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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Average, by Brand Whitlock

-

-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/license

-

-

-Title: The Happy Average

-

-Author: Brand Whitlock

-

-Illustrator: Howard Chandler Christy

-

-Release Date: May 23, 2014 [EBook #45728]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: ASCII

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY AVERAGE ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by Peter Bayes, Roger Frank and the online

-Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at

-http://www.pgdpcanada.net

-

-

-

-

-

-[Illustration]

-

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

-

-                           The Happy Average

-

-                           By BRAND WHITLOCK

-

-                               AUTHOR OF

-                   "Her Infinite Variety," "The 13th

-                            District, etc."

-

-                             ILLUSTRATED BY

-                        HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY

-

-                           A. L. BURT COMPANY

-                         Publishers    New York

-

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

-

-                            COPYRIGHT, 1904

-                       THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

-

-                                OCTOBER

-

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

-

-                           The Happy Average

-

-                               CHAPTER I

-

-                          A YOUNG MAN'S FANCY

-

-"Come on, old man."

-

-Lawrence led the way with a jaunty step that was intended to show his

-easy footing with the Carters. But Marley lagged behind. Even if calling

-on girls had not been such a serious business with him, he could not

-forget that he was just graduated from college and that a certain

-dignity befitted him. He wished Lawrence would not speak so loud; the

-girls might hear, and think he was afraid; he wished to keep the truth

-from them as long as possible. He had already caught a glimpse of the

-girls, or thought he had, but before he could make sure, the vague white

-figures on the veranda stirred; he heard a scurrying, and the loose bang

-of a screen door. Then it was still. Lawrence laughed--somehow, as

-Marley felt, derisively.

-

-The way from the sidewalk up to the Carters' veranda was not long, of

-course, though it seemed long to Marley, and Marley's deliberation made

-it seem long to Lawrence. They paused at the steps of the veranda, and

-Lawrence made a low bow.

-

-"Good evening, Mrs. Carter," he said. "Ah, Captain, you here too?"

-

-Marley had not noticed the captain, or Mrs. Carter; they sat there so

-quietly, enjoying the cool of the evening, or such cool as a July

-evening can find in central Ohio.

-

-"My friend, Mr. Marley, Mrs. Carter--Glenn Marley--you've heard of him,

-Captain."

-

-Marley bowed and said something. The presentation there in the darkness

-made it rather difficult for him, and neither the captain nor his wife

-moved. Lawrence sat down on the steps and fanned himself with his hat.

-

-"Been a hot day, Captain," he said. "Think there's any sign of rain?" He

-sniffed the air. The captain did not need to sniff the air to be able to

-reply, in a voice that rumbled up from his bending figure, that he had

-no hope of any.

-

-"Mayme's home, ain't she?" asked Lawrence, turning to Mrs. Carter.

-

-"I'll go see," said Mrs. Carter, and she rose quickly, as if glad to get

-away, and the screen door slammed again.

-

-"Billy was in the bank to-day," Lawrence went on, speaking to Captain

-Carter. "He said your wheat was ready to cut. Did you get Foose all

-right?"

-

-"Yes," said the captain, "he'll give me next week."

-

-"Do you have to board the threshers?"

-

-"No, not this year; they bring along their own cook, and a tent and

-everything."

-

-"Je-rusalem!" exclaimed Lawrence. "Things _are_ changing in these days,

-ain't they? Harvesting ain't as hard on the women-folks as it used to

-be."

-

-"No," said the captain, "but I pay for it, so much extra a bushel."

-

-His head shook regretfully, but he would have lost his regrets in

-telling of the time when he had swung a cradle all day in the harvest

-field, had not Mrs. Carter's voice just then been heard calling up the

-stairs:

-

-"Mayme!"

-

-"Whoo!" answered a high, feminine voice.

-

-"Come down. There's some one here to see you."

-

-Mrs. Carter turned into the parlor, and the tall windows that opened to

-the floor of the veranda burst into light.

-

-"She'll be right down, John," said Mrs. Carter, appearing in the door.

-"You give me your hats and go right in."

-

-"All right," said Lawrence, and he got to his feet. "Come on, Glenn."

-

-Mrs. Carter took the hats of the young men and hung them on the rack,

-where they might easily have hung them themselves. Then she went back to

-the veranda, letting the screen door bang behind her, and Lawrence and

-Marley entered the parlor. Marley took his seat on one of the haircloth

-chairs that seemed to have ranged themselves permanently along the

-walls, and Lawrence went to the square piano that stood across one

-corner of the room, and sat down tentatively on the stool, swinging from

-side to side.

-

-Marley glanced at the pictures on the walls. One of them was a steel

-engraving of Lincoln and his cabinet; another, in a black oval frame,

-portrayed Captain Carter in uniform, his hair dusting the strapped

-shoulders of a coat made after the pattern that seems to have been worn

-so uncomfortably by the heroes of the Civil War. There was, however, a

-later picture of the captain, a crayon enlargement of a photograph, that

-had taken him in civilian garb. This picture, in its huge gilt frame,

-was the most aggressive thing in the room, except, possibly, the walnut

-what-not. Marley had a great fear of the what-not; it seemed to him that

-if he stirred he must topple it over, and dash its load of trinkets to

-the floor. Presently he heard the swish of skirts. Then a tall girl came

-in, and Lawrence sprang to his feet.

-

-"Hello, Mayme. What'd you run for?" he said.

-

-He had crossed the room and seized the girl's hand. She flashed a rebuke

-at him, though it was evident that the rebuke was more out of deference

-to the strange presence of Marley than for any real resentment she felt.

-

-"This is my friend, Mr. Marley, Miss Carter," Lawrence said. "You've

-heard me speak of him."

-

-Marley edged away from the what-not, rose and took the hand the girl

-gave him. Then Miss Carter crossed to the black haircloth sofa and

-seated herself, smoothing out her skirts.

-

-"Didn't know what to do, so we thought we'd come out and see you," said

-Lawrence.

-

-"Oh, indeed!" said Miss Carter. "Well, it's too bad about you. We'll do

-when you can't find anybody else to put up with you, eh?"

-

-"Oh, yes, you'll do in a pinch," chaffed Lawrence.

-

-"Well, can't you find a comfortable seat?" the girl asked, still

-addressing Lawrence, who had gone back to the piano stool.

-

-"I'm going to play in a minute," said Lawrence, "and sing."

-

-"Well, excuse _me_!" implored Miss Carter. "Do let me get you a seat."

-

-Lawrence promptly went over to the sofa and leaned back in one corner of

-it, affecting a discomfort.

-

-"Can't I get you a pillow, Mr. Lawrence?" Miss Carter asked presently.

-"Or perhaps a cot; I believe there's one somewhere in the attic."

-

-"Oh, I reckon I can stand it," said Lawrence.

-

-Marley had regained his seat on the edge of the slippery chair.

-

-"Where's Vinie?" asked Lawrence.

-

-"She's coming," answered Miss Carter.

-

-"Taking out her curl papers, eh?" said Lawrence. "She needn't mind us."

-

-Miss Carter pretended a disgust, but as she was framing a retort,

-somehow, the eyes of all of them turned toward the hall door. A girl in

-a gown of white stood there clasping and unclasping her hands curiously,

-and looking from one to another of those in the room.

-

-"Come in, Lavinia," said Miss Carter. Something had softened her voice.

-The girl stepped into the room almost timidly.

-

-"Miss Blair," said Miss Carter, "let me introduce Mr. Marley."

-

-The sudden consciousness that he had been sitting--and staring--smote

-Marley, and he sprang to his feet. Embarrassment overpowered him and he

-bowed awkwardly. Lawrence had been silent, and his silence had been a

-long one for him. Seeming to recognize this he hastened to say:

-

-"Well, how's the world using you, Vinie?"

-

-The girl smiled and answered:

-

-"Oh, pretty well, thank you, Jack."

-

-It grated on Marley to hear her called Vinie. Lavinia Blair! Lavinia

-Blair! That was her name. He had heard it before, of course, yet it had

-never sounded as it did now when he repeated it to himself. The girl had

-seated herself in a rocking-chair across the room, almost out of range,

-as it were. He was rather glad of this, if anything. It seemed to

-relieve him of the duty of talking to her. He supposed, of course, they

-would pair off somehow. The young people always did in Macochee. He

-supposed he had been brought there to pair off with Lavinia Blair. He

-liked the thought, yet the position had its responsibilities. Somehow he

-never could forget that he could not dance. He hoped they would not

-propose dancing. He always had a fear of that in making calls, and all

-the calls he made seemed to come to it soon or late; some one always

-proposed it.

-

-Marley was aware that Lawrence and Mayme Carter had resumed the exchange

-of their rude repartee, though he did not know what they had said. They

-kept laughing, too. Lavinia Blair seemed to join in the laughter if not

-in the badinage. Marley wished he might join in it. Jack Lawrence was

-evidently funnier than ever that night; Mayme Carter was convulsed. Now

-and then Lawrence said something to her in a tone too low for the others

-to hear, and these remarks pushed her to the verge of hysterics. Marley

-had a notion they were laughing at him.

