternal deference. She told herself that there was something dreary and
+horrible about a state of human worldliness which could thus idolize
+mere rank and place. She knew well enough that so long as Lord
+Glenartney were not a complete idiot, and so long as his moral character
+escaped the worst depravity, he would be esteemed a magnificent match
+for her cousin.
+
+The Earl remained at Sallie's side all through the succeeding act. When
+the curtain again fell he still remained, while other gentlemen took the
+places of those now departing. And among these, to her surprise and
+pleasure, was Ralph Kindelon.
+
+She almost rose as she extended her hand to her friend. A defiant
+satisfaction had suddenly thrilled her. She pronounced Kindelon's name
+quite loudly as she presented him to her aunt. Instead of merely bowing
+to Mrs. Poughkeepsie, Kindelon, with effusive cordiality, put forth his
+hand. Pauline saw a startled look creep across her aunt's face. The
+handsome massive-framed Irishman was not clad in evening dress. He
+towered above all the other gentlemen; he seemed, as indeed he almost
+was, like a creature of another species. His advent made an instant
+sensation; a universal stare was levelled upon him by these sleek
+devotees of fashion, among whom he had the air of pushing his way with a
+presumptuous geniality. He carried a soft "wide-awake" hat in one hand;
+his clothes were of some dark gray stuff; his neatly but heavily booted
+feet made dull sounds upon the floor as he now moved backward in search
+of a chair. There was no possible doubt regarding his perfect
+self-possession; he had evidently come to remain and to assert himself.
+
+"Who on earth is he?" Mrs. Poughkeepsie found a chance to swiftly
+whisper in the ear of her niece. There was an absolutely dramatic touch
+in the agitation which went with her questioning sentence.
+
+Pauline looked steadily at her aunt as she responded: "A very valued
+friend of mine."
+
+"But, my dear!" faltered Mrs. Poughkeepsie. The fragmentary little
+vocative conveyed a volume of patrician dismay.
+
+By this time Kindelon had found a chair. He placed it close to Pauline.
+
+"I am so very glad that you discovered me," said Pauline. She spoke in
+quite loud tones, while everybody listened. Her words had the effect of
+a distinct challenge, and as such she intended them.
+
+"I am flinging down a gauntlet," she thought, "to snobbery and
+conservatism. This slight event marks a positive era in my life."
+
+"I saw you from the orchestra," now said Kindelon, in his heartiest
+tones. "The distance revealed you to me, though I cannot say it lent the
+least enchantment, for that would surely be impossible." He now looked
+towards Mrs. Poughkeepsie, without a trace of awe in his mirthful
+expression. "You must pardon my gallantry, madam," he proceeded. "Your
+niece and I, though recent friends, are yet old ones. We have crossed
+the Atlantic together, and that, in the winter season, is a wondrous
+promoter of intimacy, as you perhaps know. Perhaps Mrs. Varick has
+already done me the honor of mentioning our acquaintance."
+
+"Not until now," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie, with a smile that had the
+glitter of ice in it.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+The orchestra had not yet recommenced, and the curtain would not
+reascend for at least ten good minutes. A vigorous babble of many voices
+rose from the many upstairs boxes. In some of these Kindelon's
+appearance might not have created the least comment. Here it was a
+veritable bombshell.
+
+The "Poughkeepsie set" was famed for its rigid exclusiveness. Wherever
+Miss Sallie and her mother went, a little train of courtiers invariably
+followed them. They always represented an ultra-select circle inside of
+the larger and still decidedly aristocratic one. Only certain young men
+ever presumed to approach Sallie at all, and these were truly the
+darlings of fortune and fashion--young gentlemen of admitted ascendency,
+whose attentions would have made an obscure girl rapidly prominent, and
+who, while often distinguished for admirable manners, always contrived
+to hover near those who were the sovereign reverse of obscure. They
+would carry only her bouquets, or those of other girls who belonged to
+the same special and envied clique; they would "take out in the German"
+only Sallie and her particular intimates. Bitter jealousies among the
+contemplating dowagers were often a result of this determined
+eclecticism. "Why _is_ it that my Kate has to put up with so many
+second-rate men?" would pass with tormenting persistence through the
+mind of this matron. "Why can't my Caroline get any of the great swells
+to notice her?" would drearily haunt another. And between these two
+distressed ladies there might meanwhile be seated a third, whose
+daughter, for reasons of overwhelming wealth or particular
+attractiveness, always moved clad in a nimbus of sanctity.
+
+Pauline was perfectly well aware that the coming of her friend had
+seemed an audacity, and that his unconventionally garrulous tongue was
+now regarded as a greater one. Courtlandt may have told her that the
+rival factions had cemented their differences and that all society
+in New York was more democratic than formerly. Still, it was
+unimaginable that her aunt Cynthia could ever really change her spots.
+Where she trod, there, too, must float the aroma of an individual
+self-glorification. Pauline was as much delighted by Kindelon's easy
+daring as by the almost glacial answer of her stately kinswoman; and she
+at once hastened to say, while looking with a smile at the unembarrassed
+Kindelon himself,--
+
+"I have scarcely had a chance to tell either my aunt or my cousin how
+good you were to me on the 'Bothnia.'" Then she lifted her fan, and
+waved it prettily toward Sallie. "This _is_ my cousin, Miss
+Poughkeepsie," she went on; she did not wait for the slow accomplishment
+of Sallie's forced and freezing bow, but at once added: "and here is
+Lord Glenartney, here Mr. Fyshkille, here Mr. Van Arsdale, here Mr.
+Hackensack. Now, I think you know us all, Mr. Kindelon."
+
+As she ended her little speech she met Mrs. Poughkeepsie's eyes fixed
+upon her in placid consternation. Of course this wholesale introduction,
+among the chance occupants of an opera box, was a most unprecedented
+violation of usage. But that was precisely Pauline's wish--to violate
+usage, if she could do it without recourse to any merely vulgar rupture.
+They had all stared at Ralph Kindelon, had treated him as if he were
+some curious animal instead of a fellow-creature greatly their own
+superior, and they should have a chance now of discovering just how well
+he could hold his own in their little self-satisfied assemblage.
+
+Kindelon bowed and smiled in every direction. He appeared unconscious
+that everybody did not bow and smile with just the same reciprocal
+warmth.
+
+"This is the most luxurious way of enjoying the opera," he exclaimed,
+with an upward gesture of both hands to indicate the walls of the
+commodious box. "But, ah! I am afraid that it possesses its drawbacks as
+well! One would be tempted to talk too much here--to discountenance the
+performance. Now, I am an irreclaimable talker, as Mrs. Varick can
+testify; she has hardly done anything but listen since the beginning of
+our acquaintance. And yet I should like to feel that I had my tribute of
+silence always ready for the great musical masters. Among these I rank
+the Italian composers, whom it has now become fashionable to despise.
+Pray, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, are you--or is your daughter?--a convert to
+what they term the new school?"
+
+There was no ignoring the felicitous, rhythmic voice that pronounced
+these hurried and yet clearly enunciated sentences, unless by means of
+an insolence so direct and cruel that it would transgress all bounds of
+civil decency. Mrs. Poughkeepsie was capable of not a little insolence
+at a pinch; her ramparts were spiked, and could deal no gentle hurts to
+those who sought anything like the scaling of them. But here the
+overtures made were alike too suave and too bold. She felt herself in
+the presence of a novel civility--one that assumed her rebuff to be
+impossible.
+
+"I have always preferred the Italian music," she now said. "But then my
+knowledge of the German is limited."
+
+"Oh, German music is the most dreadful baw!" here struck in Lord
+Glenartney. He had taken an immediate fancy to Kindelon; he liked people
+who were in a different sphere from himself; he usually went with
+jockeys and prize-fighters, whenever the demands of his great position
+permitted such association, in his native country. Here in America he
+knew only the Poughkeepsie set, which had seized upon him and kept close
+watch over him ever since he had landed in New York.
+
+"No, I don't at all agree with you there," said Kindelon. "Undoubtedly
+German music is based upon a grand idea. I should be sorry not to
+believe so."
+
+"Bless my soul!" laughed his lordship; "I don't know anything about
+grand ideahs. The small ones are quite as much as I can manage
+comfortably."
+
+"Mr. Kindelon will be shocked by such a confession, I'm sure," said the
+gentleman named Fyshkille, who was strikingly slim, who gazed at people
+condescendingly over a pale parapet of very stiff shirt-collar, and who
+considered himself to have a natural turn for satire. "He appears to be
+a person of such grand ideas himself."
+
+This airy bit of impudence caused Mr. Van Arsdale to twirl one end of a
+dim, downy mustache and perpetrate a rather ambiguous giggle. But Mr.
+Hackensack, who was stout, with a pair of large black eyes set in a fat,
+colorless, mindless face, whipped forth a silk pocket-handkerchief and
+gave an explosive burst of merriment within its soft folds.
+
+"You seem to be very much amused at something," drawled Sallie, while
+she looked in her languid way toward her trio of admirers.
+
+"We are," said the satirical Mr. Fyshkille, who prided himself on always
+keeping his countenance. His two friends, who thought him a devilish
+clever fellow, both produced another laugh, this time suppressed on the
+part of each.
+
+Pauline felt keenly annoyed. She glanced at Kindelon, telling herself
+that he must surely see the pitiable ridicule of which he was being
+made the butt.
+
+She had, however, quite miscalculated. The self-esteem of Kindelon as
+utterly failed to realize that he was an object of the slightest banter,
+whether overt or covert, as though he had been both near-sighted and
+deaf. He knew nothing of the idle autocracy with which accident had now
+brought him into contact. He was opposed to it on principle, but he had
+had no experience of its trivial methods of arrogance. He had come into
+the box to see Pauline, and he took it broadly for granted that he would
+be treated with politeness by her surrounders, and listened to (provided
+he assumed that office of general spokesman which he nearly always
+assumed wherever chance placed him) with admiring attention.
+
+A few minutes later he had stripped his would-be foes of all sting by
+effectively and solidly manifesting unconsciousness that they had
+intended to be hostile. He talked of Wagner and his followers with a
+brilliant force that did not solicit heed and yet compelled it. He
+discoursed upon the patent absurdities of Italian opera with a nimble
+wit and an incisive severity. Then he justified his preference for
+Donizetti and Rossini with a readiness that made his past sarcasm on
+their modes quickly forgotten. And finally he delivered a eulogy upon
+the German motive and ideal in music which showed the fine liberality of
+a mind that recognizes the shortcomings in its own predilection, and
+foresees the inevitable popularity of a more advanced and complicated
+system.
+
+He had silenced everybody before he finished, but with the silence of
+respect. He had forced even these petty triflers who dwelt on the mere
+skirts of all actual life, to recognize him as not simply the comer from
+a world which they did not care to know about, but from a world greater
+and higher than any which they were capable of knowing about. And
+finally, in the flush of this handsome little triumph, he made his exit,
+just as the curtain was again rising, after a few murmured words to
+Pauline regarding certain night-work on the New York "Asteroid," which
+must prevent him from seeing the remainder of the performance.
+
+Nobody heeded the opera for at least five minutes after his departure.
+He had left his spell behind him. Pauline at first marked its cogency,
+and then observed this gradually dissolve. The flimsiness of their
+thinking and living returned to them again in all its paltry reality.
+
+"Of course," murmured Mrs. Poughkeepsie to Pauline, "he is a person who
+writes books, of one sort or another."
+
+"If they're novels," said Lord Glenartney, "I'd like awfully to know
+abaout 'em. I'm fond of readin' a good novel. It's so jolly if one's
+lyin' daown and carn't sleep, but feels a bit seedy, ye know."
+
+"I fancy they must be rather long novels," said Sallie, with a drowsy
+scorn that suited her big, placid anatomy.
+
+"I wish he'd not run off so; I wanted the address of his hatter,"
+declared the envenomed Mr. Fyshkille.
+
+"Or his tailor," amended Mr. Van Arsdale, with the auxiliary giggle.
+
+"I guess you'd find both somewhere in the Bowery," pursued the fleshy
+Mr. Hackensack, who always said "I guess," for "I fancy," and had a
+nasal voice, and an incorrigible American soul inside his correct
+foreign garments.
+
+Pauline now swept a haughty look at Mr. Fyshkille and his two allies,
+and said, with open displeasure,--
+
+"I suppose you think it an unpardonable sin for any gentleman to suit
+his own taste in dress, and not copy that of some English model. But
+your uncivil comments on Mr. Kindelon before myself, his admitted
+friend, show me that he might easily teach you a lesson in good
+manners."
+
+All three of the offenders were now forced to utter words of apology,
+while Lord Glenartney looked as if he thought Mrs. Varick's wrath great
+fun, and Sallie exchanged a look of ironical distress with her mother,
+that seemed to inquire: "What uncomfortable absurdity will Pauline next
+be guilty of?"
+
+But Mrs. Poughkeepsie and Sallie left their kinswoman at her Bond Street
+residence that night with very agreeable adieus. True, Lord Glenartney
+occupied a seat in their carriage, but even if this had not been the
+case, neither mother nor daughter would have vented upon Pauline any of
+the disapproval she had provoked in them. She was now a power in the
+world, and besides being near to them in blood, even her follies merited
+the leniency of a Poughkeepsie.
+
+But after Sallie and her mother had said good-night to his lordship and
+were alone at home together, the young lady spoke with querulous disgust
+of her cousin's behavior.
+
+"She will lose caste horribly, mamma, if she goes on in this way. It's
+perfectly preposterous! If there is one thing on earth that is really
+_low_, it's for a woman to become strong-minded!"
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie nodded. "You are quite right. But she's her own
+mistress, and there is no restraining her."
+
+"People _ought_ to be restrained," grumbled Sallie, loosening her opera
+cloak, "when they want to throw away their positions like that."
+
+"Oh, Pauline can't throw hers away so easily," affirmed Mrs.
+Poughkeepsie with sapient composure. "No, not with her name and her big
+income. She will merely get herself laughed at, you know--_encanailler_
+herself most ludicrously; that is all. We must let her have her head, as
+one says of a horse. Her father was always full of caprices; he wouldn't
+have died a poor man if he had not been. She merely has a caprice now.
+Of course she will come to terms again with society sooner or later, and
+repent having made such a goose of herself. That is, unless"--And here
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie paused, while a slight but distinct shudder ended her
+sentence.
+
+Sallie gave a faint, harsh laugh. "Oh, I understand you thoroughly,
+mamma," she exclaimed. "You mean unless some common man like that Mr.
+Kindelon should induce her to marry him. How awful such a thing would
+be! I declare, the very thought of it is sickening! With that superb
+fortune, too! I shouldn't be surprised if he had proposed already!
+Perhaps she has only been preparing us gradually for the frightful news
+that she has accepted him!"
+
+But no such frightful news reached the Poughkeepsies, as day succeeded
+day. Pauline went little into the fashionable throngs, which were at the
+height of their winter gayeties. She soon quitted her Bond Street
+residence for good, and secured a small basement-house on a side street
+near Fifth Avenue, furnishing it with that speed in the way of luxurious
+appointment which a plethoric purse so readily commands.
+
+"I am quite prepared now," she said to Kindelon one morning, after
+having received him in her new and lovely sitting-room, where everything
+was unique and choice, from the charming chandelier of twisted silver to
+the silken Japanese screen, rich with bird and flower in gold and
+crimson. "Of course you understand what I mean."
+
+He affected not to do so. "Prepared?" he repeated, with the gay gleam
+slipping into his eyes. "For what?"
+
+"My _salon_, of course."
+
+"Oh," he said. "I confess that I suspected what you meant, though I was
+not quite sure. I almost feared lest your resolution might have
+undergone a change of late."
+
+"And pray, why?" asked Pauline, raising her brows, with a little
+imperious smile.
+
+"You have not mentioned the project for surely a good fortnight," he
+returned. "I had wondered whether or no it had weakened with you."
+
+"It is stronger than ever," Pauline asseverated. She folded her hands in
+her lap and tried to look excessively firm and resolute. She was always
+particularly handsome when she tried to look thus; she was just slender
+and feminine enough in type to make the assumption of strength, of
+determination, especially becoming.
+
+"Ah, very well," replied Kindelon, with one of his richly expressive
+smiles. "Then I have a proposition to make you. It concerns an immediate
+course of action on your part. Have you ever heard of Mrs. Hagar
+Williamson Dares?"
+
+Pauline burst into a laugh. "No. It sounds more like an affirmation than
+a name--'Mrs. Hagar Williamson Dares.' One feels like saying, 'Does
+she?' Don't think me irredeemably trifling, and please continue. Please
+tell me, I mean, what remarkable things has this remarkably-named lady
+done?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Pauline's face, full of a pleased anticipation, fell. "Nothing! How
+tiresome!"
+
+"I mean nothing remarkable," Kindelon went on, "in the luminously
+intellectual sense. And yet she is a very extraordinary woman. At
+twenty-five she was divorced from her husband."
+
+Pauline shook her head troubledly. "That does not sound at all
+promising."
+
+"He was a dissolute wretch. The courts easily granted her a release from
+him. At this time she was almost penniless. The question, as she had two
+little children, naturally arose: 'How are we three to live?' She had
+been reared in a New England home; her dead father had been a man of
+extensive learning, and at one time the principal of a successful
+school. Hagar had always had 'a taste for writing,' as we call it. She
+began by doing criticisms for a New York journal of rather scholarly
+tendency, whose editor had combined pity for her almost starving
+condition with appreciation of her undoubted talents. But the prices
+that the poor struggling young mother received were necessarily very
+meagre. She became practical. She asked herself if there was no other
+way of earning money by her pen. She soon discovered a way; it did not
+require her to know about Diderot and Strauss and Spinoza, with all of
+whose writings (and with many classics more of equal fame) she was
+finely familiar; it simply required that she should lay aside every
+vestige of literary pride and write _practically_. Good Heavens! what a
+word that word 'practical' is in literature! You must tell the people
+how to bake a pie, to cure a headache, to bleach a shirt, to speak the
+truth, to clean silverware, to make a proposal of marriage. Mrs. Dares
+did it in country letters, in city letters, in newspaper editorials, in
+anonymous fine-print columns, in the back parts of fashion and household
+magazines--and she does it still. For a number of years past she has
+superintended a periodical of the popular sort, which I dare say you
+have never heard of. The amount of work that she accomplishes is
+enormous. A strong man would stagger under it, but this frail woman
+(you'll think her frail when you see her) bears it with wondrous
+endurance. Her life has been a terrible failure, looked at from one
+point of view--for it is scarcely exaggeration to say that had she not
+been handicapped by poverty in the beginning she might have swayed and
+charmed her generation with great books. But from another point of view
+her life has been a sublime success; she has trampled all aspiration
+under foot, forsworn every impulse of honorable egotism, and toiled for
+the maintenance of a home, for the education of her two daughters. They
+are both grown up, now--girls who are themselves bread-winners like
+their mother, and bearing their yoke of labor as cheerfully, though not
+with the same splendid strength, as she. One is a school-teacher in a
+well-known _kindergarten_ here, and one has become an artist of no
+contemptible ability. Meanwhile Mrs. Dares has not merely established a
+pleasant and refined household; she has caused to be diffused from it,
+as a social centre, the warm radiations of a sweet, wholesome
+hospitality. Like some of the high-born Fifth Avenue leaders of fashion,
+she has her 'evenings.' But they are of a totally different character.
+They are not 'select;' I don't claim that grace for them. And yet they
+are very interesting, very typical. Some shabby people meet
+there--shabby, I mean, in mental ways no less than in character and
+costume. But the prevailing element is of a higher order than they.
+Anyone whom Mrs. Dares believes to be an earnest worker in the field of
+letters will have no difficulty about gaining her favor. I think she
+would rather greet in her rooms some threadbare young poet who had
+published at his own expense a slim little volume of poems possessing
+distinct merit and having received the snubs of both critics and public,
+than welcome some rich and successful writer whose real claim upon
+recognition she honestly doubted. And for this reason she makes
+mistakes. I have no doubt she is aware of making them. When we search
+the highways and hedges for cases of deserving charity, we cannot but
+light upon at least an occasional impostor--to put the matter as
+optimistically as possible. And now let me tell you that if my mighty
+explanatory outburst has roused your desire to meet Mrs. Dares, the
+opportunity to do so lies well within your reach."
+
+"How?" said Pauline. And then, as if abashed by the brusque abruptness
+of her own question, she added, with a little penitent nod: "Oh, yes;
+you mean that she has kindly consented to let you bring her here."
+
+"Not at all," said Kindelon. "It is true that she goes about a good
+deal. Her position as a journalist gives her, of course, the _entree_ to
+many theatres, and as she is passionately fond of the drama, her face is
+seldom missed on a _premiere_ at any reputable house--Daly's, the Union
+Square, the Madison Square, or Wallack's. She takes delight, too, in
+appearing at the entertainments of her various friends, and she always
+does so clad elegantly, richly, but without a shadow of ostentatious
+display. On these occasions her society is eagerly sought. I have
+sometimes wondered why; for her conversation, though invariably full of
+sound sense and pithy acumen, lacks the cheerful play of humor which is
+so widely demanded to generate anything like popularity wherever men and
+women are socially met. But she is very popular, and I suppose it is her
+striking simplicity, her gift of always being sincerely and unaffectedly
+_herself_, which has made her so. Still, for all this gregarious
+impulse, if I may thus name it, I do not believe she would take the
+first step, where you are concerned, to establish an acquaintance."
+
+"And for what reason?" asked Pauline. Her tones, while she put this
+query, were full of a hurt bewilderment. Kindelon seemed to muse for a
+brief space; and any such unconversational mood was rare, as we know,
+with his mercurial lightsomeness of manner. "She would be sensitive," he
+presently said, "about making an advance of this sort."
+
+"Of this sort?" repeated Pauline, with a somewhat irritated inflection.
+"Of what sort?"
+
+Her companion watched her with fixity for a moment. Then he raised his
+large forefinger, and slowly shook it, with admonitory comedy of
+gesture. "You must not tell me that you don't understand," he said.
+"Put yourself in this lady's place. Suppose that you, in spite of fine
+brains and noble character, lacked the social standing"--
+
+Pauline broke in quite hotly at this. Her eyes had taken a quick
+sparkle, and the color was flying rosy and pure into her fair face.
+"Pshaw!" she exclaimed. "It is not any question of social standing. I
+want to know these people"--She suddenly paused, as though her tongue
+had betrayed her into some regrettable and unseemly phrase. "I want to
+pass," she continued more slowly, "from an aimless world into one of
+thought and sense. Mrs. Dares is prominent in this other world. From
+what you say I should judge that she is a very representative and
+influential spirit there. Why should she not be benign and gracious
+enough to seek me here? Why should she require that I shall emphatically
+pay her my court? Your description makes me glad and happy to know her.
+If she learned this, would she hold aloof from any absurd scruples about
+a disparity in social standing?--Well, if she did," declared Pauline,
+who by this time was quite excitedly flushed and fluttered, "then I
+should say that you had over-painted her virtues and too flatteringly
+concealed her faults!"
+
+Kindelon threw back his head, as she finished, and laughed with such
+heartiness that more of his strong white teeth were transiently visible
+than would have pleased a strict judge of decorum.
+
+"Oh, how amusing you are!" he cried. "You are really superb and don't
+perceive it!--Well," he proceeded, growing graver, "I suppose you would
+be far less so if you had the vaguest inkling of it. Now, pray listen.
+Does it enter your conscience at all that you are disguising a kind of
+royal patronage and condescension behind a gentle and saint-like
+humility? No--of course it doesn't. But, my dear lady, this is
+unequivocally true. You scoff at social standing, and yet you
+complacently base yourself upon it. You want to desert all your old
+tenets, and yet you keep a kind of surreptitious clasp about them. You
+would not for the world be considered a person who cared for the
+aristocratic purple, and yet you wrap it round you in the most illogical
+fashion. Mrs. Dares has her evenings; to-night is one of them. You, as
+yet, have no evenings; your _salon_ is still in embryo. You want to
+affiliate with her, to be one of her set, her surroundings, her _monde_.
+And yet you quietly bid her to your house, as though she were proposing
+your co-operation, your support, your intimacy, and not you hers!"
+
+Pauline, with perhaps a deepened tinge of color in her cheeks, was
+staring at the floor when Kindelon ended. And from beneath her gown came
+the impatient little tap of a nervous foot. After an interval of
+silence, during which her friend's gaze watched her with a merry
+vivacity of expression, she slowly lifted her shapely blond head, and
+answered in grave, even saddened tones,--
+
+"Then my _salon_ is to be a failure?--an unrealizable castle in Spain?"
+
+"Oh, no," promptly said Kindelon, with one of those sympathetic laughs
+which belonged among his elusive fascinations. "By no means--unless you
+so will it."
+
+"But I don't will it," said Pauline.
+
+"Very well. Then it will be a castle in--in New York. That sounds
+tangible enough, surely. It is the first step that counts, and you have
+only to take your first step. It will certainly look much better to know
+some of your courtiers before you ascend your throne. And meanwhile it
+would be far more discreet to cultivate an acquaintance with your
+probable prime minister."
+
+"All of which means--?" she said.
+
+"That you had best let me accompany you to Mrs. Dares's house this
+evening."
+
+"But I am not invited!" exclaimed Pauline.
+
+"Oh yes, you are," said Kindelon, with easy security in the jocund
+contradiction. "Miss Cora, the youngest daughter of Mrs. Dares, told me
+last night that she and her mother would both be very glad to have you
+come."
+
+There was a momentary intonation in Kindelon's voice that struck his
+listener as oddly unexpected. "So you have already spoken of me?" she
+said lingeringly, and looking at him with more intentness than she
+herself knew of.
+
+"Yes," he replied, with a certain speed, and with tones that were not
+just set in an unembarrassed key. "I go there now and then."
+
+"And you have mentioned me to Mrs. Dares?"
+
+"Yes--more than once, I think. She knows that you may be induced to come
+this evening."
+
+His glance, usually so direct, had managed to avoid Pauline's, which was
+then very direct indeed.
+
+"Tell me," Pauline said, after another silence had somehow made itself
+felt between them. "Are you a very good friend of this girl--Miss Cora?"
+
+He returned her look then, but with an unwonted vacillation of his
+own--or so she chose to think.
+
+"Yes," he responded, fluently frank, as it seemed. "We are very good
+friends--excellent friends, I may say. You will find her quite as
+charming, in a different way, as her mother. I mean, of course, if you
+will go with me this evening--or any future evening."
+
+Pauline put forth her hand, and laid it for an instant on his
+full-moulded arm.
+
+"I will go with you this evening," she said.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+Kindelon found Pauline in a very lightsome and animated state of mind
+when he called at her house that evening. She had a touch of positive
+excitement in her way of referring to the proposed visit. He thought he
+had never seen her look more attractive than when she received him,
+already wrapped in a fleecy white over-garment and drawing on her
+gloves, while a piquant smile played at the corners of her mouth and a
+vivacious glitter filled her gray eyes.
+
+"You are here before the carriage," she said to him, "though we shan't
+have to wait long for that.--Hark--there is the bell, now; my men would
+not presume to be a minute late this evening. The footman must have
+detected in my manner a great seriousness when I gave him my order; I
+felt very serious, I can assure you, as I did so. It meant the first
+step in a totally new career."
+
+"Upon my word, you look fluttered," said Kindelon, in his mellow, jocose
+voice.
+
+"Naturally I do!" exclaimed Pauline, as she nodded to the servant who
+now announced that the carriage was in readiness. "I am going to have a
+fresh, genuine sensation. I am going to emancipate myself--to break my
+tether, as it were. I've been a prisoner for life; I don't know how the
+sunshine looks, or how it feels to take a gulp of good, free air."
+
+He watched her puzzledly until the outer darkness obscured her face, and
+they entered the carriage together. She mystified him while she talked
+on, buoyant enough, yet always in the same key. He was not sure whether
+or no her sparkling manner had a certain sincere trepidation behind it.
+Now and then it seemed to him as if her voluble professions of anxiety
+rang false--as if she were making sport of herself, of him, or of the
+projected diversion.
+
+"Do you really take the whole matter so much to heart," he presently
+said, while the vehicle rolled them along the wintry, lamplit streets,
+"or is this only some bit of dainty and graceful masquerading?"
+
+"Masquerading?" she echoed, with a shocked accent.
+
+"Oh, well, you are accustomed to meeting all sorts of people. You can't
+think that any human classes are so sharply divided that to cross a new
+threshold means to enter a new world."
+
+She was silent, and he could see her face only vaguely for some little
+time; but when a passing light cast an evanescent gleam upon it he
+thought that he detected something like a look of delicate mischief
+there. Her next words, rather promptly spoken, bore with them an
+explanatory bluntness.
+
+"I am convinced that if everybody else disappoints me Miss Dares will
+not."
+
+"Miss Dares?" he almost faltered, in the tone of one thrown off his
+guard.
+
+"Miss Cora Dares," Pauline continued, with a self-correcting precision.
+"The younger of the two daughters, the one who paints. Oh, you see," she
+continued, after a little laugh that was merry, though faint, "I have
+forgotten nothing. I've a great curiosity to see this young artist. You
+had not half so much to tell me about her as about her mother, and yet
+you have somehow contrived to make her quite as interesting."
+
+"Why?" Kindelon asked, with a soft abruptness to which the fact of his
+almost invisible face lent a greater force. "Is it because you think
+that I like Cora Dares? I should like to think that was your reason for
+being interested in her."
+
+Another brief silence on Pauline's part followed his words, and then she
+suddenly responded, with the most non-committal innocence of tone:
+
+"Why, what other reason could I possibly have? Of course I suppose that
+you like her. And of course that is why I am anxious to meet her."
+
+There was a repelling pleasantry in these three short sentences. If
+Kindelon had been inclined to slip any further into the realm of
+sentiment, the very reverse of encouragement had now met him. Pauline's
+matter-of-course complacency had a distinct chill under its superficial
+warmth. "Don't misunderstand me, please," she went on, with so altered a
+voice that her listener felt as if she had indeed been masquerading
+through some caprice best known to herself, and now chose once and for
+all to drop masque and cloak. "I really expect a most novel and
+entertaining experience to-night. You say that I have met all sorts of
+people. I have by no means done so. It strikes me that our acquaintance
+is not so young that I should tell you this. It is true that I made a
+few pleasant and even valuable friendships in Europe; but these have
+been exceptional in my life, and I now return to my native city to
+disapprove everybody whom I once approved."
+
+"And you expect to approve all the people whom you shall meet to-night?"
+
+"You ask that in a tone of positive alarm."
+
+"I can't help betraying some nervous fear. Your expectations are so
+exorbitant."
+
+Pauline tossed her head in the dimness. "Oh, you will find me more
+easily suited than you suppose."
+
+Kindelon gave a kind of dubious laugh. "I'm not so sure that you will be
+easily suited," he said. "You are very pessimistic in your judgments of
+the fashionable throng. It strikes me that you are a rigid critic of
+nearly everybody. How can I tell that you will not denounce me, in an
+hour or so, as the worst of impostors, for having presumed to introduce
+you among a lot of objectionable bores?"
+
+"I think you will admit," said Pauline, in offended reply, "that most of
+Mrs. Dares's friends have brains."
+
+"Brains? Oh, yes, all sorts of brains."
+
+"That is just what I want to meet," she rapidly exclaimed--"all sorts of
+brains. I am accustomed, at present, to only two or three sorts.--Oh,
+you need not be afraid that I shall become bored. No, indeed! On the
+contrary, I expect to be exhilarated. I shall fraternize with most of
+them--I shall be one of them almost immediately. Wait until you see!"
+
+"I shan't see that," said Kindelon, with an amused _brusquerie_.
+
+"What do you mean?" she questioned, once more offendedly.
+
+He began to speak, with his old glib fleetness. "Why, my dear lady,
+because you are _not_ one of them, and never can be. You are a
+patrician, reared differently, and you will carry your stamp with you
+wherever you go. Your very voice will betray you in ten seconds. You may
+show them that you want to be their good friend, but you can't convince
+them that you and they are of the same stock. Some of them will envy
+you, others may secretly presume to despise you, and still others may
+very cordially like you. I don't think it has ever dawned upon me until
+lately how different you are from these persons whom you wish to make
+your allies and supporters. That night, when I went into your aunt's
+opera-box, I had a very slight understanding of the matter. I've always
+scoffed at the idea of a New York aristocracy. It seemed so absurd, so
+self-contradictory. And if it existed at all, I've always told myself,
+it must be the merest nonsensical sham. But now I begin to recognize it
+as an undeniable fact. There's a sort of irony, too, in my finding it
+out so late--after I have knocked about as a journalist in a city which
+I believed to be democratic if it was anything. However, you've made the
+whole matter plain to me. You didn't intend to open my plebeian eyes,
+but you have done so. It is really wonderful how you have set me
+thinking. I've often told myself that America was a political failure as
+a republic, but I never realized that it was a social one."
+
+Just then the carriage stopped. "I am sorry," said Pauline, "to have
+unconsciously made you think ill of the literary society of New York."
+She paused for a moment, and there was a rebuking solemnity in her voice
+as she added: "I believe--I insist upon believing till I see
+otherwise--that it does not deserve to be condemned."
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+The footman was now heard, as he sprang from the box. "Good gracious!"
+exclaimed Kindelon; "I haven't condemned it! It condemns itself."
+
+Pauline gave a laugh full of accusative satire. "Oh!" she burst forth.
+"I should like to hear you speak against it before Mrs. Dares--and your
+friend Miss Cora, too--as you have just done before me!"
+
+The footman had by this time opened the carriage door. He kept one
+white-gloved hand on the knob, standing, with his cockaded hat and his
+long-skirted coat, motionless and respectful in the outer gloom.
+
+Kindelon threw up both hands, and waved them in a burlesque of despair.
+"There is _no_ literary society in New York," he murmured, as if the
+admission had been wrung from him. "Don't go inside there with any idea
+of meeting it, for it is not to be found! Mrs. Dares herself will tell
+you so!"
+
+Pauline shook her head vigorously. "I'm sure you can't mean that," she
+exclaimed, in grieved reproach.
+
+Kindelon gave one of his laughs, and jumped out of the carriage. Pauline
+took the hand which he offered her, while the displaced footman
+decorously receded.
+
+"I do mean it," he said, as they went up a high, narrow stoop together,
+and saw two slim, lit windows loom before them.
+
+"I hope I am not responsible for this last change of faith in you," she
+answered, while Kindelon was ringing the bell.
