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+Project Gutenberg's The Descent of Man and Other Stories, by Edith Wharton
+
+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 Descent of Man and Other Stories
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Posting Date: August 11, 2009 [EBook #4519]
+Release Date: October, 2003
+First Posted: January 29, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DESCENT OF MAN, OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DESCENT OF MAN
+
+AND OTHER STORIES
+
+
+BY EDITH WHARTON
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+THE DESCENT OF MAN, AND OTHER STORIES
+
+
+
+The Descent of Man
+
+The Other Two
+
+Expiation
+
+The Lady's Maid's Bell
+
+The Mission of Jane
+
+The Reckoning
+
+The Letter
+
+The Dilettante
+
+The Quicksand
+
+A Venetian Night's Entertainment
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DESCENT OF MAN
+
+I
+
+
+When Professor Linyard came back from his holiday in the Maine woods
+the air of rejuvenation he brought with him was due less to the
+influences of the climate than to the companionship he had enjoyed on
+his travels. To Mrs. Linyard's observant eye he had appeared to set out
+alone; but an invisible traveller had in fact accompanied him, and if
+his heart beat high it was simply at the pitch of his adventure: for
+the Professor had eloped with an idea.
+
+No one who has not tried the experiment can divine its exhilaration.
+Professor Linyard would not have changed places with any hero of
+romance pledged to a flesh-and-blood abduction. The most fascinating
+female is apt to be encumbered with luggage and scruples: to take up a
+good deal of room in the present and overlap inconveniently into the
+future; whereas an idea can accommodate itself to a single molecule of
+the brain or expand to the circumference of the horizon. The
+Professor's companion had to the utmost this quality of adaptability.
+As the express train whirled him away from the somewhat inelastic
+circle of Mrs. Linyard's affections, his idea seemed to be sitting
+opposite him, and their eyes met every moment or two in a glance of
+joyous complicity; yet when a friend of the family presently joined him
+and began to talk about college matters, the idea slipped out of sight
+in a flash, and the Professor would have had no difficulty in proving
+that he was alone.
+
+But if, from the outset, he found his idea the most agreeable of
+fellow-travellers, it was only in the aromatic solitude of the woods
+that he tasted the full savour of his adventure. There, during the long
+cool August days, lying full length on the pine-needles and gazing up
+into the sky, he would meet the eyes of his companion bending over him
+like a nearer heaven. And what eyes they were!--clear yet unfathomable,
+bubbling with inexhaustible laughter, yet drawing their freshness and
+sparkle from the central depths of thought! To a man who for twenty
+years had faced an eye reflecting the obvious with perfect accuracy,
+these escapes into the inscrutable had always been peculiarly inviting;
+but hitherto the Professor's mental infidelities had been restricted by
+an unbroken and relentless domesticity. Now, for the first time since
+his marriage, chance had given him six weeks to himself, and he was
+coming home with his lungs full of liberty.
+
+It must not be inferred that the Professor's domestic relations were
+defective: they were in fact so complete that it was almost impossible
+to get away from them. It is the happy husbands who are really in
+bondage; the little rift within the lute is often a passage to freedom.
+Marriage had given the Professor exactly what he had sought in it; a
+comfortable lining to life. The impossibility of rising to sentimental
+crises had made him scrupulously careful not to shirk the practical
+obligations of the bond. He took as it were a sociological view of his
+case, and modestly regarded himself as a brick in that foundation on
+which the state is supposed to rest. Perhaps if Mrs. Linyard had cared
+about entomology, or had taken sides in the war over the transmission
+of acquired characteristics, he might have had a less impersonal notion
+of marriage; but he was unconscious of any deficiency in their
+relation, and if consulted would probably have declared that he didn't
+want any woman bothering with his beetles. His real life had always
+lain in the universe of thought, in that enchanted region which, to
+those who have lingered there, comes to have so much more colour and
+substance than the painted curtain hanging before it. The Professor's
+particular veil of Maia was a narrow strip of homespun woven in a
+monotonous pattern; but he had only to lift it to step into an empire.
+
+This unseen universe was thronged with the most seductive shapes: the
+Professor moved Sultan-like through a seraglio of ideas. But of all the
+lovely apparitions that wove their spells about him, none had ever worn
+quite so persuasive an aspect as this latest favourite. For the others
+were mostly rather grave companions, serious-minded and elevating
+enough to have passed muster in a Ladies' Debating Club; but this new
+fancy of the Professor's was simply one embodied laugh. It was, in
+other words, the smile of relaxation at the end of a long day's toil:
+the flash of irony that the laborious mind projects, irresistibly, over
+labour conscientiously performed. The Professor had always been a hard
+worker. If he was an indulgent friend to his ideas, he was also a stern
+task-master to them. For, in addition to their other duties, they had
+to support his family: to pay the butcher and baker, and provide for
+Jack's schooling and Millicent's dresses. The Professor's household was
+a modest one, yet it tasked his ideas to keep it up to his wife's
+standard. Mrs. Linyard was not an exacting wife, and she took enough
+pride in her husband's attainments to pay for her honours by turning
+Millicent's dresses and darning Jack's socks, and going to the College
+receptions year after year in the same black silk with shiny seams. It
+consoled her to see an occasional mention of Professor Linyard's
+remarkable monograph on the Ethical Reactions of the Infusoria, or an
+allusion to his investigations into the Unconscious Cerebration of the
+Amoeba.
+
+Still there were moments when the healthy indifference of Jack and
+Millicent reacted on the maternal sympathies; when Mrs. Linyard would
+have made her husband a railway-director, if by this transformation she
+might have increased her boy's allowance and given her daughter a new
+hat, or a set of furs such as the other girls were wearing. Of such
+moments of rebellion the Professor himself was not wholly unconscious.
+He could not indeed understand why any one should want a new hat; and
+as to an allowance, he had had much less money at college than Jack,
+and had yet managed to buy a microscope and collect a few "specimens";
+while Jack was free from such expensive tastes! But the Professor did
+not let his want of sympathy interfere with the discharge of his
+paternal obligations. He worked hard to keep the wants of his family
+gratified, and it was precisely in the endeavor to attain this end that
+he at length broke down and had to cease from work altogether.
+
+To cease from work was not to cease from thought of it; and in the
+unwonted pause from effort the Professor found himself taking a general
+survey of the field he had travelled. At last it was possible to lift
+his nose from the loom, to step a moment in front of the tapestry he
+had been weaving. From this first inspection of the pattern so long
+wrought over from behind, it was natural to glance a little farther and
+seek its reflection in the public eye. It was not indeed of his special
+task that he thought in this connection. He was but one of the great
+army of weavers at work among the threads of that cosmic woof; and what
+he sought was the general impression their labour had produced.
+
+When Professor Linyard first plied his microscope, the audience of the
+man of science had been composed of a few fellow-students, sympathetic
+or hostile as their habits of mind predetermined, but versed in the
+jargon of the profession and familiar with the point of departure. In
+the intervening quarter of a century, however, this little group had
+been swallowed up in a larger public. Every one now read scientific
+books and expressed an opinion on them. The ladies and the clergy had
+taken them up first; now they had passed to the school-room and the
+kindergarten. Daily life was regulated on scientific principles; the
+daily papers had their "Scientific Jottings"; nurses passed
+examinations in hygienic science, and babies were fed and dandled
+according to the new psychology.
+
+The very fact that scientific investigation still had, to some minds, a
+flavour of heterodoxy, gave it a perennial interest. The mob had broken
+down the walls of tradition to batten in the orchard of forbidden
+knowledge. The inaccessible goddess whom the Professor had served in
+his youth now offered her charms in the market-place. And yet it was
+not the same goddess after all, but a pseudo-science masquerading in
+the garb of the real divinity. This false goddess had her ritual and
+her literature. She had her sacred books, written by false priests and
+sold by millions to the faithful. In the most successful of these
+works, ancient dogma and modern discovery were depicted in a close
+embrace under the lime-lights of a hazy transcendentalism; and the
+tableau never failed of its effect. Some of the books designed on this
+popular model had lately fallen into the Professor's hands, and they
+filled him with mingled rage and hilarity. The rage soon died: he came
+to regard this mass of pseudo-literature as protecting the truth from
+desecration. But the hilarity remained, and flowed into the form of his
+idea. And the idea--the divine, incomparable idea--was simply that he
+should avenge his goddess by satirizing her false interpreters. He
+would write a skit on the "popular" scientific book; he would so heap
+platitude on platitude, fallacy on fallacy, false analogy on false
+analogy, so use his superior knowledge to abound in the sense of the
+ignorant, that even the gross crowd would join in the laugh against its
+augurs. And the laugh should be something more than the distension of
+mental muscles; it should be the trumpet-blast bringing down the walls
+of ignorance, or at least the little stone striking the giant between
+the eyes.
+
+
+II
+
+The Professor, on presenting his card, had imagined that it would
+command prompt access to the publisher's sanctuary; but the young man
+who read his name was not moved to immediate action. It was clear that
+Professor Linyard of Hillbridge University was not a specific figure to
+the purveyors of popular literature. But the publisher was an old
+friend; and when the card had finally drifted to his office on the
+languid tide of routine he came forth at once to greet his visitor.
+
+The warmth of his welcome convinced the Professor that he had been
+right in bringing his manuscript to Ned Harviss. He and Harviss had
+been at Hillbridge together, and the future publisher had been one of
+the wildest spirits in that band of college outlaws which yearly turns
+out so many inoffensive citizens and kind husbands and fathers. The
+Professor knew the taming qualities of life. He was aware that many of
+his most reckless comrades had been transformed into prudent
+capitalists or cowed wage-earners; but he was almost sure that he could
+count on Harviss. So rare a sense of irony, so keen a perception of
+relative values, could hardly have been blunted even by twenty years'
+intercourse with the obvious.
+
+The publisher's appearance was a little disconcerting. He looked as if
+he had been fattened on popular fiction; and his fat was full of
+optimistic creases. The Professor seemed to see him bowing into his
+office a long train of spotless heroines laden with the maiden tribute
+of the hundredth thousand volume.
+
+Nevertheless, his welcome was reassuring. He did not disown his early
+enormities, and capped his visitor's tentative allusions by such
+flagrant references to the past that the Professor produced his
+manuscript without a scruple.
+
+"What--you don't mean to say you've been doing something in our line?"
+
+The Professor smiled. "You publish scientific books sometimes, don't
+you?"
+
+The publisher's optimistic creases relaxed a little. "H'm--it all
+depends--I'm afraid you're a little _too_ scientific for us. We have a
+big sale for scientific breakfast foods, but not for the concentrated
+essences. In your case, of course, I should be delighted to stretch a
+point; but in your own interest I ought to tell you that perhaps one of
+the educational houses would do you better."
+
+The Professor leaned back, still smiling luxuriously.
+
+"Well, look it over--I rather think you'll take it."
+
+"Oh, we'll _take_ it, as I say; but the terms might not--"
+
+"No matter about the terms--"
+
+The publisher threw his head back with a laugh. "I had no idea that
+science was so profitable; we find our popular novelists are the
+hardest hands at a bargain."
+
+"Science is disinterested," the Professor corrected him. "And I have a
+fancy to have you publish this thing."
+
+"That's immensely good of you, my dear fellow. Of course your name goes
+with a certain public--and I rather like the originality of our
+bringing out a work so out of our line. I daresay it may boom us both."
+His creases deepened at the thought, and he shone encouragingly on the
+Professor's leave-taking.
+
+Within a fortnight, a line from Harviss recalled the Professor to town.
+He had been looking forward with immense zest to this second meeting;
+Harviss's college roar was in his tympanum, and he pictured himself
+following up the protracted chuckle which would follow his friend's
+progress through the manuscript. He was proud of the adroitness with
+which he had kept his secret from Harviss, had maintained to the last
+the pretense of a serious work, in order to give the keener edge to his
+reader's enjoyment. Not since under-graduate days had the Professor
+tasted such a draught of pure fun as his anticipations now poured for
+him.
+
+This time his card brought instant admission. He was bowed into the
+office like a successful novelist, and Harviss grasped him with both
+hands.
+
+"Well--do you mean to take it?" he asked, with a lingering coquetry.
+
+"Take it? Take it, my dear fellow? It's in press already--you'll excuse
+my not waiting to consult you? There will be no difficulty about terms,
+I assure you, and we had barely time to catch the autumn market. My
+dear Linyard, why didn't you _tell_ me?" His voice sank to a
+reproachful solemnity, and he pushed forward his own arm-chair.
+
+The Professor dropped into it with a chuckle. "And miss the joy of
+letting you find out?"
+
+"Well--it _was_ a joy." Harviss held out a box of his best cigars. "I
+don't know when I've had a bigger sensation. It was so deucedly
+unexpected--and, my dear fellow, you've brought it so exactly to the
+right shop."
+
+"I'm glad to hear you say so," said the Professor modestly.
+
+Harviss laughed in rich appreciation. "I don't suppose you had a doubt
+of it; but of course I was quite unprepared. And it's so
+extraordinarily out of your line--"
+
+The Professor took off his glasses and rubbed them with a slow smile.
+
+"Would you have thought it so--at college?"
+
+Harviss stared. "At college?--Why, you were the most iconoclastic
+devil--"
+
+There was a perceptible pause. The Professor restored his glasses and
+looked at his friend. "Well--?" he said simply.
+
+"Well--?" echoed the other, still staring. "Ah--I see; you mean that
+that's what explains it. The swing of the pendulum, and so forth. Well,
+I admit it's not an uncommon phenomenon. I've conformed myself, for
+example; most of our crowd have, I believe; but somehow I hadn't
+expected it of you."
+
+The close observer might have detected a faint sadness under the
+official congratulation of his tone; but the Professor was too amazed
+to have an ear for such fine shades.
+
+"Expected it of me? Expected what of me?" he gasped. "What in heaven do
+you think this thing is?" And he struck his fist on the manuscript
+which lay between them.
+
+Harviss had recovered his optimistic creases. He rested a benevolent
+eye on the document.
+
+"Why, your apologia--your confession of faith, I should call it. You
+surely must have seen which way you were going? You can't have written
+it in your sleep?"
+
+"Oh, no, I was wide awake enough," said the Professor faintly.
+
+"Well, then, why are you staring at me as if I were _not?"_ Harviss
+leaned forward to lay a reassuring hand on his visitor's worn
+coat-sleeve. "Don't mistake me, my dear Linyard. Don't fancy there was
+the least unkindness in my allusion to your change of front. What is
+growth but the shifting of the stand-point? Why should a man be
+expected to look at life with the same eyes at twenty and at--our age?
+It never occurred to me that you could feel the least delicacy in
+admitting that you have come round a little--have fallen into line, so
+to speak."
+
+But the Professor had sprung up as if to give his lungs more room to
+expand; and from them there issued a laugh which shook the editorial
+rafters.
+
+"Oh, Lord, oh Lord--is it really as good as that?" he gasped.
+
+Harviss had glanced instinctively toward the electric bell on his desk;
+it was evident that he was prepared for an emergency.
+
+"My dear fellow--" he began in a soothing tone.
+
+"Oh, let me have my laugh out, do," implored the Professor. "I'll--I'll
+quiet down in a minute; you needn't ring for the young man." He dropped
+into his chair again, and grasped its arms to steady his shaking. "This
+is the best laugh I've had since college," he brought out between his
+paroxysms. And then, suddenly, he sat up with a groan. "But if it's as
+good as that it's a failure!" he exclaimed.
+
+Harviss, stiffening a little, examined the tip of his cigar. "My dear
+Linyard," he said at length, "I don't understand a word you're saying."
+
+The Professor succumbed to a fresh access, from the vortex of which he
+managed to fling out--"But that's the very core of the joke!"
+
+Harviss looked at him resignedly. "What is?"
+
+"Why, your not seeing--your not understanding--"
+
+"Not understanding _what?"_
+
+"Why, what the book is meant to be." His laughter subsided again and he
+sat gazing thoughtfully at the publisher. "Unless it means," he wound
+up, "that I've over-shot the mark."
+
+"If I am the mark, you certainly have," said Harviss, with a glance at
+the clock.
+
+The Professor caught the glance and interpreted it. "The book is a
+skit," he said, rising.
+
+The other stared. "A skit? It's not serious, you mean?"
+
+"Not to me--but it seems you've taken it so."
+
+"You never told me--" began the publisher in a ruffled tone.
+
+"No, I never told you," said the Professor.
+
+Harviss sat staring at the manuscript between them. "I don't pretend to
+be up in such recondite forms of humour," he said, still stiffly. "Of
+course you address yourself to a very small class of readers."
+
+"Oh, infinitely small," admitted the Professor, extending his hand
+toward the manuscript.
+
+Harviss appeared to be pursuing his own train of thought. "That is," he
+continued, "if you insist on an ironical interpretation."
+
+"If I insist on it--what do you mean?"
+
+The publisher smiled faintly. "Well--isn't the book susceptible of
+another? If _I_ read it without seeing--"
+
+"Well?" murmured the other, fascinated.--"why shouldn't the rest of the
+world?" declared Harviss boldly. "I represent the Average
+Reader--that's my business, that's what I've been training myself to do
+for the last twenty years. It's a mission like another--the thing is to
+do it thoroughly; not to cheat and compromise. I know fellows who are
+publishers in business hours and dilettantes the rest of the time.
+Well, they never succeed: convictions are just as necessary in business
+as in religion. But that's not the point--I was going to say that if
+you'll let me handle this book as a genuine thing I'll guarantee to
+make it go."
+
+The Professor stood motionless, his hand still on the manuscript.
+
+"A genuine thing?" he echoed.
+
+"A serious piece of work--the expression of your convictions. I tell
+you there's nothing the public likes as much as convictions--they'll
+always follow a man who believes in his own ideas. And this book is
+just on the line of popular interest. You've got hold of a big thing.
+It's full of hope and enthusiasm: it's written in the religious key.
+There are passages in it that would do splendidly in a Birthday
+Book--things that popular preachers would quote in their sermons. If
+you'd wanted to catch a big public you couldn't have gone about it in a
+better way. The thing's perfect for my purpose--I wouldn't let you
+alter a word of it. It'll sell like a popular novel if you'll let me
+handle it in the right way."
+
+
+III
+
+When the Professor left Harviss's office, the manuscript remained
+behind. He thought he had been taken by the huge irony of the
+situation--by the enlarged circumference of the joke. In its original
+form, as Harviss had said, the book would have addressed itself to a
+very limited circle: now it would include the world. The elect would
+understand; the crowd would not; and his work would thus serve a double
+purpose. And, after all, nothing was changed in the situation; not a
+word of the book was to be altered. The change was merely in the
+publisher's point of view, and in the "tip" he was to give the
+reviewers. The Professor had only to hold his tongue and look serious.
+
+These arguments found a strong reinforcement in the large premium which
+expressed Harviss's sense of his opportunity. As a satire, the book
+would have brought its author nothing; in fact, its cost would have
+come out of his own pocket, since, as Harviss assured him, no publisher
+would have risked taking it. But as a profession of faith, as the
+recantation of an eminent biologist, whose leanings had hitherto been
+supposed to be toward a cold determinism, it would bring in a steady
+income to author and publisher. The offer found the Professor in a
+moment of financial perplexity. His illness, his unwonted holiday, the
+necessity of postponing a course of well-paid lectures, had combined to
+diminish his resources; and when Harviss offered him an advance of a
+thousand dollars the esoteric savour of the joke became irresistible.
+It was still as a joke that he persisted in regarding the transaction;
+and though he had pledged himself not to betray the real intent of the
+book, he held _in petto_ the notion of some day being able to take the
+public into his confidence. As for the initiated, they would know at
+once: and however long a face he pulled, his colleagues would see the
+tongue in his cheek. Meanwhile it fortunately happened that, even if
+the book should achieve the kind of triumph prophesied by Harviss, it
+would not appreciably injure its author's professional standing.
+Professor Linyard was known chiefly as a microscopist. On the structure
+and habits of a certain class of coleoptera he was the most
+distinguished living authority; but none save his intimate friends knew
+what generalizations on the destiny of man he had drawn from these
+special studies. He might have published a treatise on the Filioque
+without disturbing the confidence of those on whose approval his
+reputation rested; and moreover he was sustained by the thought that
+one glance at his book would let them into its secret. In fact, so sure
+was he of this that he wondered the astute Harviss had cared to risk
+such speedy exposure. But Harviss had probably reflected that even in
+this reverberating age the opinions of the laboratory do not easily
+reach the street; and the Professor, at any rate, was not bound to
+offer advice on this point.
+
+The determining cause of his consent was the fact that the book was
+already in press. The Professor knew little about the workings of the
+press, but the phrase gave him a sense of finality, of having been
+caught himself in the toils of that mysterious engine. If he had had
+time to think the matter over, his scruples might have dragged him
+back; but his conscience was eased by the futility of resistance.
+
+
+IV
+
+Mrs. Linyard did not often read the papers; and there was therefore a
+special significance in her approaching her husband one evening after
+dinner with a copy of the _New York Investigator_ in her hand. Her
+expression lent solemnity to the act: Mrs. Linyard had a limited but
+distinctive set of expressions, and she now looked as she did when the
+President of the University came to dine.
+
+"You didn't tell me of this, Samuel," she said in a slightly tremulous
+voice.
+
+"Tell you of what?" returned the Professor, reddening to the margin of
+his baldness.
+
+"That you had published a book--I might never have heard of it if Mrs.
+Pease hadn't brought me the paper."
+
+Her husband rubbed his eye-glasses with a groan. "Oh, you would have
+heard of it," he said gloomily.
+
+Mrs. Linyard stared. "Did you wish to keep it from me, Samuel?" And as
+he made no answer, she added with irresistible pride: "Perhaps you
+don't know what beautiful things have been said about it."
+
+He took the paper with a reluctant hand. "Has Pease been saying
+beautiful things about it?"
+
+"The Professor? Mrs. Pease didn't say he had mentioned it."
+
+The author heaved a sigh of relief. His book, as Harviss had
+prophesied, had caught the autumn market: had caught and captured it.
+The publisher had conducted the campaign like an experienced
+strategist. He had completely surrounded the enemy. Every newspaper,
+every periodical, held in ambush an advertisement of "The Vital Thing."
+Weeks in advance the great commander had begun to form his lines of
+attack. Allusions to the remarkable significance of the coming work had
+appeared first in the scientific and literary reviews, spreading thence
+to the supplements of the daily journals. Not a moment passed without a
+quickening touch to the public consciousness: seventy millions of
+people were forced to remember at least once a day that Professor
+Linyard's book was on the verge of appearing. Slips emblazoned with the
+question: _Have you read "The Vital Thing"?_ fell from the pages of
+popular novels and whitened the floors of crowded street-cars. The
+query, in large lettering, assaulted the traveller at the railway
+bookstall, confronted him on the walls of "elevated" stations, and
+seemed, in its ascending scale, about to supplant the interrogations as
+to soap and stove-polish which animate our rural scenery.
+
+On the day of publication, the Professor had withdrawn to his
+laboratory. The shriek of the advertisements was in his ears, and his
+one desire was to avoid all knowledge of the event they heralded. A
+reaction of self-consciousness had set in, and if Harviss's cheque had
+sufficed to buy up the first edition of "The Vital Thing" the Professor
+would gladly have devoted it to that purpose. But the sense of
+inevitableness gradually subdued him, and he received his wife's copy
+of the _Investigator_ with a kind of impersonal curiosity. The review
+was a long one, full of extracts: he saw, as he glanced over them, how
+well they would look in a volume of "Selections." The reviewer began by
+thanking his author "for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of
+ringing optimism, of faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good,
+which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent
+nihilism.... It is well," the writer continued, "when such reminders
+come to us not from the moralist but from the man of science--when from
+the desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there rises this glorious
+cry of faith and reconstruction."
+
+The review was minute and exhaustive. Thanks no doubt to Harviss's
+diplomacy, it had been given to the _Investigator's_ "best man," and
+the Professor was startled by the bold eye with which his emancipated
+fallacies confronted him. Under the reviewer's handling they made up
+admirably as truths, and their author began to understand Harviss's
+regret that they should be used for any less profitable purpose.
+
+The _Investigator_, as Harviss phrased it, "set the pace," and the
+other journals followed, finding it easier to let their critical
+man-of-all-work play a variation on the first reviewer's theme than to
+secure an expert to "do" the book afresh. But it was evident that the
+Professor had captured his public, for all the resources of the
+profession could not, as Harviss gleefully pointed out, have carried
+the book so straight to the heart of the nation. There was something
+noble in the way in which Harviss belittled his own share in the
+achievement, and insisted on the inutility of shoving a book which had
+started with such headway on.
+
+"All I ask you is to admit that I saw what would happen," he said with
+a touch of professional pride. "I knew you'd struck the right note--I
+knew they'd be quoting you from Maine to San Francisco. Good as
+fiction? It's better--it'll keep going longer."
+
+"Will it?" said the Professor with a slight shudder. He was resigned to
+an ephemeral triumph, but the thought of the book's persistency
+frightened him.
+
+"I should say so! Why, you fit in everywhere--science, theology,
+natural history--and then the all-for-the-best element which is so
+popular just now. Why, you come right in with the How-to-Relax series,
+and they sell way up in the millions. And then the book's so full of
+tenderness--there are such lovely things in it about flowers and
+children. I didn't know an old Dryasdust like you could have such a lot
+of sentiment in him. Why, I actually caught myself snivelling over that
+passage about the snowdrops piercing the frozen earth; and my wife was
+saying the other day that, since she's read 'The Vital Thing,' she
+begins to think you must write the 'What-Cheer Column,' in the
+_Inglenook."_ He threw back his head with a laugh which ended in the
+inspired cry: "And, by George, sir, when the thing begins to slow off
+we'll start somebody writing against it, and that will run us straight
+into another hundred thousand."
+
+And as earnest of this belief he drew the Professor a supplementary
+cheque.
+
+
+V
+
+Mrs. Linyard's knock cut short the importunities of the lady who had
+been trying to persuade the Professor to be taken by flashlight at his
+study table for the Christmas number of the _Inglenook_. On this point
+the Professor had fancied himself impregnable; but the unwonted smile
+with which he welcomed his wife's intrusion showed that his defences
+were weakening.
+
+The lady from the _Inglenook_ took the hint with professional
+promptness, but said brightly, as she snapped the elastic around her
+note-book: "I shan't let you forget me, Professor."
+
+The groan with which he followed her retreat was interrupted by his
+wife's question: "Do they pay you for these interviews, Samuel?"
+
+The Professor looked at her with sudden attention. "Not directly," he
+said, wondering at her expression.
+
+She sank down with a sigh. "Indirectly, then?"
+
+"What is the matter, my dear? I gave you Harviss's second cheque the
+other day--"
+
+Her tears arrested him. "Don't be hard on the boy, Samuel! I really
+believe your success has turned his head."
+
+"The boy--what boy? My success--? Explain yourself, Susan!"
+
+"It's only that Jack has--has borrowed some money--which he can't
+repay. But you mustn't think him altogether to blame, Samuel. Since the
+success of your book he has been asked about so much--it's given the
+children quite a different position. Millicent says that wherever they
+go the first question asked is, 'Are you any relation of the author of
+"The Vital Thing"?' Of course we're all very proud of the book; but it
+entails obligations which you may not have thought of in writing it."
+
+The Professor sat gazing at the letters and newspaper clippings on the
+study-table which he had just successfully defended from the camera of
+the _Inglenook_. He took up an envelope bearing the name of a popular
+weekly paper.
+
+"I don't know that the _Inglenook_ would help much," he said, "but I
+suppose this might."
+
+Mrs. Linyard's eyes glowed with maternal avidity.
+
+"What is it, Samuel?"
+
+"A series of 'Scientific Sermons' for the Round-the-Gas-Log column of
+_The Woman's World_. I believe that journal has a larger circulation
+than any other weekly, and they pay in proportion."
+
+He had not even asked the extent of Jack's indebtedness. It had been so
+easy to relieve recent domestic difficulties by the timely production
+of Harviss's two cheques, that it now seemed natural to get Mrs.
+Linyard out of the room by promising further reinforcements. The
+Professor had indignantly rejected Harviss's suggestion that he should
+follow up his success by a second volume on the same lines. He had
+sworn not to lend more than a passive support to the fraud of "The
+Vital Thing"; but the temptation to free himself from Mrs. Linyard
+prevailed over his last scruples, and within an hour he was at work on
+the Scientific Sermons.
+
+The Professor was not an unkind man. He really enjoyed making his
+family happy; and it was his own business if his reward for so doing
+was that it kept them out of his way. But the success of "The Vital
+Thing" gave him more than this negative satisfaction. It enlarged his
+own existence and opened new doors into other lives. The Professor,
+during fifty virtuous years, had been cognizant of only two types of
+women: the fond and foolish, whom one married, and the earnest and
+intellectual, whom one did not. Of the two, he infinitely preferred the
+former, even for conversational purposes. But as a social instrument
+woman was unknown to him; and it was not till he was drawn into the
+world on the tide of his literary success that he discovered the
+deficiencies in his classification of the sex. Then he learned with
+astonishment of the existence of a third type: the woman who is fond
+without foolishness and intellectual without earnestness. Not that the
+Professor inspired, or sought to inspire, sentimental emotions; but he
+expanded in the warm atmosphere of personal interest which some of his
+new acquaintances contrived to create about him. It was delightful to
+talk of serious things in a setting of frivolity, and to be personal
+without being domestic.
+
+Even in this new world, where all subjects were touched on lightly, and
+emphasis was the only indelicacy, the Professor found himself
+constrained to endure an occasional reference to his book. It was
+unpleasant at first; but gradually he slipped into the habit of hearing
+it talked of, and grew accustomed to telling pretty women just how "it
+had first come to him."
+
+Meanwhile the success of the Scientific Sermons was facilitating his
+family relations. His photograph in the _Inglenook_, to which the lady
+of the note-book had succeeded in appending a vivid interview, carried
+his fame to circles inaccessible even to "The Vital Thing"; and the
+Professor found himself the man of the hour. He soon grew used to the
+functions of the office, and gave out hundred-dollar interviews on
+every subject, from labour-strikes to Babism, with a frequency which
+reacted agreeably on the domestic exchequer. Presently his head began
+to figure in the advertising pages of the magazines. Admiring readers
+learned the name of the only breakfast-food in use at his table, of the
+ink with which "The Vital Thing" had been written, the soap with which
+the author's hands were washed, and the tissue-builder which fortified
+him for further effort. These confidences endeared the Professor to
+millions of readers, and his head passed in due course from the
+magazine and the newspaper to the biscuit-tin and the chocolate-box.
+
+
+VI
+
+The Professor, all the while, was leading a double life. While the
+author of "The Vital Thing" reaped the fruits of popular approval, the
+distinguished microscopist continued his laboratory work unheeded save
+by the few who were engaged in the same line of investigations. His
+divided allegiance had not hitherto affected the quality of his work:
+it seemed to him that he returned to the laboratory with greater zest
+after an afternoon in a drawing-room where readings from "The Vital
+Thing" had alternated with plantation melodies and tea. He had long
+ceased to concern himself with what his colleagues thought of his
+literary career. Of the few whom he frequented, none had referred to
+"The Vital Thing"; and he knew enough of their lives to guess that
+their silence might as fairly be attributed to indifference as to
+disapproval. They were intensely interested in the Professor's views on
+beetles, but they really cared very little what he thought of the
+Almighty.
+
+The Professor entirely shared their feelings, and one of his chief
+reasons for cultivating the success which accident had bestowed on him,
+was that it enabled him to command a greater range of appliances for
+his real work. He had known what it was to lack books and instruments;
+and "The Vital Thing" was the magic wand which summoned them to his
+aid. For some time he had been feeling his way along the edge of a
+discovery: balancing himself with professional skill on a plank of
+hypothesis flung across an abyss of uncertainty. The conjecture was the
+result of years of patient gathering of facts: its corroboration would
+take months more of comparison and classification. But at the end of
+the vista victory loomed. The Professor felt within himself that
+assurance of ultimate justification which, to the man of science, makes
+a life-time seem the mere comma between premiss and deduction. But he
+had reached the point where his conjectures required formulation. It
+was only by giving them expression, by exposing them to the comment and
+criticism of his associates, that he could test their final value; and
+this inner assurance was confirmed by the only friend whose confidence
+he invited.
+
+Professor Pease, the husband of the lady who had opened Mrs. Linyard's
+eyes to the triumph of "The Vital Thing," was the repository of her
+husband's scientific experiences. What he thought of "The Vital Thing"
+had never been divulged; and he was capable of such vast exclusions
+that it was quite possible that pervasive work had not yet reached him.
+In any case, it was not likely to affect his judgment of the author's
+professional capacity.
+
+"You want to put that all in a book, Linyard," was Professor Pease's
+summing-up. "I'm sure you've got hold of something big; but to see it
+clearly yourself you ought to outline it for others. Take my
+advice--chuck everything else and get to work tomorrow. It's time you
+wrote a book, anyhow."
+
+_ It's time you wrote a book, anyhow!_ The words smote the Professor
+with mingled pain and ecstasy: he could have wept over their
+significance. But his friend's other phrase reminded him with a start
+of Harviss. "You have got hold of a big thing--" it had been the
+publisher's first comment on "The Vital Thing." But what a world of
+meaning lay between the two phrases! It was the world in which the
+powers who fought for the Professor were destined to wage their final
+battle; and for the moment he had no doubt of the outcome. The next day
+he went to town to see Harviss. He wanted to ask for an advance on the
+new popular edition of "The Vital Thing." He had determined to drop a
+course of supplementary lectures at the University, and to give himself
+up for a year to his book. To do this, additional funds were necessary;
+but thanks to "The Vital Thing" they would be forthcoming.
+
+The publisher received him as cordially as usual; but the response to
+his demand was not as prompt as his previous experience had entitled
+him to expect.
+
+"Of course we'll be glad to do what we can for you, Linyard; but the
+fact is, we've decided to give up the idea of the new edition for the
+present."
+
+"You've given up the new edition?"
+
+"Why, yes--we've done pretty well by 'The Vital Thing,' and we're
+inclined to think it's _your_ turn to do something for it now."
+
+The Professor looked at him blankly. "What can I do for it?" he
+asked--"what _more_" his accent added.
+
+"Why, put a little new life in it by writing something else. The secret
+of perpetual motion hasn't yet been discovered, you know, and it's one
+of the laws of literature that books which start with a rush are apt to
+slow down sooner than the crawlers. We've kept 'The Vital Thing' going
+for eighteen months--but, hang it, it ain't so vital any more. We
+simply couldn't see our way to a new edition. Oh, I don't say it's dead
+yet--but it's moribund, and you're the only man who can resuscitate it."
+
+The Professor continued to stare. "I--what can I do about it?" he
+stammered.
+
+"Do? Why write another like it--go it one better: you know the trick.
+The public isn't tired of you by any means; but you want to make
+yourself heard again before anybody else cuts in. Write another
+book--write two, and we'll sell them in sets in a box: The Vital Thing
+Series. That will take tremendously in the holidays. Try and let us
+have a new volume by October--I'll be glad to give you a big advance if
+you'll sign a contract on that."
+
+The Professor sat silent: there was too cruel an irony in the
+coincidence.
+
+Harviss looked up at him in surprise.
+
+"Well, what's the matter with taking my advice--you're not going out of
+literature, are you?"
+
+The Professor rose from his chair. "No--I'm going into it," he said
+simply.
+
+"Going into it?"
+
+"I'm going to write a real book--a serious one."
+
+"Good Lord! Most people think 'The Vital Thing' 's serious."
+
+"Yes--but I mean something different."
+
+"In your old line--beetles and so forth?"
+
+"Yes," said the Professor solemnly.
+
+Harviss looked at him with equal gravity. "Well, I'm sorry for that,"
+he said, "because it takes you out of our bailiwick. But I suppose
+you've made enough money out of 'The Vital Thing' to permit yourself a
+little harmless amusement. When you want more cash come back to
+us--only don't put it off too long, or some other fellow will have
+stepped into your shoes. Popularity don't keep, you know; and the
+hotter the success the quicker the commodity perishes."
+
+He leaned back, cheerful and sententious, delivering his axioms with
+conscious kindliness.
+
+The Professor, who had risen and moved to the door, turned back with a
+wavering step.
+
+"When did you say another volume would have to be ready?" he faltered.
+
+"I said October--but call it a month later. You don't need any pushing
+nowadays."
+
+"And--you'd have no objection to letting me have a little advance now?
+I need some new instruments for my real work."
+
+Harviss extended a cordial hand. "My dear fellow, that's talking--I'll
+write the cheque while you wait; and I daresay we can start up the
+cheap edition of 'The Vital Thing' at the same time, if you'll pledge
+yourself to give us the book by November.--How much?" he asked, poised
+above his cheque-book.
+
+In the street, the Professor stood staring about him, uncertain and a
+little dazed.
+
+"After all, it's only putting it off for six months," he said to
+himself; "and I can do better work when I get my new instruments."
+
+He smiled and raised his hat to the passing victoria of a lady in whose
+copy of "The Vital Thing" he had recently written:
+
+_Labor est etiam ipsa voluptas._
+
+
+
+
+THE OTHER TWO
+
+
+I
+
+WAYTHORN, on the drawing-room hearth, waited for his wife to come down
+to dinner.
+
+It was their first night under his own roof, and he was surprised at
+his thrill of boyish agitation. He was not so old, to be sure--his
+glass gave him little more than the five-and-thirty years to which his
+wife confessed--but he had fancied himself already in the temperate
+zone; yet here he was listening for her step with a tender sense of all
+it symbolized, with some old trail of verse about the garlanded nuptial
+door-posts floating through his enjoyment of the pleasant room and the
+good dinner just beyond it.
+
+They had been hastily recalled from their honeymoon by the illness of
+Lily Haskett, the child of Mrs. Waythorn's first marriage. The little
+girl, at Waythorn's desire, had been transferred to his house on the
+day of her mother's wedding, and the doctor, on their arrival, broke
+the news that she was ill with typhoid, but declared that all the
+symptoms were favorable. Lily could show twelve years of unblemished
+health, and the case promised to be a light one. The nurse spoke as
+reassuringly, and after a moment of alarm Mrs. Waythorn had adjusted
+herself to the situation. She was very fond of Lily--her affection for
+the child had perhaps been her decisive charm in Waythorn's eyes--but
+she had the perfectly balanced nerves which her little girl had
+inherited, and no woman ever wasted less tissue in unproductive worry.
+Waythorn was therefore quite prepared to see her come in presently, a
+little late because of a last look at Lily, but as serene and
+well-appointed as if her good-night kiss had been laid on the brow of
+health. Her composure was restful to him; it acted as ballast to his
+somewhat unstable sensibilities. As he pictured her bending over the
+child's bed he thought how soothing her presence must be in illness:
+her very step would prognosticate recovery.
+
+His own life had been a gray one, from temperament rather than
+circumstance, and he had been drawn to her by the unperturbed gayety
+which kept her fresh and elastic at an age when most women's activities
+are growing either slack or febrile. He knew what was said about her;
+for, popular as she was, there had always been a faint undercurrent of
+detraction. When she had appeared in New York, nine or ten years
+earlier, as the pretty Mrs. Haskett whom Gus Varick had unearthed
+somewhere--was it in Pittsburgh or Utica?--society, while promptly
+accepting her, had reserved the right to cast a doubt on its own
+discrimination. Inquiry, however, established her undoubted connection
+with a socially reigning family, and explained her recent divorce as
+the natural result of a runaway match at seventeen; and as nothing was
+known of Mr. Haskett it was easy to believe the worst of him.
+
+Alice Haskett's remarriage with Gus Varick was a passport to the set
+whose recognition she coveted, and for a few years the Varicks were the
+most popular couple in town. Unfortunately the alliance was brief and
+stormy, and this time the husband had his champions. Still, even
+Varick's stanchest supporters admitted that he was not meant for
+matrimony, and Mrs. Varick's grievances were of a nature to bear the
+inspection of the New York courts. A New York divorce is in itself a
+diploma of virtue, and in the semi-widowhood of this second separation
+Mrs. Varick took on an air of sanctity, and was allowed to confide her
+wrongs to some of the most scrupulous ears in town. But when it was
+known that she was to marry Waythorn there was a momentary reaction.
+Her best friends would have preferred to see her remain in the role of
+the injured wife, which was as becoming to her as crape to a rosy
+complexion. True, a decent time had elapsed, and it was not even
+suggested that Waythorn had supplanted his predecessor. Still, people
+shook their heads over him, and one grudging friend, to whom he
+affirmed that he took the step with his eyes open, replied oracularly:
+"Yes--and with your ears shut."
+
+Waythorn could afford to smile at these innuendoes. In the Wall Street
+phrase, he had "discounted" them. He knew that society has not yet
+adapted itself to the consequences of divorce, and that till the
+adaptation takes place every woman who uses the freedom the law accords
+her must be her own social justification. Waythorn had an amused
+confidence in his wife's ability to justify herself. His expectations
+were fulfilled, and before the wedding took place Alice Varick's group
+had rallied openly to her support. She took it all imperturbably: she
+had a way of surmounting obstacles without seeming to be aware of them,
+and Waythorn looked back with wonder at the trivialities over which he
+had worn his nerves thin. He had the sense of having found refuge in a
+richer, warmer nature than his own, and his satisfaction, at the
+moment, was humorously summed up in the thought that his wife, when she
+had done all she could for Lily, would not be ashamed to come down and
+enjoy a good dinner.
+
+The anticipation of such enjoyment was not, however, the sentiment
+expressed by Mrs. Waythorn's charming face when she presently joined
+him. Though she had put on her most engaging teagown she had neglected
+to assume the smile that went with it, and Waythorn thought he had
+never seen her look so nearly worried.
+
+"What is it?" he asked. "Is anything wrong with Lily?"
+
+"No; I've just been in and she's still sleeping." Mrs. Waythorn
+hesitated. "But something tiresome has happened."
+
+He had taken her two hands, and now perceived that he was crushing a
+paper between them.
+
+"This letter?"
+
+"Yes--Mr. Haskett has written--I mean his lawyer has written."
+
+Waythorn felt himself flush uncomfortably. He dropped his wife's hands.
+
+"What about?"
+
+"About seeing Lily. You know the courts--"
+
+"Yes, yes," he interrupted nervously.
+
+Nothing was known about Haskett in New York. He was vaguely supposed to
+have remained in the outer darkness from which his wife had been
+rescued, and Waythorn was one of the few who were aware that he had
+given up his business in Utica and followed her to New York in order to
+be near his little girl. In the days of his wooing, Waythorn had often
+met Lily on the doorstep, rosy and smiling, on her way "to see papa."
+
+"I am so sorry," Mrs. Waythorn murmured.
+
+He roused himself. "What does he want?"
+
+"He wants to see her. You know she goes to him once a week."
+
+"Well--he doesn't expect her to go to him now, does he?"
+
+"No--he has heard of her illness; but he expects to come here."
+
+"_Here?_"
+
+Mrs. Waythorn reddened under his gaze. They looked away from each other.
+
+"I'm afraid he has the right....You'll see...." She made a proffer of
+the letter.
+
+Waythorn moved away with a gesture of refusal. He stood staring about
+the softly lighted room, which a moment before had seemed so full of
+bridal intimacy.
+
+"I'm so sorry," she repeated. "If Lily could have been moved--"
+
+"That's out of the question," he returned impatiently.