-

-Meanwhile Lavinia Blair sat with her hands in her lap, smiling as though

-she were amused. Marley wondered if he amused her. He felt that he ought

-to say something, but he did not know what to say. He thought of several

-things, but, as he turned them over in his mind, he was convinced that

-they were not appropriate. So he sat and looked at Lavinia Blair, looked

-at her eyes, her mouth, her hair. He thought he had never seen such a

-complexion.

-

-Mayme Carter had snatched her handkerchief back from Lawrence, and

-retreated to her end of the sofa. There she sat up stiffly, folded her

-hands, and, though her mirth still shook her spasmodically, she said:

-

-"Now, Jack, behave yourself."

-

-Lawrence burlesqued a surprise, and said:

-

-"I'll leave it to Vine if I've done anything."

-

-Marley wondered how much further abbreviation Lavinia Blair's name would

-stand, but he was suddenly aware that he was being addressed. Miss

-Carter, with an air of dismissing Lawrence, said:

-

-"You have not been in Macochee long, have you, Mr. Marley?"

-

-Marley admitted that he had not, but said that he liked the town. When

-Lawrence explained that Marley was going to settle down there and become

-one of them, Miss Carter said she was awfully glad, but warned him

-against associating too much with Lawrence. This embarrassed Marley, if

-it did not Lawrence, and he immediately gave the scene to Lawrence, who

-guessed he would sing his song. To do so he went to the piano, and began

-to pick over the frayed sheets of music that lay on its green cover. To

-forestall him, however, Miss Carter rushed across the room and slid on

-to the piano stool herself, saying breathlessly:

-

-"Anything to stop that!"

-

-She struck a few vagrant chords, and Marley, glad of a subject on which

-he could express himself, pleaded with her to play. At last she did so.

-When she had finished, Lawrence clapped his hands loudly, and stopped

-only when a voice startled them. It was Mrs. Carter calling through the

-window:

-

-"Play your new piece, Mayme!"

-

-Miss Carter demurred, but after they had argued the question through the

-window, the daughter gave in, and played it. The music soothed Lawrence

-to silence, and when Miss Carter completed her little repertoire, his

-mockery could recover itself no further than to say:

-

-"Won't you favor us, Miss Blair?"

-

-When Lavinia Blair declined, he struck an imploring attitude and said:

-

-"Oh, please do! We're dying to hear you. You didn't leave your music at

-home, did you?"

-

-Marley heard the chairs scraping on the veranda, and the screen door

-slammed once more. Then he heard Captain Carter go up the stairs, while

-Mrs. Carter halted in the doorway of the parlor long enough to say:

-

-"You lock the front door when you come up, Mayme."

-

-Mayme without turning replied "All right," and when her mother had

-disappeared she said:

-

-"It's awful hot in here, let's go outside."

-

-Marley found himself strolling in the yard with Lavinia Blair. The moon

-had not risen, but the girl's throat and arms gleamed in the starlight;

-her white dress seemed to be a cloud of gauze; she floated, rather than

-walked, there by his side. They paused by the gate. About them were the

-voices of the summer night, the crickets, the katydids, far away the

-frogs, chirping musically. They stood a while in the silence, and then

-they turned, and were talking again.

-

-Marley did most of the talking, and all he said was about himself,

-though he did not realize that this was so. He had already told her of

-his life in the towns where his father had preached before he came to

-Macochee, and of his four years in college at Delaware. He tried to give

-her some notion of the sense of alienation he had felt as the son of an

-itinerant Methodist minister; for him no place had ever taken on the

-warm color and expression of home. He explained that as yet he knew

-little of Macochee, having been away at college when his father moved

-there the preceding fall. It was so easy to talk to her, and as he told

-her of his ambitions, the things he was going to do became so many, and

-so easy. He was going to become a lawyer; he thought he should go to

-Cincinnati.

-

-"And leave Macochee?" said Lavinia Blair.

-

-Marley caught his breath.

-

-"Would you care?" he whispered.

-

-She did not answer. He heard the crickets, the katydids, the frogs

-again; there came the perfume of the lilacs, late flowering that year;

-the heavy odor of a shrub almost overpowered him.

-

-"My father is a lawyer," Lavinia said.

-

-They had turned off the path, and were wandering over the lawn. The dew

-sparkled on it; and Marley became solicitous.

-

-"Won't you get your feet wet?" he asked.

-

-The girl laughed at the idea, but she caught up her skirts, and they

-wandered on in the shade of the tall elms. Marley did not know where

-they were. The yard seemed an endless garden, immense, unknown,

-enchanted; the dark trees all around him stood like the forest of some

-park, and the lawn stretched away to fall over endless terraces; he

-imagined statues and fountains gleaming in the heavy shadows of the

-trees. The house seemed lost in the distance, though he felt its

-presence there behind him.

-

-Once he saw the twinkle of a passing light in an upper story. He could

-no longer hear the voices of Mayme and Lawrence, but he caught the

-tinkling notes of a banjo, away off somewhere. Its music was very sweet.

-They strolled on, their feet swishing in the damp grass, then suddenly

-there was a rush, a loud barking, and a dog sprang at them out of the

-darkness. Lavinia gave a little cry. Marley was startled; he felt that

-he must run, yet he thought of the girl beside him. He must not let her

-see his fear. He stepped in front of her. He could feel her draw more

-closely to him, and he thrilled as the sense of his protectorship came

-to him. He must think of some heroic scheme of vanquishing the dog, but

-it stopped in its mad rush, and Lavinia, standing aside, said:

-

-"Why, it's only Sport!"

-

-They laughed, and their laugh was the happier because of the relief from

-their fear.

-

-"We must have wandered around behind the house," said Lavinia. "There's

-the shed."

-

-They turned, and went back. The enchantment of the yard had departed.

-Marley seemed to see things clearly once more, though his heart still

-beat as he felt the delicious sense of protectorship that had come over

-him as Lavinia shrank to his side at the moment the dog rushed at them.

-Nor could he ever forget her face as she smiled up at him in the little

-opening they came into on the side lawn. The young moon was just sailing

-over the trees. As they approached the veranda, Lawrence's voice called

-out of the darkness:

-

-"Well, where have you young folks been stealing away to?"

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER II

-

-                              WADE POWELL

-

-

-Marley halted at the threshold and glanced up at the sign that swung

-over the doorway. The gilt lettering of the sign had long ago been

-tarnished, and where its black sanded paint had peeled in many weathers

-the original tin was as rusty as the iron arm from which it creaked. Yet

-Macochee had long since lost its need of the shingle to tell it where

-Wade Powell's law office was. It had been for many years in one of the

-little rooms of the low brick building in Miami Street, just across from

-the Court House; it was almost as much of an institution as the Court

-House itself, with which its triumphs and its trials were identified.

-Marley gathered enough courage from his inspection of the sign to enter,

-but once inside, he hesitated. Then a heavy voice spoke.

-

-"Well, come in," it said peremptorily.

-

-Wade Powell, sitting with his feet on his table, held his newspaper

-aside and looked at Marley over his spectacles. Marley had had an ideal

-of Wade Powell, and now he had to pause long enough to relinquish the

-ideal and adjust himself to the reality. The hair was as disordered as

-his young fancy would have had it, but it was thinner than he had known

-it in his dreams, and its black was streaked with gray. The face was

-smooth-shaven, which accorded with his notion, though it had not been

-shaven as recently as he felt it should have been. But he could not

-reconcile himself to the spectacles that rested on Powell's nose, and

-pressed their bows into the flesh of his temples--the eagle eyes of the

-Wade Powell of his imagination had never known glasses.

-

-When Wade Powell slowly pulled his spectacles from his nose and tossed

-them on to the table before him, he bent his eyes on Marley, and their

-gaze, under their heavy brows, somewhat restored him, but it could not

-atone for the disappointment. Perhaps the disappointment that Marley

-felt in this moment came from some dim, unrealized sense that Wade

-Powell was growing old. The spectacles, the gray in his hair, the

-wrinkles in his face, the looseness of the skin at his jaws and at his

-throat--where a fold of it hung between the points of his collar--all

-told that Wade Powell had passed the invisible line which marks life's

-summit, and that his face was turned now toward the evening. There was

-the touch of sadness in the indistinct conception of him as a man who

-had not altogether realized the ambitions of his youth or the

-predictions of his friends, and the sadness came from the intuition that

-the failure or the half-failure was not of the heroic kind.

-

-The office in which he sat, and on which, in the long years, he had

-impressed his character, was untidy; the floor was dirty, the books on

-the shelves were dusty and leaning all awry; the set of the Ohio reports

-had not been kept up to date; one might have told by a study of them at

-just what period enterprise and energy had faltered, while the gaps here

-and there showed how an uncalculating generosity had helped a natural

-indolence by lending indiscriminately to other lawyers, who, with the

-lack of respect for the moral of the laws they pretended to revere, had

-borrowed with no thought of returning.