+
+"Well," he at once said, "I believe you are. There is no kind of real
+society here except one. Mind you, I don't say this in any but the most
+dispassionate and critical way. And I'm not glad to say it, either; I'm
+sorry, in fact. But it is true"--And then, after a second of silence, he
+repeated--"no kind of society except one."
+
+Pauline smiled as she watched him, but there was both exasperation and
+challenge in the smile.
+
+"What kind is that?" she queried.
+
+"Ask your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie," he replied.
+
+Pauline gave an irritated sigh. As she did so the door of Mrs. Dares's
+house was opened by a spruce-looking young negress, and they both
+passed into the little limited hall beyond. Tapestries of tasteful
+design were looped back from the small doors which gave upon the hall.
+Their blended stuffs of different colors produced a novel effect, wholly
+disproportioned to the real worth of the fabrics themselves. The deft
+skill of Mrs. Dares's younger daughter was responsible, not alone for
+these, but for other equally happy embellishments throughout this
+delightful miniature dwelling. In every chamber there was to be found
+some pretty decorative stratagem whereby a maximum of graceful and even
+brilliant ornamentation had been won from a minimum of pecuniary
+expense. Pauline's eye had swept too many costly objects of upholstery
+not to recognize that a slender purse had here gone with a keen artistic
+sense. The true instinct of beauty seemed never to err, and its constant
+accompaniment of simplicity in the way of actual material lent it a new
+charm. Screen, rug, panelling, mantel-cover, tidy, and chair-cushion
+took for her a quick value because of their being wrought through no
+luxurious means. It was so easy to buy all these things in velvet, in
+silk, in choice woods; it was so hard, so rare, to be able to plan them
+all from less pretentious resources. Before she had been five minutes
+in Mrs. Dares's abode, Pauline found herself affected by the mingled
+attractiveness and modesty of its details, as we are allured by the
+tints, contours, and even perfumes of certain wildflowers which glow
+only the more sweetly because of their contrast with cultured blooms.
+
+Mrs. Dares herself had a look not unlike that of some timid little
+wildflower. She was short of stature and very fragile; Kindelon's past
+accounts of her incessant accomplishments took the hue of fable as
+Pauline gazed upon her. She was extremely pale, with large, warm, dark
+eyes set in a face of cameo-like delicacy. Her dress hung in folds about
+her slight person, as if there had been some pitying motive in the
+looseness of its fit. But she wore it with an air of her own. It was a
+timid air, and yet it was one of ease and repose. The intelligence and
+earnestness of her clear-cut face gave her an undeniable dignity; you
+soon became sure that she was wholly unassuming, but you as soon
+realized that this trait of diffidence had no weakness in mind or
+character for its cause. It seemed, in truth, to correspond with her
+bodily frailty, and to make her individualism more complete while none
+the less emphatic. The personality that pushes itself upon our heed
+does not always make us notice it the quickest. Mrs. Dares never pushed
+herself upon anybody's heed, yet she was seldom unnoticed. Her voice
+rarely passed beyond a musical semitone, and yet you rarely failed to
+catch each word it uttered. Pauline not only caught each word, as her
+new hostess now stood and addressed her, leaving for the time all other
+guests who were crowding the rather meagre apartments, but she tacitly
+decided, as well, that there was an elegance and purity in the
+expressions used by this notable little lady which some of the
+grander-mannered dames whom she had intimately known might have copied
+with profit. One peculiarity about Mrs. Dares, however, was not slow to
+strike her: the pale, delicate face never smiled. Not that it was
+melancholy or even uncheerful, but simply serious. Mrs. Dares had no
+sense of humor. She could sometimes say a witty thing that bit hard and
+sharp, but she was without any power to wear that lazier mental
+fatigue-dress from which some of the most vigorous minds have been
+unable, before hers, to win the least relaxation. This was probably the
+true reason why her small drawing-room often contained guests whose
+eccentricity of garb or deportment would otherwise have excluded them
+from her civilities. She could not enjoy the foibles of her
+fellow-creatures; she was too perpetually busy in taking a grave view of
+their sterner and more rational traits. She found something in nearly
+everybody that interested her, and it always interested her because it
+was human, solemn, important--a part, so to speak, of the great
+struggle, the great development, the great problem. This may, after all,
+be no real explanation of why she never smiled; for a smile, as we know,
+can hold the sadness of tears in its gleam, just as a drop of morning
+dew will hold the moisture of the autumn rainfall. But the absence of
+all mirthful trace on her gentle lips accorded, nevertheless, with the
+inherent sobriety of her nature, and they who got to know her well would
+unconsciously assign for both a common origin.
+
+"My dear Mrs. Varick," she said to Pauline, "I am very glad that you
+chose to seek my poor hospitality this evening. Mr. Kindelon has already
+prophesied that we shall be good friends, and as I look at you I find
+myself beginning to form a most presumptuous certainty that he will not
+prove a false prophet. He tells me that you are weary of the fashionable
+world; I have seen nothing of that, myself, though I fancy I know what
+it is like.--A great Castle of Indolence, I mean, where there are many
+beautiful chambers, but where the carpets yield too luxuriously under
+foot, and the couches have too inviting a breadth. Now, in this little
+drawing-room of mine you will meet few people who have not some daily
+task to perform--however ill many of us may accomplish it. In that way
+the change will have an accent for you--the air will be fresher and more
+tonic, though shifting from warm to chilly in the most irregular manner.
+I want to warn you, my dear lady, that you will miss that evenness of
+temperature which makes such easy breathing elsewhere. Be prepared for a
+decided atmospheric shock, now and then: but you will find it rather
+stimulating when it arrives, and by no means unwholesome."
+
+Pauline could scarcely repress her astonishment at this very original
+speech of welcome. She and Mrs. Dares were separated from all other
+occupants of the room while it was being delivered; Kindelon had moved
+away after making his two friends known to each other, and doubtless
+with the intention of letting his hostess stand or fall on her own
+conversational merits, as far as concerned the first impression which
+Pauline should receive from her. But this impression was one in which
+admiration and approval played quite as strong a part as surprise.
+Pauline had wanted just such a spur and impetus as her faculties were
+now receiving; she kept silent for a few brief seconds, in silent
+enjoyment of the complex emotions which Mrs. Dares had wakened. Then she
+said, with a low laugh that had not the least suspicion of frivolity,--
+
+"If it is a social temperature with those barometric tricks and freaks,
+Mrs. Dares, I promise you that I shan't catch cold in it. But I fear Mr.
+Kindelon has wasted too many premonitory words upon me. He should have
+politely allowed me to betray myself, as a specimen of harmless and
+humble commonplace. I am sure to do it sooner or later."
+
+"Oh, he has told me of your aim, your purpose," said Mrs. Dares.
+
+Pauline colored, and laid one hand on the lady's slender arm. "Then we
+are rivals, I suppose?" she murmured, with an arch smile.
+
+Mrs. Dares turned and looked at her guest before answering; there was a
+mild, dreamy comprehensiveness in the way she seemed to survey their
+many shapes, letting her large, soft, dusky eyes dwell upon no special
+one of them. A little later she regarded Pauline again. She now shook
+her head negatively before replying.
+
+"Oh, no, no," she said. "What you see here is not in any sense a
+representative assemblage. I have often wished that some one would
+establish a stricter and more definite standard than mine. We need it
+sadly. There are no entertainments given in New York where the mentally
+alert people--those who read, and think, and write--can meet with an
+assurance that their company has been desired for reasons of an
+exceptional personal valuation. The guest without the wedding-garment is
+always certain to be there. I fear that I have paid too little heed to
+the wedding-garment; my daughters--and especially my eldest daughter,
+Martha--are always telling me that, in various ways.--Oh, no, Mrs.
+Varick, we shall not be rivals. You will have the leisure to sift, to
+weigh, to admit or exclude, to label, to indorse, to classify--to make
+order, in short, out of chaos. This _I_ have never had the leisure to
+do." She looked at Pauline with an almost pensive gravity. Then she
+slowly repeated the word, "Never."
+
+"I fancy you have never had the cruelty," said Pauline.
+
+"There would be considerable solid mercy in it," was the firm answer.
+
+"Yes. To those who were both called and chosen. But how about the
+repulsed candidates for admission?"
+
+"They would deserve their defeat," said Mrs. Dares, with thoughtful
+deliberation. "Morals and manners properly combined would be their sole
+passport."
+
+"And ability," amended Pauline.
+
+"Ability? Oh, they all have ability who care to mingle night after night
+where that qualification is the dominating necessity for mutual
+enjoyment. Remember, an organized literary and intellectual society
+would not demand what that other society, of which you have seen so
+much, imperatively demands. I mean wealth, position, modishness, _ton_.
+All these would go for nothing with an aristocracy of talent, of high
+and true culture, of progress, of fine and wise achievement in all
+domains where human thought held rule. There, gross egotism,
+priggishness, raw eccentricity, false assumption of leadership, facile
+jealousy, dogmatic intolerance--these, and a hundred other faults, would
+justly exert a debarring influence."
+
+Pauline did not know how her cheeks were glowing and her eyes were
+sparkling as she now quickly said, after having swept her gaze along the
+groups of guests not far away.
+
+"And this is what you call making order out of chaos? Ah, yes, I
+understand. It is very delightful to contemplate. It quite stirs one
+with ambition. It is like having the merciless and senseless snobbery of
+mere fashionable life given a reasonable, animating motive. I should
+like to take upon myself such a task." Here she suddenly frowned in a
+moderate but rather distressed way. "Not long ago," she went on, "Mr.
+Kindelon told me that I would find no literary society in New York. But
+I contested this point. I'm inclined to contest it still, though you
+have shaken my faith, I admit."
+
+"The word 'literary' is very specializing," said Mrs. Dares. She had
+drooped her large, musing eyes.
+
+"Do you mean that for an evasion?" asked Pauline with a tart pungency
+that she at once regretted as almost discourteous. "Allow," she went on,
+promptly softening her tone, "that the word does cover a multitude of
+definitions as I use it--that it is used _faute de mieux_, and that no
+society has ever existed anywhere which one could call strictly
+literary. Come, then, my dear Mrs. Dares, allowing all this, do you
+consider that Mr. Kindelon was right? Is it all chaos to-day in New
+York? Is there no gleam of order?" And here Pauline broke into a furtive
+tremor of laughter. "Must I begin my good work at the very earliest
+possible beginning if I am to commence at all?"
+
+Mrs. Dares's dark eyes seemed to smile now, if her lips did not. "Yes,"
+she said. "Mr. Kindelon was right. You are to begin at the very
+beginning.--In London it is so different," she went on, lapsing into the
+meditative seriousness from which nothing could permanently distract
+her. "I spent a happy and memorable month there not many years ago. It
+was a delicious holiday, taken because of overwork here at home, and a
+blessed medicine I found it. I had brought with me a few lucky letters.
+They opened doors to me, and beyond those doors I met faces and voices
+full of a precious welcome. You would know the names of not a few of
+those who were gracious to me; they are names that are household words.
+And there, in London, I saw, strongly established, a dignified,
+important and influential society. Rarely, once in a while, I met some
+man or woman with a title, but he or she had always either done
+something to win the title, or something--if it was inherited--to
+outshine it. I did not stay long enough to pick flaws, to cavil; I
+enjoyed and appreciated--and I have never forgotten!"
+
+Just at this point, and somewhat to Pauline's secret annoyance, Kindelon
+returned with a lady at his side. Pauline was soon told the lady's
+name, and as she heard it her annoyance was swiftly dissipated by a new
+curiosity. She at once concluded that Miss Cora Dares bore very slight
+resemblance to her mother. She was taller, and her figure was of a full
+if not generous moulding. Her rippled chestnut hair grew low over the
+forehead; almost too low for beauty, though her calm, straight-featured
+face, lit by a pair of singularly luminous blue eyes, and ending in a
+deep-dimpled chin of exquisite symmetry, needed but a glance to make
+good its attractive claim. Miss Cora Dares was quite profuse in her
+smiles; she gave Pauline, while taking the latter's hand, a very bright
+and charming one, which made her look still less like her mother.
+
+"We saw you and mamma talking very earnestly together, Mrs. Varick," she
+said, with a brief side-glance toward Kindelon, "and so we concluded
+that it would be safe to leave you undisturbed for at least a little
+while. But mamma is curiously unsafe as an entertainer." This was said
+with an extremely sweet and amiable look in Mrs. Dares's direction. "She
+sometimes loses herself in gentle rhapsodies. My sister Martha and I
+have to keep watch upon her by turns, out of pity for the unliberated
+victims."
+
+"I need not tell you how I scorn the injustice of that charge, my dear
+Mrs. Dares!" here cried Kindelon. "It would be late in the day to inform
+you of my devoted admiration!"
+
+"I fear it is early in the day for me to speak of mine," said Pauline;
+but the laugh that went with her words (or was it the words themselves?)
+rang sincerely, and took from what she said the levity of mere idle
+compliment.
+
+"But you will surely care to meet some of our friends, Mrs. Varick," now
+said Cora Dares.
+
+"Oh, by all means, yes!" exclaimed Pauline. The girl's limpid, steadfast
+eyes fascinated her, and she gazed into their lucent depths longer than
+she was perhaps aware. It was almost like an abrupt awakening to find
+that she and Mrs. Dares's youngest daughter were standing alone
+together, Kindelon and the elder lady having gone. "I want very much to
+meet many of your friends," Pauline proceeded. She put her head a little
+on one side, while her lips broke into a smile that her companion
+appeared to understand perfectly and to answer with mute, gay
+intelligence. "I suppose you have heard all about me and my grand
+project, just as your charming mother has heard, Miss Dares?"
+
+"Oh, yes," returned Cora.
+
+"And you think it practicable?"
+
+"I think it praiseworthy."
+
+"Which means that I shall fail."
+
+Cora looked humorously troubled. "If you do, it will not be your fault.
+I am not doubtful on that point."
+
+"Your mother has by no means encouraged me. She says that I must be
+careful in my selections, but she gives me very little hope of finding
+many worthy subjects to select. She seems to think that when the wheat
+has been taken from the tares, as it were, there will be very little
+wheat left."
+
+"Yes, I know mamma's opinions. I don't quite share them. My sister
+Martha does, however, thoroughly.--Ah, here is Martha now. Let me make
+you acquainted."
+
+Martha Dares proved to be still more unlike her mother than Cora, save
+as regarded her stature, which was very short. She had a plump person,
+and a face which was prepossessing solely from its expression of honest
+good-nature. It was a face whose fat cheeks, merry little black eyes and
+shapeless nose were all a stout defiance of the classic type. Pauline at
+once decided that Martha was shrewd, energetic and cheerful, and that
+she might reveal, under due provocation, a temper of hot flash and acute
+sting.
+
+"And now you know the whole family, Mrs. Varick," said Cora, when her
+sister had been presented.
+
+"Yes, I complete the group," said Miss Dares, with a jocund trip of the
+tongue about her speech, that suggested a person who did all her
+thinking in the same fleet and impetuous way. "I hope you find it an
+interesting group, Mrs. Varick?"
+
+"Very," said Pauline. "Its members have so much individuality. They are
+all three so different."
+
+"True enough," hurried Martha. "We react upon each other, for this
+reason, in a very salutary way. You've no idea what a corrective agent
+my practical turn is for this poetic sister of mine, who would be up in
+the clouds nearly all the time, trying to paint the unpaintable, but for
+an occasional downward jerk from me, you know, such as a boy will give
+to a refractory kite. But I'll grant you that Cora has more than
+partially convinced me that life isn't entirely made up of spelling,
+arithmetic, geography and the use of the globes--for I'm a
+school-teacher, please understand, though in a rather humble way. And
+there's poor dear mamma. Goodness knows what would become of _her_ if it
+were not for both of us. She hasn't an idea how to economize her
+wonderful powers of work. Cora and I have established a kind of military
+despotism; we have to say 'halt' and 'shoulder your pen,' just as if she
+were a sort of soldier. But it will never do for me to rattle on like
+this. I'm as bad, after my own fashion, as our mutual friend, Mr.
+Kindelon, when I once really get started. By the way, you know Mr.
+Kindelon very well indeed, don't you?"
+
+"Very well, though I have not known him very long," answered Pauline.
+
+She somehow felt that Martha's question concealed more interest than its
+framer wished to betray. The little black eyes had taken a new keenness,
+but the genial face had sobered as well. And for some reason just at
+this point both Martha and Pauline turned their looks upon Cora.
+
+She had slightly flushed; the change, however, was scarcely noticeable.
+She at once spoke, as though being thus observed had made her speak.
+
+"He always has something pleasant to say of you," softly declared Cora.
+Here she turned to her sister. "Will you bring up some people to Mrs.
+Varick," she asked, "or shall I?"
+
+"Oh, just as you choose," answered Martha. She had fixed her eyes on
+Pauline again. The next moment Cora had glided off.
+
+"What my sister says is quite true," affirmed Martha.
+
+"You mean--?" Pauline questioned, with a faint start which she could
+scarcely have explained.
+
+"That Mr. Kindelon admires you very much."
+
+"I am glad to hear it," returned Pauline, thinking how commonplace the
+sentence sounded, and at the same time feeling her color rise and deepen
+under the persistent scrutiny of those sharp dark eyes.
+
+"Don't you think him intensely able?" said Martha, much more slowly than
+usual. "We do."
+
+Pauline bowed assent. "Brilliantly able," she answered. "Tell me, Miss
+Dares, with which of you is he the more intimate, your sister or
+yourself?"
+
+Martha gave a laugh that was crisp and curt. She looked away from
+Pauline as she answered. "Oh, he's more intimate with me than with
+Cora," she said. "We are stanch friends. He tells me nearly everything.
+I think he would tell me if he were to fall in love."
+
+"Really?" laughed Pauline. Her face was wreathed in smiles of apparent
+amusement. She looked, just then, as she had often looked in the
+fashionable world, when everything around her seemed so artificial that
+she took the tints of her environment and became as artificial herself.
+
+But it pleased her swiftly to change the subject. "I am quite excited
+this evening," she went on. "I am beginning a new career; you
+understand, of course. Tell me, Miss Dares, how do _you_ think I shall
+succeed in it?"
+
+Martha was watching her fixedly. And Martha's reply had a short, odd
+sound. "I think you are almost clever enough not to fail," she said.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+Before Pauline had been an hour longer in the Dares's drawing-room she
+had become acquainted with many new people. She could not count them all
+when she afterward tried to do so; the introductions had been very rapid
+for some little time; one, so to speak, had trodden upon the heel of
+another. Her meditated project had transpired, and not a few of her
+recent acquaintances eyed her with a critical estimate of her capability
+to become their future leader.
+
+She soon found herself an object of such general scrutiny that she was
+in danger of growing embarrassed to the verge of actual bewilderment.
+She was now the centre of a little group, and every member of it
+regarded her with more or less marked attentiveness.
+
+"I've a tragic soul in a comic body, Mrs. Varick," said a fat little
+spinster, with a round moon of a face and a high color, whose name was
+Miss Upton. "That is the way I announce myself to all strangers. I
+should have gone on the stage and played _Juliet_ if it hadn't been for
+my unpoetic person. But imagine a bouncing, obese Juliet! No; I realized
+that it would never do. I shall have to die with all my music in me, as
+it were."
+
+"A great many poets have done that," said a pale young gentleman with
+very black hair and eyes, and an expression of ironical fatigue which
+seldom varied. He was Mr. Leander Prawle, and he was known to have
+written verses for which he himself had unbounded admiration. "Indeed,"
+the young poet continued, lifting one thin, white hand to where his
+moustache was not yet, "it is hard to sing a pure and noble song with
+the discords of daily life about one."
+
+"Not if you can make the world stop its discords and listen to you, Mr.
+Prawle," said Pauline.
+
+"Oh, Prawle can never do that," said a broad-shouldered young blond,
+with a face full of drowsy reverie and hair rolled back from it in a
+sort of yellow mane. "He's always writing transcendental verses about
+Man with a capital M and the grand amelioration of Humanity with a
+capital H. Prawle has no color. He hates an adjective as if it were a
+viper. He should have lived with me in the _Quartier Latin_; he should
+have read, studied and loved the divine Theophile Gautier--most perfect
+of all French poets!"
+
+The speaker fixed his sleepy blue eyes upon Leander Prawle while he thus
+spoke. A slight smile touched his lips, leaving a faint dimple in either
+smooth oval cheek. He was certainly very handsome, in an unconventional,
+audacious way. His collar gave a lower glimpse of his firm yet soft
+throat than usage ordinarily sanctions; the backward wave of his hair
+was certainly against any conceded form. He had been made known to
+Pauline as Mr. Arthur Trevor, and she had felt surprised at his name
+being so English; she had expected to find it French; Mr. Trevor had
+appeared to her extremely French.
+
+"When you speak of Paris and of Gautier," she now said to him, "you
+really relieve me, Mr. Trevor. I was so prepared, on first meeting you,
+to find that you were not an American."
+
+"Oh, Trevor is very French," said Leander Prawle coldly.
+
+Trevor laughed, lifting one hand, on the middle finger of which was the
+tawny tell-tale mark of the confirmed cigarette-smoker.
+
+"And my friend, Prawle," he said, "is enormously English."
+
+"Not English--American," slowly corrected Leander Prawle.
+
+"It is the same thing!" cried Arthur Trevor. "He is cold-blooded, Mrs.
+Varick," the young gentleman continued, with emphasis and a certain
+excitement. "We are always fighting, Prawle and I. I tell Prawle that in
+his own beloved literature, he should have but one model outside of
+Shakespeare. That is Keats--the sweet, sensuous, adorable Keats."
+
+"I loathe Keats," said Leander Prawle, as if he were repeating some
+fragment of a litany. "I think him a word-monger."
+
+"Aha," laughed Arthur Trevor, showing his white, sound teeth, "Keats was
+an immense genius. He knew the art of expression."
+
+"And he expressed nothing," said Leander Prawle.
+
+"He expressed beauty," declared Trevor. "Poetry is that. There is
+nothing else. Even the great master, Hugo, would tell you so."
+
+"Hugo is a mere rhapsodist," said Leander Prawle.
+
+Trevor laughed again. He gave a comic, exaggerated shudder while he did
+so. He now exclusively addressed Pauline. "My dear Mrs. Varick," he
+said, "are you not horrified?"
+
+Before Pauline could answer, the fat little Miss Upton spoke. "Oh, Mr.
+Trevor," she said, "you know that though you and Mr. Prawle are always
+quarrelling about poetry, and belong to two different schools, still,
+each of you, in his way, is admirable. You are the North and South
+poles."
+
+"No," said Arthur Trevor, "for the North and South poles never come
+together, while Prawle and I are continually clashing."
+
+"It looks very much as if chaos were the result," said Pauline.
+
+Arthur Trevor gazed at her reproachfully. "I hope you don't mean that,"
+he said. He put his arm while he spoke, about the neck of a short and
+fleshy man, with a bald, pink scalp and a pair of dull, uneasy eyes.
+"Here is our friend, Rufus Corson," he continued. "Rufus has not spoken
+a word to you since he was presented, Mrs. Varick. But he's a
+tremendously important fellow. He doesn't look it, but he is the poet of
+death, decay, and horror."
+
+"Good Heavens!" murmured Pauline playfully.
+
+"It is true," pursued Arthur Trevor. "Rufus, here, is a wonderful
+fellow, and he has written some verses that will one day make him famous
+as the American Baudelaire."
+
+"I have not read Baudelaire," said Pauline.
+
+Mr. Corson at once answered her. He spoke in a forced, loitering way. He
+wore the dress of a man who scorns all edicts of mode, and yet he was
+very commonplace in appearance.
+
+"The literature of the present age is in a state of decadence," he said.
+Mr. Corson, himself, looked to be in a state of plump prosperity; even
+his rosy baldness had a vivid suggestion of youth and of the enjoyments
+which youth bestows. "I write hopelessly," he continued, "because I live
+in a hopeless time. My 'Sonnet to a Skull' has been praised, because"--
+
+"It has _not_ been praised," said Leander Prawle firmly and severely.
+
+Mr. Corson regarded Prawle with an amused pity. "It has been praised by
+people whom you don't know," he said, "and who don't want to know you."
+
+"It is horrible," enunciated Leander Prawle, while he appealingly rolled
+toward Pauline his dark eyes, which the confirmed pallor of his face
+made still darker. "Mrs. Varick," he went on, "I am sure that you will
+agree with me in asserting that skulls and skeletons and disease are not
+fit subjects for poetical treatment."
+
+"Yes," answered Pauline, "I think that they are not beautiful--and for
+this reason I should condemn them."
+
+"Then you will make a great mistake, Mrs. Varick," now quickly
+interposed Arthur Trevor. He passed one hand backward along the yellow
+mane of his hair while he thus spoke. But he still kept an arm about the
+neck of his friend, Corson. "I maintain," he continued, "that Corson has
+a perfect right to sing of autumnal things. A corpse is as legitimate a
+subject as a sunset. They are both morbid; they both mean what is
+moribund."
+
+"Oh, but they are so different!" exclaimed the fat Miss Upton. "One is
+the work of Gawd, to delight man, and the other is--oh, dear! the other
+is--well, it's only a mere dead body! None of the great poets have ever
+written in that dreadful style, Mr. Trevor. Of course, I know that Mr.
+Corson has done some _powerful_ work, but is it right to give people the
+shudders and horrors, as he does? Why not have sunshine in poetry,
+instead of gloom and misery?"
+
+"Sunshine is commonplace," said Arthur Trevor.
+
+"Very," said Mr. Corson.
+
+"Sunshine means hope," declared Leander Prawle. "It means evolution,
+development, progress."
+
+"Art is art!" cried Trevor. "Sing of what you please, so long as your
+_technique_ is good, so long as you have the right _chic_, the right
+_facon_, the right way of putting things!"
+
+"True," said Corson. "I write of skulls and corpses because you can get
+new effects out of them. They haven't been done to death, like faith,
+and philanthropy, and freedom. Optimism is so tiresome, nowadays. All
+the Greeks are dead. Notre Dame stands intact, but the Parthenon is a
+ruin."
+
+Leander Prawle shivered. "You can make clever rhymes about
+charnel-houses," he said, "but that is not poetry. You can deplore the
+allurements of women with green eyes and stony hearts, but you degrade
+womanhood while you do so. You"--
+
+"Are you not bored?" whispered Kindelon, in his mellow Irish brogue to
+Pauline, as he just then stole to her side. "If so, let us walk away
+together."
+
+Pauline slipped her hand into his proffered arm. "I was not bored," she
+said, as they moved off, "but I was just beginning to be. Are there
+nothing but belligerent poets here to-night?"
+
+"Oh, you will find other sorts of people."
+
+"But, who are these three wranglers, Mr. Trevor, Mr. Prawle, and Mr.
+Corson?"
+
+Kindelon laughed. "They are fanatics," he said. "Each one believes
+himself a Milton in ability."
+
+"Are they successful?"
+
+"They send poems (with stamps inclosed) to the magazines, and have them
+rejected. They make believe to despise the magazines, but secretly they
+would give worlds to see their names in print. Heaven knows, the
+magazines print rubbish enough. But they are sensible in rejecting
+Arthur Trevor's poems, which are something in this style--I quote from
+memory:--
+
+    "'The hot, fierce tiger-lily madly yearns
+    To kill with passionate poison the wild moth
+    That reels in drunken ecstasy above
+    Its gorgeous bosom....'
+
+"Or in rejecting that bald-pated posing Corson's trash, which runs like
+this:--
+
+    "'Death is far better than the loathsome lot
+    Of kissing lips that soon must pale and rot,
+    Of clasping forms that soon must cease their breath
+    Within the black embrace of haughty death!'
+
+"Or in declining to publish Mr. Leander Prawle's buncombe, which sounds
+somewhat after this fashion:
+
+    "'Man shall one day develop to a god,
+    Though now he walks unwinged, unaureoled....
+    To-day we moil and mope--to-morrow's dawn
+    Shall bring us pinions to outsoar the stars.'
+
+"That's the sort of the thing this brave trio does. All poets are
+partially mad, of course. But then _they_ are mad without being poets;
+it's this that makes their lunacy so tiresome."
+
+"And are they always quarrelling when they meet?"
+
+"Oh, they do it for effect. They are privately very good friends. They
+are all equally obscure; they've no cause, yet, to hate one another. If
+one of them should get a book published before either of the other two,
+they would probably both abominate him in good earnest."
+
+Just then a tall, sallow gentleman, with small, gray eyes and a nose
+like the beak of a carnivorous bird, laid his hand on Kindelon's sleeve.
+
+"Powers has just asked me to write the Fenimore Cooper article for his
+new American Cyclopaedia," declared this gentleman, whose name was
+Barrowe, and whom Pauline had already met.
+
+"Well, you're precisely the man," replied Kindelon. "Nobody can do it
+better."
+
+"Precisely the man!" exclaimed Mr. Barrowe. "Perhaps I would be if I
+were not so overwhelmed with other duties--so unmercifully handicapped."
+He turned to Pauline. "I am devoted to literature, madam," he went on,
+"but I am forced into commerce for the purpose of keeping starvation
+away from my family and myself. There is the plain, unvarnished truth.
+And now, as it is, I return home after hours of hard, uncongenial work,
+to snatch a short interval between dinner-time and bed-time for whatever
+I can accomplish with my poor tired pen. My case is a peculiar and
+pathetic one--and this Powers ought to understand it. But, no; he comes
+to me in the coolest manner, and makes my doing that article for him a
+question of actual good-nature and friendly support. So, of course, I
+consent. But it shows a great want of delicacy in Powers. He knows well
+enough that I am obliged to neglect many social duties--that I should
+not even be here at this moment--that besides my daily business I am
+besieged with countless applications from literary people for all sorts
+of favors. Why, this very week, I have received no less than fourteen
+requests for my autograph. How are my wife and little ones to live if I
+am perpetually to oblige inconsiderate and thoughtless friends?"
+
+"Your complaints would indicate," said Kindelon, rather dryly, "that
+Powers has not offered you the requisite cheque for proposed services."
+
+Mr. Barrowe gave an irritated groan. "Kindelon!" he exclaimed, "do you
+know you can be a very rude man when you want?"
+
+"You've told me that several times before, Barrowe," said Kindelon,
+quite jovially, moving on with Pauline.
+
+He did this briskly enough to prevent the indignant Mr. Barrowe from
+making any further reply.
+
+"I'm afraid you'll have trouble with that man," he said to Pauline,
+presently, "if you admit him into your _salon_."
+
+"I have read some of his essays," she answered. "They are published
+abroad, you know. I thought them very clever."
+
+"So they are--amazingly. But Barrowe himself is a sort of monomaniac. He
+believes that he is the most maltreated of authors. He is forever boring
+his friends with these egotistic lamentations. Now, the truth of the
+matter is that he has more to solidly congratulate himself upon than
+almost any author whom I know. He was sensible enough, years ago, to
+embark in commercial affairs. I forget just what he does; I think he is
+a wholesale druggist, or grocer. He writes brilliantly and with
+extraordinary speed. His neglect of social duties, as he calls them, is
+the purest nonsense. He goes wherever he is asked, and finds plenty of
+time for work besides. This request from Powers secretly pleases him.
+The new Cyclopaedia is going to be a splendid series of volumes. But
+Barrowe must have his little elegiac moan over his blighted life."
+
+"And the applications from fellow-authors?" asked Pauline. "The requests
+for autographs?"
+
+"Pshaw! those are a figment of his fancy, I suspect. He imagines that he
+is of vast importance in the literary world. His sensitiveness is
+something ridiculous. He's a far worse monologuist than I am, which is
+surely saying a great deal; but if you answer him he considers it an
+interruption, and if you disagree with him he ranks it as impertinence.
+I think he rather likes me because I persistently, fearlessly, and
+relentlessly do both. But with all his faults, Barrowe has a large, warm
+heart. Still, it's astonishing how a fine and true character can often
+enshroud itself with repellent mannerisms, just as a firm breadth of
+sea-rock will become overcrusted with brittle barnacles.... Ah,
+Whitcomb, good evening."
+
+A corpulent man, with silver-gray hair and a somewhat pensive
+expression, was the recipient of Kindelon's last cordial sentence of
+salutation. After he had made the needful introduction, Kindelon said,
+addressing Pauline while he regarded Mr. Whitcomb,--
+
+"This is the author of no less than five standard histories."
+
+"Kindelon is very good to call them standard, Mrs. Varick," said Mr.
+Whitcomb, in a voice quite as pensive as his face. "I wish that a few
+thousands more would only share his opinion."
+
+"Oh, but they are gradually getting to do it, my dear Whitcomb!"
+declared Kindelon. "Don't make any mistake on that point. A few days ago
+I chanced to meet your publisher, Sours. Now, an author must stand
+pretty sure of success when his publisher pays him a round compliment."
+
+"What did Sours say?" asked Mr. Whitcomb, with an almost boyish
+eagerness.
+
+"He said," exclaimed Kindelon, "that Whitcomb was our coming American
+historian. There, my dear sir, what do you think of that?"
+
+Mr. Whitcomb sadly shook his silver-gray head. "I've been coming," he
+murmured, "ever since I was twenty-eight, and I shall be fifty-seven
+next May. I can't say that I think Sours's compliment meant much. It's
+got to be a sort of set phrase about me, that I'm coming. It never
+occurs to anybody to say that I've come, and I suppose it will not if I
+live to be eighty and totter round with white hair. No, I shall always
+be coming, coming...."
+
+As the gentleman repeated this final word he smiled with a kind of weary
+amiability, still shaking his gray head; and a moment later he had
+passed from sight.
+
+"Mrs. Varick," now said a cold, rasping voice to Pauline, "have you
+managed to enjoy yourself, thus far? If you recollect, we were
+introduced a little while ago ... Miss Cragge, you know."
+
+"Oh, yes, I remember, Miss Cragge," said Pauline. "And I find it very
+pleasant here, I assure you."
+
+Miss Cragge had given Kindelon a short nod, which he returned somewhat
+faintly. She was a lady of masculine height, with a square-jawed face, a
+rather mottled complexion, and a pair of slaty-blue eyes that looked at
+you very directly indeed from beneath a broad, flat forehead. She was
+dressed in a habit of some shabby gray stuff, and wore at her throat a
+large antique cameo pin, which might have been unearthed from an
+ancestral chest near the lavendered laces and faded love-letters of a
+long-dead grandmother. She was by no means an agreeable-looking lady;
+she was so ungentle in her quick, snapping speech and so unfeminine in
+her gaunt, bony, and almost towering figure, that she promptly impressed
+you with an idea of Nature having maliciously blended the harsher traits
+of both sexes in one austere personality, and at the same time leaving
+the result sarcastically feminine. She seldom addressed you without
+appearing to be bent on something which she thought you might have to
+tell her, or which she would like you very much to reveal. Her
+affirmations often had the sound of interrogatories. She had none of the
+tact, the grace, the _finesse_ of the ordinary "interviewer;" she went
+to her task rough-handed and undexterous.