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+Her lip was beginning to tremble, and he felt himself a brute.
+
+"He must come, of course," he said. "When is--his day?"
+
+"I'm afraid--to-morrow."
+
+"Very well. Send a note in the morning."
+
+The butler entered to announce dinner.
+
+Waythorn turned to his wife. "Come--you must be tired. It's beastly,
+but try to forget about it," he said, drawing her hand through his arm.
+
+"You're so good, dear. I'll try," she whispered back.
+
+Her face cleared at once, and as she looked at him across the flowers,
+between the rosy candle-shades, he saw her lips waver back into a smile.
+
+"How pretty everything is!" she sighed luxuriously.
+
+He turned to the butler. "The champagne at once, please. Mrs. Waythorn
+is tired."
+
+In a moment or two their eyes met above the sparkling glasses. Her own
+were quite clear and untroubled: he saw that she had obeyed his
+injunction and forgotten.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+WAYTHORN, the next morning, went down town earlier than usual. Haskett
+was not likely to come till the afternoon, but the instinct of flight
+drove him forth. He meant to stay away all day--he had thoughts of
+dining at his club. As his door closed behind him he reflected that
+before he opened it again it would have admitted another man who had as
+much right to enter it as himself, and the thought filled him with a
+physical repugnance.
+
+He caught the "elevated" at the employees' hour, and found himself
+crushed between two layers of pendulous humanity. At Eighth Street the
+man facing him wriggled out and another took his place. Waythorn
+glanced up and saw that it was Gus Varick. The men were so close
+together that it was impossible to ignore the smile of recognition on
+Varick's handsome overblown face. And after all--why not? They had
+always been on good terms, and Varick had been divorced before
+Waythorn's attentions to his wife began. The two exchanged a word on
+the perennial grievance of the congested trains, and when a seat at
+their side was miraculously left empty the instinct of
+self-preservation made Waythorn slip into it after Varick.
+
+The latter drew the stout man's breath of relief.
+
+"Lord--I was beginning to feel like a pressed flower." He leaned back,
+looking unconcernedly at Waythorn. "Sorry to hear that Sellers is
+knocked out again."
+
+"Sellers?" echoed Waythorn, starting at his partner's name.
+
+Varick looked surprised. "You didn't know he was laid up with the gout?"
+
+"No. I've been away--I only got back last night." Waythorn felt himself
+reddening in anticipation of the other's smile.
+
+"Ah--yes; to be sure. And Sellers's attack came on two days ago. I'm
+afraid he's pretty bad. Very awkward for me, as it happens, because he
+was just putting through a rather important thing for me."
+
+"Ah?" Waythorn wondered vaguely since when Varick had been dealing in
+"important things." Hitherto he had dabbled only in the shallow pools
+of speculation, with which Waythorn's office did not usually concern
+itself.
+
+It occurred to him that Varick might be talking at random, to relieve
+the strain of their propinquity. That strain was becoming momentarily
+more apparent to Waythorn, and when, at Cortlandt Street, he caught
+sight of an acquaintance, and had a sudden vision of the picture he and
+Varick must present to an initiated eye, he jumped up with a muttered
+excuse.
+
+"I hope you'll find Sellers better," said Varick civilly, and he
+stammered back: "If I can be of any use to you--" and let the departing
+crowd sweep him to the platform.
+
+At his office he heard that Sellers was in fact ill with the gout, and
+would probably not be able to leave the house for some weeks.
+
+"I'm sorry it should have happened so, Mr. Waythorn," the senior clerk
+said with affable significance. "Mr. Sellers was very much upset at the
+idea of giving you such a lot of extra work just now."
+
+"Oh, that's no matter," said Waythorn hastily. He secretly welcomed the
+pressure of additional business, and was glad to think that, when the
+day's work was over, he would have to call at his partner's on the way
+home.
+
+He was late for luncheon, and turned in at the nearest restaurant
+instead of going to his club. The place was full, and the waiter
+hurried him to the back of the room to capture the only vacant table.
+In the cloud of cigar-smoke Waythorn did not at once distinguish his
+neighbors; but presently, looking about him, he saw Varick seated a few
+feet off. This time, luckily, they were too far apart for conversation,
+and Varick, who faced another way, had probably not even seen him; but
+there was an irony in their renewed nearness.
+
+Varick was said to be fond of good living, and as Waythorn sat
+despatching his hurried luncheon he looked across half enviously at the
+other's leisurely degustation of his meal. When Waythorn first saw him
+he had been helping himself with critical deliberation to a bit of
+Camembert at the ideal point of liquefaction, and now, the cheese
+removed, he was just pouring his _cafe double_ from its little
+two-storied earthen pot. He poured slowly, his ruddy profile bent above
+the task, and one beringed white hand steadying the lid of the
+coffee-pot; then he stretched his other hand to the decanter of cognac
+at his elbow, filled a liqueur-glass, took a tentative sip, and poured
+the brandy into his coffee-cup.
+
+Waythorn watched him in a kind of fascination. What was he thinking
+of--only of the flavor of the coffee and the liqueur? Had the morning's
+meeting left no more trace in his thoughts than on his face? Had his
+wife so completely passed out of his life that even this odd encounter
+with her present husband, within a week after her remarriage, was no
+more than an incident in his day? And as Waythorn mused, another idea
+struck him: had Haskett ever met Varick as Varick and he had just met?
+The recollection of Haskett perturbed him, and he rose and left the
+restaurant, taking a circuitous way out to escape the placid irony of
+Varick's nod.
+
+It was after seven when Waythorn reached home. He thought the footman
+who opened the door looked at him oddly.
+
+"How is Miss Lily?" he asked in haste.
+
+"Doing very well, sir. A gentleman--"
+
+"Tell Barlow to put off dinner for half an hour," Waythorn cut him off,
+hurrying upstairs.
+
+He went straight to his room and dressed without seeing his wife. When
+he reached the drawing-room she was there, fresh and radiant. Lily's
+day had been good; the doctor was not coming back that evening.
+
+At dinner Waythorn told her of Sellers's illness and of the resulting
+complications. She listened sympathetically, adjuring him not to let
+himself be overworked, and asking vague feminine questions about the
+routine of the office. Then she gave him the chronicle of Lily's day;
+quoted the nurse and doctor, and told him who had called to inquire. He
+had never seen her more serene and unruffled. It struck him, with a
+curious pang, that she was very happy in being with him, so happy that
+she found a childish pleasure in rehearsing the trivial incidents of
+her day.
+
+After dinner they went to the library, and the servant put the coffee
+and liqueurs on a low table before her and left the room. She looked
+singularly soft and girlish in her rosy pale dress, against the dark
+leather of one of his bachelor armchairs. A day earlier the contrast
+would have charmed him.
+
+He turned away now, choosing a cigar with affected deliberation.
+
+"Did Haskett come?" he asked, with his back to her.
+
+"Oh, yes--he came."
+
+"You didn't see him, of course?"
+
+She hesitated a moment. "I let the nurse see him."
+
+That was all. There was nothing more to ask. He swung round toward her,
+applying a match to his cigar. Well, the thing was over for a week, at
+any rate. He would try not to think of it. She looked up at him, a
+trifle rosier than usual, with a smile in her eyes.
+
+"Ready for your coffee, dear?"
+
+He leaned against the mantelpiece, watching her as she lifted the
+coffee-pot. The lamplight struck a gleam from her bracelets and tipped
+her soft hair with brightness. How light and slender she was, and how
+each gesture flowed into the next! She seemed a creature all compact of
+harmonies. As the thought of Haskett receded, Waythorn felt himself
+yielding again to the joy of possessorship. They were his, those white
+hands with their flitting motions, his the light haze of hair, the lips
+and eyes....
+
+She set down the coffee-pot, and reaching for the decanter of cognac,
+measured off a liqueur-glass and poured it into his cup.
+
+Waythorn uttered a sudden exclamation.
+
+"What is the matter?" she said, startled.
+
+"Nothing; only--I don't take cognac in my coffee."
+
+"Oh, how stupid of me," she cried.
+
+Their eyes met, and she blushed a sudden agonized red.
+
+
+III
+
+TEN DAYS later, Mr. Sellers, still house-bound, asked Waythorn to call
+on his way down town.
+
+The senior partner, with his swaddled foot propped up by the fire,
+greeted his associate with an air of embarrassment.
+
+"I'm sorry, my dear fellow; I've got to ask you to do an awkward thing
+for me."
+
+Waythorn waited, and the other went on, after a pause apparently given
+to the arrangement of his phrases: "The fact is, when I was knocked out
+I had just gone into a rather complicated piece of business for--Gus
+Varick."
+
+"Well?" said Waythorn, with an attempt to put him at his ease.
+
+"Well--it's this way: Varick came to me the day before my attack. He
+had evidently had an inside tip from somebody, and had made about a
+hundred thousand. He came to me for advice, and I suggested his going
+in with Vanderlyn."
+
+"Oh, the deuce!" Waythorn exclaimed. He saw in a flash what had
+happened. The investment was an alluring one, but required negotiation.
+He listened intently while Sellers put the case before him, and, the
+statement ended, he said: "You think I ought to see Varick?"
+
+"I'm afraid I can't as yet. The doctor is obdurate. And this thing
+can't wait. I hate to ask you, but no one else in the office knows the
+ins and outs of it."
+
+Waythorn stood silent. He did not care a farthing for the success of
+Varick's venture, but the honor of the office was to be considered, and
+he could hardly refuse to oblige his partner.
+
+"Very well," he said, "I'll do it."
+
+That afternoon, apprised by telephone, Varick called at the office.
+Waythorn, waiting in his private room, wondered what the others thought
+of it. The newspapers, at the time of Mrs. Waythorn's marriage, had
+acquainted their readers with every detail of her previous matrimonial
+ventures, and Waythorn could fancy the clerks smiling behind Varick's
+back as he was ushered in.
+
+Varick bore himself admirably. He was easy without being undignified,
+and Waythorn was conscious of cutting a much less impressive figure.
+Varick had no head for business, and the talk prolonged itself for
+nearly an hour while Waythorn set forth with scrupulous precision the
+details of the proposed transaction.
+
+"I'm awfully obliged to you," Varick said as he rose. "The fact is I'm
+not used to having much money to look after, and I don't want to make
+an ass of myself--" He smiled, and Waythorn could not help noticing
+that there was something pleasant about his smile. "It feels uncommonly
+queer to have enough cash to pay one's bills. I'd have sold my soul for
+it a few years ago!"
+
+Waythorn winced at the allusion. He had heard it rumored that a lack of
+funds had been one of the determining causes of the Varick separation,
+but it did not occur to him that Varick's words were intentional. It
+seemed more likely that the desire to keep clear of embarrassing topics
+had fatally drawn him into one. Waythorn did not wish to be outdone in
+civility.
+
+"We'll do the best we can for you," he said. "I think this is a good
+thing you're in."
+
+"Oh, I'm sure it's immense. It's awfully good of you--" Varick broke
+off, embarrassed. "I suppose the thing's settled now--but if--"
+
+"If anything happens before Sellers is about, I'll see you again," said
+Waythorn quietly. He was glad, in the end, to appear the more
+self-possessed of the two.
+
+The course of Lily's illness ran smooth, and as the days passed
+Waythorn grew used to the idea of Haskett's weekly visit. The first
+time the day came round, he stayed out late, and questioned his wife as
+to the visit on his return. She replied at once that Haskett had merely
+seen the nurse downstairs, as the doctor did not wish any one in the
+child's sick-room till after the crisis.
+
+The following week Waythorn was again conscious of the recurrence of
+the day, but had forgotten it by the time he came home to dinner. The
+crisis of the disease came a few days later, with a rapid decline of
+fever, and the little girl was pronounced out of danger. In the
+rejoicing which ensued the thought of Haskett passed out of Waythorn's
+mind and one afternoon, letting himself into the house with a latchkey,
+he went straight to his library without noticing a shabby hat and
+umbrella in the hall.
+
+In the library he found a small effaced-looking man with a thinnish
+gray beard sitting on the edge of a chair. The stranger might have been
+a piano-tuner, or one of those mysteriously efficient persons who are
+summoned in emergencies to adjust some detail of the domestic
+machinery. He blinked at Waythorn through a pair of gold-rimmed
+spectacles and said mildly: "Mr. Waythorn, I presume? I am Lily's
+father."
+
+Waythorn flushed. "Oh--" he stammered uncomfortably. He broke off,
+disliking to appear rude. Inwardly he was trying to adjust the actual
+Haskett to the image of him projected by his wife's reminiscences.
+Waythorn had been allowed to infer that Alice's first husband was a
+brute.
+
+"I am sorry to intrude," said Haskett, with his over-the-counter
+politeness.
+
+"Don't mention it," returned Waythorn, collecting himself. "I suppose
+the nurse has been told?"
+
+"I presume so. I can wait," said Haskett. He had a resigned way of
+speaking, as though life had worn down his natural powers of resistance.
+
+Waythorn stood on the threshold, nervously pulling off his gloves.
+
+"I'm sorry you've been detained. I will send for the nurse," he said;
+and as he opened the door he added with an effort: "I'm glad we can
+give you a good report of Lily." He winced as the _we_ slipped out, but
+Haskett seemed not to notice it.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Waythorn. It's been an anxious time for me."
+
+"Ah, well, that's past. Soon she'll be able to go to you." Waythorn
+nodded and passed out.
+
+In his own room, he flung himself down with a groan. He hated the
+womanish sensibility which made him suffer so acutely from the
+grotesque chances of life. He had known when he married that his wife's
+former husbands were both living, and that amid the multiplied contacts
+of modern existence there were a thousand chances to one that he would
+run against one or the other, yet he found himself as much disturbed by
+his brief encounter with Haskett as though the law had not obligingly
+removed all difficulties in the way of their meeting.
+
+Waythorn sprang up and began to pace the room nervously. He had not
+suffered half so much from his two meetings with Varick. It was
+Haskett's presence in his own house that made the situation so
+intolerable. He stood still, hearing steps in the passage.
+
+"This way, please," he heard the nurse say. Haskett was being taken
+upstairs, then: not a corner of the house but was open to him. Waythorn
+dropped into another chair, staring vaguely ahead of him. On his
+dressing-table stood a photograph of Alice, taken when he had first
+known her. She was Alice Varick then--how fine and exquisite he had
+thought her! Those were Varick's pearls about her neck. At Waythorn's
+instance they had been returned before her marriage. Had Haskett ever
+given her any trinkets--and what had become of them, Waythorn wondered?
+He realized suddenly that he knew very little of Haskett's past or
+present situation; but from the man's appearance and manner of speech
+he could reconstruct with curious precision the surroundings of Alice's
+first marriage. And it startled him to think that she had, in the
+background of her life, a phase of existence so different from anything
+with which he had connected her. Varick, whatever his faults, was a
+gentleman, in the conventional, traditional sense of the term: the
+sense which at that moment seemed, oddly enough, to have most meaning
+to Waythorn. He and Varick had the same social habits, spoke the same
+language, understood the same allusions. But this other man...it was
+grotesquely uppermost in Waythorn's mind that Haskett had worn a
+made-up tie attached with an elastic. Why should that ridiculous detail
+symbolize the whole man? Waythorn was exasperated by his own
+paltriness, but the fact of the tie expanded, forced itself on him,
+became as it were the key to Alice's past. He could see her, as Mrs.
+Haskett, sitting in a "front parlor" furnished in plush, with a
+pianola, and a copy of "Ben Hur" on the centre-table. He could see her
+going to the theatre with Haskett--or perhaps even to a "Church
+Sociable"--she in a "picture hat" and Haskett in a black frock-coat, a
+little creased, with the made-up tie on an elastic. On the way home
+they would stop and look at the illuminated shop-windows, lingering
+over the photographs of New York actresses. On Sunday afternoons
+Haskett would take her for a walk, pushing Lily ahead of them in a
+white enameled perambulator, and Waythorn had a vision of the people
+they would stop and talk to. He could fancy how pretty Alice must have
+looked, in a dress adroitly constructed from the hints of a New York
+fashion-paper; how she must have looked down on the other women,
+chafing at her life, and secretly feeling that she belonged in a bigger
+place.
+
+For the moment his foremost thought was one of wonder at the way in
+which she had shed the phase of existence which her marriage with
+Haskett implied. It was as if her whole aspect, every gesture, every
+inflection, every allusion, were a studied negation of that period of
+her life. If she had denied being married to Haskett she could hardly
+have stood more convicted of duplicity than in this obliteration of the
+self which had been his wife.
+
+Waythorn started up, checking himself in the analysis of her motives.
+What right had he to create a fantastic effigy of her and then pass
+judgment on it? She had spoken vaguely of her first marriage as
+unhappy, had hinted, with becoming reticence, that Haskett had wrought
+havoc among her young illusions....It was a pity for Waythorn's peace
+of mind that Haskett's very inoffensiveness shed a new light on the
+nature of those illusions. A man would rather think that his wife has
+been brutalized by her first husband than that the process has been
+reversed.
+
+"Why, how do you do?" she said with a distinct note of pleasure
+
+
+IV
+
+"MR. WAYTHORN, I don't like that French governess of Lily's."
+
+Haskett, subdued and apologetic, stood before Waythorn in the library,
+revolving his shabby hat in his hand.
+
+Waythorn, surprised in his armchair over the evening paper, stared back
+perplexedly at his visitor.
+
+"You'll excuse my asking to see you," Haskett continued. "But this is
+my last visit, and I thought if I could have a word with you it would
+be a better way than writing to Mrs. Waythorn's lawyer."
+
+Waythorn rose uneasily. He did not like the French governess either;
+but that was irrelevant.
+
+"I am not so sure of that," he returned stiffly; "but since you wish it
+I will give your message to--my wife." He always hesitated over the
+possessive pronoun in addressing Haskett.
+
+The latter sighed. "I don't know as that will help much. She didn't
+like it when I spoke to her."
+
+Waythorn turned red. "When did you see her?" he asked.
+
+"Not since the first day I came to see Lily--right after she was taken
+sick. I remarked to her then that I didn't like the governess."
+
+Waythorn made no answer. He remembered distinctly that, after that
+first visit, he had asked his wife if she had seen Haskett. She had
+lied to him then, but she had respected his wishes since; and the
+incident cast a curious light on her character. He was sure she would
+not have seen Haskett that first day if she had divined that Waythorn
+would object, and the fact that she did not divine it was almost as
+disagreeable to the latter as the discovery that she had lied to him.
+
+"I don't like the woman," Haskett was repeating with mild persistency.
+"She ain't straight, Mr. Waythorn--she'll teach the child to be
+underhand. I've noticed a change in Lily--she's too anxious to
+please--and she don't always tell the truth. She used to be the
+straightest child, Mr. Waythorn--" He broke off, his voice a little
+thick. "Not but what I want her to have a stylish education," he ended.
+
+Waythorn was touched. "I'm sorry, Mr. Haskett; but frankly, I don't
+quite see what I can do."
+
+Haskett hesitated. Then he laid his hat on the table, and advanced to
+the hearth-rug, on which Waythorn was standing. There was nothing
+aggressive in his manner; but he had the solemnity of a timid man
+resolved on a decisive measure.
+
+"There's just one thing you can do, Mr. Waythorn," he said. "You can
+remind Mrs. Waythorn that, by the decree of the courts, I am entitled
+to have a voice in Lily's bringing up." He paused, and went on more
+deprecatingly: "I'm not the kind to talk about enforcing my rights, Mr.
+Waythorn. I don't know as I think a man is entitled to rights he hasn't
+known how to hold on to; but this business of the child is different.
+I've never let go there--and I never mean to."
+
+The scene left Waythorn deeply shaken. Shamefacedly, in indirect ways,
+he had been finding out about Haskett; and all that he had learned was
+favorable. The little man, in order to be near his daughter, had sold
+out his share in a profitable business in Utica, and accepted a modest
+clerkship in a New York manufacturing house. He boarded in a shabby
+street and had few acquaintances. His passion for Lily filled his life.
+Waythorn felt that this exploration of Haskett was like groping about
+with a dark-lantern in his wife's past; but he saw now that there were
+recesses his lantern had not explored. He had never inquired into the
+exact circumstances of his wife's first matrimonial rupture. On the
+surface all had been fair. It was she who had obtained the divorce, and
+the court had given her the child. But Waythorn knew how many
+ambiguities such a verdict might cover. The mere fact that Haskett
+retained a right over his daughter implied an unsuspected compromise.
+Waythorn was an idealist. He always refused to recognize unpleasant
+contingencies till he found himself confronted with them, and then he
+saw them followed by a special train of consequences. His next days
+were thus haunted, and he determined to try to lay the ghosts by
+conjuring them up in his wife's presence.
+
+When he repeated Haskett's request a flame of anger passed over her
+face; but she subdued it instantly and spoke with a slight quiver of
+outraged motherhood.
+
+"It is very ungentlemanly of him," she said.
+
+The word grated on Waythorn. "That is neither here nor there. It's a
+bare question of rights."
+
+She murmured: "It's not as if he could ever be a help to Lily--"
+
+Waythorn flushed. This was even less to his taste. "The question is,"
+he repeated, "what authority has he over her?"
+
+She looked downward, twisting herself a little in her seat. "I am
+willing to see him--I thought you objected," she faltered.
+
+In a flash he understood that she knew the extent of Haskett's claims.
+Perhaps it was not the first time she had resisted them.
+
+"My objecting has nothing to do with it," he said coldly; "if Haskett
+has a right to be consulted you must consult him."
+
+She burst into tears, and he saw that she expected him to regard her as
+a victim.
+
+Haskett did not abuse his rights. Waythorn had felt miserably sure that
+he would not. But the governess was dismissed, and from time to time
+the little man demanded an interview with Alice. After the first
+outburst she accepted the situation with her usual adaptability.
+Haskett had once reminded Waythorn of the piano-tuner, and Mrs.
+Waythorn, after a month or two, appeared to class him with that
+domestic familiar. Waythorn could not but respect the father's
+tenacity. At first he had tried to cultivate the suspicion that Haskett
+might be "up to" something, that he had an object in securing a
+foothold in the house. But in his heart Waythorn was sure of Haskett's
+single-mindedness; he even guessed in the latter a mild contempt for
+such advantages as his relation with the Waythorns might offer.
+Haskett's sincerity of purpose made him invulnerable, and his successor
+had to accept him as a lien on the property.
+
+Mr. Sellers was sent to Europe to recover from his gout, and Varick's
+affairs hung on Waythorn's hands. The negotiations were prolonged and
+complicated; they necessitated frequent conferences between the two
+men, and the interests of the firm forbade Waythorn's suggesting that
+his client should transfer his business to another office.
+
+Varick appeared well in the transaction. In moments of relaxation his
+coarse streak appeared, and Waythorn dreaded his geniality; but in the
+office he was concise and clear-headed, with a flattering deference to
+Waythorn's judgment. Their business relations being so affably
+established, it would have been absurd for the two men to ignore each
+other in society. The first time they met in a drawing-room, Varick
+took up their intercourse in the same easy key, and his hostess's
+grateful glance obliged Waythorn to respond to it. After that they ran
+across each other frequently, and one evening at a ball Waythorn,
+wandering through the remoter rooms, came upon Varick seated beside his
+wife. She colored a little, and faltered in what she was saying; but
+Varick nodded to Waythorn without rising, and the latter strolled on.
+
+In the carriage, on the way home, he broke out nervously: "I didn't
+know you spoke to Varick."
+
+Her voice trembled a little. "It's the first time--he happened to be
+standing near me; I didn't know what to do. It's so awkward, meeting
+everywhere--and he said you had been very kind about some business."
+
+"That's different," said Waythorn.
+
+She paused a moment. "I'll do just as you wish," she returned pliantly.
+"I thought it would be less awkward to speak to him when we meet."
+
+Her pliancy was beginning to sicken him. Had she really no will of her
+own--no theory about her relation to these men? She had accepted
+Haskett--did she mean to accept Varick? It was "less awkward," as she
+had said, and her instinct was to evade difficulties or to circumvent
+them. With sudden vividness Waythorn saw how the instinct had
+developed. She was "as easy as an old shoe"--a shoe that too many feet
+had worn. Her elasticity was the result of tension in too many
+different directions. Alice Haskett--Alice Varick--Alice Waythorn--she
+had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of
+her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of the inmost self
+where the unknown god abides.
+
+"Yes--it's better to speak to Varick," said Waythorn wearily.
+
+"Earth's Martyrs." By Stephen Phillips.
+
+
+V
+
+THE WINTER wore on, and society took advantage of the Waythorns'
+acceptance of Varick. Harassed hostesses were grateful to them for
+bridging over a social difficulty, and Mrs. Waythorn was held up as a
+miracle of good taste. Some experimental spirits could not resist the
+diversion of throwing Varick and his former wife together, and there
+were those who thought he found a zest in the propinquity. But Mrs.
+Waythorn's conduct remained irreproachable. She neither avoided Varick
+nor sought him out. Even Waythorn could not but admit that she had
+discovered the solution of the newest social problem.
+
+He had married her without giving much thought to that problem. He had
+fancied that a woman can shed her past like a man. But now he saw that
+Alice was bound to hers both by the circumstances which forced her into
+continued relation with it, and by the traces it had left on her
+nature. With grim irony Waythorn compared himself to a member of a
+syndicate. He held so many shares in his wife's personality and his
+predecessors were his partners in the business. If there had been any
+element of passion in the transaction he would have felt less
+deteriorated by it. The fact that Alice took her change of husbands
+like a change of weather reduced the situation to mediocrity. He could
+have forgiven her for blunders, for excesses; for resisting Hackett,
+for yielding to Varick; for anything but her acquiescence and her tact.
+She reminded him of a juggler tossing knives; but the knives were blunt
+and she knew they would never cut her.
+
+And then, gradually, habit formed a protecting surface for his
+sensibilities. If he paid for each day's comfort with the small change
+of his illusions, he grew daily to value the comfort more and set less
+store upon the coin. He had drifted into a dulling propinquity with
+Haskett and Varick and he took refuge in the cheap revenge of
+satirizing the situation. He even began to reckon up the advantages
+which accrued from it, to ask himself if it were not better to own a
+third of a wife who knew how to make a man happy than a whole one who
+had lacked opportunity to acquire the art. For it _was_ an art, and
+made up, like all others, of concessions, eliminations and
+embellishments; of lights judiciously thrown and shadows skillfully
+softened. His wife knew exactly how to manage the lights, and he knew
+exactly to what training she owed her skill. He even tried to trace the
+source of his obligations, to discriminate between the influences which
+had combined to produce his domestic happiness: he perceived that
+Haskett's commonness had made Alice worship good breeding, while
+Varick's liberal construction of the marriage bond had taught her to
+value the conjugal virtues; so that he was directly indebted to his
+predecessors for the devotion which made his life easy if not inspiring.
+
+From this phase he passed into that of complete acceptance. He ceased
+to satirize himself because time dulled the irony of the situation and
+the joke lost its humor with its sting. Even the sight of Haskett's hat
+on the hall table had ceased to touch the springs of epigram. The hat
+was often seen there now, for it had been decided that it was better
+for Lily's father to visit her than for the little girl to go to his
+boarding-house. Waythorn, having acquiesced in this arrangement, had
+been surprised to find how little difference it made. Haskett was never
+obtrusive, and the few visitors who met him on the stairs were unaware
+of his identity. Waythorn did not know how often he saw Alice, but with
+himself Haskett was seldom in contact.
+
+One afternoon, however, he learned on entering that Lily's father was
+waiting to see him. In the library he found Haskett occupying a chair
+in his usual provisional way. Waythorn always felt grateful to him for
+not leaning back.
+
+"I hope you'll excuse me, Mr. Waythorn," he said rising. "I wanted to
+see Mrs. Waythorn about Lily, and your man asked me to wait here till
+she came in."
+
+"Of course," said Waythorn, remembering that a sudden leak had that
+morning given over the drawing-room to the plumbers.
+
+He opened his cigar-case and held it out to his visitor, and Haskett's
+acceptance seemed to mark a fresh stage in their intercourse. The
+spring evening was chilly, and Waythorn invited his guest to draw up
+his chair to the fire. He meant to find an excuse to leave Haskett in a
+moment; but he was tired and cold, and after all the little man no
+longer jarred on him.
+
+The two were inclosed in the intimacy of their blended cigar-smoke when
+the door opened and Varick walked into the room. Waythorn rose
+abruptly. It was the first time that Varick had come to the house, and
+the surprise of seeing him, combined with the singular inopportuneness
+of his arrival, gave a new edge to Waythorn's blunted sensibilities. He
+stared at his visitor without speaking.
+
+Varick seemed too preoccupied to notice his host's embarrassment.
+
+"My dear fellow," he exclaimed in his most expansive tone, "I must
+apologize for tumbling in on you in this way, but I was too late to
+catch you down town, and so I thought--" He stopped short, catching
+sight of Haskett, and his sanguine color deepened to a flush which
+spread vividly under his scant blond hair. But in a moment he recovered
+himself and nodded slightly. Haskett returned the bow in silence, and
+Waythorn was still groping for speech when the footman came in carrying
+a tea-table.
+
+The intrusion offered a welcome vent to Waythorn's nerves. "What the
+deuce are you bringing this here for?" he said sharply.
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir, but the plumbers are still in the
+drawing-room, and Mrs. Waythorn said she would have tea in the
+library." The footman's perfectly respectful tone implied a reflection
+on Waythorn's reasonableness.
+
+"Oh, very well," said the latter resignedly, and the footman proceeded
+to open the folding tea-table and set out its complicated appointments.
+While this interminable process continued the three men stood
+motionless, watching it with a fascinated stare, till Waythorn, to
+break the silence, said to Varick: "Won't you have a cigar?"
+
+He held out the case he had just tendered to Haskett, and Varick helped
+himself with a smile. Waythorn looked about for a match, and finding
+none, proffered a light from his own cigar. Haskett, in the background,
+held his ground mildly, examining his cigar-tip now and then, and
+stepping forward at the right moment to knock its ashes into the fire.
+
+The footman at last withdrew, and Varick immediately began: "If I could
+just say half a word to you about this business--"
+
+"Certainly," stammered Waythorn; "in the dining-room--"
+
+But as he placed his hand on the door it opened from without, and his
+wife appeared on the threshold.
+
+She came in fresh and smiling, in her street dress and hat, shedding a
+fragrance from the boa which she loosened in advancing.
+
+"Shall we have tea in here, dear?" she began; and then she caught sight
+of Varick. Her smile deepened, veiling a slight tremor of surprise.
+"Why, how do you do?" she said with a distinct note of pleasure.
+
+As she shook hands with Varick she saw Haskett standing behind him. Her
+smile faded for a moment, but she recalled it quickly, with a scarcely
+perceptible side-glance at Waythorn.
+
+"How do you do, Mr. Haskett?" she said, and shook hands with him a
+shade less cordially.
+
+The three men stood awkwardly before her, till Varick, always the most
+self-possessed, dashed into an explanatory phrase.
+
+"We--I had to see Waythorn a moment on business," he stammered,
+brick-red from chin to nape.
+
+Haskett stepped forward with his air of mild obstinacy. "I am sorry to
+intrude; but you appointed five o'clock--" he directed his resigned
+glance to the time-piece on the mantel.
+
+She swept aside their embarrassment with a charming gesture of
+hospitality.
+
+"I'm so sorry--I'm always late; but the afternoon was so lovely." She
+stood drawing her gloves off, propitiatory and graceful, diffusing
+about her a sense of ease and familiarity in which the situation lost
+its grotesqueness. "But before talking business," she added brightly,
+"I'm sure every one wants a cup of tea."
+
+She dropped into her low chair by the tea-table, and the two visitors,
+as if drawn by her smile, advanced to receive the cups she held out.
+
+She glanced about for Waythorn, and he took the third cup with a laugh.
+
+
+
+
+EXPIATION
+
+
+I.
+
+"I CAN never," said Mrs. Fetherel, "hear the bell ring without a
+shudder."
+
+Her unruffled aspect--she was the kind of woman whose emotions never
+communicate themselves to her clothes--and the conventional background
+of the New York drawing-room, with its pervading implication of an
+imminent tea-tray and of an atmosphere in which the social functions
+have become purely reflex, lent to her declaration a relief not lost on
+her cousin Mrs. Clinch, who, from the other side of the fireplace,
+agreed with a glance at the clock, that it _was_ the hour for bores.
+
+"Bores!" cried Mrs. Fetherel impatiently. "If I shuddered at _them_, I
+should have a chronic ague!"
+
+She leaned forward and laid a sparkling finger on her cousin's shabby
+black knee. "I mean the newspaper clippings," she whispered.
+
+Mrs. Clinch returned a glance of intelligence. "They've begun already?"
+
+"Not yet; but they're sure to now, at any minute, my publisher tells
+me."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel's look of apprehension sat oddly on her small features,
+which had an air of neat symmetry somehow suggestive of being set in
+order every morning by the housemaid. Some one (there were rumors that
+it was her cousin) had once said that Paula Fetherel would have been
+very pretty if she hadn't looked so like a moral axiom in a copy-book
+hand.
+
+Mrs. Clinch received her confidence with a smile. "Well," she said, "I
+suppose you were prepared for the consequences of authorship?"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel blushed brightly. "It isn't their coming," she
+owned--"it's their coming _now_."
+
+"Now?"
+
+"The Bishop's in town."
+
+Mrs. Clinch leaned back and shaped her lips to a whistle which
+deflected in a laugh. "Well!" she said.
+
+"You see!" Mrs. Fetherel triumphed.
+
+"Well--weren't you prepared for the Bishop?"
+
+"Not now--at least, I hadn't thought of his seeing the clippings."
+
+"And why should he see them?"
+
+"Bella--_won't_ you understand? It's John."
+
+"John?"
+
+"Who has taken the most unexpected tone--one might almost say out of
+perversity."
+
+"Oh, perversity--" Mrs. Clinch murmured, observing her cousin between
+lids wrinkled by amusement. "What tone has John taken?"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel threw out her answer with the desperate gesture of a
+woman who lays bare the traces of a marital fist. "The tone of being
+proud of my book."
+
+The measure of Mrs. Clinch's enjoyment overflowed in laughter.
+
+"Oh, you may laugh," Mrs. Fetherel insisted, "but it's no joke to me.
+In the first place, John's liking the book is so--so--such a false
+note--it puts me in such a ridiculous position; and then it has set him
+watching for the reviews--who would ever have suspected John of knowing
+that books were _reviewed?_ Why, he's actually found out about the
+Clipping Bureau, and whenever the postman rings I hear John rush out of
+the library to see if there are any yellow envelopes. Of course, when
+they _do_ come he'll bring them into the drawing-room and read them
+aloud to everybody who happens to be here--and the Bishop is sure to
+happen to be here!"
+
+Mrs. Clinch repressed her amusement. "The picture you draw is a lurid
+one," she conceded, "but your modesty strikes me as abnormal,
+especially in an author. The chances are that some of the clippings
+will be rather pleasant reading. The critics are not all union men."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel stared. "Union men?"
+
+"Well, I mean they don't all belong to the well-known
+Society-for-the-Persecution-of-Rising-Authors. Some of them have even
+been known to defy its regulations and say a good word for a new
+writer."
+
+"Oh, I dare say," said Mrs. Fetherel, with the laugh her cousin's
+epigram exacted. "But you don't quite see my point. I'm not at all
+nervous about the success of my book--my publisher tells me I have no
+need to be--but I _am_ afraid of its being a succes de scandale."
+
+"Mercy!" said Mrs. Clinch, sitting up.
+
+The butler and footman at this moment appeared with the tea-tray, and
+when they had withdrawn, Mrs. Fetherel, bending her brightly rippled
+head above the kettle, continued in a murmur of avowal, "The title,
+even, is a kind of challenge."
+
+"'Fast and Loose,'" Mrs. Clinch mused. "Yes, it ought to take."
+
+"I didn't choose it for that reason!" the author protested. "I should
+have preferred something quieter--less pronounced; but I was determined
+not to shirk the responsibility of what I had written. I want people to
+know beforehand exactly what kind of book they are buying."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Clinch, "that's a degree of conscientiousness that
+I've never met with before. So few books fulfil the promise of their
+titles that experienced readers never expect the fare to come up to the
+menu."
+
+"'Fast and Loose' will be no disappointment on that score," her cousin
+significantly returned. "I've handled the subject without gloves. I've
+called a spade a spade."
+
+"You simply make my mouth water! And to think I haven't been able to
+read it yet because every spare minute of my time has been given to
+correcting the proofs of 'How the Birds Keep Christmas'! There's an
+instance of the hardships of an author's life!"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel's eye clouded. "Don't joke, Bella, please. I suppose to
+experienced authors there's always something absurd in the nervousness
+of a new writer, but in my case so much is at stake; I've put so much
+of myself into this book and I'm so afraid of being misunderstood...of
+being, as it were, in advance of my time... like poor Flaubert....I
+_know_ you'll think me ridiculous... and if only my own reputation were
+at stake, I should never give it a thought...but the idea of dragging
+John's name through the mire..."
+
+Mrs. Clinch, who had risen and gathered her cloak about her, stood
+surveying from her genial height her cousin's agitated countenance.
+
+"Why did you use John's name, then?"
+
+"That's another of my difficulties! I _had_ to. There would have been
+no merit in publishing such a book under an assumed name; it would have
+been an act of moral cowardice. 'Fast and Loose' is not an ordinary
+novel. A writer who dares to show up the hollowness of social
+conventions must have the courage of her convictions and be willing to
+accept the consequences of defying society. Can you imagine Ibsen or
+Tolstoy writing under a false name?" Mrs. Fetherel lifted a tragic eye
+to her cousin. "You don't know, Bella, how often I've envied you since
+I began to write. I used to wonder sometimes--you won't mind my saying
+so?--why, with all your cleverness, you hadn't taken up some more
+exciting subject than natural history; but I see now how wise you were.
+Whatever happens, you will never be denounced by the press!"
+
+"Is that what you're afraid of?" asked Mrs. Clinch, as she grasped the
+bulging umbrella which rested against her chair. "My dear, if I had
+ever had the good luck to be denounced by the press, my brougham would
+be waiting at the door for me at this very moment, and I shouldn't have
+to ruin this umbrella by using it in the rain. Why, you innocent, if
+I'd ever felt the slightest aptitude for showing up social conventions,
+do you suppose I should waste my time writing 'Nests Ajar' and 'How to
+Smell the Flowers'? There's a fairly steady demand for pseudo-science
+and colloquial ornithology, but it's nothing, simply nothing, to the
+ravenous call for attacks on social institutions--especially by those
+inside the institutions!"
+
+There was often, to her cousin, a lack of taste in Mrs. Clinch's
+pleasantries, and on this occasion they seemed more than usually
+irrelevant.
+
+"'Fast and Loose' was not written with the idea of a large sale."
+
+Mrs. Clinch was unperturbed. "Perhaps that's just as well," she
+returned, with a philosophic shrug. "The surprise will be all the
+pleasanter, I mean. For of course it's going to sell tremendously;
+especially if you can get the press to denounce it."
+
+"Bella, how _can_ you? I sometimes think you say such things expressly
+to tease me; and yet I should think you of all women would understand
+my purpose in writing such a book. It has always seemed to me that the
+message I had to deliver was not for myself alone, but for all the
+other women in the world who have felt the hollowness of our social
+shams, the ignominy of bowing down to the idols of the market, but have
+lacked either the courage or the power to proclaim their independence;
+and I have fancied, Bella dear, that, however severely society might
+punish me for revealing its weaknesses, I could count on the sympathy
+of those who, like you"--Mrs. Fetherel's voice sank--"have passed
+through the deep waters."
+
+Mrs. Clinch gave herself a kind of canine shake, as though to free her
+ample shoulders from any drop of the element she was supposed to have
+traversed.
+
+"Oh, call them muddy rather than deep," she returned; "and you'll find,
+my dear, that women who've had any wading to do are rather shy of
+stirring up mud. It sticks--especially on white clothes."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel lifted an undaunted brow. "I'm not afraid," she
+proclaimed; and at the same instant she dropped her tea-spoon with a
+clatter and shrank back into her seat. "There's the bell," she
+exclaimed, "and I know it's the Bishop!"
+
+It was in fact the Bishop of Ossining, who, impressively announced by
+Mrs. Fetherel's butler, now made an entry that may best be described as
+not inadequate to the expectations the announcement raised. The Bishop
+always entered a room well; but, when unannounced, or preceded by a Low
+Church butler who gave him his surname, his appearance lacked the
+impressiveness conferred on it by the due specification of his diocesan
+dignity. The Bishop was very fond of his niece Mrs. Fetherel, and one
+of the traits he most valued in her was the possession of a butler who
+knew how to announce a bishop.
+
+Mrs. Clinch was also his niece; but, aside from the fact that she
+possessed no butler at all, she had laid herself open to her uncle's
+criticism by writing insignificant little books which had a way of
+going into five or ten editions, while the fruits of his own episcopal
+leisure--"The Wail of Jonah" (twenty cantos in blank verse), and
+"Through a Glass Brightly; or, How to Raise Funds fora Memorial
+Window"--inexplicably languished on the back shelves of a publisher
+noted for his dexterity in pushing "devotional goods." Even this
+indiscretion the Bishop might, however, have condoned, had his niece
+thought fit to turn to him for support and advice at the painful
+juncture of her history when, in her own words, it became necessary for
+her to invite Mr. Clinch to look out for another situation. Mr.
+Clinch's misconduct was of the kind especially designed by Providence
+to test the fortitude of a Christian wife and mother, and the Bishop
+was absolutely distended with seasonable advice and edification; so
+that when Bella met his tentative exhortations with the curt remark
+that she preferred to do her own housecleaning unassisted, her uncle's
+grief at her ingratitude was not untempered with sympathy for Mr.
+Clinch.
+
+It is not surprising, therefore, that the Bishop's warmest greetings
+were always reserved for Mrs. Fetherel; and on this occasion Mrs.
+Clinch thought she detected, in the salutation which fell to her share,
+a pronounced suggestion that her own presence was superfluous--a hint
+which she took with her usual imperturbable good humor.
+
+
+II
+
+Left alone with the Bishop, Mrs. Fetherel sought the nearest refuge
+from conversation by offering him a cup of tea. The Bishop accepted
+with the preoccupied air of a man to whom, for the moment, tea is but a
+subordinate incident. Mrs. Fetherel's nervousness increased; and
+knowing that the surest way of distracting attention from one's own
+affairs is to affect an interest in those of one's companion, she
+hastily asked if her uncle had come to town on business.
+
+"On business--yes--" said the Bishop in an impressive tone. "I had to
+see my publisher, who has been behaving rather unsatisfactorily in
+regard to my last book."
+
+"Ah--your last book?" faltered Mrs. Fetherel, with a sickening sense of
+her inability to recall the name or nature of the work in question, and
+a mental vow never again to be caught in such ignorance of a
+colleague's productions.
+
+"'Through a Glass Brightly,'" the Bishop explained, with an emphasis
+which revealed his detection of her predicament. "You may remember that
+I sent you a copy last Christmas?"
+
+"Of course I do!" Mrs. Fetherel brightened. "It was that delightful
+story of the poor consumptive girl who had no money, and two little
+brothers to support--"
+
+"Sisters--idiot sisters--" the Bishop gloomily corrected.