-

-Two or three pictures hung crookedly on the walls; the table at which

-Powell sat was old and scarred; its ink-stand had long ago gone dry and

-been abandoned; a cheap bottle, with its cork rolling tipsily by its

-side, had taken the ink-stand's place. The papers scattered over the

-table had an air of hopelessness, as though they had grown tired, like

-the clients they represented, in waiting for Powell's attention. The

-half-open door at the back led into a room that had been, and possibly

-might yet be, used as a private office or consulting room, should any

-one care to brave its darkness and its dust; but as for Wade Powell, it

-was plain that he preferred to sit democratically in the outer office,

-where all might see him, and, what was of more importance to him, where

-he might see all.

-

-The one new thing in the room was a typewriter, standing on its little

-sewing-machine table, in the corner of the room. There was no

-stenographer nor any chair for one; Marley imagined Powell, whenever he

-had occasion to write, sitting down to the machine himself, and picking

-out his pleadings painfully, laboriously and slowly, letter by letter,

-using only his index fingers. And this somehow humbled his ideal the

-more. Marley almost wished he hadn't come.

-

-"What's on your mind, young man?" said Wade Powell, leaning back in his

-chair and dropping his long arm at his side until his newspaper swept

-the floor. Marley had seated himself in a wooden chair that was

-evidently intended for clients, and he began nervously.

-

-"Well, I--"

-

-Here he stopped, overcome again by an embarrassment. A smile spread over

-Wade Powell's face, a gentle smile with a winning quality in it, and his

-face to Marley became young again.

-

-"Tell your troubles," he said. "I've confessed all the young men in

-Macochee for twenty-five years. Yes--thirty-five--" He grew suddenly

-sober as he numbered the years and then exclaimed as if to himself:

-

-"My God! Has it been that long?"

-

-He took out his watch and looked at it as if it must somehow correct his

-reckoning. For a moment, then, he thought; his gaze was far away. But

-Marley brought him back when he said:

-

-"I only want--I only want to study law."

-

-"Oh!" said Powell, and he seemed somehow relieved. "Is that all?"

-

-To Marley this seemed quite enough, and the disappointment he felt,

-which was a part of the effect Wade Powell's office had had on him,

-showed suddenly in his face. Powell glanced quickly at him, and hastened

-to reassure him.

-

-"We can fix that easily enough," he said. "Have you ever read any law?"

-

-"No," said Marley.

-

-"Been to college?"

-

-Marley told him that he had just that summer been graduated and when he

-mentioned the name of the college Powell said:

-

-"The Methodists, eh?"

-

-He could hardly conceal a certain contempt in the tone with which he

-said this, and then, as if instantly regretting the unkindness, he

-observed:

-

-"It's a good school, I'm told."

-

-He could not, however, evince an entire approval, and so seeming to

-desert the subject he hastened on:

-

-"What's your name?"

-

-"Glenn Marley."

-

-"Oh!" Wade Powell dropped his feet to the floor and sat upright. "Are

-you Preacher Marley's son?"

-

-Marley did not like to hear his father called "Preacher," and when he

-said that he was the son of Doctor Marley, Powell remarked:

-

-"I've heard him preach, and he's a damn good preacher too, I want to

-tell you."

-

-Marley warmed under this profane indorsement. He had always, from a boy,

-felt somehow that he must defend his father's position as a preacher

-from the world, as with the little world of his boyhood and youth he had

-always had to defend his own position as the son of a preacher.

-

-"Yes, sir, he's a good preacher, and a good man," Powell went on. He had

-taken a cigar from his pocket and was nipping the end from it with his

-teeth. He lighted it, and leaned back comfortably again to smoke, and

-then in tardy hospitality he drew another cigar from his waistcoat

-pocket and held it toward Marley.

-

-"Smoke?" he said, and then he added apologetically, "I didn't think; I

-never do."

-

-Marley declined the cigar, but Powell pressed it on him, saying:

-

-"Well, your father does, I'll bet. Give it to him with Wade Powell's

-compliments. He won't hesitate to smoke with a publican and sinner."

-

-Marley smiled and put the cigar away in his pocket.

-

-"I don't know, though," Powell went on slowly, speaking as much to

-himself as to Marley, while he watched the thick white clouds he rolled

-from his lips, "that he'd want you to be in my office. I know some of

-the _brethren_ wouldn't approve. They'd think I'd contaminate you."

-

-Marley would have hastened to reassure Powell had he known how to do so

-without seeming to recognize the possibility of contamination; but while

-he hesitated Powell avoided the necessity for him by asking:

-

-"Did your father send you to me?"

-

-He looked at Marley eagerly, and with an expression of unfounded hope,

-as he awaited the answer.

-

-"No," replied Marley, "he doesn't know. I haven't talked with him at

-all. I have to do something and I've always thought I'd go into the law.

-I presume it would be better to go to a law school, but father couldn't

-afford that after putting me through college. I thought I could read law

-in some office, and maybe get admitted that way."

-

-"Sure," said Powell, "it's easy enough. You'll have to learn the law

-after you get to practising anyway--and there isn't much to learn at

-that. It's mostly a fake."

-

-Marley looked at him in some alarm, at this new smiting of an idol.

-

-"I began to read law," Powell went on, "under old Judge Colwin--that is,

-what I read. I used to sit at the window with a book in my lap and watch

-the girls go by. Still," he added with a tone of doing himself some

-final justice, "it was a liberal education to sit under the old judge's

-drippings. I learned more that way than I ever did at the law school."

-

-He smoked on a moment, ruminating on his lost youth; then, bringing

-himself around to business again, he said:

-

-"How'd you happen to come to me?"

-

-"Well," said Marley, haltingly, "I'd heard a good deal of you--and I

-thought I'd like you, and then I've heard father speak of you."

-

-"You have?" said Powell, looking up quickly.

-

-"Yes."

-

-"What'd he say?"

-

-"Well, he said you were a great orator and he said you were always with

-the under dog. He said he liked that."

-

-Powell turned his eyes away and his face reddened.

-

-"Well, let's see. If you think your father would approve of your sitting

-at the feet of such a Gamaliel as I, we can--" He was squinting

-painfully at his book-shelves. "Is that Blackstone over there on the top

-shelf?"

-

-Marley got up and glanced along the backs of the dingy books, their

-calfskin bindings deeply browned by the years, their red and black

-labels peeling off.

-

-"Here's Blackstone," he said, taking down a book, "but it's the second

-volume."

-

-"Second volume, eh? Don't see the first around anywhere, do you?"

-

-Marley looked, without finding it.

-

-"Then see if Walker's there."

-

-Marley looked again.

-

-"Walker's _American Law_," Powell explained.

-

-"I don't see it," Marley said.

-

-"No, I reckon not," assented Powell, "some one's borrowed it. I seem to

-run a sort of circulating library of legal works in this town, without

-fines--though we have statutes against petit larceny. Well, hand me

-Swan's _Treatise_. That's it, on the end of the second shelf."

-

-Marley took down the book, and gave it to Powell. While Marley dusted

-his begrimed fingers with his handkerchief, Powell blew the dust off the

-top of the book; he slapped it on the arm of his chair, the dust flying

-from it at every stroke. He picked up his spectacles, put them on and

-turned over the first few leaves of the book.

-

-"You might begin on that," he said presently, "until we can borrow a

-Blackstone or a Walker for you. This book is the best law-book ever

-written anyway; the law's all there. If you knew all that contains, you

-could go in any court and get along without giving yourself away; which

-is the whole duty of a lawyer."

-

-He closed the book and gave it to Marley, who was somewhat at a loss;

-this was the final disappointment. He had thought that his introduction

-into the mysteries of the noble profession should be attended by some

-sort of ceremony. He looked at the book in his hand quite helplessly and

-then looked up at Powell.

-

-"Is that--all?" he said.

-

-"Why, yes," Powell answered. "Isn't that enough?"

-

-"I thought--that is, that I might have some duties. How am I to begin?"

-

-"Why, just open the book to the first page and read that, then turn over

-to the second page and read that, and so on--till you get to the end."

-

-"What will my hours be?"

-

-"Your hours?" said Powell, as if he did not understand. "Oh, just suit

-yourself."

-

-Marley was looking at the book again.

-

-"Don't you make any entry--any memorandum?" he asked, still unable to

-separate himself from the idea that something formal, something legal,

-should mark the beginning of such an important epoch.

-

-"Oh, you keep track of the date," said Powell, "and at the end of three

-years I'll give you a certificate. You may find that you can do most of

-your reading at home, but come around."

-

-Marley looked about the office, trying to imagine himself in this new

-situation.

-

-"I'd like, you know," he said, "to do something, if I could, to repay

-you for your trouble."

-

-"That's all right, my boy," said Powell. Then he added as if the thought

-had just come to him:

-

-"Say, can you run a typewriter?"