+
+"I'm glad you like it," she at once said to Pauline. "I know you've
+moved a good deal in fashionable society, and I should be gratified to
+learn how this change affects you."
+
+"Quite refreshingly," returned Pauline.
+
+"You don't feel like a fish out of water, then?" said Miss Cragge, with
+a sombre little laugh. "Or like a cat in a strange garret?... I saw you
+at the opera the other evening. You were with Mrs. Poughkeepsie and her
+daughter; I was down stairs in the orchestra. I go a good deal to places
+of amusement--in a professional way, you know; I'm a dead-head, as the
+managers call it--I help to paper the house."
+
+"You are rather too idiomatic, I fear," now said Kindelon, with a chilly
+ring in his tones, "for Mrs. Varick to understand you."
+
+"Idiomatic is very good--excellent, in fact," replied Miss Cragge, with
+a pleasantry that barely missed being morose. "I suppose you mean that I
+am slangy. You're always trying to snub me, Kindelon, but I don't mind
+you. You can't snub me--nobody can. I'm too thick-skinned." Here the
+strangely self-poised lady laughed again, if the grim little sound that
+left her mirthless lips could really be called a laugh. "I know the
+Poughkeepsies by sight," she continued, re-addressing Pauline, "because
+it's my business as a newspaper correspondent to get all the fashionable
+items that I can collect, and whenever I'm at any public place of
+amusement where there's a chance of meeting those upper-ten people, I
+always keep my eyes and ears open as wide as possible. I'm correspondent
+for eight weekly papers outside of New York, besides doing work for two
+of the city dailies. I never saw anything like the craze for society
+gossip nowadays. One good story from high life, with a moderate spice of
+scandal in it, will pay me six times as well as anything else. They say
+I'm always hunting about for material, and no wonder that I am. The
+thing is bread and butter to me--and not much butter, either. You see,
+the rich classes here are getting to represent so large a body; so many
+people are trying to push themselves into society. And when they can't
+elbow their way into the swell balls and parties, why, the next best
+thing is to read about who were there, and what they had on, and who led
+the German, and what they ate and drank, and how the house was
+decorated. It seemed a queer enough business for me, at first; I started
+with grand ideas, but I've had to come down a good many pegs; I've had
+to pull in my horns. And now I don't mind it a bit; I suppose Kindelon
+would say that I enjoyed it ... eh, Kindelon? Why, Mrs. Varick, I used
+to write book-reviews for the New York 'Daily Criterion,' and my pay
+kept growing less and less. One day I wrote a very careful review of a
+book that I admired greatly--it was George Eliot's 'Middlemarch,' in
+fact. The editor-in-chief sent for me. He named the article, and then
+said, 'I hear that you wrote it. It's a very fine piece of work.'
+'Thank you, sir,' I replied, with a tingle of gratification. 'Yes, a
+very fine piece of work, indeed,' continued the editor; 'I read it with
+much pleasure. But don't do that sort of thing again, Miss Cragge--we've
+no use for it on the 'Criterion.' After that I became less ambitious and
+more mercenary. There's no use pounding against stone walls. The reading
+public will have what it wants, and if I don't give it to them, somebody
+else will be only too glad to take my place.... By the way, Mrs. Varick,
+do you think that Miss Poughkeepsie is going to marry that Scotch
+earl--Lord Glenartney?"
+
+"I can't tell you, really," said Pauline. She had made up her mind to
+dislike Miss Cragge very much indeed. At the same time she felt a
+certain pity for her.
+
+Kindelon began to press quietly forward, and Pauline, who still had his
+arm, by no means resisted this measure.
+
+"I've been very candid," called Miss Cragge, while the two were slipping
+away from her. She spoke with even more than her usual blunt, curt
+manner. "It was because I knew Kindelon would be apt to say hard things
+of me, and I wanted to spike a few of his guns. But I hope I haven't
+shocked you, Mrs. Varick."
+
+"Oh, not at all," said Pauline, as blandly as her feelings would
+permit....
+
+"You were a good deal disgusted, no doubt," said Kindelon, when they
+were beyond Miss Cragge's hearing.
+
+"She isn't the most charming person I have ever met," replied Pauline.
+"I will grant you that."
+
+"How amiably you denounce her! But I forget," he added. "Such a little
+time ago you were prepared to be exhilarated and ... what was the other
+word?... to fraternize with most of the company here."
+
+She chose not to heed the last stroke of light irony.
+
+"Are you and Miss Cragge enemies?" she asked.
+
+"Well, I abominate her, and she knows it. I rarely abominate anybody,
+and I think she knows that also. To my mind she is a conscienceless,
+hybrid creature. She is a result of a terrible modern license--the
+license of the Press. There is a frank confession, for a newspaper man
+like myself. But, between ourselves, I don't know where modern
+journalism, in some of its ferocious phases, is going to stop, unless it
+stops at a legislative veto. Miss Cragge would sacrifice her best
+friend (if she had any friends--which she hasn't) to the requirements
+of what she calls 'an item.' She thinks no more of assailing a
+reputation, in her quest for so-termed 'material,' than a rat would
+think of carrying off a lump of cheese. She knows very well that I will
+never forgive her for having printed a lot of libellous folly about a
+certain friend of mine. He had written a rather harmless and weak novel
+of New York society, New York manners. Miss Cragge had some old grudge
+against him; I think it was on account of an adverse criticism which she
+believed him to have written regarding some dreary, amateurish poems for
+whose author she had conceived a liking. This was quite enough for Miss
+Cragge. She filled a column of the Rochester "Rocket," or the Topeka
+"Trumpet," or some such sheet, with irate fictions about poor Charley
+Erskine. He had no redress, poor fellow; she declared that he had
+slandered a pure, high-minded lady in society here by caricaturing her
+in his novel. She parodied some of poor Charley's rather fragile verses;
+she accused him of habitually talking fatuous stuff at a certain
+Bohemian sort of beer-garden which he had visited scarcely five times
+within that same year. Oh, well, the whole thing was so atrocious that I
+offered my friend the New York "Asteroid" in which to hurl back any
+epistolary thunderbolt he should care to manufacture. But Charley
+wouldn't; he might have written a bad novel and worse poems, but he had
+sense enough to know that his best scorn lay in severe silence. Still,
+apart from all this, I have excellent reasons for shunning Miss Cragge,
+and I have told you some of them. She is the most aggravated form of the
+American newspaper correspondent, prowling about and seeking whom she
+may devour. I consider her a dangerous person, and I advise you not to
+allow her within your _salon_."
+
+"Oh, I shan't," quickly answered Pauline. "You need not have counselled
+me on that point. It was quite unnecessary. I intend to pick and
+choose." She gave a long, worried sigh, now, which Kindelon just heard
+above the conversational hum surrounding them. "I am afraid it all comes
+to picking and choosing, everywhere," she went on. "Aunt Cynthia
+Poughkeepsie is perpetually doing it in _her_ world, and I begin to
+think that there is none other where it must not be done."
+
+Kindelon leaned his handsome crisp-curled head nearer to her own; he
+fixed his light-blue eyes, in which lay so warm and liquid a sparkle,
+intently upon the lifted gaze of Pauline.
+
+"You are right," he said. "You will learn that, among other lessons,
+before you are much older. There is no such thing as not picking and
+choosing. Whatever the grade of life, it is always done by those who
+have any sort of social impulse. I believe it is done in Eighth Avenue
+and Avenue A, when they give parties in little rooms of tenement houses
+and hire a fiddler to speed the dance. There is always some Michael or
+Fritz who has been ostracized. The O'Haras and the Schneiders follow the
+universal law. Wherever three are gathered together, the third is pretty
+sure to be of questionable welcome. This isn't an ideal planet, my dear
+lady, and 'liberty' and 'fraternity' are good enough watchwords, but
+'equality' never yet was one;--if I didn't remember my Buckle, my
+Spencer, my Huxley, and my dear old Whig Macaulay, I should add that it
+never _would_ be one."
+
+Just at this point Kindelon and Pauline found themselves face to face
+with two gentlemen who were both in a seemingly excited frame of mind.
+Pauline remembered that they had both been presented to her not long
+ago. She recollected their names, too; her memory had been nerved to
+meet all retentive exigencies. The large, florid man, with the bush of
+sorrel beard, was Mr. Bedlowe, and the smaller, smooth-shaven man, with
+the consumptive stoop and the professorial blue spectacles, was Mr.
+Howe.
+
+Mr. Howe and Mr. Bedlowe were two novelists of very opposite repute.
+Kindelon had already caught a few words from the latter, querulously
+spoken.
+
+"Ah, so you think modern novel-writing a sham, my dear Howe?" he said,
+pausing with his companion, while either gentleman bowed recognition to
+Pauline. "Isn't that rank heresy from the author of a book that has just
+been storming the town?"
+
+"My book didn't storm the town, Kindelon," retorted Mr. Howe, lifting a
+hand of scholarly slimness and pallor toward his opaque goggles. "I wish
+it had," he proceeded, somewhat wearily. "No; Bedlowe and I were having
+one of our old quarrels. I say that we novelists of the Anglo-Saxon
+tongue are altogether too limited. That is what I mean by declaring that
+modern novel-writing is a sham."
+
+"He means a great deal more, I'm sorry to say," here cried Mr. Bedlowe,
+who had a habit of grasping his sorrel beard in one hand and thrusting
+its end toward his hirsute lips as though they were about to be allured
+by some edible mouthful.
+
+"He means, Kindelon, that because we haven't the shocking immoral
+latitude of the French race, we can't properly express ourselves in
+fiction. And he goes still further--Howe is always going still further
+every fresh time that I meet him. He says that if the modern novelist
+dared to express himself on religious subjects, he would be an
+agnostic."
+
+"Precisely!" cried Mr. Howe, with the pale hand wavering downward from
+the eerie glasses. "But he doesn't dare! If he did, his publisher
+wouldn't publish him!"
+
+"My publisher publishes _me_!" frowned Mr. Bedlowe.
+
+"Oh, you're a pietist," was the excited answer. "At least, you go in for
+that when you write your novels. It pays, and you do it. I don't say
+that you do it _because_ it pays, but ..."
+
+"You infer it," grumbled Mr. Bedlowe, "and that's almost the same as
+saying it." He visibly bristled here. "I've got a wholesome faith," he
+proceeded, with hostility. "That's why I wrote 'The Christian Knight in
+Armor' and 'The Doubtful Soul Satisfied.' Each of them sold seventy
+thousand copies apiece. There's a proof that the public wanted
+them--that they filled a need."
+
+"So does the 'Weekly Wake-Me-Up,'" said Mr. Howe, with mild disdain. "My
+dear Bedlowe, you have two qualities as a modern novel-writer which are
+simply atrocious--I mean, plot and piety. The natural result of these is
+popularity. But your popularity means nothing. You utterly neglect
+analysis"--
+
+"I despise analysis!"
+
+"You entirely ignore style"--
+
+"I express my thoughts without affectation."
+
+"Your characters are wholly devoid of subtlety"--
+
+"I abhor subtlety!"
+
+"You preach sermons"--
+
+"Which thousands listen to!"
+
+"You fail completely to represent your time"--
+
+"My readers, who represent my time, don't agree with you."
+
+"You end your books with marriages and christenings in the most absurdly
+old-fashioned way"--
+
+"I end a story as every story _should_ end. Sensible people have a
+sensible curiosity to know what becomes of hero and heroine."
+
+"Curiosity is the vice of the vulgar novel-reader. Psychological
+interest is the one sole interest that should concern the more cultured
+mind. And though you may sell your seventy thousand copies, I beg to
+assure you that ..."
+
+"Had we not heard quite enough of that hot squabble?" said Kindelon to
+Pauline, after he had pressed with her into other conversational
+regions, beyond the assault and defence of these two inimical novelists.
+
+"I rather enjoyed it," said Pauline.
+
+"They would have presently dragged us into their argument," returned
+Kindelon. "It was just as well that we retired without committing
+ourselves by an opinion. I should have sided with Howe, though I think
+him an extremist."
+
+"I know some of Mr. Bedlowe's novels," said Pauline. "They are very
+popular in England. I thought them simply dire."
+
+"And Howe is a real artist. He has a sort of cult here, though not a
+large one. What he says is true enough, in the main. The modern novelist
+dares not express his religious views, unless they be of the most
+conventional and tame sort. And how few fine minds are there to-day
+which are not rationalistic, unorthodox? A man like Bedlowe coins money
+from his milk-and-water platitudes, while Howe must content himself with
+the recognition of a small though devout circle.... Did you meet the
+great American dramatist, by the way? I mean Mr. Osgood Paiseley. He is
+standing over yonder near the mantel ... that slender little man with
+the abnormally massive head."
+
+"Yes, I met him," returned Pauline. "He is coming this way."
+
+"Have you any new dramatic work in preparation, Paiseley?" asked
+Kindelon, as the gentleman who had just been mentioned now drew near
+himself and Pauline.
+
+"Yes," was Mr. Paiseley's reply. He spoke with a nasal tone and without
+much grammatical punctilio. "I've got a piece on hand that I'm doing for
+Mattie Molloy. Do you know her at all? She does the song-and-dance
+business with comedy variations. I think the piece'll be a go; it'll
+just suit her, I guess."
+
+"Your last melodrama, 'The Brand of Cain,' was very successful, was it
+not?" pursued Kindelon.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Paiseley, as he threw back an errant lock or two from
+his great width of swollen-looking forehead, "I'm afraid it isn't going
+to catch on so very well, after all. The piece is all right, but the
+company can't play it. Cooke guys his part because he don't like it, and
+doesn't get a hand on some of the strongest lines that have been put
+into any actor's mouth for the past twenty years--fact! as sure as
+you're born! Moore makes up horribly, and Kitty Vane is so over-weighted
+that Miss Cowes, in a straight little part of only a few lengths, gets
+away with her for two scenes; and Sanders is awfully preachy. If I could
+have had my own say about casting the piece, we'd have turned away money
+for six weeks and made it a sure thing for the road. I mean for the big
+towns, not the one-night places; it's got too many utility-people to
+make it pay there. But I shan't offer anything more to the
+stock-theatres; after this, I'm going to fit stars."
+
+Pauline turned a covertly puzzled look upon her companion. She seemed to
+be hearing a new language. And yet, although the words were all familiar
+enough, their collocation mystified her.
+
+"You think there is more profit, then, in fitting stars," said Kindelon,
+"if there is less fame?"
+
+Mr. Paiseley laughed, with not a little bitterness. "Oh, fame," he said,
+"is the infirmity of the young American dramatist. I've outgrown it. I
+used to have it. But what's the use of fighting against France and
+England in the stock-theatres? Give me a fair show there, and I can draw
+bigger money than Dennery or Sardou--don't you make any mistake! But
+those foreign fellows are always crowding us natives out of New York.
+The managers hem and smirk over our pieces, and say they're good enough,
+but they've got something that's running well at the Porte Sang Martang
+or the Odeun in Paris. The best we can do is to have our plays done by a
+scratch company at some second-rate house, or, if it's a first-class
+house, they give us bad time. No, I fit travelling stars at so much cash
+down, and so much royalty afterward--that is, when I can't get a
+percentage on the gross. I don't work any more for fame; I want my
+dinner...."
+
+"Your friend takes a rather commercial view of the American stage," said
+Pauline to Kindelon, after they had again moved onward.
+
+"I am sorry to say that it is almost the only view taken by any of our
+dramatists. Paiseley is thoroughly representative of his class. They
+would all like to write a fine play, but they nearly all make the
+getting of money their primary object. Now, I do not believe that the
+lust of gain has ever been a foremost incentive in the production of any
+great mental achievement. Our novels and poems are to-day better than
+our plays, I think, because they are written with a more artistic and a
+less monetary stimulus. The rewards of the successful playwright may
+mean a fortune to him; he always remembers that when he begins, and he
+usually begins for the reason that he does remember it...."
+
+Pauline had glimpses of not a few more individualities, that evening,
+before she at length took her leave.
+
+"Well, how have you enjoyed it?" asked Kindelon, as they were being
+driven home together.
+
+"I have not entirely enjoyed it," was the slow answer.
+
+"You have been disappointed?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But your purpose of the _salon_ still remains good?"
+
+"Indeed it does!" she exclaimed with eagerness. "I shall begin my
+work--I shall issue my invitations in a few days. Mrs. Dares will no
+doubt supply me with a full list of names and addresses."
+
+"And you will invite everybody?"
+
+"Oh, by no means. I shall pick and choose."
+
+"Beware of calamity!" said Kindelon. And his voice was so odd a blending
+of the jocose and serious that she could ill guess whether he were in
+earnest or not.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+Pauline now began in excellent earnest the preparations for embarking
+upon her somewhat quaint enterprise. During the next three or four days
+she saw a good deal of Kindelon. They visited together the little
+editorial sanctum in Spruce Street, where Mrs. Dares sat dictating some
+of her inexhaustible "copy" to a pale and rather jaded-looking female
+amanuensis. The lady received her visitors with a most courteous
+hospitality. Pauline had a sense of shocking idleness as she looked at
+the great cumbrous writing-desk covered with ink-stains, files or
+clippings of newspapers, and long ribbon-like rolls of "proof." Her own
+fine garments seemed to crackle ostentatiously beside the noiseless
+folds of Mrs. Dares's work-day cashmere.
+
+"We shall not take up much of your valuable time," she said to the
+large-eyed, serious little lady. "We have called principally to ask a
+favor of you, and I hope you will not think it a presumptuous request."
+
+"I hope it is presumptuous," said Mrs. Dares, "for that, provided I can
+grant it at all, will make it so much pleasanter to grant."
+
+"You may be sure," cried Kindelon gayly to Pauline, "that you have made
+a complete conquest of Mrs. Dares. She is usually quite miserly with her
+compliments. She puts me on the wretched allowance of one a year."
+
+"Perhaps you don't deserve a more liberal income," said Pauline. Then
+she re-addressed Mrs. Dares. "I want to ask you," she proceeded, with a
+shy kind of venture in her tone, "if you will kindly loan me your
+visiting-book for a little while."
+
+"My visiting-book?" murmured Mrs. Dares. Then she slowly shook her head,
+while the pale girl at the desk knitted her brows perplexedly, as though
+she had encountered some tantalizing foreign word. "I would gladly lend
+it if I had one," Mrs. Dares went on; "but I possess no such article."
+
+"Good gracious!" exclaimed Pauline, with an involuntary surprise that
+instantly afterward she regretted as uncivil. "You _have_ none!"
+
+But Mrs. Dares did not seem to detect the least incivility in Pauline's
+amazement.
+
+"No, my dear Mrs. Varick, I have no need of a visiting-book, for I have
+no time to visit."
+
+"But you surely have some sort of list, have you not?" now inquired
+Kindelon.
+
+Mrs. Dares lightly touched her forehead. "Only here in my memory," she
+said, "and that is decidedly an imperfect list. My guests understand
+that to be invited to one of my evenings is to be invited to all. I
+suppose that in the fashionable world," she proceeded, fixing her great
+dark eyes on Pauline, "it is wholly different. There, matters of this
+sort are managed with much ceremony, no doubt."
+
+"With much trivial ceremony," said Pauline. "A little scrap of
+pasteboard there represents an individuality--and in just as efficient
+manner as if it were truly the person represented. To be in society, as
+it is called, is to receive a perpetual shower of cards. I strongly
+doubt if many people ever care to meet in a truly social way those whose
+company they pretend to solicit. There are few more perfect mockeries in
+that most false and mocking life, than the ordinary visit of etiquette."
+Pauline here gave a little meaning smile as she briefly paused. "But I
+suppose you will understand, Mrs. Dares," she continued, "that I regret
+your having no regular list. I wanted to borrow it--and with what
+purpose I am sure you can readily imagine."
+
+"Yes," was the reply. "My daughter Cora shall prepare you one, however.
+She has an admirable memory. If she fails in the matter of addresses,
+there is the directory as a help, you know. And so your idea about the
+_salon_ is unchanged?"
+
+"It is unalterable," said Pauline, with a laugh. "But I hate so to
+trouble your daughter."
+
+"She will not think it any trouble," said Kindelon quickly.
+
+Pauline looked at him with a slight elevation of the brows. "You speak
+confidently for Miss Cora," she said.
+
+Kindelon lifted one hand, and waved it a trifle embarrassedly. "Oh, I
+have always found her so accommodating," he answered.
+
+"Yes, Cora is always glad to please those whom she likes," said Mrs.
+Dares....
+
+A little later Pauline and Kindelon took leave of their hostess. They
+had been driven to Spruce Street in the carriage of the former, and as
+they quitted the huge building in which Mrs. Dares's tiny sanctum was
+situated, Kindelon said to his companion: "You shall return home at
+once?"
+
+Pauline gave a careless laugh. She looked about her at all the
+commercial hurry and bustle of the placarded, vehicle-thronged street.
+"I have nowhere else to go just at present," she said. "Not that I
+should not like to stay down town, as you call it, a little longer. The
+noise and activity please me.... Oh, by the way," she added, "did you
+not say that you must repair to your office?"
+
+"The 'Asteroid' imperatively claims me," said Kindelon, taking out his
+watch. "Only twelve o'clock," he proceeded; "I thought it later. Well, I
+have at least an hour at your service still. Have you any commands?"
+
+"Where on earth could we pass your hour of leisure?" said Pauline. "It
+would probably not be proper if I accompanied you into the office of the
+'Asteroid.'"
+
+"It would be sadly dull."
+
+"Then I will drive up town after I have left you there."
+
+"Why not remain _down_ town, since the change pleases you?"
+
+"Driving aimlessly about for a whole hour?"
+
+"By no means. I have an idea of what we might do. I think you might not
+find the idea at all disagreeable. If you will permit, I will give your
+footman an order, and plan for you a little surprise."
+
+"Do so, by all means," said Pauline lightsomely, entering the carriage.
+"I throw myself upon your mercy and your protection."
+
+Kindelon soon afterward seated himself at her side, and the carriage was
+immediately borne into the clamorous region of what we term lower
+Broadway.
+
+"I hope I shall like your surprise," said Pauline, as she leaned back
+against the cushions, not knowing how pretty she looked in her patrician
+elegance of garb and person. "But we will not talk of it; I might guess
+what it is if we did, and that would spoil all. My faith in you shall be
+blind and unquestioning, and I shall expect a proportionately rich
+reward.... What gulfs of difference lie between that interesting little
+Mrs. Dares and most of the women whom I have met! People tell us that we
+must travel to see life. I begin to think that one great city like New
+York can give us the most majestic experience, if only we know how to
+receive it. Take my Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie, for example, and compare
+her with Mrs. Dares! A whole continent seems to lie between them, and
+yet they are continually living at scarcely a stone's-throw apart."
+
+Kindelon gave a brisk, acquiescent nod.
+
+"True enough," he said. "Travel shows us only the outsides of men and
+women. We go abroad to discover better what profits of observation lie
+at home...."
+
+The carriage at length stopped.
+
+"Is my surprise all ready to burst upon me?" asked Pauline, at this
+point.
+
+"Yes. Its explosion is now imminent," said Kindelon, with dry solemnity
+of accent.
+
+Pauline, after she had alighted, surveyed her surroundings for a moment,
+and then said,--
+
+"I knew we were approaching the Battery, but I did not suppose you meant
+to stop there. And why _have_ you stopped, pray?"
+
+Kindelon pointed toward a distant flash of water glimpsed between the
+nude black boughs of many high trees. "You can't think what a delightful
+stroll we could take over yonder," he said, "along the esplanade. The
+carriage could wait here for us, you know."
+
+"Certainly," acceded Pauline.
+
+They soon entered the noble park lying on their right. It was a day of
+unusual warmth for that wintry season, but the air freshened and
+sharpened as they drew further seaward. There are many New Yorkers to
+whom our beautiful Battery is but a name, and Pauline was one of them.
+As she neared the rotund wooden building of Castle Garden, a wholly
+novel and unexpected sight awaited her. Not long ago one of the great
+ocean-steamers had discharged here many German immigrants, and some of
+these had come forth from the big sea-fronting structure beyond, to meet
+the stares of that dingy, unkempt rabble which always collects, on such
+occasions, about its doorways. Pauline and Kindelon paused to watch the
+poor dazed-looking creatures, with their pinched, vacuous faces, their
+timid miens, their coarse, dirty bundles. The women mostly had blond
+braids of hair matted in close coils against the backs of their heads;
+they wore no bonnets, and one or two of them led a bewildered, dull-eyed
+child by the hand, while one or two more clasped infants to their
+breasts, wrapped in soiled shawls. The men had a spare, haggard, slavish
+demeanor; the liberal air and sun, the very amplitude and brilliancy of
+sky and water, seemed to cow and depress them; they slunk instead of
+walking; there was something in their visages of an animal suggestion;
+they did not appear entirely human, and made you recall the mythic
+combinations of man and beast.
+
+"They are Germans, I suppose," said Kindelon to Pauline; "or perhaps
+they hail from some of the Austrian provinces. Many of my own country
+people, the Irish, are not much less shocking to behold when they first
+land here."
+
+"These do not shock me," said Pauline; "they sadden me. They look as if
+they had not wit enough to understand whither they had come, but quite
+enough to feel alarmed and distrustful of their present environment."
+
+"This drama of immigration is constantly unfolding itself here, day
+after day," answered Kindelon. "It surely has its mournful side, but
+you, as an American, ought by all means to discern its bright one. These
+poor souls are the social refuse of Europe; they are the pathetic
+fugitives from vile and time-honored abuses; they are the dreary
+consequences of kingdoms and empires. Their state is almost brutish, as
+you see; they don't think themselves half as far above the brute as you
+think them, depend upon it. They have had manhood and womanhood crushed
+into the dust for generations. It is as much their hereditary instinct
+to fawn and crawl as it is for a dog to bark or a cat to lap milk. They
+represent the enlightened and thrifty peasantry over-sea. Bah! how it
+sickens a man to consider that because a few insolent kings must have
+their hands kissed and their pride of rule glutted, millions of their
+people are degraded into such doltish satires upon humanity! But I
+mentioned the bright side of this question, from the American
+standpoint."
+
+"Yes," said Pauline quickly, lifting her face to his. "I hope it is
+really a bright side."
+
+"It is--very. America receives these pitiful wretches, and after a few
+short months they are regenerated, transformed. There has never, in the
+history of the world, been a nation of the same magnificent hospitality
+as this. Before such droves of deplorable beings any other nation would
+shut her ports or arm her barriers, in strong affright. But America
+(which I have always thought a much more terse and expressive name than
+the United States) does nothing of the sort. With a superb kindness,
+which has behind it a sense of unexampled power, she bids them all
+welcome. And in a little while they breathe her vitalizing air with a
+new and splendid result. They forget the soldiers who kicked them, the
+tyrants who made them shoulder muskets in defence of thrones, the taxes
+wrung from their scant wages that princes might dance and feast. They
+forget all this gross despotism; they begin to live; their very frames
+and features change; their miserable past is like a broken fetter flung
+gladly away. And America does all this for them--this, which no other
+country has done or can do!"
+
+He spoke with a fine heat, an impressive enthusiasm. Pauline, standing
+beside him, had earnestly fixed her look upon his handsome, virile face,
+noting the spark that pierced his light-blue eyes, between the black
+gloss of their lashes, and the little sensitive tremor that disturbed
+his nostril. She had never felt more swayed by his force of personality
+than now. She had never felt more keenly than now that his manful
+countenance and shape were both fit accompaniments of an important and
+robust nature.
+
+"And what does America really do with these poor, maltreated creatures,
+after having greeted and domesticated them?" came her next words, filled
+with an appealing sincerity of utterance.
+
+Something appeared suddenly to have changed Kindelon's mood. He laughed
+shortly and half turned away.
+
+"Oh," he said, in wholly altered voice, "if they are Irish she sometimes
+makes Tammany politicians of them, and if they are Germans she sometimes
+turns them into howling socialists."
+
+"Do you mean what you say?" exclaimed Pauline almost indignantly.
+
+He bent his head and looked at her intently, for a moment, with a covert
+play of mirth under the crisp, dark flow of his mustache.
+
+"I am afraid that I do," he replied, with another laugh.
+
+"Then you think this grand American hospitality of which you have just
+spoken to be a failure--a sham?"
+
+"No, no--far from that," he said rapidly, and with recurring
+seriousness. "I was only going back to the dark side of the
+question--that is all. You know, I told you it had both its dark and its
+bright side.... Come, let us leave this rabble. You have not really seen
+the Battery yet. Its true splendors lie just beyond...."
+
+They were presently strolling along the stone-paved esplanade, with its
+granite posts connected by loops of one continuous iron chainwork. To
+the south they had a partial view of Brooklyn, that city which is a sort
+of reflective and imitative New York, with masts bristling from her
+distant wharves and more than a single remote church-spire telling of
+the large religious impulse which has given her a quaint ecclesiastical
+fame. But westward your eye could traverse the spacious bay until it met
+the dull-red semicircle of Fort Columbus, planted low and stout upon the
+shore of Governor's Island, and the soft, swelling, purplish hills of
+Staten Island, where they loomed still further beyond. Boats of all
+shapes and kinds were passing over the luminous waters, from the squat,
+ugly tug, with its hoarse whistle, to the huge black bulk of an Atlantic
+steamer, bound for transpontine shores and soon to move majestically
+oceanward through the fair sea-gate of the Narrows. A few loiterers
+leaned against the stone posts, and a few more lounged upon the seats
+ranged further inland along this salubrious marine promenade. Back among
+the turfy levels that stretched broadly between the flagged pathways,
+you saw the timorous green of hardy grass, where an occasional pale
+wreath of unmelted snow yet lingered. People were passing to and fro,
+with steps that rang hollow on the hard pavement. If you listened
+intently you could catch a kind of dreamy hum from the vast city, which
+might almost be said to begin its busy, tumultuous life here in this
+very spot, thence pushing through many a life-crowded street and avenue,
+sheer on to the rocky fields and goat-haunted gutters of dreary Harlem.
+
+"What a glorious bay it is!" exclaimed Kindelon, while he and Pauline
+stood on the breezy esplanade. "There never was a city with more royal
+approaches than New York."
+
+"That fort yonder," said Pauline, "will perhaps thunder broadsides, one
+day, at the fleet of an invading enemy. This is still such a young city
+compared with those of other lands.... I suppose these waters, centuries
+later, will see grand sights, as civilization augments."
+
+"Perhaps they may see very mournful ones," objected Kindelon.
+
+"But you are an evolutionist," declared Pauline, with a priggish little
+pursing of the lips that he found secretly very amusing. "You believe
+that everything is working toward nobler conditions, though you laughed
+at Leander Prawle, the optimistic poet, the other evening, for his
+roseate prophecies about the human race."
+
+"Oh, I'm an evolutionist," answered Kindelon. "I believe it will all
+come right by-and-by, like the gigantic unravelling of a gigantic
+skein.... But such views don't prevent me from feeling the probability of
+New York being reduced to ashes more than once in the coming centuries."
+
+"Oh, yes, I remember," said Pauline. "There are often the apparent
+retrogressions--rhythmic variations of movement which temporarily retard
+all progress in societies."
+
+Kindelon burst into one of his mellowest and heartiest laughs. "You are
+delicious," he said, "when you try to recollect your Herbert Spencer.
+You make me think of a flower that has been dropped among the leaves of
+an Algebra."
+
+"I am not at all sure that I like your simile," said Pauline, tossing
+her head somewhat. "It is pleasant to be likened to a flower, but in
+this case it is rather belittling. And if it comes to recollecting my
+Herbert Spencer, perhaps the process is not one of very violent
+_effort_, either."
+
+"Oh," said Kindelon ruefully, "I have offended you."
+
+A sunny smile broke from her lips the next moment. "I can't be
+offended," she replied, "when I think how you rebuked my absurd outburst
+of pedantry. Ah! truly a little knowledge _is_ a dangerous thing, and I
+am afraid I have very little.... How lovely it all is, here," she
+proceeded, changing the subject, as they now began to move onward, while
+they still kept close to the edge of the smooth-paven terrace. "And what
+a pity that our dwelling-houses should all be away from the water! My
+grandparents--or my great-grandparents, I forget which--once lived close
+to the Battery. I recollect poor mamma telling me that I had an
+ancestress whom they used to call the belle of Bowling Green."
+
+"That was certainly in the days before commerce had seized every yard of
+these unrivalled water-fronts," laughed Kindelon. "Babylon on its
+Euphrates, or Nineveh on its Tigris, could not eclipse New York in
+stately beauty if mansions were built along its North and East rivers.
+But trade is a tyrant, as you see. She concedes to you Fifth Avenue, but
+she denies you anything more poetic."
+
+"I wonder who is the belle of Bowling Green now?" said Pauline, looking
+up at her companion with a serio-comic smile.
+
+He shook his head. "I am afraid your favored progenitress was the last
+of the dynasty."
+
+"Oh, no," dissented Pauline, appearing to muse a trifle. "I fancy there
+is still a belle. Perhaps she has a German or an Irish name."
+
+"It may be Kindelon," he suggested.
+
+"No--it is something more usual than that. If she is not a Schmitt I
+suspect that she is an O'Brien. I picture her as pretty, but somewhat
+delicate; she works in some dreadful factory, you know, not far away,
+all through the week. But on Sunday she emerges from her narrow little
+room in a tenement-house, brave and smart as you please. The beaux fight
+for her smiles as they join her, and she knows just how to distribute
+them; she is a most astute little coquette, in her way."
+
+"And the beaux? Are they worthy of her coquetries?"
+
+"Oh, well, she thinks them so. I fear that most of them have soiled
+finger-nails, and that their Sunday coats fit them very ill.... But now
+let me pursue my little romance. The poor creature is terribly fond of
+one of them. There is always one, you know, dearer than the rest."
+
+"Is there?" said Kindelon oddly. "You're quite elucidating. I didn't
+know that."
+
+"Don't be sarcastic," reproved Pauline with mock grimness. "Sarcasm is
+always the death of romance. I have an idea that the secretly-adored one
+is more of a convert than all his fellows to the beautifying influences
+of soap. His Sunday face is bright and fresh; it looks conscientiously
+washed."
+
+"And his finger-nails? Does your imagination also include those, or do
+they transcend its limits?"