+
+"I mean sisters; and who managed to collect money enough to put up a
+beautiful memorial window to her--her grandfather, whom she had never
+seen--"
+
+"But whose sermons had been her chief consolation and support during
+her long struggle with poverty and disease." The Bishop gave the
+satisfied sigh of the workman who reviews his completed task. "A
+touching subject, surely; and I believe I did it justice; at least, so
+my friends assured me."
+
+"Why, yes--I remember there was a splendid review of it in the
+'Reredos'!" cried Mrs. Fetherel, moved by the incipient instinct of
+reciprocity.
+
+"Yes--by my dear friend Mrs. Gollinger, whose husband, the late Dean
+Gollinger, was under very particular obligations to me. Mrs. Gollinger
+is a woman of rare literary acumen, and her praise of my book was
+unqualified; but the public wants more highly seasoned fare, and the
+approval of a thoughtful churchwoman carries less weight than the
+sensational comments of an illiterate journalist." The Bishop lent a
+meditative eye on his spotless gaiters. "At the risk of horrifying you,
+my dear," he added, with a slight laugh, "I will confide to you that my
+best chance of a popular success would be to have my book denounced by
+the press."
+
+"Denounced?" gasped Mrs. Fetherel. "On what ground?"
+
+"On the ground of immorality." The Bishop evaded her startled gaze.
+"Such a thing is inconceivable to you, of course; but I am only
+repeating what my publisher tells me. If, for instance, a critic could
+be induced--I mean, if a critic were to be found, who called in
+question the morality of my heroine in sacrificing her own health and
+that of her idiot sisters in order to put up a memorial window to her
+grandfather, it would probably raise a general controversy in the
+newspapers, and I might count on a sale of ten or fifteen thousand
+within the next year. If he described her as morbid or decadent, it
+might even run to twenty thousand; but that is more than I permit
+myself to hope. In fact, I should be satisfied with any general charge
+of immorality." The Bishop sighed again. "I need hardly tell you that I
+am actuated by no mere literary ambition. Those whose opinion I most
+value have assured me that the book is not without merit; but, though
+it does not become me to dispute their verdict, I can truly say that my
+vanity as an author is not at stake. I have, however, a special reason
+for wishing to increase the circulation of 'Through a Glass Brightly';
+it was written for a purpose--a purpose I have greatly at heart--"
+
+"I know," cried his niece sympathetically. "The chantry window--?"
+
+"Is still empty, alas! and I had great hopes that, under Providence, my
+little book might be the means of filling it. All our wealthy
+parishioners have given lavishly to the cathedral, and it was for this
+reason that, in writing 'Through a Glass,' I addressed my appeal more
+especially to the less well-endowed, hoping by the example of my
+heroine to stimulate the collection of small sums throughout the entire
+diocese, and perhaps beyond it. I am sure," the Bishop feelingly
+concluded, "the book would have a wide-spread influence if people could
+only be induced to read it!"
+
+His conclusion touched a fresh thread of association in Mrs. Fetherel's
+vibrating nerve-centers. "I never thought of that!" she cried.
+
+The Bishop looked at her inquiringly.
+
+"That one's books may not be read at all! How dreadful!" she exclaimed.
+
+He smiled faintly. "I had not forgotten that I was addressing an
+authoress," he said. "Indeed, I should not have dared to inflict my
+troubles on any one not of the craft."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel was quivering with the consciousness of her involuntary
+self-betrayal. "Oh, uncle!" she murmured.
+
+"In fact," the Bishop continued, with a gesture which seemed to brush
+away her scruples, "I came here partly to speak to you about your
+novel. 'Fast and Loose,' I think you call it?"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel blushed assentingly.
+
+"And is it out yet?" the Bishop continued.
+
+"It came out about a week ago. But you haven't touched your tea, and it
+must be quite cold. Let me give you another cup..."
+
+"My reason for asking," the Bishop went on, with the bland
+inexorableness with which, in his younger days, he had been known to
+continue a sermon after the senior warden had looked four times at his
+watch--"my reason for asking is, that I hoped I might not be too late
+to induce you to change the title."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel set down the cup she had filled. "The title?" she
+faltered.
+
+The Bishop raised a reassuring hand. "Don't misunderstand me, dear
+child; don't for a moment imagine that I take it to be in anyway
+indicative of the contents of the book. I know you too well for that.
+My first idea was that it had probably been forced on you by an
+unscrupulous publisher--I know too well to what ignoble compromises one
+may be driven in such cases!..." He paused, as though to give her the
+opportunity of confirming this conjecture, but she preserved an
+apprehensive silence, and he went on, as though taking up the second
+point in his sermon--"Or, again, the name may have taken your fancy
+without your realizing all that it implies to minds more alive than
+yours to offensive innuendoes. It is--ahem--excessively suggestive, and
+I hope I am not too late to warn you of the false impression it is
+likely to produce on the very readers whose approbation you would most
+value. My friend Mrs. Gollinger, for instance--"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel, as the publication of her novel testified, was in theory
+a woman of independent views; and if in practise she sometimes failed
+to live up to her standard, it was rather from an irresistible tendency
+to adapt herself to her environment than from any conscious lack of
+moral courage. The Bishop's exordium had excited in her that sense of
+opposition which such admonitions are apt to provoke; but as he went on
+she felt herself gradually enclosed in an atmosphere in which her
+theories vainly gasped for breath. The Bishop had the immense
+dialectical advantage of invalidating any conclusions at variance with
+his own by always assuming that his premises were among the necessary
+laws of thought. This method, combined with the habit of ignoring any
+classifications but his own, created an element in which the first
+condition of existence was the immediate adoption of his standpoint; so
+that his niece, as she listened, seemed to feel Mrs. Gollinger's
+Mechlin cap spreading its conventual shadow over her rebellious brow
+and the "Revue de Paris" at her elbow turning into a copy of the
+"Reredos." She had meant to assure her uncle that she was quite aware
+of the significance of the title she had chosen, that it had been
+deliberately selected as indicating the subject of her novel, and that
+the book itself had been written indirect defiance of the class of
+readers for whose susceptibilities she was alarmed. The words were
+almost on her lips when the irresistible suggestion conveyed by the
+Bishop's tone and language deflected them into the apologetic murmur,
+"Oh, uncle, you mustn't think--I never meant--" How much farther this
+current of reaction might have carried her, the historian is unable to
+computer, for at this point the door opened and her husband entered the
+room.
+
+"The first review of your book!" he cried, flourishing a yellow
+envelope. "My dear Bishop, how lucky you're here!"
+
+Though the trials of married life have been classified and catalogued
+with exhaustive accuracy, there is one form of conjugal misery which
+has perhaps received inadequate attention; and that is the suffering of
+the versatile woman whose husband is not equally adapted to all her
+moods. Every woman feels for the sister who is compelled to wear a
+bonnet which does not "go" with her gown; but how much sympathy is
+given to her whose husband refuses to harmonize with the pose of the
+moment? Scant justice has, for instance, been done to the misunderstood
+wife whose husband persists in understanding her; to the submissive
+helpmate whose taskmaster shuns every opportunity of browbeating her;
+and to the generous and impulsive being whose bills are paid with
+philosophic calm. Mrs. Fetherel, as wives go, had been fairly exempt
+from trials of this nature, for her husband, if undistinguished by
+pronounced brutality or indifference, had at least the negative merit
+of being her intellectual inferior. Landscape gardeners, who are aware
+of the usefulness of a valley in emphasizing the height of a hill, can
+form an idea of the account to which an accomplished woman may turn
+such deficiencies; and it need scarcely be said that Mrs. Fetherel had
+made the most of her opportunities. It was agreeably obvious to every
+one, Fetherel included, that he was not the man to appreciate such a
+woman; but there are no limits to man's perversity, and he did his best
+to invalidate this advantage by admiring her without pretending to
+understand her. What she most suffered from was this fatuous approval:
+the maddening sense that, however she conducted herself, he would
+always admire her. Had he belonged to the class whose conversational
+supplies are drawn from the domestic circle, his wife's name would
+never have been off his lips; and to Mrs. Fetherel's sensitive
+perceptions his frequent silences were indicative of the fact that she
+was his one topic.
+
+It was, in part, the attempt to escape this persistent approbation that
+had driven Mrs. Fetherel to authorship. She had fancied that even the
+most infatuated husband might be counted onto resent, at least
+negatively, an attack on the sanctity of the hearth; and her
+anticipations were heightened by a sense of the unpardonableness of her
+act. Mrs. Fetherel's relations with her husband were in fact
+complicated by an irrepressible tendency to be fond of him; and there
+was a certain pleasure in the prospect of a situation that justified
+the most explicit expiation.
+
+These hopes Fetherel's attitude had already defeated. He read the book
+with enthusiasm, he pressed it on his friends, he sent a copy to his
+mother; and his very soul now hung on the verdict of the reviewers. It
+was perhaps this proof of his general ineptitude that made his wife
+doubly alive to his special defects; so that his inopportune entrance
+was aggravated by the very sound of his voice and the hopeless
+aberration of his smile. Nothing, to the observant, is more indicative
+of a man's character and circumstances than his way of entering a room.
+The Bishop of Ossining, for instance, brought with him not only an
+atmosphere of episcopal authority, but an implied opinion on the verbal
+inspiration of the Scriptures, and on the attitude of the church toward
+divorce; while the appearance of Mrs. Fetherel's husband produced an
+immediate impression of domestic felicity. His mere aspect implied that
+there was a well-filled nursery upstairs; that this wife, if she did
+not sew on his buttons, at least superintended the performance of that
+task; that they both went to church regularly, and that they dined with
+his mother every Sunday evening punctually at seven o'clock.
+
+All this and more was expressed in the affectionate gesture with which
+he now raised the yellow envelope above Mrs. Fetherel's clutch; and
+knowing the uselessness of begging him not to be silly, she said, with
+a dry despair, "You're boring the Bishop horribly."
+
+Fetherel turned a radiant eye on that dignitary. "She bores us all
+horribly, doesn't she, sir?" he exulted.
+
+"Have you read it?" said his wife, uncontrollably.
+
+"Read it? Of course not--it's just this minute come. I say, Bishop,
+you're not going--?"
+
+"Not till I've heard this," said the Bishop, settling himself in his
+chair with an indulgent smile.
+
+His niece glanced at him despairingly. "Don't let John's nonsense
+detain you," she entreated.
+
+"Detain him? That's good," guffawed Fetherel. "It isn't as long as one
+of his sermons--won't take me five minutes to read. Here, listen to
+this, ladies and gentlemen: 'In this age of festering pessimism and
+decadent depravity, it is no surprise to the nauseated reviewer to open
+one more volume saturated with the fetid emanations of the sewer--'"
+
+Fetherel, who was not in the habit of reading aloud, paused with a
+gasp, and the Bishop glanced sharply at his niece, who kept her gaze
+fixed on the tea-cup she had not yet succeeded in transferring to his
+hand.--"'Of the sewer,'" her husband resumed; "'but his wonder is
+proportionately great when he lights on a novel as sweetly inoffensive
+as Paula Fetherel's "Fast and Loose." Mrs. Fetherel is, we believe, a
+new hand at fiction, and her work reveals frequent traces of
+inexperience; but these are more than atoned for by her pure, fresh
+view of life and her altogether unfashionable regard for the reader's
+moral susceptibilities. Let no one be induced by its distinctly
+misleading title to forego the enjoyment of this pleasant picture of
+domestic life, which, in spite of a total lack of force in
+character-drawing and of consecutiveness in incident, may be described
+as a distinctly pretty story.'"
+
+
+III
+
+It was several weeks later that Mrs. Clinch once more brought the
+plebeian aroma of heated tram-cars and muddy street-crossings into the
+violet-scented atmosphere of her cousin's drawing-room.
+
+"Well," she said, tossing a damp bundle of proof into the corner of a
+silk-cushioned bergere, "I've read it at last and I'm not so awfully
+shocked!"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel, who sat near the fire with her head propped on a languid
+hand, looked up without speaking.
+
+"Mercy, Paula," said her visitor, "you're ill."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel shook her head. "I was never better," she said,
+mournfully.
+
+"Then may I help myself to tea? Thanks."
+
+Mrs. Clinch carefully removed her mended glove before taking a buttered
+tea-cake; then she glanced again at her cousin.
+
+"It's not what I said just now--?" she ventured.
+
+"Just now?"
+
+"About 'Fast and Loose'? I came to talk it over."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel sprang to her feet. "I never," she cried dramatically,
+"want to hear it mentioned again!"
+
+"Paula!" exclaimed Mrs. Clinch, setting down her cup.
+
+Mrs. Fetherel slowly turned on her an eye brimming with the
+incommunicable; then, dropping into her seat again, she added, with a
+tragic laugh, "There's nothing left to say."
+
+"Nothing--?" faltered Mrs. Clinch, longing for another tea-cake, but
+feeling the inappropriateness of the impulse in an atmosphere so
+charged with the portentous. "Do you mean that everything _has_ been
+said?" She looked tentatively at her cousin. "Haven't they been nice?"
+
+"They've been odious--odious--" Mrs. Fetherel burst out, with an
+ineffectual clutch at her handkerchief. "It's been perfectly
+intolerable!"
+
+Mrs. Clinch, philosophically resigning herself to the propriety of
+taking no more tea, crossed over to her cousin and laid a sympathizing
+hand on that lady's agitated shoulder.
+
+"It _is_ a bore at first," she conceded; "but you'll be surprised to
+see how soon one gets used to it."
+
+"I shall--never--get--used to it--" Mrs. Fetherel brokenly declared.
+
+"Have they been so very nasty--all of them?"
+
+"Every one of them!" the novelist sobbed.
+
+"I'm so sorry, dear; it _does_ hurt, I know--but hadn't you rather
+expected it?"
+
+"Expected it?" cried Mrs. Fetherel, sitting up.
+
+Mrs. Clinch felt her way warily. "I only mean, dear, that I fancied
+from what you said before the book came out--that you rather
+expected--that you'd rather discounted--"
+
+"Their recommending it to everybody as a perfectly harmless story?"
+
+"Good gracious! Is _that_ what they've done?"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel speechlessly nodded.
+
+"Every one of them?"
+
+"Every one--"
+
+"Whew!" said Mrs. Clinch, with an incipient whistle.
+
+"Why, you've just said it yourself!" her cousin suddenly reproached her.
+
+"Said what?"
+
+"That you weren't so _awfully_ shocked--"
+
+"I? Oh, well--you see, you'd keyed me up to such a pitch that it wasn't
+quite as bad as I expected--"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel lifted a smile steeled for the worst. "Why not say at
+once," she suggested, "that it's a distinctly pretty story?"
+
+"They haven't said _that?_"
+
+"They've all said it."
+
+"My poor Paula!"
+
+"Even the Bishop--"
+
+"The Bishop called it a pretty story?"
+
+"He wrote me--I've his letter somewhere. The title rather scared
+him--he wanted me to change it; but when he'd read the book he wrote
+that it was all right and that he'd sent several copies to his friends."
+
+"The old hypocrite!" cried Mrs. Clinch. "That was nothing but
+professional jealousy."
+
+"Do you think so?" cried her cousin, brightening.
+
+"Sure of it, my dear. His own books don't sell, and he knew the
+quickest way to kill yours was to distribute it through the diocese
+with his blessing."
+
+"Then you don't really think it's a pretty story?"
+
+"Dear me, no! Not nearly as bad as that--"
+
+"You're so good, Bella--but the reviewers?"
+
+"Oh, the reviewers," Mrs. Clinch jeered. She gazed meditatively at the
+cold remains of her tea-cake. "Let me see," she said, suddenly; "do you
+happen to remember if the first review came out in an important paper?"
+
+"Yes--the 'Radiator.'"
+
+"That's it! I thought so. Then the others simply followed suit: they
+often do if a big paper sets the pace. Saves a lot of trouble. Now if
+you could only have got the 'Radiator' to denounce you--"
+
+"That's what the Bishop said!" cried Mrs. Fetherel.
+
+"He did?"
+
+"He said his only chance of selling 'Through a Glass Brightly' was to
+have it denounced on the ground of immorality."
+
+"H'm," said Mrs. Clinch. "I thought he knew a trick or two." She turned
+an illuminated eye on her cousin. "You ought to get _him_ to denounce
+'Fast and Loose'!" she cried.
+
+Mrs. Fetherel looked at her suspiciously. "I suppose every book must
+stand or fall on its own merits," she said in an unconvinced tone.
+
+"Bosh! That view is as extinct as the post-chaise and the
+packet-ship--it belongs to the time when people read books. Nobody does
+that now; the reviewer was the first to set the example, and the public
+were only too thankful to follow it. At first they read the reviews;
+now they read only the publishers' extracts from them. Even these are
+rapidly being replaced by paragraphs borrowed from the vocabulary of
+commerce. I often have to look twice before I am sure if I am reading a
+department-store advertisement or the announcement of a new batch of
+literature. The publishers will soon be having their 'fall and spring
+openings' and their 'special importations for Horse-Show Week.' But the
+Bishop is right, of course--nothing helps a book like a rousing attack
+on its morals; and as the publishers can't exactly proclaim the
+impropriety of their own wares, the task has to be left to the press or
+the pulpit."
+
+"The pulpit--?" Mrs. Fetherel mused.
+
+"Why, yes--look at those two novels in England last year--"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel shook her head hopelessly. "There is so much more
+interest in literature in England than here."
+
+"Well, we've got to make the supply create the demand. The Bishop could
+run your novel up into the hundred thousands in no time."
+
+"But if he can't make his own sell--?"
+
+"My dear, a man can't very well preach against his own writings!"
+
+Mrs. Clinch rose and picked up her proofs.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry for you, Paula dear," she concluded, "but I can't
+help being thankful that there's no demand for pessimism in the field
+of natural history. Fancy having to write 'The Fall of a Sparrow,' or
+'How the Plants Misbehave!'"
+
+
+IV
+
+Mrs. Fetherel, driving up to the Grand Central Station one morning
+about five months later, caught sight of the distinguished novelist,
+Archer Hynes, hurrying into the waiting-room ahead of her. Hynes, on
+his side, recognizing her brougham, turned back to greet her as the
+footman opened the carriage-door.
+
+"My dear colleague! Is it possible that we are traveling together?"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel blushed with pleasure. Hynes had given her two columns of
+praise in the Sunday "Meteor," and she had not yet learned to disguise
+her gratitude.
+
+"I am going to Ossining," she said, smilingly.
+
+"So am I. Why, this is almost as good as an elopement."
+
+"And it will end where elopements ought to--in church."
+
+"In church? You're not going to Ossining to go to church?"
+
+"Why not? There's a special ceremony in the cathedral--the chantry
+window is to be unveiled."
+
+"The chantry window? How picturesque! What _is_ a chantry? And why do
+you want to see it unveiled? Are you after copy--doing something in the
+Huysmans manner? 'La Cathedrale,' eh?"
+
+"Oh, no." Mrs. Fetherel hesitated. "I'm going simply to please my
+uncle," she said, at last.
+
+"Your uncle?"
+
+"The Bishop, you know." She smiled.
+
+"The Bishop--the Bishop of Ossining? Why, wasn't he the chap who made
+that ridiculous attack on your book? Is that prehistoric ass your
+uncle? Upon my soul, I think you're mighty forgiving to travel all the
+way to Ossining for one of his stained-glass sociables!"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel's smile flowed into a gentle laugh. "Oh, I've never
+allowed that to interfere with our friendship. My uncle felt dreadfully
+about having to speak publicly against my book--it was a great deal
+harder for him than for me--but he thought it his duty to do so. He has
+the very highest sense of duty."
+
+"Well," said Hynes, with a shrug, "I don't know that he didn't do you a
+good turn. Look at that!"
+
+They were standing near the book-stall, and he pointed to a placard
+surmounting the counter and emblazoned with the conspicuous
+announcement: "Fast and Loose. New Edition with Author's Portrait.
+Hundred and Fiftieth Thousand."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel frowned impatiently. "How absurd! They've no right to use
+my picture as a poster!"
+
+"There's our train," said Hynes; and they began to push their way
+through the crowd surging toward one of the inner doors.
+
+As they stood wedged between circumferent shoulders, Mrs. Fetherel
+became conscious of the fixed stare of a pretty girl who whispered
+eagerly to her companion: "Look Myrtle! That's Paula Fetherel right
+behind us--I knew her in a minute!"
+
+"Gracious--where?" cried the other girl, giving her head a twist which
+swept her Gainsborough plumes across Mrs. Fetherel's face.
+
+The first speaker's words had carried beyond her companion's ear, and a
+lemon-colored woman in spectacles, who clutched a copy of the "Journal
+of Psychology" on one drab-cotton-gloved hand, stretched her disengaged
+hand across the intervening barrier of humanity.
+
+"Have I the privilege of addressing the distinguished author of 'Fast
+and Loose'? If so, let me thank you in the name of the Woman's
+Psychological League of Peoria for your magnificent courage in raising
+the standard of revolt against--"
+
+"You can tell us the rest in the car," said a fat man, pressing his
+good-humored bulk against the speaker's arm.
+
+Mrs. Fetherel, blushing, embarrassed and happy, slipped into the space
+produced by this displacement, and a few moments later had taken her
+seat in the train.
+
+She was a little late, and the other chairs were already filled by a
+company of elderly ladies and clergymen who seemed to belong to the
+same party, and were still busy exchanging greetings and settling
+themselves in their places.
+
+One of the ladies, at Mrs. Fetherel's approach, uttered an exclamation
+of pleasure and advanced with outstretched hand. "My dear Mrs.
+Fetherel! I am so delighted to see you here. May I hope you are going
+to the unveiling of the chantry window? The dear Bishop so hoped that
+you would do so! But perhaps I ought to introduce myself. I am Mrs.
+Gollinger"--she lowered her voice expressively--"one of your uncle's
+oldest friends, one who has stood close to him through all this sad
+business, and who knows what he suffered when he felt obliged to
+sacrifice family affection to the call of duty."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel, who had smiled and colored slightly at the beginning of
+this speech, received its close with a deprecating gesture.
+
+"Oh, pray don't mention it," she murmured. "I quite understood how my
+uncle was placed--I bore him no ill will for feeling obliged to preach
+against my book."
+
+"He understood that, and was so touched by it! He has often told me
+that it was the hardest task he was ever called upon to perform--and,
+do you know, he quite feels that this unexpected gift of the chantry
+window is in some way a return for his courage in preaching that
+sermon."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel smiled faintly. "Does he feel that?"
+
+"Yes; he really does. When the funds for the window were so
+mysteriously placed at his disposal, just as he had begun to despair of
+raising them, he assured me that he could not help connecting the fact
+with his denunciation of your book."
+
+"Dear uncle!" sighed Mrs. Fetherel. "Did he say that?"
+
+"And now," continued Mrs. Gollinger, with cumulative rapture--"now that
+you are about to show, by appearing at the ceremony to-day, that there
+has been no break in your friendly relations, the dear Bishop's
+happiness will be complete. He was so longing to have you come to the
+unveiling!"
+
+"He might have counted on me," said Mrs. Fetherel, still smiling.
+
+"Ah, that is so beautifully forgiving of you!" cried Mrs. Gollinger,
+enthusiastically. "But then, the Bishop has always assured me that your
+real nature was very different from that which--if you will pardon my
+saying so--seems to be revealed by your brilliant but--er--rather
+subversive book. 'If you only knew my niece, dear Mrs. Gollinger,' he
+always said, 'you would see that her novel was written in all innocence
+of heart;' and to tell you the truth, when I first read the book I
+didn't think it so very, _very_ shocking. It wasn't till the dear
+Bishop had explained tome--but, dear me, I mustn't take up your time in
+this way when so many others are anxious to have a word with you."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel glanced at her in surprise, and Mrs. Gollinger continued,
+with a playful smile: "You forget that your face is familiar to
+thousands whom you have never seen. We all recognized you the moment
+you entered the train, and my friends here are so eager to make your
+acquaintance--even those"--her smile deepened--"who thought the dear
+Bishop not _quite unjustified_ in his attack on your remarkable novel."
+
+
+V
+
+A religious light filled the chantry of Ossining Cathedral, filtering
+through the linen curtain which veiled the central window, and mingling
+with the blaze of tapers on the richly adorned altar.
+
+In this devout atmosphere, agreeably laden with the incense-like aroma
+of Easter lilies and forced lilacs, Mrs. Fetherel knelt with a sense of
+luxurious satisfaction. Beside her sat Archer Hynes, who had remembered
+that there was to be a church scene in his next novel, and that his
+impressions of the devotional environment needed refreshing. Mrs.
+Fetherel was very happy. She was conscious that her entrance had sent a
+thrill through the female devotees who packed the chantry, and she had
+humor enough to enjoy the thought that, but for the good Bishop's
+denunciation of her book, the heads of his flock would not have been
+turned so eagerly in her direction. Moreover, as she had entered she
+had caught sight of a society reporter, and she knew that her presence,
+and the fact that she was accompanied by Hynes, would be conspicuously
+proclaimed in the morning papers. All these evidences of the success of
+her handiwork might have turned a calmer head than Mrs. Fetherel's; and
+though she had now learned to dissemble her gratification, it still
+filled her inwardly with a delightful glow.
+
+The Bishop was somewhat late in appearing, and she employed the
+interval in meditating on the plot of her next novel, which was already
+partly sketched out, but for which she had been unable to find a
+satisfactory denouement. By a not uncommon process of ratiocination,
+Mrs. Fetherel's success had convinced her of her vocation. She was sure
+now that it was her duty to lay bare the secret plague-spots of
+society, and she was resolved that there should be no doubt as to the
+purpose of her new book. Experience had shown her that where she had
+fancied she was calling a spade a spade she had in fact been alluding
+in guarded terms to the drawing-room shovel. She was determined not to
+repeat the same mistake, and she flattered herself that her coming
+novel would not need an episcopal denunciation to insure its sale,
+however likely it was to receive this crowning evidence of success.
+
+She had reached this point in her meditations when the choir burst into
+song and the ceremony of the unveiling began. The Bishop, almost always
+felicitous in his addresses to the fair sex, was never more so than
+when he was celebrating the triumph of one of his cherished purposes.
+There was a peculiar mixture of Christian humility and episcopal
+exultation in the manner with which he called attention to the
+Creator's promptness in responding to his demand for funds, and he had
+never been more happily inspired than in eulogizing the mysterious gift
+of the chantry window.
+
+Though no hint of the donor's identity had been allowed to escape him,
+it was generally understood that the Bishop knew who had given the
+window, and the congregation awaited in a flutter of suspense the
+possible announcement of a name. None came, however, though the Bishop
+deliciously titillated the curiosity of his flock by circling ever
+closer about the interesting secret. He would not disguise from them,
+he said, that the heart which had divined his inmost wish had been a
+woman's--is it not to woman's intuitions that more than half the
+happiness of earth is owing? What man is obliged to learn by the
+laborious process of experience, woman's wondrous instinct tells her at
+a glance; and so it had been with this cherished scheme, this
+unhoped-for completion of their beautiful chantry. So much, at least,
+he was allowed to reveal; and indeed, had he not done so, the window
+itself would have spoken for him, since the first glance at its
+touching subject and exquisite design would show it to have originated
+in a woman's heart. This tribute to the sex was received with an
+audible sigh of contentment, and the Bishop, always stimulated by such
+evidence of his sway over his hearers, took up his theme with gathering
+eloquence.
+
+Yes--a woman's heart had planned the gift, a woman's hand had executed
+it, and, might he add, without too far withdrawing the veil in which
+Christian beneficence ever loved to drape its acts--might he add that,
+under Providence, a book, a simple book, a mere tale, in fact, had had
+its share in the good work for which they were assembled to give thanks?
+
+At this unexpected announcement, a ripple of excitement ran through the
+assemblage, and more than one head was abruptly turned in the direction
+of Mrs. Fetherel, who sat listening in an agony of wonder and
+confusion. It did not escape the observant novelist at her side that
+she drew down her veil to conceal an uncontrollable blush, and this
+evidence of dismay caused him to fix an attentive gaze on her, while
+from her seat across the aisle, Mrs. Gollinger sent a smile of unctuous
+approval.
+
+"A book--a simple book--" the Bishop's voice went on above this flutter
+of mingled emotions. "What is a book? Only a few pages and a little
+ink--and yet one of the mightiest instruments which Providence has
+devised for shaping the destinies of man . .. one of the most powerful
+influences for good or evil which the Creator has placed in the hands
+of his creatures..."
+
+The air seemed intolerably close to Mrs. Fetherel, and she drew out her
+scent-bottle, and then thrust it hurriedly away, conscious that she was
+still the center of an unenviable attention. And all the while the
+Bishop's voice droned on...
+
+"And of all forms of literature, fiction is doubtless that which has
+exercised the greatest sway, for good or ill, over the passions and
+imagination of the masses. Yes, my friends, I am the first to
+acknowledge it--no sermon, however eloquent, no theological treatise,
+however learned and convincing, has ever inflamed the heart and
+imagination like a novel--a simple novel. Incalculable is the power
+exercised over humanity by the great magicians of the pen--a power ever
+enlarging its boundaries and increasing its responsibilities as popular
+education multiplies the number of readers....Yes, it is the novelist's
+hand which can pour balm on countless human sufferings, or inoculate
+mankind with the festering poison of a corrupt imagination...."
+
+Mrs. Fetherel had turned white, and her eyes were fixed with a blind
+stare of anger on the large-sleeved figure in the center of the chancel.
+
+"And too often, alas, it is the poison and not the balm which the
+unscrupulous hand of genius proffers to its unsuspecting readers. But,
+my friends, why should I continue? None know better than an assemblage
+of Christian women, such as I am now addressing, the beneficent or
+baleful influences of modern fiction; and so, when I say that this
+beautiful chantry window of ours owes its existence in part to the
+romancer's pen"--the Bishop paused, and bending forward, seemed to seek
+a certain face among the countenances eagerly addressed to his--"when I
+say that this pen, which for personal reasons it does not become me to
+celebrate unduly--"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel at this point half rose, pushing back her chair, which
+scraped loudly over the marble floor; but Hynes involuntarily laid a
+warning hand on her arm, and she sank down with a confused murmur about
+the heat.
+
+"--When I confess that this pen, which for once at least has proved
+itself so much mightier than the sword, is that which was inspired to
+trace the simple narrative of 'Through a Glass Brightly'"--Mrs.
+Fetherel looked up with a gasp of mingled relief and anger--"when I
+tell you, my dear friends, that it was your Bishop's own work which
+first roused the mind of one of his flock to the crying need of a
+chantry window, I think you will admit that I am justified in
+celebrating the triumphs of the pen, even though it be the modest
+instrument which your own Bishop wields."
+
+The Bishop paused impressively, and a faint gasp of surprise and
+disappointment was audible throughout the chantry. Something very
+different from this conclusion had been expected, and even Mrs.
+Gollinger's lips curled with a slightly ironic smile. But Archer
+Hynes's attention was chiefly reserved for Mrs. Fetherel, whose face
+had changed with astonishing rapidity from surprise to annoyance, from
+annoyance to relief, and then back again to something very like
+indignation.
+
+The address concluded, the actual ceremony of the unveiling was about
+to take place, and the attention of the congregation soon reverted to
+the chancel, where the choir had grouped themselves beneath the veiled
+window, prepared to burst into a chant of praise as the Bishop drew
+back the hanging. The moment was an impressive one, and every eye was
+fixed on the curtain. Even Hynes's gaze strayed to it for a moment, but
+soon returned to his neighbor's face; and then he perceived that Mrs.
+Fetherel, alone of all the persons present, was not looking at the
+window. Her eyes were fixed in an indignant stare on the Bishop; a
+flush of anger burned becomingly under her veil, and her hands
+nervously crumpled the beautifully printed program of the ceremony.
+
+Hynes broke into a smile of comprehension. He glanced at the Bishop,
+and back at the Bishop's niece; then, as the episcopal hand was
+solemnly raised to draw back the curtain, he bent and whispered in Mrs.
+Fetherel's ear:
+
+"Why, you gave it yourself! You wonderful woman, of course you gave it
+yourself!"
+
+Mrs. Fetherel raised her eyes to his with a start. Her blush deepened
+and her lips shaped a hasty "No"; but the denial was deflected into the
+indignant murmur--"It wasn't _his_ silly book that did it anyhow!"
+
+
+
+
+THE LADY'S MAID'S BELL
+
+
+I
+
+IT was the autumn after I had the typhoid. I'd been three months in
+hospital, and when I came out I looked so weak and tottery that the two
+or three ladies I applied to were afraid to engage me. Most of my money
+was gone, and after I'd boarded for two months, hanging about the
+employment-agencies, and answering any advertisement that looked any
+way respectable, I pretty nearly lost heart, for fretting hadn't made
+me fatter, and I didn't see why my luck should ever turn. It did
+though--or I thought so at the time. A Mrs. Railton, a friend of the
+lady that first brought me out to the States, met me one day and
+stopped to speak to me: she was one that had always a friendly way with
+her. She asked me what ailed me to look so white, and when I told her,
+"Why, Hartley," says she, "I believe I've got the very place for you.
+Come in to-morrow and we'll talk about it."
+
+The next day, when I called, she told me the lady she'd in mind was a
+niece of hers, a Mrs. Brympton, a youngish lady, but something of an
+invalid, who lived all the year round at her country-place on the
+Hudson, owing to not being able to stand the fatigue of town life.
+
+"Now, Hartley," Mrs. Railton said, in that cheery way that always made
+me feel things must be going to take a turn for the better--"now
+understand me; it's not a cheerful place i'm sending you to. The house
+is big and gloomy; my niece is nervous, vaporish; her husband--well,
+he's generally away; and the two children are dead. A year ago, I would
+as soon have thought of shutting a rosy active girl like you into a
+vault; but you're not particularly brisk yourself just now, are you?
+and a quiet place, with country air and wholesome food and early hours,
+ought to be the very thing for you. Don't mistake me," she added, for I
+suppose I looked a trifle downcast; "you may find it dull, but you
+won't be unhappy. My niece is an angel. Her former maid, who died last
+spring, had been with her twenty years and worshipped the ground she
+walked on. She's a kind mistress to all, and where the mistress is
+kind, as you know, the servants are generally good-humored, so you'll
+probably get on well enough with the rest of the household. And you're
+the very woman I want for my niece: quiet, well-mannered, and educated
+above your station. You read aloud well, I think? That's a good thing;
+my niece likes to be read to. She wants a maid that can be something of
+a companion: her last was, and I can't say how she misses her. It's a
+lonely life...Well, have you decided?"
+
+"Why, ma'am," I said, "I'm not afraid of solitude."
+
+"Well, then, go; my niece will take you on my recommendation. I'll
+telegraph her at once and you can take the afternoon train. She has no
+one to wait on her at present, and I don't want you to lose any time."
+
+I was ready enough to start, yet something in me hung back; and to gain
+time I asked, "And the gentleman, ma'am?"
+
+"The gentleman's almost always away, I tell you," said Mrs. Ralston,
+quick-like--"and when he's there," says she suddenly, "you've only to
+keep out of his way."
+
+I took the afternoon train and got out at D---- station at about four
+o'clock. A groom in a dog-cart was waiting, and we drove off at a smart
+pace. It was a dull October day, with rain hanging close overhead, and
+by the time we turned into the Brympton Place woods the daylight was
+almost gone. The drive wound through the woods for a mile or two, and
+came out on a gravel court shut in with thickets of tall black-looking
+shrubs. There were no lights in the windows, and the house _did_ look a
+bit gloomy.
+
+I had asked no questions of the groom, for I never was one to get my
+notion of new masters from their other servants: I prefer to wait and
+see for myself. But I could tell by the look of everything that I had
+got into the right kind of house, and that things were done handsomely.
+A pleasant-faced cook met me at the back door and called the house-maid
+to show me up to my room. "You'll see madam later," she said. "Mrs.
+Brympton has a visitor."
+
+I hadn't fancied Mrs. Brympton was a lady to have many visitors, and
+somehow the words cheered me. I followed the house-maid upstairs, and
+saw, through a door on the upper landing, that the main part of the
+house seemed well-furnished, with dark panelling and a number of old
+portraits. Another flight of stairs led us up to the servants' wing. It
+was almost dark now, and the house-maid excused herself for not having
+brought a light. "But there's matches in your room," she said, "and if
+you go careful you'll be all right. Mind the step at the end of the
+passage. Your room is just beyond."
+
+I looked ahead as she spoke, and half-way down the passage, I saw a
+woman standing. She drew back into a doorway as we passed, and the
+house-maid didn't appear to notice her. She was a thin woman with a
+white face, and a darkish stuff gown and apron. I took her for the
+housekeeper and thought it odd that she didn't speak, but just gave me
+a long look as she went by. My room opened into a square hall at the
+end of the passage. Facing my door was another which stood open: the
+house-maid exclaimed when she saw it.
+
+"There--Mrs. Blinder's left that door open again!" said she, closing it.
+
+"Is Mrs. Blinder the housekeeper?"
+
+"There's no housekeeper: Mrs. Blinder's the cook."
+
+"And is that her room?"
+
+"Laws, no," said the house-maid, cross-like. "That's nobody's room.
+It's empty, I mean, and the door hadn't ought to be open. Mrs. Brympton
+wants it kept locked."
+
+She opened my door and led me into a neat room, nicely furnished, with
+a picture or two on the walls; and having lit a candle she took leave,
+telling me that the servants'-hall tea was at six, and that Mrs.
+Brympton would see me afterward.
+
+I found them a pleasant-spoken set in the servants' hall, and by what
+they let fall I gathered that, as Mrs. Railton had said, Mrs. Brympton
+was the kindest of ladies; but I didn't take much notice of their talk,
+for I was watching to see the pale woman in the dark gown come in. She
+didn't show herself, however, and I wondered if she ate apart; but if
+she wasn't the housekeeper, why should she? Suddenly it struck me that
+she might be a trained nurse, and in that case her meals would of
+course be served in her room. If Mrs. Brympton was an invalid it was
+likely enough she had a nurse. The idea annoyed me, I own, for they're
+not always the easiest to get on with, and if I'd known, I shouldn't
+have taken the place. But there I was, and there was no use pulling a
+long face over it; and not being one to ask questions, I waited to see
+what would turn up.
+
+When tea was over, the house-maid said to the footman: "Has Mr. Ranford
+gone?" and when he said yes, she told me to come up with her to Mrs.
+Brympton.
+
+Mrs. Brympton was lying down in her bedroom. Her lounge stood near the
+fire and beside it was a shaded lamp. She was a delicate-looking lady,
+but when she smiled I felt there was nothing I wouldn't do for her. She
+spoke very pleasantly, in a low voice, asking me my name and age and so
+on, and if I had everything I wanted, and if I wasn't afraid of feeling
+lonely in the country.
+
+"Not with you I wouldn't be, madam," I said, and the words surprised me
+when I'd spoken them, for I'm not an impulsive person; but it was just
+as if I'd thought aloud.
+
+She seemed pleased at that, and said she hoped I'd continue in the same
+mind; then she gave me a few directions about her toilet, and said
+Agnes the house-maid would show me next morning where things were kept.
+
+"I am tired to-night, and shall dine upstairs," she said. "Agnes will
+bring me my tray, that you may have time to unpack and settle yourself;
+and later you may come and undress me."
+
+"Very well, ma'am," I said. "You'll ring, I suppose?"
+
+I thought she looked odd.
+
+"No--Agnes will fetch you," says she quickly, and took up her book
+again.
+
+Well--that was certainly strange: a lady's maid having to be fetched by
+the house-maid whenever her lady wanted her! I wondered if there were
+no bells in the house; but the next day I satisfied myself that there
+was one in every room, and a special one ringing from my mistress's
+room to mine; and after that it did strike me as queer that, whenever
+Mrs. Brympton wanted anything, she rang for Agnes, who had to walk the
+whole length of the servants' wing to call me.
+
+But that wasn't the only queer thing in the house. The very next day I
+found out that Mrs. Brympton had no nurse; and then I asked Agnes about
+the woman I had seen in the passage the afternoon before. Agnes said
+she had seen no one, and I saw that she thought I was dreaming. To be
+sure, it was dusk when we went down the passage, and she had excused
+herself for not bringing a light; but I had seen the woman plain enough
+to know her again if we should meet. I decided that she must have been
+a friend of the cook's, or of one of the other women-servants: perhaps
+she had come down from town for a night's visit, and the servants
+wanted it kept secret. Some ladies are very stiff about having their
+servants' friends in the house overnight. At any rate, I made up my
+mind to ask no more questions.
+
+In a day or two, another odd thing happened. I was chatting one
+afternoon with Mrs. Blinder, who was a friendly disposed woman, and had
+been longer in the house than the other servants, and she asked me if I
+was quite comfortable and had everything I needed. I said I had no
+fault to find with my place or with my mistress, but I thought it odd
+that in so large a house there was no sewing-room for the lady's maid.
+
+"Why," says she, "there _is_ one; the room you're in is the old
+sewing-room."
+
+"Oh," said I; "and where did the other lady's maid sleep?"
+
+At that she grew confused, and said hurriedly that the servants' rooms
+had all been changed about last year, and she didn't rightly remember.
+
+That struck me as peculiar, but I went on as if I hadn't noticed:
+"Well, there's a vacant room opposite mine, and I mean to ask Mrs.
+Brympton if I mayn't use that as a sewing-room."
+
+To my astonishment, Mrs. Blinder went white, and gave my hand a kind of
+squeeze. "Don't do that, my dear," said she, trembling-like. "To tell
+you the truth, that was Emma Saxon's room, and my mistress has kept it
+closed ever since her death."
+
+"And who was Emma Saxon?"
+
+"Mrs. Brympton's former maid."
+
+"The one that was with her so many years?" said I, remembering what
+Mrs. Railton had told me.
+
+Mrs. Blinder nodded.
+
+"What sort of woman was she?"
+
+"No better walked the earth," said Mrs. Blinder. "My mistress loved her
+like a sister."
+
+"But I mean--what did she look like?"
+
+Mrs. Blinder got up and gave me a kind of angry stare. "I'm no great
+hand at describing," she said; "and I believe my pastry's rising." And
+she walked off into the kitchen and shut the door after her.
+
+
+II
+
+I HAD been near a week at Brympton before I saw my master. Word came
+that he was arriving one afternoon, and a change passed over the whole
+household. It was plain that nobody loved him below stairs. Mrs.
+Blinder took uncommon care with the dinner that night, but she snapped
+at the kitchen-maid in a way quite unusual with her; and Mr. Wace, the
+butler, a serious, slow-spoken man, went about his duties as if he'd
+been getting ready for a funeral. He was a great Bible-reader, Mr. Wace
+was, and had a beautiful assortment of texts at his command; but that
+day he used such dreadful language that I was about to leave the table,
+when he assured me it was all out of Isaiah; and I noticed that
+whenever the master came Mr. Wace took to the prophets.
+
+About seven, Agnes called me to my mistress's room; and there I found
+Mr. Brympton. He was standing on the hearth; a big fair bull-necked
+man, with a red face and little bad-tempered blue eyes: the kind of man
+a young simpleton might have thought handsome, and would have been like
+to pay dear for thinking it.
+
+He swung about when I came in, and looked me over in a trice. I knew
+what the look meant, from having experienced it once or twice in my
+former places. Then he turned his back on me, and went on talking to
+his wife; and I knew what _that_ meant, too. I was not the kind of
+morsel he was after. The typhoid had served me well enough in one way:
+it kept that kind of gentleman at arm's-length.