-

-"I can learn."

-

-"Well, that's more than I can do," said Powell, glancing at his new

-machine. "I've tried, but it would take a stationary engineer to operate

-that thing. You might help out with my letters and my pleadings now and

-then. And I'd like to have you around. You'd make good company."

-

-"Well," said Marley, "I'll be here in the morning." He still clung to

-the idea that he was to be a part of the office, to be an identity in

-the local machinery of the law. As he rose to go, a young man appeared

-in the doorway. He was tall, and the English cap and the rough Scotch

-suit he wore, with the trousers rolled up over his heavy tan shoes,

-enabled Marley to identify him instantly as young Halliday. He was

-certain of this when Powell, looking up, said indifferently:

-

-"Hello, George. Raining in London?"

-

-"Oh, I say, Powell," replied Halliday, ignoring a taunt that had grown

-familiar to him, "that Zeller case--we would like to have that go over

-to the fall term, if you don't mind."

-

-"Why don't you settle it?" asked Powell.

-

-Halliday was leaning against the door-post, and had drawn a short brier

-pipe from his pocket. Before he answered, he paused long enough to fill

-it with tobacco. Then he said:

-

-"You'll have to see the governor about that--it's a case he's been

-looking after."

-

-"Oh, well," said Powell, with his easy acquiescence, "all right."

-

-Halliday had pressed the tobacco into the bowl of the pipe and struck a

-match.

-

-"Then, I'll tell old Bill," he said, pausing in his sentence to light

-his pipe, "to mark it off the assignment."

-

-Marley watched Halliday saunter away, with a feeling that mixed

-admiration with amazement. He could not help admiring his clothes, and

-he felt drawn toward him as a college man from a school so much greater

-than his own, though he felt some resentment because Halliday had never

-once given a sign that he was aware of Marley's presence. His amazement

-came from the utter disrespect with which Halliday referred to Judge

-Blair. Old Bill! Marley had caught his breath. He would have liked to

-discuss Halliday with Powell, but the lawyer seemed to be as indifferent

-to Halliday's existence as Halliday had been to Marley's, and when

-Marley saw that Powell was not likely to refer to him, he started toward

-the door. As he went Powell resumptively called after him:

-

-"I'll get a Blackstone for you in a day or two. Be down in the morning."

-

-Marley went away bearing Swan's _Treatise_ under his arm. He looked up

-at the Court House across the way; the trees were stirring in the light

-winds of summer, and their leaves writhed joyously in the sun. The

-windows of the Court House were open, and he could hear the voice of

-some lawyer arguing a cause to the jury. Marley thought of Judge Blair

-sitting there, the jury in its box, the sleepy bailiff drowsing in his

-place, the accustomed attorneys and the angry litigants, and his heart

-began to beat a little more rapidly, for the thought of Judge Blair

-brought the thought of Lavinia Blair. And in the days to come, when he

-should be arguing a cause to a jury, as that lawyer, whose voice came

-pealing and echoing in sudden and surprising shouts through the open

-windows, was arguing a cause now, would Lavinia Blair be interested?

-

-He had imagined that a day so full of importance for him would be marked

-by greater ceremonials, and yet while he was disappointed, he was

-reassured. He had solved a problem, he had done with inaction, he had

-made a beginning, he was entered at last upon a career. As all the

-events of the recent years rushed on him, the years of college life, the

-decisions and indecisions of his classmates, their vague troubles about

-a career, he felt a pride that he had so soon solved that problem. He

-felt a certain superiority too, that made him carry his head high, as he

-turned into Main Street and marched across the Square. It required only

-decision and life was conquered. He saw the years stretching out

-prosperously before him, expanding as his ambitions expanded. He was

-glad that he had tackled life so promptly, that he had come so quickly

-to an issue with it; it was not so bad, viewed thus close, as it had

-been from a distance. He laughed at the folly of all the talk he had

-heard about the difficulty of young men getting a start in these days;

-he must write to his fraternity fellows at once, and tell them what he

-had done and how he was succeeding. They would surely see that at the

-bar he would do, not only himself, but them, the greatest credit, and

-they would be proud.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER III

-

-                             GREENWOOD LAKE

-

-

-The girls, flitting about with nervous laughter and now and then little

-screams, had spread long cloths over the table of plain boards that had

-served so many picnic parties at Greenwood Lake; the table-cloths and

-the dresses of the girls gleamed white in the amber light that streamed

-across the little sheet of water, though the slender trees, freshened by

-the morning shower that threatened to spoil the outing, were beginning

-to darken under the shadows that diffused themselves subtly through the

-grove, as if there were exudations of the heavy foliage.

-

-Lawrence, in his white ducks, stood by the table, assuming to direct the

-laying of the supper. His immense cravat of blue was the only bit of

-color about him, unless it were his red hair, which he had had clipped

-that very morning, and his shorn appearance intensified his comic air.

-Marley, sitting apart on the stump of a small oak, could hear the

-burlesque orders Lawrence shouted at the girls. The girls were convulsed

-by his orders; at times they had to put their dishes down lest in their

-laughter they spill the food or break the china; just then Marley saw

-Mayme Carter double over suddenly, her mass of yellow hair lurching

-forward to her brow, while the woods rang with her laughter. The other

-men were off looking after the horses.

-

-Lavinia moved quickly here and there, smiling joyously, her face

-flushed; though she laughed as the others did at Lawrence's drollery,

-she did not laugh as loudly, and she did not scream. Just now she rose

-from bending over the table, and brushed her brown hair from her brow

-with the back of her hand, while she stood and surveyed the table as if

-to see what it lacked. When she raised her hand the sleeve of her muslin

-gown fell away from her wrist and showed her slender forearm, white in

-the calm light of evening. Marley could not take his eyes from her. She

-ran into the pavilion, her little low shoes flashed below her

-petticoats, and he grew sad; when she reappeared, all her movements

-seemed to be new, to have fresh beauties. Then he suspected that the

-girls were laughing at him and he felt miserable.

-

-He thought of himself sitting alone and apart, an awkward, ungainly

-figure. He longed to go away, yet he feared that, if he did, he would

-not have the courage to come back. He shifted his position, only to make

-matters worse. Then suddenly his feeling took the form of a rage with

-Lawrence; he longed to seize Lawrence and kick him, to pitch him into

-the lake, to humiliate him before the girls. He thought he saw all at

-once that Lawrence had been making fun of him, surreptitiously; that was

-what had made the girls laugh so.

-

-There was some little consolation in the thought that Lavinia did not

-laugh as much as the others; perhaps, if she did not care to defend him,

-she at least pitied him. And then he began to pity himself. The whole

-evening stretched before him; pretty soon he would have to move up to

-the table, and sit down on the narrow little benches that were fastened

-between the trees; then after supper they would begin their dancing and

-when that came he did not see what he could do.

-

-The only pleasure he had had that afternoon had been on the way out; he

-had been alone with Lavinia, and the four miles of pleasant road that

-lay between the town and Greenwood Lake were too short for all the

-happiness Marley found in them. He could feel Lavinia again by his side,

-her hands folded on the thin old linen lap-robe. He could not recall a

-word they had said, but it seemed to him that the conversation had

-flowed on intimately and tranquilly; she had been so close and

-sympathetic; and he would always remember how her eyes had been raised

-to his. The fields with the wheat in shock had swept by in the beauty of

-harvest time; the road, its dust laid by the morning shower, had rolled

-under the wheels of the buggy softly, smoothly and noiselessly; the air

-had been odorous with the scent of green things freshened by the rain,

-and had vibrated with the sounds of summer.

-

-Then suddenly his reverie was broken. The men were gathering about the

-table with the girls; all of them looked at him expectantly.

-

-"Here, you!" called Lawrence. "Do you think we're going to do all the

-work? Come, get in the game, and don't look so solemn--this ain't a

-funeral."

-

-They all laughed, and Marley felt his face flame, but he rose and went

-over to the table, halting in indecision.

-

-"Run get some water," ordered Lawrence, imperatively waving his hand.

-"Mayme," he shouted, "hand him the pitcher! Step lively, now. The

-men-folks are hungry after their day's work. Has any one got a pitcher

-concealed about his person? What did you do with the pitcher, Glenn?

-Take it to water your horse?"

-

-They were laughing uproariously, and Marley was plainly discomfited. But

-Lavinia stepped to his side, a large white pitcher in her hand. "I'll

-show you," she said.

-

-They started away together, and Marley felt a protection in her

-presence. A little way farther he suddenly thought of the pitcher, which

-Lavinia still was bearing, and he took it from her. As he seized the

-handle their fingers became for an instant entangled.

-

-"Did I hurt you?" he asked.

-

-"Oh, no!" she assured him, and as they walked on, out of the sight of

-the laughing group behind them, an ease came over him.

-

-"Do you know where the well is?" he asked.

-

-"Oh, yes," she answered. "It's down here. I could have come just as well

-as not."