+
+"I have a vague perception of their relative superiority.... Pray let me
+continue without your prosaic interruptions. Poor little Mary.... Did I
+not say that her first name was Mary, by-the-by?"
+
+"I have been under the impression for several seconds that you called
+her Bridget."
+
+"Very well. I will call her so, if you insist. Poor little Bridget, who
+steals forth, _endimanchee_ and expectant, fails for an hour or two to
+catch a glimpse of her beloved. She is beginning to be sadly bored by
+the society of her present three, four, or five admirers, when suddenly
+she sees the Beloved approaching. Then she brightens and becomes quite
+sparklingly animated. And when her Ideal draws near, twirling a licorice
+cane--I insist upon having her Ideal twirl a licorice cane--she receives
+him with an air of the most unconcerned indifference. It is exquisite to
+observe the calm, careless way in which she asks him...."
+
+"Pardon me," interrupted Kindelon, with a short and almost brusque tone,
+"but is not this gentleman coming toward us your cousin?"
+
+"My cousin?" faltered Pauline.
+
+"Yes--Mr. Courtlandt Beekman."
+
+Pauline did not answer, for she had already caught sight of Courtlandt,
+advancing in her own direction from that of the South Ferry, which she
+and Kindelon were now rather near. She stopped abruptly in her walk, and
+perceptibly colored.
+
+A moment afterward Courtlandt saw both herself and her escort. He showed
+great surprise, and then quickly conquered it. As he came forward,
+Pauline gave a shrill, nervous laugh. "I suppose you feel like asking me
+what on earth I am doing here," she said, in by no means her natural
+voice, and with a good deal of fluttered insecurity about her demeanor.
+
+"I shouldn't think that necessary," replied Courtlandt. His sallow face
+had not quite its usual hue, but nothing could be steadier than the cool
+light of his eye. "It's very evident that you are taking a stroll with
+Mr. Kindelon." He then extended his hand, cased in a yellow dogskin
+glove, to Kindelon. "How are you?" he said to the man whom he entirely
+disliked, in a tone of neutral civility.
+
+"Very well, this pleasant day," returned Kindelon, jovially
+imperturbable. "And you, Mr. Beekman?"
+
+"Quite well, thanks." He spoke as if he were stating a series of brief
+commercial facts. "I had some business with a man over in Brooklyn, and
+took this way back to my office, which is only a street or two beyond."
+He turned toward the brilliant expanse of the bay, lifting a big
+silver-knobbed stick which he carried, waving it right and left. "Very
+nice down here, isn't it?" he went on. His look now dwelt in the most
+casual way upon Pauline. "Well, I must be off," he continued. "I've a
+lot of business to-day."
+
+He had passed them, when Pauline, turning, said composedly but sharply:
+
+"Can't I take you to your office, Court?"
+
+"Thanks, no. I won't trouble you. It's just a step from here." He lifted
+his hat--an act which he had already performed a second or so
+previously--and walked onward. He had not betrayed the least sign of
+annoyance all through this transient and peculiarly awkward interview.
+He had been precisely the same serene, quiescent, demure Courtlandt as
+of old.
+
+Pauline stood for some little time watching him as he gradually
+disappeared. When the curve near Castle Garden hid him, she gave an
+impatient, irritated sigh.
+
+"You seem vexed," said Kindelon, who had been intently though furtively
+regarding her.
+
+"I am vexed," she murmured. Her increased color was still a deep rose.
+
+"Is there anything very horrible in walking for a little while on the
+Battery?" he questioned.
+
+She gave a broken laugh. "Yes," she answered. "I'm afraid there is."
+
+Kindelon shrugged his shoulders. "But surely you are your own
+mistress?"
+
+"Rather too much so," she said, with lowered eyes. "At least that is
+what people will say, I suppose."
+
+"I thought you were above idle and aimless comments."
+
+"Let us go back to the carriage."
+
+"By all means, if you prefer it."
+
+They reversed their course, and moved along for some time in silence. "I
+think you must understand," Pauline suddenly said, lifting her eyes to
+Kindelon's face.
+
+"I understand," he replied, with hurt seriousness, "that I was having
+one of the pleasantest hours I have ever spent, until that man accosted
+us like a grim fate."
+
+"You must not call my cousin Courtlandt 'that man.' I don't like it."
+
+"I am sorry," he said curtly, and a little doggedly. "I might have
+spoken more ill of him, but I didn't."
+
+Pauline was biting her lips. "You have no right to speak ill of him,"
+she retorted. "He is my cousin."
+
+"That is just the reason why I held my tongue."
+
+"You don't like him, then?"
+
+"I do not."
+
+"I can readily comprehend it."
+
+Kindelon's light-blue eyes fired a little under their black lashes. "You
+say that in a way I do not understand," he answered.
+
+"You and Courtlandt are of a different world."
+
+"I am not a combination of a fop and a parson, if you mean that."
+
+Pauline felt herself grow pale with anger as she shot a look up into her
+companion's face.
+
+"You would not dare say that to my cousin himself," she exclaimed
+defiantly, "though you dare say it to me!"
+
+Kindelon had grown quite pale. His voice trembled as he replied. "I dare
+do anything that needs the courage of a man," he said. "I thought you
+knew me well enough to be sure of this."
+
+"Our acquaintance is a recent one," responded Pauline. She felt nearly
+certain that she had shot a wounding shaft in those few words, but she
+chose to keep her eyes averted and not see whether wrath or pain had
+followed its delivery.
+
+A long silence followed. They had nearly reached her carriage when
+Kindelon spoke.
+
+"You are in love with your cousin," he said.
+
+She threw back her head, laughing ironically. "What a seer you are!" she
+exclaimed. "How did you guess that?"
+
+"Ah," he answered her, with a melancholy gravity, "you will not deny
+it!"
+
+She repeated her laugh, though it rang less bitterly than before. She
+had expected him to meet her irony in a much more rebellious spirit.
+
+"I don't like to have my blood-relations abused in my hearing," she
+said. "I am in love with all of them, that way, if that is the way you
+mean."
+
+"That is not the way I mean."
+
+They were now but a few yards from the waiting carriage. The footman,
+seeing them, descended from his box, and stood beside the opened door.
+
+"I shall not return with you," continued Kindelon, "since I perceive you
+do not wish my company longer. But I offer you my apologies for having
+spoken disparagingly of your cousin. I was wrong, and I beg your
+pardon."
+
+With the last words he extended his hand. Pauline took it.
+
+"I have not said that I did not wish your company," she answered, "but
+if you choose to infer so, it is your own affair."
+
+"I do infer so, and I infer more.... It is best that I--I should not see
+you often, like this. There is a great difference between you and me.
+That cousin of yours hated me at sight. Your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie,
+hated me at sight as well. Perhaps their worldly wisdom was by no means
+to blame, either.... Oh, I understand more than you imagine!"
+
+There was not only real grief in Kindelon's voice, but an under-throb of
+real passion.
+
+"Understand?" Pauline murmured. "What do you understand?"
+
+"That you are as stanch and loyal as ever to your old traditions. That
+this idea of change, of amelioration, of casting aside your so-called
+patrician bondage, has only the meaning of a dainty gentlewoman's dainty
+caprice ... that"--
+
+His voice broke. It almost seemed to her as if his large frame was
+shaken by some visible tremor. She had no thought of being angry at him
+now.
+
+She pitied him, and yet with an irresistible impulse her thought flew to
+Cora Dares, the sweet-faced young painter, and what she herself had of
+late grown to surmise, to suspect. A sort of involuntary triumph blent
+itself with her pity, on this account.
+
+She spoke in a kind voice, but also in a firm one. She slightly waved
+her hand toward the adjacent carriage. "Will you accompany me, then?"
+she asked.
+
+He looked at her fixedly for an instant. Then he shook his head. "No,"
+he answered. "Good-by." He lifted his hat, and walked swiftly away.
+
+She had seen his eyes just before he went. Their look haunted her. She
+entered the carriage, and was driven up town. She told herself that he
+had behaved very badly to her. But she did not really think this. She
+was inwardly thrilled by a strange, new pleasure, and she had shed many
+tears before reaching home.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+The excitement of Pauline had by no means passed when she regained her
+home. Kindelon's last words still rang in her ears.
+
+She declared to herself that it was something horrible to have been
+called a dainty gentlewoman. At the same time, she remembered the
+impetuosity of his address, and instinctively forgave even while she
+condemned. Still, there remained with her a certain severe resentful
+sense. "What right," she asked herself, "has this man to undervalue and
+contemn my purpose? Is it not based upon a proper and worthy impulse? Is
+egotism at its root? Is not a wholesome disgust there, instead? Have I
+not seen, with a radical survey, the aimless folly of the life led by
+men and women who presume to call themselves social leaders and social
+grandees? Has Kindelon any shred of excuse for telling me to my face
+that I am a mere politic trimmer?"
+
+She had scarcely been home an hour before she received a note from Cora
+Dares. The note was brief, but very accurate in meaning. It informed
+Pauline that Mrs. Dares had just sent a message to her daughter's
+studio, and that Cora would be glad to receive Mrs. Varick on that or
+any succeeding afternoon, with the view of a consultation regarding the
+proposed list of guests.
+
+Pauline promptly resolved to visit Cora that same day. She ordered her
+carriage, and then countermanded the order. Not solely because of the
+pleasant weather, and not solely because she was in a mood for walking,
+did she thus alter her first design. She reflected that there might be a
+touch of apparent ostentation in the use of a carriage to call upon this
+young self-supporting artist. She even made a change of toilet, and
+robed herself in a street costume much plainer than that which she had
+previously worn.
+
+Cora Dares's studio was on Fourth Avenue, and one of many others in a
+large building which artists principally peopled. It was in the top
+floor of this structure, and was reached, like her mother's sanctum, by
+that most simplifying of modern conveniences, the elevator. Pauline's
+knock at a certain rather shadowy door in an obscure passage was at once
+answered by Cora herself.
+
+The studio was extremely pretty; you saw this at a glance. Its one
+ample window let in a flood of unrestricted sunlight. Its space was
+small, and doubtless for this reason a few brilliant draperies and
+effective though uncostly embellishments had made its interior bloom and
+glow picturesquely enough. But it contained no ornament of a more
+alluring pattern than Cora herself, as Pauline soon decided.
+
+"Pray don't let me disturb you in your painting," said the latter, after
+an exchange of greetings had occurred. "I see that you were busily
+engaged at your easel. I hope you can talk and paint at the same time."
+
+"Oh, yes," said Cora, with her bright, winsome smile. She was dressed in
+some dark, soft stuff, whose sombre hue brought into lovely relief the
+chestnut ripples of her hair and the placid refinement of her
+clear-chiselled face. "But if I am to give you a list of names," she
+went on, "that will be quite another matter."
+
+"Oh, never mind the list of names," replied Pauline, who had just seated
+herself. "I mean, not for the present. It will be more convenient for
+you, no doubt, to send me this list to-morrow or next day. Meanwhile I
+shall be willing to wait very patiently. I am in no great hurry, Miss
+Dares. It was exceedingly kind of you to communicate with me in this
+expeditious way. And now, if you will only extend your benevolence a
+little further and give an hour or two of future leisure toward the
+development of my little plan, I shall feel myself still more in your
+debt."
+
+Cora nodded amiably. "Perhaps that _would_ be the better arrangement,"
+she said. Her profile was now turned toward Pauline, as she stood in
+front of her canvas and began to make little touches upon it with her
+long, slim brush. "I think, Mrs. Varick, that I can easily send you the
+list to-morrow. I will make it out to-night; I shall not forget anybody;
+at least I am nearly sure that I shall not."
+
+"You are more than kind," said Pauline. She paused for a slight while,
+and then added: "You spend all day here, Miss Dares?"
+
+"All day," was Cora's answer; and the face momentarily turned in
+Pauline's direction, with its glimpse of charming, dimpled chin, with
+the transitory light from its sweet, blue, lustrous eyes, affected her
+as a rarity of feminine beauty. "But I often have my hours of
+stupidity," Cora continued. "It is not so with me to-day. I have somehow
+seized my idea and mastered it, such as it is. You can see nothing on
+the canvas as yet. It is all obscure and sketchy."
+
+"It is still very vague," said Pauline. "But have you no finished
+pictures?"
+
+"Oh, yes, five or six. They are some yonder, if you choose to look at
+them."
+
+"I do choose," Pauline replied, rising. She went toward the wall which
+Cora had indicated by a slight wave of her brush.
+
+The pictures were four in number. They were without frames. Pauline
+examined each attentively. She knew nothing of Art in a technical and
+professional way; but she had seen scores of good pictures abroad; she
+knew what she liked without being able to tell why she liked it, and not
+seldom it befell that she liked what was intrinsically and solidly good.
+
+"You paint figures as if you had studied in foreign schools," she said,
+quite suddenly, turning toward her hostess.
+
+"I studied in Paris for a year," Cora replied. "That was all mamma could
+afford for me." And she gave a sad though by no means despondent little
+laugh.
+
+"You surely studied to advantage," declared Pauline. "Your color makes
+me think of Henner ... and your flesh-tints, too. And as for these two
+landscapes, they remind me of Daubigny. It is a proof of your remarkable
+talent that you should paint both landscapes and figure-pieces with so
+much positive success."
+
+Cora's face was glowing, now. "You have just named two artists," she
+exclaimed, "whose work I have always specially admired and loved. If I
+resemble either of them in the least, I am only too happy and thankful!"
+
+Pauline was silent for several minutes. She was watching Cora with great
+intentness. "Ah! how I envy you!" she at length murmured, and as she
+thus spoke her voice betrayed excessive feeling.
+
+"I thought _you_ envied nobody," answered Cora, somewhat wonderingly.
+
+Pauline gave a little soft cry. "You mean because I am rich, no doubt!"
+she said, a kind of melancholy sarcasm tinging her words.
+
+"Riches mean a great deal," said Cora.
+
+"But if you have no special endowment that separates you from the rest
+of the world, you are still a woman."
+
+"I am not sorry to be a woman."
+
+"No! because you are a living protest against the inferiority of our
+sex. You can do something; you need not forever have men doing something
+for you, like the great majority of us!" Pauline's gray eyes had
+kindled, and her lips were slightly tremulous as they began to shape
+her next sentence. "Most of us _are_ sorry to be women," she went on,
+"but I think a great many of us are sorry to be the sort of women fate
+or circumstance makes us. There is the galling trouble. If we have no
+gift, like yours, that can compel men's recognition and respect, we must
+content ourselves with being merged into the big commonplace multitude.
+And to be merged into the big commonplace multitude is to be more or
+less despised. This may sound like the worst kind of cynicism, but I
+assure you, Miss Dares, that it is by no means as flippant as that. I
+have seen more of life than you ... why not? You perhaps have heard a
+fact or two about my past. I have _had_ a past--and not a pleasant one,
+either. And experience (which is the name we give our disappointments,
+very often) has taught me that if we could see down to the innermost
+depth of any good man's liking for any good woman, we would find there
+an undercurrent of real contempt."
+
+"Contempt!" echoed Cora. She had slightly thrown back her head, either
+in dismay or denial.
+
+"Yes--contempt," asseverated Pauline. "I believe, in all honesty, at
+this hour, that if the charm which our sex exerts over the other--the
+physical fascination, and the fascination of sentiment, tenderness,
+idealization--had never existed, we would have been literally crushed
+out of being long ago. Men have permitted us to live thus far through
+the centuries, not because we are weaker than they, but because some
+extraordinary and undiscoverable law has made them bow to our weakness
+instead of destroying it outright. They always destroy every other thing
+weaker than themselves, except woman. They have no compunction, no
+hesitation. History will show you this, if you accept its annals in an
+unbiased spirit. They either eat the lower animals, or else put them
+into usages of the most severe labor. They leave woman unharmed because
+Nature has so commanded them. But here they are the slaves of an edict
+which they obey more blindly, more instinctively, than even the best of
+them know."
+
+"I can't believe that these are your actual views!" now exclaimed Cora.
+"I can't believe that you rate the sacred emotion of love as something
+to be discussed like a mere scientific problem!"
+
+Pauline went up to the speaker and stood close beside her while she
+responded,--
+
+"Ah! my dear Miss Dares, the love between man and woman is entitled to
+no more respect than the law of gravitation. Both belong to the great
+unknown scheme. We may shake our heads in transcendental disapprobation,
+but it is quite useless. The loftiest affection of the human heart is no
+more important and no more mysterious than the question of why Newton's
+apple fell from the tree or why a plant buds in spring. All causes are
+unknown, and to seek their solution is to idly grope."
+
+Cora was regarding Pauline, as the latter finished, with a look full of
+sad interest. "You speak like ... like some one whom we both know," she
+said hesitatingly. "You speak as if you did not believe in God."
+
+"I do not disbelieve in God," quickly answered Pauline. "The
+carelessly-applied term of 'atheist' is to my thinking a name fit only
+for some pitiable braggart. He who denies the existence of a God is of
+no account among people of sense; but he who says, 'I am ignorant of all
+that concerns the conceivability of a God' has full right to express
+such ignorance."
+
+Cora slowly inclined her head. "That is the way I have heard _him_
+talk," she said, almost musingly. Then she gave a quick glance straight
+into Pauline's watchful eyes. "I--I mean," she added, confusedly, as if
+she had betrayed herself into avowing some secret reflection, "that Mr.
+Kindelon has more than once spoken in a similar way."
+
+"Mr. Kindelon?" replied Pauline, with a gentle, peculiar, interrogative
+emphasis. "And did you agree with him?"
+
+"No," swiftly answered Cora. "I have a faith that he cannot shake--that
+no one can shake! But he has not tried to do so; I must render him that
+justice."
+
+Pauline turned away, with a faint laugh. "The wise men, who have thought
+and therefore doubted," she returned, "are often fond of orthodoxy in
+the women whom they like. They think it picturesque."
+
+She laughed again, and Cora's eyes followed her as she moved toward the
+pictures which she had previously been examining. "Let us change the
+subject," she went on, with a note of cold composure in her voice. "I
+see that you don't like rationalism.... Well, you are a poet, as your
+pictures tell me, and few poets like to do more than feel first and
+think afterward.... Are these pictures for sale, Miss Dares?"
+
+Cora's answer came a trifle tardily. "Three of them," she said.
+
+"Which three?" Pauline asked, somewhat carelessly, as it seemed.
+
+"All but that study of a head. As you see, it is scarcely finished."
+
+"It is the one I should like to purchase. You say it is not for sale?"
+
+"No, Mrs. Varick."
+
+"It is very clever," commented Pauline, almost as though she addressed
+her own thoughts. She turned her face toward Cora's; it wore an
+indefinite flickering sort of smile. "Has it any name?"
+
+"Oh, no; it is a mere study."
+
+"I like it extremely.... By the way, is it a portrait?"
+
+Cora did not reply for several seconds. She had begun to put little
+touches upon her canvas again--or to seem as if she were so putting
+them.
+
+"It's not good enough to be called anything," she presently replied.
+
+"I want it," said Pauline. She was looking straight at the picture--a
+small square of rather recklessly rich color. "I want it very much
+indeed. I ... I will give you a considerable sum for it."
+
+She named the sum that she was willing to give, and in an admirably
+cool, loitering voice. It was something that surpassed any price ever
+proposed to Cora Dares for one of her paintings, by several hundreds of
+dollars.
+
+Cora kept silent. She was touching her canvas. Pauline waited. Suddenly
+she turned and regarded her companion.
+
+"Well?" she said.
+
+Cora flung aside her brush. The two women faced each other.
+
+"I think you are cruel!" cried Cora. It was evident that she was nearly
+in straits for speech, and her very lovely blue eyes seemed to sparkle
+through unshed tears. "I--I told you that I did not wish to sell the
+picture," she hurried on. "I--I don't call it a picture at all, as I
+also told you. It--it is far from being worth the price that you have
+offered me. It ... it ... And," here Cora paused. Her last words had a
+choked sound.
+
+Pauline was looking at her fixedly but quite courteously.
+
+"It is Ralph Kindelon's portrait," she said.
+
+Cora started. "Well! and if it is!" she exclaimed.
+
+Instantly, after that, Pauline went over to her and took one of her
+hands.
+
+"My dear Miss Dares," she said, with that singular sweetness which she
+could always throw into her voice, "I beg you to forgive me. If you
+really wish to retain that picture--and I see that you do--why, then I
+would not take it from you even as a voluntary gift. Let us speak no
+more on the subject."
+
+Cora gave a pained, difficult smile, now. She looked full into Pauline's
+steady eyes for a brief space, and then withdrew her own.
+
+"Very well," she almost faltered, "let us speak no more on the
+subject...."
+
+"I have been horribly merciless," Pauline told herself, when she had
+quitted Cora Dares's studio about ten minutes later. "I have made that
+poor girl confess to me that she loves Ralph Kindelon. And how suited
+they are to each other! She has actual genius--he is brimming with
+intellectual power. I have made a sad failure in my visit to Cora
+Dares.... I hope all my vain exploits among these people, who are so
+different from the people with whom my surroundings of fortune and
+destiny have thus far brought me into natural contact, will not result
+so disastrously."
+
+Her thoughts returned to Kindelon, as she walked homeward, and to the
+hostile terms on which they had parted but a few hours ago.
+
+"My project begins badly," she again mused. "Everything about it seems
+to promise ill. But it is too late to draw back. Besides, I am very far
+from wishing to draw back. I am like an enthusiastic explorer; I want
+to face new discoveries in the very teeth of disaster."
+
+On reaching home she had scarcely time to take off her bonnet before the
+name of her cousin Courtlandt was brought to her by a servant. She went
+down into the little reception-room to meet him, with rather lively
+anticipations of being forced to put herself on the defensive. Her
+sensations had not been unlike those with which we regard the lowering
+of the mercury in a thermometer, while ordering extra fuel so as to be
+on guard against a sudden chill.
+
+Courtlandt was standing before the silver-grated hearth-place; he
+watched the black, tumbled blocks of coal with eyes bent down upon their
+snapping and crackling flames as Pauline appeared. He did not
+immediately raise his eyes as her entering step sounded. But when he did
+raise them, she saw that he was clad in his old impregnable calm.
+
+She sank into a chair, not far from the fire. "Well," she said, with an
+amused smile playing about her lips, "I suppose you have come to scold
+me dreadfully."
+
+"What makes you suppose so?" he asked.
+
+"You darted away, there at the Battery, as if you were fearfully
+shocked."
+
+"I don't think I darted away."
+
+"Oh, well, we won't split hairs. You wouldn't stay, and you might easily
+have stayed. You pleaded stress of business, and you hadn't any, or this
+appearance up-town at so early an hour couldn't have taken place."
+
+"It is remarkable," said Courtlandt, with his gravest serenity, "how you
+pierce through people's pitiful disguises. You make me feel
+conscience-stricken by a realization of my own deceit."
+
+"That is fortunate," said Pauline, with a slight, curt laugh. "For then
+you will, perhaps, express your disapprobation less impudently."
+
+"I might speak pretty plainly to you and yet not be at all impudent."
+
+Pauline threw back her head with a defiant stolidity. "Oh, speak as
+plainly as you please," she said. "I shall have my own views of just how
+impudent you are. I generally have."
+
+"You did something that was a good deal off color for a woman who wants
+herself always regarded as careful of the proprieties. I found you doing
+it, and I was shocked, as you say."
+
+Pauline straightened herself in her chair. "I don't know what you mean,"
+she replied, a little crisply, "by 'off color.' I suppose it is slang,
+and I choose, with a good reason, to believe that it conveys an
+unjustly contemptuous estimate of my very harmless act. I took a stroll
+along that beautiful Battery with a friend."
+
+"With an adventuring newspaper fellow, you mean," said Courtlandt, cool
+as always, but a little more sombre.
+
+Pauline rose. "I will stand a certain amount of rudeness toward myself,"
+she declared, "but I will not stand sneers at Mr. Kindelon. No doubt if
+you had met me walking with some empty-headed fop, like Fyshkille, or
+Van Arsdale, you would have thought my conduct perfectly proper."
+
+"I'd have thought it devilish odd," said Courtlandt, "and rather bad
+form. I've no more respect for those fellows than you have. But if you
+got engaged to one of them I shouldn't call it a horrible disaster."
+
+Pauline smiled, with a threat of rising ire in the smile. "Who thought
+of my becoming 'engaged' to anybody?" she asked. And her accentuation of
+the word which Courtlandt had just employed produced the effect of its
+being scornfully quoted.
+
+He was toying with the links of his watch-chain, and he kept his eyes
+lowered while he said: "Are you in love with this Kindelon chap?"
+
+She flushed to the roots of her hair. "I--I shall leave the room," she
+said unsteadily, "if you presume to talk any further in this strain."
+
+"You are a very rich woman," pursued Courtlandt. What he said had
+somehow the effect of a man exploding something with a hand of admirable
+firmness.
+
+Pauline bit her lips excitedly. She made a movement as if about to quit
+the chamber. Then some new decision seemed to actuate her. "Oh, Court!"
+she exclaimed reproachfully, "how can you treat me in this unhandsome
+way?"
+
+He had lifted his eyes, now. "I am trying to save you from making a
+ridiculous marriage," he said. "I tried once before--a good while
+ago--to save you from making a frightful one. My attempt was useless
+then. I suppose it will be equally useless now."
+
+Pauline gave an agitated moan, and covered her face with both hands....
+Hideous memories had been evoked by the words to which she had just
+listened. But immediately afterward a knock sounded at the partly closed
+door which led into the hall. She started, uncovered her face, and moved
+toward this door. Courtlandt watched her while she exchanged certain low
+words with a servant. Then, a little later, she approached him, and he
+saw that her agitation had vanished, and that it appeared to have so
+vanished because of a strong controlling effort.
+
+"Mr. Kindelon is here," she said, in abrupt undertone. "If you do not
+wish to meet him you can go back into the dining-room." She made a
+gesture toward a _portiere_ not far away. "That leads to the
+dining-room," she went on. "Act just as you choose, but be civil, be
+courteous, or do not remain."
+
+"I will not remain," said Courtlandt.
+
+He had passed from the room some little time before Kindelon entered it.
+
+"You did not expect to see me," said the latter, facing Pauline. His big
+frame had a certain droop that suggested humility and even contrition.
+He held his soft hat crushed in one hand, and he made no sign of
+greeting with the other.
+
+"No," said Pauline softly, "I did not expect to see you." She was
+waiting for the sound of the hall-door outside; she soon heard it, and
+knew that it meant the exit of Courtlandt. Then she went on: "but since
+you are here, will you not be seated?"
+
+"Not until you have forgiven me!" Kindelon murmured. Between the rich,
+fervent, emotional voice which now addressed her and the even
+regularity of the tones she had just heard, what a world of difference
+lay!
+
+"You were certainly rude," she said, thinking how chivalrously his
+repentance became him, and how strong a creature he looked in this
+weaker submissive phase. "You know that I had only the most friendly
+feelings toward you. You accused me of actual hypocrisy. But I will
+choose to believe that you did not mean to lose your temper in that
+positively wild way. Yes, I forgive you, and, in token of my forgiveness
+there is my hand."
+
+She extended her hand, and as she did so he literally sprang forward,
+seizing it. The next instant he had stooped and kissed it. After that he
+sank into a near chair.
+
+"If you had not forgiven me," he said, "I should have been a very
+miserable man. Your pardon makes me happy. Now I am ready to turn over a
+new page of--of friendship--yes, friendship, of course. I shall never
+say those absurd, accusatory things again. What right have I to say
+them? What right have I to anything more than the honor of your notice,
+as long as you choose to bestow it? I have thought everything over; I've
+realized that the fact of your being willing to know me at all is an
+immense extended privilege!"
+
+Pauline still remained standing. She had half turned from him while he
+thus impetuously spoke; she was staring down into the ruddy turmoil of
+the fire.
+
+"Don't say anything more with regard to the little disagreement," she
+answered. "It is all ended. Now let us talk of other things."
+
+He did not answer, and she let quite a long pause ensue while she still
+kept her eyes upon the snapping coal-blocks. At length she continued,--
+
+"I shall have the full list of Mrs. Dares's guests quite soon. It has
+been promised me."
+
+"Yes?" she heard him say, a little absently.
+
+"I shall, no doubt, have it by to-morrow morning," she went on. "Then I
+shall begin my arrangements. I shall issue invitations to those whom I
+wish for my guests. And I shall expect you to help me. You promised to
+help me, as you know. There will be people on the list whom I have not
+yet met--a good many of them. You shall tell me all about these, or, if
+you prefer, you shall simply draw your pen through their names--Why
+don't you ask me how I shall obtain this boasted list?"
+
+"You mean that Mrs. Dares will send it?" she heard him ask.
+
+"No, I mean that I shall secure it from her daughter."
+
+"Her daughter?"
+
+"Yes--Cora. I have been to see Cora. I visited her studio--By the way,
+what a good portrait she has there of you. It is really an excellent
+likeness."
+
+She slowly turned and let a furtive look sweep his face. It struck her
+that he was confused and discomfited in a wholly new way.
+
+"I think it a fair likeness," he returned. "But I did not sit for it,"
+he added quickly. "She painted it from memory. It--it is for sale like
+her other things."
+
+"Oh, no, it is not for sale," said Pauline. She saw his color alter a
+little as her gaze again found stealthy means of scrutinizing it. "Miss
+Cora told me that very decidedly. She wants to keep it--no doubt as a
+precious memento. I thought the wish very flattering--I--I wondered why
+you did not ask Cora Dares to marry you."
+
+She perceived that he had grown pale, now, as he rose and said,--
+
+"I think I shall never ask any woman to marry me." He walked slowly
+toward the door, pausing at a little distance from its threshold. "When
+you want me," he now proceeded, "will you send for me? Then I will most
+gladly come."
+
+"You mean--about the _salon_?" she questioned.
+
+"Yes--about the _salon_. In that and all other ways I am yours to
+command--"
+
+When he had gone she sat musing before the fire for nearly an hour. That
+night, at a little after nine o'clock, she was surprised to receive a
+copious list of names from Cora Dares, accompanied by a brief note.
+
+She sent for Kindelon on the following day, and they spent the next
+evening together from eight until eleven. He was his old, easy, gay,
+brilliant self again. What had occurred between them seemed to have been
+absolutely erased from his memory. It almost piqued her to see how
+perfectly he played what she knew to be a part.
+
+Soon afterward her invitations were sent out for the following Thursday.
+Each one was a simple "At Home." She awaited Thursday with much interest
+and suspense.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+By nine o'clock on Thursday evening all her guests had arrived. They
+comfortably filled her two smart and brilliant drawing-rooms, but quite
+failed to produce the crowded effect noticeable in Mrs. Dares's less
+ample quarters.
+
+Pauline saw with pleasure that the fine pictures, bronzes, and
+bric-a-brac which she had brought from Europe were most admiringly
+noticed. Small groups were constantly being formed before this canvas or
+that cabinet, table, and pedestal. She had kept for some time quite
+close to Mrs. Dares, having a practical sense of the little lady's
+valuable social assistance on an occasion like the present, apart from
+all personal feelings of liking.
+
+"You make it much easier for me," she said at length, after the
+assemblage appeared complete and no new arrivals had occurred for at
+least ten minutes. "It was so kind of you to come, when I know that you
+make a rule of not going anywhere."
+
+"This was a very exceptional invitation, my dear," answered Mrs. Dares.
+"It was something wholly out of the common, you know."
+
+"I understand," said Pauline, with her sweetest laugh. "You wanted to
+see your mantle descend, after a manner, upon my younger shoulders. You
+wanted to observe whether I should wear it gracefully or not."
+
+"I had few doubts on that point," was the slow, soft reply.
+
+"So you really think me a worthy pupil?" continued Pauline, glancing
+about her with an air of pretty and very pardonable pride.
+
+"You have a most lovely home," said Mrs. Dares, "and one exquisitely
+designed for the species of entertainment which you are generous enough
+to have resolved upon."
+
+"Ah, don't say 'generous,'" broke in Pauline. "You give me a twinge of
+conscience. I am afraid my motive has been quite a selfishly ambitious
+one. At least, I sometimes fancy so. How many human motives _are_
+thoroughly disinterested? But if I succeed with my _salon_--which before
+long I hope to make as fixed and inevitable a matter as the day of the
+week on which it is held--the result must surely be a most salutary and
+even reformatory one. In securing my guerdon for work accomplished I
+shall have done society a solid benefit; and when I wear my little crown
+I shall feel, unlike most royal personages, that it is blessed by
+friends and not stained by the blood of enemies."
+
+Her tone was one of airy jest, but a voice at her side instantly said,
+as she finished,--
+
+"Do not be too sure of that. Very few crowns are ever won without some
+sort of bloodshed."
+
+She turned and saw Kindelon, who had overheard nearly all her last
+speech to Mrs. Dares. Something in his manner lessened the full smile on
+Pauline's lips without actually putting it to flight.
+
+"You speak as if you bore gloomy tidings," she said.
+
+Kindelon's eyes twinkled, though his mouth preserved perfect sobriety.
+"You have done precisely what I expected you would do," he said, "in
+undertaking an arbitrary selection of certain guests and an arbitrary
+exclusion of certain others. You have raised a growl."
+
+"A growl!" murmured Mrs. Dares, with a slight dismayed gesture.
+
+Pauline's face grew serious. "Who, pray, are the growlers?" she asked.
+
+"Well, the chief one is that incorrigible and irrepressible Barrowe. He
+has his revolutionary opinions, of course. He is always having
+revolutionary opinions. He makes me think of the Frenchman who declared
+that if he ever found himself in Heaven his first impulse would be to
+throw up barricades."
+
+Pauline bit her lip. "Barricades are usually thrown up in streets," she
+said, with a faint, ired ring of the voice. "Mr. Barrowe probably
+forgets that fact."
+
+"Do you mean that you would like to show him the street now?" asked
+Kindelon.
+
+"I have not heard of what his alleged growl consists."
+
+"I warned you against him, but you thought it best that he should be
+invited. Since you had decided upon weeding, there was no one whom you
+could more profitably weed."
+
+"Mr. Barrowe has a very kind heart," here asserted Mrs. Dares, with tone
+and mien at their gentlest and sweetest. "He is clad with bristles, if
+you please, but the longer you know him the more clearly you recognize
+that his savage irritability is external and superficial."
+
+"I think it very appropriate to say that he is clad with bristles,"
+retorted Kindelon. "It makes me wish that I had reported him as grunting
+instead of growling. In that case the simile would be perfect."