+
+"This is my new maid, Hartley," says Mrs. Brympton in her kind voice;
+and he nodded and went on with what he was saying.
+
+In a minute or two he went off, and left my mistress to dress for
+dinner, and I noticed as I waited on her that she was white, and chill
+to the touch.
+
+Mr. Brympton took himself off the next morning, and the whole house
+drew a long breath when he drove away. As for my mistress, she put on
+her hat and furs (for it was a fine winter morning) and went out for a
+walk in the gardens, coming back quite fresh and rosy, so that for a
+minute, before her color faded, I could guess what a pretty young lady
+she must have been, and not so long ago, either.
+
+She had met Mr. Ranford in the grounds, and the two came back together,
+I remember, smiling and talking as they walked along the terrace under
+my window. That was the first time I saw Mr. Ranford, though I had
+often heard his name mentioned in the hall. He was a neighbor, it
+appeared, living a mile or two beyond Brympton, at the end of the
+village; and as he was in the habit of spending his winters in the
+country he was almost the only company my mistress had at that season.
+He was a slight tall gentleman of about thirty, and I thought him
+rather melancholy-looking till I saw his smile, which had a kind of
+surprise in it, like the first warm day in spring. He was a great
+reader, I heard, like my mistress, and the two were forever borrowing
+books of one another, and sometimes (Mr. Wace told me) he would read
+aloud to Mrs. Brympton by the hour, in the big dark library where she
+sat in the winter afternoons. The servants all liked him, and perhaps
+that's more of a compliment than the masters suspect. He had a friendly
+word for every one of us, and we were all glad to think that Mrs.
+Brympton had a pleasant companionable gentleman like that to keep her
+company when the master was away. Mr. Ranford seemed on excellent terms
+with Mr. Brympton too; though I couldn't but wonder that two gentlemen
+so unlike each other should be so friendly. But then I knew how the
+real quality can keep their feelings to themselves.
+
+As for Mr. Brympton, he came and went, never staying more than a day or
+two, cursing the dulness and the solitude, grumbling at everything, and
+(as I soon found out) drinking a deal more than was good for him. After
+Mrs. Brympton left the table he would sit half the night over the old
+Brympton port and madeira, and once, as I was leaving my mistress's
+room rather later than usual, I met him coming up the stairs in such a
+state that I turned sick to think of what some ladies have to endure
+and hold their tongues about.
+
+The servants said very little about their master; but from what they
+let drop I could see it had been an unhappy match from the beginning.
+Mr. Brympton was coarse, loud and pleasure-loving; my mistress quiet,
+retiring, and perhaps a trifle cold. Not that she was not always
+pleasant-spoken to him: I thought her wonderfully forbearing; but to a
+gentleman as free as Mr. Brympton I daresay she seemed a little offish.
+
+Well, things went on quietly for several weeks. My mistress was kind,
+my duties were light, and I got on well with the other servants. In
+short, I had nothing to complain of; yet there was always a weight on
+me. I can't say why it was so, but I know it was not the loneliness
+that I felt. I soon got used to that; and being still languid from the
+fever, I was thankful for the quiet and the good country air.
+Nevertheless, I was never quite easy in my mind. My mistress, knowing I
+had been ill, insisted that I should take my walk regular, and often
+invented errands for me:--a yard of ribbon to be fetched from the
+village, a letter posted, or a book returned to Mr. Ranford. As soon as
+I was out of doors my spirits rose, and I looked forward to my walks
+through the bare moist-smelling woods; but the moment I caught sight of
+the house again my heart dropped down like a stone in a well. It was
+not a gloomy house exactly, yet I never entered it but a feeling of
+gloom came over me.
+
+Mrs. Brympton seldom went out in winter; only on the finest days did
+she walk an hour at noon on the south terrace. Excepting Mr. Ranford,
+we had no visitors but the doctor, who drove over from D---- about once
+a week. He sent for me once or twice to give me some trifling direction
+about my mistress, and though he never told me what her illness was, I
+thought, from a waxy look she had now and then of a morning, that it
+might be the heart that ailed her. The season was soft and unwholesome,
+and in January we had a long spell of rain. That was a sore trial to
+me, I own, for I couldn't go out, and sitting over my sewing all day,
+listening to the drip, drip of the eaves, I grew so nervous that the
+least sound made me jump. Somehow, the thought of that locked room
+across the passage began to weigh on me. Once or twice, in the long
+rainy nights, I fancied I heard noises there; but that was nonsense, of
+course, and the daylight drove such notions out of my head. Well, one
+morning Mrs. Brympton gave me quite a start of pleasure by telling me
+she wished me to go to town for some shopping. I hadn't known till then
+how low my spirits had fallen. I set off in high glee, and my first
+sight of the crowded streets and the cheerful-looking shops quite took
+me out of myself. Toward afternoon, however, the noise and confusion
+began to tire me, and I was actually looking forward to the quiet of
+Brympton, and thinking how I should enjoy the drive home through the
+dark woods, when I ran across an old acquaintance, a maid I had once
+been in service with. We had lost sight of each other for a number of
+years, and I had to stop and tell her what had happened to me in the
+interval. When I mentioned where I was living she rolled up her eyes
+and pulled a long face.
+
+"What! The Mrs. Brympton that lives all the year at her place on the
+Hudson? My dear, you won't stay there three months."
+
+"Oh, but I don't mind the country," says I, offended somehow at her
+tone. "Since the fever I'm glad to be quiet."
+
+She shook her head. "It's not the country I'm thinking of. All I know
+is she's had four maids in the last six months, and the last one, who
+was a friend of mine, told me nobody could stay in the house."
+
+"Did she say why?" I asked.
+
+"No--she wouldn't give me her reason. But she says to me, _Mrs. Ansey_,
+she says, _if ever a young woman as you know of thinks of going there,
+you tell her it's not worth while to unpack her boxes_."
+
+"Is she young and handsome?" said I, thinking of Mr. Brympton.
+
+"Not her! She's the kind that mothers engage when they've gay young
+gentlemen at college."
+
+Well, though I knew the woman was an idle gossip, the words stuck in my
+head, and my heart sank lower than ever as I drove up to Brympton in
+the dusk. There _was_ something about the house--I was sure of it now...
+
+When I went in to tea I heard that Mr. Brympton had arrived, and I saw
+at a glance that there had been a disturbance of some kind. Mrs.
+Blinder's hand shook so that she could hardly pour the tea, and Mr.
+Wace quoted the most dreadful texts full of brimstone. Nobody said a
+word to me then, but when I went up to my room Mrs. Blinder followed me.
+
+"Oh, my dear," says she, taking my hand, "I'm so glad and thankful
+you've come back to us!"
+
+That struck me, as you may imagine. "Why," said I, "did you think I was
+leaving for good?"
+
+"No, no, to be sure," said she, a little confused, "but I can't a-bear
+to have madam left alone for a day even." She pressed my hand hard,
+and, "Oh, Miss Hartley," says she, "be good to your mistress, as you're
+a Christian woman." And with that she hurried away, and left me staring.
+
+A moment later Agnes called me to Mrs. Brympton. Hearing Mr. Brympton's
+voice in her room, I went round by the dressing-room, thinking I would
+lay out her dinner-gown before going in. The dressing-room is a large
+room with a window over the portico that looks toward the gardens. Mr.
+Brympton's apartments are beyond. When I went in, the door into the
+bedroom was ajar, and I heard Mr. Brympton saying angrily:--"One would
+suppose he was the only person fit for you to talk to."
+
+"I don't have many visitors in winter," Mrs. Brympton answered quietly.
+
+"You have _me!_" he flung at her, sneering.
+
+"You are here so seldom," said she.
+
+"Well--whose fault is that? You make the place about as lively as a
+family vault--"
+
+With that I rattled the toilet-things, to give my mistress warning and
+she rose and called me in.
+
+The two dined alone, as usual, and I knew by Mr. Wace's manner at
+supper that things must be going badly. He quoted the prophets
+something terrible, and worked on the kitchen-maid so that she declared
+she wouldn't go down alone to put the cold meat in the ice-box. I felt
+nervous myself, and after I had put my mistress to bed I was
+half-tempted to go down again and persuade Mrs. Blinder to sit up
+awhile over a game of cards. But I heard her door closing for the
+night, and so I went on to my own room. The rain had begun again, and
+the drip, drip, drip seemed to be dropping into my brain. I lay awake
+listening to it, and turning over what my friend in town had said. What
+puzzled me was that it was always the maids who left...
+
+After a while I slept; but suddenly a loud noise wakened me. My bell
+had rung. I sat up, terrified by the unusual sound, which seemed to go
+on jangling through the darkness. My hands shook so that I couldn't
+find the matches. At length I struck a light and jumped out of bed. I
+began to think I must have been dreaming; but I looked at the bell
+against the wall, and there was the little hammer still quivering.
+
+I was just beginning to huddle on my clothes when I heard another
+sound. This time it was the door of the locked room opposite mine
+softly opening and closing. I heard the sound distinctly, and it
+frightened me so that I stood stock still. Then I heard a footstep
+hurrying down the passage toward the main house. The floor being
+carpeted, the sound was very faint, but I was quite sure it was a
+woman's step. I turned cold with the thought of it, and for a minute or
+two I dursn't breathe or move. Then I came to my senses.
+
+"Alice Hartley," says I to myself, "someone left that room just now and
+ran down the passage ahead of you. The idea isn't pleasant, but you may
+as well face it. Your mistress has rung for you, and to answer her bell
+you've got to go the way that other woman has gone."
+
+Well--I did it. I never walked faster in my life, yet I thought I
+should never get to the end of the passage or reach Mrs. Brympton's
+room. On the way I heard nothing and saw nothing: all was dark and
+quiet as the grave. When I reached my mistress's door the silence was
+so deep that I began to think I must be dreaming, and was half-minded
+to turn back. Then a panic seized me, and I knocked.
+
+There was no answer, and I knocked again, loudly. To my astonishment
+the door was opened by Mr. Brympton. He started back when he saw me,
+and in the light of my candle his face looked red and savage.
+
+_"You!"_ he said, in a queer voice. _"How many of you are there, in
+God's name?"_
+
+At that I felt the ground give under me; but I said to myself that he
+had been drinking, and answered as steadily as I could: "May I go in,
+sir? Mrs. Brympton has rung for me."
+
+"You may all go in, for what I care," says he, and, pushing by me,
+walked down the hall to his own bedroom. I looked after him as he went,
+and to my surprise I saw that he walked as straight as a sober man.
+
+I found my mistress lying very weak and still, but she forced a smile
+when she saw me, and signed to me to pour out some drops for her. After
+that she lay without speaking, her breath coming quick, and her eyes
+closed. Suddenly she groped out with her hand, and "_Emma_," says she,
+faintly.
+
+"It's Hartley, madam," I said. "Do you want anything?"
+
+She opened her eyes wide and gave me a startled look.
+
+"I was dreaming," she said. "You may go, now, Hartley, and thank you
+kindly. I'm quite well again, you see." And she turned her face away
+from me.
+
+
+III
+
+THERE was no more sleep for me that night, and I was thankful when
+daylight came.
+
+Soon afterward, Agnes called me to Mrs. Brympton. I was afraid she was
+ill again, for she seldom sent for me before nine, but I found her
+sitting up in bed, pale and drawn-looking, but quite herself.
+
+"Hartley," says she quickly, "will you put on your things at once and
+go down to the village for me? I want this prescription made up--" here
+she hesitated a minute and blushed--"and I should like you to be back
+again before Mr. Brympton is up."
+
+"Certainly, madam," I said.
+
+"And--stay a moment--" she called me back as if an idea had just struck
+her--"while you're waiting for the mixture, you'll have time to go on
+to Mr. Ranford's with this note."
+
+It was a two-mile walk to the village, and on my way I had time to turn
+things over in my mind. It struck me as peculiar that my mistress
+should wish the prescription made up without Mr. Brympton's knowledge;
+and, putting this together with the scene of the night before, and with
+much else that I had noticed and suspected, I began to wonder if the
+poor lady was weary of her life, and had come to the mad resolve of
+ending it. The idea took such hold on me that I reached the village on
+a run, and dropped breathless into a chair before the chemist's
+counter. The good man, who was just taking down his shutters, stared at
+me so hard that it brought me to myself.
+
+"Mr. Limmel," I says, trying to speak indifferent, "will you run your
+eye over this, and tell me if it's quite right?"
+
+He put on his spectacles and studied the prescription.
+
+"Why, it's one of Dr. Walton's," says he. "What should be wrong with
+it?"
+
+"Well--is it dangerous to take?"
+
+"Dangerous--how do you mean?"
+
+I could have shaken the man for his stupidity.
+
+"I mean--if a person was to take too much of it--by mistake of
+course--" says I, my heart in my throat.
+
+"Lord bless you, no. It's only lime-water. You might feed it to a baby
+by the bottleful."
+
+I gave a great sigh of relief, and hurried on to Mr. Ranford's. But on
+the way another thought struck me. If there was nothing to conceal
+about my visit to the chemist's, was it my other errand that Mrs.
+Brympton wished me to keep private? Somehow, that thought frightened me
+worse than the other. Yet the two gentlemen seemed fast friends, and I
+would have staked my head on my mistress's goodness. I felt ashamed of
+my suspicions, and concluded that I was still disturbed by the strange
+events of the night. I left the note at Mr. Ranford's--and, hurrying
+back to Brympton, slipped in by a side door without being seen, as I
+thought.
+
+An hour later, however, as I was carrying in my mistress's breakfast, I
+was stopped in the hall by Mr. Brympton.
+
+"What were you doing out so early?" he says, looking hard at me.
+
+"Early--me, sir?" I said, in a tremble.
+
+"Come, come," he says, an angry red spot coming out on his forehead,
+"didn't I see you scuttling home through the shrubbery an hour or more
+ago?"
+
+I'm a truthful woman by nature, but at that a lie popped out
+ready-made. "No, sir, you didn't," said I, and looked straight back at
+him.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders and gave a sullen laugh. "I suppose you think
+I was drunk last night?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"No, sir, I don't," I answered, this time truthfully enough.
+
+He turned away with another shrug. "A pretty notion my servants have of
+me!" I heard him mutter as he walked off.
+
+Not till I had settled down to my afternoon's sewing did I realize how
+the events of the night had shaken me. I couldn't pass that locked door
+without a shiver. I knew I had heard someone come out of it, and walk
+down the passage ahead of me. I thought of speaking to Mrs. Blinder or
+to Mr. Wace, the only two in the house who appeared to have an inkling
+of what was going on, but I had a feeling that if I questioned them
+they would deny everything, and that I might learn more by holding my
+tongue and keeping my eyes open. The idea of spending another night
+opposite the locked room sickened me, and once I was seized with the
+notion of packing my trunk and taking the first train to town; but it
+wasn't in me to throw over a kind mistress in that manner, and I tried
+to go on with my sewing as if nothing had happened.
+
+I hadn't worked ten minutes before the sewing-machine broke down. It
+was one I had found in the house, a good machine, but a trifle out of
+order: Mrs. Blinder said it had never been used since Emma Saxon's
+death. I stopped to see what was wrong, and as I was working at the
+machine a drawer which I had never been able to open slid forward and a
+photograph fell out. I picked it up and sat looking at it in a maze. It
+was a woman's likeness, and I knew I had seen the face somewhere--the
+eyes had an asking look that I had felt on me before. And suddenly I
+remembered the pale woman in the passage.
+
+I stood up, cold all over, and ran out of the room. My heart seemed to
+be thumping in the top of my head, and I felt as if I should never get
+away from the look in those eyes. I went straight to Mrs. Blinder. She
+was taking her afternoon nap, and sat up with a jump when I came in.
+
+"Mrs. Blinder," said I, "who is that?" And I held out the photograph.
+
+She rubbed her eyes and stared.
+
+"Why, Emma Saxon," says she. "Where did you find it?"
+
+I looked hard at her for a minute. "Mrs. Blinder," I said, "I've seen
+that face before."
+
+Mrs. Blinder got up and walked over to the looking-glass. "Dear me! I
+must have been asleep," she says. "My front is all over one ear. And
+now do run along, Miss Hartley, dear, for I hear the clock striking
+four, and I must go down this very minute and put on the Virginia ham
+for Mr. Brympton's dinner."
+
+
+IV
+
+TO all appearances, things went on as usual for a week or two. The only
+difference was that Mr. Brympton stayed on, instead of going off as he
+usually did, and that Mr. Ranford never showed himself. I heard Mr.
+Brympton remark on this one afternoon when he was sitting in my
+mistress's room before dinner.
+
+"Where's Ranford?" says he. "He hasn't been near the house for a week.
+Does he keep away because I'm here?"
+
+Mrs. Brympton spoke so low that I couldn't catch her answer.
+
+"Well," he went on, "two's company and three's trumpery; I'm sorry to
+be in Ranford's way, and I suppose I shall have to take myself off
+again in a day or two and give him a show." And he laughed at his own
+joke.
+
+The very next day, as it happened, Mr. Ranford called. The footman said
+the three were very merry over their tea in the library, and Mr.
+Brympton strolled down to the gate with Mr. Ranford when he left.
+
+I have said that things went on as usual; and so they did with the rest
+of the household; but as for myself, I had never been the same since
+the night my bell had rung. Night after night I used to lie awake,
+listening for it to ring again, and for the door of the locked room to
+open stealthily. But the bell never rang, and I heard no sound across
+the passage. At last the silence began to be more dreadful to me than
+the most mysterious sounds. I felt that _someone_ were cowering there,
+behind the locked door, watching and listening as I watched and
+listened, and I could almost have cried out, "Whoever you are, come out
+and let me see you face to face, but don't lurk there and spy on me in
+the darkness!"
+
+Feeling as I did, you may wonder I didn't give warning. Once I very
+nearly did so; but at the last moment something held me back. Whether
+it was compassion for my mistress, who had grown more and more
+dependent on me, or unwillingness to try a new place, or some other
+feeling that I couldn't put a name to, I lingered on as if spell-bound,
+though every night was dreadful to me, and the days but little better.
+
+For one thing, I didn't like Mrs. Brympton's looks. She had never been
+the same since that night, no more than I had. I thought she would
+brighten up after Mr. Brympton left, but though she seemed easier in
+her mind, her spirits didn't revive, nor her strength either. She had
+grown attached to me, and seemed to like to have me about; and Agnes
+told me one day that, since Emma Saxon's death, I was the only maid her
+mistress had taken to. This gave me a warm feeling for the poor lady,
+though after all there was little I could do to help her.
+
+After Mr. Brympton's departure, Mr. Ranford took to coming again,
+though less often than formerly. I met him once or twice in the
+grounds, or in the village, and I couldn't but think there was a change
+in him too; but I set it down to my disordered fancy.
+
+The weeks passed, and Mr. Brympton had now been a month absent. We
+heard he was cruising with a friend in the West Indies, and Mr. Wace
+said that was a long way off, but though you had the wings of a dove
+and went to the uttermost parts of the earth, you couldn't get away
+from the Almighty. Agnes said that as long as he stayed away from
+Brympton, the Almighty might have him and welcome; and this raised a
+laugh, though Mrs. Blinder tried to look shocked, and Mr. Wace said the
+bears would eat us.
+
+We were all glad to hear that the West Indies were a long way off, and
+I remember that, in spite of Mr. Wace's solemn looks, we had a very
+merry dinner that day in the hall. I don't know if it was because of my
+being in better spirits, but I fancied Mrs. Brympton looked better too,
+and seemed more cheerful in her manner. She had been for a walk in the
+morning, and after luncheon she lay down in her room, and I read aloud
+to her. When she dismissed me I went to my own room feeling quite
+bright and happy, and for the first time in weeks walked past the
+locked door without thinking of it. As I sat down to my work I looked
+out and saw a few snow-flakes falling. The sight was pleasanter than
+the eternal rain, and I pictured to myself how pretty the bare gardens
+would look in their white mantle. It seemed to me as if the snow would
+cover up all the dreariness, indoors as well as out.
+
+The fancy had hardly crossed my mind when I heard a step at my side. I
+looked up, thinking it was Agnes.
+
+"Well, Agnes--" said I, and the words froze on my tongue; for there, in
+the door, stood Emma Saxon.
+
+I don't know how long she stood there. I only know I couldn't stir or
+take my eyes from her. Afterward I was terribly frightened, but at the
+time it wasn't fear I felt, but something deeper and quieter. She
+looked at me long and long, and her face was just one dumb prayer to
+me--but how in the world was I to help her? Suddenly she turned, and I
+heard her walk down the passage. This time I wasn't afraid to follow--I
+felt that I must know what she wanted. I sprang up and ran out. She was
+at the other end of the passage, and I expected her to take the turn
+toward my mistress's room; but instead of that she pushed open the door
+that led to the backstairs. I followed her down the stairs, and across
+the passageway to the back door. The kitchen and hall were empty at
+that hour, the servants being off duty, except for the footman, who was
+in the pantry. At the door she stood still a moment, with another look
+at me; then she turned the handle, and stepped out. For a minute I
+hesitated. Where was she leading me to? The door had closed softly
+after her, and I opened it and looked out, half-expecting to find that
+she had disappeared. But I saw her a few yards off, hurrying across the
+court-yard to the path through the woods. Her figure looked black and
+lonely in the snow, and for a second my heart failed me and I thought
+of turning back. But all the while she was drawing me after her; and
+catching up an old shawl of Mrs. Blinder's I ran out into the open.
+
+Emma Saxon was in the wood-path now. She walked on steadily, and I
+followed at the same pace, till we passed out of the gates and reached
+the high-road. Then she struck across the open fields to the village.
+By this time the ground was white, and as she climbed the slope of a
+bare hill ahead of me I noticed that she left no foot-prints behind
+her. At sight of that, my heart shrivelled up within me, and my knees
+were water. Somehow, it was worse here than indoors. She made the whole
+countryside seem lonely as the grave, with none but us two in it, and
+no help in the wide world.
+
+Once I tried to go back; but she turned and looked at me, and it was as
+if she had dragged me with ropes. After that I followed her like a dog.
+We came to the village, and she led me through it, past the church and
+the blacksmith's shop, and down the lane to Mr. Ranford's. Mr.
+Ranford's house stands close to the road: a plain old-fashioned
+building, with a flagged path leading to the door between box-borders.
+The lane was deserted, and as I turned into it, I saw Emma Saxon pause
+under the old elm by the gate. And now another fear came over me. I saw
+that we had reached the end of our journey, and that it was my turn to
+act. All the way from Brympton I had been asking myself what she wanted
+of me, but I had followed in a trance, as it were, and not till I saw
+her stop at Mr. Ranford's gate did my brain begin to clear itself. It
+stood a little way off in the snow, my heart beating fit to strangle
+me, and my feet frozen to the ground; and she stood under the elm and
+watched me.
+
+I knew well enough that she hadn't led me there for nothing. I felt
+there was something I ought to say or do--but how was I to guess what
+it was? I had never thought harm of my mistress and Mr. Ranford, but I
+was sure now that, from one cause or another, some dreadful thing hung
+over them. _She_ knew what it was; she would tell me if she could;
+perhaps she would answer if I questioned her.
+
+It turned me faint to think of speaking to her; but I plucked up heart
+and dragged myself across the few yards between us. As I did so, I
+heard the house-door open, and saw Mr. Ranford approaching. He looked
+handsome and cheerful, as my mistress had looked that morning, and at
+sight of him the blood began to flow again in my veins.
+
+"Why, Hartley," said he, "what's the matter? I saw you coming down the
+lane just now, and came out to see if you had taken root in the snow."
+He stopped and stared at me. "What are you looking at?" he says.
+
+I turned toward the elm as he spoke, and his eyes followed me; but
+there was no one there. The lane was empty as far as the eye could
+reach.
+
+A sense of helplessness came over me. She was gone, and I had not been
+able to guess what she wanted. Her last look had pierced me to the
+marrow; and yet it had not told me! All at once, I felt more desolate
+than when she had stood there watching me. It seemed as if she had left
+me all alone to carry the weight of the secret I couldn't guess. The
+snow went round me in great circles, and the ground fell away from
+me....
+
+A drop of brandy and the warmth of Mr. Ranford's fire soon brought me
+to, and I insisted on being driven back at once to Brympton. It was
+nearly dark, and I was afraid my mistress might be wanting me. I
+explained to Mr. Ranford that I had been out for a walk and had been
+taken with a fit of giddiness as I passed his gate. This was true
+enough; yet I never felt more like a liar than when I said it.
+
+When I dressed Mrs. Brympton for dinner she remarked on my pale looks
+and asked what ailed me. I told her I had a headache, and she said she
+would not require me again that evening, and advised me to go to bed.
+
+It was a fact that I could scarcely keep on my feet; yet I had no fancy
+to spend a solitary evening in my room. I sat downstairs in the hall as
+long as I could hold my head up; but by nine I crept upstairs, too
+weary to care what happened if I could but get my head on a pillow. The
+rest of the household went to bed soon afterward; they kept early hours
+when the master was away, and before ten I heard Mrs. Blinder's door
+close, and Mr. Wace's soon after.
+
+It was a very still night, earth and air all muffled in snow. Once in
+bed I felt easier, and lay quiet, listening to the strange noises that
+come out in a house after dark. Once I thought I heard a door open and
+close again below: it might have been the glass door that led to the
+gardens. I got up and peered out of the window; but it was in the dark
+of the moon, and nothing visible outside but the streaking of snow
+against the panes.
+
+I went back to bed and must have dozed, for I jumped awake to the
+furious ringing of my bell. Before my head was clear I had sprung out
+of bed, and was dragging on my clothes. _It is going to happen now_, I
+heard myself saying; but what I meant I had no notion. My hands seemed
+to be covered with glue--I thought I should never get into my clothes.
+At last I opened my door and peered down the passage. As far as my
+candle-flame carried, I could see nothing unusual ahead of me. I
+hurried on, breathless; but as I pushed open the baize door leading to
+the main hall my heart stood still, for there at the head of the stairs
+was Emma Saxon, peering dreadfully down into the darkness.
+
+For a second I couldn't stir; but my hand slipped from the door, and as
+it swung shut the figure vanished. At the same instant there came
+another sound from below stairs--a stealthy mysterious sound, as of a
+latch-key turning in the house-door. I ran to Mrs. Brympton's room and
+knocked.
+
+There was no answer, and I knocked again. This time I heard some one
+moving in the room; the bolt slipped back and my mistress stood before
+me. To my surprise I saw that she had not undressed for the night. She
+gave me a startled look.
+
+"What is this, Hartley?" she says in a whisper. "Are you ill? What are
+you doing here at this hour?"
+
+"I am not ill, madam; but my bell rang."
+
+At that she turned pale, and seemed about to fall.
+
+"You are mistaken," she said harshly; "I didn't ring. You must have
+been dreaming." I had never heard her speak in such a tone. "Go back to
+bed," she said, closing the door on me.
+
+But as she spoke I heard sounds again in the hall below: a man's step
+this time; and the truth leaped out on me.
+
+"Madam," I said, pushing past her, "there is someone in the house--"
+
+"Someone--?"
+
+"Mr. Brympton, I think--I hear his step below--"
+
+A dreadful look came over her, and without a word, she dropped flat at
+my feet. I fell on my knees and tried to lift her: by the way she
+breathed I saw it was no common faint. But as I raised her head there
+came quick steps on the stairs and across the hall: the door was flung
+open, and there stood Mr. Brympton, in his travelling-clothes, the snow
+dripping from him. He drew back with a start as he saw me kneeling by
+my mistress.
+
+"What the devil is this?" he shouted. He was less high-colored than
+usual, and the red spot came out on his forehead.
+
+"Mrs. Brympton has fainted, sir," said I.
+
+He laughed unsteadily and pushed by me. "It's a pity she didn't choose
+a more convenient moment. I'm sorry to disturb her, but--"
+
+I raised myself up, aghast at the man's action.
+
+"Sir," said I, "are you mad? What are you doing?"
+
+"Going to meet a friend," said he, and seemed to make for the
+dressing-room.
+
+At that my heart turned over. I don't know what I thought or feared;
+but I sprang up and caught him by the sleeve.
+
+"Sir, sir," said I, "for pity's sake look at your wife!"
+
+He shook me off furiously.
+
+"It seems that's done for me," says he, and caught hold of the
+dressing-room door.
+
+At that moment I heard a slight noise inside. Slight as it was, he
+heard it too, and tore the door open; but as he did so he dropped back.
+On the threshold stood Emma Saxon. All was dark behind her, but I saw
+her plainly, and so did he. He threw up his hands as if to hide his
+face from her; and when I looked again she was gone.
+
+He stood motionless, as if the strength had run out of him; and in the
+stillness my mistress suddenly raised herself, and opening her eyes
+fixed a look on him. Then she fell back, and I saw the death-flutter
+pass over her....
+
+We buried her on the third day, in a driving snow-storm. There were few
+people in the church, for it was bad weather to come from town, and
+I've a notion my mistress was one that hadn't many near friends. Mr.
+Ranford was among the last to come, just before they carried her up the
+aisle. He was in black, of course, being such a friend of the family,
+and I never saw a gentleman so pale. As he passed me, I noticed that he
+leaned a trifle on a stick he carried; and I fancy Mr. Brympton noticed
+it too, for the red spot came out sharp on his forehead, and all
+through the service he kept staring across the church at Mr. Ranford,
+instead of following the prayers as a mourner should.
+
+When it was over and we went out to the graveyard, Mr. Ranford had
+disappeared, and as soon as my poor mistress's body was underground,
+Mr. Brympton jumped into the carriage nearest the gate and drove off
+without a word to any of us. I heard him call out, "To the station,"
+and we servants went back alone to the house.
+
+
+
+
+THE MISSION OF JANE
+
+
+I
+
+LETHBURY, surveying his wife across the dinner table, found his
+transient conjugal glance arrested by an indefinable change in her
+appearance.
+
+"How smart you look! Is that a new gown?" he asked.
+
+Her answering look seemed to deprecate his charging her with the
+extravagance of wasting a new gown on him, and he now perceived that
+the change lay deeper than any accident of dress. At the same time, he
+noticed that she betrayed her consciousness of it by a delicate, almost
+frightened blush. It was one of the compensations of Mrs. Lethbury's
+protracted childishness that she still blushed as prettily as at
+eighteen. Her body had been privileged not to outstrip her mind, and
+the two, as it seemed to Lethbury, were destined to travel together
+through an eternity of girlishness.
+
+"I don't know what you mean," she said.
+
+Since she never did, he always wondered at her bringing this out as a
+fresh grievance against him; but his wonder was unresentful, and he
+said good-humoredly: "You sparkle so that I thought you had on your
+diamonds."
+
+She sighed and blushed again.
+
+"It must be," he continued, "that you've been to a dressmaker's
+opening. You're absolutely brimming with illicit enjoyment."
+
+She stared again, this time at the adjective. His adjectives always
+embarrassed her: their unintelligibleness savored of impropriety.
+
+"In short," he summed up, "you've been doing something that you're
+thoroughly ashamed of."
+
+To his surprise she retorted: "I don't see why I should be ashamed of
+it!"
+
+Lethbury leaned back with a smile of enjoyment. When there was nothing
+better going he always liked to listen to her explanations.
+
+"Well--?" he said.
+
+She was becoming breathless and ejaculatory. "Of course you'll
+laugh--you laugh at everything!"
+
+"That rather blunts the point of my derision, doesn't it?" he
+interjected; but she rushed on without noticing:
+
+"It's so easy to laugh at things."
+
+"Ah," murmured Lethbury with relish, "that's Aunt Sophronia's, isn't
+it?"
+
+Most of his wife's opinions were heirlooms, and he took a quaint
+pleasure in tracing their descent. She was proud of their age, and saw
+no reason for discarding them while they were still serviceable. Some,
+of course, were so fine that she kept them for state occasions, like
+her great-grandmother's Crown Derby; but from the lady known as Aunt
+Sophronia she had inherited a stout set of every-day prejudices that
+were practically as good as new; whereas her husband's, as she noticed,
+were always having to be replaced. In the early days she had fancied
+there might be a certain satisfaction in taxing him with the fact; but
+she had long since been silenced by the reply: "My dear, I'm not a rich
+man, but I never use an opinion twice if I can help it."
+
+She was reduced, therefore, to dwelling on his moral deficiencies; and
+one of the most obvious of these was his refusal to take things
+seriously. On this occasion, however, some ulterior purpose kept her
+from taking up his taunt.
+
+"I'm not in the least ashamed!" she repeated, with the air of shaking a
+banner to the wind; but the domestic atmosphere being calm, the banner
+drooped unheroically.
+
+"That," said Lethbury judicially, "encourages me to infer that you
+ought to be, and that, consequently, you've been giving yourself the
+unusual pleasure of doing something I shouldn't approve of."
+
+She met this with an almost solemn directness. "No," she said. "You
+won't approve of it. I've allowed for that."
+
+"Ah," he exclaimed, setting down his liqueur-glass. "You've worked out
+the whole problem, eh?"
+
+"I believe so."
+
+"That's uncommonly interesting. And what is it?"
+
+She looked at him quietly. "A baby."
+
+If it was seldom given her to surprise him, she had attained the
+distinction for once.
+
+"A baby?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"A--human baby?"
+
+"Of course!" she cried, with the virtuous resentment of the woman who
+has never allowed dogs in the house.
+
+Lethbury's puzzled stare broke into a fresh smile. "A baby I sha'n't
+approve of? Well, in the abstract I don't think much of them, I admit.
+Is this an abstract baby?"
+
+Again she frowned at the adjective; but she had reached a pitch of
+exaltation at which such obstacles could not deter her.
+
+"It's the loveliest baby--" she murmured.
+
+"Ah, then it's concrete. It exists. In this harsh world it draws its
+breath in pain--"
+
+"It's the healthiest child I ever saw!" she indignantly corrected.
+
+"You've seen it, then?"
+
+Again the accusing blush suffused her. "Yes--I've seen it."
+
+"And to whom does the paragon belong?"
+
+And here indeed she confounded him. "To me--I hope," she declared.
+
+He pushed his chair back with an inarticulate murmur. "To _you_--?"
+
+"To _us_," she corrected.
+
+"Good Lord!" he said. If there had been the least hint of hallucination
+in her transparent gaze--but no: it was as clear, as shallow, as easily
+fathomable as when he had first suffered the sharp surprise of striking
+bottom in it.
+
+It occurred to him that perhaps she was trying to be funny: he knew
+that there is nothing more cryptic than the humor of the unhumorous.
+
+"Is it a joke?" he faltered.
+
+"Oh, I hope not. I want it so much to be a reality--"
+
+He paused to smile at the limitations of a world in which jokes were
+not realities, and continued gently: "But since it is one already--"
+
+"To us, I mean: to you and me. I want--" her voice wavered, and her
+eyes with it. "I have always wanted so dreadfully...it has been such a
+disappointment...not to..."
+
+"I see," said Lethbury slowly.
+
+But he had not seen before. It seemed curious, now, that he had never
+thought of her taking it in that way, had never surmised any hidden
+depths beneath her outspread obviousness. He felt as though he had
+touched a secret spring in her mind.
+
+There was a moment's silence, moist and tremulous on her part, awkward
+and slightly irritated on his.
+
+"You've been lonely, I suppose?" he began. It was odd, having suddenly
+to reckon with the stranger who gazed at him out of her trivial eyes.
+
+"At times," she said.
+
+"I'm sorry."
+
+"It was not your fault. A man has so many occupations; and women who
+are clever--or very handsome--I suppose that's an occupation too.
+Sometimes I've felt that when dinner was ordered I had nothing to do
+till the next day."
+
+"Oh," he groaned.
+
+"It wasn't your fault," she insisted. "I never told you--but when I
+chose that rose-bud paper for the front room upstairs, I always
+thought--"
+
+"Well--?"
+
+"It would be such a pretty paper--for a baby--to wake up in. That was
+years ago, of course; but it was rather an expensive paper... and it
+hasn't faded in the least..." she broke off incoherently.
+
+"It hasn't faded?"
+
+"No--and so I thought...as we don't use the room for anything ... now
+that Aunt Sophronia is dead...I thought I might... you might...oh,
+Julian, if you could only have seen it just waking up in its crib!"
+
+"Seen what--where? You haven't got a baby upstairs?"
+
+"Oh, no--not _yet_," she said, with her rare laugh--the girlish
+bubbling of merriment that had seemed one of her chief graces in the
+early days. It occurred to him that he had not given her enough things
+to laugh about lately. But then she needed such very elementary things:
+it was as difficult to amuse her as a savage. He concluded that he was
+not sufficiently simple.
+
+"Alice," he said, almost solemnly, "what _do_ you mean?"
+
+She hesitated a moment: he saw her gather her courage for a supreme
+effort. Then she said slowly, gravely, as though she were pronouncing a
+sacramental phrase:
+
+"I'm so lonely without a little child--and I thought perhaps you'd let
+me adopt one....It's at the hospital...its mother is dead...and I
+could...pet it, and dress it, and do things for it...and it's such a
+good baby...you can ask any of the nurses...it would never, _never_
+bother you by crying..."
+
+
+II
+
+Lethbury accompanied his wife to the hospital in a mood of chastened
+wonder. It did not occur to him to oppose her wish. He knew, of course,
+that he would have to bear the brunt of the situation: the jokes at the
+club, the inquiries, the explanations. He saw himself in the comic role
+of the adopted father, and welcomed it as an expiation. For in his
+rapid reconstruction of the past he found himself cutting a shabbier
+figure than he cared to admit. He had always been intolerant of stupid
+people, and it was his punishment to be convicted of stupidity. As his
+mind traversed the years between his marriage and this unexpected
+assumption of paternity, he saw, in the light of an overheated
+imagination, many signs of unwonted crassness. It was not that he had
+ceased to think his wife stupid: she _was_ stupid, limited, inflexible;
+but there was a pathos in the struggles of her swaddled mind, in its
+blind reachings toward the primal emotions. He had always thought she
+would have been happier with a child; but he had thought it
+mechanically, because it had so often been thought before, because it
+was in the nature of things to think it of every woman, because his
+wife was so eminently one of a species that she fitted into all the
+generalizations on the sex. But he had regarded this generalization as
+merely typical of the triumph of tradition over experience. Maternity
+was no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman, the one end to
+which her whole organism tended; but the law of increasing complexity
+had operated in both sexes, and he had not seriously supposed that,
+outside the world of Christmas fiction and anecdotic art, such truisms
+had any special hold on the feminine imagination. Now he saw that the
+arts in question were kept alive by the vitality of the sentiments they
+appealed to.
+
+Lethbury was in fact going through a rapid process of readjustment. His
+marriage had been a failure, but he had preserved toward his wife the
+exact fidelity of act that is sometimes supposed to excuse any
+divagation of feeling; so that, for years, the tie between them had
+consisted mainly in his abstaining from making love to other women. The
+abstention had not always been easy, for the world is surprisingly
+well-stocked with the kind of woman one ought to have married but did
+not; and Lethbury had not escaped the solicitation of such
+alternatives. His immunity had been purchased at the cost of taking
+refuge in the somewhat rarified atmosphere of his perceptions; and his
+world being thus limited, he had given unusual care to its details,
+compensating himself for the narrowness of his horizon by the minute
+finish of his foreground. It was a world of fine shadings and the
+nicest proportions, where impulse seldom set a blundering foot, and the
+feast of reason was undisturbed by an intemperate flow of soul. To such
+a banquet his wife naturally remained uninvited. The diet would have
+disagreed with her, and she would probably have objected to the other
+guests. But Lethbury, miscalculating her needs, had hitherto supposed
+that he had made ample provision for them, and was consequently at
+liberty to enjoy his own fare without any reproach of mendicancy at his
+gates. Now he beheld her pressing a starved face against the windows of
+his life, and in his imaginative reaction he invested her with a pathos
+borrowed from the sense of his own shortcomings.
+
+In the hospital, the imaginative process continued with increasing
+force. He looked at his wife with new eyes. Formerly she had been to
+him a mere bundle of negations, a labyrinth of dead walls and bolted
+doors. There was nothing behind the walls, and the doors led
+no-whither: he had sounded and listened often enough to be sure of
+that. Now he felt like a traveller who, exploring some ancient ruin,
+comes on an inner cell, intact amid the general dilapidation, and
+painted with images which reveal the forgotten uses of the building.
+
+His wife stood by a white crib in one of the wards. In the crib lay a
+child, a year old, the nurse affirmed, but to Lethbury's eye a mere
+dateless fragment of humanity projected against a background of
+conjecture. Over this anonymous particle of life Mrs. Lethbury leaned,
+such ecstasy reflected in her face as strikes up, in Correggio's
+Night-piece, from the child's body to the mother's countenance. It was
+a light that irradiated and dazzled her. She looked up at an inquiry of
+Lethbury's, but as their glances met he perceived that she no longer
+saw him, that he had become as invisible to her as she had long been to
+him. He had to transfer his question to the nurse.
+
+"What is the child's name?" he asked.
+
+"We call her Jane," said the nurse.
+
+
+III
+
+Lethbury, at first, had resisted the idea of a legal adoption; but when
+he found that his wife's curiously limited imagination prevented her
+regarding the child as hers till it had been made so by process of law,
+he promptly withdrew his objection. On one point only he remained
+inflexible; and that was the changing of the waif's name. Mrs.
+Lethbury, almost at once, had expressed a wish to rechristen it: she
+fluctuated between Muriel and Gladys, deferring the moment of decision
+like a lady wavering between two bonnets. But Lethbury was unyielding.
+In the general surrender of his prejudices this one alone held out.
+
+"But Jane is so dreadful," Mrs. Lethbury protested.
+
+"Well, we don't know that _she_ won't be dreadful. She may grow up a
+Jane."
+
+His wife exclaimed reproachfully. "The nurse says she's the loveliest--"
+
+"Don't they always say that?" asked Lethbury patiently. He was prepared
+to be inexhaustibly patient now that he had reached a firm foothold of
+opposition.
+
+"It's cruel to call her Jane," Mrs. Lethbury pleaded.
+
+"It's ridiculous to call her Muriel."
+
+"The nurse is _sure_ she must be a lady's child."
+
+Lethbury winced: he had tried, all along, to keep his mind off the
+question of antecedents.
+
+"Well, let her prove it," he said, with a rising sense of exasperation.
+He wondered how he could ever have allowed himself to be drawn into
+such a ridiculous business; for the first time he felt the full irony
+of it. He had visions of coming home in the afternoon to a house
+smelling of linseed and paregoric, and of being greeted by a chronic
+howl as he went up stairs to dress for dinner. He had never been a
+club-man, but he saw himself becoming one now.
+
+The worst of his anticipations were unfulfilled. The baby was
+surprisingly well and surprisingly quiet. Such infantile remedies as
+she absorbed were not potent enough to be perceived beyond the nursery;
+and when Lethbury could be induced to enter that sanctuary, there was
+nothing to jar his nerves in the mild pink presence of his adopted
+daughter. Jars there were, indeed: they were probably inevitable in the
+disturbed routine of the household; but they occurred between Mrs.
+Lethbury and the nurses, and Jane contributed to them only a placid
+stare which might have served as a rebuke to the combatants.