-

-"I'm glad to come," he said; and then he added, "with _you_."

-

-They had reached the wooden pump behind the pavilion. The little sheet

-of water curved away like a crescent, following the course of the stream

-of which it was but a widening. Its little islands were mirrored in its

-surface. The sun was just going down, the sky beyond the lake was rosy,

-and the same rosy hue now suffused everything; the waters themselves

-were reddened.

-

-It was very still, and the peace of the evening lay on them both.

-Lavinia stood motionless, and looked out across the water to the little

-Ohio hills that rolled away toward the west. She stood and gazed a long

-time, her hands at her sides, yet with their fingers open and extended,

-as if the beauty of the scene had suddenly transfixed her. Marley did

-not see the lake or the sun, the islands or the hills; he saw only the

-girl before him, the outline of her cheek, the down on it showing fine

-in the pure light, the hair that nestled at her neck, the curve from her

-shoulder to her arms and down to her intent fingers. At last she sighed,

-and looked up at him.

-

-"Isn't it all beautiful?" she said solemnly.

-

-"Beautiful?" he repeated, as if in question, not knowing what she said.

-

-Just then they heard Lawrence hallooing, and Marley began to pump

-vigorously. He rinsed out the pitcher, then filled it, and they went

-back, walking closely side by side, and they did not speak all the way.

-

-Mayme Carter, who, as it seemed, had a local reputation as a compounder

-of lemonade, had the lemons and the sugar all ready when Marley and

-Lavinia rejoined the group, and Lawrence, as he seized the pitcher,

-said:

-

-"I see that, between you, you've spilled nearly all of the water, but I

-guess Mayme and I'll have to make it do."

-

-The others laughed at this, as they did at all of Lawrence's speeches,

-and then they turned and laughed at Marley and Lavinia, though the men,

-who as yet did not feel themselves on terms with Marley, had a subtile

-manner of not including him in their ridicule, however little they

-spared Lavinia.

-

-The supper was eaten with the hunger their spirits and the fresh air had

-given them and Marley, placed, as of course, by Lavinia's side, felt

-sheltered by her, as he felt sheltered by all the talk that raged about

-him. He wished that he could join in the talk, but he could not discover

-what it was all about. Once, in a desperate determination to assert

-himself, he did mention a book he had been reading, but his remark

-seemed to have a chilling effect from which they did not recover until

-Lawrence, out of his own inexhaustible fund of nonsense, restored them

-to their inanities. He tried to hide his embarrassment by eating the

-cold chicken, the ham and sardines, the potato chips and pickles, the

-hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches that went up and down the board in

-endless procession, and he was thankful, when he thought of it, that

-Lawrence seemed to forget him, though Lawrence had forgotten no one else

-there. He seemed to note accurately each mouthful every one took.

-

-"Hand up another dozen eggs for Miss Winters, Joe," he called to one of

-the men, and then they all laughed at Miss Winters.

-

-When the cake came, Lawrence identified each kind with some remark about

-the mother of the girl who had brought it, and tasted all, because, as

-he said, he could not afford to show partiality. The fun lagged somewhat

-as the meal neared its end, but Lawrence revived it instantly and

-sensationally by rising suddenly, bending far over toward Lavinia in a

-tragic attitude and saying:

-

-"Why, Vine, child, you haven't eaten a mouthful! I do believe you're in

-love!"

-

-The company burst into laughter, but they suddenly stopped when they saw

-Marley. His face showed his anger with them, and he made a little

-movement, but Lavinia smiled up at Lawrence, and said:

-

-"Well, Jack, it's evident that _you're_ not."

-

-And then they all laughed at Lawrence, and the girls clapped their

-hands, while Marley, angry now with himself, tried to laugh with them.

-

-When they stopped laughing Lawrence produced his cigarettes, and tossing

-one to Marley in a way that delicately conveyed a sense of intimacy and

-affection, he said:

-

-"When you girls get your dishes done up we'll be back and see if we

-can't think up something to entertain you," and then he called Marley

-and with him and the other men strolled down to the lake.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER IV

-

-                               MOONLIGHT

-

-

-The dance was proposed almost immediately. Marley had hoped up to the

-very last minute that something, possibly a miracle, would prevent it,

-but scarcely had the men finished their first cigarettes before Howard

-was saying:

-

-"Well, let's be getting back to the girls. They'll want to dance."

-

-Howard spoke as if the dancing would be a sacrifice on the part of the

-men to the pleasure of the girls, but they all turned at once, some of

-them flinging their cigarettes into the water, as if to complete the

-sacrifice, and started back. When they reached the pavilion, Payson and

-Gallard took instruments out of green bags, Payson a guitar and Gallard

-a mandolin, and Lawrence, bustling about over the floor, shoving the few

-chairs against the unplastered wooden walls, was shouting:

-

-"Tune 'em up, boys, tune 'em up!"

-

-The first tentative notes of the strings twanged in the hollow room, and

-Lawrence was asking the girls for dances, scribbling their names on his

-cuff with a disregard of its white polished linen almost painful.

-

-"I'll have to divide up some of 'em, you know, girls," he said. "Jim and

-Elmer have to play, and that makes us two men shy. But I'll do the best

-I can--wish I could take you all in my arms at once and dance with you."

-

-The girls, standing in an expectant, eager little group, clutched one

-another nervously, and pretended to sneer at Lawrence's patronage.

-

-Marley was standing with Lavinia near the door. He was trying to affect

-an ease; he knew by the way the other girls glanced at him now and then

-that they were speculating on his possibilities as a partner; he tried

-just then to look as if he were going to dance as all the other men

-were, yet he felt the necessity of confessing to Lavinia.

-

-"You know," he said contritely, "that I don't dance."

-

-She looked up, a disappointment springing to her eyes too quickly for

-her to conceal it. She was flushed with pleasure and excitement, and

-tapping her foot in time with the chords Payson and Gallard were trying

-on their instruments. Marley saw her surprise.

-

-"I ought not to have come," he said; "I've no business here."

-

-The look of disappointment in Lavinia's eyes had gone, and in its place

-was now an expression of sympathy.

-

-"It makes no difference," she said. And then she added in a low voice:

-"I'll not dance either; there are too many of us girls anyway."

-

-"Oh, don't let me keep you from it," said Marley, and yet a joy was

-shining in his eyes. She turned away and blushed.

-

-"I'll give you all my dances," she said; "we can sit them out."

-

-"But it won't be any fun for you," protested Marley. And just then

-Lawrence came up.

-

-"Say, Glenn," he said, "if you don't want to dance I'll take Lavinia for

-the first number."

-

-The guitar and mandolin, after a long preliminary strumming to get

-themselves in tune, suddenly burst into _The Georgia Campmeeting_, and

-the couples were instantly springing across the floor.

-

-"Come on, Vine," said Lawrence, his fingers twitching. And Lavinia,

-eager, trembling, alive, casting one last glance at Marley, said "Just

-this one!" and went whirling away with Lawrence.

-

-Marley moved aside, awkwardly, when the couples, sweeping in a long oval

-stream around the little room, whirled past him. Lavinia danced with a

-grace that almost hurt him; she was laughing as she looked up into

-Lawrence's face, talking to him as they danced. Marley felt a gloom,

-almost a rage, settle on him. He looked up and down the room. At the

-farther end, through the door by which the musicians sat swinging their

-feet over their knees in time to the tune they played, he could see the

-man who kept the grounds at the lake, looking on at the dance; his wife

-was with him, and they smiled contentedly at the joy of the young

-people.

-

-Marley could not bear their joy, any more than he could bear the joy of

-the dancers, and he looked away from them. Glancing along the wall he

-saw a girl, sitting alone. It was Grace Winters; she was older than the

-others, and she sat there sullenly, her dark brows contracted under her

-dark hair. Marley felt drawn toward her by a common trouble, and he

-thought, instantly, that he might appear less conspicuous if he went and

-sat beside her. As he approached, her sallow face brightened with a

-brilliant smile of welcome and she drew aside her skirts to make a place

-for him, though there was no one else on all that side of the room.

-Marley sat down.

-

-"It's warm, isn't it?" he said.

-

-"Yes," Miss Winters replied, "almost too warm to dance, don't you

-think?"

-

-Marley tried to express his acquiescence in the polite smile he had seen

-the other men use before the dance began, but he did not feel that he

-carried it off very well.

-

-"I should think you'd be dancing, Mr. Marley," Miss Winters said. "I

-hear you are a splendid dancer. Don't you care to dance this evening?"

-

-"I can't dance," said Marley, crudely.

-

-He was looking at Lavinia, following her young figure as it glided past

-with Lawrence. Miss Winters turned away. Her face became gloomy again,

-and she said nothing more. Marley was absorbed in Lavinia, and they sat

-there together silent, conspicuous and alone, in a wide separation.

-

-Marley thought the dance never would end. It seemed to him that the

-dancers must drop from fatigue; but at last the mandolin and guitar

-ceased suddenly, the girls cried out a disappointed unisonant "Oh!" and

-then they all laughed and clapped their hands. Lavinia and Lawrence were

-coming up, glowing with the joy of the dance.