+
+Mrs. Dares shook her head remonstratingly. "Don't try to misrepresent
+your own good heart by sarcasm," she replied. She spoke with her
+unchangeable gravity; she had no lightsome moments, and the perpetually
+serious views which she took of everything made you sometimes wonder how
+and why it was that she managed to make her smileless repose miss the
+austere note and sound the winsome one.
+
+"I am certain of not losing your esteem," exclaimed Kindelon, with all
+his most characteristic warmth. "Your own heart is so large and kind
+that everybody who has got to know it can feel secure in drawing
+recklessly upon its charity."
+
+Mrs. Dares made him no answer, for just then a gentleman who had
+approached claimed her attention. And Pauline, now feeling that she and
+Kindelon were virtually alone together, said with abrupt speed,--
+
+"You told me that this Mr. Barrowe had a kind heart, in spite of his
+gruff, unreasonable manners. You admitted as much, and so, remembering
+how clever his writings are, I decided to retain him on the list. But
+please tell me just what he has been saying."
+
+"Oh, he's tempestuous on the subject of your having done any weeding at
+all. He thinks it arrogant and patronizing of you. He thinks that I am
+at the bottom of it; he always delights in blaming me for something. He
+positively revels, I suppose, in his present opportunity."
+
+"But if he is indignant and condemnatory," said Pauline, "why does he
+not remain away? He has the right of discountenancing my conduct by his
+absence."
+
+"Ah, you don't know him! He never neglects a chance for being turbulent.
+I heard him assert, just now, that Miss Cragge had received a most cruel
+insult from you."
+
+"Miss Cragge!" exclaimed Pauline, with a flash of her gray eyes. "I
+would not have such a creature as that in my drawing-rooms for a very
+great deal! Upon my word," she went on, with a sudden laugh that had
+considerable cold bitterness, "this irascible personage needs a piece of
+my mind. I don't say that I intend giving it to him, for I am at home,
+and the requirements of the hostess mark imperative limits. But I have
+ways left me of showing distinct disfavor, for all that. Are there any
+other acts of mine which Mr. Barrowe does me the honor to disapprove?"
+
+"Oh, yes. I hear that he considers you have acted most unfairly toward
+the triad of poets, Leander Prawle, Arthur Trevor, and Rufus Corson."
+
+Pauline gave a smile that was really but a curl of the lip. "Indeed!"
+she murmured. "I was rather amused by Mr. Prawle's poetic prophecy of a
+divine future race; it may be bad poetry, as he puts it, but I thought
+it rather good evolution. Then the _Quartier Latin_ floridity of Mr.
+Trevor amused me as well: I have always liked fervor of expression in
+verse, and I am not prepared to say that Mr. Trevor has always written
+ludicrous exaggeration--especially since he reveres Theophile Gautier,
+who is an enchanting singer. But when it comes to treating with that
+morbid _poseur_, Mr. Corson, who affects to see beauty in decay and
+corruption, and who makes a silly attempt to deify indecency, I draw my
+line, and shut my doors."
+
+"Of course you do," said Kindelon. "No doubt if you had opened them to
+Mr. Corson, Barrowe would have been scandalized at your doing so. As it
+is, he chooses to championize Mr. Corson and Miss Cragge. He is a
+natural grumbler, a constitutional fighter. By the way, he is coming in
+our direction. Do you see him approaching?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I see him," said Pauline resolutely, "and I am quite prepared
+for him."
+
+Mr. Barrowe presented himself at her side in another minute or two. His
+tall frame accomplished a very awkward bow, while his little eyes
+twinkled above his beak-like nose, with a suggestion of restrained
+belligerence.
+
+"Your entertainment is very successful, Mrs. Varick," he began, ignoring
+Kindelon, who had already receded a step or two.
+
+"Have you found it so?" returned Pauline coolly. "I had fancied
+otherwise."
+
+Mr. Barrowe shrugged his frail shoulders. "Your rooms are beautiful," he
+said, "and of course you must know that I like the assemblage; it
+contains so many of my good friends."
+
+"I hope you miss nobody," said Pauline, after a slight pause.
+
+Mr. Barrowe gave a thin, acid cough. "Yes," he declared, "I miss more
+than one. I miss them, and I hear that you have not invited them. I am
+very sorry that you have not. It is going to cause ill-feeling.
+Everybody knows that you took Mrs. Dares's list--my dear, worthy
+friend's list. It is too bad, Mrs. Varick; I assure you that it is too
+bad."
+
+"I do not think that it is too bad," said Pauline freezingly, with the
+edges of her lips. "I do not think that it is bad at all. I have invited
+those whom I wished to invite."
+
+"Precisely!" cried Mr. Barrowe, with a shrill, snapping sound in the
+utterance of the word. "You have been wrongly advised, however--horribly
+advised. I don't pretend to state _who_ has advised you, but if you had
+consulted me--well, handicapped as I am by a hundred other duties, bored
+to death as I am by people applying for all sorts of favors, I would
+nevertheless, in so good a cause, have willingly spared you some of my
+valuable time. I would have told you by no means to exclude so excellent
+a person as poor, hard-working Miss Cragge. To slight her like that was
+a very unkind cut. You must excuse my speaking plainly."
+
+"I must either excuse it or resent it," said Pauline, meeting the
+glitter of Mr. Barrowe's small eyes with the very calm and direct gaze
+of her own. "But suppose I do the latter? It has usually been my custom,
+thus far through life, to resent interference of any sort."
+
+"Interference!" echoed Mr. Barrowe, with querulous asperity. "Ah, madam,
+I think I recognize just who _has_ been advising you, now; you make my
+suspicion a certainty." He glanced irately enough toward Kindelon as he
+spoke the last words.
+
+Kindelon took a step or two forward, reaching Pauline's side and
+pausing there. His manner, as he began to speak, showed no anger, but
+rather that blending of decision and carelessness roused by an adversary
+from whom we have slight fear of defeat.
+
+"Come, Barrowe," he said, "if you mean me you had better state so
+plainly. As it happens, Mrs. Varick was advised, in the matter of not
+sending Miss Cragge an invitation, solely by herself. But if she had
+asked my counsel it would entirely have agreed with her present course."
+
+"No doubt," almost snarled Mr. Barrowe. "The ill turn comes to the same
+thing. We need not split hairs. I made no personal reference to you,
+Kindelon; but if the cap fits you can wear it."
+
+"I should like to hand it back to you with a bunch of bells on it," said
+Kindelon.
+
+"Is that what you call Irish wit?" replied Mr. Barrowe, while his lips
+grew pale. "If so, you should save it for the columns of the 'Asteroid,'
+which sadly needs a little."
+
+"The 'Asteroid' never prints personalities," returned Kindelon, with
+nonchalant mockery. "It leaves that kind of journalism to your friend
+Miss Cragge."
+
+"Miss Cragge, sir," muttered Barrowe, "is a lady."
+
+"I did not say she was a gentleman," retorted Kindelon, "though her
+general deportment has more than once cast a doubt upon her sex."
+
+Mr. Barrowe gave a faint shiver. "I'm glad I haven't it on my
+conscience," he declared, "that I injured an honest girl to gratify a
+mere spite." He at once turned to Pauline, now. "Madam," he pursued, "I
+must warn you that your project will prove a dire failure if you attempt
+to develop it on a system of despotic preferences. We were all glad to
+come to you, in a liberal, democratic, intellectual spirit. But the very
+moment you undertake the establishment of a society formed on a basis of
+capricious likes and dislikes, I assure you that you are building on
+sand and that your structure will fall."
+
+"In that case, Mr. Barrowe," said Pauline, stung by his unwarranted
+officiousness into the employment of biting irony, "you can have no
+excuse if you allow yourself to be buried in my ruins."
+
+She passed rapidly away, while Kindelon accompanied her. "You were quite
+right," came his speedy encouragement, as they moved onward together.
+"You showed that insufferable egotist the door in the politest and
+firmest manner possible."
+
+"I was in my own house, though," said Pauline, with an intonation that
+betokened the dawn of repentance. "He was very exasperating, truly,
+but--I was in my own house, you know."
+
+"Of course you were," exclaimed Kindelon, "and he treated you as if it
+belonged to somebody else. We are all apt to assert a proprietary right
+when a fellow-citizen ventures to relieve us of our purse, and I think a
+similar claim holds good with regard to our self-respect."
+
+Pauline presently came to a standstill. She looked troubled, and her
+gaze remained downcast for a little while. But soon she lifted it and
+met Kindelon's eyes steadily watching her.
+
+"You don't think I was unjustifiably rude?" she asked.
+
+"No; indeed I do not. I don't think you were rude at all."
+
+She was silent for a brief interval. Then she said, without taking her
+eyes in the least from her companion's face,--
+
+"Do you believe that most women would have acted the same?"
+
+"No," he said, with a quick, slight laugh, "because most women have
+neither your brains nor your independence."
+
+"And you like both in a woman?"
+
+"I like both in you," he said, lowering his handsome head a little as he
+uttered the words.
+
+"Do you think Cora Dares would have acted as I have done?" Pauline
+asked.
+
+He made an impatient gesture; he appeared for a moment distressed and
+embarrassed.
+
+"You and Cora Dares are--are not the same," he said, almost
+stammeringly.
+
+"Oh, I know that very well," answered Pauline. "I have had very good
+reason to know that we are not the same. We are extremely different. By
+the way, she is not here to-night."
+
+"Not here?" he repeated interrogatively, but with a suggestion of drolly
+helpless duplicity.
+
+Pauline raised one finger, shaking it at him for an instant and no more.
+The gesture, transient as it was, seemed to convey a world of
+significance. No doubt Kindelon tacitly admitted this, though his face
+preserved both its ordinary color and composure.
+
+"You are well aware that she is not here," Pauline said.
+
+"Why do you say that?" he asked.
+
+"I think so."
+
+"But perhaps you may be mistaken. Perhaps you have merely fancied that I
+have noticed Miss Cora's non-appearance."
+
+"Perhaps," Pauline repeated. She seemed to be saying the word to her own
+thoughts. But suddenly her manner became far less absent. "Mrs. Dares
+told me that Miss Cora had a headache to-night," she said, with brisk
+activity. "We can all have headaches, you know," she went on, "when we
+choose."
+
+Kindelon nodded slowly. "I have heard that it is an accommodating
+malady," he said, in tones that were singularly lifeless and neutral.
+
+Pauline put forth her hand, and let it rest on his broad, strong arm for
+a second or two.
+
+"Did Miss Cora have a headache?" she asked.
+
+He threw back his head, and shook it with a sudden sound of his breath
+which resembled a sigh of irritation, and yet was not quite that.
+
+"Upon my word, I don't know!" he cried softly.
+
+Just then Pauline found herself confronted by Mr. Howe, the novelist.
+His stoop was very apparent; it seemed even more consumptive than usual;
+his slim hand was incessantly touching and retouching his blue
+spectacles, which gleamed opaque and with a goblin suggestion from the
+smooth-shaven, scholarly pallor of his visage.
+
+"Excuse me, Mrs. Varick," he began, "but I--I wish to speak a word with
+you."
+
+Pauline smiled and assumed an affable demeanor. It cost her an effort to
+do so, for certain acute reasons; but she nevertheless achieved good
+results.
+
+"A great many words, Mr. Howe," she answered, "if you wish."
+
+Mr. Howe gave a sickly smile. "Oh, I don't ask a great many," he
+faltered; and it at once became evident that he was for some reason ill
+at ease, disconsolate, abysmally depressed.
+
+"You are annoyed," said Pauline, chiefly because she found nothing else,
+as a would-be courteous hostess, to say.
+
+"Annoyed?" came the hesitant reply, while Mr. Howe rearranged his blue
+spectacles with a hand that seemed to assume a new momentary
+decisiveness. "I am grieved, Mrs. Varick. I am grieved because a friend
+of mine has received a slight from you, and I hope that it is an
+unintentional slight. I--I want to ask you whether it cannot be
+corrected. I allude to Mr. Bedlowe."
+
+"Mr. Bedlowe!" repeated Pauline amazedly. She turned to Kindelon as she
+spoke.
+
+"Oh, yes," came Kindelon's ready answer; "you remember Bedlowe, of
+course."
+
+"I remember Mr. Bedlowe," said Pauline, sedately.
+
+"Ah! you seem to have forgotten him!" exclaimed Mr. Howe, with a great
+deal of gentlemanly distress. He had discontinued all manual connection
+with his blue glasses; he had even pressed both hands together, in a
+rotatory, nervous way, while he went on speaking. "I hope you did not
+mean to leave poor Bedlowe out," he proceeded, with quite a funereal
+pathos. "The poor fellow feels it dreadfully. I promised him I would say
+nothing about the matter, and yet (as you see) I have broken my
+promise."
+
+"I think Mrs. Varick is sorry to see that you have broken your promise,"
+said Kindelon, shortly and tepidly.
+
+Mr. Howe glanced at Kindelon through his glasses. He was obliged to
+raise his head as he did so, on account of their differing statures.
+
+"Kindelon!" he cried, in reproach, "I thought you were one of my
+friends."
+
+"So I am," came Kindelon's reply, "and that is why I don't like the
+pietistic novelist, Bedlowe, who wrote 'The Christian Knight in Armor'
+and the 'Doubtful Soul Satisfied.'"
+
+If there could be the ghost of a cough, Mr. Howe gave it. He again
+lifted his wan, lank hand toward his spectacles.
+
+"Oh, Kindelon," he remonstrated, "you must not be as uncharitable as
+that. Bedlowe does the best he can--and really, between ourselves, his
+best is remarkably good. Think of his great popularity. Think of the way
+he appeals to the large masses. Think"--
+
+But here Pauline broke in, with the merriest laugh that had left her
+lips that night.
+
+"My dear Mr. Howe!" she exclaimed, "you forget that I heard a bitter
+wrangle between you and Mr. Bedlowe only a few days ago. You had a great
+many hard things to say of him then. I hope you have not so easily
+altered your convictions."
+
+"I--I haven't altered my convictions at all," stammered Mr. Howe, quite
+miserably. "But between Bedlowe as a literary man, and--and Bedlowe as a
+social companion--I draw a very marked line."
+
+Kindelon here put his big hand on Mr. Howe's slight shoulder, jovially
+and amicably, while he said,--
+
+"Come, now, my dear Howe, you mean that the analytical and agnostic
+novelist wants the romantic and pietistic novelist, only for the purpose
+of breaking a lance with him. You want him for that reason and no
+other."
+
+Mr. Howe removed his spectacles, and while he performed this act it was
+evident that he was extremely agitated. The removal of his spectacles
+revealed two very red-rimmed eyes, whose color escaped all note because
+of their smallness.
+
+"I--I want Mr. Bedlowe for no such reason," he asserted. "But I--I do
+not want to attend a--so-called _salon_ at which mere fashionable fancy
+takes the place of solid hospitality."
+
+"You forget," said Pauline, with rapid coolness, "that you are speaking
+in the presence of your hostess."
+
+"He remembers only," came the fleet words of Kindelon, "that he speaks
+at the prompting of Barrowe."
+
+Pauline tossed her head; she was angry again. "I don't care anything
+about Mr. Barrowe," she asserted, with a very positive glance at the
+unspectacled Mr. Howe. "I should prefer to believe that Mr. Howe
+expresses his own opinions. Even if they are very rude ones, I should
+prefer having them original."
+
+"They are original," said Mr. Howe feebly, but somehow with the manner
+of a man who possesses a reserve of strength which he is unable to
+readily command. "I do not borrow my opinions. I--I think nearly all
+people must know this."
+
+"I know it," said Pauline very tranquilly, and with an accent suave yet
+sincere. "I have read your novels, Mr. Howe, and I have liked them very
+much. I don't say that this is the reason why I have asked you here
+to-night, and I don't say that my dislike of Mr. Bedlowe's novels is the
+reason why I have not asked Mr. Bedlowe here to-night. But I hope you
+will let my admiration of your talent cover all delinquencies, and
+permit me to be the judge of whom I shall choose and whom I shall not
+choose for my guests."
+
+Mr. Howe put on his spectacles. While he was putting them on, he said in
+a voice that had a choked and also mournfully reproachful sound,--
+
+"I have no social gifts, Mrs. Varick. I can't measure swords with you. I
+can only measure pens. That is the trouble with so many of us writers.
+We can only write; we can't talk. I--I think it grows worse with us, in
+these days when one has to write with the most careful selection of
+words, so as to escape what is now called commonplace diction. We get
+into the habit of striving after novelty of expression--we have to use
+our 'Thesaurus,' and search for synonyms--we have to smoke excessively
+(a good many of us) in order to keep our nerves at the proper literary
+pitch--we have to take stimulants (a good many of us--though I don't
+understand that, for I never touch wine) in order to drag up the words
+and ideas from an underlying stagnancy. Frankly, for myself, I talk
+quite ill. But I don't want to have you think that I am talking in
+another voice than my own. I don't want, in spite of my failure as a man
+of words, that you should suppose"--
+
+"I suppose nothing, Mr. Howe," broke in Pauline, while she caught the
+speaker's hand in hers, gloved modishly up to the elbow with soft, tawny
+kid. "I insist upon supposing nothing except that you are glad to come
+here and will be glad to come again. I know three or four of your novels
+very well, and I know them so well that I love them, and have read them
+twice or thrice, which is a great deal to say of a novel, as even you, a
+novelist, will admit. But I don't like Mr. Bedlowe's novels any more
+than you do; and if Mr. Barrowe has tried to set you on fire with his
+incendiary feelings, I shall be excessively sorry. You have written
+lovely and brilliant things; you know the human soul, and you have shown
+that you know it. You may not have sold seventy thousand copies, as the
+commercial phrase goes, but I don't care whether you have sold seventy
+thousand or only a plain seventy; you are a true artist, all the
+same.... And now I am going to leave you, for my other guests claim me.
+But I hope you will not care for anything severe and bitter which that
+dyspeptic Mr. Barrowe may say; for, depend upon it, he only wins your
+adherence because he is a clever man on paper, and not because he is
+even tolerable in the stern operations of real life. Frankly, between
+ourselves, I am sure that he makes a very bad husband, though he is
+always talking of being handicapped by autograph-bores and interviewers
+who keep him away from Mrs. Barrowe. I suspect that Mrs. Barrowe must be
+a very unhappy lady. And I'm sure, on the other hand, that Mrs. Howe is
+very happy--for I know there is a Mrs. Howe, or you couldn't describe
+the American women as ably as you do...." Pauline passed onward as she
+ended her final sentence. Kindelon, still at her side, soon said to
+her,--
+
+"What a clever farewell you made: you have won Howe. You flattered him
+very adroitly. It's an open secret that his wife helps him in those
+exquisite novels of his. She is his one type of woman. I think that is
+why Howe will never be great; he will always be exquisite instead. He
+adores his wife, who hates society and always stays at home. If Howe had
+once committed a genuine fault it might have served posterity as a
+crystallized masterpiece."
+
+Pauline shook her head with negative emphasis. "I like him just as he
+is," she murmured. She was silent for a moment, and then added, almost
+plaintively: "My entertainment looks pleasant enough, but I fear that it
+is all a disastrous failure."
+
+"A failure?" echoed Kindelon, with no sympathy in the interrogation.
+
+"Yes, everybody is grumbling. I distinctly feel it. It is not only that
+Barrowe has infected everybody; it is that everybody has a latent
+hostility towards anything like harmonious reunion."
+
+"Isn't there a bit of pure imagination in your verdict?" Kindelon asked.
+
+"Premonition," answered Pauline, "if you choose to call it by that
+name." She stood, while she thus spoke, under an effulgent chandelier,
+whose jets, wrought in the semblance of candles, dispersed from ornate
+metallic sconces a truly splendid glow.
+
+"We have a new arrival," he said. He was glancing toward a near doorway
+while he spoke. Pauline's eyes had followed his own.
+
+"My aunt!" she exclaimed. "And Sallie--and Courtlandt, too!"
+
+"Yes, Courtlandt, too--my friend, Courtlandt," said Kindelon oddly.
+
+"I told Aunt Cynthia she had best not come," murmured Pauline.
+
+"And your cousin, Courtlandt?" said Kindelon. "Did you tell _him_ not to
+come?"
+
+"I am sorry that they came--I somehow can't help but be sorry!"
+exclaimed Pauline, while she moved towards the door by which she had
+seen her kindred enter.
+
+"Sorry? So am I," said Kindelon. He spoke below his breath, but Pauline
+heard him.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+"I am very glad to see you," Pauline was telling her aunt, a little
+later. She felt, while she spoke them, that her words were the merest
+polite falsehood. "I did not suppose you would care to honor me this
+evening--I mean all three of you," she added, with a rather mechanical
+smile in the direction of Miss Sallie and Courtlandt.
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie promptly spoke. She was looking about her through a
+pair of gold-rimmed glasses while she did so. Her portliness was not
+without a modish majesty; folds of a black, close-clinging, lace-like
+fabric fell about her large person with much grace of effect; her severe
+nose appeared to describe an even more definite arc than usual.
+
+"Sallie and I had nothing for to-night," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie. "Lent
+began to-day, you know, and there wasn't even a dinner to go to."
+
+"I am pleased to afford you a refuge in your social distress," returned
+Pauline. It flashed through her mind that circumstance was drawing upon
+her, to-night, for a good deal of bitter feeling. What subtle thunder
+was in the air, ready to sour the milk of human kindness to its last
+drop?
+
+"My dear," murmured her aunt, temporarily discontinuing her stares, and
+speaking more in reproach than conciliation, "you must not be so very
+quick to take offence when none is intended."
+
+Pauline gave a laugh which she tried to make amiable. "It pleases me to
+think that no offence was intended," she declared.
+
+"Your little party was by no means a _pis-aller_ with _me_,
+dear Pauline," here stated Sallie, "whatever it may have been
+in mamma's case. I really wanted so much, don't you know, to see
+these--a--persons." The peculiar pause which Sallie managed to make
+before she pronounced the word "persons," and the gentle yet assertive
+accent which she managed to place upon the word itself, were both, in
+their way, beyond description. Not that either was of the import which
+would render description requisite, except from the point of view which
+considers all weightless trifles valuable.
+
+Pauline bit her lip. She had long ago thought Sallie disqualified for
+contest by her native silliness. The girl had not a tithe of her
+mother's brains; she possessed all the servitude of an echo and all the
+imitativeness of a reflection. But like most weak things she had the
+power to wound, though her little sting was no doubt quite unintentional
+at present.
+
+Courtlandt here spoke. He was perfectly his ordinary sober self as he
+said,--
+
+"I happened to drop in upon Aunt Cynthia to-night, and she brought me
+here. I believe that I come without an invitation. Don't I? I've
+forgotten."
+
+"You haven't forgotten," contradicted Pauline, though not at all
+unpleasantly. "You know I didn't invite you, because I didn't think you
+would care to come. You gave me every reason to think so."
+
+"That was very rude," commented Sallie, with a rebuking look at
+Courtlandt. She had a great idea of manners, but her reverence was quite
+theoretical, as more than one ineligible and undesirable young gentleman
+knew, when she had chosen to freeze him at parties with the blank,
+indifferent regard of a sphinx. "It is so odd, really, Pauline," she
+went on, with her supercilious drawl, which produced a more irritating
+effect upon her cousin because apparently so spontaneous and
+unaffected--"it is so odd to meet people whom one does not know. I have
+always been accustomed to go to places where I knew everybody, and
+bowed, and had them come up and speak."
+
+Pauline busied herself for an instant in smoothing the creases of her
+long gloves between wrist and elbow. "Don't you find it rather pleasant,
+Sallie," she said, "to procure an occasional change?"
+
+"It ought to be refreshing," struck in Courtlandt, neutrally.
+
+"You can have people to talk to you this evening, if you wish," pursued
+Pauline, while a certain sense that she was being persecuted by her
+relatives waged war with a decorous recognition of who and where she
+was.
+
+Before Sallie could answer, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, who had ceased her
+determined survey, said in her naturally high, cool, suave tones,--
+
+"Oh, of course we want you to present some of them to us, Pauline, dear.
+We came for that, Sallie and I. We want to see what has made you so fond
+of them. They are all immensely clever, of course. But one can listen
+and be instructed, if one does not talk. Do they expect you to talk, by
+the way? Will they not be quite willing to do all the talking
+themselves? I have heard--I don't just remember when or how--that they
+usually _are_ willing."
+
+"My dear Aunt Cynthia," said Pauline, in a low but not wholly composed
+voice, "you speak of my guests as if they were the inmates of a
+menagerie."
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie threw back her head a very little. The motion made a
+jewel of great price and fine lustre shoot sparks of pale fire from the
+black lace shrouding her ample bosom. She laughed at the same moment,
+and by no means ill-naturedly. "I am sure they wouldn't like to have you
+suggest anything so dreadful," she said, "you, their protectress and
+patroness."
+
+"I am neither," affirmed Pauline stoutly.
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie lifted her brow in surprise. She almost lifted her
+august shoulders as well. "Then pray what are you, my dear?" she asked.
+
+"Their hostess--and their equal," asserted Pauline. She spoke with
+momentary seriousness, but immediately afterward she chose to assume an
+air of careless raillery.
+
+"Ah, Aunt Cynthia," she went on, "you don't know how you make me envy
+you!"
+
+"Envy me, Pauline?"
+
+"Oh, yes; you have settled matters so absolutely. You have no
+misgivings, no distrusts. You are so magnificently secure."
+
+"I don't understand," politely faltered Mrs. Poughkeepsie. She looked
+inquiringly at Courtlandt.
+
+"It is metaphysics," Courtlandt at once said. "They are a branch of
+study in which Pauline has made great progress." His face remained so
+completely placid and controlled that he might have been giving the
+number of a residence or recording the last quotation in stocks.
+
+Sallie had become absorbed in staring here and there, just as her mother
+had been a brief while ago; Mrs. Poughkeepsie was at a little distance
+from her niece; Courtlandt stood close at Pauline's side, so that the
+latter could ask him, in an undertone full of curt, covert
+imperiousness,--
+
+"Did you come here to say and do rude things?"
+
+"I never say nor do rude things if I can help it," he answered, with a
+leaden stolidity in his own undertone.
+
+"Why did _they_ come?" continued Pauline, lowering her voice still more.
+
+"You invited them, I believe. That is, at least, my impression."
+
+"I mentioned the affair. I never imagined they would wish to come."
+
+"You see that you were mistaken. If I had been you I wouldn't have given
+them the awful opportunity."
+
+"What awful opportunity?" queried Pauline, furtively bristling.
+
+"Of coming," said Courtlandt.
+
+"My dear Pauline," here broke in Mrs. Poughkeepsie, "shall you not
+present anybody to us?"
+
+"Anyone whom you please to meet, Aunt," responded Pauline.
+
+"But, my _dear_, we please to meet _anyone_. We have no preferences. How
+_can_ we have?"
+
+"This is torment," thought poor Pauline. She glanced toward Courtlandt,
+but she might as well have appealed to one of her chairs. "What shall I
+do?" her thoughts sped fleetly on. "This woman and this girl would shock
+and repel whomever I should bring to them. It would be like introducing
+the North Pole and the South."
+
+But her face revealed no sign of her perplexity. She quietly put her
+hand within Courtlandt's arm. "Come, Court," she said, with a very
+creditable counterfeit of gay sociality, "let us find a few devotees for
+Aunt Cynthia and Sallie."
+
+"We shall find a good many," said Courtlandt, as they moved away. "Have
+no fear of that."
+
+"I am by no means sure that we shall find _any_," protested Pauline,
+both with dismay and antagonism.
+
+"Pshaw," retorted Courtlandt. "Mention the name. It will work like
+magic."
+
+"The name? What name?"
+
+"Poughkeepsie. Do you suppose these haphazard Bohemians wouldn't like to
+better themselves if they could?"
+
+Pauline took her hand from his arm, though he made a slight muscular
+movement of detention.
+
+"They are not haphazard Bohemians," she said. "You know, too, that they
+are not. They are mostly people of intellect, of culture, of high and
+large views. I don't know what you mean by saying that they would 'like
+to better themselves.' Where have they ever heard of Aunt Cynthia? Her
+name would be simply a dead letter to them."
+
+Courtlandt gave a low laugh, that was almost gruff, and was certainly
+harsh. "Where have they ever heard of Aunt Cynthia?" he repeated. "Why,
+she never dines out that the society column of half-a-dozen newspapers
+does not record it, and her name would be very far from a dead letter.
+It would be a decidedly living letter."
+
+"But you don't understand," insisted Pauline, exasperatedly. "These
+people have no aims to know the so-called higher classes."
+
+"Excuse me," said Courtlandt, with superb calm. "Everybody has aims to
+know the so-called higher classes--if he or she possibly can. Especially
+'she'," he added in his colorless monotone.
+
+Just then Pauline found herself confronted by Miss Upton. The moon-like
+face of this diminutive lady wore a flushed eagerness as she began to
+speak.
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Varick," she said, "I've a great, _great_ favor to ask of you!
+I want you to introduce me to your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie."
+
+"With pleasure," answered Pauline, feeling as if the request had been a
+sort of jeer. "You know my aunt by sight, then, Miss Upton?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I've known her for some time by sight, Mrs. Varick. Miss
+Cragge pointed her out to me one night at Wallack's. She had a box, with
+her daughter and several other people. One of them was an English
+lord--or so Miss Cragge said.... But excuse my mentioning my friend's
+name, as you don't like her."
+
+"Who told you that I did not like Miss Cragge?" asked Pauline, with
+abrupt crispness.
+
+"Oh, nobody, nobody," hurried Miss Upton. "But you haven't invited her
+here to-night--you left her out, you know. That was all. And I
+thought...."
+
+"Are you a friend of Miss Cragge's?" asked Pauline.
+
+"Oh, yes ... that is, I know her quite well. She writes dramatic
+criticisms, you know, and she has seen me in amateur theatricals. She's
+kind enough to tell me that she _doesn't_ think that I have a tragic
+soul in a comic body." Here Miss Upton gave a formidably resonant laugh.
+"But I'm convinced that I have, and so I've never gone on the stage. But
+if I could get a few of the _very_ aristocratic people, Mrs.
+Varick,--like yourself, and your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie--to hear me
+give a private reading or two, from 'Romeo and Juliet' or 'The
+Hunchback' or 'Parthenia', why, I should be prepared to receive a _new
+opinion_, don't you understand, with regard to my abilities. There is
+nothing like being endorsed at the start by people who belong to the
+real upper circles of society."
+
+"Of course there isn't," said Courtlandt, speaking too low for Miss
+Upton to catch his words, and almost in the ear of Pauline. "Introduce
+me," he went swiftly on. "I will save you the bore of further
+introductions. You will soon see how they will all flock about the
+great nabob, though she may be ignorant of aesthetics, philosophy,
+Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, and anybody you please."
+
+Pauline turned and looked at him. There was the shadow of a sparkle in
+the familiar brown eyes--the eyes that she never regarded closely
+without being reminded of her girlhood, even of her childhood as well.
+
+"It is a challenge then?" she asked softly.
+
+For a second he seemed not to understand her. Then he nodded his head.
+"Yes--a challenge," he answered.
+
+She gave an inward sigh.... A little later she had made the desired
+introduction.... Presently, as Miss Upton moved away on Courtlandt's arm
+in the direction of her aunt and Sallie, she burst into a laugh, of
+whose loudness and acerbity she was equally unconscious.
+
+Martha Dares, appearing at her side, arrested the laugh. Pauline grew
+promptly serious as she looked into Martha's homely face, with its
+little black eyes beaming above the fat cheeks and the unclassic nose,
+but not beaming by any means so merrily as when she had last given all
+its features her full heed.
+
+"You don't laugh a bit as if you were pleased," said Martha, in her
+short, alert way. "I hope nothing has gone wrong."
+
+"It seems to me as if everything were going wrong," returned Pauline,
+with a momentary burst of frankness which she at once regretted.
+
+"Good gracious!" said Martha. "I'm astonished to hear you tell me so."
+
+"Forget that I have told you so," said Pauline, throwing a little
+delicate repulsion into voice and mien. "By the way, your sister is not
+here to-night, Miss Dares."
+
+Martha's plump figure receded a step or two.
+
+"No," she replied, in the tone of one somewhat puzzled for a reply. "I
+came with my mother."
+
+"And your sister had a headache."
+
+"A headache," repeated Martha, showing what strongly resembled
+involuntary surprise.
+
+"Yes. So your mother told me."
+
+"Well, it's true," said Martha. Pauline was watching her more closely
+than she perhaps detected. "Cora's been working very hard, of late. She
+works altogether too hard. I often tell her so--Here comes Mr.
+Kindelon," Martha pursued, very abruptly changing the subject, while her
+gaze seemed to fix itself on some point behind her companion. "He wants
+to speak with you, I suppose. I'll move along--you see, I go about just
+as I choose. What's the use of my waiting for an escort? I'm not
+accustomed to attentions from the other sex, so I just behave as if it
+didn't exist. That's the wisest plan."
+
+"But you surely need not be afraid of Mr. Kindelon," said Pauline.
+
+"Oh, we're not the best of friends just now," returned Martha.... She
+had passed quite fleetly away in another instant. And while Pauline was
+wondering at the oddity of her departure, Kindelon presented himself.
+
+"You and Martha Dares are not good friends?" she quickly asked. She did
+not stop to consider whether or no her curiosity was unwarrantable, but
+she felt it to be a very distinct and cogent curiosity.
+
+Kindelon frowned. "I don't want to talk of Martha Dares," he said, "and
+I hope that you do not, either. She is a very unattractive topic."
+
+"Isn't that a rather recent discovery?"
+
+"Oh, no--Shall we speak of something else? Your aunt's arrival, for
+instance. I see that she is quite surrounded."
+
+"Surrounded?" replied Pauline falteringly. Her eyes turned in the
+direction of Mrs. Poughkeepsie and Sallie.
+
+It was true. Seven or eight ladies and gentlemen were gathered about
+the stately lady and her daughter. Both appeared to be holding a little
+separate and exclusive reception of their own.
+
+"Courtlandt was right!" exclaimed Pauline ruefully, and with a stab of
+mortification. She turned to meet the inquiring look of Kindelon. "I
+thought Aunt Cynthia would be unpopular here," she continued. "I
+supposed that no one in my rooms to-night would care to seek her
+acquaintance."
+
+"This is a grandee," said Kindelon, "and so they are glad enough to know
+her. If your cousin, Mr. Beekman, prophesied anything of that sort, he
+was indeed perfectly right."