+
+In the reaction from his first impulse of atonement, Lethbury noted
+with sharpened perceptions the effect of the change on his wife's
+character. He saw already the error of supposing that it could work any
+transformation in her. It simply magnified her existing qualities. She
+was like a dried sponge put in water: she expanded, but she did not
+change her shape. From the stand-point of scientific observation it was
+curious to see how her stored instincts responded to the
+pseudo-maternal call. She overflowed with the petty maxims of the
+occasion. One felt in her the epitome, the consummation, of centuries
+of animal maternity, so that this little woman, who screamed at a mouse
+and was nervous about burglars, came to typify the cave-mother rending
+her prey for her young.
+
+It was less easy to regard philosophically the practical effects of her
+borrowed motherhood. Lethbury found with surprise that she was becoming
+assertive and definite. She no longer represented the negative side of
+his life; she showed, indeed, a tendency to inconvenient affirmations.
+She had gradually expanded her assumption of motherhood till it
+included his own share in the relation, and he suddenly found himself
+regarded as the father of Jane. This was a contingency he had not
+foreseen, and it took all his philosophy to accept it; but there were
+moments of compensation. For Mrs. Lethbury was undoubtedly happy for
+the first time in years; and the thought that he had tardily
+contributed to this end reconciled him to the irony of the means.
+
+At first he was inclined to reproach himself for still viewing the
+situation from the outside, for remaining a spectator instead of a
+participant. He had been allured, for a moment, by the vision of
+severed hands meeting over a cradle, as the whole body of domestic
+fiction bears witness to their doing; and the fact that no such
+conjunction took place he could explain only on the ground that it was
+a borrowed cradle. He did not dislike the little girl. She still
+remained to him a hypothetical presence, a query rather than a fact;
+but her nearness was not unpleasant, and there were moments when her
+tentative utterances, her groping steps, seemed to loosen the dry
+accretions enveloping his inner self. But even at such moments--moments
+which he invited and caressed--she did not bring him nearer to his
+wife. He now perceived that he had made a certain place in his life for
+Mrs. Lethbury, and that she no longer fitted into it. It was too late
+to enlarge the space, and so she overflowed and encroached. Lethbury
+struggled against the sense of submergence. He let down barrier after
+barrier, yielded privacy after privacy; but his wife's personality
+continued to dilate. She was no longer herself alone: she was herself
+and Jane. Gradually, in a monstrous fusion of identity, she became
+herself, himself and Jane; and instead of trying to adapt her to a
+spare crevice of his character, he found himself carelessly squeezed
+into the smallest compartment of the domestic economy.
+
+
+IV
+
+He continued to tell himself that he was satisfied if his wife was
+happy; and it was not till the child's tenth year that he felt a doubt
+of her happiness.
+
+Jane had been a preternaturally good child. During the eight years of
+her adoption she had caused her foster-parents no anxiety beyond those
+connected with the usual succession of youthful diseases. But her
+unknown progenitors had given her a robust constitution, and she passed
+unperturbed through measles, chicken-pox and whooping-cough. If there
+was any suffering it was endured vicariously by Mrs. Lethbury, whose
+temperature rose and fell with the patient's, and who could not hear
+Jane sneeze without visions of a marble angel weeping over a broken
+column. But though Jane's prompt recoveries continued to belie such
+premonitions, though her existence continued to move forward on an even
+keel of good health and good conduct, Mrs. Lethbury's satisfaction
+showed no corresponding advance. Lethbury, at first, was disposed to
+add her disappointment to the long list of feminine inconsistencies
+with which the sententious observer of life builds up his favorite
+induction; but circumstances presently led him to take a kindlier view
+of the case.
+
+Hitherto his wife had regarded him as a negligible factor in Jane's
+evolution. Beyond providing for his adopted daughter, and effacing
+himself before her, he was not expected to contribute to her
+well-being. But as time passed he appeared to his wife in a new light.
+It was he who was to educate Jane. In matters of the intellect, Mrs.
+Lethbury was the first to declare her deficiencies--to proclaim them,
+even, with a certain virtuous superiority. She said she did not pretend
+to be clever, and there was no denying the truth of the assertion. Now,
+however, she seemed less ready, not to own her limitations, but to
+glory in them. Confronted with the problem of Jane's instruction, she
+stood in awe of the child.
+
+"I have always been stupid, you know," she said to Lethbury with a new
+humility, "and I'm afraid I sha'n't know what is best for Jane. I'm
+sure she has a wonderfully good mind, and I should reproach myself if I
+didn't give her every opportunity." She looked at him helplessly. "You
+must tell me what ought to be done."
+
+Lethbury was not unwilling to oblige her. Somewhere in his mental
+lumber-room there rusted a theory of education such as usually lingers
+among the impedimenta of the childless. He brought this out,
+refurbished it, and applied it to Jane. At first he thought his wife
+had not overrated the quality of the child's mind. Jane seemed
+extraordinarily intelligent. Her precocious definiteness of mind was
+encouraging to her inexperienced preceptor. She had no difficulty in
+fixing her attention, and he felt that every fact he imparted was being
+etched in metal. He helped his wife to engage the best teachers, and
+for a while continued to take an ex-official interest in his adopted
+daughter's studies. But gradually his interest waned. Jane's ideas did
+not increase with her acquisitions. Her young mind remained a mere
+receptacle for facts: a kind of cold-storage from which anything that
+had been put there could be taken out at a moment's notice, intact but
+congealed. She developed, moreover, an inordinate pride in the capacity
+of her mental storehouse, and a tendency to pelt her public with its
+contents. She was overheard to jeer at her nurse for not knowing when
+the Saxon Heptarchy had fallen, and she alternately dazzled and
+depressed Mrs. Lethbury by the wealth of her chronological allusions.
+She showed no interest in the significance of the facts she amassed:
+she simply collected dates as another child might have collected stamps
+or marbles. To her foster-mother she seemed a prodigy of wisdom; but
+Lethbury saw, with a secret movement of sympathy, how the aptitudes in
+which Mrs. Lethbury gloried were slowly estranging her from their
+possessor.
+
+"She is getting too clever for me," his wife said to him, after one of
+Jane's historical flights, "but I am so glad that she will be a
+companion to you."
+
+Lethbury groaned in spirit. He did not look forward to Jane's
+companionship. She was still a good little girl: but there was
+something automatic and formal in her goodness, as though it were a
+kind of moral calisthenics that she went through for the sake of
+showing her agility. An early consciousness of virtue had moreover
+constituted her the natural guardian and adviser of her elders. Before
+she was fifteen she had set about reforming the household. She took
+Mrs. Lethbury in hand first; then she extended her efforts to the
+servants, with consequences more disastrous to the domestic harmony;
+and lastly she applied herself to Lethbury. She proved to him by
+statistics that he smoked too much, and that it was injurious to the
+optic nerve to read in bed. She took him to task for not going to
+church more regularly, and pointed out to him the evils of desultory
+reading. She suggested that a regular course of study encourages mental
+concentration, and hinted that inconsecutiveness of thought is a sign
+of approaching age.
+
+To her adopted mother her suggestions were equally pertinent. She
+instructed Mrs. Lethbury in an improved way of making beef stock, and
+called her attention to the unhygienic qualities of carpets. She poured
+out distracting facts about bacilli and vegetable mould, and
+demonstrated that curtains and picture-frames are a hot-bed of animal
+organisms. She learned by heart the nutritive ingredients of the
+principal articles of diet, and revolutionized the cuisine by an
+attempt to establish a scientific average between starch and
+phosphates. Four cooks left during this experiment, and Lethbury fell
+into the habit of dining at his club.
+
+Once or twice, at the outset, he had tried to check Jane's ardor; but
+his efforts resulted only in hurting his wife's feelings. Jane remained
+impervious, and Mrs. Lethbury resented any attempt to protect her from
+her daughter. Lethbury saw that she was consoled for the sense of her
+own inferiority by the thought of what Jane's intellectual
+companionship must be to him; and he tried to keep up the illusion by
+enduring with what grace he might the blighting edification of Jane's
+discourse.
+
+
+V
+
+As Jane grew up, he sometimes avenged himself by wondering if his wife
+was still sorry that they had not called her Muriel. Jane was not ugly;
+she developed, indeed, a kind of categorical prettiness that might have
+been a projection of her mind. She had a creditable collection of
+features, but one had to take an inventory of them to find out that she
+was good-looking. The fusing grace had been omitted.
+
+Mrs. Lethbury took a touching pride in her daughter's first steps in
+the world. She expected Jane to take by her complexion those whom she
+did not capture by her learning. But Jane's rosy freshness did not work
+any perceptible ravages. Whether the young men guessed the axioms on
+her lips and detected the encyclopaedia in her eye, or whether they
+simply found no intrinsic interest in these features, certain it is,
+that, in spite of her mother's heroic efforts, and of incessant calls
+on Lethbury's purse, Jane, at the end of her first season, had dropped
+hopelessly out of the running. A few duller girls found her
+interesting, and one or two young men came to the house with the object
+of meeting other young women; but she was rapidly becoming one of the
+social supernumeraries who are asked out only because they are on
+people's lists.
+
+The blow was bitter to Mrs. Lethbury; but she consoled herself with the
+idea that Jane had failed because she was too clever. Jane probably
+shared this conviction; at all events she betrayed no consciousness of
+failure. She had developed a pronounced taste for society, and went
+out, unweariedly and obstinately, winter after winter, while Mrs.
+Lethbury toiled in her wake, showering attentions on oblivious
+hostesses. To Lethbury there was something at once tragic and
+exasperating in the sight of their two figures, the one conciliatory,
+the other dogged, both pursuing with unabated zeal the elusive prize of
+popularity. He even began to feel a personal stake in the pursuit, not
+as it concerned Jane, but as it affected his wife. He saw that the
+latter was the victim of Jane's disappointment: that Jane was not above
+the crude satisfaction of "taking it out" of her mother. Experience
+checked the impulse to come to his wife's defence; and when his
+resentment was at its height, Jane disarmed him by giving up the
+struggle.
+
+Nothing was said to mark her capitulation; but Lethbury noticed that
+the visiting ceased, and that the dressmaker's bills diminished. At the
+same time, Mrs. Lethbury made it known that Jane had taken up
+charities; and before long Jane's conversation confirmed this
+announcement. At first Lethbury congratulated himself on the change;
+but Jane's domesticity soon began to weigh on him. During the day she
+was sometimes absent on errands of mercy; but in the evening she was
+always there. At first she and Mrs. Lethbury sat in the drawing-room
+together, and Lethbury smoked in the library; but presently Jane formed
+the habit of joining him there, and he began to suspect that he was
+included among the objects of her philanthropy.
+
+Mrs. Lethbury confirmed the suspicion. "Jane has grown very
+serious-minded lately," she said. "She imagines that she used to
+neglect you, and she is trying to make up for it. Don't discourage
+her," she added innocently.
+
+Such a plea delivered Lethbury helpless to his daughter's
+ministrations: and he found himself measuring the hours he spent with
+her by the amount of relief they must be affording her mother. There
+were even moments when he read a furtive gratitude in Mrs. Lethbury's
+eye.
+
+But Lethbury was no hero, and he had nearly reached the limit of
+vicarious endurance when something wonderful happened. They never quite
+knew afterward how it had come about, or who first perceived it; but
+Mrs. Lethbury one day gave tremulous voice to their inferences.
+
+"Of course," she said, "he comes here because of Elise." The young lady
+in question, a friend of Jane's, was possessed of attractions which had
+already been found to explain the presence of masculine visitors.
+
+Lethbury risked a denial. "I don't think he does," he declared.
+
+"But Elise is thought very pretty," Mrs. Lethbury insisted.
+
+"I can't help that," said Lethbury doggedly.
+
+He saw a faint light in his wife's eyes; but she remarked carelessly:
+"Mr. Budd would be a very good match for Elise."
+
+Lethbury could hardly repress a chuckle: he was so exquisitely aware
+that she was trying to propitiate the gods.
+
+For a few weeks neither said a word; then Mrs. Lethbury once more
+reverted to the subject.
+
+"It is a month since Elise went abroad," she said.
+
+"Is it?"
+
+"And Mr. Budd seems to come here just as often--"
+
+"Ah," said Lethbury with heroic indifference; and his wife hastily
+changed the subject.
+
+Mr. Winstanley Budd was a young man who suffered from an excess of
+manner. Politeness gushed from him in the driest seasons. He was always
+performing feats of drawing-room chivalry, and the approach of the most
+unobtrusive female threw him into attitudes which endangered the
+furniture. His features, being of the cherubic order, did not lend
+themselves to this role; but there were moments when he appeared to
+dominate them, to force them into compliance with an aquiline ideal.
+The range of Mr. Budd's social benevolence made its object hard to
+distinguish. He spread his cloak so indiscriminately that one could not
+always interpret the gesture, and Jane's impassive manner had the
+effect of increasing his demonstrations: she threw him into paroxysms
+of politeness.
+
+At first he filled the house with his amenities; but gradually it
+became apparent that his most dazzling effects were directed
+exclusively to Jane. Lethbury and his wife held their breath and looked
+away from each other. They pretended not to notice the frequency of Mr.
+Budd's visits, they struggled against an imprudent inclination to leave
+the young people too much alone. Their conclusions were the result of
+indirect observation, for neither of them dared to be caught watching
+Mr. Budd: they behaved like naturalists on the trail of a rare
+butterfly.
+
+In his efforts not to notice Mr. Budd, Lethbury centred his attentions
+on Jane; and Jane, at this crucial moment, wrung from him a reluctant
+admiration. While her parents went about dissembling their emotions,
+she seemed to have none to conceal. She betrayed neither eagerness nor
+surprise; so complete was her unconcern that there were moments when
+Lethbury feared it was obtuseness, when he could hardly help whispering
+to her that now was the moment to lower the net.
+
+Meanwhile the velocity of Mr. Budd's gyrations increased with the ardor
+of courtship: his politeness became incandescent, and Jane found
+herself the centre of a pyrotechnical display culminating in the "set
+piece" of an offer of marriage.
+
+Mrs. Lethbury imparted the news to her husband one evening after their
+daughter had gone to bed. The announcement was made and received with
+an air of detachment, as though both feared to be betrayed into
+unseemly exultation; but Lethbury, as his wife ended, could not repress
+the inquiry, "Have they decided on a day?"
+
+Mrs. Lethbury's superior command of her features enabled her to look
+shocked. "What can you be thinking of? He only offered himself at five!"
+
+"Of course--of course--" stammered Lethbury--"but nowadays people marry
+after such short engagements--"
+
+"Engagement!" said his wife solemnly. "There is no engagement."
+
+Lethbury dropped his cigar. "What on earth do you mean?"
+
+"Jane is thinking it over."
+
+_"Thinking it over?"_ "She has asked for a month before deciding."
+
+Lethbury sank back with a gasp. Was it genius or was it madness? He
+felt incompetent to decide; and Mrs. Lethbury's next words showed that
+she shared his difficulty.
+
+"Of course I don't want to hurry Jane--"
+
+"Of course not," he acquiesced.
+
+"But I pointed out to her that a young man of Mr. Budd's impulsive
+temperament might--might be easily discouraged--"
+
+"Yes; and what did she say?"
+
+"She said that if she was worth winning she was worth waiting for."
+
+
+VI
+
+The period of Mr. Budd's probation could scarcely have cost him as much
+mental anguish as it caused his would-be parents-in-law.
+
+Mrs. Lethbury, by various ruses, tried to shorten the ordeal, but Jane
+remained inexorable; and each morning Lethbury came down to breakfast
+with the certainty of finding a letter of withdrawal from her
+discouraged suitor.
+
+When at length the decisive day came, and Mrs. Lethbury, at its close,
+stole into the library with an air of chastened joy, they stood for a
+moment without speaking; then Mrs. Lethbury paid a fitting tribute to
+the proprieties by faltering out: "It will be dreadful to have to give
+her up--"
+
+Lethbury could not repress a warning gesture; but even as it escaped
+him, he realized that his wife's grief was genuine.
+
+"Of course, of course," he said, vainly sounding his own emotional
+shallows for an answering regret. And yet it was his wife who had
+suffered most from Jane!
+
+He had fancied that these sufferings would be effaced by the milder
+atmosphere of their last weeks together; but felicity did not soften
+Jane. Not for a moment did she relax her dominion: she simply widened
+it to include a new subject. Mr. Budd found himself under orders with
+the others; and a new fear assailed Lethbury as he saw Jane assume
+prenuptial control of her betrothed. Lethbury had never felt any strong
+personal interest in Mr. Budd; but, as Jane's prospective husband, the
+young man excited his sympathy. To his surprise, he found that Mrs.
+Lethbury shared the feeling.
+
+"I'm afraid he may find Jane a little exacting," she said, after an
+evening dedicated to a stormy discussion of the wedding arrangements.
+"She really ought to make some concessions. If he _wants_ to be married
+in a black frock-coat instead of a dark gray one--" She paused and
+looked doubtfully at Lethbury.
+
+"What can I do about it?" he said.
+
+"You might explain to him--tell him that Jane isn't always--"
+
+Lethbury made an impatient gesture. "What are you afraid of? His
+finding her out or his not finding her out?"
+
+Mrs. Lethbury flushed. "You put it so dreadfully!"
+
+Her husband mused for a moment; then he said with an air of cheerful
+hypocrisy: "After all, Budd is old enough to take care of himself."
+
+But the next day Mrs. Lethbury surprised him. Late in the afternoon she
+entered the library, so breathless and inarticulate that he scented a
+catastrophe.
+
+"I've done it!" she cried.
+
+"Done what?"
+
+"Told him." She nodded toward the door. "He's just gone. Jane is out,
+and I had a chance to talk to him alone."
+
+Lethbury pushed a chair forward and she sank into it.
+
+"What did you tell him? That she is _not_ always--"
+
+Mrs. Lethbury lifted a tragic eye. "No; I told him that she always
+_is_--"
+
+"Always _is_--?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a pause. Lethbury made a call on his hoarded philosophy. He
+saw Jane suddenly reinstated in her evening seat by the library fire;
+but an answering chord in him thrilled at his wife's heroism.
+
+"Well--what did he say?"
+
+Mrs. Lethbury's agitation deepened. It was clear that the blow had
+fallen.
+
+"He...he said...that we...had never understood Jane... or appreciated
+her..." The final syllables were lost in her handkerchief, and she left
+him marvelling at the mechanism of a woman.
+
+After that, Lethbury faced the future with an undaunted eye. They had
+done their duty--at least his wife had done hers--and they were reaping
+the usual harvest of ingratitude with a zest seldom accorded to such
+reaping. There was a marked change in Mr. Budd's manner, and his
+increasing coldness sent a genial glow through Lethbury's system. It
+was easy to bear with Jane in the light of Mr. Budd's disapproval.
+
+There was a good deal to be borne in the last days, and the brunt of it
+fell on Mrs. Lethbury. Jane marked her transition to the married state
+by an appropriate but incongruous display of nerves. She became
+sentimental, hysterical and reluctant. She quarrelled with her
+betrothed and threatened to return the ring. Mrs. Lethbury had to
+intervene, and Lethbury felt the hovering sword of destiny. But the
+blow was suspended. Mr. Budd's chivalry was proof against all his
+bride's caprices, and his devotion throve on her cruelty. Lethbury
+feared that he was too faithful, too enduring, and longed to urge him
+to vary his tactics. Jane presently reappeared with the ring on her
+finger, and consented to try on the wedding-dress; but her
+uncertainties, her reactions, were prolonged till the final day.
+
+When it dawned, Lethbury was still in an ecstasy of apprehension.
+Feeling reasonably sure of the principal actors, he had centred his
+fears on incidental possibilities. The clergyman might have a stroke,
+or the church might burn down, or there might be something wrong with
+the license. He did all that was humanly possible to avert such
+contingencies, but there remained that incalculable factor known as the
+hand of God. Lethbury seemed to feel it groping for him.
+
+In the church it almost had him by the nape. Mr. Budd was late; and for
+five immeasurable minutes Lethbury and Jane faced a churchful of
+conjecture. Then the bridegroom appeared, flushed but chivalrous, and
+explaining to his father-in-law under cover of the ritual that he had
+torn his glove and had to go back for another.
+
+"You'll be losing the ring next," muttered Lethbury; but Mr. Budd
+produced this article punctually, and a moment or two later was bearing
+its wearer captive down the aisle.
+
+At the wedding-breakfast Lethbury caught his wife's eye fixed on him in
+mild disapproval, and understood that his hilarity was exceeding the
+bounds of fitness. He pulled himself together, and tried to subdue his
+tone; but his jubilation bubbled over like a champagne-glass
+perpetually refilled. The deeper his draughts, the higher it rose.
+
+It was at the brim when, in the wake of the dispersing guests, Jane
+came down in her travelling-dress and fell on her mother's neck.
+
+"I can't leave you!" she wailed, and Lethbury felt as suddenly sobered
+as a man under a douche. But if the bride was reluctant her captor was
+relentless. Never had Mr. Budd been more dominant, more aquiline.
+Lethbury's last fears were dissipated as the young man snatched Jane
+from her mother's bosom and bore her off to the brougham.
+
+The brougham rolled away, the last milliner's girl forsook her post by
+the awning, the red carpet was folded up, and the house door closed.
+Lethbury stood alone in the hall with his wife. As he turned toward
+her, he noticed the look of tired heroism in her eyes, the deepened
+lines of her face. They reflected his own symptoms too accurately not
+to appeal to him. The nervous tension had been horrible. He went up to
+her, and an answering impulse made her lay a hand on his arm. He held
+it there a moment.
+
+"Let us go off and have a jolly little dinner at a restaurant," he
+proposed.
+
+There had been a time when such a suggestion would have surprised her
+to the verge of disapproval; but now she agreed to it at once.
+
+"Oh, that would be so nice," she murmured with a great sigh of relief
+and assuagement.
+
+Jane had fulfilled her mission after all: she had drawn them together
+at last.
+
+
+
+
+THE RECKONING
+
+
+I
+
+"THE marriage law of the new dispensation will be: _Thou shalt not be
+unfaithful--to thyself_."
+
+A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the haze
+of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband descended from
+his improvised platform, saw him merged in a congratulatory group of
+ladies. Westall's informal talks on "The New Ethics" had drawn about
+him an eager following of the mentally unemployed--those who, as he had
+once phrased it, liked to have their brain-food cut up for them. The
+talks had begun by accident. Westall's ideas were known to be
+"advanced," but hitherto their advance had not been in the direction of
+publicity. He had been, in his wife's opinion, almost pusillanimously
+careful not to let his personal views endanger his professional
+standing. Of late, however, he had shown a puzzling tendency to
+dogmatize, to throw down the gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in
+the face of society; and the relation of the sexes being a topic always
+sure of an audience, a few admiring friends had persuaded him to give
+his after-dinner opinions a larger circulation by summing them up in a
+series of talks at the Van Sideren studio.
+
+The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially, on the
+fact that they had a studio. Van Sideren's pictures were chiefly
+valuable as accessories to the _mise en scene_ which differentiated his
+wife's "afternoons" from the blighting functions held in long New York
+drawing-rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends
+whiskey-and-soda instead of tea. Mrs. Van Sideren, for her part, was
+skilled in making the most of the kind of atmosphere which a lay-figure
+and an easel create; and if at times she found the illusion hard to
+maintain, and lost courage to the extent of almost wishing that Herbert
+could paint, she promptly overcame such moments of weakness by calling
+in some fresh talent, some extraneous re-enforcement of the "artistic"
+impression. It was in quest of such aid that she had seized on Westall,
+coaxing him, somewhat to his wife's surprise, into a flattered
+participation in her fraud. It was vaguely felt, in the Van Sideren
+circle, that all the audacities were artistic, and that a teacher who
+pronounced marriage immoral was somehow as distinguished as a painter
+who depicted purple grass and a green sky. The Van Sideren set were
+tired of the conventional color-scheme in art and conduct.
+
+Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of marriage;
+she might indeed have claimed her husband as a disciple. In the early
+days of their union she had secretly resented his disinclination to
+proclaim himself a follower of the new creed; had been inclined to tax
+him with moral cowardice, with a failure to live up to the convictions
+for which their marriage was supposed to stand. That was in the first
+burst of propagandism, when, womanlike, she wanted to turn her
+disobedience into a law. Now she felt differently. She could hardly
+account for the change, yet being a woman who never allowed her
+impulses to remain unaccounted for, she tried to do so by saying that
+she did not care to have the articles of her faith misinterpreted by
+the vulgar. In this connection, she was beginning to think that almost
+every one was vulgar; certainly there were few to whom she would have
+cared to intrust the defence of so esoteric a doctrine. And it was
+precisely at this point that Westall, discarding his unspoken
+principles, had chosen to descend from the heights of privacy, and
+stand hawking his convictions at the street-corner!
+
+It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously focussed
+upon herself Mrs. Westall's wandering resentment. In the first place,
+the girl had no business to be there. It was "horrid"--Mrs. Westall
+found herself slipping back into the old feminine vocabulary--simply
+"horrid" to think of a young girl's being allowed to listen to such
+talk. The fact that Una smoked cigarettes and sipped an occasional
+cocktail did not in the least tarnish a certain radiant innocency which
+made her appear the victim, rather than the accomplice, of her parents'
+vulgarities. Julia Westall felt in a hot helpless way that something
+ought to be done--that some one ought to speak to the girl's mother.
+And just then Una glided up.
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!" Una fixed her with large
+limpid eyes. "You believe it all, I suppose?" she asked with seraphic
+gravity.
+
+"All--what, my dear child?"
+
+The girl shone on her. "About the higher life--the freer expansion of
+the individual--the law of fidelity to one's self," she glibly recited.
+
+Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning blush.
+
+"My dear Una," she said, "you don't in the least understand what it's
+all about!"
+
+Miss Van Sideren stared, with a slowly answering blush. "Don't _you_,
+then?" she murmured.
+
+Mrs. Westall laughed. "Not always--or altogether! But I should like
+some tea, please."
+
+Una led her to the corner where innocent beverages were dispensed. As
+Julia received her cup she scrutinized the girl more carefully. It was
+not such a girlish face, after all--definite lines were forming under
+the rosy haze of youth. She reflected that Una must be six-and-twenty,
+and wondered why she had not married. A nice stock of ideas she would
+have as her dower! If _they_ were to be a part of the modern girl's
+trousseau--
+
+Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start. It was as though some one
+else had been speaking--a stranger who had borrowed her own voice: she
+felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental ventriloquism.
+Concluding suddenly that the room was stifling and Una's tea too sweet,
+she set down her cup, and looked about for Westall: to meet his eyes
+had long been her refuge from every uncertainty. She met them now, but
+only, as she felt, in transit; they included her parenthetically in a
+larger flight. She followed the flight, and it carried her to a corner
+to which Una had withdrawn--one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van
+Sideren attributed the success of her Saturdays. Westall, a moment
+later, had overtaken his look, and found a place at the girl's side.
+She bent forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back, listening, with the
+depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to flattery, enabling him to
+swallow the strongest doses without apparent grossness of appetite.
+Julia winced at her own definition of the smile.
+
+On the way home, in the deserted winter dusk, Westall surprised his
+wife by a sudden boyish pressure of her arm. "Did I open their eyes a
+bit? Did I tell them what you wanted me to?" he asked gaily.
+
+Almost unconsciously, she let her arm slip from his. "What _I_
+wanted--?"
+
+"Why, haven't you--all this time?" She caught the honest wonder of his
+tone. "I somehow fancied you'd rather blamed me for not talking more
+openly--before--You've made me feel, at times, that I was sacrificing
+principles to expediency."
+
+She paused a moment over her reply; then she asked quietly: "What made
+you decide not to--any longer?"
+
+She felt again the vibration of a faint surprise. "Why--the wish to
+please you!" he answered, almost too simply.
+
+"I wish you would not go on, then," she said abruptly.
+
+He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the
+darkness.
+
+"Not go on--?"
+
+"Call a hansom, please. I'm tired," broke from her with a sudden rush
+of physical weariness.
+
+Instantly his solicitude enveloped her. The room had been infernally
+hot--and then that confounded cigarette smoke--he had noticed once or
+twice that she looked pale--she mustn't come to another Saturday. She
+felt herself yielding, as she always did, to the warm influence of his
+concern for her, the feminine in her leaning on the man in him with a
+conscious intensity of abandonment. He put her in the hansom, and her
+hand stole into his in the darkness. A tear or two rose, and she let
+them fall. It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles!
+
+That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the
+subject of his talk. He combined a man's dislike of uncomfortable
+questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding them; and she knew
+that if he returned to the subject he must have some special reason for
+doing so.
+
+"You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon. Did I put
+the case badly?"
+
+"No--you put it very well."
+
+"Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have me go
+on with it?"
+
+She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention deepening
+her sense of helplessness.
+
+"I don't think I care to hear such things discussed in public."
+
+"I don't understand you," he exclaimed. Again the feeling that his
+surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own attitude. She
+was not sure that she understood herself.
+
+"Won't you explain?" he said with a tinge of impatience.
+
+Her eyes wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been the
+scene of so many of their evening confidences. The shaded lamps, the
+quiet-colored walls hung with mezzotints, the pale spring flowers
+scattered here and there in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sevres,
+recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment in which the evenings of
+her first marriage had been passed--a wilderness of rosewood and
+upholstery, with a picture of a Roman peasant above the mantel-piece,
+and a Greek slave in "statuary marble" between the folding-doors of the
+back drawing-room. It was a room with which she had never been able to
+establish any closer relation than that between a traveller and a
+railway station; and now, as she looked about at the surroundings which
+stood for her deepest affinities--the room for which she had left that
+other room--she was startled by the same sense of strangeness and
+unfamiliarity. The prints, the flowers, the subdued tones of the old
+porcelains, seemed to typify a superficial refinement that had no
+relation to the deeper significances of life.
+
+Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.
+
+"I don't know that I can explain," she faltered.
+
+He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the hearth.
+The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn face, which had a
+kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the surface-refinement of its
+setting.
+
+"Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?" he asked.
+
+"In our ideas--?"
+
+"The ideas I am trying to teach. The ideas you and I are supposed to
+stand for." He paused a moment. "The ideas on which our marriage was
+founded."
+
+The blood rushed to her face. He had his reasons, then--she was sure
+now that he had his reasons! In the ten years of their marriage, how
+often had either of them stopped to consider the ideas on which it was
+founded? How often does a man dig about the basement of his house to
+examine its foundation? The foundation is there, of course--the house
+rests on it--but one lives abovestairs and not in the cellar. It was
+she, indeed, who in the beginning had insisted on reviewing the
+situation now and then, on recapitulating the reasons which justified
+her course, on proclaiming, from time to time, her adherence to the
+religion of personal independence; but she had long ceased to feel the
+need of any such ideal standards, and had accepted her marriage as
+frankly and naturally as though it had been based on the primitive
+needs of the heart, and needed no special sanction to explain or
+justify it.
+
+"Of course I still believe in our ideas!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Then I repeat that I don't understand. It was a part of your theory
+that the greatest possible publicity should be given to our view of
+marriage. Have you changed your mind in that respect?"
+
+She hesitated. "It depends on circumstances--on the public one is
+addressing. The set of people that the Van Siderens get about them
+don't care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine. They are attracted
+simply by its novelty."
+
+"And yet it was in just such a set of people that you and I met, and
+learned the truth from each other."
+
+"That was different."
+
+"I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs that such
+things never _are_ discussed before young girls; but that is beside the
+point, for I don't remember seeing any young girl in my audience
+to-day--"
+
+"Except Una Van Sideren!"
+
+He turned slightly and pushed back the lamp at his elbow.
+
+"Oh, Miss Van Sideren--naturally--"
+
+"Why naturally?"
+
+"The daughter of the house--would you have had her sent out with her
+governess?"
+
+"If I had a daughter I should not allow such things to go on in my
+house!"
+
+Westall, stroking his mustache, leaned back with a faint smile. "I
+fancy Miss Van Sideren is quite capable of taking care of herself."
+
+"No girl knows how to take care of herself--till it's too late."
+
+"And yet you would deliberately deny her the surest means of
+self-defence?"
+
+"What do you call the surest means of self-defence?"
+
+"Some preliminary knowledge of human nature in its relation to the
+marriage tie."
+
+She made an impatient gesture. "How should you like to marry that kind
+of a girl?"
+
+"Immensely--if she were my kind of girl in other respects."
+
+She took up the argument at another point.
+
+"You are quite mistaken if you think such talk does not affect young
+girls. Una was in a state of the most absurd exaltation--" She broke
+off, wondering why she had spoken.
+
+Westall reopened a magazine which he had laid aside at the beginning of
+their discussion. "What you tell me is immensely flattering to my
+oratorical talent--but I fear you overrate its effect. I can assure you
+that Miss Van Sideren doesn't have to have her thinking done for her.
+She's quite capable of doing it herself."
+
+"You seem very familiar with her mental processes!" flashed unguardedly
+from his wife.
+
+He looked up quietly from the pages he was cutting.
+
+"I should like to be," he answered. "She interests me."
+
+
+II
+
+If there be a distinction in being misunderstood, it was one denied to
+Julia Westall when she left her first husband. Every one was ready to
+excuse and even to defend her. The world she adorned agreed that John
+Arment was "impossible," and hostesses gave a sigh of relief at the
+thought that it would no longer be necessary to ask him to dine.
+
+There had been no scandal connected with the divorce: neither side had
+accused the other of the offence euphemistically described as
+"statutory." The Arments had indeed been obliged to transfer their
+allegiance to a State which recognized desertion as a cause for
+divorce, and construed the term so liberally that the seeds of
+desertion were shown to exist in every union. Even Mrs. Arment's second
+marriage did not make traditional morality stir in its sleep. It was
+known that she had not met her second husband till after she had parted
+from the first, and she had, moreover, replaced a rich man by a poor
+one. Though Clement Westall was acknowledged to be a rising lawyer, it
+was generally felt that his fortunes would not rise as rapidly as his
+reputation. The Westalls would probably always have to live quietly and
+go out to dinner in cabs. Could there be better evidence of Mrs.
+Arment's complete disinterestedness?
+
+If the reasoning by which her friends justified her course was somewhat
+cruder and less complex than her own elucidation of the matter, both
+explanations led to the same conclusion: John Arment was impossible.
+The only difference was that, to his wife, his impossibility was
+something deeper than a social disqualification. She had once said, in
+ironical defence of her marriage, that it had at least preserved her
+from the necessity of sitting next to him at dinner; but she had not
+then realized at what cost the immunity was purchased. John Arment was
+impossible; but the sting of his impossibility lay in the fact that he
+made it impossible for those about him to be other than himself. By an
+unconscious process of elimination he had excluded from the world
+everything of which he did not feel a personal need: had become, as it
+were, a climate in which only his own requirements survived. This might
+seem to imply a deliberate selfishness; but there was nothing
+deliberate about Arment. He was as instinctive as an animal or a child.
+It was this childish element in his nature which sometimes for a moment
+unsettled his wife's estimate of him. Was it possible that he was
+simply undeveloped, that he had delayed, somewhat longer than is usual,
+the laborious process of growing up? He had the kind of sporadic
+shrewdness which causes it to be said of a dull man that he is "no
+fool"; and it was this quality that his wife found most trying. Even to
+the naturalist it is annoying to have his deductions disturbed by some
+unforeseen aberrancy of form or function; and how much more so to the
+wife whose estimate of herself is inevitably bound up with her judgment
+of her husband!
+
+Arment's shrewdness did not, indeed, imply any latent intellectual
+power; it suggested, rather, potentialities of feeling, of suffering,
+perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on which Julia's sensibilities
+naturally declined to linger. She so fully understood her own reasons
+for leaving him that she disliked to think they were not as
+comprehensible to her husband. She was haunted, in her analytic
+moments, by the look of perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with
+which he had acquiesced to her explanations.
+
+These moments were rare with her, however. Her marriage had been too
+concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically. If she had been
+unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as real as though it
+had been uncomplicated. Soul is more bruisable than flesh, and Julia
+was wounded in every fibre of her spirit. Her husband's personality
+seemed to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting
+off the air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of
+her starved hopes. A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old
+conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair.
+If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in
+ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature. She, for
+one, would have no share in maintaining the pretence of which she had
+been a victim: the pretence that a man and a woman, forced into the
+narrowest of personal relations, must remain there till the end, though
+they may have outgrown the span of each other's natures as the mature
+tree outgrows the iron brace about the sapling.
+
+It was in the first heat of her moral indignation that she had met
+Clement Westall. She had seen at once that he was "interested," and had
+fought off the discovery, dreading any influence that should draw her
+back into the bondage of conventional relations. To ward off the peril
+she had, with an almost crude precipitancy, revealed her opinions to
+him. To her surprise, she found that he shared them. She was attracted
+by the frankness of a suitor who, while pressing his suit, admitted
+that he did not believe in marriage. Her worst audacities did not seem
+to surprise him: he had thought out all that she had felt, and they had
+reached the same conclusion. People grew at varying rates, and the yoke
+that was an easy fit for the one might soon become galling to the
+other. That was what divorce was for: the readjustment of personal
+relations. As soon as their necessarily transitive nature was
+recognized they would gain in dignity as well as in harmony. There
+would be no farther need of the ignoble concessions and connivances,
+the perpetual sacrifice of personal delicacy and moral pride, by means
+of which imperfect marriages were now held together. Each partner to
+the contract would be on his mettle, forced to live up to the highest
+standard of self-development, on pain of losing the other's respect and
+affection. The low nature could no longer drag the higher down, but
+must struggle to rise, or remain alone on its inferior level. The only
+necessary condition to a harmonious marriage was a frank recognition of
+this truth, and a solemn agreement between the contracting parties to
+keep faith with themselves, and not to live together for a moment after
+complete accord had ceased to exist between them. The new adultery was
+unfaithfulness to self.
+
+It was, as Westall had just reminded her, on this understanding that
+they had married. The ceremony was an unimportant concession to social
+prejudice: now that the door of divorce stood open, no marriage need be
+an imprisonment, and the contract therefore no longer involved any
+diminution of self-respect. The nature of their attachment placed them
+so far beyond the reach of such contingencies that it was easy to
+discuss them with an open mind; and Julia's sense of security made her
+dwell with a tender insistence on Westall's promise to claim his
+release when he should cease to love her. The exchange of these vows
+seemed to make them, in a sense, champions of the new law, pioneers in
+the forbidden realm of individual freedom: they felt that they had
+somehow achieved beatitude without martyrdom.
+
+This, as Julia now reviewed the past, she perceived to have been her
+theoretical attitude toward marriage. It was unconsciously,
+insidiously, that her ten years of happiness with Westall had developed
+another conception of the tie; a reversion, rather, to the old instinct
+of passionate dependency and possessorship that now made her blood
+revolt at the mere hint of change. Change? Renewal? Was that what they
+had called it, in their foolish jargon? Destruction, extermination
+rather--this rending of a myriad fibres interwoven with another's
+being! Another? But he was not other! He and she were one, one in the
+mystic sense which alone gave marriage its significance. The new law
+was not for them, but for the disunited creatures forced into a mockery
+of union. The gospel she had felt called on to proclaim had no bearing
+on her own case.... She sent for the doctor and told him she was sure
+she needed a nerve tonic.
+
+She took the nerve tonic diligently, but it failed to act as a sedative
+to her fears. She did not know what she feared; but that made her
+anxiety the more pervasive. Her husband had not reverted to the subject
+of his Saturday talks. He was unusually kind and considerate, with a
+softening of his quick manner, a touch of shyness in his consideration,
+that sickened her with new fears. She told herself that it was because
+she looked badly--because he knew about the doctor and the nerve
+tonic--that he showed this deference to her wishes, this eagerness to
+screen her from moral draughts; but the explanation simply cleared the
+way for fresh inferences.
+
+The week passed slowly, vacantly, like a prolonged Sunday. On Saturday
+the morning post brought a note from Mrs. Van Sideren. Would dear Julia
+ask Mr. Westall to come half an hour earlier than usual, as there was
+to be some music after his "talk"? Westall was just leaving for his
+office when his wife read the note. She opened the drawing-room door
+and called him back to deliver the message.
+
+He glanced at the note and tossed it aside. "What a bore! I shall have
+to cut my game of racquets. Well, I suppose it can't be helped. Will
+you write and say it's all right?"
+
+Julia hesitated a moment, her hand stiffening on the chair-back against
+which she leaned.
+
+"You mean to go on with these talks?" she asked.
+
+"I--why not?" he returned; and this time it struck her that his
+surprise was not quite unfeigned. The discovery helped her to find
+words.
+
+"You said you had started them with the idea of pleasing me--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I told you last week that they didn't please me."
+
+"Last week? Oh--" He seemed to make an effort of memory. "I thought you
+were nervous then; you sent for the doctor the next day."
+
+"It was not the doctor I needed; it was your assurance--"
+
+"My assurance?"
+
+Suddenly she felt the floor fail under her. She sank into the chair
+with a choking throat, her words, her reasons slipping away from her
+like straws down a whirling flood.
+
+"Clement," she cried, "isn't it enough for you to know that I hate it?"
+
+He turned to close the door behind them; then he walked toward her and
+sat down. "What is it that you hate?" he asked gently.
+
+She had made a desperate effort to rally her routed argument.
+
+"I can't bear to have you speak as if--as if--our marriage--were like
+the other kind--the wrong kind. When I heard you there, the other
+afternoon, before all those inquisitive gossiping people, proclaiming
+that husbands and wives had a right to leave each other whenever they
+were tired--or had seen some one else--"
+
+Westall sat motionless, his eyes fixed on a pattern of the carpet.
+
+"You _have_ ceased to take this view, then?" he said as she broke off.
+"You no longer believe that husbands and wives _are_ justified in
+separating--under such conditions?"
+
+"Under such conditions?" she stammered. "Yes--I still believe that--but
+how can we judge for others? What can we know of the circumstances--?"
+
+He interrupted her. "I thought it was a fundamental article of our
+creed that the special circumstances produced by marriage were not to
+interfere with the full assertion of individual liberty." He paused a
+moment. "I thought that was your reason for leaving Arment."
+
+She flushed to the forehead. It was not like him to give a personal
+turn to the argument.
+
+"It was my reason," she said simply.
+
+"Well, then--why do you refuse to recognize its validity now?"
+
+"I don't--I don't--I only say that one can't judge for others."
+
+He made an impatient movement. "This is mere hair-splitting. What you
+mean is that, the doctrine having served your purpose when you needed
+it, you now repudiate it."
+
+"Well," she exclaimed, flushing again, "what if I do? What does it
+matter to us?"
+
+Westall rose from his chair. He was excessively pale, and stood before
+his wife with something of the formality of a stranger.
+
+"It matters to me," he said in a low voice, "because I do _not_
+repudiate it."
+
+"Well--?"
+
+"And because I had intended to invoke it as"--
+
+He paused and drew his breath deeply. She sat silent, almost deafened
+by her heart-beats.--"as a complete justification of the course I am
+about to take."
+
+Julia remained motionless. "What course is that?" she asked.
+
+He cleared his throat. "I mean to claim the fulfilment of your promise."
+
+For an instant the room wavered and darkened; then she recovered a
+torturing acuteness of vision. Every detail of her surroundings pressed
+upon her: the tick of the clock, the slant of sunlight on the wall, the
+hardness of the chair-arms that she grasped, were a separate wound to
+each sense.
+
+"My promise--" she faltered.
+
+"Your part of our mutual agreement to set each other free if one or the
+other should wish to be released."