-

-"Oh, that was splendid, Jack!" Lavinia cried, putting back her hair with

-that wave of her hand.

-

-Lawrence's face was redder than ever. He leaned over and in a whisper

-that was for Lavinia and Marley together he said:

-

-"Lavinia, you're the queen dancer of the town." And then he turned to

-Miss Winters.

-

-"Grace," he said, distributing himself with the impartiality he felt his

-position as a social leader demanded, "you've promised me a dance for a

-long time. Now's my chance."

-

-"Why certainly, Jack," Miss Winters said, with her brilliant smile, and

-then she took Lawrence's arm and drew him away, as if otherwise he might

-escape.

-

-"Take me outdoors!" said Lavinia to Marley. "Those big lamps make it

-_so_ hot in here."

-

-Marley was glad to leave, and they went out on to the little piazza of

-the pavilion. Lavinia stood on the very edge of the steps, and drank in

-the fresh air eagerly.

-

-"Oh!" she said. "Oh! Isn't it delicious!"

-

-The darkness lay thick between the trees. The air was rich with the

-scent of the mown fields that lay beyond the grove. The insects shrilled

-contentedly. Marley stood and looked at Lavinia, standing on the edge of

-the steps, her body bent a little forward, her face upturned. She put

-back her hair again.

-

-"Let's go on down!" she said, a little adventurous quality in her tone.

-She ran lightly down the steps, Marley after her.

-

-"Won't you take cold?" he asked, bending close to her.

-

-She looked up and laughed. They were walking on, unconsciously making

-their way toward the edge of the little lake. Marley felt the white form

-floating there beside him and a happiness, new, unknown before, came to

-him. They were on the edge of the little lake. Before them the water

-lay, dark now, and smooth. A small stage was moored to the shore and a

-boat was fastened to it. They could hear the light lapping of the water

-that barely stirred the boat. Presently Lavinia ran out on to the stage.

-She gave a little spring, and rocked it up and down; then smiled up at

-Marley like a child venturing in forbidden places. Marley stepped

-carefully on to the stage.

-

-"Isn't it a perfect night?" Lavinia said, looking up at the dark purple

-sky, strewn with all the stars. Marley looked at her white throat.

-

-"The most beautiful night I ever knew!" he said. He spoke solemnly,

-devoutly, and Lavinia turned and gazed on him. Marley touched the boat

-with the toe of his shoe.

-

-"We might row," he said almost timidly.

-

-"Could we?" inquired Lavinia.

-

-"If we may take the boat."

-

-"Oh, of course--anybody may. Can you row?"

-

-Marley laughed. He had rowed in the college crew on the old Olentangy at

-Delaware. His laugh was a complete answer to Lavinia. She approached the

-boat, and Marley bent over and drew it alongside the stage.

-

-"Get in," he said. It was good to find something he could do. He helped

-her carefully into the boat, and held it firmly until she had arranged

-herself in the stern, her feet against the cleats, and her white skirts

-tucked about her. Then he took his seat, shipped the oars and shoved

-off. He swept the boat out into the deep water, and rowed away up the

-lake. He rowed precisely, feathering his oars, that she might see how

-much a master he was. They did not speak for a long time. First one,

-then the other, of the little islands swept darkly by; the water slapped

-the bow of the boat as Marley urged it forward. The lights of the

-pavilion on the shore twinkled an instant, then went out behind the

-trees. They could hear the distant mellow thrumming of the guitar and

-the tinkle of the mandolin.

-

-"Are you too cool?" he asked presently.

-

-"Oh, no, not at all!" said Lavinia.

-

-"Hadn't you better take my coat?" Marley persisted. The idea of putting

-his coat about her thrilled him.

-

-"You'll need it," she said.

-

-"No, I'll be warm rowing."

-

-She shook her head, and smiled. They drifted on. Still came the distant

-strumming of the guitar and the tinkle of the mandolin. Marley thought

-of the young people dancing, and then, noting Lavinia's silence, he

-asked, out of the doubt that was his one remaining annoyance:

-

-"Wouldn't you rather be back there dancing?"

-

-"No, no!" she answered softly.

-

-"I'm ashamed of myself."

-

-"Why?" She started a little.

-

-"Because I can't dance!" There was guilt in his tone.

-

-"You mustn't feel that way about it," Lavinia said. "It's nothing."

-

-"Isn't it?"

-

-"No. It's easy to learn."

-

-"I never could learn."

-

-Lavinia was still, and Marley thought she assented to this. But in

-another moment she spoke again.

-

-"I--" she began, and then she hesitated.

-

-Marley stopped rowing and rested on his oars. The water lapped the bows

-of the boat as it slackened its speed.

-

-"I could teach you," Lavinia went on.

-

-"Could you?" Marley leaned forward eagerly.

-

-"I'd like to." She was trailing one white hand in the water.

-

-"Will you?"

-

-"Yes," she said. "We can do it over at Mayme's--any time. She'll play

-for us."

-

-Marley felt a great gratitude, and he wondered how he could pour it

-forth upon her.

-

-"You are too good to me," he exclaimed.

-

-Then, suddenly, a change came over the dark surface of the waters. A

-mellow quality touched them; they seemed to tremble ecstatically, then

-they broke into sparkling ripples; the air quivered with a luminous

-beauty and a light flooded the little valley. Marley and Lavinia turned

-instinctively and looked up, and there, over the tops of the trees,

-black a moment before, now rounded domes of silver, rose the moon. They

-gazed at it a long time. Finally Marley turned and looked at Lavinia.

-Her white dress had become a drapery, her arms gleamed, her eyes were

-lustrous in the transfiguration of the moonlight. He could see that her

-lips were slightly parted, and her fingertips, dipped in the cool water

-over the gunwale of the boat, trailed behind them a long narrow thread

-of silver. They looked into each other's eyes, and neither spoke. They

-drifted on. At last, Marley said:

-

-"Lavinia!"

-

-She stirred.

-

-"Do you know--" he began, and then he stopped. "Don't you know," he went

-on, "can't you see, that I love you?"

-

-He rested his arms on the oars, and leaned over toward her.

-

-"I've loved you ever since that first night--do you remember? I know--I

-know I'm not good enough, but can't you--can't I--love you?"

-

-He saw her eyelids fall, and as she turned and looked over the side of

-the boat, she put forth her hand, and he took it.

-

-They were awakened from the dream by a call, and after what seemed to

-Marley a long time, he finally remembered the voice as Lawrence's.

-

-"We must go back," he said reluctantly. "How long have we been gone?"

-

-"I don't know," said Lavinia. He heard her sigh.

-

-Marley pulled the boat in the direction whence came the hallooing voice;

-he had quite lost all notion of their whereabouts. But presently they

-saw the lights of the pavilion, and then the dark figures of the men,

-and the white figures of the girls on shore.

-

-As they pulled up and Marley sprang out of the boat to the landing

-stage, Lawrence said:

-

-"Well, where have you babes been?"

-

-Marley helped Lavinia out of the boat.

-

-"We've been rowing," he said.

-

-"We thought you'd been drowned," said Lawrence.

-

-Marley and Lavinia drove home together in silence. In the light of the

-moon, the road was silver, and the fields with their shocks of wheat

-were gold.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER V

-

-                              THE SERENADE

-

-

-"I don't know what ails Lavinia," said Mrs. Blair to her husband as he

-sat on the veranda after dinner the next day. The judge laid his paper

-in his lap, and looked up at his wife over his glasses.

-

-"Isn't she well?" he asked.

-

-"M--yes," replied Mrs. Blair, prolonging the word in her lack of

-conviction, "I guess so."

-

-"Don't you know?" the judge demanded in some impatience with her

-uncertainty.

-

-"She says she feels all right."

-

-"Well, then, what makes you think she isn't?"

-

-"Oh, I don't know," replied Mrs. Blair, "she seems so quiet, that's

-all."

-

-"Lavinia is not a girl given to excitement or demonstration," said the

-judge, lapsing easily into the manner of speech he had cultivated on the

-bench.

-

-"No, that's so," assented Mrs. Blair. "But she's always cheerful and

-bright."

-

-"Is she gloomy?"

-

-"No, I wouldn't exactly call it that, but she seems preoccupied--rather

-wistful I should say, yes--wistful." She seemed pleased to have found

-the right word.

-

-"Oh, she's all right. That picnic last night may have fatigued her. I

-presume there was dancing."

-

-"Yes."

-

-"I don't know that we should let her go out that way." The judge took

-off his glasses and twirled them by their black cord while he gazed

-across the street, apparently at some dogs that were tumbling each other

-about in the Chenowiths' yard. The judge had a subconscious anxiety that

-they would get into Mrs. Chenowith's flower beds.

-

-"You and I used to go to them; they never hurt us," argued Mrs. Blair.