+
+Pauline shook her head musingly. "Good heavens!" she murmured, "are
+there any people in the world who can stand tests? I begin to think
+not." Her speech grew more animated, her eyes began to brighten
+indignantly and with an almost tearful light. "Here am I," she went on,
+"determined to encourage certain individuals in what I believed was
+their contempt of social frivolity and the void delusion which has been
+misnamed position and birth. With a sort of polite irony Aunt Cynthia
+appears and shows me that I am egregiously wrong--that she can hold her
+court here as well as at the most giddily fashionable assemblage....
+Look; my cousin has just presented Mr. Whitcomb, the 'coming historian'
+with the pensive face, and Mr. Paiseley, the great American dramatist
+with the abnormal head. How pleased they both seem! They appear to
+tingle with deference. Aunt Cynthia is patronizing them, I am sure, as
+she now addresses them. She thinks them entirely her inferiors; she
+considers them out of her world, which is the correct world to be in,
+and there's an end of it. You can lay the Atlantic cable, you can build
+the Brooklyn Bridge, but you can't budge the granitic prejudices of Aunt
+Cynthia.... Yet why do they consent to be patronized by her? Do they not
+know and feel that she represents a mere sham? Do they value her for
+what she is, or misvalue her for something that she is not?"
+
+Kindelon laughed a little gravely as he answered: "I am afraid they do
+the former. And in being what she is, she is a great deal."
+
+"Surely not in the estimate of those who are at all serious on the
+subject of living--those whom superficialities in all conduct or thought
+weary and even disgust."
+
+"But these," said Kindelon, with one of his hand-sweeps, "are not that
+sort of people."
+
+"I supposed a great many of them were."
+
+"You supposed wrongly."
+
+Pauline gave a momentary frown, whose gloom meant pain. And before her
+face had re-brightened she had begun to speak. "But they cannot care to
+do as Aunt Cynthia does--to trifle, to idle."
+
+"I fancy that a good many of them would trifle and idle if they had your
+aunt's facilities for that employment--or lack of it."
+
+"But they paint, they read, they write, they think; they make poems,
+novels, dramas. They are people with an occupation, an ideal. How can
+they be interested in a fellow-creature who does nothing with her time
+except waste it?"
+
+"She wastes it very picturesquely," replied Kindelon. "She is Mrs.
+Poughkeepsie; she represents great prosperity, aristocratic ease, lofty
+security above need. They read about her; they should not do so, but
+that they do is more the fault of modern journalism than theirs.
+Theoretically they may consider that she deserves their hardest
+feelings; but this has no concern whatever with their curiosity, their
+interest, their hope of advancement."
+
+"Their hope of advancement!" echoed Pauline, forlornly, almost aghast.
+"What possible hope of advancement could _they_ have from such a
+source?"
+
+Her querulous question had scarcely ended when she perceived that Arthur
+Trevor had presented himself at her side. The young poet was exceedingly
+smart to-night. His tawny hair was rolled off his wide brow with a sort
+of precise negligence; it looked as if a deliberative brush and not a
+careless hand had so rolled it. He fixed his dreamy blue eyes with
+steadfastness upon Pauline's face before speaking.
+
+"I am so sorry, Mrs. Varick," he began, giving a distinct sigh and
+slowly shaking his head from side to side. "I wonder if you know what I
+am sorry about."
+
+"Oh, yes," returned Pauline, with a nervous trill of laughter. "You have
+come to me with a complaint on the subject of Mr. Rufus Corson. You see,
+Mr. Trevor, rumor has forestalled you. I heard that you were furious
+because I omitted to ask your intimate enemy."
+
+Arthur Trevor gave an exaggerated start; it was a very French start; he
+lifted his blond eyebrows as much as his shoulders. And he looked at
+Kindelon while he responded:
+
+"Ah! I see! Kindelon has been telling you horrid things. Kindelon hates
+us poets. These men of the newspapers always do. But there is a wide
+gulf between the poetry of to-day and the newspapers of to-day."
+
+"Of course there is," quickly struck in Kindelon. "That is why the
+modern newspaper is read so much and the modern poetry so little."
+
+Arthur Trevor chose to ignore this barbed rejoinder. His dreamy eyes and
+general air of placid reverie made such an attitude singularly easy of
+assumption.
+
+"Poor Rufus feels your slight," he said, addressing Pauline solely. "Why
+do you call him my intimate enemy? We are the dearest of friends. He
+adores decay, and sings of it. I do not sing of it, but I adore it for
+its color. There is always color in decay."
+
+"Discolor," said Kindelon, with better wit than grammar.
+
+"Decay," pursued Arthur Trevor, "is the untried realm of the future
+poet. Scarcely anything else is left him. He is driven to find a beauty
+in ugliness, and there is an immense beauty in ugliness, if one can only
+perceive it. The province of the future poet shall be to make one
+perceive it."
+
+"That is like saying," declared Kindelon, "that the province of the
+future gentleman shall be to make one perceive the courtesy in
+discourtesy or the refinement in vulgarity."
+
+Again Mr. Trevor ignored Kindelon. "Poor Rufus was so much less to blame
+than Leander Prawle," he continued. "And yet you invited Leander
+Prawle. Prawle is so absurdly optimistic. Prawle has absolutely no
+color. Prawle is irretrievably statuesque and sculpturesque. It is so
+nonsensical to be that in poetry. Sculpture is the only art that gives
+an imperious _rien ne va plus_ to the imagination. Prawle should have
+been a sculptor. He would have made a very bad one, because his ideas
+are too cold even for marble. But his poetry would not have been such an
+icy failure if it had been carved instead of written."
+
+"You need not put up with this kind of thing any longer than you want,"
+whispered Kindelon to Pauline. "Hostship, like Mr. Prawle's poetry,
+remember, has its limitations."
+
+Pauline pretended not to hear this audacious aside. "Mr. Trevor," she
+said, making her voice very even and collected, "I regret that I could
+not quite bring myself to ask your friend. The Egyptians, you recollect,
+used to have a death's-head at their banquets. But that was a good many
+years ago, and New York isn't Thebes.... Please pardon me if I tell you
+that I must leave you for a little while."
+
+As Pauline was passing him, Trevor lifted his eyes toward the ceiling.
+He did so without a hint of rhapsody, but in a sort of solemn
+exaltation. "New York is surely not Thebes!" he exclaimed. "Ah, if it
+only were! To have lived in Thebes for one day, to have got its real and
+actual color, would be worth ten years of dull existence here!"
+
+"How I wish fate had treated him more to his taste!" said Kindelon, when
+Pauline and himself were a little distance off. "He meant to make an
+appeal for that mortuary Corson. He might better have tried to
+perpetuate his own welcome at your next _salon_."
+
+"My next _salon_!" echoed Pauline, with a laugh full of fatigue and
+derision.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked shortly.
+
+"I mean that I had best give no other _salon_," she replied. "I mean
+that this is a failure and a mockery."
+
+She looked full up into his eyes as she spoke. They both paused. "So
+soon?" questioned Kindelon, as if in soft amazement.
+
+"Yes--so soon," she answered, with a quiver in her voice and a slight
+upward movement of both hands. "What is it all amounting to?"
+
+"What did I tell you?" he said.
+
+"Oh, confirm your prophecy?" she broke forth, somewhat excitedly. "I
+know you warned me against disappointment. Enjoy your satisfaction--Look
+at Aunt Cynthia now. She is holding a perfect court. How they _do_
+flock round Sallie and herself, just as Courtlandt said that they would!
+I feel that this is the beginning and the end. I have misjudged,
+miscalculated, misinterpreted. And I am miserably dejected!"
+
+Just then Martha Dares approached Pauline. "Will you please introduce me
+to your aunt?" said Martha.
+
+"With the greatest pleasure, Miss Dares," returned Pauline.
+
+"_Et tu Brute?_" said Kindelon, under his breath. Pauline heard him, but
+Martha did not....
+
+A little later Courtlandt had joined her, and Kindelon had glided away.
+
+"Are you convinced?" said Courtlandt.
+
+"Convinced of what?" she retorted, with an almost fierce defiance.
+
+"Oh, of nothing, since you take it so ferociously." She saw that his
+calm brown eyes were coolly watching her face.
+
+"When is your next _salon_?" he asked. "Is it to be a week from
+to-night?"
+
+"It is never to be again," she answered.
+
+She meant the words, precisely as she spoke them. She longed for the
+entertainment to end, and when it had ended she felt relieved, as if
+from a painful tension and strain. Musing a little later in her
+bed-chamber, before retiring, she began to feel a slight change of mood.
+Had she not, after all, expected, demanded, exacted, too much? Was she
+justified in giving way to this depression and disappointment? Was she
+not more blamable in deceiving herself than these people were in
+surprising her? She had been warned by Kindelon; she had, in a certain
+way, been warned by Mrs. Dares. But these were not her desired band of
+plain livers and high thinkers. They were very far below any such
+elevated standard. They had seemed to make a sort of selfish rush into
+her drawing-rooms for the purpose of getting there, and afterward
+boasting that they had got there. She was by no means sure if the very
+quality and liberality of her refreshments had not made for them the
+prospect of another Thursday evening offer increased allurements. Many
+of them were full of the most distressing trivialities. The conduct of
+Mr. Barrowe had seemed to her atrociously unpleasant. His action with
+regard to the excluded Miss Cragge struck her as a superlative bit of
+impudence. If she went on giving more receptions she would doubtless
+only accumulate more annoyances of a similar sort.
+
+No; the intellectual life of the country was young, like the country
+itself. It was not only young; it was raw and crude. To continue in her
+task would be to fail hopelessly. She had best not continue in it. She
+might be wrong in abandoning it so soon; there might be hope yet. But,
+after all, she was undertaking no holy crusade; conscience made no
+demands upon her for the perpetuation and triumph of her project. Let it
+pass into the limbo of abortive efforts. Let it go to make another stone
+in that infernal pathway proverbially paved by good intentions....
+
+She slept ill that night, and breakfasted later than usual. And she had
+scarcely finished breakfasting when a card was handed her, which it
+heightened her color a little to peruse.
+
+The card bore Miss Cragge's name, and one portion of its rather imposing
+square was filled with the names of many Eastern and Western journals
+besides, of which the owner evidently desired to record that she was a
+special correspondent. It seemed to Pauline, while she gazed at the
+scrap of pasteboard, that this was exactly the sort of card which a
+person like Miss Cragge would be apt to use for presentation. She was at
+a loss to understand why Miss Cragge could have visited her at all, and
+perhaps the acquiescing answer which she presently gave her servant was
+given because curiosity surpassed and conquered repulsion.
+
+But after the servant had departed, Pauline regretted that she had
+agreed to see Miss Cragge. "What can the woman want of me?" she now
+reflected, "except to abuse and possibly insult me?"
+
+Still, the word had been sent. She must hold to it.
+
+Pauline gave Miss Cragge a cool yet perfectly courteous bow, as they met
+a little later.
+
+"You are Miss Cragge, I believe," she said, very quietly and amiably.
+
+"Oh, I didn't suppose you'd forgotten me so soon!" came the reproachful
+and rather unsteady answer. Miss Cragge had risen some time before
+Pauline entered the room, and her gaunt shape, clad in scant gear,
+looked notably awkward. Her street costume was untidy, shabby, and even
+bedraggled. She held a bundle of newspapers, which she shifted nervously
+from hand to hand.
+
+"You wish to speak with me, then?" said Pauline, still courteously.
+
+"Yes," returned Miss Cragge. It was evident that she underwent a certain
+distinct agitation. "I have called upon you, Mrs. Varick, because I felt
+that I ought to do so."
+
+"It is, then, a matter of duty, Miss Cragge?"
+
+"Yes--a matter of duty. A matter of duty toward myself. Toward myself
+as a woman, you know--I think that I have been wronged--greatly
+wronged."
+
+"Not wronged by me, I hope."
+
+"Through you, by someone else."
+
+"I do not understand you."
+
+"I--I shall try to make myself plain."
+
+"I trust you will succeed."
+
+"Oh, I shall succeed," declared Miss Cragge, gasping a little for breath
+as she now continued. "I have an enemy, Mrs. Varick, and that enemy is
+your friend. Yes, I mean Mr. Kindelon, of course. He has set you against
+me. He has made you shut your doors upon me. Oh, you need not deny that
+this is true. I am perfectly certain of its truth. I am always received
+by Hagar Williamson Dares. She is a noble, true woman, and she lets me
+come to her house because she knows I have my battle to fight, just as
+she has always had her own, and that I deserve her sympathy and her
+friendship. I don't maintain that I've been always blameless. A
+newspaper woman can't always be that. She gives wounds, just as she gets
+wounds. But I never did Ralph Kindelon any harm in my life. He hates me,
+but he has no business to hate me. I never cared much about his hatred
+till now. But now he has shown me that he is an active and dangerous
+enemy. I mean, of course, about this affair of yours. I wanted to be
+invited to your house last evening; I expected to be invited. I was on
+the Dareses' list. I'm going to be perfectly candid. It would have been
+a feather in my cap to have come here. I know exactly what your position
+in society is, and I appreciate the value of your acquaintance. If you
+had snubbed me of your own accord, I would have pocketed the snub
+without a murmur. I'm used to snubbings; I have to be, for I get a good
+many. Nobody can go abroad picking up society-items as I do, and not
+receive the cold shoulder. But in this case it was no spontaneous rebuff
+on your part; it was the malicious interference of a third party; it was
+Kindelon's mean-spirited persuasion used against me behind my back. And
+it has been an injury to me. It's going to hurt me more than you think.
+It has been found out and talked over that I was dropped by you.... Now,
+I don't want to be dropped. I want to claim my rights--to ask if you
+will not do me justice--if you will not waive any personal concern with
+a private quarrel and allow me to have the same chance that you have
+given so many others. To put it plainly and frankly, Mrs. Varick, I have
+come here this morning for the purpose of asking you if you will not
+give me an invitation to your next entertainment."
+
+All the time she had thus spoken, Miss Cragge had remained standing.
+Pauline, who also stood, had shown no desire that her visitor should
+sit. She was biting her lip as Miss Cragge ended, and her tones were
+full of a haughty repulsion as she now said,--
+
+"Really, I am unprepared to give you any answer whatever. But you seem
+to demand an answer, and therefore I shall give you one. You are very
+straightforward with me, and so I do not see why I should not be equally
+straightforward with you."
+
+Miss Cragge gave a bitter, crisp little laugh. "I see what is coming,"
+she said. "You think me abominable, and you are going to tell me so."
+
+"I should not tell you if I thought it," replied Pauline. "But I must
+tell you that I think you unwarrantably bold."
+
+"And you refuse me any other explanation?" now almost panted Miss
+Cragge. "You will not give me even the satisfaction of knowing why you
+have dropped me?"
+
+Pauline shook her head. "I do not recognize your right to question me on
+that point," she returned. "You assume to know my reason for not having
+asked you here. I object to the form and the quality of your question. I
+deny that I have dropped you, as you choose to term it. I think your
+present course a presumptuous one, and I am ignorant of having violated
+any rights of your own by not having sent you a card to my reception.
+There are a great many other people in New York besides yourself to whom
+I did not send a card. Any quarrel between you and Mr. Kindelon is a
+matter of no concern to me. And as for my having dealt you an injury,
+that assertion is quite preposterous. I do not for an instant admit it,
+and since your attitude toward me is painfully unpleasant, I beg that
+this conversation may be terminated at once."
+
+"Oh, you show me the door, do you?" exclaimed Miss Cragge. She looked
+very angry as she now spoke, and her anger was almost repulsively
+unbecoming. Her next words had the effect of a harsh snarl. "I might
+have expected just this sort of treatment," she proceeded, with both her
+dingy-gloved hands manipulating the bundle of newspapers at still
+brisker speed. "But I'm a very good hater, Mrs. Varick, and I'm not
+stamped on quite so easily as you may suppose. I usually die pretty hard
+in such cases, and perhaps you'll find that your outrageous behavior
+will get the punishment it merits. Oh, you needn't throw back your proud
+head like that, as if I were the dirt under your feet! I guess you'll be
+sorry before very long. I intend to make you so if I can!"
+
+Pauline felt herself turn pale. "You are insolent," she said, "and I
+desire you to leave my house immediately."
+
+Miss Cragge walked to the door, but paused as she reached its threshold,
+looking back across one of her square shoulders with a most malevolent
+scowl.
+
+"You've got no more heart than a block of wood," she broke forth. "You
+never had any. I know all about you. You married an old man for his
+money a few years ago. He was old enough to be your grandfather, and a
+wretched libertine at that. You knew it, too, when you married him. So
+now that you've got his money you're going to play the literary patron
+with it. And like the cold-blooded coquette that you are, you've made
+Ralph Kindelon leave poor Cora Dares, who's madly in love with him, and
+dance attendance on yourself. I suppose you think Kindelon really cares
+for you. Well, you're mightily mistaken if you do think so, and if he
+ever marries you I guess it won't be long before he makes you find it
+out!"
+
+Miss Cragge disappeared after the delivery of this tirade, and as she
+closed the outer hall-door with a loud slam Pauline had sank into a
+chair. She sat thus for a longer time than she knew, with hands knotted
+in her lap, and with breast and lips quivering.
+
+The vulgarity, the brutality of those parting words had literally
+stunned her. It is no exaggeration to state that Miss Cragge's reference
+to her marriage had inflicted a positive agony of shame. But the
+allusion to Cora Dares's love for Kindelon, and to Kindelon's merely
+mercenary regard for herself, had also stabbed with depth and suffering.
+Was it then true that this man's feelings toward her were only the
+hypocritical sham of an aim at worldly advancement? "How shall I act to
+him when we again meet?" Pauline asked herself. "If I really thought
+this charge true, I should treat him with entire contempt. And have I
+the right to believe it true? This Cragge creature has a viperish
+nature. Should I credit such information from such a source?"
+
+That was a day of days with poor Pauline. She seemed to look upon Ralph
+Kindelon in a totally new light. She realized that the man's brilliant
+personality had made his society very dear to her. She told herself that
+she cared for him as she had cared for none other in her life. But the
+thought that personal ambition was solely at the root of his devotion
+affected her with something not far from horror.
+
+By degrees the memory of Miss Cragge's final outburst stung her less and
+less. The whole speech had been so despicable, the intention to wantonly
+insult had been so evident. After a few hours had passed, Pauline found
+that she had regained nearly all her customary composure. She felt that
+if Kindelon should come that evening she could discuss with him calmly
+and rationally the almost hideous occurrence of the morning.
+
+He did come, and she told him a great deal, but she did not tell him
+all. No mention of Cora Dares left her lips, nor of the acrid slur at
+his own relations toward herself. He listened to the recital with a face
+that wrath paled, while it lit a keener spark in his eyes. But he at
+length answered in tones thoroughly controlled, if a little husky and
+roughened:
+
+"I can scarcely express to you my disgust for that woman's conduct. I
+did not think her capable of it. She represents one of the most baleful
+forces of modern times--the nearly unbridled license of the newspaper.
+She has dipped her pen for years into poisonous ink; she is one of our
+American monstrosities and abominations. Her threat of punishment to you
+would be ridiculous if it were not so serious."
+
+"You think that she will carry it out?" asked Pauline.
+
+"I should not be at all surprised if she did so."
+
+"Do you mean that she may write some slanderous article about me?"
+
+"It is quite possible."
+
+Pauline gave a plaintive sigh. "Oh, have I no means of preventing her?"
+she exclaimed.
+
+Kindelon shook his head negatively. "She attacks from an ambuscade,
+nearly always," he answered. "There is no such thing as spiking her
+guns, for they are kept so hidden. Still, let us hope for the best."
+
+Pauline burst into tears. "What a wretched failure I have made of it
+all!" she cried. "Ah, if I had only known sooner that my project would
+bring such disaster upon me!"
+
+"It has brought no disaster as yet," said Kindelon, with a voice full of
+the most earnest sympathy.
+
+"It has brought distress, regret, torment!" asseverated Pauline, still
+struggling with her tears.
+
+"Have you told me all?" he suddenly asked, with an acute, anxious look.
+
+"All?" murmured Pauline.
+
+"Yes. Did that woman say anything more?"
+
+"Yes," Pauline answered, after a little silence, with lowered eyes.
+
+"Ah!" sounded Kindelon's exasperated sigh. "I can almost guess what it
+was," he went on. "She was not content, then, with saying atrocious
+things of your marriage; she must couple our names together--yours and
+mine."
+
+"She mentioned another name still," said Pauline, who continued to gaze
+at the floor. "It was the name of Cora Dares." Pauline lifted her eyes,
+now; they wore a determined, glittering look. "She said that Cora Dares
+was madly in love with you. 'Madly' struck me as an odd enough word to
+apply to that gentle, dignified girl."
+
+"It might well do so!" burst from Kindelon, in a smothered voice. He
+rose and began to pace the floor. She had never seen him show such an
+excited manner; all his past volatility was as nothing to it. And yet he
+was plainly endeavoring to repress his excitement. "However," he
+proceeded, in a swift undertone, "this absurd slander need not concern
+you."
+
+"You call it slander, as if you did not really think it so," she said.
+
+He paused, facing her. "Are you going to let the venomous spite of an
+inferior win your respectful credence?" he questioned.
+
+"We can't help believing certain things," said Pauline, measuredly, "no
+matter who utters them. I believed that Cora Dares was in love with you
+before I heard Miss Cragge say it. Or, at least, I seriously suspected
+as much. But of course this could not be a matter of the least concern
+to myself, until"--And here she paused very suddenly.
+
+"Well?" he queried. "Until?"--
+
+She appeared to reflect, for an instant, on the advisability of saying
+more. Then she lifted both hands, with a tossing, reckless motion. "Oh,"
+she declared, "not until that woman had the audacity to accuse me of
+heartlessly standing in the path of Cora Dares's happiness--of
+alienating your regard from her--of using, moreover, a hatefully
+treacherous means toward this end--a means which I should despise myself
+if I ever dreamed of using!..." Pauline's voice had begun to tremble
+while she pronounced the latter word.
+
+"I understand," he said. His own voice was unsteady, though the anger
+had in great measure left it. To her surprise, he drew quite near her,
+and then seated himself close at her side. "If you did truly care for
+me," came his next sentence, "how little I should care what false
+witness that woman bore against the attachment! But since that day down
+at the Battery, when I wore my heart on my sleeve so daringly, I have
+made a resolve. It will be your fault, too, if I fail to keep it. And if
+I do fail, I shall fail most wretchedly. I--I shall make a sort of
+desperate leap at the barrier which now separates you and me."
+
+"You say it will be my fault," was Pauline's response. The color had
+stolen into her cheeks before she framed her next sentence, and with a
+most clear glow. "How will it be my fault?"
+
+"You must have given me encouragement," he said, "or at least something
+that I shall take for encouragement."
+
+A silence followed. She was looking straight at the opposite wall; her
+cheeks were almost roseate now; a tearful light shone in her eyes as his
+sidelong look watched them. "Perhaps," she faltered, "you might take for
+encouragement what I did not mean as such."
+
+"Ah, that is cruel!" he retorted.
+
+She turned quickly; she put one hand on his arm. "I did not wish to be
+cruel!" she affirmed, gently and very feelingly.
+
+It seemed to her, then, that the strong arm on which her hand rested
+underwent a faint tremor.
+
+"It is easy for you to be cruel, where I am concerned."
+
+"Easy!" she repeated, rapidly withdrawing her hand, and using a hurt
+intonation.
+
+He leaned closer to her, then. "Yes," he said. "And you know why. I have
+told you of the difference between us. I have told you, because I am
+incessantly feeling it."
+
+"There is a great difference," she answered, with a brisk little nod, as
+though of relief and gratification. "You have more intellect than I--far
+more. You are exceptional, capable, important. I am simply usual,
+strenuous, and quite of the general herd. That is the only difference
+which I will admit, although you have reproached me for practising a
+certain kind of masquerade--for secretly respecting the shadow and
+vanity called caste, birth, place. Yes," she went on, with a soft fervor
+that partook of exultation, while she turned her eyes upon his face and
+thought how extraordinary a face it was in its look of power and
+manliness, "I will accede to no other difference than this. You are
+above me, and I will not let you place yourself on my level!"
+
+She felt his breath touch her cheek, then, as he replied: "You are so
+fine and high and pure that I think you could love only one whom you set
+above yourself--however mistakenly."
+
+"My love must go with respect--always," she said.
+
+"I am not worthy of your respect."
+
+"Do you want me to credit Miss Cragge?"
+
+"Did _she_ say that I was unworthy of it?"
+
+"I--I cannot tell you what she said on that point. I would not tell you,
+though you begged me to do so."
+
+She saw a bitter smile cross his face, but it lingered there merely an
+instant. "I can guess," he avowed, "that she tried to make you believe I
+do not really love you! It is so like her to do that."
+
+"I--I will say nothing," stammered Pauline, once more averting her eyes.
+
+Immediately afterward he had taken her hand in his own. She resisted
+neither its clasp nor its pressure.
+
+"You know that I love you," she now heard him say, though the leap of
+her heart made his words sound far off, confused, unreal. "You must
+have known it days ago! There--my resolve is broken! But what can I do?
+You have stooped downward from your high state by telling me that I am
+better than you. I am not better than you, Pauline! I am below you--all
+the world would say so except yourself. But you don't care for the
+world. Well, then I will despise it, too, because you bid me. I never
+respected what you represent until you made me respect it by making me
+love you. Now I respect and love it, both, because you are a part of it.
+This is what your project, your ambition, has come to. Ah! how pitiful a
+failure! you're disgusted with your _salon_--you have been ill-treated,
+rebuffed, deceived! The little comedy is played to the end--and what
+remains? Only a poor newspaper-fellow, a sort of Irish adventuring
+journalist, who offers you his worthless heart to do what you choose
+with it! What _will_ you choose to do with it? I don't presume to
+advise, to demand--not even to ask! If you said you would marry Ralph
+Kindelon you would be making a horrible match! Don't let us forget that.
+Don't let us forget how Mrs. Poughkeepsie would storm and scold!"
+
+He had both her hands in both his own, now. She looked at him with eyes
+that sparkled and swam in tears. But though she did not withdraw her
+hands, she receded from him while brokenly saying:
+
+"I--I don't care anything about Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie. But
+there--there is something else that I do care about. It--it seems to
+steal almost like a ghost between us--I can't tell why--I have no real
+reason to be troubled as I am--it is like a last and most severe
+distress wrought by this failure of mine with all those new people....
+It is the thought that you have made Cora Dares believe that you meant
+to marry her."
+
+Pauline's voice died away wretchedly, and she drooped her head as the
+final faint word was spoken. But she still let Kindelon hold her hands.
+And his grasp tightened about them as she heard him answer:
+
+"I suppose Cora Dares _may_ have believed that.... But, good God! am I
+so much to blame? I had never met _you_, Pauline. It was before I went
+to Ireland the last time--I never asked her to marry me--It was what
+they call a flirtation. Am I to be held to account for it? Hundreds of
+men have been foolish in this way before myself--Have you raised me so
+high only to dash me down?--Won't you speak? Won't you tell me that you
+forgive a dead fancy for the sake of a living love? Are you so
+cruel?--so exacting?"
+
+"I am not cruel," she denied, lifting her eyes....
+
+It was a good many minutes later that she said to him, with the tears
+standing on her flushed cheeks, and her fluttered voice in truly sad
+case,
+
+"I--I am going to accept the Irish adventuring journalist (as--as he
+calls himself) for my husband, though he--he has never really asked me
+yet."
+
+"He could not ask you," affirmed Kindelon, with by no means his first
+kiss. "Like every subject who wishes to marry a princess, he was forced
+to recognize a new matrimonial code!"
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+Pauline was surprised, during the several ensuing days, to find how
+greatly her indignation toward Miss Cragge had diminished. The new
+happiness which had come to her looked in a way resultant, as she
+reflected upon it, from that most trying and oppressive interview.
+
+"I could almost find it in my heart to forgive her completely," she told
+Kindelon, with a beaming look.
+
+"I wish that my forgiveness were to be secured as easily," replied
+Kindelon.
+
+"Your forgiveness from whom?" asked Pauline, with a pretty start of
+amazement.
+
+"Oh, you know. From your aunt, the vastly conservative Mrs.
+Poughkeepsie, and her equally conservative daughter."
+
+Pauline gave a laugh of mock irritation. She could not be really
+irritated; she was too drenched with the wholesome sunshine of good
+spirits. "It is so ridiculous, Ralph," she said, "for you to speak of my
+relations as if they were my custodians or my patrons. I am completely
+removed from them as regards all responsibility, all independence. I
+wish to keep friends with them, of course; we are of the same blood, and
+quarrels between kinspeople are always in odious taste. But any very
+insolent opposition would make me break with them to-morrow."
+
+"And also with your cousin, Courtlandt Beekman?" asked Kindelon,
+smiling, though not very mirthfully.
+
+Pauline put her head on one side. "I draw a sharp line between him and
+the Poughkeepsies," she said, either seeming to deliberate or else doing
+so in good earnest. "We were friends since children, Court and I," she
+proceeded. "I should hate not to keep friends with Court always."
+
+"You must make up your mind to break with him," said Kindelon, with
+undoubted gravity.
+
+"And why?" she quickly questioned.
+
+"He abominates me."
+
+"Oh, nonsense! And even if he does, he will change in time ... I thought
+of writing him to-day," Pauline slowly proceeded. "But I did not. I have
+put off all that sort of thing shamefully."
+
+"All that sort of thing?"
+
+"Yes--writing to people that I am engaged, you know. That is the
+invariable custom. You must announce your intended matrimonial step in
+due form."
+
+He looked at her with a pitying smile which she thought became him most
+charmingly. "And you have procrastinated from sheer dread, my poor
+Pauline!" he murmured, lifting her hand to his lips and letting it rest
+against them. "Dread of an explosion--of a distressing nervous ordeal.
+How I read your adroit little deceits!"
+
+She withdrew her hand, momentarily counterfeiting annoyance. "You absurd
+would-be seer!" she exclaimed. "No, I'll call you a raven. But you can't
+depress me by your ominous wing-flapping! I thought Aunt Cynthia would
+drop in yesterday; I thought most _certainly_ that she would drop in
+to-day. That is my reason for not making our engagement transpire
+through letter."
+
+"I see," said Kindelon, with a comic, quizzical sombreness. "You didn't
+want to open your guns on the enemy; you were waiting for at least a
+show of offensive attack...."
+
+But, as it chanced, Mrs. Poughkeepsie did drop in upon Pauline at about
+two o'clock the next day. She came unattended by Sallie, but she had
+important and indeed momentous news to impart concerning Sallie. As
+regarded Pauline's engagement, she was, of course, in total ignorance
+of it. But she chose to deliver her own supreme tidings with no
+suggestion of impulsive haste.
+
+"You are looking very well," she said to Pauline, as they sat on a
+yielding cachemire lounge together, in the little daintily-decked lower
+reception-room. "And, my dear niece," she continued, "you must let me
+tell you that I am full of congratulations at your not being made ill by
+what happened here the other evening. Sallie and I felt for you deeply.
+It was so apparent to us that you would never have done it if you had
+known how dreadfully it would turn out.... But there is no use of raking
+up old by-gones. You have seen the folly of the whole thing, of course.
+My dear, it has naturally got abroad. The Hackensacks know it, and the
+Tremaines, and those irrepressible gossips, the Desbrosses girls. But
+Sallie and I have silenced all stupid scandals as best we could, and
+merely represented the affair as a capricious little pleasantry on your
+part. You haven't lost caste a particle by it--don't fancy that you
+have. You were a Van Corlear, and you're now Mrs. Varick, with a great
+fortune; and such a whim is to be pardoned accordingly."
+
+Pauline was biting her lips, now. "I don't want it to be pardoned, Aunt
+Cynthia," she said, "and I don't hold it either as a capricious
+pleasantry or a whim. It was very serious with me. I told you that
+before."
+
+"Truly you did, my dear," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie. She laughed a mellow
+laugh of amusement, and laid one gloved hand upon Pauline's arm. "But
+you saw those horrible people in your drawing-rooms, and I am sure that
+this must have satisfied you that the whole project was impossible ...
+_en l'air_, my dear, as it unquestionably was. Why, I assure you that
+Sallie and I laughed together for a whole hour after we got home. They
+were nearly all such droll creatures! It was like a fancy-ball without
+the mask, you know. Upon my word, I enjoyed it after a fashion, Pauline;
+so did Sallie. One woman always addressed me as 'ma'am.' Another asked
+me if I '_resided_ on _the_ Fifth Avenue.' Still another ... (no, by the
+way, that wasn't a woman; it was a man) ... inquired of Sallie whether
+she danced the Lancers much in fashionable circles.... Oh, how funny it
+all was! And they didn't talk of books in the least. I supposed that we
+were to be pelted with quotations from living and dead authors, and
+asked all kinds of radical questions as to what we had read. But they
+simply talked to us of the most ordinary matters, and in a _very_
+extraordinary way.... However, let us not concern ourselves with them
+any more, my dear. They were horrid, and you know they were horrid, and
+it goes without saying that you will have no more to do with them."
+
+"I thought some of them horrid," said Pauline, with an ambiguous
+coolness, "though perhaps I found them so in a different way from
+yourself."
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie repeated her mellow laugh, and majestically nodded
+once or twice as she did so.
+
+"Well, well, my dear," she recommenced, "let us dismiss them and forget
+them.... I hope you are going out again. You have only to signify a
+wish, you know. There will not be the slightest feeling in society--not
+the slightest."
+
+"Really?" said Pauline, with an involuntary sarcasm which she could not
+repress.
+
+But her aunt received the sarcasm in impervious good faith. "Oh, not the
+slightest feeling," she repeated. "And I do hope, Pauline," she went on,
+with a certain distinct yet unexplained alteration of manner, "that you
+will make your _rentree_, as it were, at a little dinner I shall give
+Sallie next Thursday. It celebrates an event." Here Mrs. Poughkeepsie
+paused and looked full at her niece. "I mean Sallie's engagement."
+
+"Sallie's engagement?" quickly murmured Pauline. The latter word had
+carried an instant personal force of reminder.
+
+"Yes--to Lord Glenartney. You met him once or twice, I believe."
+
+"Lord Glenartney!" softly iterated Pauline. She was thinking what a gulf
+of difference lay, for the august social intelligence of her aunt,
+between the separate bits of tidings which she and Mrs. Poughkeepsie had
+been waiting to impart, each to each.