+
+She was silent again. He waited a moment, shifting his position
+nervously; then he said, with a touch of irritability: "You acknowledge
+the agreement?"
+
+The question went through her like a shock. She lifted her head to it
+proudly. "I acknowledge the agreement," she said.
+
+"And--you don't mean to repudiate it?"
+
+A log on the hearth fell forward, and mechanically he advanced and
+pushed it back.
+
+"No," she answered slowly, "I don't mean to repudiate it."
+
+There was a pause. He remained near the hearth, his elbow resting on
+the mantel-shelf. Close to his hand stood a little cup of jade that he
+had given her on one of their wedding anniversaries. She wondered
+vaguely if he noticed it.
+
+"You intend to leave me, then?" she said at length.
+
+His gesture seemed to deprecate the crudeness of the allusion.
+
+"To marry some one else?"
+
+Again his eye and hand protested. She rose and stood before him.
+
+"Why should you be afraid to tell me? Is it Una Van Sideren?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+"I wish you good luck," she said.
+
+
+III
+
+She looked up, finding herself alone. She did not remember when or how
+he had left the room, or how long afterward she had sat there. The fire
+still smouldered on the hearth, but the slant of sunlight had left the
+wall.
+
+Her first conscious thought was that she had not broken her word, that
+she had fulfilled the very letter of their bargain. There had been no
+crying out, no vain appeal to the past, no attempt at temporizing or
+evasion. She had marched straight up to the guns.
+
+Now that it was over, she sickened to find herself alive. She looked
+about her, trying to recover her hold on reality. Her identity seemed
+to be slipping from her, as it disappears in a physical swoon. "This is
+my room--this is my house," she heard herself saying. Her room? Her
+house? She could almost hear the walls laugh back at her.
+
+She stood up, a dull ache in every bone. The silence of the room
+frightened her. She remembered, now, having heard the front door close
+a long time ago: the sound suddenly re-echoed through her brain. Her
+husband must have left the house, then--her _husband?_ She no longer
+knew in what terms to think: the simplest phrases had a poisoned edge.
+She sank back into her chair, overcome by a strange weakness. The clock
+struck ten--it was only ten o'clock! Suddenly she remembered that she
+had not ordered dinner...or were they dining out that evening?
+_Dinner--dining out_--the old meaningless phraseology pursued her! She
+must try to think of herself as she would think of some one else, a
+some one dissociated from all the familiar routine of the past, whose
+wants and habits must gradually be learned, as one might spy out the
+ways of a strange animal...
+
+The clock struck another hour--eleven. She stood up again and walked to
+the door: she thought she would go up stairs to her room. _Her_ room?
+Again the word derided her. She opened the door, crossed the narrow
+hall, and walked up the stairs. As she passed, she noticed Westall's
+sticks and umbrellas: a pair of his gloves lay on the hall table. The
+same stair-carpet mounted between the same walls; the same old French
+print, in its narrow black frame, faced her on the landing. This visual
+continuity was intolerable. Within, a gaping chasm; without, the same
+untroubled and familiar surface. She must get away from it before she
+could attempt to think. But, once in her room, she sat down on the
+lounge, a stupor creeping over her...
+
+Gradually her vision cleared. A great deal had happened in the
+interval--a wild marching and countermarching of emotions, arguments,
+ideas--a fury of insurgent impulses that fell back spent upon
+themselves. She had tried, at first, to rally, to organize these
+chaotic forces. There must be help somewhere, if only she could master
+the inner tumult. Life could not be broken off short like this, for a
+whim, a fancy; the law itself would side with her, would defend her.
+The law? What claim had she upon it? She was the prisoner of her own
+choice: she had been her own legislator, and she was the predestined
+victim of the code she had devised. But this was grotesque,
+intolerable--a mad mistake, for which she could not be held
+accountable! The law she had despised was still there, might still be
+invoked...invoked, but to what end? Could she ask it to chain Westall
+to her side? _She_ had been allowed to go free when she claimed her
+freedom--should she show less magnanimity than she had exacted?
+Magnanimity? The word lashed her with its irony--one does not strike an
+attitude when one is fighting for life! She would threaten, grovel,
+cajole...she would yield anything to keep her hold on happiness. Ah,
+but the difficulty lay deeper! The law could not help her--her own
+apostasy could not help her. She was the victim of the theories she
+renounced. It was as though some giant machine of her own making had
+caught her up in its wheels and was grinding her to atoms...
+
+It was afternoon when she found herself out-of-doors. She walked with
+an aimless haste, fearing to meet familiar faces. The day was radiant,
+metallic: one of those searching American days so calculated to reveal
+the shortcomings of our street-cleaning and the excesses of our
+architecture. The streets looked bare and hideous; everything stared
+and glittered. She called a passing hansom, and gave Mrs. Van Sideren's
+address. She did not know what had led up to the act; but she found
+herself suddenly resolved to speak, to cry out a warning. It was too
+late to save herself--but the girl might still be told. The hansom
+rattled up Fifth Avenue; she sat with her eyes fixed, avoiding
+recognition. At the Van Siderens' door she sprang out and rang the
+bell. Action had cleared her brain, and she felt calm and
+self-possessed. She knew now exactly what she meant to say.
+
+The ladies were both out...the parlor-maid stood waiting for a card.
+Julia, with a vague murmur, turned away from the door and lingered a
+moment on the sidewalk. Then she remembered that she had not paid the
+cab-driver. She drew a dollar from her purse and handed it to him. He
+touched his hat and drove off, leaving her alone in the long empty
+street. She wandered away westward, toward strange thoroughfares, where
+she was not likely to meet acquaintances. The feeling of aimlessness
+had returned. Once she found herself in the afternoon torrent of
+Broadway, swept past tawdry shops and flaming theatrical posters, with
+a succession of meaningless faces gliding by in the opposite
+direction...
+
+A feeling of faintness reminded her that she had not eaten since
+morning. She turned into a side street of shabby houses, with rows of
+ash-barrels behind bent area railings. In a basement window she saw the
+sign _Ladies' Restaurant:_ a pie and a dish of doughnuts lay against
+the dusty pane like petrified food in an ethnological museum. She
+entered, and a young woman with a weak mouth and a brazen eye cleared a
+table for her near the window. The table was covered with a red and
+white cotton cloth and adorned with a bunch of celery in a thick
+tumbler and a salt-cellar full of grayish lumpy salt. Julia ordered
+tea, and sat a long time waiting for it. She was glad to be away from
+the noise and confusion of the streets. The low-ceilinged room was
+empty, and two or three waitresses with thin pert faces lounged in the
+background staring at her and whispering together. At last the tea was
+brought in a discolored metal teapot. Julia poured a cup and drank it
+hastily. It was black and bitter, but it flowed through her veins like
+an elixir. She was almost dizzy with exhilaration. Oh, how tired, how
+unutterably tired she had been!
+
+She drank a second cup, blacker and bitterer, and now her mind was once
+more working clearly. She felt as vigorous, as decisive, as when she
+had stood on the Van Siderens' door-step--but the wish to return there
+had subsided. She saw now the futility of such an attempt--the
+humiliation to which it might have exposed her... The pity of it was
+that she did not know what to do next. The short winter day was fading,
+and she realized that she could not remain much longer in the
+restaurant without attracting notice. She paid for her tea and went out
+into the street. The lamps were alight, and here and there a basement
+shop cast an oblong of gas-light across the fissured pavement. In the
+dusk there was something sinister about the aspect of the street, and
+she hastened back toward Fifth Avenue. She was not used to being out
+alone at that hour.
+
+At the corner of Fifth Avenue she paused and stood watching the stream
+of carriages. At last a policeman caught sight of her and signed to her
+that he would take her across. She had not meant to cross the street,
+but she obeyed automatically, and presently found herself on the
+farther corner. There she paused again for a moment; but she fancied
+the policeman was watching her, and this sent her hastening down the
+nearest side street... After that she walked a long time, vaguely...
+Night had fallen, and now and then, through the windows of a passing
+carriage, she caught the expanse of an evening waistcoat or the shimmer
+of an opera cloak...
+
+Suddenly she found herself in a familiar street. She stood still a
+moment, breathing quickly. She had turned the corner without noticing
+whither it led; but now, a few yards ahead of her, she saw the house in
+which she had once lived--her first husband's house. The blinds were
+drawn, and only a faint translucence marked the windows and the transom
+above the door. As she stood there she heard a step behind her, and a
+man walked by in the direction of the house. He walked slowly, with a
+heavy middle-aged gait, his head sunk a little between the shoulders,
+the red crease of his neck visible above the fur collar of his
+overcoat. He crossed the street, went up the steps of the house, drew
+forth a latch-key, and let himself in...
+
+There was no one else in sight. Julia leaned for a long time against
+the area-rail at the corner, her eyes fixed on the front of the house.
+The feeling of physical weariness had returned, but the strong tea
+still throbbed in her veins and lit her brain with an unnatural
+clearness. Presently she heard another step draw near, and moving
+quickly away, she too crossed the street and mounted the steps of the
+house. The impulse which had carried her there prolonged itself in a
+quick pressure of the electric bell--then she felt suddenly weak and
+tremulous, and grasped the balustrade for support. The door opened and
+a young footman with a fresh inexperienced face stood on the threshold.
+Julia knew in an instant that he would admit her.
+
+"I saw Mr. Arment going in just now," she said. "Will you ask him to
+see me for a moment?"
+
+The footman hesitated. "I think Mr. Arment has gone up to dress for
+dinner, madam."
+
+Julia advanced into the hall. "I am sure he will see me--I will not
+detain him long," she said. She spoke quietly, authoritatively, in the
+tone which a good servant does not mistake. The footman had his hand on
+the drawing-room door.
+
+"I will tell him, madam. What name, please?"
+
+Julia trembled: she had not thought of that. "Merely say a lady," she
+returned carelessly.
+
+The footman wavered and she fancied herself lost; but at that instant
+the door opened from within and John Arment stepped into the hall. He
+drew back sharply as he saw her, his florid face turning sallow with
+the shock; then the blood poured back to it, swelling the veins on his
+temples and reddening the lobes of his thick ears.
+
+It was long since Julia had seen him, and she was startled at the
+change in his appearance. He had thickened, coarsened, settled down
+into the enclosing flesh. But she noted this insensibly: her one
+conscious thought was that, now she was face to face with him, she must
+not let him escape till he had heard her. Every pulse in her body
+throbbed with the urgency of her message.
+
+She went up to him as he drew back. "I must speak to you," she said.
+
+Arment hesitated, red and stammering. Julia glanced at the footman, and
+her look acted as a warning. The instinctive shrinking from a "scene"
+predominated over every other impulse, and Arment said slowly: "Will
+you come this way?"
+
+He followed her into the drawing-room and closed the door. Julia, as
+she advanced, was vaguely aware that the room at least was unchanged:
+time had not mitigated its horrors. The contadina still lurched from
+the chimney-breast, and the Greek slave obstructed the threshold of the
+inner room. The place was alive with memories: they started out from
+every fold of the yellow satin curtains and glided between the angles
+of the rosewood furniture. But while some subordinate agency was
+carrying these impressions to her brain, her whole conscious effort was
+centred in the act of dominating Arment's will. The fear that he would
+refuse to hear her mounted like fever to her brain. She felt her
+purpose melt before it, words and arguments running into each other in
+the heat of her longing. For a moment her voice failed her, and she
+imagined herself thrust out before she could speak; but as she was
+struggling for a word, Arment pushed a chair forward, and said quietly:
+"You are not well."
+
+The sound of his voice steadied her. It was neither kind nor unkind--a
+voice that suspended judgment, rather, awaiting unforeseen
+developments. She supported herself against the back of the chair and
+drew a deep breath. "Shall I send for something?" he continued, with a
+cold embarrassed politeness.
+
+Julia raised an entreating hand. "No--no--thank you. I am quite well."
+
+He paused midway toward the bell and turned on her. "Then may I ask--?"
+
+"Yes," she interrupted him. "I came here because I wanted to see you.
+There is something I must tell you."
+
+Arment continued to scrutinize her. "I am surprised at that," he said.
+"I should have supposed that any communication you may wish to make
+could have been made through our lawyers."
+
+"Our lawyers!" She burst into a little laugh. "I don't think they could
+help me--this time."
+
+Arment's face took on a barricaded look. "If there is any question of
+help--of course--"
+
+It struck her, whimsically, that she had seen that look when some
+shabby devil called with a subscription-book. Perhaps he thought she
+wanted him to put his name down for so much in sympathy--or even in
+money... The thought made her laugh again. She saw his look change
+slowly to perplexity. All his facial changes were slow, and she
+remembered, suddenly, how it had once diverted her to shift that
+lumbering scenery with a word. For the first time it struck her that
+she had been cruel. "There _is_ a question of help," she said in a
+softer key: "you can help me; but only by listening... I want to tell
+you something..."
+
+Arment's resistance was not yielding. "Would it not be easier
+to--write?" he suggested.
+
+She shook her head. "There is no time to write...and it won't take
+long." She raised her head and their eyes met. "My husband has left
+me," she said.
+
+"Westall--?" he stammered, reddening again.
+
+"Yes. This morning. Just as I left you. Because he was tired of me."
+
+The words, uttered scarcely above a whisper, seemed to dilate to the
+limit of the room. Arment looked toward the door; then his embarrassed
+glance returned to Julia.
+
+"I am very sorry," he said awkwardly.
+
+"Thank you," she murmured.
+
+"But I don't see--"
+
+"No--but you will--in a moment. Won't you listen to me? Please!"
+Instinctively she had shifted her position putting herself between him
+and the door. "It happened this morning," she went on in short
+breathless phrases. "I never suspected anything--I thought we
+were--perfectly happy... Suddenly he told me he was tired of me...
+there is a girl he likes better... He has gone to her..." As she spoke,
+the lurking anguish rose upon her, possessing her once more to the
+exclusion of every other emotion. Her eyes ached, her throat swelled
+with it, and two painful tears burnt a way down her face.
+
+Arment's constraint was increasing visibly. "This--this is very
+unfortunate," he began. "But I should say the law--"
+
+"The law?" she echoed ironically. "When he asks for his freedom?"
+
+"You are not obliged to give it."
+
+"You were not obliged to give me mine--but you did."
+
+He made a protesting gesture.
+
+"You saw that the law couldn't help you--didn't you?" she went on.
+"That is what I see now. The law represents material rights--it can't
+go beyond. If we don't recognize an inner law...the obligation that
+love creates...being loved as well as loving... there is nothing to
+prevent our spreading ruin unhindered...is there?" She raised her head
+plaintively, with the look of a bewildered child. "That is what I see
+now...what I wanted to tell you. He leaves me because he's tired...but
+_I_ was not tired; and I don't understand why he is. That's the
+dreadful part of it--the not understanding: I hadn't realized what it
+meant. But I've been thinking of it all day, and things have come back
+to me--things I hadn't noticed...when you and I..." She moved closer to
+him, and fixed her eyes on his with the gaze that tries to reach beyond
+words. "I see now that _you_ didn't understand--did you?"
+
+Their eyes met in a sudden shock of comprehension: a veil seemed to be
+lifted between them. Arment's lip trembled.
+
+"No," he said, "I didn't understand."
+
+She gave a little cry, almost of triumph. "I knew it! I knew it! You
+wondered--you tried to tell me--but no words came... You saw your life
+falling in ruins...the world slipping from you...and you couldn't speak
+or move!"
+
+She sank down on the chair against which she had been leaning. "Now I
+know--now I know," she repeated.
+
+"I am very sorry for you," she heard Arment stammer.
+
+She looked up quickly. "That's not what I came for. I don't want you to
+be sorry. I came to ask you to forgive me...for not understanding that
+_you_ didn't understand... That's all I wanted to say." She rose with a
+vague sense that the end had come, and put out a groping hand toward
+the door.
+
+Arment stood motionless. She turned to him with a faint smile.
+
+"You forgive me?"
+
+"There is nothing to forgive--"
+
+"Then will you shake hands for good-by?" She felt his hand in hers: it
+was nerveless, reluctant.
+
+"Good-by," she repeated. "I understand now."
+
+She opened the door and passed out into the hall. As she did so, Arment
+took an impulsive step forward; but just then the footman, who was
+evidently alive to his obligations, advanced from the background to let
+her out. She heard Arment fall back. The footman threw open the door,
+and she found herself outside in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+THE LETTER
+
+
+I
+
+For many years he had lived withdrawn from the world in which he had
+once played so active and even turbulent a part. The study of Tuscan
+art was his only pursuit, and it was to help him in the classification
+of his notes and documents that I was first called to his villa.
+Colonel Alingdon had then the look of a very old man, though his age
+can hardly have exceeded seventy. He was small and bent, with a finely
+wrinkled face which still wore the tan of youthful exposure. But for
+this dusky redness it would have been hard to reconstruct from the
+shrunken recluse, with his low fastidious voice and carefully tended
+hands, an image of that young knight of adventure whose sword had been
+at the service of every uprising which stirred the uneasy soil of Italy
+in the first half of the nineteenth century.
+
+Though I was more of a proficient in Colonel Alingdon's later than his
+earlier pursuits, the thought of his soldiering days was always coming
+between me and the pacific work of his old age. As we sat collating
+papers and comparing photographs, I had the feeling that this dry and
+quiet old man had seen even stranger things than people said: that he
+knew more of the inner history of Europe than half the diplomatists of
+his day.
+
+I was not alone in this conviction; and the friend who had engaged me
+for Colonel Alingdon had appended to his instructions the injunction to
+"get him to talk." But this was what no one could do. Colonel Alingdon
+was ready to discuss by the hour the date of a Giottesque triptych, or
+the attribution of a disputed master; but on the history of his early
+life he was habitually silent.
+
+It was perhaps because I recognized this silence and respected it that
+it afterward came to be broken for me. Or it was perhaps merely
+because, as the failure of Colonel Alingdon's sight cut him off from
+his work, he felt the natural inclination of age to revert from the
+empty present to the crowded past. For one cause or another he _did_
+talk to me in the last year of his life; and I felt myself mingled, to
+an extent inconceivable to the mere reader of history, with the
+passionate scenes of the Italian struggle for liberty. Colonel Alingdon
+had been mixed with it in all its phases: he had known the last
+Carbonari and the Young Italy of Mazzini; he had been in Perugia when
+the mercenaries of a liberal Pope slaughtered women and children in the
+streets; he had been in Sicily with the Thousand, and in Milan during
+the _Cinque Giornate_.
+
+"They say the Italians didn't know how to fight," he said one day,
+musingly--"that the French had to come down and do their work for them.
+People forget how long it was since they had had any fighting to do.
+But they hadn't forgotten how to suffer and hold their tongues; how to
+die and take their secrets with them. The Italian war of independence
+was really carried on underground: it was one of those awful silent
+struggles which are so much more terrible than the roar of a battle.
+It's a deuced sight easier to charge with your regiment than to lie
+rotting in an Austrian prison and know that if you give up the name of
+a friend or two you can go back scot-free to your wife and children.
+And thousands and thousands of Italians had the choice given them--and
+hardly one went back."
+
+He sat silent, his meditative fingertips laid together, his eyes fixed
+on the past which was the now only thing clearly visible to them.
+
+"And the women?" I said. "Were they as brave as the men?"
+
+I had not spoken quite at random. I had always heard that there had
+been as much of love as of war in Colonel Alingdon's early career, and
+I hoped that my question might give a personal turn to his
+reminiscences.
+
+"The women?" he repeated. "They were braver--for they had more to bear
+and less to do. Italy could never have been saved without them."
+
+His eye had kindled and I detected in it the reflection of some vivid
+memory. It was then that I asked him what was the bravest thing he had
+ever known of a woman's doing.
+
+The question was such a vague one that I hardly knew why I had put it,
+but to my surprise he answered almost at once, as though I had touched
+on a subject of frequent meditation.
+
+"The bravest thing I ever saw done by a woman," he said, "was brought
+about by an act of my own--and one of which I am not particularly
+proud. For that reason I have never spoken of it before--there was a
+time when I didn't even care to think of it--but all that is past now.
+She died years ago, and so did the Jack Alingdon she knew, and in
+telling you the story I am no more than the mouthpiece of an old
+tradition which some ancestor might have handed down to me."
+
+He leaned back, his clear blind gaze fixed smilingly on me, and I had
+the feeling that, in groping through the labyrinth of his young
+adventures, I had come unawares upon their central point.
+
+
+II
+
+When I was in Milan in 'forty-seven an unlucky thing happened to me.
+
+I had been sent there to look over the ground by some of my Italian
+friends in England. As an English officer I had no difficulty in
+getting into Milanese society, for England had for years been the
+refuge of the Italian fugitives, and I was known to be working in their
+interests. It was just the kind of job I liked, and I never enjoyed
+life more than I did in those days. There was a great deal going
+on--good music, balls and theatres. Milan kept up her gayety to the
+last. The English were shocked by the _insouciance_ of a race who could
+dance under the very nose of the usurper; but those who understood the
+situation knew that Milan was playing Brutus, and playing it uncommonly
+well.
+
+I was in the thick of it all--it was just the atmosphere to suit a
+young fellow of nine-and-twenty, with a healthy passion for waltzing
+and fighting. But, as I said, an unlucky thing happened to me. I was
+fool enough to fall in love with Donna Candida Falco. You have heard of
+her, of course: you know the share she had in the great work. In a
+different way she was what the terrible Princess Belgioioso had been to
+an earlier generation. But Donna Candida was not terrible. She was
+quiet, discreet and charming. When I knew her she was a widow of
+thirty, her husband, Andrea Falco, having died ten years previously,
+soon after their marriage. The marriage had been notoriously unhappy,
+and his death was a release to Donna Candida. Her family were of
+Modena, but they had come to live in Milan soon after the execution of
+Ciro Menotti and his companions. You remember the details of that
+business? The Duke of Modena, one of the most adroit villains in
+Europe, had been bitten with the hope of uniting the Italian states
+under his rule. It was a vision of Italian liberation--of a sort. A few
+madmen were dazzled by it, and Ciro Menotti was one of them. You know
+the end. The Duke of Modena, who had counted on Louis Philippe's
+backing, found that that astute sovereign had betrayed him to Austria.
+Instantly, he saw that his first business was to get rid of the
+conspirators he had created. There was nothing easier than for a
+Hapsburg Este to turn on a friend. Ciro Menotti had staked his life for
+the Duke--and the Duke took it. You may remember that, on the night
+when seven hundred men and a cannon attacked Menotti's house, the Duke
+was seen looking on at the slaughter from an arcade across the square.
+
+Well, among the lesser fry taken that night was a lad of eighteen,
+Emilio Verna, who was the only brother of Donna Candida. The Verna
+family was one of the most respected in Modena. It consisted, at that
+time, of the mother, Countess Verna, of young Emilio and his sister.
+Count Verna had been in Spielberg in the twenties. He had never
+recovered from his sufferings there, and died in exile, without seeing
+his wife and children again. Countess Verna had been an ardent patriot
+in her youth, but the failure of the first attempts against Austria had
+discouraged her. She thought that in losing her husband she had
+sacrificed enough for her country, and her one idea was to keep Emilio
+on good terms with the government. But the Verna blood was not
+tractable, and his father's death was not likely to make Emilio a good
+subject of the Estes. Not that he had as yet taken any active share in
+the work of the conspirators: he simply hadn't had time. At his trial
+there was nothing to show that he had been in Menotti's confidence; but
+he had been seen once or twice coming out of what the ducal police
+called "suspicious" houses, and in his desk were found some verses to
+Italy. That was enough to hang a man in Modena, and Emilio Verna was
+hanged.
+
+The Countess never recovered from the blow. The circumstances of her
+son's death were too abominable, to unendurable. If he had risked his
+life in the conspiracy, she might have been reconciled to his losing
+it. But he was a mere child, who had sat at home, chafing but
+powerless, while his seniors plotted and fought. He had been sacrificed
+to the Duke's insane fear, to his savage greed for victims, and the
+Countess Verna was not to be consoled.
+
+As soon as possible, the mother and daughter left Modena for Milan.
+There they lived in seclusion till Candida's marriage. During her
+girlhood she had had to accept her mother's view of life: to shut
+herself up in the tomb in which the poor woman brooded over her
+martyrs. But that was not the girl's way of honoring the dead. At the
+moment when the first shot was fired on Menotti's house she had been
+reading Petrarch's Ode to the Lords of Italy, and the lines _l'antico
+valor nell'italici cor non e ancor morto_ had lodged like a bullet in
+her brain. From the day of her marriage she began to take a share in
+the silent work which was going on throughout Italy. Milan was at that
+time the centre of the movement, and Candida Falco threw herself into
+it with all the passion which her unhappy marriage left unsatisfied. At
+first she had to act with great reserve, for her husband was a prudent
+man, who did not care to have his habits disturbed by political
+complications; but after his death there was nothing to restrain her,
+except the exquisite tact which enabled her to work night and day in
+the Italian cause without giving the Austrian authorities a pretext for
+interference.
+
+When I first knew Donna Candida, her mother was still living: a tragic
+woman, prematurely bowed, like an image of death in the background of
+the daughter's brilliant life. The Countess, since her son's death, had
+become a patriot again, though in a narrower sense than Candida. The
+mother's first thought was that her dead must be avenged, the
+daughter's that Italy must be saved; but from different motives they
+worked for the same end. Candida felt for the Countess that protecting
+tenderness with which Italian children so often regard their parents, a
+feeling heightened by the reverence which the mother's sufferings
+inspired. Countess Verna, as the wife and mother of martyrs, had done
+what Candida longed to do: she had given her utmost to Italy. There
+must have been moments when the self-absorption of her grief chilled
+her daughter's ardent spirit; but Candida revered in her mother the
+image of their afflicted country.
+
+"It was too terrible," she said, speaking of what the Countess had
+suffered after Emilio's death. "All the circumstances were too
+unmerciful. It seemed as if God had turned His face from my mother; as
+if she had been singled out to suffer more than any of the others. All
+the other families received some message or token of farewell from the
+prisoners. One of them bribed the gaoler to carry a letter--another
+sent a lock of hair by the chaplain. But Emilio made no sign, sent no
+word. My mother felt as though he had turned his back on us. She used
+to sit for hours, saying again and again, 'Why was he the only one to
+forget his mother?' I tried to comfort her, but it was useless: she had
+suffered too much. Now I never reason with her; I listen, and let her
+ease her poor heart. Do you know, she still asks me sometimes if I
+think he may have left a letter--if there is no way of finding out if
+he left one? She forgets that I have tried again and again: that I have
+sent bribes and messages to the gaoler, the chaplain, to every one who
+came near him. The answer is always the same--no one has ever heard of
+a letter. I suppose the poor boy was stunned, and did not think of
+writing. Who knows what was passing through his poor bewildered brain?
+But it would have been a great help to my mother to have a word from
+him. If I had known how to imitate his writing I should have forged a
+letter."
+
+I knew enough of the Italians to understand how her boy's silence must
+have aggravated the Countess's grief. Precious as a message from a
+dying son would be to any mother, such signs of tenderness have to the
+Italians a peculiar significance. The Latin race is rhetorical: it
+possesses the gift of death-bed eloquence, the knack of saying the
+effective thing on momentous occasions. The letters which the Italian
+patriots sent home from their prisons or from the scaffold are not the
+halting farewells that anguish would have wrung from a less expressive
+race: they are veritable "compositions," saved from affectation only by
+the fact that fluency and sonority are a part of the Latin inheritance.
+Such letters, passed from hand to hand among the bereaved families,
+were not only a comfort to the survivors but an incentive to fresh
+sacrifices. They were the "seed of the martyrs" with which Italy was
+being sown; and I knew what it meant to the Countess Verna to have no
+such treasure in her bosom, to sit silent while other mothers quoted
+their sons' last words.
+
+I said just now that it was an unlucky day for me when I fell in love
+with Donna Candida; and no doubt you have guessed the reason. She was
+in love with some one else. It was the old situation of Heine's song.
+That other loved another--loved Italy, and with an undivided passion.
+His name was Fernando Briga, and at that time he was one of the
+foremost liberals in Italy. He came of a middle-class Modenese family.
+His father was a doctor, a prudent man, engrossed in his profession and
+unwilling to compromise it by meddling in politics. His irreproachable
+attitude won the confidence of the government, and the Duke conferred
+on him the sinister office of physician to the prisons of Modena. It
+was this Briga who attended Emilio Falco, and several of the other
+prisoners who were executed at the same time.
+
+Under shelter of his father's loyalty young Fernando conspired in
+safety. He was studying medicine, and every one supposed him to be
+absorbed in his work; but as a matter of fact he was fast ripening into
+one of Mazzini's ablest lieutenants. His career belongs to history, so
+I need not enlarge on it here. In 1847 he was in Milan, and had become
+one of the leading figures in the liberal group which was working for a
+coalition with Piedmont. Like all the ablest men of his day, he had
+cast off Mazziniism and pinned his faith to the house of Savoy. The
+Austrian government had an eye on him, but he had inherited his
+father's prudence, though he used it for nobler ends, and his
+discretion enabled him to do far more for the cause than a dozen
+enthusiasts could have accomplished. No one understood this better than
+Donna Candida. She had a share of his caution, and he trusted her with
+secrets which he would not have confided to many men. Her drawing-room
+was the centre of the Piedmontese party, yet so clever was she in
+averting suspicion that more than one hunted conspirator hid in her
+house, and was helped across the Alps by her agents.
+
+Briga relied on her as he did on no one else; but he did not love her,
+and she knew it. Still, she was young, she was handsome, and he loved
+no one else: how could she give up hoping? From her intimate friends
+she made no secret of her feelings: Italian women are not reticent in
+such matters, and Donna Candida was proud of loving a hero. You will
+see at once that I had no chance; but if she could not give up hope,
+neither could I. Perhaps in her desire to secure my services for the
+cause she may have shown herself overkind; or perhaps I was still young
+enough to set down to my own charms a success due to quite different
+causes. At any rate, I persuaded myself that if I could manage to do
+something conspicuous for Italy I might yet make her care for me. With
+such an incentive you will not wonder that I worked hard; but though
+Donna Candida was full of gratitude she continued to adore my rival.
+
+One day we had a hot scene. I began, I believe, by reproaching her with
+having led me on; and when she defended herself, I retaliated by
+taunting her with Briga's indifference. She grew pale at that, and said
+it was enough to love a hero, even without hope of return; and as she
+said it she herself looked so heroic, so radiant, so unattainably the
+woman I wanted, that a sneer may have escaped me:--was she so sure then
+that Briga was a hero? I remember her proud silence and our wretched
+parting. I went away feeling that at last I had really lost her; and
+the thought made me savage and vindictive.
+
+Soon after, as it happened, came the _Five Days_, and Milan was free. I
+caught a distant glimpse of Donna Candida in the hospital to which I
+was carried after the fight; but my wound was a slight one and in
+twenty-four hours I was about again on crutches. I hoped she might send
+for me, but she did not, and I was too sulky to make the first advance.
+A day or two later I heard there had been a commotion in Modena, and
+not being in fighting trim I got leave to go over there with one or two
+men whom the Modenese liberals had called in to help them. When we
+arrived the precious Duke had been swept out and a provisional
+government set up. One of my companions, who was a Modenese, was made a
+member, and knowing that I wanted something to do, he commissioned me
+to look up some papers in the ducal archives. It was fascinating work,
+for in the pursuit of my documents I uncovered the hidden springs of
+his late Highness's paternal administration. The principal papers
+relative to the civil and criminal administration of Modena have since
+been published, and the world knows how that estimable sovereign cared
+for the material and spiritual welfare of his subjects.
+
+Well--in the course of my search, I came across a file of old papers
+marked: "Taken from political prisoners. A.D. 1831." It was the year of
+Menotti's conspiracy, and everything connected with that date was
+thrilling. I loosened the band and ran over the letters. Suddenly I
+came across one which was docketed: "Given by Doctor Briga's son to the
+warder of His Highness's prisons." _Doctor Briga's son?_ That could be
+no other than Fernando: I knew he was an only child. But how came such
+a paper into his hands, and how had it passed from them into those of
+the Duke's warder? My own hands shook as I opened the letter--I felt
+the man suddenly in my power.
+
+Then I began to read. "My adored mother, even in this lowest circle of
+hell all hearts are not closed to pity, and I have been given the hope
+that these last words of farewell may reach you...." My eyes ran on
+over pages of plaintive rhetoric. "Embrace for me my adored
+Candida...let her never forget the cause for which her father and
+brother perished...let her keep alive in her breast the thought of
+Spielberg and Reggio. Do not grieve that I die so young... though not
+with those heroes in deed I was with them in spirit, and am worthy to
+be enrolled in the sacred phalanx..." and so on. Before I reached the
+signature I knew the letter was from Emilio Verna.
+
+I put it in my pocket, finished my work and started immediately for
+Milan. I didn't quite know what I meant to do--my head was in a whirl.
+I saw at once what must have happened. Fernando Briga, then a lad of
+fifteen or sixteen, had attended his father in prison during Emilio
+Verna's last hours, and the latter, perhaps aware of the lad's liberal
+sympathies, had found an opportunity of giving him the letter. But why
+had Briga given it up to the warder? That was the puzzling question.
+The docket said: "_Given by_ Doctor Briga's son"--but it might mean
+"taken from." Fernando might have been seen to receive the letter and
+might have been searched on leaving the prison. But that would not
+account for his silence afterward. How was it that, if he knew of the
+letter, he had never told Emilio's family of it? There was only one
+explanation. If the letter had been taken from him by force he would
+have had no reason for concealing its existence; and his silence was
+clear proof that he had given it up voluntarily, no doubt in the hope
+of standing well with the authorities. But then he was a traitor and a
+coward; the patriot of 'forty-eight had begun life as an informer! But
+does innate character ever change so radically that the lad who has
+committed a base act at fifteen may grow up into an honorable man? A
+good man may be corrupted by life, but can the years turn a born sneak
+into a hero?
+
+You may fancy how I answered my own questions....If Briga had been
+false and cowardly then, was he not sure to be false and cowardly
+still? In those days there were traitors under every coat, and more
+than one brave fellow had been sold to the police by his best
+friend....You will say that Briga's record was unblemished, that he had
+exposed himself to danger too frequently, had stood by his friends too
+steadfastly, to permit of a rational doubt of his good faith. So reason
+might have told me in a calmer moment, but she was not allowed to make
+herself heard just then. I was young, I was angry, I chose to think I
+had been unfairly treated, and perhaps at my rival's instigation. It
+was not unlikely that Briga knew of my love for Donna Candida, and had
+encouraged her to use it in the good cause. Was she not always at his
+bidding? My blood boiled at the thought, and reaching Milan in a rage I
+went straight to Donna Candida.
+
+I had measured the exact force of the blow I was going to deal. The
+triumph of the liberals in Modena had revived public interest in the
+unsuccessful struggle of their predecessors, the men who, sixteen years
+earlier, had paid for the same attempt with their lives. The victors of
+'forty-eight wished to honor the vanquished of 'thirty-two. All the
+families exiled by the ducal government were hastening back to recover
+possession of their confiscated property and of the graves of their
+dead. Already it had been decided to raise a monument to Menotti and
+his companions. There were to be speeches, garlands, a public holiday:
+the thrill of the commemoration would run through Europe. You see what
+it would have meant to the poor Countess to appear on the scene with
+her boy's letter in her hand; and you see also what the memorandum on
+the back of the letter would have meant to Donna Candida. Poor Emilio's
+farewell would be published in all the journals of Europe: the finding
+of the letter would be on every one's lips. And how conceal those fatal
+words on the back? At the moment, it seemed to me that fortune could
+not have given me a handsomer chance of destroying my rival than in
+letting me find the letter which he stood convicted of having
+suppressed.
+
+My sentiment was perhaps not a strictly honorable one; yet what could I
+do but give the letter to Donna Candida? To keep it back was out of the
+question; and with the best will in the world I could not have erased
+Briga's name from the back. The mistake I made was in thinking it lucky
+that the paper had fallen into my hands.
+
+Donna Candida was alone when I entered. We had parted in anger, but she
+held out her hand with a smile of pardon, and asked what news I brought
+from Modena. The smile exasperated me: I felt as though she were trying
+to get me into her power again.
+
+"I bring you a letter from your brother," I said, and handed it to her.
+I had purposely turned the superscription downward, so that she should
+not see it.
+
+She uttered an incredulous cry and tore the letter open. A light struck
+up from it into her face as she read--a radiance that smote me to the
+soul. For a moment I longed to snatch the paper from her and efface the
+name on the back. It hurt me to think how short-lived her happiness
+must be.
+
+Then she did a fatal thing. She came up to me, caught my two hands and
+kissed them. "Oh, thank you--bless you a thousand times! He died
+thinking of us--he died loving Italy!"
+
+I put her from me gently: it was not the kiss I wanted, and the touch
+of her lips hardened me.
+
+She shone on me through her happy tears. "What happiness--what
+consolation you have brought my poor mother! This will take the
+bitterness from her grief. And that it should come to her now! Do you
+know, she had a presentiment of it? When we heard of the Duke's flight
+her first word was: 'Now we may find Emilio's letter.' At heart she was
+always sure that he had written--I suppose some blessed instinct told
+her so." She dropped her face on her hands, and I saw her tears fall on
+the wretched letter.
+
+In a moment she looked up again, with eyes that blessed and trusted me.
+"Tell me where you found it," she said.
+
+I told her.
+
+"Oh, the savages! They took it from him--"
+
+My opportunity had come. "No," I said, "it appears they did _not_ take
+it from him."
+
+"Then how--"
+
+I waited a moment. "The letter," I said, looking full at her, "was
+given up to the warder of the prison by the son of Doctor Briga."
+
+She stared, repeating the words slowly. "The son of Doctor Briga? But
+that is--Fernando," she said.
+
+"I have always understood," I replied, "that your friend was an only
+son."
+
+I had expected an outcry of horror; if she had uttered it I could have
+forgiven her anything. But I heard, instead, an incredulous
+exclamation: my statement was really too preposterous! I saw that her
+mind had flashed back to our last talk, and that she charged me with
+something too nearly true to be endurable.
+
+"My brother's letter? Given to the prison warder by Fernando Briga? My
+dear Captain Alingdon--on what authority do you expect me to believe
+such a tale?"
+
+Her incredulity had in it an evident implication of bad faith, and I
+was stung to a quick reply.
+
+"If you will turn over the letter you will see."
+
+She continued to gaze at me a moment: then she obeyed. I don't think I
+ever admired her more than I did then. As she read the name a tremor
+crossed her face; and that was all. Her mind must have reached out
+instantly to the farthest consequences of the discovery, but the long
+habit of self-command enabled her to steady her muscles at once. If I
+had not been on the alert I should have seen no hint of emotion.
+
+For a while she looked fixedly at the back of the letter; then she
+raised her eyes to mine.
+
+"Can you tell me who wrote this?" she asked.
+
+Her composure irritated me. She had rallied all her forces to Briga's
+defence, and I felt as though my triumph were slipping from me.
+
+"Probably one of the clerks of the archives," I answered. "It is
+written in the same hand as all the other memoranda relating to the
+political prisoners of that year."
+
+"But it is a lie!" she exclaimed. "He was never admitted to the
+prisons."
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"How should he have been?"
+
+"He might have gone as his father's assistant."
+
+"But if he had seen my poor brother he would have told me long ago."
+
+"Not if he had really given up this letter," I retorted.
+
+I supposed her quick intelligence had seized this from the first; but I
+saw now that it came to her as a shock. She stood motionless, clenching
+the letter in her hands, and I could guess the rapid travel of her
+thoughts.
+
+Suddenly she came up to me. "Colonel Alingdon," she said, "you have
+been a good friend of mine, though I think you have not liked me
+lately. But whether you like me or not, I know you will not deceive me.
+On your honor, do you think this memorandum may have been written later
+than the letter?"
+
+I hesitated. If she had cried out once against Briga I should have
+wished myself out of the business; but she was too sure of him.
+
+"On my honor," I said, "I think it hardly possible. The ink has faded
+to the same degree."
+
+She made a rapid comparison and folded the letter with a gesture of
+assent.
+
+"It may have been written by an enemy," I went on, wishing to clear
+myself of any appearance of malice.
+
+She shook her head. "He was barely fifteen--and his father was on the
+side of the government. Besides, this would have served him with the
+government, and the liberals would never have known of it."
+
+This was unanswerable--and still not a word of revolt against the man
+whose condemnation she was pronouncing!
+
+"Then--" I said with a vague gesture.
+
+She caught me up. "Then--?"
+
+"You have answered my objections," I returned.
+
+"Your objections?"
+
+"To thinking that Signor Briga could have begun his career as a patriot
+by betraying a friend."
+
+I had brought her to the test at last, but my eyes shrank from her face
+as I spoke. There was a dead silence, which I broke by adding lamely:
+"But no doubt Signor Briga could explain."
+
+She lifted her head, and I saw that my triumph was to be short. She
+stood erect, a few paces from me, resting her hand on a table, but not
+for support.
+
+"Of course he can explain," she said; "do you suppose I ever doubted
+it? But--" she paused a moment, fronting me nobly--"he need not, for I
+understand it all now."
+
+"Ah," I murmured with a last flicker of irony.
+
+"I understand," she repeated. It was she, now, who sought my eyes and
+held them. "It is quite simple--he could not have done otherwise."
+
+This was a little too oracular to be received with equanimity. I
+suppose I smiled.
+
+"He could not have done otherwise," she repeated with tranquil
+emphasis. "He merely did what is every Italian's duty--he put Italy
+before himself and his friends." She waited a moment, and then went on
+with growing passion: "Surely you must see what I mean? He was
+evidently in the prison with his father at the time of my poor
+brother's death. Emilio perhaps guessed that he was a friend--or
+perhaps appealed to him because he was young and looked kind. But don't
+you see how dangerous it would have been for Briga to bring this letter
+to us, or even to hide it in his father's house? It is true that he was
+not yet suspected of liberalism, but he was already connected with
+Young Italy, and it is just because he managed to keep himself so free
+of suspicion that he was able to do such good work for the cause." She
+paused, and then went on with a firmer voice. "You don't know the
+danger we all lived in. The government spies were everywhere. The laws
+were set aside as the Duke pleased--was not Emilio hanged for having an
+ode to Italy in his desk? After Menotti's conspiracy the Duke grew mad
+with fear--he was haunted by the dread of assassination. The police, to
+prove their zeal, had to trump up false charges and arrest innocent
+persons--you remember the case of poor Ricci? Incriminating papers were
+smuggled into people's houses--they were condemned to death on the paid
+evidence of brigands and galley-slaves. The families of the
+revolutionists were under the closest observation and were shunned by
+all who wished to stand well with the government. If Briga had been
+seen going into our house he would at once have been suspected. If he
+had hidden Emilio's letter at home, its discovery might have ruined his
+family as well as himself. It was his duty to consider all these
+things. In those days no man could serve two masters, and he had to
+choose between endangering the cause and failing to serve a friend. He
+chose the latter--and he was right."
+
+I stood listening, fascinated by the rapidity and skill with which she
+had built up the hypothesis of Briga's defence. But before she ended a
+strange thing happened--her argument had convinced me. It seemed to me
+quite likely that Briga had in fact been actuated by the motives she
+suggested.
+
+I suppose she read the admission in my face, for hers lit up
+victoriously.
+
+"You see?" she exclaimed. "Ah, it takes one brave man to understand
+another."