-

-"No, I suppose not. But then--that was different."

-

-Mrs. Blair laughed lightly, and the laugh served to dissipate their

-cares. She went to the edge of the veranda and pulled a few leaves from

-the climbing rose-vine that grew there, and the judge put on his glasses

-and spread out his paper.

-

-"I'll take her out for a drive this afternoon," said Mrs. Blair, turning

-to go indoors.

-

-"She'll be all right," said the judge, already deep in the political

-columns.

-

-That night at supper, the judge looked at Lavinia closely, and after a

-while he said:

-

-"You're not eating, Lavinia. Don't you feel well?"

-

-Lavinia turned to her father and smiled.

-

-"Oh, I'm all right."

-

-Her smile perplexed the judge.

-

-"You look pale," he said.

-

-Mrs. Blair glanced warningly at him the length of the table.

-

-"My girl's losing her color," he forged ahead.

-

-Lavinia dropped her eyelids, and a look of pain appeared in her face,

-causing it to grow paler.

-

-"Please don't worry about me, papa," she said.

-

-Mrs. Blair divined Lavinia's dislike of this personal discussion. She

-tried to catch her husband's eye again, but he was looking at Lavinia

-narrowly through his glasses.

-

-"Did you go riding this afternoon?" he asked as if he were examining a

-witness whom counsel had not drawn out properly.

-

-"Yes," Mrs. Blair hastened to say. "We drove out the Ludlow a long way."

-

-"She was riding last night, too," said Connie.

-

-"Who with?" demanded Chad, turning to Connie with the challenge he

-always had ready for her.

-

-"Who with?" retorted Connie. "Why, Glenn Marley, of course. Who else?"

-

-"Well, what of it?" demanded Chad. "What's it to you?"

-

-"Oh, children, children!" protested Mrs. Blair, wearily. "Do give us a

-little peace!"

-

-"Well, she began it," said Chad.

-

-Connie was eating savagely, but she whirled on Chad, speaking with

-difficulty because her mouth was filled with food:

-

-"You shut up, will you?"

-

-Chad laughed with a contempt almost theatrical, waved his hand lightly

-and said:

-

-"Run away, little girl, run away."

-

-Mrs. Blair asked the judge why he did not correct his children, and

-though the sigh he gave expressed the hopelessness, as it seemed to him,

-of bringing the two younger members of his train into anything like

-decorous behavior, he laid his knife and fork in his plate.

-

-"This must cease," he said. "It is scandalous. One might conclude that

-you were the children of some family in Lighttown."

-

-"It is very trying," said Mrs. Blair, acquiescing in her husband's

-reproof. "They are just like fire and tow." She said this quite

-impersonally and then turned to Connie: "If you can't behave yourself,

-I'll have to send you from the table."

-

-"That's it!" wailed Connie. "That's it! Blame everything on to me!"

-

-Mrs. Blair looked severely at her, and Connie's face reddened. She

-glanced angrily at her mother and began again:

-

-"Well, I--"

-

-The judge rapped the table smartly with his knuckles.

-

-"Now I want this stopped!" he said. "And right away. If it isn't I'll--"

-He was about to say if it wasn't he would clear the room, as he was fond

-of saying whenever the idle spectators in his court showed signs of

-being human, but he did not finish his sentence. Chad was subdued and

-decorous, and Connie drooped her head, and began to gulp her food. Her

-eyes were filling with tears and the tears began to fall, slowly, one by

-one, splashing heavily into her plate.

-

-Lavinia was trembling; she tried to control herself, tried to lift her

-glass, but when she did, her hand shook so that the water was likely to

-spill. This completed the undoing of her nerves, her eyes suddenly

-flooded with tears, and she snatched her handkerchief from her lap, rose

-precipitately, and hurried from the room, dropping her napkin as she

-went. They heard her going up the stairs, and presently the door of her

-room closed.

-

-Connie had followed Lavinia with her misty eyes as she left the table

-and now she too prepared to leave. She felt a sudden pity springing from

-her great love of her older sister, and her great pride in her, and she

-felt a contrition, though she tried to convict Chad, as the latest

-object of her fiery and erratic temper, by glowering at him.

-

-"I'll go to her," she said, "_I_ can comfort her!"

-

-"No, stay where you are," said her mother. "Just leave her alone."

-

-The evening light of the summer day flooded into the dining-room;

-outside a robin was singing. In the room there was constraint and heavy

-silence, broken only by the slight clatter of the silver or the china.

-But after a while the judge spoke:

-

-"Did Lavinia go to the picnic with young Marley?" he asked. He regretted

-instantly that he had revived the topic that had given rise to the

-difficulty, but as it lay on the minds of all, it was impossible, just

-then, to escape its influence.

-

-"I believe so," said Mrs. Blair. "He really seems like a nice young

-man."

-

-The judge scowled.

-

-"I don't know," he said. "He's in the office of Wade Powell--I suppose

-he is the one, isn't he?" He thought it unbecoming that a judge should

-show an intimate knowledge of the relations of young men who were merely

-studying law.

-

-"Yes, sir," said Chad, maintaining his own dignity.

-

-"Everybody seems to speak well of him," said Mrs. Blair.

-

-"But I can't quite reconcile that with his selecting Wade Powell as a

-preceptor. I would hardly consider his influence the best in the world,

-and I would imagine that Doctor Marley would hold to the same opinion."

-

-Judge Blair spoke with a certain disappointment in Doctor Marley. He had

-gone to hear him preach once or twice, and found, as he said, an

-intellectual quality in his utterances that he missed in the sermons Mr.

-Hill had been preaching for twenty years in the Presbyterian church.

-

-"Perhaps he doesn't know Wade Powell," said Mrs. Blair. "Doctor Marley

-is comparatively a stranger here, you know."

-

-"Yes, I presume that explains it. But--" he shook his head. He could not

-forgive any one who showed respect for Wade Powell. "Powell has little

-business except a certain criminal practice, and now and then a personal

-injury case."

-

-"Is there anything wrong in personal injury cases?" asked Mrs. Blair.

-

-The judge looked at his wife in surprise.

-

-"Well, I suppose you know, don't you," he said, "that such cases are

-taken on contingent fees?" He spoke with the natural judicial contempt

-of the poor litigant.

-

-"Of course, dear," she replied, "I shall not undertake to defend Mr.

-Powell. He's a wild sort."

-

-"Yes; a drunkard, practically," said Judge Blair, "and an infidel

-besides. The moral environment there is certainly not one for a young

-man--"

-

-"Is he really an _infidel_?" asked Mrs. Blair, abruptly dropping her

-knife and fork.

-

-"Well," replied the judge with the judicial affectation of fairness,

-"he's at least a free-thinker. Perhaps agnostic were the better word.

-That is one reason why I can not understand Doctor Marley's permitting

-his son to be associated with him. It seems to me to argue a weakness,

-or a lack of observation in the doctor, as it does a certain depravity

-of taste in his son."

-

-They discussed Marley until the meal was done, and Connie and Chad had

-gone out of doors. Judge Blair followed his wife into the sitting-room.

-

-"I'm worried, I'll admit," said the judge. "What could it have been that

-so distressed her?"

-

-"Oh well, the children's little quarrels were too much for her nerves."

-

-"I suppose so."

-

-They were silent and thoughtful, sitting together, rocking gently in

-their chairs as the twilight stole into the room.

-

-"It's too bad he's going to study law," the judge said after a while.

-

-He shook his gray head dubiously.

-

-"But you always say that about any one who's going to study law," Mrs.

-Blair argued. "You even said it about George Halliday when his father

-took him into partnership."

-

-"Well, it's bad business nowadays unless a young man wants to go to the

-city, and it's hard to get a foothold there."

-

-"But you began as a lawyer," she urged, as though he had finished as

-something else.

-

-"It was different in my day."

-

-"And you've always done well in the law," Mrs. Blair went on, ignoring

-his distinction.

-

-"Oh yes," the judge said in a tone that expressed a sense of individual

-exception. "But I went on the bench just in time to save my bacon.

-There's no telling what might have become of us if I had remained in the

-practice."

-

-They were silent long enough for him to feel the relief he had always

-found in his salaried position, and then he said:

-

-"You don't suppose--"

-

-"Oh, certainly not!" his wife hastened to assure him.

-

-"Well, I think it would be well, perhaps, to watch her closely. I don't

-just like the notion."

-

-"But his father is--"

-

-"Yes, but after all, we really know nothing about him."

-

-"That is true."

-

-"And then Lavinia's so young."

-

-"Yes."

-

-"I'd go to her."

-

-"After a while," Mrs. Blair said.

-

-They heard steps on the veranda, and then the voices of Mr. and Mrs.

-Chenowith who had run across, as Mrs. Chenowith said, when Mrs. Blair

-met them in the darkness that filled the wide hall, to see how they all

-were. The Chenowiths begged Mrs. Blair not to light the gas; they

-preferred to sit out of doors. The Chenowiths remained all the evening.