+
+"Yes, Glenartney has proposed to dear Sallie," began the lady, waxing
+promptly and magnificently confidential. "Of course it is a great match,
+even for Sallie. There can be no doubt of that. I don't deny it; I don't
+for an instant shut my eyes to it; I consider that it would justly
+subject me to ridicule if I did. Lord Glenartney was not expected to
+marry in this country; there was no reason why he should do so. He is
+immensely rich; he has three seats, in England and Scotland. He is twice
+a Baron, besides being once an Earl, and is first cousin to the Duke of
+Devergoil. Sallie has done well; I wish everybody to clearly understand,
+my dear Pauline, that I _think_ Sallie has done brilliantly
+and wonderfully well. A mother always has ambitious dreams for her
+child ... can a mother's heart help having them? But in my very wildest
+dreams I never calculated upon such a marriage for my darling child as
+this!"
+
+Pauline sat silent before her aunt's final outburst of maternal fervor.
+She was thinking of the silly caricature upon all manly worthiness that
+the Scotch peer just named had seemed to her. She was thinking of her
+own doleful, mundane marriage in the past. She was wondering what malign
+power had so crooked and twisted human wisdom and human sense of
+fitness, that a woman endowed with brains, education, knowledge of right
+and wrong, should thus exult (and in the sacred name of maternity as
+well!) over a union of this wofully sordid nature.
+
+"I--I hope Sallie will be happy," she said, feeling that any real doubt
+on the point might strike her aunt as a piece of personal envy.
+"Curiously enough," she continued, "_I_, also have to tell you of an
+engagement, Aunt Cynthia."
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie raised her brows in surprise. "Oh, you mean poor dear
+Lily Schenectady. I've heard of it. It has come at last, my dear, and he
+is only a clerk on about two thousand a year, besides not being of the
+_direct_ line of the Auchinclosses, as one might say, but merely a sort
+of obscure relation. Still, it is said that he has fair expectations;
+and then you know that poor dear Lily's freckles _are_ a drawback, and
+that she has been called a _spotted_ lily by some witty persons, and
+that it has really become a nickname in society, and"--
+
+"I did not refer to Lily Schenectady," here interrupted Pauline. "I
+spoke of myself."
+
+The mine had been exploded. Pauline and Mrs. Poughkeepsie looked at each
+other.
+
+"Pauline!" presently came the faltered answer.
+
+"Yes, Aunt Cynthia, I spoke of myself. I am engaged to Mr. Kindelon."
+
+"Mr. Kindelon!"
+
+"Yes. I am sure you know who he is."
+
+"Oh, I know who he is." Mrs. Poughkeepsie spoke these words with a
+ruminative yet astonished drawl.
+
+"Well, I am engaged to him," said Pauline, stoutly but not
+over-assertively. She had never looked more composed, more simply
+womanly than now.
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie rose. It always meant something when this lady rose.
+It meant a flutter of raiment, a deliberation of readjustment, a kind of
+superb, massive dislocation.
+
+"I am horrified!" exclaimed the mother of the future Countess
+Glenartney.
+
+Pauline rose, then, with a dry, chill gleam in her eyes. "I think that
+there is nothing to horrify you," she said.
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie gave a kind of sigh that in equine phrase we might
+call a snort. Her large body visibly trembled. She rapidly drew forth a
+handkerchief from some receptacle in her ample-flowing costume, and
+placed it at her lips. Pauline steadily watched her, with hands crossed
+a little below the waist.
+
+"I do so hope that you are not going to faint, Aunt Cynthia," she said,
+with a satire that partook of strong belligerence.
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie, with her applied handkerchief, did not look at all
+like fainting as she glanced above the snowy cambric folds toward her
+niece.
+
+"I--I never faint, Pauline ... it is not my way. I--I know how to bear
+calamities. But this is quite horrible ... it agitates me accordingly.
+I--I have nothing to say and yet I--I have a great deal to say."
+
+"Then don't say it!" now sharply rang Pauline's retort.
+
+"Ah! you lose your temper? It is just what I might have thought--under
+the circumstances!"
+
+Pauline clenched her teeth together for a short space, to keep from any
+futile disclosure of anger. And presently she said, with a shrill yet
+even directness,--
+
+"What, pray, _are_ the circumstances? I tell you that I am to marry the
+man whom I choose to marry. You advised me--you nearly _forced_ me,
+once--to marry the man whom it was an outrage to make my husband!"
+
+"Pauline!"
+
+"What I tell you is true! He whom I select is not of your world! And, by
+the way, what is your world? A little throng of mannerists, snobs, and
+triflers! I care nothing for such a world! I want a larger and a better.
+You say that I have failed in my effort to break down this barrier of
+conservatism which hedged me about from my birth.... Well, allow that I
+_have_ failed in that! I have not failed in finding some true gold from
+all that you sneer at as tawdry dross!... Tawdry! I did well to chance
+upon the word! What was that gentlemanly bit of vice whom you were so
+willing I should marry a few years ago? You've just aired your tenets to
+me; I'll air a few of mine to you now. We live in New York, you and I.
+Do you know what New York means? It means what America means--or what
+America _ought_ to mean, from Canada to the Gulf! And that is--exemption
+from the hateful bonds of self-glorifying snobbery which have disgraced
+Europe for centuries! You call yourself an aristocrat. How dare you do
+so? You dwell in a land which was washed with the blood, less than a
+century ago, of men who died to kill just what you boast of and exalt!
+Look more to your breeding and your brains, and less to your so-called
+caste! I come of your own race, and can speak with right about it. What
+was it, less than four generations ago? You call it Dutch, and with a
+grand air. It flowed in the veins of immigrant Dutchmen, who would have
+opened their eyes with wonder to see the mansion you dwell in, the
+silver forks you eat with! _They_ dwelt in wooden shanties and ate with
+pewter forks.... Your objection to my marriage with Ralph Kindelon is
+horrible--that and nothing more! He towers above the idiot whom you are
+glad to have Sallie marry! What do I care for the little 'lord'? You bow
+before it; I despise it. You call my project, my dream, my desire, a
+failure ... I grant that it is. But it is immeasurably above that petty
+worship of the Golden Calf, which _you_ name respectability and which
+_I_ denounce as only a pitiful sham! The world is growing older, but you
+don't grow old with it. You close your eyes to all progress. You get a
+modish milliner, you keep your pew in Grace Church, you drop a big coin
+into the plate when a millionaire hands it to you, and you are content.
+Your contentment is a pitiful fraud. Your purse could do untold good,
+and yet you keep it clasped--or, if you loose the clasp, you do it with
+a flourish, a vogue, an _eclat_.... Mrs. Amsterdam has done the same for
+this or that asylum or hospital, and so you, with fashionable
+acquiescence, do likewise. And you--you, Cynthia Poughkeepsie, who tried
+to wreck my girlish life and almost succeeded--you, who read nothing of
+what great modern minds in their grandly helpful impulse toward humanity
+are trying to make humanity hear--you, who think the fit set of a
+patrician's gown above the big struggle of men and women to live--you,
+who immerse yourself in idle vanities and talk of everyone outside your
+paltry pale as you would talk of dogs--_you_ dare to upbraid me because
+I announce to you that I will marry a man whom power of mind makes your
+superior, and whom natural gifts of courtesy make far more than your
+equal!"
+
+As Pauline hotly finished she saw her aunt recede many steps from her.
+
+"Oh, this--this is frightful!" gasped Mrs. Poughkeepsie. "It--it is the
+_theatre_! You will go on the stage, I suppose. It seems to me you have
+done everything but go on the stage, already! That would be the crowning
+insult to yourself--to your family!"
+
+"I shan't go on the stage," shot Pauline, "because I have no talent for
+it. If I had talent, perhaps I would go. I think it a far better life
+for an American woman than to prate triumphantly about marrying her
+daughter to a titled English fool!"
+
+Mrs. Poughkeepsie uttered a cry, at this point. She passed from the
+room, and Pauline, overcome with the excess of her disclaimer, soon
+afterward sank upon a chair....
+
+An almost hysterical fit of weeping at once followed.... It must have
+been a half-hour later when she felt Kindelon's face lowered to her own.
+He had nearly always come, since their engagement, at more or less
+unexpected hours.
+
+"Some hateful thing has happened," he said very tenderly; "whom have you
+seen? Why do you sob so, Pauline? Have you seen _her_? Has Cora Dares
+been here?"
+
+Pauline almost sprang from her chair, facing him. "Cora Dares," she
+cried, plaintively and with passion. "Why do you mention her name now?"
+
+Kindelon folded her in his strong arms. "Pauline," he expostulated, "be
+quiet! I merely thought of what you yourself had told me, and of what I
+myself had told _you_? What is it, then, since it is not she? Tell me,
+and I will listen as best I can."
+
+She soon began to tell him, leaning her head upon his broad breast,
+falteringly and with occasional severe effort.
+
+"I--I was wrong," she at length finished. "I should not have spoken so
+rashly, so madly.... But it was all because of you, Ralph--because of my
+love for you!"
+
+He pressed her more closely within the arms that held her.
+
+"I don't blame you!" he exclaimed. "You were wrong, as you admit that
+you were wrong ... but I don't blame you!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+
+That night was an almost sleepless one for Pauline, and during the next
+morning she was in straits of keen contrition. Theoretically she
+despised her aunt, but in reality she despised far more her own loss of
+control. Her self-humiliation was so pungent, indeed, that when, at
+twelve o'clock on this same day, Courtlandt's card was handed to her,
+she felt a strong desire to escape seeing him, through the facile little
+falsehood of a "not at home." But she concluded, presently, that it
+would be best to face the situation at once, since avoidance would be
+simply postponement. Courtlandt was as inevitable as death; he must be
+met sooner or later.
+
+She met him. She did not expect that he would offer her his hand, and
+she made no sign of offering her own. He was standing near a small
+table, as she entered, and his attention seemed much occupied with some
+exquisitely lovely roses in a vase of aerial porcelain. He somehow
+contrived not wholly to disregard the roses while he regarded Pauline.
+It was very cleverly done, and with that unconscious quiet which stamped
+all his clever doings.
+
+"These are very nice," he said, referring to the roses. He had a pair of
+tawny gloves grasped in one hand, and he made an indolent, whipping
+gesture toward the vase while Pauline seated herself. But he still
+remained standing.
+
+"Yes," she replied, as we speak words automatically. "They are rare
+here, but I know that kind of rose in Paris."
+
+"Did your future husband send them?" asked Courtlandt. His composure was
+superb. He did not look at Pauline, but with apparent carelessness at
+the flowers.
+
+"Yes," she said; and then, after a slight pause, she added: "Mr.
+Kindelon sent them."
+
+Courtlandt fixed his eyes upon her face, here. "Wasn't it rather
+sudden?" he questioned.
+
+"My engagement?"
+
+"Your engagement."
+
+"Sudden? Well, I suppose so."
+
+"I didn't expect it quite yet."
+
+She gave a little laugh which sounded thin and paltry to her own ears.
+"That means you were prepared for it, then?"
+
+"Oh, I saw it coming."
+
+"And Aunt Cynthia has told you, no doubt."
+
+"Yes. Aunt Cynthia has told me. I felt that I ought to drop in with my
+congratulations."
+
+Pauline rose now; her lips were trembling, and her voice likewise, as
+she said:--
+
+"I do hope that you give them sincerely, Court."
+
+"Oh, if you put it in that way, I don't give them at all."
+
+"Then you came here to mock me?"
+
+"I don't know why I came here. I think it would have been best for me
+not to come. I thought so when I decided to come. Probably you do not
+understand this. I can't help you, in that case, for I don't understand
+it myself."
+
+"I choose to draw my own conclusions, and they are kindly and friendly
+ones. Never mind how or what I understand. You are here, and you have
+said nothing rude yet. I hope you are not going to say anything rude,
+for I haven't the heart to pick a quarrel with you--one of our old,
+funny, soon-healed quarrels, you know. I am too happy, in one way, and
+too repentant in another."
+
+"Repentant?"
+
+"Yes. I said frightful things yesterday to Aunt Cynthia. I dare say she
+has repeated them."
+
+"Oh, yes, she repeated every one of them."
+
+"And no doubt with a good deal of wrathful embellishment!" here
+exclaimed Pauline, bristling.
+
+"Do you think they would bear decoration? Wouldn't it be like putting a
+cupola on the apex of the Trinity Church steeple?"
+
+"Not at all!" cried Pauline. "I might have said a great deal worse!
+Oceans and continents lie between Aunt Cynthia and myself! And I told
+her so!"
+
+"Really? I thought you were at pretty _close_ quarters with each other,
+judging from her account of the row."
+
+"There was no _row_!" declared Pauline, drawing herself up very finely.
+"What did she accuse me of saying, please?"
+
+"Oh, I forget. She said you abused her like a pickpocket for not liking
+the man you're engaged to."
+
+Pauline shrugged her shoulders, in the manner of one who thinks better
+of the angry mood, and handsomely abjures it. "Positively, Courtlandt,"
+she said, "I begin to think you had no purpose whatever in coming here
+to-day."
+
+His sombre brown eyes began to sparkle, though quite faintly, as he now
+fixed them upon her. "I certainly had one purpose," he said. She saw
+that his right hand had thrust itself into the breast of his coat, as
+though it searched there for something. "I wanted to show you this, as I
+imagined that you don't see the horrid little sheet called 'The Morning
+Monitor,'" he proceeded.
+
+"'The Morning Monitor'!" faltered Pauline, with a sudden grievous
+premonition, as she watched her cousin draw forth a folded newspaper.
+"No, I never heard of it."
+
+"It has evidently heard of you," he answered. "I never read the vilely
+personal little affair. But a kind friend showed me this issue of
+to-day. Just glance at the second column on the second page--the one
+which is headed 'The Adventures of a Widow'--and tell me what you think
+of it."
+
+Pauline took the newspaper with unsteady hand. She sank into her chair
+again, and began to read the column indicated. The journal which she now
+held was one of recent origin in New York, and it marked the lowest ebb
+of scandalous newspaper license. It had secured an enormous circulation;
+it was already threatening to make its editor a Croesus. It traded, in
+the most unblushing way, upon the curiosity of its subscribers for a
+knowledge of the peccadilloes, imprudences, and general private
+histories of prominent or wealthy citizens. It was a ferret that
+prowled, prodded, bored, insinuated. It was utterly lawless, utterly
+libellous. It left not even Launcelot brave nor Galahad pure. It was one
+of those detestable opportunities which this nineteenth century,
+notwithstanding a thousand evidences of progress, thrusts into the hands
+of cynics and pessimists to rail against the human nature of which they
+themselves are the most melancholy product. It had had suits brought
+against it, but the noble sale of its copies rendered its heroic
+continuation possible. Truth, crushed to earth, may rise again, but
+scurrilous slander, in the shape of "The Morning Monitor," remained
+capably erect. It fed and throve on its own dire poison.
+
+Pauline soon found herself reading, with misty eyes and indignant
+heart-beats, a kind of baleful biography of herself, in which her
+career, from her rash early marriage until her recent entertainment of
+certain guests, was mercilessly parodied, ridiculed, vilified. These
+pages will not chronicle in any unsavory details what she read. It was
+an article of luridly intemperate style, dissolute grammar, and gaudy
+rhetoric. It bit as a brute bites, and stung as a wasp stings, without
+other reason that that of low, dull spleen. It mentioned no other name
+than Kindelon's, but it shot from that one name a hundred petty shafts
+of malign innuendo.
+
+"Oh, this is horrible!" at length moaned Pauline. She flung the paper
+down; the tears had begun to stream from her eyes. "What shall I do
+against so hideous an attack?"
+
+Courtlandt was at her side in an instant. He caught her hand, and the
+heat of his own was like that of fever.
+
+"Do but one thing!" he said, with a vehemence all the more startling
+because of his usual unvaried composure. "Break away from this folly
+once and forever! You know that I love you--that I have loved you for
+years! Don't tell me that you don't know it, for at the best you've only
+taught yourself to forget it! I've never _said_ that I loved you before,
+but what of that? You have seen the truth a hundred times--in my sober
+way of showing it! I've never thought that you returned the feeling; I
+don't even fancy so now. But I'm so fond of you, Pauline, that I want
+you to be my wife, merely liking and respecting me. I hate to shame
+myself by even speaking of your money, but you can sign that all away to
+some hospital to-morrow, if you please--you can get it all together and
+throw it into the North River, as far as I am concerned! Send Kindelon
+adrift--jilt him! On my soul I beg this of you for your own future
+happiness more than anything else! I don't say that it will be a square
+or right thing to do. But it will save you from the second horrible
+mistake of your life! You made one, that death saved you from. But this
+will be worse. It will last your lifetime. Kindelon isn't of your
+_monde_, and never can be. There is so much in that. I am not speaking
+like a snob. But he has no more sense of the proprieties, the nice
+externals, the way of doing all those thousand trifling things, which,
+trifling as they are, make up three-quarters of actual existence, than
+if he were an Indian, a Bedouin, or a gypsy! Before Heaven, Pauline, if
+I thought such a marriage could bring you happiness, I'd give you up
+without a murmur! I'm not fool enough to die, or pine, or even mope
+because of any woman on the globe not caring for me! But now, by giving
+me the right to guard you--by making me so grateful to you that only the
+rest of my life can fitly show my gratitude, you will escape calamity,
+distress, and years of remorse!"
+
+It had hardly seemed to her, at first, as if Courtlandt were really
+speaking; this intensity was so entirely uncharacteristic of him; these
+rapid tones and spirited glances were so remote from his accustomed
+personality. Yet by degrees she recognized not alone the quality of the
+change, but its motive and source. She could not but feel tenderly
+toward him then. She was a woman, and he had told her that he loved her;
+this bore its inevitable condoning results.
+
+And yet her voice was almost stern as she now said to him, rising, and
+repelling the hand by which he still strove to clasp her own,--
+
+"I think you admitted that if I broke my engagement with Ralph Kindelon
+it would not be--I use your own words, Court--the square or right thing
+to do.... Well, I shall not do it! There, I hope you are satisfied."
+
+He looked at her with a surpassing pain. His hands, while they hung at
+his sides, knotted themselves. "Oh, Pauline," he exclaimed, "I am _not_
+satisfied!"
+
+She met his look steadily. The tears in her eyes had vanished, though
+those already shed glistened on her cheeks. "Very well. I am sorry. I
+love Ralph Kindelon. I mean to be his wife."
+
+"You meant to be Varick's wife."
+
+"It is horrible for you to bring that up!" she cried. "Here I commit no
+mistake. He is a man of men! He loves me, and I love him. Do you know
+anything against him--outside of the codes and creeds that would exclude
+him from one of Aunt Cynthia's dancing-classes?"
+
+"I know this against him; he is not true. He is not to be trusted. He
+rings wrong. He is not a gentleman--in the sense quite outside of Aunt
+Cynthia's definition."
+
+"It is false!" exclaimed Pauline, crimsoning. "Prove to me," she went
+on, with fleet fire, "that he is not true--not to be trusted. I dare you
+to prove it."
+
+He walked slowly toward the door. "It is an intuition," he said. "I
+can't prove it. I could as soon tell you who wrote that villainous thing
+in the newspaper there."
+
+Pauline gave a laugh of coldest contempt. "Oh," she cried, "in a moment
+more you will be saying that _he_ wrote it!"
+
+Courtlandt shook his head. The gesture conveyed, in some way, an
+excessive and signal sadness.
+
+"In a moment more," he answered, "I shall be saying nothing to you. And
+I don't know that I shall ever willingly come into your presence again.
+Good-by."
+
+Pauline gave no answer, sinking back into her seat as he disappeared.
+
+Her eye lighted upon the fallen newspaper while she did so. Its
+half-crumpled folds made her forget that her cousin was departing. She
+suddenly sprang up again, and caught the sheet from the floor. A fire
+was blazing near by. She hurried toward the grate, intending to destroy
+the printed abomination.
+
+But, pausing half-way, she once more burst into tears. A recollection
+cut her to the heart of how futile would be any attempt, now, to destroy
+the atrocious wrong itself. That must live and work its unmerited ill.
+
+"And to this dark ending," she thought, with untold dejection, "has come
+my perfectly honest ambition--my fair and proper and wholesome plan!"
+And then, abruptly, her tearful eyes began to sparkle, while a bright,
+mirthless smile touched her lips.
+
+"But I can at least have my retort," she decided. "_He_ will help
+me--stand by me in this miserable emergency. I will send for him,--yes,
+I will send for Ralph at once! He will do just as I dictate, and I know
+what I _shall_ dictate! Miss Cragge wrote that base screed, and Miss
+Cragge shall suffer accordingly!"
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+
+She sent for Kindelon at once, but before her message could possibly
+have reached the office of the "Asteroid," he presented himself.
+
+He had recently seen the article, and told her so with a lover-like
+tenderness that she found balsamic, if not precisely curative.
+
+"It is fiendish," he at length said, "and if I thought any man had done
+it I would thrash him into confessing so. But I am nearly sure that a
+woman did it."
+
+"Miss Cragge?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You can't thrash her, Ralph. But you can punish her."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Through your own journal--the 'Asteroid.' You can show the world just
+what a virago she is."
+
+"No," he replied, after a reflective pause, "that can't be."
+
+"Can't be!" exclaimed Pauline, almost hysterically reproachful. "The
+'Asteroid' can call the 'Herald,' the 'Times' and the 'Tribune' every
+possible bad name; it can fly at the throats of politicians whom it
+doesn't indorse; it can seethe and hiss like a witch's caldron in
+editorials about some recent regretted measure at Albany! But when I ask
+it to defend me against slanderous ridicule it refuses--it"--
+
+"Ah," cried Kindelon, interrupting her, "it refuses because it is
+powerless to defend you."
+
+"Powerless!"
+
+"_Qui s'excuse s'accuse._ Any attempted vindication would be merely to
+direct the public eye still more closely upon this matter. All evil
+things hold within themselves the germ of their own destruction. Let
+this villainy die a natural death, Pauline; to fight it will be to
+perpetuate its power. In the meanwhile I can probably gain a clue to its
+authorship. But I do not promise, mind. No, I do not promise!"
+
+"And this is all!" faltered Pauline. "Oh, Ralph, according to your
+argument, every known wrong should be endured because of the notoriety
+which attaches to the redressing of it."
+
+He looked very troubled and very compassionate as he answered her. "The
+notoriety is in many cases of no importance, my love. If I were
+coarsely assailed, for instance, I should not hesitate to openly
+confront my assailant. But with a pure woman it is different; and with
+_some_ pure women--yourself I quote as a most shining example of these
+latter--it is unspeakably different! The chastity of some names is so
+perfect that any touch whatever will soil it."
+
+"If so, then mine has been soiled already!" cried Pauline. "Oh," she
+went on, "you men are all alike toward us women! Our worst crime is that
+you yourselves should talk about us! To have your fellow-men say, 'This
+woman has been rendered the object of a scandalous insult, but has
+retaliated with courage,' is to make her seem in your eyes as if the
+insult were really a deserved one! Whenever we are prominent, except in
+a social way, we are called notorious. If our husbands are drunkards or
+brutes who abuse us, and we fly to the refuge of the divorce-court, we
+are notorious. If we go on the stage, no matter how well we may guard
+our honest womanhood there, we are notorious. If we turn ministers,
+doctors, lecturers, philanthropists, political agitators, it is all the
+same; we are observed, discussed, criticised; hence we are notorious.
+Now, I've never rebelled against this finely just system, though like
+nearly all other yoked human beings I have indulged certain private
+views upon my own bondage. And in my case it was hardly a bondage....
+Except for certain years where discontent was in a large measure
+remorse, I have been lifted by exceptional circumstance above those
+pangs and torments which I have felt certain must have beset many
+another woman through no act of her own. But now an occasion suddenly
+dawns when I find myself demanding a man's full justice. To tell me that
+I can't get it because I am a woman is no answer whatever. I want it,
+all the same."
+
+Kindelon gazed at her with a sort of woe-begone amazement. "I don't tell
+you that you can't get it, as far as it is to be had," he almost
+groaned. "I merely remind you that this is the nineteenth century, and
+neither the twentieth nor the twenty-first."
+
+Pauline gave a fierce little motion of her shapely head. "I am reminded
+of that nearly every day that I live," she retorted. "You fall back, of
+course, upon public opinion. All of you always do, where a woman is
+concerned, whenever you are cornered. And it is so easy to corner
+you--to make you swing at us this cudgel of 'domestic retirement' and
+'feminine modesty.' I once talked for two hours in Paris with one of
+the strongest French radical thinkers of modern times. For the first
+hour and a half he delighted me; he spoke of the immense things that
+modern scientific developments were doing for the human race. For the
+last half-hour he disgusted me. And why? I discovered that his 'human
+race' meant a race entirely masculine. He left woman out of the question
+altogether. She might get along the best way she could. When he spoke of
+his own sex he was superbly broad; when he spoke of ours he was narrower
+than any Mohammedan with a harem full of wives and a prospective
+Paradise full of subservient houris."
+
+Kindelon rose and began to pace the floor, with his hands clasped behind
+him. "Well," he said, in a tone of mild distraction, "I'm very sorry for
+your famous French thinker. I hope you don't want me to tell you that I
+sympathize with him."
+
+"I'm half inclined to believe it!" sped Pauline. "If my cousin
+Courtlandt had spoken as you have done, I should have accepted such
+ideas as perfectly natural. Courtlandt is the incarnation of
+conventionalism. He is part of the rush in our social wheelwork, and yet
+he makes it move more slowly. He could no more pull up his window-shades
+and let in fresh sunshine than you could close your shutters and live
+in his decorous _demijour_!"
+
+Kindelon still continued his impatient pacing. "I'm very glad of your
+favorable comparison," he said, with more sadness than satire. He
+abruptly paused, then, facing Pauline. "What is it, in Heaven's name,
+that you want me to do?"
+
+"You should not ask; you should know!" she exclaimed. Her
+clear-glistening eyes, her flushed cheeks, and the assertive, almost
+imperious posture of her delicate figure made her seem to him a rarely
+beautiful vision as he now watched her. "Reflect, pray reflect," she
+quickly proceeded, "upon the position in which I now stand! I attempted
+to do what if I had been a much better woman than I am it would not at
+all have been a blameworthy thing to do. The result was failure; it was
+failure through no fault of my own. I found myself in a clique of
+wrangling egotists, and not in a body of sensible co-operative
+supporters. Chief among these was Miss Cragge, whose repulsive traits I
+foresaw--or rather you aided me to foresee them. I omitted her from my
+banquet (very naturally and properly, I maintain), and this is the apple
+of discord that she has thrown." Here Pauline pointed to the fatal
+newspaper, which lay not far off. "Of course," she went on, with a very
+searching look at Kindelon, "there can be no doubt that Miss Cragge _is_
+the offender! I, for my part, am certain of it; you, for yours, are
+certain as well, unless I greatly err. But this makes your refusal to
+publicly chastise her insolence all the more culpable!"
+
+"Culpable!" he echoed, hurrying toward her. "Pauline! you don't know
+what you are saying! Have I the least pity, the least compunction toward
+that woman?"
+
+Pauline closed her eyes for an instant, and shook her head, with a
+repulsing gesture of one hand. "Then you have a very false pity toward
+another woman--and a very false compunction as well," she answered.
+
+"How can I _act_, situated as I am?" he cried, with sharp excitement.
+"You have not yet allowed our engagement to transpire. What visible or
+conceded rights _have_ I to be your defender?"
+
+"You are unjust," she said. "I give you every right. That article
+insinuates that I am a sort of high-bred yet low-toned adventuress. No
+_lady_ could feel anything but shame and indignation at it. Besides, it
+incessantly couples your name with mine.... And as for right to be my
+champion in exposing and rebuking this outrage, I--I give you every
+right, as I said."
+
+"I desire but one," returned Kindelon. His voice betrayed no further
+perturbation. He seated himself at her side, and almost by force took
+both her hands in the strong grasp of both his own.
+
+"What right?" she questioned. Her mood of accusation, of reproach, was
+not yet quieted; her eyes still sparkled from it; her restless lips
+still betrayed it.
+
+"The right," he answered, "of calling you my wife. As it is, what am I?
+A man far below you in all worldly place, who has gained from you a
+matrimonial promise. Marry me!--marry me at once!--to-morrow!--and
+everything will be different! Then you shall have become mine to defend,
+and I will show you how I can defend what is my own!"
+
+"To-morrow!" murmured Pauline.
+
+"Yes, to-morrow! You will say it is too soon. You will urge
+conventionalism now, though a minute ago you accused _me_ of urging it!
+When you are once my wife I shall feel empowered to lawfully befriend
+you!"
+
+"Lawfully!" she repeated. "Can you not do so manfully, as it is?"
+
+"No--not without the interfering claims and assertions of your family!"
+
+"I _have_ no real family. And those whom you call such are without the
+right of either claim or assertion, as regards any question of what I
+choose or do not choose to do!"
+
+He still retained her hands; he put his lips against her cheek; he would
+not let her withdraw, though she made a kind of aggrieved effort to do
+so.
+
+"They have no rights, Pauline, and yet they would overwhelm me with
+obloquy! As your husband--once as your wedded, chosen husband, what
+should I care for them all? I would laugh at them! Make it to-morrow!
+Then see how I will play my wife's part, and fight her battle!..."
+
+They talked for some time after this in lowered tones.... Pauline was in
+a wholly new mood when she at length said,--
+
+"To-morrow, then, if you choose."
+
+"You mean it? You promise it?"
+
+"I mean it--and I promise it, since you seem so doubtful."
+
+"I am doubtful," he exclaimed, kissing her, "because I can scarcely
+dream that this sudden happiness has fallen to me from the stars!..."
+
+When he had left her, and she was quite alone, Pauline found her lips
+murmuring over the words, in a sort of mechanical repetition: "I have
+promised to marry him to-morrow."
+
+She had indeed made this vow, and as a very sacred one. And the more
+that she reflected upon it the more thoroughly praiseworthy a course it
+seemed. Her nearest living relations were the Poughkeepsies and
+Courtlandt. She had quarrelled with both--or it meant nearly the same
+thing. There was no one left to consult. Besides, even if there had
+been, why should she consult any third party in this affair, momentous
+though it was? She loved; she was beloved. She was a widow with a great
+personal, worldly independence. She had already been assailed; what
+mattered a little more assailance? For most of those who would gossip
+and sneer she had a profound and durable contempt.... Why, then, should
+she regret her spoken word?
+
+And yet she found herself not so much regretting it as fearing lest she
+might regret it. She suddenly felt the need, and in keenest way, of a
+near confidential, trustworthy friend. But her long residence abroad had
+acted alienatingly enough toward all earlier American friendships. She
+could think of twenty women--married, or widows like herself--who would
+have received her solicited counsel with every apparent sign of
+sympathy. But with all these she had lost the old intimate sense; new
+ground must be broken in dealing with them; their views and creeds were
+what her own had been when she had known and prattled platitudes with
+them before her dolorous marriage: or at least she so chose to think, so
+chose to decide.
+
+"There is one whom I could seek, and with whom I could seriously discuss
+the advisability of such a speedy marriage," at length ran Pauline's
+reflections. "That one is Mrs. Dares. Her large, sweet, just mind would
+be quite equal to telling me if I am really wrong or right.... Still,
+there is an obstacle--her daughter, Cora. Yet that would make no
+difference with Mrs. Dares. She would be above even a maternal
+prejudice. She is all gentle equity and disinterested kindliness. I
+might see her alone--quite alone--this evening. Neither Cora nor the
+sister, Martha, need know anything. I would pledge her to secrecy before
+I spoke a word ... I will go to her! I will go to Mrs. Dares, and will
+ask her just what I ought to do."
+
+This resolve strengthened with Pauline after she had once made it. The
+hour was now somewhat late in the afternoon. She distrusted the time of
+Mrs. Dares's arrival up-town from her work, and decided that the visit
+had best be paid at about seven o'clock that same evening.
+
+A little later she was amazed to receive the card of Mr. Barrowe. She
+went into her reception-room to see this gentleman, with mingled
+amusement and awkwardness; she was so ignorant what fatality had landed
+him within her dwelling.
+
+"I scarcely know how to greet you, Mr. Barrowe," she said, after giving
+a hand to her guest. "You and I parted by no means peacefully last
+night, and I--I am (yes, I confess it!) somewhat unprepared...."
+
+At this point Mr. Barrowe made voluble interruption. His little
+twinkling eyes looked smaller and acuter than before, and his gaunt,
+spheroidal nose had an unusual pallor as it rose from his somewhat
+depressed cheeks.
+
+"You needn't say _you_ are unprepared, Mrs. Varick!" he exclaimed. "I am
+unprepared myself. I had no idea of visiting you this afternoon. I had
+no idea that you would again give me the pleasure of receiving me.
+Handicapped as I am, myself, by visits, letters, applications,
+mercantile matters, I have insisted, however, on getting rid of
+all--yes, _all_ trammels."
+
+Here Mr. Barrowe paused, and Pauline gently inclined her head, saying,--
+
+"That is very good of you. Pray proceed."
+
+"Proceed!" cried Mr. Barrowe. He had already seated himself, but he now
+rose, approached Pauline, took her hand, and with an extravagant
+gallantry which his lank body caused closely to verge upon the
+ludicrous, lifted this hand ceremoniously to his pale lips. Immediately
+afterward he resumed his seat. And at once he recommenced speaking.
+
+"I feel that I--I owe you the most profound of apologies," he declared,
+with a hesitation that seemed to have a sincere emotional origin.
+"Handicapped as I am by a hundred other matters, besieged as I am by
+bores who want my autograph, by people who desire me to write for this
+or that journal, by people who desire consultation with me on countless
+literary or even commercial subjects, I nevertheless have felt it a
+question of conscience to pay you this visit."
+
+"A question of conscience?" said Pauline, suavely.
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Varick. I--I have seen that stringently objectionable article
+in the ... ahem ... the 'Morning Monitor.' May I ask if you also have
+seen it? And pray be sure that when I thus ask I feel confident you
+_must_ have seen it, since bad tidings travel quickly, and..."
+
+"Yes, Mr. Barrowe, I have seen it," said Pauline, interrupting another
+thin, diplomatic sort of cough on the part of her visitor. "And I
+should be glad if you could tell me what devoted foe wrote it."
+
+Mr. Barrowe now trembled with eagerness. "I--I _can_ tell you!" he
+exclaimed. "It--it was that unhappy Miss Cragge! I had no sooner read
+it, in my office this morning, than I was attacked by a conviction--an
+absolute conviction--that _she_ wrote it. Handicapped, besieged as
+I am ... but let that pass...."
+
+"Yes--let that pass," softly cried Pauline, meaning no discourtesy, yet
+bent upon reaching the bare fact and proof. "You say that you are sure
+that Miss Cragge wrote the article?"