+
+Perhaps I winced a little at being thus coupled with her hero; at any
+rate, some last impulse of resistance made me say: "I should be quite
+convinced, if Briga had only spoken of the letter afterward. If brave
+people understand each other, I cannot see why he should have been
+afraid of telling you the truth."
+
+She colored deeply, and perhaps not quite resentfully.
+
+"You are right," she said; "he need not have been afraid. But he does
+not know me as I know him. I was useful to Italy, and he may have
+feared to risk my friendship."
+
+"You are the most generous woman I ever knew!" I exclaimed.
+
+She looked at me intently. "You also are generous," she said.
+
+I stiffened instantly, suspecting a purpose behind her praise. "I have
+given you small proof of it!" I said.
+
+She seemed surprised. "In bringing me this letter? What else could you
+do?" She sighed deeply. "You can give me proof enough now."
+
+She had dropped into a chair, and I saw that we had reached the most
+difficult point in our interview.
+
+"Captain Alingdon," she said, "does any one else know of this letter?"
+
+"No. I was alone in the archives when I found it."
+
+"And you spoke of it to no one?"
+
+"To no one."
+
+"Then no one must know."
+
+I bowed. "It is for you to decide."
+
+She paused. "Not even my mother," she continued, with a painful blush.
+
+I looked at her in amazement. "Not even--?"
+
+She shook her head sadly. "You think me a cruel daughter? Well--_he_
+was a cruel friend. What he did was done for Italy: shall I allow
+myself to be surpassed?"
+
+I felt a pang of commiseration for the mother. "But you will at least
+tell the Countess--"
+
+Her eyes filled with tears. "My poor mother--don't make it more
+difficult for me!"
+
+"But I don't understand--"
+
+"Don't you see that she might find it impossible to forgive him? She
+has suffered so much! And I can't risk that--for in her anger she might
+speak. And even if she forgave him, she might be tempted to show the
+letter. Don't you see that, even now, a word of this might ruin him? I
+will trust his fate to no one. If Italy needed him then she needs him
+far more to-day."
+
+She stood before me magnificently, in the splendor of her great
+refusal; then she turned to the writing-table at which she had been
+seated when I came in. Her sealing-taper was still alight, and she held
+her brother's letter to the flame.
+
+I watched her in silence while it burned; but one more question rose to
+my lips.
+
+"You will tell _him_, then, what you have done for him?" I cried.
+
+And at that the heroine turned woman, melted and pressed unhappy hands
+in mine.
+
+"Don't you see that I can never tell him what I do for him? That is my
+gift to Italy," she said.
+
+
+
+
+THE DILETTANTE
+
+
+IT was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found himself
+advancing in its favor, that Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned
+as usual into Mrs. Vervain's street.
+
+The "as usual" was his own qualification of the act; a convenient way
+of bridging the interval--in days and other sequences--that lay between
+this visit and the last. It was characteristic of him that he
+instinctively excluded his call two days earlier, with Ruth Gaynor,
+from the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain: the special conditions
+attending it had made it no more like a visit to Mrs. Vervain than an
+engraved dinner invitation is like a personal letter. Yet it was to
+talk over his call with Miss Gaynor that he was now returning to the
+scene of that episode; and it was because Mrs. Vervain could be trusted
+to handle the talking over as skilfully as the interview itself that,
+at her corner, he had felt the dilettante's irresistible craving to
+take a last look at a work of art that was passing out of his
+possession.
+
+On the whole, he knew no one better fitted to deal with the unexpected
+than Mrs. Vervain. She excelled in the rare art of taking things for
+granted, and Thursdale felt a pardonable pride in the thought that she
+owed her excellence to his training. Early in his career Thursdale had
+made the mistake, at the outset of his acquaintance with a lady, of
+telling her that he loved her and exacting the same avowal in return.
+The latter part of that episode had been like the long walk back from a
+picnic, when one has to carry all the crockery one has finished using:
+it was the last time Thursdale ever allowed himself to be encumbered
+with the debris of a feast. He thus incidentally learned that the
+privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a charming
+woman can accord; and in seeking to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment he
+had developed a science of evasion in which the woman of the moment
+became a mere implement of the game. He owed a great deal of delicate
+enjoyment to the cultivation of this art. The perils from which it had
+been his refuge became naively harmless: was it possible that he who
+now took his easy way along the levels had once preferred to gasp on
+the raw heights of emotion? Youth is a high-colored season; but he had
+the satisfaction of feeling that he had entered earlier than most into
+that chiar'oscuro of sensation where every half-tone has its value.
+
+As a promoter of this pleasure no one he had known was comparable to
+Mrs. Vervain. He had taught a good many women not to betray their
+feelings, but he had never before had such fine material to work in.
+She had been surprisingly crude when he first knew her; capable of
+making the most awkward inferences, of plunging through thin ice, of
+recklessly undressing her emotions; but she had acquired, under the
+discipline of his reticences and evasions, a skill almost equal to his
+own, and perhaps more remarkable in that it involved keeping time with
+any tune he played and reading at sight some uncommonly difficult
+passages.
+
+It had taken Thursdale seven years to form this fine talent; but the
+result justified the effort. At the crucial moment she had been
+perfect: her way of greeting Miss Gaynor had made him regret that he
+had announced his engagement by letter. It was an evasion that
+confessed a difficulty; a deviation implying an obstacle, where, by
+common consent, it was agreed to see none; it betrayed, in short, a
+lack of confidence in the completeness of his method. It had been his
+pride never to put himself in a position which had to be quitted, as it
+were, by the back door; but here, as he perceived, the main portals
+would have opened for him of their own accord. All this, and much more,
+he read in the finished naturalness with which Mrs. Vervain had met
+Miss Gaynor. He had never seen a better piece of work: there was no
+over-eagerness, no suspicious warmth, above all (and this gave her art
+the grace of a natural quality) there were none of those damnable
+implications whereby a woman, in welcoming her friend's betrothed, may
+keep him on pins and needles while she laps the lady in complacency. So
+masterly a performance, indeed, hardly needed the offset of Miss
+Gaynor's door-step words--"To be so kind to me, how she must have liked
+you!"--though he caught himself wishing it lay within the bounds of
+fitness to transmit them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew
+who was unfailingly certain to enjoy a good thing. It was perhaps the
+one drawback to his new situation that it might develop good things
+which it would be impossible to hand on to Margaret Vervain.
+
+The fact that he had made the mistake of underrating his friend's
+powers, the consciousness that his writing must have betrayed his
+distrust of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning down her
+street instead of going on to the club. He would show her that he knew
+how to value her; he would ask her to achieve with him a feat
+infinitely rarer and more delicate than the one he had appeared to
+avoid. Incidentally, he would also dispose of the interval of time
+before dinner: ever since he had seen Miss Gaynor off, an hour earlier,
+on her return journey to Buffalo, he had been wondering how he should
+put in the rest of the afternoon. It was absurd, how he missed the
+girl....Yes, that was it; the desire to talk about her was, after all,
+at the bottom of his impulse to call on Mrs. Vervain! It was absurd, if
+you like--but it was delightfully rejuvenating. He could recall the
+time when he had been afraid of being obvious: now he felt that this
+return to the primitive emotions might be as restorative as a holiday
+in the Canadian woods. And it was precisely by the girl's candor, her
+directness, her lack of complications, that he was taken. The sense
+that she might say something rash at any moment was positively
+exhilarating: if she had thrown her arms about him at the station he
+would not have given a thought to his crumpled dignity. It surprised
+Thursdale to find what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure;
+and though his sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness to
+any conscious purpose, he could but rejoice in the fact that his
+sentimental economies had left him such a large surplus to draw upon.
+
+Mrs. Vervain was at home--as usual. When one visits the cemetery one
+expects to find the angel on the tombstone, and it struck Thursdale as
+another proof of his friend's good taste that she had been in no undue
+haste to change her habits. The whole house appeared to count on his
+coming; the footman took his hat and overcoat as naturally as though
+there had been no lapse in his visits; and the drawing-room at once
+enveloped him in that atmosphere of tacit intelligence which Mrs.
+Vervain imparted to her very furniture.
+
+It was a surprise that, in this general harmony of circumstances, Mrs.
+Vervain should herself sound the first false note.
+
+"You?" she exclaimed; and the book she held slipped from her hand.
+
+It was crude, certainly; unless it were a touch of the finest art. The
+difficulty of classifying it disturbed Thursdale's balance.
+
+"Why not?" he said, restoring the book. "Isn't it my hour?" And as she
+made no answer, he added gently, "Unless it's some one else's?"
+
+She laid the book aside and sank back into her chair. "Mine, merely,"
+she said.
+
+"I hope that doesn't mean that you're unwilling to share it?"
+
+"With you? By no means. You're welcome to my last crust."
+
+He looked at her reproachfully. "Do you call this the last?"
+
+She smiled as he dropped into the seat across the hearth. "It's a way
+of giving it more flavor!"
+
+He returned the smile. "A visit to you doesn't need such condiments."
+
+She took this with just the right measure of retrospective amusement.
+
+"Ah, but I want to put into this one a very special taste," she
+confessed.
+
+Her smile was so confident, so reassuring, that it lulled him into the
+imprudence of saying, "Why should you want it to be different from what
+was always so perfectly right?"
+
+She hesitated. "Doesn't the fact that it's the last constitute a
+difference?"
+
+"The last--my last visit to you?"
+
+"Oh, metaphorically, I mean--there's a break in the continuity."
+
+Decidedly, she was pressing too hard: unlearning his arts already!
+
+"I don't recognize it," he said. "Unless you make me--" he added, with
+a note that slightly stirred her attitude of languid attention.
+
+She turned to him with grave eyes. "You recognize no difference
+whatever?"
+
+"None--except an added link in the chain."
+
+"An added link?"
+
+"In having one more thing to like you for--your letting Miss Gaynor see
+why I had already so many." He flattered himself that this turn had
+taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase.
+
+Mrs. Vervain sank into her former easy pose. "Was it that you came
+for?" she asked, almost gaily.
+
+"If it is necessary to have a reason--that was one."
+
+"To talk to me about Miss Gaynor?"
+
+"To tell you how she talks about you."
+
+"That will be very interesting--especially if you have seen her since
+her second visit to me."
+
+"Her second visit?" Thursdale pushed his chair back with a start and
+moved to another. "She came to see you again?"
+
+"This morning, yes--by appointment."
+
+He continued to look at her blankly. "You sent for her?"
+
+"I didn't have to--she wrote and asked me last night. But no doubt you
+have seen her since."
+
+Thursdale sat silent. He was trying to separate his words from his
+thoughts, but they still clung together inextricably. "I saw her off
+just now at the station."
+
+"And she didn't tell you that she had been here again?"
+
+"There was hardly time, I suppose--there were people about--" he
+floundered.
+
+"Ah, she'll write, then."
+
+He regained his composure. "Of course she'll write: very often, I hope.
+You know I'm absurdly in love," he cried audaciously.
+
+She tilted her head back, looking up at him as he leaned against the
+chimney-piece. He had leaned there so often that the attitude touched a
+pulse which set up a throbbing in her throat. "Oh, my poor Thursdale!"
+she murmured.
+
+"I suppose it's rather ridiculous," he owned; and as she remained
+silent, he added, with a sudden break--"Or have you another reason for
+pitying me?"
+
+Her answer was another question. "Have you been back to your rooms
+since you left her?"
+
+"Since I left her at the station? I came straight here."
+
+"Ah, yes--you _could:_ there was no reason--" Her words passed into a
+silent musing.
+
+Thursdale moved nervously nearer. "You said you had something to tell
+me?"
+
+"Perhaps I had better let her do so. There may be a letter at your
+rooms."
+
+"A letter? What do you mean? A letter from _her?_ What has happened?"
+
+His paleness shook her, and she raised a hand of reassurance. "Nothing
+has happened--perhaps that is just the worst of it. You always _hated_,
+you know," she added incoherently, "to have things happen: you never
+would let them."
+
+"And now--?"
+
+"Well, that was what she came here for: I supposed you had guessed. To
+know if anything had happened."
+
+"Had happened?" He gazed at her slowly. "Between you and me?" he said
+with a rush of light.
+
+The words were so much cruder than any that had ever passed between
+them that the color rose to her face; but she held his startled gaze.
+
+"You know girls are not quite as unsophisticated as they used to be.
+Are you surprised that such an idea should occur to her?"
+
+His own color answered hers: it was the only reply that came to him.
+
+Mrs. Vervain went on, smoothly: "I supposed it might have struck you
+that there were times when we presented that appearance."
+
+He made an impatient gesture. "A man's past is his own!"
+
+"Perhaps--it certainly never belongs to the woman who has shared it.
+But one learns such truths only by experience; and Miss Gaynor is
+naturally inexperienced."
+
+"Of course--but--supposing her act a natural one--" he floundered
+lamentably among his innuendoes--"I still don't see--how there was
+anything--"
+
+"Anything to take hold of? There wasn't--"
+
+"Well, then--?" escaped him, in crude satisfaction; but as she did not
+complete the sentence he went on with a faltering laugh: "She can
+hardly object to the existence of a mere friendship between us!"
+
+"But she does," said Mrs. Vervain.
+
+Thursdale stood perplexed. He had seen, on the previous day, no trace
+of jealousy or resentment in his betrothed: he could still hear the
+candid ring of the girl's praise of Mrs. Vervain. If she were such an
+abyss of insincerity as to dissemble distrust under such frankness, she
+must at least be more subtle than to bring her doubts to her rival for
+solution. The situation seemed one through which one could no longer
+move in a penumbra, and he let in a burst of light with the direct
+query: "Won't you explain what you mean?"
+
+Mrs. Vervain sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong his
+distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her,
+it was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It
+was the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything; and she
+had lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not
+wanted, that she seemed unable to produce one on the spot.
+
+At last she said slowly: "She came to find out if you were really free."
+
+Thursdale colored again. "Free?" he stammered, with a sense of physical
+disgust at contact with such crassness.
+
+"Yes--if I had quite done with you." She smiled in recovered security.
+"It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion for definitions."
+
+"Yes--well?" he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.
+
+"Well--and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she
+wanted me to define _my_ status--to know exactly where I had stood all
+along."
+
+Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the clue.
+"And even when you had told her that--"
+
+"Even when I had told her that I had _had_ no status--that I had never
+stood anywhere, in any sense she meant," said Mrs. Vervain,
+slowly--"even then she wasn't satisfied, it seems."
+
+He uttered an uneasy exclamation. "She didn't believe you, you mean?"
+
+"I mean that she _did_ believe me: too thoroughly."
+
+"Well, then--in God's name, what did she want?"
+
+"Something more--those were the words she used."
+
+"Something more? Between--between you and me? Is it a conundrum?" He
+laughed awkwardly.
+
+"Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer forbidden
+to contemplate the relation of the sexes."
+
+"So it seems!" he commented. "But since, in this case, there wasn't
+any--" he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in her gaze.
+
+"That's just it. The unpardonable offence has been--in our not
+offending."
+
+He flung himself down despairingly. "I give it up!--What did you tell
+her?" he burst out with sudden crudeness.
+
+"The exact truth. If I had only known," she broke off with a beseeching
+tenderness, "won't you believe that I would still have lied for you?"
+
+"Lied for me? Why on earth should you have lied for either of us?"
+
+"To save you--to hide you from her to the last! As I've hidden you from
+myself all these years!" She stood up with a sudden tragic import in
+her movement. "You believe me capable of that, don't you? If I had only
+guessed--but I have never known a girl like her; she had the truth out
+of me with a spring."
+
+"The truth that you and I had never--"
+
+"Had never--never in all these years! Oh, she knew why--she measured us
+both in a flash. She didn't suspect me of having haggled with you--her
+words pelted me like hail. 'He just took what he wanted--sifted and
+sorted you to suit his taste. Burnt out the gold and left a heap of
+cinders. And you let him--you let yourself be cut in bits'--she mixed
+her metaphors a little--'be cut in bits, and used or discarded, while
+all the while every drop of blood in you belonged to him! But he's
+Shylock--and you have bled to death of the pound of flesh he has cut
+out of you.' But she despises me the most, you know--far the most--"
+Mrs. Vervain ended.
+
+The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they
+seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind
+of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor might intrude without
+perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand
+opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a private music-room.
+
+Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess. Half the room was between them,
+but they seemed to stare close at each other now that the veils of
+reticence and ambiguity had fallen.
+
+His first words were characteristic. "She _does_ despise me, then?" he
+exclaimed.
+
+"She thinks the pound of flesh you took was a little too near the
+heart."
+
+He was excessively pale. "Please tell me exactly what she said of me."
+
+"She did not speak much of you: she is proud. But I gather that while
+she understands love or indifference, her eyes have never been opened
+to the many intermediate shades of feeling. At any rate, she expressed
+an unwillingness to be taken with reservations--she thinks you would
+have loved her better if you had loved some one else first. The point
+of view is original--she insists on a man with a past!"
+
+"Oh, a past--if she's serious--I could rake up a past!" he said with a
+laugh.
+
+"So I suggested: but she has her eyes on his particular portion of it.
+She insists on making it a test case. She wanted to know what you had
+done to me; and before I could guess her drift I blundered into telling
+her."
+
+Thursdale drew a difficult breath. "I never supposed--your revenge is
+complete," he said slowly.
+
+He heard a little gasp in her throat. "My revenge? When I sent for you
+to warn you--to save you from being surprised as _I_ was surprised?"
+
+"You're very good--but it's rather late to talk of saving me." He held
+out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.
+
+"How you must care!--for I never saw you so dull," was her answer.
+"Don't you see that it's not too late for me to help you?" And as he
+continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: "Take the rest--in
+imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I
+lied to her--she's too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a
+sense, I sha'n't have been wasted."
+
+His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the look
+back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to
+need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept
+them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this
+contact of naked souls.
+
+It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but
+something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He
+went up to his friend and took her hand.
+
+"You would do it--you would do it!"
+
+She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.
+
+"Good-by," he said, kissing it.
+
+"Good-by? You are going--?"
+
+"To get my letter."
+
+"Your letter? The letter won't matter, if you will only do what I ask."
+
+He returned her gaze. "I might, I suppose, without being out of
+character. Only, don't you see that if your plan helped me it could
+only harm her?"
+
+"Harm _her?_"
+
+"To sacrifice you wouldn't make me different. I shall go on being what
+I have always been--sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you want
+my punishment to fall on _her?_"
+
+She looked at him long and deeply. "Ah, if I had to choose between
+you--!"
+
+"You would let her take her chance? But I can't, you see. I must take
+my punishment alone."
+
+She drew her hand away, sighing. "Oh, there will be no punishment for
+either of you."
+
+"For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me."
+
+She shook her head with a slight laugh. "There will be no letter."
+
+Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look.
+"No letter? You don't mean--"
+
+"I mean that she's been with you since I saw her--she's seen you and
+heard your voice. If there _is_ a letter, she has recalled it--from the
+first station, by telegraph."
+
+He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile. "But in the
+mean while I shall have read it," he said.
+
+The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful
+emptiness of the room.
+
+
+
+
+THE QUICKSAND
+
+
+I
+
+AS Mrs. Quentin's victoria, driving homeward, turned from the Park into
+Fifth Avenue, she divined her son's tall figure walking ahead of her in
+the twilight. His long stride covered the ground more rapidly than
+usual, and she had a premonition that, if he were going home at that
+hour, it was because he wanted to see her.
+
+Mrs. Quentin, though not a fanciful woman, was sometimes aware of a
+sixth sense enabling her to detect the faintest vibrations of her son's
+impulses. She was too shrewd to fancy herself the one mother in
+possession of this faculty, but she permitted herself to think that few
+could exercise it more discreetly. If she could not help overhearing
+Alan's thoughts, she had the courage to keep her discoveries to
+herself, the tact to take for granted nothing that lay below the
+surface of their spoken intercourse: she knew that most people would
+rather have their letters read than their thoughts. For this
+superfeminine discretion Alan repaid her by--being Alan. There could
+have been no completer reward. He was the key to the meaning of life,
+the justification of what must have seemed as incomprehensible as it
+was odious, had it not all-sufficingly ended in himself. He was a
+perfect son, and Mrs. Quentin had always hungered for perfection.
+
+Her house, in a minor way, bore witness to the craving. One felt it to
+be the result of a series of eliminations: there was nothing fortuitous
+in its blending of line and color. The almost morbid finish of every
+material detail of her life suggested the possibility that a diversity
+of energies had, by some pressure of circumstance, been forced into the
+channel of a narrow dilettanteism. Mrs. Quentin's fastidiousness had,
+indeed, the flaw of being too one-sided. Her friends were not always
+worthy of the chairs they sat in, and she overlooked in her associates
+defects she would not have tolerated in her bric-a-brac. Her house was,
+in fact, never so distinguished as when it was empty; and it was at its
+best in the warm fire-lit silence that now received her.
+
+Her son, who had overtaken her on the door-step, followed her into the
+drawing-room, and threw himself into an armchair near the fire, while
+she laid off her furs and busied herself about the tea table. For a
+while neither spoke; but glancing at him across the kettle, his mother
+noticed that he sat staring at the embers with a look she had never
+seen on his face, though its arrogant young outline was as familiar to
+her as her own thoughts. The look extended itself to his negligent
+attitude, to the droop of his long fine hands, the dejected tilt of his
+head against the cushions. It was like the moral equivalent of physical
+fatigue: he looked, as he himself would have phrased it, dead-beat,
+played out. Such an air was so foreign to his usual bright
+indomitableness that Mrs. Quentin had the sense of an unfamiliar
+presence, in which she must observe herself, must raise hurried
+barriers against an alien approach. It was one of the drawbacks of
+their excessive intimacy that any break in it seemed a chasm.
+
+She was accustomed to let his thoughts circle about her before they
+settled into speech, and she now sat in motionless expectancy, as
+though a sound might frighten them away.
+
+At length, without turning his eyes from the fire, he said: "I'm so
+glad you're a nice old-fashioned intuitive woman. It's painful to see
+them think."
+
+Her apprehension had already preceded him. "Hope Fenno--?" she faltered.
+
+He nodded. "She's been thinking--hard. It was very painful--to me, at
+least; and I don't believe she enjoyed it: she said she didn't." He
+stretched his feet to the fire. "The result of her cogitations is that
+she won't have me. She arrived at this by pure ratiocination--it's not
+a question of feeling, you understand. I'm the only man she's ever
+loved--but she won't have me. What novels did you read when you were
+young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that. If she'd been brought
+up on Trollope and Whyte-Melville, instead of Tolstoi and Mrs. Ward, we
+should have now been vulgarly sitting on a sofa, trying on the
+engagement-ring."
+
+Mrs. Quentin at first was kept silent by the mother's instinctive anger
+that the girl she has not wanted for her son should have dared to
+refuse him. Then she said, "Tell me, dear."
+
+"My good woman, she has scruples."
+
+"Scruples?"
+
+"Against the paper. She objects to me in my official capacity as owner
+of the _Radiator_."
+
+His mother did not echo his laugh.
+
+"She had found a solution, of course--she overflows with expedients. I
+was to chuck the paper, and we were to live happily ever afterward on
+canned food and virtue. She even had an alternative ready--women are so
+full of resources! I was to turn the _Radiator_ into an independent
+organ, and run it at a loss to show the public what a model newspaper
+ought to be. On the whole, I think she fancied this plan more than the
+other--it commended itself to her as being more uncomfortable and
+aggressive. It's not the fashion nowadays to be good by stealth."
+
+Mrs. Quentin said to herself, "I didn't know how much he cared!" Aloud
+she murmured, "You must give her time."
+
+"Time?"
+
+"To move out the old prejudices and make room for new ones."
+
+"My dear mother, those she has are brand-new; that's the trouble with
+them. She's tremendously up-to-date. She takes in all the moral
+fashion-papers, and wears the newest thing in ethics."
+
+Her resentment lost its way in the intricacies of his metaphor. "Is she
+so very religious?"
+
+"You dear archaic woman! She's hopelessly irreligious; that's the
+difficulty. You can make a religious woman believe almost anything:
+there's the habit of credulity to work on. But when a girl's faith in
+the Deluge has been shaken, it's very hard to inspire her with
+confidence. She makes you feel that, before believing in you, it's her
+duty as a conscientious agnostic to find out whether you're not
+obsolete, or whether the text isn't corrupt, or somebody hasn't proved
+conclusively that you never existed, anyhow."
+
+Mrs. Quentin was again silent. The two moved in that atmosphere of
+implications and assumptions where the lightest word may shake down the
+dust of countless stored impressions; and speech was sometimes more
+difficult between them than had their union been less close.
+
+Presently she ventured, "It's impossible?"
+
+"Impossible?"
+
+She seemed to use her words cautiously, like weapons that might slip
+and inflict a cut. "What she suggests."
+
+Her son, raising himself, turned to look at her for the first time.
+Their glance met in a shock of comprehension. He was with her against
+the girl, then! Her satisfaction overflowed in a murmur of tenderness.
+
+"Of course not, dear. One can't change--change one's life...."
+
+"One's self," he emended. "That's what I tell her. What's the use of my
+giving up the paper if I keep my point of view?"
+
+The psychological distinction attracted her. "Which is it she minds
+most?"
+
+"Oh, the paper--for the present. She undertakes to modify the point of
+view afterward. All she asks is that I shall renounce my heresy: the
+gift of grace will come later."
+
+Mrs. Quentin sat gazing into her untouched cup. Her son's first words
+had produced in her the hallucinated sense of struggling in the thick
+of a crowd that he could not see. It was horrible to feel herself
+hemmed in by influences imperceptible to him; yet if anything could
+have increased her misery it would have been the discovery that her
+ghosts had become visible.
+
+As though to divert his attention, she precipitately asked, "And you--?"
+
+His answer carried the shock of an evocation. "I merely asked her what
+she thought of _you_."
+
+"Of me?"
+
+"She admires you immensely, you know."
+
+For a moment Mrs. Quentin's cheek showed the lingering light of
+girlhood: praise transmitted by her son acquired something of the
+transmitter's merit. "Well--?" she smiled.
+
+"Well--you didn't make my father give up the _Radiator_, did you?"
+
+His mother, stiffening, made a circuitous return: "She never comes
+here. How can she know me?"
+
+"She's so poor! She goes out so little." He rose and leaned against the
+mantel-piece, dislodging with impatient fingers a slender bronze
+wrestler poised on a porphyry base, between two warm-toned Spanish
+ivories. "And then her mother--" he added, as if involuntarily.
+
+"Her mother has never visited me," Mrs. Quentin finished for him.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "Mrs. Fenno has the scope of a wax doll. Her
+rule of conduct is taken from her grandmother's sampler."
+
+"But the daughter is so modern--and yet--"
+
+"The result is the same? Not exactly. _She_ admires you--oh,
+immensely!" He replaced the bronze and turned to his mother with a
+smile. "Aren't you on some hospital committee together? What especially
+strikes her is your way of doing good. She says philanthropy is not a
+line of conduct, but a state of mind--and it appears that you are one
+of the elect."
+
+As, in the vague diffusion of physical pain, relief seems to come with
+the acuter pang of a single nerve, Mrs. Quentin felt herself suddenly
+eased by a rush of anger against the girl. "If she loved you--" she
+began.
+
+His gesture checked her. "I'm not asking you to get her to do that."
+
+The two were again silent, facing each other in the disarray of a
+common catastrophe--as though their thoughts, at the summons of danger,
+had rushed naked into action. Mrs. Quentin, at this revealing moment,
+saw for the first time how many elements of her son's character had
+seemed comprehensible simply because they were familiar: as, in reading
+a foreign language, we take the meaning of certain words for granted
+till the context corrects us. Often as in a given case, her maternal
+musings had figured his conduct, she now found herself at a loss to
+forecast it; and with this failure of intuition came a sense of the
+subserviency which had hitherto made her counsels but the anticipation
+of his wish. Her despair escaped in the moan, "What _is_ it you ask me?"
+
+"To talk to her."
+
+"Talk to her?"
+
+"Show her--tell her--make her understand that the paper has always been
+a thing outside your life--that hasn't touched you--that needn't touch
+_her_. Only, let her hear you--watch you--be with you--she'll see...she
+can't help seeing..."
+
+His mother faltered. "But if she's given you her reasons--?"
+
+"Let her give them to you! If she can--when she sees you...." His
+impatient hand again displaced the wrestler. "I care abominably," he
+confessed.
+
+
+II
+
+On the Fenno threshold a sudden sense of the futility of the attempt
+had almost driven Mrs. Quentin back to her carriage; but the door was
+already opening, and a parlor-maid who believed that Miss Fenno was in
+led the way to the depressing drawing-room. It was the kind of room in
+which no member of the family is likely to be found except after dinner
+or after death. The chairs and tables looked like poor relations who
+had repaid their keep by a long career of grudging usefulness: they
+seemed banded together against intruders in a sullen conspiracy of
+discomfort. Mrs. Quentin, keenly susceptible to such influences, read
+failure in every angle of the upholstery. She was incapable of the
+vulgar error of thinking that Hope Fenno might be induced to marry Alan
+for his money; but between this assumption and the inference that the
+girl's imagination might be touched by the finer possibilities of
+wealth, good taste admitted a distinction. The Fenno furniture,
+however, presented to such reasoning the obtuseness of its black-walnut
+chamferings; and something in its attitude suggested that its owners
+would be as uncompromising. The room showed none of the modern attempts
+at palliation, no apologetic draping of facts; and Mrs. Quentin,
+provisionally perched on a green-reps Gothic sofa with which it was
+clearly impossible to establish any closer relations, concluded that,
+had Mrs. Fenno needed another seat of the same size, she would have set
+out placidly to match the one on which her visitor now languished.
+
+To Mrs. Quentin's fancy, Hope Fenno's opinions, presently imparted in a
+clear young voice from the opposite angle of the Gothic sofa, partook
+of the character of their surroundings. The girl's mind was like a
+large light empty place, scantily furnished with a few massive
+prejudices, not designed to add to any one's comfort but too ponderous
+to be easily moved. Mrs. Quentin's own intelligence, in which its
+owner, in an artistically shaded half-light, had so long moved amid a
+delicate complexity of sensations, seemed in comparison suddenly close
+and crowded; and in taking refuge there from the glare of the young
+girl's candor, the older woman found herself stumbling in an unwonted
+obscurity. Her uneasiness resolved itself into a sense of irritation
+against her listener. Mrs. Quentin knew that the momentary value of any
+argument lies in the capacity of the mind to which it is addressed, and
+as her shafts of persuasion spent themselves against Miss Fenno's
+obduracy, she said to herself that, since conduct is governed by
+emotions rather than ideas, the really strong people are those who
+mistake their sensations for opinions. Viewed in this light, Miss Fenno
+was certainly very strong: there was an unmistakable ring of finality
+in the tone with which she declared,
+
+"It's impossible."
+
+Mrs. Quentin's answer veiled the least shade of feminine resentment. "I
+told Alan that, where he had failed, there was no chance of my making
+an impression."
+
+Hope Fenno laid on her visitor's an almost reverential hand. "Dear Mrs.
+Quentin, it's the impression you make that confirms the impossibility."
+
+Mrs. Quentin waited a moment: she was perfectly aware that, where her
+feelings were concerned, her sense of humor was not to be relied on.
+"Do I make such an odious impression?" she asked at length, with a
+smile that seemed to give the girl her choice of two meanings.
+
+"You make such a beautiful one! It's too beautiful--it obscures my
+judgment."
+
+Mrs. Quentin looked at her thoughtfully. "Would it be permissible, I
+wonder, for an older woman to suggest that, at your age, it isn't
+always a misfortune to have what one calls one's judgment temporarily
+obscured?"
+
+Miss Fenno flushed. "I try not to judge others--"
+
+"You judge Alan."
+
+"Ah, _he_ is not others," she murmured, with an accent that touched the
+older woman.
+
+"You judge his mother."
+
+"I don't; I don't!"
+
+Mrs. Quentin pressed her point. "You judge yourself, then, as you would
+be in my position--and your verdict condemns me."
+
+"How can you think it? It's because I appreciate the difference in our
+point of view that I find it so difficult to defend myself--"
+
+"Against what?"
+
+"The temptation to imagine that I might be as _you_ are--feeling as I
+do."
+
+Mrs. Quentin rose with a sigh. "My child, in my day love was less
+subtle." She added, after a moment, "Alan is a perfect son."
+
+"Ah, that again--that makes it worse!"
+
+"Worse?"
+
+"Just as your goodness does, your sweetness, your immense indulgence in
+letting me discuss things with you in a way that must seem almost an
+impertinence."
+
+Mrs. Quentin's smile was not without irony. "You must remember that I
+do it for Alan."
+
+"That's what I love you for!" the girl instantly returned; and again
+her tone touched her listener.
+
+"And yet you're sacrificing him--and to an idea!"
+
+"Isn't it to ideas that all the sacrifices that were worth while have
+been made?"
+
+"One may sacrifice one's self."
+
+Miss Fenno's color rose. "That's what I'm doing," she said gently.
+
+Mrs. Quentin took her hand. "I believe you are," she answered. "And it
+isn't true that I speak only for Alan. Perhaps I did when I began; but
+now I want to plead for you too--against yourself." She paused, and
+then went on with a deeper note: "I have let you, as you say, speak
+your mind to me in terms that some women might have resented, because I
+wanted to show you how little, as the years go on, theories, ideas,
+abstract conceptions of life, weigh against the actual, against the
+particular way in which life presents itself to us--to women
+especially. To decide beforehand exactly how one ought to behave in
+given circumstances is like deciding that one will follow a certain
+direction in crossing an unexplored country. Afterward we find that we
+must turn out for the obstacles--cross the rivers where they're
+shallowest--take the tracks that others have beaten--make all sorts of
+unexpected concessions. Life is made up of compromises: that is what
+youth refuses to understand. I've lived long enough to doubt whether
+any real good ever came of sacrificing beautiful facts to even more
+beautiful theories. Do I seem casuistical? I don't know--there may be
+losses either way...but the love of the man one loves...of the child
+one loves... that makes up for everything...."
+
+She had spoken with a thrill which seemed to communicate itself to the
+hand her listener had left in hers. Her eyes filled suddenly, but
+through their dimness she saw the girl's lips shape a last desperate
+denial:
+
+"Don't you see it's because I feel all this that I mustn't--that I
+can't?"
+
+
+III
+
+Mrs. Quentin, in the late spring afternoon, had turned in at the doors
+of the Metropolitan Museum. She had been walking in the Park, in a
+solitude oppressed by the ever-present sense of her son's trouble, and
+had suddenly remembered that some one had added a Beltraffio to the
+collection. It was an old habit of Mrs. Quentin's to seek in the
+enjoyment of the beautiful the distraction that most of her
+acquaintances appeared to find in each other's company. She had few
+friends, and their society was welcome to her only in her more
+superficial moods; but she could drug anxiety with a picture as some
+women can soothe it with a bonnet.
+
+During the six months that had elapsed since her visit to Miss Fenno
+she had been conscious of a pain of which she had supposed herself no
+longer capable: as a man will continue to feel the ache of an amputated
+arm. She had fancied that all her centres of feeling had been
+transferred to Alan; but she now found herself subject to a kind of
+dual suffering, in which her individual pang was the keener in that it
+divided her from her son's. Alan had surprised her: she had not
+foreseen that he would take a sentimental rebuff so hard. His
+disappointment took the uncommunicative form of a sterner application
+to work. He threw himself into the concerns of the _Radiator_ with an
+aggressiveness that almost betrayed itself in the paper. Mrs. Quentin
+never read the _Radiator_, but from the glimpses of it reflected in the
+other journals she gathered that it was at least not being subjected to
+the moral reconstruction which had been one of Miss Fenno's
+alternatives.
+
+Mrs. Quentin never spoke to her son of what had happened. She was
+superior to the cheap satisfaction of avenging his injury by
+depreciating its cause. She knew that in sentimental sorrows such
+consolations are as salt in the wound. The avoidance of a subject so
+vividly present to both could not but affect the closeness of their
+relation. An invisible presence hampered their liberty of speech and
+thought. The girl was always between them; and to hide the sense of her
+intrusion they began to be less frequently together. It was then that
+Mrs. Quentin measured the extent of her isolation. Had she ever dared
+to forecast such a situation, she would have proceeded on the
+conventional theory that her son's suffering must draw her nearer to
+him; and this was precisely the relief that was denied her. Alan's
+uncommunicativeness extended below the level of speech, and his mother,
+reduced to the helplessness of dead-reckoning, had not even the solace
+of adapting her sympathy to his needs. She did not know what he felt:
+his course was incalculable to her. She sometimes wondered if she had
+become as incomprehensible to him; and it was to find a moment's refuge
+from the dogging misery of such conjectures that she had now turned in
+at the Museum.
+
+The long line of mellow canvases seemed to receive her into the rich
+calm of an autumn twilight. She might have been walking in an enchanted
+wood where the footfall of care never sounded. So deep was the sense of
+seclusion that, as she turned from her prolonged communion with the new
+Beltraffio, it was a surprise to find she was not alone.
+
+A young lady who had risen from the central ottoman stood in suspended
+flight as Mrs. Quentin faced her. The older woman was the first to
+regain her self-possession.
+
+"Miss Fenno!" she said.
+
+The girl advanced with a blush. As it faded, Mrs. Quentin noticed a
+change in her. There had always been something bright and bannerlike in
+her aspect, but now her look drooped, and she hung at half-mast, as it
+were. Mrs. Quentin, in the embarrassment of surprising a secret that
+its possessor was doubtless unconscious of betraying, reverted
+hurriedly to the Beltraffio.
+
+"I came to see this," she said. "It's very beautiful."
+
+Miss Fenno's eye travelled incuriously over the mystic blue reaches of
+the landscape. "I suppose so," she assented; adding, after another
+tentative pause, "You come here often, don't you?"
+
+"Very often," Mrs. Quentin answered. "I find pictures a great help."
+
+"A help?"
+
+"A rest, I mean...if one is tired or out of sorts."
+
+"Ah," Miss Fenno murmured, looking down.
+
+"This Beltraffio is new, you know," Mrs. Quentin continued. "What a
+wonderful background, isn't it? Is he a painter who interests you?"
+
+The girl glanced again at the dusky canvas, as though in a final
+endeavor to extract from it a clue to the consolations of art. "I don't
+know," she said at length; "I'm afraid I don't understand pictures."
+She moved nearer to Mrs. Quentin and held out her hand.
+
+"You're going?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Mrs. Quentin looked at her. "Let me drive you home," she said,
+impulsively. She was feeling, with a shock of surprise, that it gave
+her, after all, no pleasure to see how much the girl had suffered.
+
+Miss Fenno stiffened perceptibly. "Thank you; I shall like the walk."
+
+Mrs. Quentin dropped her hand with a corresponding movement of
+withdrawal, and a momentary wave of antagonism seemed to sweep the two
+women apart. Then, as Mrs. Quentin, bowing slightly, again addressed
+herself to the picture, she felt a sudden touch on her arm.
+
+"Mrs. Quentin," the girl faltered, "I really came here because I saw
+your carriage." Her eyes sank, and then fluttered back to her hearer's
+face. "I've been horribly unhappy!" she exclaimed.
+
+Mrs. Quentin was silent. If Hope Fenno had expected an immediate
+response to her appeal, she was disappointed. The older woman's face
+was like a veil dropped before her thoughts.
+
+"I've thought so often," the girl went on precipitately, "of what you
+said that day you came to see me last autumn. I think I understand now
+what you meant--what you tried to make me see.... Oh, Mrs. Quentin,"
+she broke out, "I didn't mean to tell you this--I never dreamed of it
+till this moment--but you _do_ remember what you said, don't you? You
+must remember it! And now that I've met you in this way, I can't help
+telling you that I believe--I begin to believe--that you were right,
+after all."
+
+Mrs. Quentin had listened without moving; but now she raised her eyes
+with a slight smile. "Do you wish me to say this to Alan?" she asked.
+
+The girl flushed, but her glance braved the smile. "Would he still care
+to hear it?" she said fearlessly.
+
+Mrs. Quentin took momentary refuge in a renewed inspection of the
+Beltraffio; then, turning, she said, with a kind of reluctance: "He
+would still care."
+
+"Ah!" broke from the girl.
+
+During this exchange of words the two speakers had drifted
+unconsciously toward one of the benches. Mrs. Quentin glanced about
+her: a custodian who had been hovering in the doorway sauntered into
+the adjoining gallery, and they remained alone among the silvery
+Vandykes and flushed bituminous Halses. Mrs. Quentin sank down on the
+bench and reached a hand to the girl.
+
+"Sit by me," she said.
+
+Miss Fenno dropped beside her. In both women the stress of emotion was
+too strong for speech. The girl was still trembling, and Mrs. Quentin
+was the first to regain her composure.
+
+"You say you've suffered," she began at last. "Do you suppose _I_
+haven't?"
+
+"I knew you had. That made it so much worse for me--that I should have
+been the cause of your suffering for Alan!"
+
+Mrs. Quentin drew a deep breath. "Not for Alan only," she said. Miss
+Fenno turned on her a wondering glance. "Not for Alan only. _That_ pain
+every woman expects--and knows how to bear. We all know our children
+must have such disappointments, and to suffer with them is not the
+deepest pain. It's the suffering apart--in ways they don't understand."
+She breathed deeply. "I want you to know what I mean. You were
+right--that day--and I was wrong."
+
+"Oh," the girl faltered.
+
+Mrs. Quentin went on in a voice of passionate lucidity. "I knew it
+then--I knew it even while I was trying to argue with you--I've always
+known it! I didn't want my son to marry you till I heard your reasons
+for refusing him; and then--then I longed to see you his wife!"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Quentin!"
+
+"I longed for it; but I knew it mustn't be."
+
+"Mustn't be?"
+
+Mrs. Quentin shook her head sadly, and the girl, gaining courage from
+this mute negation, cried with an uncontrollable escape of feeling:
+
+"It's because you thought me hard, obstinate narrow-minded? Oh, I
+understand that so well! My self-righteousness must have seemed so
+petty! A girl who could sacrifice a man's future to her own moral
+vanity--for it _was_ a form of vanity; you showed me that plainly
+enough--how you must have despised me! But I am not that girl
+now--indeed I'm not. I'm not impulsive--I think things out. I've
+thought this out. I know Alan loves me--I know _how_ he loves me--and I
+believe I can help him--oh, not in the ways I had fancied before--but
+just merely by loving him." She paused, but Mrs. Quentin made no sign.
+"I see it all so differently now. I see what an influence love itself
+may be--how my believing in him, loving him, accepting him just as he
+is, might help him more than any theories, any arguments. I might have
+seen this long ago in looking at _you_--as he often told me--in seeing
+how you'd kept yourself apart from--from--Mr. Quentin's work and
+his--been always the beautiful side of life to them--kept their faith
+alive in spite of themselves--not by interfering, preaching, reforming,
+but by--just loving them and being there--" She looked at Mrs. Quentin
+with a simple nobleness. "It isn't as if I cared for the money, you
+know; if I cared for that, I should be afraid--"
+
+"You will care for it in time," Mrs. Quentin said suddenly.
+
+Miss Fenno drew back, releasing her hand. "In time?"
+
+"Yes; when there's nothing else left." She stared a moment at the
+pictures. "My poor child," she broke out, "I've heard all you say so
+often before!"
+
+"You've heard it?"
+
+"Yes--from myself. I felt as you do, I argued as you do, I acted as I
+mean to prevent your doing, when I married Alan's father."
+
+The long empty gallery seemed to reverberate with the girl's startled
+exclamation--"Oh, Mrs. Quentin--"
+
+"Hush; let me speak. Do you suppose I'd do this if you were the kind of
+pink-and-white idiot he ought to have married? It's because I see
+you're alive, as I was, tingling with beliefs, ambitions, energies, as
+I was--that I can't see you walled up alive, as I was, without
+stretching out a hand to save you!" She sat gazing rigidly forward, her
+eyes on the pictures, speaking in the low precipitate tone of one who
+tries to press the meaning of a lifetime into a few breathless
+sentences.
+
+"When I met Alan's father," she went on, "I knew nothing of his--his
+work. We met abroad, where I had been living with my mother. That was
+twenty-six years ago, when the _Radiator_ was less--less notorious than
+it is now. I knew my husband owned a newspaper--a great newspaper--and
+nothing more. I had never seen a copy of the _Radiator_; I had no
+notion what it stood for, in politics--or in other ways. We were
+married in Europe, and a few months afterward we came to live here.
+People were already beginning to talk about the _Radiator_. My husband,
+on leaving college, had bought it with some money an old uncle had left
+him, and the public at first was merely curious to see what an
+ambitious, stirring young man without any experience of journalism was
+going to make out of his experiment. They found first of all that he
+was going to make a great deal of money out of it. I found that out
+too. I was so happy in other ways that it didn't make much difference
+at first; though it was pleasant to be able to help my mother, to be
+generous and charitable, to live in a nice house, and wear the handsome
+gowns he liked to see me in. But still it didn't really count--it
+counted so little that when, one day, I learned what the _Radiator_
+was, I would have gone out into the streets barefooted rather than live
+another hour on the money it brought in...." Her voice sank, and she
+paused to steady it. The girl at her side did not speak or move. "I
+shall never forget that day," she began again. "The paper had stripped
+bare some family scandal--some miserable bleeding secret that a dozen
+unhappy people had been struggling to keep out of print--that _would_
+have been kept out if my husband had not--Oh, you must guess the rest!
+I can't go on!"
+
+She felt a hand on hers. "You mustn't go on, Mrs. Quentin," the girl
+whispered.
+
+"Yes, I must--I must! You must be made to understand." She drew a deep
+breath. "My husband was not like Alan. When he found out how I felt
+about it he was surprised at first--but gradually he began to see--or
+at least I fancied he saw--the hatefulness of it. At any rate he saw
+how I suffered, and he offered to give up the whole thing--to sell the
+paper. It couldn't be done all of a sudden, of course--he made me see
+that--for he had put all his money in it, and he had no special
+aptitude for any other kind of work. He was a born journalist--like
+Alan. It was a great sacrifice for him to give up the paper, but he
+promised to do it--in time--when a good opportunity offered. Meanwhile,
+of course, he wanted to build it up, to increase the circulation--and
+to do that he had to keep on in the same way--he made that clear to me.
+I saw that we were in a vicious circle. The paper, to sell well, had to
+be made more and more detestable and disgraceful. At first I
+rebelled--but somehow--I can't tell you how it was--after that first
+concession the ground seemed to give under me: with every struggle I
+sank deeper. And then--then Alan was born. He was such a delicate baby
+that there was very little hope of saving him. But money did it--the
+money from the paper. I took him abroad to see the best physicians--I
+took him to a warm climate every winter. In hot weather the doctors
+recommended sea air, and we had a yacht and cruised every summer. I
+owed his life to the _Radiator_. And when he began to grow stronger the
+habit was formed--the habit of luxury. He could not get on without the
+things he had always been used to. He pined in bad air; he drooped
+under monotony and discomfort; he throve on variety, amusement, travel,
+every kind of novelty and excitement. And all I wanted for him his
+inexhaustible foster-mother was there to give!
+
+"My husband said nothing, but he must have seen how things were going.
+There was no more talk of giving up the _Radiator_. He never reproached
+me with my inconsistency, but I thought he must despise me, and the
+thought made me reckless. I determined to ignore the paper
+altogether--to take what it gave as though I didn't know where it came
+from. And to excuse this I invented the theory that one may, so to
+speak, purify money by putting it to good uses. I gave away a great
+deal in charity--I indulged myself very little at first. All the money
+that was not spent on Alan I tried to do good with. But gradually, as
+my boy grew up, the problem became more complicated. How was I to
+protect Alan from the contamination I had let him live in? I couldn't
+preach by example--couldn't hold up his father as a warning, or
+denounce the money we were living on. All I could do was to disguise
+the inner ugliness of life by making it beautiful outside--to build a
+wall of beauty between him and the facts of life, turn his tastes and
+interests another way, hide the _Radiator_ from him as a smiling woman
+at a ball may hide a cancer in her breast! Just as Alan was entering
+college his father died. Then I saw my way clear. I had loved my
+husband--and yet I drew my first free breath in years. For the
+_Radiator_ had been left to Alan outright--there was nothing on earth
+to prevent his selling it when he came of age. And there was no excuse
+for his not selling it. I had brought him up to depend on money, but
+the paper had given us enough money to gratify all his tastes. At last
+we could turn on the monster that had nourished us. I felt a savage joy
+in the thought--I could hardly bear to wait till Alan came of age. But
+I had never spoken to him of the paper, and I didn't dare speak of it
+now. Some false shame kept me back, some vague belief in his ignorance.
+I would wait till he was twenty-one, and then we should be free.
+
+"I waited--the day came, and I spoke. You can guess his answer, I
+suppose. He had no idea of selling the _Radiator_. It wasn't the money
+he cared for--it was the career that tempted him. He was a born
+journalist, and his ambition, ever since he could remember, had been to
+carry on his father's work, to develop, to surpass it. There was
+nothing in the world as interesting as modern journalism. He couldn't
+imagine any other kind of life that wouldn't bore him to death. A
+newspaper like the _Radiator_ might be made one of the biggest powers
+on earth, and he loved power, and meant to have all he could get. I
+listened to him in a kind of trance. I couldn't find a word to say. His
+father had had scruples--he had none. I seemed to realize at once that
+argument would be useless. I don't know that I even tried to plead with
+him--he was so bright and hard and inaccessible! Then I saw that he
+was, after all, what I had made him--the creature of my concessions, my
+connivances, my evasions. That was the price I had paid for him--I had
+kept him at that cost!
+
+"Well--I _had_ kept him, at any rate. That was the feeling that
+survived. He was my boy, my son, my very own--till some other woman
+took him. Meanwhile the old life must go on as it could. I gave up the
+struggle. If at that point he was inaccessible, at others he was close
+to me. He has always been a perfect son. Our tastes grew together--we
+enjoyed the same books, the same pictures, the same people. All I had
+to do was to look at him in profile to see the side of him that was
+really mine. At first I kept thinking of the dreadful other side--but
+gradually the impression faded, and I kept my mind turned from it, as
+one does from a deformity in a face one loves. I thought I had made my
+last compromise with life--had hit on a _modus vivendi_ that would last
+my time.
+
+"And then he met you. I had always been prepared for his marrying, but
+not a girl like you. I thought he would choose a sweet thing who would
+never pry into his closets--he hated women with ideas! But as soon as I
+saw you I knew the struggle would have to begin again. He is so much
+stronger than his father--he is full of the most monstrous convictions.
+And he has the courage of them, too--you saw last year that his love
+for you never made him waver. He believes in his work; he adores it--it
+is a kind of hideous idol to which he would make human sacrifices! He
+loves you still--I've been honest with you--but his love wouldn't
+change him. It is you who would have to change--to die gradually, as I
+have died, till there is only one live point left in me. Ah, if one
+died completely--that's simple enough! But something persists--remember
+that--a single point, an aching nerve of truth. Now and then you may
+drug it--but a touch wakes it again, as your face has waked it in me.
+There's always enough of one's old self left to suffer with...."
+
+She stood up and faced the girl abruptly. "What shall I tell Alan?" she
+said.
+
+Miss Fenno sat motionless, her eyes on the ground. Twilight was falling
+on the gallery--a twilight which seemed to emanate not so much from the
+glass dome overhead as from the crepuscular depths into which the faces
+of the pictures were receding. The custodian's step sounded warningly
+down the corridor. When the girl looked up she was alone.
+
+
+
+
+A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT
+
+
+I
+
+THIS is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon Street
+house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell, of the famous
+East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the ladies had withdrawn
+to the oval parlour (and Maria's harp was throwing its gauzy web of
+sound across the Common), used to relate to his grandsons, about the
+year that Buonaparte marched upon Moscow.
+
+
+I
+
+"Him Venice!" said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony
+Bracknell, leaning on the high gunwale of his father's East Indiaman,
+the Hepzibah B., saw far off, across the morning sea, a faint vision of
+towers and domes dissolved in golden air.
+
+It was a rare February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony, newly of
+age, and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack merchantman of old
+Bracknell's fleet, felt his heart leap up as the distant city trembled
+into shape. _Venice!_ The name, since childhood, had been a magician's
+wand to him. In the hall of the old Bracknell house at Salem there hung
+a series of yellowing prints which Uncle Richard Saulsbee had brought
+home from one of his long voyages: views of heathen mosques and
+palaces, of the Grand Turk's Seraglio, of St. Peter's Church in Rome;
+and, in a corner--the corner nearest the rack where the old flintlocks
+hung--a busy merry populous scene, entitled: _St. Mark's Square in
+Venice_. This picture, from the first, had singularly taken little
+Tony's fancy. His unformulated criticism on the others was that they
+lacked action. True, in the view of St. Peter's an experienced-looking
+gentleman in a full-bottomed wig was pointing out the fairly obvious
+monument to a bashful companion, who had presumably not ventured to
+raise his eyes to it; while, at the doors of the Seraglio, a group of
+turbaned infidels observed with less hesitancy the approach of a veiled
+lady on a camel. But in Venice so many things were happening at
+once--more, Tony was sure, than had ever happened in Boston in a
+twelve-month or in Salem in a long lifetime. For here, by their garb,
+were people of every nation on earth, Chinamen, Turks, Spaniards, and
+many more, mixed with a parti-coloured throng of gentry, lacqueys,
+chapmen, hucksters, and tall personages in parsons' gowns who stalked
+through the crowd with an air of mastery, a string of parasites at
+their heels. And all these people seemed to be diverting themselves
+hugely, chaffering with the hucksters, watching the antics of trained
+dogs and monkeys, distributing doles to maimed beggars or having their
+pockets picked by slippery-looking fellows in black--the whole with
+such an air of ease and good-humour that one felt the cut-purses to be
+as much a part of the show as the tumbling acrobats and animals.
+
+As Tony advanced in years and experience this childish mumming lost its
+magic; but not so the early imaginings it had excited. For the old
+picture had been but the spring-board of fancy, the first step of a
+cloud-ladder leading to a land of dreams. With these dreams the name of
+Venice remained associated; and all that observation or report
+subsequently brought him concerning the place seemed, on a sober
+warranty of fact, to confirm its claim to stand midway between reality
+and illusion. There was, for instance, a slender Venice glass,
+gold-powdered as with lily-pollen or the dust of sunbeams, that,
+standing in the corner cabinet betwixt two Lowestoft caddies, seemed,
+among its lifeless neighbours, to palpitate like an impaled butterfly.
+There was, farther, a gold chain of his mother's, spun of that same
+sun-pollen, so thread-like, impalpable, that it slipped through the
+fingers like light, yet so strong that it carried a heavy pendant which
+seemed held in air as if by magic. _Magic!_ That was the word which the
+thought of Venice evoked. It was the kind of place, Tony felt, in which
+things elsewhere impossible might naturally happen, in which two and
+two might make five, a paradox elope with a syllogism, and a conclusion
+give the lie to its own premiss. Was there ever a young heart that did
+not, once and again, long to get away into such a world as that? Tony,
+at least, had felt the longing from the first hour when the axioms in
+his horn-book had brought home to him his heavy responsibilities as a
+Christian and a sinner. And now here was his wish taking shape before
+him, as the distant haze of gold shaped itself into towers and domes
+across the morning sea!
+
+The Reverend Ozias Mounce, Tony's governor and bear-leader, was just
+putting a hand to the third clause of the fourth part of a sermon on
+Free-Will and Predestination as the Hepzibah B.'s anchor rattled
+overboard. Tony, in his haste to be ashore, would have made one plunge
+with the anchor; but the Reverend Ozias, on being roused from his
+lucubrations, earnestly protested against leaving his argument in
+suspense. What was the trifle of an arrival at some Papistical foreign
+city, where the very churches wore turbans like so many Moslem
+idolators, to the important fact of Mr. Mounce's summing up his
+conclusions before the Muse of Theology took flight? He should be
+happy, he said, if the tide served, to visit Venice with Mr. Bracknell
+the next morning.
+
+The next morning, ha!--Tony murmured a submissive "Yes, sir," winked at
+the subjugated captain, buckled on his sword, pressed his hat down with
+a flourish, and before the Reverend Ozias had arrived at his next
+deduction, was skimming merrily shoreward in the Hepzibah's gig.
+
+A moment more and he was in the thick of it! Here was the very world of
+the old print, only suffused with sunlight and colour, and bubbling
+with merry noises. What a scene it was! A square enclosed in fantastic
+painted buildings, and peopled with a throng as fantastic: a bawling,
+laughing, jostling, sweating mob, parti-coloured, parti-speeched,
+crackling and sputtering under the hot sun like a dish of fritters over
+a kitchen fire. Tony, agape, shouldered his way through the press,
+aware at once that, spite of the tumult, the shrillness, the
+gesticulation, there was no undercurrent of clownishness, no tendency
+to horse-play, as in such crowds on market-day at home, but a kind of
+facetious suavity which seemed to include everybody in the
+circumference of one huge joke. In such an air the sense of strangeness
+soon wore off, and Tony was beginning to feel himself vastly at home,
+when a lift of the tide bore him against a droll-looking bell-ringing
+fellow who carried above his head a tall metal tree hung with
+sherbet-glasses.
+
+The encounter set the glasses spinning and three or four spun off and
+clattered to the stones. The sherbet-seller called on all the saints,
+and Tony, clapping a lordly hand to his pocket, tossed him a ducat by
+mistake for a sequin. The fellow's eyes shot out of their orbits, and
+just then a personable-looking young man who had observed the
+transaction stepped up to Tony and said pleasantly, in English:
+
+"I perceive, sir, that you are not familiar with our currency."
+
+"Does he want more?" says Tony, very lordly; whereat the other laughed
+and replied: "You have given him enough to retire from his business and
+open a gaming-house over the arcade."
+
+Tony joined in the laugh, and this incident bridging the preliminaries,
+the two young men were presently hobnobbing over a glass of Canary in
+front of one of the coffee-houses about the square. Tony counted
+himself lucky to have run across an English-speaking companion who was
+good-natured enough to give him a clue to the labyrinth; and when he
+had paid for the Canary (in the coin his friend selected) they set out
+again to view the town. The Italian gentleman, who called himself Count
+Rialto, appeared to have a very numerous acquaintance, and was able to
+point out to Tony all the chief dignitaries of the state, the men of
+ton and ladies of fashion, as well as a number of other characters of a
+kind not openly mentioned in taking a census of Salem.
+
+Tony, who was not averse from reading when nothing better offered, had
+perused the "Merchant of Venice" and Mr. Otway's fine tragedy; but
+though these pieces had given him a notion that the social usages of
+Venice differed from those at home, he was unprepared for the
+surprising appearance and manners of the great people his friend named
+to him. The gravest Senators of the Republic went in prodigious striped
+trousers, short cloaks and feathered hats. One nobleman wore a ruff and
+doctor's gown, another a black velvet tunic slashed with rose-colour;
+while the President of the dreaded Council of Ten was a terrible
+strutting fellow with a rapier-like nose, a buff leather jerkin and a
+trailing scarlet cloak that the crowd was careful not to step on.
+
+It was all vastly diverting, and Tony would gladly have gone on
+forever; but he had given his word to the captain to be at the
+landing-place at sunset, and here was dusk already creeping over the
+skies! Tony was a man of honour; and having pressed on the Count a
+handsome damascened dagger selected from one of the goldsmiths' shops
+in a narrow street lined with such wares, he insisted on turning his
+face toward the Hepzibah's gig. The Count yielded reluctantly; but as
+they came out again on the square they were caught in a great throng
+pouring toward the doors of the cathedral.
+
+"They go to Benediction," said the Count. "A beautiful sight, with many
+lights and flowers. It is a pity you cannot take a peep at it."
+
+Tony thought so too, and in another minute a legless beggar had pulled
+back the leathern flap of the cathedral door, and they stood in a haze
+of gold and perfume that seemed to rise and fall on the mighty
+undulations of the organ. Here the press was as thick as without; and
+as Tony flattened himself against a pillar, he heard a pretty voice at
+his elbow:--"Oh, sir, oh, sir, your sword!"
+
+He turned at sound of the broken English, and saw a girl who matched
+the voice trying to disengage her dress from the tip of his scabbard.
+She wore one of the voluminous black hoods which the Venetian ladies
+affected, and under its projecting eaves her face spied out at him as
+sweet as a nesting bird.
+
+In the dusk their hands met over the scabbard, and as she freed herself
+a shred of her lace flounce clung to Tony's enchanted fingers. Looking
+after her, he saw she was on the arm of a pompous-looking graybeard in
+a long black gown and scarlet stockings, who, on perceiving the
+exchange of glances between the young people, drew the lady away with a
+threatening look.
+
+The Count met Tony's eye with a smile. "One of our Venetian beauties,"
+said he; "the lovely Polixena Cador. She is thought to have the finest
+eyes in Venice."
+
+"She spoke English," stammered Tony.
+
+"Oh--ah--precisely: she learned the language at the Court of Saint
+James's, where her father, the Senator, was formerly accredited as
+Ambassador. She played as an infant with the royal princes of England."
+
+"And that was her father?"
+
+"Assuredly: young ladies of Donna Polixena's rank do not go abroad save
+with their parents or a duenna."
+
+Just then a soft hand slid into Tony's. His heart gave a foolish bound,
+and he turned about half-expecting to meet again the merry eyes under
+the hood; but saw instead a slender brown boy, in some kind of fanciful
+page's dress, who thrust a folded paper between his fingers and
+vanished in the throng. Tony, in a tingle, glanced surreptitiously at
+the Count, who appeared absorbed in his prayers. The crowd, at the
+ringing of a bell, had in fact been overswept by a sudden wave of
+devotion; and Tony seized the moment to step beneath a lighted shrine
+with his letter.
+
+"I am in dreadful trouble and implore your help. Polixena"--he read;
+but hardly had he seized the sense of the words when a hand fell on his
+shoulder, and a stern-looking man in a cocked hat, and bearing a kind
+of rod or mace, pronounced a few words in Venetian.
+
+Tony, with a start, thrust the letter in his breast, and tried to jerk
+himself free; but the harder he jerked the tighter grew the other's
+grip, and the Count, presently perceiving what had happened, pushed his
+way through the crowd, and whispered hastily to his companion: "For
+God's sake, make no struggle. This is serious. Keep quiet and do as I
+tell you."
+
+Tony was no chicken-heart. He had something of a name for pugnacity
+among the lads of his own age at home, and was not the man to stand in
+Venice what he would have resented in Salem; but the devil of it was
+that this black fellow seemed to be pointing to the letter in his
+breast; and this suspicion was confirmed by the Count's agitated
+whisper.
+
+"This is one of the agents of the Ten.--For God's sake, no outcry." He
+exchanged a word or two with the mace-bearer and again turned to Tony.
+"You have been seen concealing a letter about your person--"
+
+"And what of that?" says Tony furiously.
+
+"Gently, gently, my master. A letter handed to you by the page of Donna
+Polixena Cador.--A black business! Oh, a very black business! This
+Cador is one of the most powerful nobles in Venice--I beseech you, not
+a word, sir! Let me think--deliberate--"
+
+His hand on Tony's shoulder, he carried on a rapid dialogue with the
+potentate in the cocked hat.
+
+"I am sorry, sir--but our young ladies of rank are as jealously guarded
+as the Grand Turk's wives, and you must be answerable for this scandal.
+The best I can do is to have you taken privately to the Palazzo Cador,
+instead of being brought before the Council. I have pleaded your youth
+and inexperience"--Tony winced at this--"and I think the business may
+still be arranged."
+
+Meanwhile the agent of the Ten had yielded his place to a
+sharp-featured shabby-looking fellow in black, dressed somewhat like a
+lawyer's clerk, who laid a grimy hand on Tony's arm, and with many
+apologetic gestures steered him through the crowd to the doors of the
+church. The Count held him by the other arm, and in this fashion they
+emerged on the square, which now lay in darkness save for the many
+lights twinkling under the arcade and in the windows of the
+gaming-rooms above it.
+
+Tony by this time had regained voice enough to declare that he would go
+where they pleased, but that he must first say a word to the mate of
+the Hepzibah, who had now been awaiting him some two hours or more at
+the landing-place.
+
+The Count repeated this to Tony's custodian, but the latter shook his
+head and rattled off a sharp denial.
+
+"Impossible, sir," said the Count. "I entreat you not to insist. Any
+resistance will tell against you in the end."
+
+Tony fell silent. With a rapid eye he was measuring his chances of
+escape. In wind and limb he was more than a mate for his captors, and
+boyhood's ruses were not so far behind him but he felt himself equal to
+outwitting a dozen grown men; but he had the sense to see that at a cry
+the crowd would close in on him. Space was what he wanted: a clear ten
+yards, and he would have laughed at Doge and Council. But the throng
+was thick as glue, and he walked on submissively, keeping his eye alert
+for an opening. Suddenly the mob swerved aside after some new show.
+Tony's fist shot out at the black fellow's chest, and before the latter
+could right himself the young New Englander was showing a clean pair of
+heels to his escort. On he sped, cleaving the crowd like a flood-tide
+in Gloucester bay, diving under the first arch that caught his eye,
+dashing down a lane to an unlit water-way, and plunging across a narrow
+hump-back bridge which landed him in a black pocket between walls. But
+now his pursuers were at his back, reinforced by the yelping mob. The
+walls were too high to scale, and for all his courage Tony's breath
+came short as he paced the masonry cage in which ill-luck had landed
+him. Suddenly a gate opened in one of the walls, and a slip of a
+servant wench looked out and beckoned him. There was no time to weigh
+chances. Tony dashed through the gate, his rescuer slammed and bolted
+it, and the two stood in a narrow paved well between high houses.
+
+
+II
+
+THE servant picked up a lantern and signed to Tony to follow her. They
+climbed a squalid stairway of stone, felt their way along a corridor,
+and entered a tall vaulted room feebly lit by an oil-lamp hung from the
+painted ceiling. Tony discerned traces of former splendour in his
+surroundings, but he had no time to examine them, for a figure started
+up at his approach and in the dim light he recognized the girl who was
+the cause of all his troubles.
+
+She sprang toward him with outstretched hands, but as he advanced her
+face changed and she shrank back abashed.
+
+"This is a misunderstanding--a dreadful misunderstanding," she cried
+out in her pretty broken English. "Oh, how does it happen that you are
+here?"
+
+"Through no choice of my own, madam, I assure you!" retorted Tony, not
+over-pleased by his reception.
+
+"But why--how--how did you make this unfortunate mistake?"
+
+"Why, madam, if you'll excuse my candour, I think the mistake was
+yours--"
+
+"Mine?"--"in sending me a letter--"
+
+"_You_--a letter?"--"by a simpleton of a lad, who must needs hand it
+to me under your father's very nose--"
+
+The girl broke in on him with a cry. "What! It was _you_ who received
+my letter?" She swept round on the little maid-servant and submerged
+her under a flood of Venetian. The latter volleyed back in the same
+jargon, and as she did so, Tony's astonished eye detected in her the
+doubleted page who had handed him the letter in Saint Mark's.
+
+"What!" he cried, "the lad was this girl in disguise?"
+
+Polixena broke off with an irrepressible smile; but her face clouded
+instantly and she returned to the charge.
+
+"This wicked, careless girl--she has ruined me, she will be my undoing!
+Oh, sir, how can I make you understand? The letter was not intended for
+you--it was meant for the English Ambassador, an old friend of my
+mother's, from whom I hoped to obtain assistance--oh, how can I ever
+excuse myself to you?"
+
+"No excuses are needed, madam," said Tony, bowing; "though I am
+surprised, I own, that any one should mistake me for an ambassador."
+
+Here a wave of mirth again overran Polixena's face. "Oh, sir, you must
+pardon my poor girl's mistake. She heard you speaking English,
+and--and--I had told her to hand the letter to the handsomest foreigner
+in the church." Tony bowed again, more profoundly. "The English
+Ambassador," Polixena added simply, "is a very handsome man."
+
+"I wish, madam, I were a better proxy!"
+
+She echoed his laugh, and then clapped her hands together with a look
+of anguish. "Fool that I am! How can I jest at such a moment? I am in
+dreadful trouble, and now perhaps I have brought trouble on you
+also--Oh, my father! I hear my father coming!" She turned pale and
+leaned tremblingly upon the little servant.
+
+Footsteps and loud voices were in fact heard outside, and a moment
+later the red-stockinged Senator stalked into the room attended by
+half-a-dozen of the magnificoes whom Tony had seen abroad in the
+square. At sight of him, all clapped hands to their swords and burst
+into furious outcries; and though their jargon was unintelligible to
+the young man, their tones and gestures made their meaning unpleasantly
+plain. The Senator, with a start of anger, first flung himself on the
+intruder; then, snatched back by his companions, turned wrathfully on
+his daughter, who, at his feet, with outstretched arms and streaming
+face, pleaded her cause with all the eloquence of young distress.
+Meanwhile the other nobles gesticulated vehemently among themselves,
+and one, a truculent-looking personage in ruff and Spanish cape,
+stalked apart, keeping a jealous eye on Tony. The latter was at his
+wit's end how to comport himself, for the lovely Polixena's tears had
+quite drowned her few words of English, and beyond guessing that the
+magnificoes meant him a mischief he had no notion what they would be at.
+
+At this point, luckily, his friend Count Rialto suddenly broke in on
+the scene, and was at once assailed by all the tongues in the room. He
+pulled a long face at sight of Tony, but signed to the young man to be
+silent, and addressed himself earnestly to the Senator. The latter, at
+first, would not draw breath to hear him; but presently, sobering, he
+walked apart with the Count, and the two conversed together out of
+earshot.
+
+"My dear sir," said the Count, at length turning to Tony with a
+perturbed countenance, "it is as I feared, and you are fallen into a
+great misfortune."
+
+"A great misfortune! A great trap, I call it!" shouted Tony, whose
+blood, by this time, was boiling; but as he uttered the word the
+beautiful Polixena cast such a stricken look on him that he blushed up
+to the forehead.
+
+"Be careful," said the Count, in a low tone. "Though his
+Illustriousness does not speak your language, he understands a few
+words of it, and--"
+
+"So much the better!" broke in Tony; "I hope he will understand me if I
+ask him in plain English what is his grievance against me."
+
+The Senator, at this, would have burst forth again; but the Count,
+stepping between, answered quickly: "His grievance against you is that
+you have been detected in secret correspondence with his daughter, the
+most noble Polixena Cador, the betrothed bride of this gentleman, the
+most illustrious Marquess Zanipolo--" and he waved a deferential hand
+at the frowning hidalgo of the cape and ruff.
+
+"Sir," said Tony, "if that is the extent of my offence, it lies with
+the young lady to set me free, since by her own avowal--" but here he
+stopped short, for, to his surprise, Polixena shot a terrified glance
+at him.
+
+"Sir," interposed the Count, "we are not accustomed in Venice to take
+shelter behind a lady's reputation."
+
+"No more are we in Salem," retorted Tony in a white heat. "I was merely
+about to remark that, by the young lady's avowal, she has never seen me
+before."
+
+Polixena's eyes signalled her gratitude, and he felt he would have died
+to defend her.
+
+The Count translated his statement, and presently pursued: "His
+Illustriousness observes that, in that case, his daughter's misconduct
+has been all the more reprehensible."
+
+"Her misconduct? Of what does he accuse her?"
+
+"Of sending you, just now, in the church of Saint Mark's, a letter
+which you were seen to read openly and thrust in your bosom. The
+incident was witnessed by his Illustriousness the Marquess Zanipolo,
+who, in consequence, has already repudiated his unhappy bride."
+
+Tony stared contemptuously at the black Marquess. "If his
+Illustriousness is so lacking in gallantry as to repudiate a lady on so
+trivial a pretext, it is he and not I who should be the object of her
+father's resentment."
+
+"That, my dear young gentleman, is hardly for you to decide. Your only
+excuse being your ignorance of our customs, it is scarcely for you to
+advise us how to behave in matters of punctilio."
+
+It seemed to Tony as though the Count were going over to his enemies,
+and the thought sharpened his retort.
+
+"I had supposed," said he, "that men of sense had much the same
+behaviour in all countries, and that, here as elsewhere, a gentleman
+would be taken at his word. I solemnly affirm that the letter I was
+seen to read reflects in no way on the honour of this young lady, and
+has in fact nothing to do with what you suppose."
+
+As he had himself no notion what the letter was about, this was as far
+as he dared commit himself.
+
+There was another brief consultation in the opposing camp, and the
+Count then said:--"We all know, sir, that a gentleman is obliged to
+meet certain enquiries by a denial; but you have at your command the
+means of immediately clearing the lady. Will you show the letter to her
+father?"
+
+There was a perceptible pause, during which Tony, while appearing to
+look straight before him, managed to deflect an interrogatory glance
+toward Polixena. Her reply was a faint negative motion, accompanied by
+unmistakable signs of apprehension.
+
+"Poor girl!" he thought, "she is in a worse case than I imagined, and
+whatever happens I must keep her secret."
+
+He turned to the Senator with a deep bow. "I am not," said he, "in the
+habit of showing my private correspondence to strangers."
+
+The Count interpreted these words, and Donna Polixena's father, dashing
+his hand on his hilt, broke into furious invective, while the Marquess
+continued to nurse his outraged feelings aloof.
+
+The Count shook his head funereally. "Alas, sir, it is as I feared.
+This is not the first time that youth and propinquity have led to fatal
+imprudence. But I need hardly, I suppose, point out the obligation
+incumbent upon you as a man of honour."
+
+Tony stared at him haughtily, with a look which was meant for the
+Marquess. "And what obligation is that?"
+
+"To repair the wrong you have done--in other words, to marry the lady."
+
+Polixena at this burst into tears, and Tony said to himself: "Why in
+heaven does she not bid me show the letter?" Then he remembered that it
+had no superscription, and that the words it contained, supposing them
+to have been addressed to himself, were hardly of a nature to disarm
+suspicion. The sense of the girl's grave plight effaced all thought of
+his own risk, but the Count's last words struck him as so preposterous
+that he could not repress a smile.
+
+"I cannot flatter myself," said he, "that the lady would welcome this
+solution."
+
+The Count's manner became increasingly ceremonious. "Such modesty," he
+said, "becomes your youth and inexperience; but even if it were
+justified it would scarcely alter the case, as it is always assumed in
+this country that a young lady wishes to marry the man whom her father
+has selected."
+
+"But I understood just now," Tony interposed, "that the gentleman
+yonder was in that enviable position."
+
+"So he was, till circumstances obliged him to waive the privilege in
+your favour."
+
+"He does me too much honour; but if a deep sense of my unworthiness
+obliges me to decline--"
+
+"You are still," interrupted the Count, "labouring under a
+misapprehension. Your choice in the matter is no more to be consulted
+than the lady's. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is necessary
+that you should marry her within the hour."
+
+Tony, at this, for all his spirit, felt the blood run thin in his
+veins. He looked in silence at the threatening visages between himself
+and the door, stole a side-glance at the high barred windows of the
+apartment, and then turned to Polixena, who had fallen sobbing at her
+father's feet.
+
+"And if I refuse?" said he.
+
+The Count made a significant gesture. "I am not so foolish as to
+threaten a man of your mettle. But perhaps you are unaware what the
+consequences would be to the lady."
+
+Polixena, at this, struggling to her feet, addressed a few impassioned
+words to the Count and her father; but the latter put her aside with an
+obdurate gesture.
+
+The Count turned to Tony. "The lady herself pleads for you--at what
+cost you do not guess--but as you see it is vain. In an hour his
+Illustriousness's chaplain will be here. Meanwhile his Illustriousness
+consents to leave you in the custody of your betrothed."
+
+He stepped back, and the other gentlemen, bowing with deep ceremony to
+Tony, stalked out one by one from the room. Tony heard the key turn in
+the lock, and found himself alone with Polixena.
+
+
+III
+
+THE girl had sunk into a chair, her face hidden, a picture of shame and
+agony. So moving was the sight that Tony once again forgot his own
+extremity in the view of her distress. He went and kneeled beside her,
+drawing her hands from her face.
+
+"Oh, don't make me look at you!" she sobbed; but it was on his bosom
+that she hid from his gaze. He held her there a breathing-space, as he
+might have clasped a weeping child; then she drew back and put him
+gently from her.
+
+"What humiliation!" she lamented.
+
+"Do you think I blame you for what has happened?"
+
+"Alas, was it not my foolish letter that brought you to this plight?
+And how nobly you defended me! How generous it was of you not to show
+the letter! If my father knew I had written to the Ambassador to save
+me from this dreadful marriage his anger against me would be even
+greater."
+
+"Ah--it was that you wrote for?" cried Tony with unaccountable relief.
+
+"Of course--what else did you think?"
+
+"But is it too late for the Ambassador to save you?"
+
+"From _you?_" A smile flashed through her tears. "Alas, yes." She drew
+back and hid her face again, as though overcome by a fresh wave of
+shame.
+
+Tony glanced about him. "If I could wrench a bar out of that window--"
+he muttered.
+
+"Impossible! The court is guarded. You are a prisoner, alas.--Oh, I
+must speak!" She sprang up and paced the room. "But indeed you can
+scarce think worse of me than you do already--"
+
+"I think ill of you?"
+
+"Alas, you must! To be unwilling to marry the man my father has chosen
+for me--"
+
+"Such a beetle-browed lout! It would be a burning shame if you married
+him."
+
+"Ah, you come from a free country. Here a girl is allowed no choice."
+
+"It is infamous, I say--infamous!"
+
+"No, no--I ought to have resigned myself, like so many others."
+
+"Resigned yourself to that brute! Impossible!"
+
+"He has a dreadful name for violence--his gondolier has told my little
+maid such tales of him! But why do I talk of myself, when it is of you
+I should be thinking?"
+
+"Of me, poor child?" cried Tony, losing his head.
+
+"Yes, and how to save you--for I _can_ save you! But every moment
+counts--and yet what I have to say is so dreadful."
+
+"Nothing from your lips could seem dreadful."
+
+"Ah, if he had had your way of speaking!"
+
+"Well, now at least you are free of him," said Tony, a little wildly;
+but at this she stood up and bent a grave look on him.
+
+"No, I am not free," she said; "but you are, if you will do as I tell
+you."
+
+Tony, at this, felt a sudden dizziness; as though, from a mad flight
+through clouds and darkness, he had dropped to safety again, and the
+fall had stunned him.
+
+"What am I to do?" he said.
+
+"Look away from me, or I can never tell you."
+
+He thought at first that this was a jest, but her eyes commanded him,
+and reluctantly he walked away and leaned in the embrasure of the
+window. She stood in the middle of the room, and as soon as his back
+was turned she began to speak in a quick monotonous voice, as though
+she were reciting a lesson.
+
+"You must know that the Marquess Zanipolo, though a great noble, is not
+a rich man. True, he has large estates, but he is a desperate
+spendthrift and gambler, and would sell his soul for a round sum of
+ready money.--If you turn round I shall not go on!--He wrangled
+horribly with my father over my dowry--he wanted me to have more than
+either of my sisters, though one married a Procurator and the other a
+grandee of Spain. But my father is a gambler too--oh, such fortunes as
+are squandered over the arcade yonder! And so--and so--don't turn, I
+implore you--oh, do you begin to see my meaning?"
+
+She broke off sobbing, and it took all his strength to keep his eyes
+from her.
+
+"Go on," he said.
+
+"Will you not understand? Oh, I would say anything to save you! You
+don't know us Venetians--we're all to be bought for a price. It is not
+only the brides who are marketable--sometimes the husbands sell
+themselves too. And they think you rich--my father does, and the
+others--I don't know why, unless you have shown your money too
+freely--and the English are all rich, are they not? And--oh, oh--do you
+understand? Oh, I can't bear your eyes!"
+
+She dropped into a chair, her head on her arms, and Tony in a flash was
+at her side.
+
+"My poor child, my poor Polixena!" he cried, and wept and clasped her.
+
+"You _are_ rich, are you not? You would promise them a ransom?" she
+persisted.
+
+"To enable you to marry the Marquess?"
+
+"To enable you to escape from this place. Oh, I hope I may never see
+your face again." She fell to weeping once more, and he drew away and
+paced the floor in a fever.
+
+Presently she sprang up with a fresh air of resolution, and pointed to
+a clock against the wall. "The hour is nearly over. It is quite true
+that my father is gone to fetch his chaplain. Oh, I implore you, be
+warned by me! There is no other way of escape."
+
+"And if I do as you say--?"
+
+"You are safe! You are free! I stake my life on it."
+
+"And you--you are married to that villain?"
+
+"But I shall have saved you. Tell me your name, that I may say it to
+myself when I am alone."
+
+"My name is Anthony. But you must not marry that fellow."
+
+"You forgive me, Anthony? You don't think too badly of me?"
+
+"I say you must not marry that fellow."
+
+She laid a trembling hand on his arm. "Time presses," she adjured him,
+"and I warn you there is no other way."
+
+For a moment he had a vision of his mother, sitting very upright, on a
+Sunday evening, reading Dr. Tillotson's sermons in the best parlour at
+Salem; then he swung round on the girl and caught both her hands in
+his. "Yes, there is," he cried, "if you are willing. Polixena, let the
+priest come!"
+
+She shrank back from him, white and radiant. "Oh, hush, be silent!" she
+said.
+
+"I am no noble Marquess, and have no great estates," he cried. "My
+father is a plain India merchant in the colony of Massachusetts--but if
+you--"
+
+"Oh, hush, I say! I don't know what your long words mean. But I bless
+you, bless you, bless you on my knees!" And she knelt before him, and
+fell to kissing his hands.
+
+He drew her up to his breast and held her there.
+
+"You are willing, Polixena?" he said.
+
+"No, no!" She broke from him with outstretched hands. "I am not
+willing. You mistake me. I must marry the Marquess, I tell you!"
+
+"On my money?" he taunted her; and her burning blush rebuked him.
+
+"Yes, on your money," she said sadly.
+
+"Why? Because, much as you hate him, you hate me still more?"
+
+She was silent.
+
+"If you hate me, why do you sacrifice yourself for me?" he persisted.
+
+"You torture me! And I tell you the hour is past."
+
+"Let it pass. I'll not accept your sacrifice. I will not lift a finger
+to help another man to marry you."
+
+"Oh, madman, madman!" she murmured.
+
+Tony, with crossed arms, faced her squarely, and she leaned against the
+wall a few feet off from him. Her breast throbbed under its lace and
+falbalas, and her eyes swam with terror and entreaty.
+
+"Polixena, I love you!" he cried.
+
+A blush swept over her throat and bosom, bathing her in light to the
+verge of her troubled brows.
+
+"I love you! I love you!" he repeated.
+
+And now she was on his breast again, and all their youth was in their
+lips. But her embrace was as fleeting as a bird's poise and before he
+knew it he clasped empty air, and half the room was between them.
+
+She was holding up a little coral charm and laughing. "I took it from
+your fob," she said. "It is of no value, is it? And I shall not get any
+of the money, you know."
+
+She continued to laugh strangely, and the rouge burned like fire in her
+ashen face.
+
+"What are you talking of?" he said.
+
+"They never give me anything but the clothes I wear. And I shall never
+see you again, Anthony!" She gave him a dreadful look. "Oh, my poor
+boy, my poor love--'_I love you, I love you, Polixena!_'"
+
+He thought she had turned light-headed, and advanced to her with
+soothing words; but she held him quietly at arm's length, and as he
+gazed he read the truth in her face.
+
+He fell back from her, and a sob broke from him as he bowed his head on
+his hands.
+
+"Only, for God's sake, have the money ready, or there may be foul play
+here," she said.
+
+As she spoke there was a great tramping of steps outside and a burst of
+voices on the threshold.
+
+"It is all a lie," she gasped out, "about my marriage, and the
+Marquess, and the Ambassador, and the Senator--but not, oh, not about
+your danger in this place--or about my love," she breathed to him. And
+as the key rattled in the door she laid her lips on his brow.
+
+The key rattled, and the door swung open--but the black-cassocked
+gentleman who stepped in, though a priest indeed, was no votary of
+idolatrous rites, but that sound orthodox divine, the Reverend Ozias
+Mounce, looking very much perturbed at his surroundings, and very much
+on the alert for the Scarlet Woman. He was supported, to his evident
+relief, by the captain of the Hepzibah B., and the procession was
+closed by an escort of stern-looking fellows in cocked hats and
+small-swords, who led between them Tony's late friends the magnificoes,
+now as sorry a looking company as the law ever landed in her net.
+
+The captain strode briskly into the room, uttering a grunt of
+satisfaction as he clapped eyes on Tony.
+
+"So, Mr. Bracknell," said he, "you have been seeing the Carnival with
+this pack of mummers, have you? And this is where your pleasuring has
+landed you? H'm--a pretty establishment, and a pretty lady at the head
+of it." He glanced about the apartment and doffed his hat with mock
+ceremony to Polixena, who faced him like a princess.
+
+"Why, my girl," said he, amicably, "I think I saw you this morning in
+the square, on the arm of the Pantaloon yonder; and as for that Captain
+Spavent--" and he pointed a derisive finger at the Marquess--"I've
+watched him drive his bully's trade under the arcade ever since I first
+dropped anchor in these waters. Well, well," he continued, his
+indignation subsiding, "all's fair in Carnival, I suppose, but this
+gentleman here is under sailing orders, and I fear we must break up
+your little party."
+
+At this Tony saw Count Rialto step forward, looking very small and
+explanatory, and uncovering obsequiously to the captain.
+
+"I can assure you, sir," said the Count in his best English, "that this
+incident is the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding, and if you
+will oblige us by dismissing these myrmidons, any of my friends here
+will be happy to offer satisfaction to Mr. Bracknell and his
+companions."
+
+Mr. Mounce shrank visibly at this, and the captain burst into a loud
+guffaw.
+
+"Satisfaction?" says he. "Why, my cock, that's very handsome of you,
+considering the rope's at your throats. But we'll not take advantage of
+your generosity, for I fear Mr. Bracknell has already trespassed on it
+too long. You pack of galley-slaves, you!" he spluttered suddenly,
+"decoying young innocents with that devil's bait of yours--" His eye
+fell on Polixena, and his voice softened unaccountably. "Ah, well, we
+must all see the Carnival once, I suppose," he said. "All's well that
+ends well, as the fellow says in the play; and now, if you please, Mr.
+Bracknell, if you'll take the reverend gentleman's arm there, we'll bid
+adieu to our hospitable entertainers, and right about face for the
+Hepzibah."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Descent of Man and Other Stories, by
+Edith Wharton
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