+
+"Positively certain," asseverated Mr. Barrowe. "I went to the lady at
+once. I found her at her desk in the office of--well, let us not mind
+_what_ newspaper. I upbraided her with having written it! I was very
+presumptuous, perhaps--very dictatorial, but I did not care. I had stood
+up for the lady, not many evenings ago, at the risk of your
+displeasure."
+
+"The _lady_!" repeated Pauline, half under her breath, and with a
+distinct sneer. "Go on, please, Mr. Barrowe. Did Miss Cragge confess?"
+
+"Miss Cragge _did_ not confess. But she showed such a defiant tendency
+_not_ to confess--she treated me with such an overbearing
+pugnaciousness and disdain, that before I had been five minutes in her
+society I had no doubts whatever as to the real authorship of the
+shocking article. And now, Mrs. Varick, I wish to offer you my most
+humble and deferential apologies. I wish to tell you how deeply and
+sincerely sorry I am for ever having entered into the least controversy
+with you regarding that most aggressive and venomous female! For, my
+dear madam, besieged and handicapped though I may be by countless..."
+
+"Don't offer me a word of apology, Mr. Barrowe!" here struck in Pauline,
+jumping up from her seat and seizing the hand of her guest. "It is quite
+needless! I owe you more than you owe me! You have told me the name of
+my enemy, of which I was nearly certain all along." And here Pauline
+gave the gentleman's bony and cadaverous face one of those glances which
+those who liked her best thought the most charming.
+
+"I had been told," she went on, with a very winning intonation, "that
+you have a large, warm heart!"
+
+"Who--who told you that?" murmured Mr. Barrowe, evidently under the
+spell of his hostess's beauty and grace.
+
+"Mr. Kindelon," Pauline said, gently.
+
+"Kindelon!" exclaimed Mr. Barrowe, "why he is my worst enemy, as--as I
+fear, my dear madam, that Miss Cragge is yours!"
+
+"Oh, never mind Miss Cragge," said Pauline, with a sweet, quick laugh;
+"and never mind Mr. Kindelon, either. I have only to talk about _you_,
+Mr. Barrowe, and to tell you that I have never yet met a good, true man
+(for I am certain that you are such) who stood in his own light so
+persistently as you do. You have an immense talent for quarrelling," she
+went on, with pretty seriousness. "Neglect it--crush it down--be
+yourself! Yourself is a very honest and agreeable self to be. I am
+always on the side of people with good intentions, and I am sure that
+yours are of the best. A really bitter-hearted man ruffles people, and
+so do you. But your motives for it are as different from his as malice
+is different from dyspepsia. I am sure you are going to reform from this
+hour."
+
+"Reform?" echoed Mr. Barrowe.
+
+Pauline gave a laugh of silver clearness and heartiest mirth. As often
+happens with us when we are most assailed by care, she forgot all
+present misery for at least the space of a minute or so.
+
+"Yes," she cried, with a bewitching glee quite her own and by no means
+lost upon her somewhat susceptible listener, "you are going to conform
+the Mr. Barrowe of real life to the Mr. Barrowe who writes those
+brilliant, judicial, and trenchant essays. Oh, I have read them! You
+need not fancy that I am talking mere foundationless flattery such as
+you doubtless get from many of those people who ... well, who handicap
+you, you know.... And your reformation is to begin at once. I am to be
+your master. I have a lot of lessons to teach!"
+
+"When are your instructions to begin?" said Mr. Barrowe, with a certain
+awkward yet positive gallantry. "I am very anxious to receive them."
+
+"Your first intimation of them will be a request to dine with me. Will
+you accept?--you and your wife of course."
+
+"But my wife is an invalid. She never goes anywhere."
+
+"I hope, however, that she sometimes dines."
+
+"Yes, she dines, poor woman ... incidentally."
+
+"Then she will perhaps give me an incidental invitation to break
+bread.... Oh, my dear Mr. Barrowe, what I mean is simply that I want to
+know you better, and so acquire the right to tell you of a few
+superficial faults which prevent all the world from recognizing your
+kindly soul. I...."
+
+But here Pauline paused, for a servant entered with a card. She glanced
+at the card, and made an actually doleful grimace.
+
+"Mr. Leander Prawle is here," she said to her visitor.
+
+Mr. Barrowe gave a start. "In that case I must go," he said. "I once
+spoke ill of that young gentleman's most revered poem, and since then he
+has never deigned to notice me."
+
+"But you will not forget the dinner, and what is to follow," said
+Pauline, as she shook hands.
+
+"No," Mr. Barrowe protested. "If you cleave my heart in twain I shall
+try to live the better with the other half of it."
+
+"I should not like to cleave it in twain," said Pauline. "It is too
+capable and healthy a heart for that. I should only try to make it beat
+with more temperate strokes.... _Au revoir_, then. If you should meet
+Mr. Prawle outside, tell him that you are sorry."
+
+"Sorry? But his poem was abominable!"
+
+"All the more reason for you to be magnanimously sorry.... Ah, here he
+is!"
+
+Here Mr. Leander Prawle indeed was, but as he entered the room Mr.
+Barrowe slipped past him, and with a suddenness that almost prevented
+his identification on the part of the new-comer....
+
+"Mrs. Varick," exclaimed Leander Prawle, while he pressed the hand of
+his hostess. "I came here because duty prompted me to come."
+
+"I hope pleasure had a little to do with the matter, Mr. Prawle," said
+Pauline, while indicating a lounge on which they were both presently
+seated.
+
+Mr. Prawle looked just as pale as when Pauline had last seen him, just
+as dark-haired, and just as dark-eyed; but the ironical fatigue had
+somehow left his visage; there was a totally new expression there.
+
+"I suppose," he began, with his black eyes very fixedly directed upon
+Pauline's face, "that you have heard of the ... the 'Morning Monitor's'
+outrageous...."
+
+"Yes, Mr. Prawle," Pauline broke in. "I have heard all about it."
+
+"And it has pained you beyond expression!" murmured the young poet. "It
+must have done so!"
+
+"Naturally," replied Pauline.
+
+"It ... it has made _me_ suffer!" asserted the new visitor, laying one
+slim, white hand upon the region of his heart.
+
+"Really?" was the answer. "That is very nice and sympathetic of you."
+
+Mr. Prawle regarded her with an unrelaxed and very fervid scrutiny. He
+now spoke in lowered and emotional tones, leaning toward his hearer so
+that his slender body made quite an exaggerated curve.
+
+"My whole soul," he said, "is brimming with sympathy!"
+
+Pauline conquered her amazement at this entirely unforeseen outburst.
+
+"Thanks very much," she returned. "Sympathy is always a pleasant thing
+to receive."
+
+Mr. Prawle, still describing his physical curve, gave a great sigh. "Oh,
+Mrs. Varick," he murmured, "I should like to kill the man who wrote that
+horrible article."
+
+"Suppose it were a woman," said Pauline.
+
+"Then I should like to kill the woman!... Mrs. Varick, will you pardon
+me if I read you ... a few lines which indignation com----yes, combined
+with reverence--actual reverence--inspired me to write after reading
+those disgraceful statements? The lines are--are addressed to yourself.
+With--with your permission, I--I will draw them forth."
+
+Without any permission on Pauline's part, however, Mr. Prawle now drew
+forth the manuscript to which he had referred. His long pale fingers
+underwent a distinct tremor as he unrolled a large crackling sheet of
+foolscap. And then, when all, so to speak, was ready, he swept his dark
+eyes over Pauline's attentive countenance. "_Have_ I your permission?"
+he falteringly inquired.
+
+"It is granted, certainly, Mr. Prawle."
+
+After a slight pause, and in a tone of sepulchrally monotonous quality,
+the young gentleman read these lines:--
+
+    "White soul, what impious voice hath dared to blame
+    With virulent slander thine unsullied life?
+    Methinks that now the very stars should blush
+    In their chaste silver stateliness aloft!
+    Methinks the immaculate lilies should droop low
+    For very shame at this coarse obloquy.
+    The unquarried marble of Pentelicus
+    Deny its hue of snow, and even the dawn
+    Forget her stainless birthright for thy sake!
+    Cursed the hand that wrote of thee such wrong;
+    Cursed the pen such hand hath basely clasped;
+    Cursed the actual ink whose...."
+
+"My dear Mr. Prawle!" exclaimed Pauline, at this point; "I must beg you
+not to make me the cause of so terrible a curse! Indeed, I cannot
+sanction it. I must ask you to read no more."
+
+She was wholly serious. She forgot to look upon the humorous side of Mr.
+Prawle's action; his poem, so called, addressed her jarred nerves and
+wounded spirit as a piece of aggravating impudence. The whole event of
+his visit seemed like a final jeer from the sarcastic episode recently
+ended.
+
+He regarded her now with a sorrowful astonishment. "You--you wish me to
+read no more!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, if you please," said Pauline, controlling her impatience as best
+she could.
+
+"But I--I wrote it especially _for_ you!" he proceeded. "I have put my
+soul into it! I consider it in many ways the most perfect thing that I
+have _ever_ done. I intended to include it in my forthcoming volume,
+'Moonbeams and Mountain-Peaks,' under the title of 'Her Vindication.'
+Even the grossly material poetic mind of Arthur Trevor, to whom I read
+it a few hours ago, admitted its sublimity, its spirituality!"
+
+"I will admit both, also," said Pauline, whose mood grew less and less
+tolerant of this self-poised fatuity. "Only, I must add, Mr. Prawle,
+that it would have been better taste for you to have left this
+exasperating affair untouched by your somewhat saintly muse. And I shall
+furthermore request that you do not include the lines in your 'Moonbeams
+and Hill-Tops,' or"--
+
+"Mountain-Peaks!" corrected Mr. Prawle, rising with a visible shudder.
+"Oh, Mrs. Varick," he went on, "I see with great pain that you are a
+most haughty and ungenerous lady! You--you have smitten me with a
+fearful disappointment! I came here brimming with the loftiest human
+sympathy! I believed that to-day would be a turning-point in my
+existence. I confidently trusted that after hearing my poem there would
+be no further obstacle in my career of greatness!"
+
+Pauline now slowly left her seat. Unhappy as she was, there could be no
+resisting such magnificent opportunities of amusement as were now
+presented to her.
+
+"Your career of greatness?" she quietly repeated. "Did I hear you
+properly, Mr. Prawle?"
+
+Her guest was refolding his manuscript with an aggrieved and perturbed
+air. As he put the paper within a breast-pocket he rolled his dark eyes
+toward Pauline with infinite solemnity.
+
+"You doubt, then," he exclaimed, "that I am born to be great--supremely
+great? Ah, there is no need for me to put that question now! I had
+thought otherwise _before_ ... when you smiled upon me, when you seemed
+to have read my poems, to be familiar with my growing fame!"
+
+"You mistake," said Pauline: "I never meant to show you that I had read
+your poems. If I smiled upon you, Mr. Prawle, it was from courtesy
+only."
+
+"Horrible!" ejaculated the young poet. He clasped his hands together in
+a somewhat theatrically despairing way, and for an instant lowered his
+head. "I--I thought that you were prepared to indorse, to assist my
+genius!" he soon proceeded, levelling a look of strong appeal at
+Pauline. "I thought that you had separated my poetic veracity from the
+sham of Trevor and Corson! I--I thought, Mrs. Varick, that in you I had
+found a true worshipper!"
+
+Pauline was at last amused. "I usually reserve my worship for
+divinities, Mr. Prawle," she said, "and I have found but a few of these
+in all the history of literature."
+
+"I see!" cried her companion, "you mean that I am _not_ a genius!"
+
+"I did not say so. But you have given me no proof of it."
+
+"No proof of it! What was the poem I have just read?"
+
+"It was ... well, it was resonant. But I objected to it, as I have told
+you, on personal grounds." As she went on, Pauline tried to deal with a
+rather insubordinate smile of keen, sarcastic enjoyment.
+
+"So you really think," she continued, "that you possess absolute
+genius?"
+
+"I am certain of it!" cried Mr. Prawle.
+
+"That is a very pleasant mental condition."
+
+"Do _you_ doubt it?... Ah! I see but too plainly that you do!"
+
+"Frankly," said Pauline, "I do."
+
+Mr. Prawle flung both his hands towards the ceiling. "It is Kindelon's
+work," he cried, with an effect of very plaintive lamentation. "Kindelon
+is among those who yet oppose me."
+
+"Mr. Kindelon is not responsible for my opinions," said Pauline.
+"However, you probably have other opponents?"
+
+"Their name is legion! But why should I care? Do you join their
+ranks?... Well, Shelley almost died because of being misunderstood! I
+had hoped that you would assist me in--yes, in the publication of my
+book of poems, Mrs. Varick. I do not mean that I wrote to you, for this
+reason, the poem which you have just refused to hear me read. Far from
+it! I only mean that I have cherished the idea of securing in you a
+patron. Yes, a patron! I am without means to bring forth 'Moonbeams and
+Mountain-Peaks.' And I had hoped that after hearing me read what I have
+already told you is my most nobly able creation, you would ... consent,
+as a lover of art, of genius, of...."
+
+"I understand," said Pauline. "You wish me to assist you in the
+publication of your volume." She was smiling, though a trifle wearily.
+"Well, Mr. Prawle, I will do it."
+
+"You will do it!"
+
+"Yes. You shall have whatever cheque you write me for...." She
+approached Prawle and laid her hand upon his arm. "But you must promise
+me to destroy 'Her Vindication'--not even to think of publishing it. Do
+you?"
+
+"Yes ... if you insist."
+
+"I do insist.... Well, as I said, write to me for the amount required."
+
+Prawle momentarily smiled, as if from extreme gratitude. And then the
+smile abruptly faded from his pale face. "I will promise!" he declared.
+"But ... oh, it is so horrible to think that you help me from no real
+appreciation of my great gifts--that you do so only from _charity_!"
+
+"Charity is not by any means a despicable virtue."
+
+"From a great millionaire to a poor poet--yes! The poet has a sensitive
+soul! He wants to be loved for his verses, for his inspiration, if he is
+a true poet like myself!"
+
+"And you believe yourself a true poet, Mr. Prawle?"
+
+"I?"
+
+It is impossible to portray the majesty of Mr. Prawle's monosyllabic
+pronoun. "If I am not great," he enunciated slowly, "then no one _has_
+been or ever _will_ be great. I have a divine mission. A truly and
+positively divine mission."
+
+Pauline gave a little inscrutable nod. "A divine mission is a very nice
+thing to have. I hope you will execute it."
+
+"I _shall_ execute it!" cried Mr. Prawle. "All the poets, on every side
+of me, are singing about The Past. I, and I alone, sing of The Future. I
+set evolution to music ... what other poet has done that? I wrest from
+Buckle, Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley--from all the grand modern thinkers, in
+fact--their poetic and yet rationalistic elements! If you had heard my
+poem to yourself _through_--if you had had the patience, I--I may add,
+the kindliness, to hear it through, you would have seen that my terminus
+was in accord with the prevailing theories of Herbert Spencer's noble
+philosophy...."
+
+"Shall I ever cling to or love Herbert Spencer again?" thought Pauline,
+"when I see him made the shibboleth of such intellectual charlatans as
+this?"
+
+"In accord," continued Mr. Prawle, "with everything that is progressive
+and unbigoted. I finished with an allusion to the Religion of Humanity.
+I usually do, in all my poems. That is what makes them so unique, so
+incomparable!"
+
+Pauline held out her hand in distinct token of farewell.
+
+"Belief in one's self is a very saving quality," she said. "I
+congratulate you upon it."
+
+Mr. Prawle shrank offendedly toward the door. "You dismiss me!" he burst
+forth. "After I have bared my inmost soul to you, you _dismiss_ me!"
+
+Pauline tossed her head, either from irritation or semi-diversion. "Ah,
+you take too much for granted!" she said, withdrawing her hand.
+
+Mr. Prawle had raised himself to his full height. "I refuse your
+assistance!" he ejaculated. "You offer it as you would offer it to a
+pensioner--a beggar! And you--_you_, have assumed the right of
+entertaining and fostering literary talent! I scarcely addressed you at
+your last reception ... I _waited_. I supposed that in spite of
+Kindelon's known enmity, some of your guests must have told you how
+immense were my deserts--how they transcended the morbid horrors of
+Rufus Corson, and the glaring superficialities of Arthur Trevor. But I
+discover, plainly enough, that you are impervious to all intellectual
+greatness of claim. I will accept _no_ aid from you!--none whatever! But
+one day, when the name of Leander Prawle is a shining and a regnant one,
+you will perhaps remember how miserably you failed to value his merits,
+and shrink with shame at the thought of your own pitiable
+misjudgment!..."
+
+"Thank Heaven that monstrosity of literary vanity has removed itself!"
+thought Pauline, a little later, when Leander Prawle had been heard very
+decisively to close the outer hall-door. "And now I must dwell no longer
+on trifles--I must concern myself with far weightier matters."
+
+The coming marriage to Kindelon on the morrow seemed to her fraught with
+untold incentive for reflection. "But I will not reflect," she soon
+determined. "I will at once try to see Mrs. Dares, and let her reflect
+for me. She is so wise, so capable, so admirable! I have consented
+because I love! Let her, if she shall so decide, dissuade me because of
+experiences weightier than even my own past bitter ones!"
+
+The hour of her resolved visit to Mrs. Dares had now arrived. In a
+certain way she congratulated herself upon the distracting tendency of
+both Mr. Barrowe's and Mr. Prawle's visits. "They have prevented me,"
+she mused, "from dwelling too much upon my own unhappy situation. Mr.
+Barrowe is a very sensible fool, and Mr. Prawle is a very foolish fool.
+They are both, in their way, taunting and satiric radiations from the
+dying bonfire of my own rash ambition. They are both reminders to me
+that I, after all, am the greatest and most conspicuous fool. Some other
+woman, more sensible and clever than I, will perhaps seek to establish
+in New York a social movement where intellect and education are held
+above the last Anglomaniac coaching-drive to Central Park, or the last
+vulgarly-select _cotillon_ at Delmonico's. But it will be decades hence.
+I don't know how many ... but it will be decades.... All is over, now. I
+face a new life; I have ended with my _salon_. Only one result has come
+of it--Ralph Kindelon. Thank Heaven, he is a substantial result, though
+all the rest are shadow and illusion!"
+
+Pauline soon afterwards started on foot for the residence of Mrs. Dares.
+It was nearly dusk. She had determined to set before this good and
+trusted woman every detail of her present discomfort, and while
+confessing her matrimonial promise as regarded the marriage with
+Kindelon on the morrow, to exhort counsel, advice, guidance,
+justification. Being a woman, and having made up her mind,
+justification may have been the chief stimulus of her devout pilgrimage.
+
+The great bustling city was in shadow as she rang the bell at Mrs.
+Dares's residence.
+
+A strange, ominous, miserable fear was upon her while she did so. She
+could not account for it; she strove to shake it off. She remembered her
+own reflections: "All is over now. I face a new life."
+
+But she could not dismiss the brooding dread while she waited the answer
+of her summons at Mrs. Dares's door.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+The tidy young negress opened the door soon afterwards. Pauline asked
+for Mrs. Dares. The answer came that Mrs. Dares was at home.
+
+"I wish to see her alone," said Pauline.
+
+"Miss Cora's got a gent'man in the back room," came the answer, "but
+there's nobody right here."
+
+Between "right here" and the "back room," Pauline was soon shown the
+difference. As she sat in a little prettily-furnished apartment,
+awaiting the appearance of Mrs. Dares, she readily apprehended that some
+sort of a chamber lay behind. This was, reasonably, the Dareses'
+dining-room. But she heard voices from beyond the rough decorative
+woollen tapestry which intervened in heavy concealing folds.
+
+At first, seated quietly and thinking of just what she should say to
+Mrs. Dares, Pauline quite disregarded these voices.
+
+"I shall tell the plain, unvarnished truth," she reflected. "I shall
+not leave a single detail. I shall trust her judgment absolutely."
+
+A moment later she started, with a recognizing sense that she had heard
+a familiar tone from one of the voices behind the tapestry. Evidently a
+man was speaking. She rose from her seat. She had approached the curtain
+instinctively before realizing her act. A new impulse made her withdraw
+several steps from it. But the voice had been Kindelon's, and she now
+clearly heard Kindelon speak again.
+
+"Cora!" she heard him say, "there are certain wrongs for which no
+reparations _can_ be given. I know that the wrong I have done you is of
+this sort. I don't attempt to exculpate myself. I don't know why I came
+here to bid you this farewell. It was kind of you to consent to see
+me. Hundreds of other women would have refused, under like conditions.
+But you have often said that you loved me, and I suppose you love me
+still. For this reason you may find some sort of consolation hereafter
+in the thought that I have made an ambitious marriage which will place
+me high in the esteem of the world, which will give my talents a
+brilliant chance, which will cause men and women to point to me as a man
+who has achieved a fine and proud success.... Good-by, Cora.... Let me
+take your hand once--just once--before I go. I'll grant you that I've
+behaved like a scamp. I'll grant everything that can be said in my own
+disfavor. Good heavens! don't look at me in that horribly reproachful
+way, you--you make me willing to renounce this marriage wholly! Cora, I
+will do so if you'll pardon the past! I'll come back to you, I'll devote
+my future life to you! only tell me that you forgive and forget!"
+
+"No, no," Pauline now heard a struggling and seemingly agonized voice
+reply. "There is no undoing what you have done. Keep your promise to
+_her_, as you have broken your faith with _me_. I do not say that my
+love is dead yet; I think it will not die for a long time ... perhaps
+not for years. But my respect is wholly dead.... I will not touch your
+hand; I will not even remain longer in your presence. I--I have no
+vengeful feeling toward you. I wish you all future happiness. If you
+shine hereafter as your talents deserve, I shall hear of your fame, your
+triumph, with no shadow of bitterness in my soul. And my chief hope, my
+chief anxiety, will be for the woman whom you have married. I know her
+enough to know that she is full of good impulses, full of true and fine
+instincts. You will go to her with an aching conscience and a stained
+honor. But I pray that after she has lifted you into that place which
+you seek to gain through her, she may never know you as I have known
+you--never wake to my anguish of disappointment--never realize my depths
+of disillusion!"
+
+Pauline waited to hear no more. She thrust aside the drapery of the
+doorway and passed into the next room.
+
+Cora uttered a swift and smothered cry. Kindelon gave a terrible start.
+Then a silence followed. It seemed to Pauline a most appreciable
+silence. She meant and wished to break it, yet her speech kept defying
+her will, and resisted her repeated effort at due control. But at length
+she said, looking straight at Kindelon,--
+
+"I have heard--I did not mean to hear--I don't want you to say a single
+word--there is nothing for you to say. I simply appear before
+you--before you both! I--I think that is enough. I know every thing now.
+You ... must have been certain that if I had previously known--that if
+you had not told me a falsehood I ... I ... should never...."
+
+And then poor Pauline reeled giddily, putting forth both hands in a
+piteous, distraught way.... When Kindelon caught her she had already
+lost consciousness....
+
+The sense of blank was a most acute one when she awoke. Her first clear
+thought was, "How long have I been unconscious?" ... And then came
+remembrance, and with remembrance the pain of a deep-piercing hurt.
+
+No one was near by except Mrs. Dares. Pauline lay upon a lounge; she
+felt the yielding of cushions beneath her head and shoulders. Her first
+audible sign of revived consciousness was a little tremulous laugh.
+
+"That's you, Mrs. Dares?" she then said. "I--I must have fainted. How
+funny of me! I--I never fainted before."
+
+Mrs. Dares put both arms about her, and kissed her twice, thrice, on the
+cheek.
+
+"My poor, dear, unhappy lady!" she said. "I am sorry--so miserably
+sorry."
+
+Pauline repeated her tremulous laugh. She was beginning to feel the
+reassertion of physical strength. "I--I came here to see only you, Mrs.
+Dares," she now said, "but it was fated otherwise. And ... and yet it
+has all been better--far better." Here she laughed again, and a little
+hysterically. "Oh, how superb a failure I've made of it, haven't I? I
+thought the 'Morning Monitor' had dealt me my last _coup_. But one other
+still remained!"
+
+She lay silent for some little time, after this, and when Mrs. Dares
+presently spoke to her the lids which had dropped over her eyes did not
+lift themselves. It was so sweet, so tender, so exquisitely gentle a
+voice that it brought not the slightest exciting consequences.
+
+"He is greatly to blame. I do not excuse him any more than you will. But
+you must not think the worst of him. You must think him weak, but you
+must not think him entirely base. I look at his conduct with impartial
+eyes. I try to look at everybody with impartial eyes. He was far below
+you in the social scale--that is the phrase which means inferiority
+nowadays, and I am afraid it will mean inferiority for many a year to
+come. He had engaged himself to my dear Cora. He meant to marry her.
+Then he met you. Everything about you dazzled and charmed him. It was
+yourself as much as your position, your wealth, your importance. He
+cared for you; he was enchanted by you; his nature is not a deep nature,
+though his intellect is large and keen. He is almost the typical
+Irishman, this Kindelon--the Irishman who, in statesmanship, in
+governance, in administrative force, has left poor Ireland what she is
+to-day. He meant well, but he had not enough _morale_ to make this
+well-meaning active and cogent. The temptation came, and he yielded at
+once. There was no premeditated dishonor. The strain was put upon him
+and he could not bear the strain--that is all. Such men as he never can
+bear such a strain. There was not a hint of coldbloodedness in his
+conduct--there was none of the fortune-hunter's deliberate method. There
+was, indeed, no method at all; there was nothing except an inherent
+moral feebleness. Brilliant as he is, exceptional as he is, he can no
+more help consent and acquiescence in any matter which concerns his
+personal, selfish desires, than the chameleon can help taking the tints
+of what surrounds it. And I do not believe that he knows, at this hour,
+whether he loves you or my poor Cora the best. That is he--that is
+Kindelon--that is the fascinating, distressing race that he represents.
+He loved you both; his big, expansive Irish heart was quite capable of
+doing that. But his insecure, precarious conscience was incapable of
+pointing to him the one straight, imperative path. Hence your own
+sorrow, my dear, ill-used lady, and hence the sorrow of my poor
+unfortunate Cora!"
+
+Pauline's eyes slowly unclosed as Mrs. Dares's last words were spoken.
+
+"You speak like a sybil!" she murmured.
+
+"But you speak too late. If I had only talked with you a little sooner!
+I should have been so prepared for such words _then_! Now they only come
+to me like mockery and ... and sarcasm!"
+
+Again Mrs. Dares stooped and kissed her.
+
+"God knows," she said, "that I mean them for neither!"
+
+"God help me from believing that you do!" answered Pauline. She raised
+herself, and flung both arms about Mrs. Dares's neck, while a sudden
+paroxysm of sobs overmastered and swayed her.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+
+By a little after nine o'clock, this same evening, Pauline was driven in
+a carriage to her own residence.
+
+She alighted with excellent composure, rang the bell and was promptly
+admitted.
+
+But she had no sooner entered the hall than she found herself face to
+face with Courtlandt.
+
+He was in evening dress; he looked thoroughly his old self-contained
+self. Pauline passed at once into the little reception-room just off the
+hall. Courtlandt followed her. She sank into a chair, slowly untying the
+strings of her bonnet. A brisk fire crackled on the hearth; she stared
+into it.
+
+"So you came to me," she said, with a kind of measured apathy.
+
+"Yes," said Courtlandt. "I obeyed the message that you sent me."
+
+Pauline impetuously turned and looked at him. The fire-light struck her
+face as she did so, and he saw that her gray eyes were swimming in
+tears.
+
+She made no attempt to master her broken voice. "O Court," she said, "it
+was ever so good of you to come! I almost doubted if you would! I should
+have remembered that you--well, that you cared for me in another than a
+merely cousinly way. But there was no one else--that is, no one near me
+in blood. It is wonderful how we think of that blood-kinship when
+something dreadful happens to us. We may not recall it for years, until
+the blow comes. Then we feel its force, its bond, its claim.... I want
+you to sit down beside me, Court, and quietly listen. You were always
+good at listening. Besides, you will have an immense satisfaction,
+presently; you will learn that your prophecies regarding _him_ were
+correct. My eyes are open--and in time. I shall never marry him. I shall
+never marry any one again. And now, listen...."
+
+For a long time, after this, Courtlandt showed himself the most patient
+of auditors. But he was silent for a good space after his cousin had at
+length ended, while the fire sputtered and fumed behind the silver
+filigrees that bordered its hearth, as though it were delivering some
+adverse, exasperated commentary upon poor Pauline's late disclosures.
+
+But presently Courtlandt spoke. "I think you have had a very fortunate
+escape," he said. "And I hope you mean, now, to come back and be one of
+us, again."
+
+"What a way of putting it!" she exclaimed, with a great quivering sigh.
+
+"There's no other way to put it. Theory's one thing and practice
+another. As long as the world lasts there will be a lot of people in
+every land who are better and hold themselves better than a huge lot of
+other people. One can argue about this matter till he or she is black in
+the face; it's no use, though; the best way to get along is to take
+things as you find them. You and I didn't make society, so we'd better
+not try to alter it."
+
+Pauline gave a weary little smile. Her tears had ceased; she was staring
+into the fire with hard, dry, bright eyes.
+
+"O Court," she said, with a pathetic little touch of her old cruelty,
+"I'm afraid you don't shine as a philosopher. You are better as a
+prophet; what do you say of Cora Dares and _him_? Will they marry?"
+
+"Yes," returned Courtlandt unhesitatingly. "And I dare say he will make
+her an excellent husband. Didn't you tell me that she was an artist?...
+Well, he's an editor, a sort of general scribbler, so they will be on a
+delightful equality. They'll marry. You say I'm a prophet; depend upon
+it, they'll marry sooner or later."
+
+"You make me recall that you are Aunt Cynthia's nephew," said Pauline,
+with another weary smile. She was in a very miserable mood. Her wound
+still bled, and would bleed, as she knew, for many a day.
+
+Courtlandt's preposterously trite and commonplace little axiom had
+already begun to echo itself in a kind of rhythmical mockery through her
+distressed brain: "The best way to get along is to take things as you
+find them."
+
+_Was_ it the best way, after all? Was thinking for one's self and living
+after one's own chosen fashion nothing but a forlorn folly? Was
+passivity wisdom, and individualism a snare?
+
+The fire crackled on. There was more silence between the two cousins.
+The hour was growing late; outside, in the streets, you heard only the
+occasional rolling of carriage-wheels.
+
+"By the way, speaking of Aunt Cynthia, Court,--will she ever notice me
+again?"
+
+"Certainly she will."
+
+"Isn't she furious?"
+
+"That newspaper article has repressed her fury. She's enormously sorry
+for you. Aunt Cynthia would never find it hard, you know, to be
+enormously sorry for a Van Corlear; she came so near to being one
+herself; a Schenectady is next door to it."
+
+"Yes, I understand," mused Pauline. She was still staring into the fire.
+"There is that clannish feeling that comes out strong at such a time ...
+Court, I will write to her."
+
+"Do, by all means."
+
+"Not an apology, you know, but a ... well, a sort of pacific proposal."
+
+"Do, you'll find it will be all right, then. Aunt Cynthia would never
+put on any grand airs to one of her own race; she has too much respect
+for it...."
+
+The longest silence of all now ensued. The fire had ceased to crackle;
+its block of crumbled coal looked like the fragments of a huge crushed
+ruby. Pauline did not know that Courtlandt was watching her when she
+suddenly heard him say,--
+
+"You're going to have a hard fight, Pauline, but you'll come out of it
+all sound--never fear. I suppose he _was_ the sort of chap to play the
+mischief with a woman, if she once gave him a chance."
+
+"O Court," came the melancholy answer, "I wasn't thinking of _him_, just
+then. I was thinking of what my life has meant! It seems to me, now,
+like a broken staircase, leading nowhere. Such a strange, unsatisfactory
+life, thus far!"
+
+"All lives are that, if we choose to look on them so," returned
+Courtlandt. "It is the choosing or not choosing to look on them so that
+makes all the difference.... Besides, you are young yet."
+
+"Oh, I am seventy years old!" she cried, with a little fatigued moan.
+
+"In a year from now you will have lapsed back into your normal age."
+
+"I can't believe it!"
+
+"Wait and see."
+
+"Ah, I shall have to do a good deal of waiting--for nothing whatever!"
+
+"I too shall wait," said Courtlandt grimly.
+
+She suddenly turned and scanned his face. "For what?" she sharply
+questioned.
+
+"For you."
+
+Pauline threw back her head, with a brief, bitter laugh. "Then you will
+have to wait a long time!" she exclaimed, with sorrowful irony.
+
+"I expect to do that," answered Courtlandt, more grimly still. "And I am
+a good prophet. You told me so."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+EDGAR FAWCETT'S WRITINGS.
+
+
+     "_Mr. Fawcett was the man of whom Longfellow expected more than of
+     any of the other young American authors, both as a poet and a
+     novelist._"--American Queen.
+
+
+
+SONG AND STORY.
+
+1 vol. 12mo. Printed on imported hand-made paper, with gilt top. $1.50.
+
+"The _Revue des Deux Mondes_ gives high praise to Mr. FAWCETT'S poetry,
+and compares his briefer lyrics to the famous _Emaux et Camees_ of
+Theophile Gautier."--_Beacon._
+
+"Possessed of the singing voice, the artist's intolerance of slovenly
+workmanship, and an unerring sense of proportion, Mr. FAWCETT should
+fulfil the most sanguine expectations.... They are filled with the charm
+of suggestiveness; scarcely a poem but brings some new thought, some
+strange analogy, to haunt the brain after reading it."--CHARLES G. D.
+ROBERTS, in _The Week_.
+
+
+TINKLING CYMBALS.
+
+1 vol. 12mo. $1.50.
+
+A brilliant novel of New York and Newport in the nineteenth century, by
+one of its closest and most observing students. "Enchantingly
+interesting."--_The Inter-Ocean_ (Chicago).
+
+
+
+ADVENTURES OF A WIDOW.
+
+1 vol. 12mo. $1.50.
+
+"Mr. FAWCETT is, without question, one of the best of our younger
+novelists.... He is thoroughly at home among the people and the scenes
+he chooses to depict."--_Beacon_ (Boston).
+
+"As a writer, Mr. FAWCETT is most enjoyable. He has wonderful command of
+emotion, and in his recent novels there are many passages of singular
+strength, hot passion, or most moving pathos.... He is irresistibly
+attractive."
+
+
+JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., BOSTON.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF A WIDOW***
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