-When they had gone, the judge drew the chairs indoors, while Mrs. Blair

-rolled up the wide strip of red carpet that covered the steps of the

-veranda. And when they had gone up to their room, Mrs. Blair stole

-across to Lavinia, softly closing the door behind her.

-

-She found the girl stretched on her bed, her face buried in the pillows,

-which were wet with her tears.

-

-"What is troubling my little girl?" she asked. She sat down on the side

-of the bed, and lightly stroked Lavinia's soft hair. The girl stirred,

-and drew herself close to her mother. Mrs. Blair did not speak, but

-continued to stroke her hair, and waited. Presently Lavinia cried out:

-

-"Oh, mama! mama!"

-

-And then she was in her mother's arms, weeping on her mother's breast.

-

-"I've never kept anything from you before, mama," Lavinia cried.

-

-"No," Mrs. Blair whispered. "Can't you tell mama now?"

-

-And then with her mother's arms about her Lavinia told her all. When she

-had finished she lay tranquilly. Mrs. Blair was relieved and yet her

-troubles had but grown the more complicated. She saw all the intricate

-elements with which she would have to deal, and she quailed before them,

-realizing what tact would be required of her.

-

-"The coming of love should be a time of joy, dear," she said presently.

-Even in the darkness, she could see the white blur of Lavinia's face

-change its expression. A smile had touched it.

-

-"It should, shouldn't it, mama?"

-

-"Yes, indeed."

-

-"But I never kept anything from you before."

-

-Mrs. Blair laughed.

-

-"But you kept this only a day, dear. That doesn't count."

-

-"It was a long day."

-

-"I know, sweetheart." The mother kissed her, and they were silent a

-while.

-

-"I do love him so," said Lavinia, presently. "And you'll love him too,

-mama, I know you will."

-

-"I'm sure of that, dear."

-

-"But what of papa?"

-

-Mrs. Blair felt the girl grow tense in her arms.

-

-"That will all come right in time," said Mrs. Blair.

-

-"Will you tell him?"

-

-"Not just now, dear. We'll have this for a little secret of our own.

-There's plenty of time. You are young, you know, and so is Glenn."

-

-"I love to hear you call him Glenn."

-

-Mrs. Blair remained with Lavinia until she had tucked her into her bed.

-

-"Just my little child," the mother whispered over the girl. "Just my

-little child."

-

-"Yes, always that," said Lavinia. And her mother kissed her again and

-again, and left her in the dark.

-

-When Mrs. Blair rejoined her husband, he laid down the book he always

-read before retiring, and looked up with the question in his eyes.

-

-"She's just a little nervous and tired," Mrs. Blair said. "She'll be all

-right in the morning. I think it best not to notice her."

-

-"Do you think we'd better have Doctor Pierce see her?"

-

-"Oh, not at all!" Mrs. Blair laughed, and the judge, reassured, went

-back to his book.

-

-They were awakened from their first doze that night by voices singing.

-

-"It's some of the darkies from Gooseville," said Mrs. Blair. "They're

-out serenading."

-

-"Yes," said the judge. "It is sweet to fall asleep by."

-

-At the sound of the singing Lavinia had crept from her bed and crouched

-in her white night-dress before the open window; the shutters were

-closed. She heard the melody from far down the street. The singing

-ceased, then began again, drawing nearer and nearer. Presently she heard

-the fall of feet on the sidewalk before the house, and the low tones of

-voices in hurried consultation. And then a clear baritone voice rose,

-and she heard it begin the song:

-

-           "Oh the sun shines bright in my old Kentucky home,

-           'Tis summer, the darkies are gay."

-

-She knew the voice. Her heart swelled and the tears came again and there

-alone in the fragrant night she opened her arms and stretched them out

-into the darkness.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER VI

-

-                             LOVE'S ARREARS

-

-

-The days following the picnic had been no easier for Marley than they

-had been for Lavinia. As he looked back on that night, a fear took hold

-of him; the whole experience, the most wonderful of his life, grew more

-and more unreal. Much as he longed to see Lavinia again, he was afraid

-to go to her home; he wondered whether he should write her a note;

-perhaps she would think him false, perhaps she would think he had

-already forgotten her; the idea tormented him; he did not know what to

-do. He had seen her but once, and then at a distance; the Blairs'

-well-known surrey had stopped in the middle of the Square, and George

-Halliday stood leaning into the carriage chatting with Lavinia. Marley

-had but a glimpse of Lavinia's face, pink in the shadow of the

-surrey-top. As they drove away she had turned with a smile and a nod at

-Halliday. The sight had affected Marley strangely.

-

-He felt himself so weak and incapable in this affair that he longed to

-discuss it with some one, and on Sunday afternoon he found his mother at

-her window with the _Christian Advocate_, which replaced, in her case,

-the nap nearly every one else took at that hour.

-

-"How old was father when you were married, mother?" he began.

-

-He spoke out of that curious ignorance of the lives of their parents so

-common to children; he had never been able to realize his parents as

-having separate and independent existences before his own. Mrs. Marley

-laid her paper by, and a smile came to her face.

-

-"He was twenty-two," she said.

-

-"Just my age," observed Marley.

-

-Mrs. Marley looked up hastily.

-

-"You're not thinking of getting married, are you, Glenn?" she asked.

-

-"No." he said with a laugh.

-

-"My goodness! You're just a boy!"

-

-"But I'm as old as father was."

-

-"Y--es," said Mrs. Marley, "but then--"

-

-"But then, what?"

-

-"That was different."

-

-Marley smiled.

-

-"Had father entered the ministry yet?" he said presently.

-

-"Yes, we were married in his first year. He had been teaching school,

-and the fall he was admitted to the conference he was sent out to the

-Gibsonburg circuit in Green County. We were married in the spring."

-

-Her face flushed, and she turned the pages of her paper with a dreamy

-deliberation.

-

-"Ah, but your father was a handsome young man, Glenn!" she said

-presently.

-

-"He's handsome yet," Marley replied with the pride he always felt in his

-father. And then he asked:

-

-"Did he have any money?"

-

-"Yes," she said, and she laughed, "just a hundred dollars!"

-

-"A hundred dollars! Well, he had nerve, didn't he? And so did you!"

-

-"We had more than that," said Mrs. Marley, solemnly.

-

-Marley looked at his mother suddenly. Her face seemed for an instant to

-be transfigured in the afternoon glow.

-

-He might have told her then; he was on the point of it, but a footfall

-on the brick walk outside caused him to look up, and he saw Lawrence

-coming into the yard. Lawrence beckoned him and he went out.

-

-"Come on," said Lawrence. "Let's go out to Carters'."

-

-Marley looked a question at him, and the smile which Lawrence never

-could repress long at a time was twitching at the corners of his large

-mouth.

-

-"She'll be there."

-

-"How do you know?" asked Marley.

-

-Lawrence smiled a little more significantly.

-

-When they got to the Carters' they found Mayme and Lavinia together in

-the yard, strolling about in apparent aimlessness, yet with an

-expectancy in their manner that belied its quality of mere idleness. In

-the look Lavinia gave him all of Marley's perplexities vanished.

-Lawrence stood by with a grin on his red face, and Mayme Carter's eyes

-danced. She and Lawrence assumed almost immediately an elder, paternal

-manner, and looked on at the lovers' meeting as from far heights that

-were to be reached only after all such youthful experiences had long

-since become possible in retrospect alone. Still smiling, they edged

-away, and left the lovers alone.

-

-"Is it really true?" Marley asked.

-

-Lavinia colored a little as she smiled up at him.

-

-"And you are happy?" he asked.

-

-"So happy!" she said.

-

-And then all at once a cloud came over her eyes. She closed them an

-instant.

-

-"What is it?" he asked in alarm.

-

-"Nothing."

-

-"Tell me."

-

-"It's nothing." She was smiling again, as if to show that her happiness

-was complete. "See?" Her eyes were blinking rapidly.

-

-"I'm glad," he said.

-

-As they turned and walked across the yard Marley looked at her

-nervously.

-

-"Do you know," he said, "that I couldn't remember what color your eyes

-were?" He spoke with all the virtue there is in confession.

-

-"What color are they?" she asked, suddenly closing her eyes.

-

-"They're blue," Marley replied, saying the word ecstatically, as if it

-had a new, wonderful meaning for him.

-

-"Connie says they're green."

-

-"Connie?"

-

-"Yes, don't you know? She's my younger sister."

-

-"Oh." He did not know any of her family, and the baffling sense of

-unreality came over him again.

-

-"You'll know her," said Lavinia, and added thoughtfully: "I hope she'll

-like you. Then there's Chad, my little brother."

-

-Marley was growing alarmed at the intricacies of an introduction into a

-large family, the characters of which were as yet like the characters in

-the first few chapters of a novel, but he thought it would not reflect

-on him to admit that he did not know Chad, seeing that he was merely a

-little brother.

-

-"He admires you immensely," said Lavinia.

-

-"Does he?" said Marley, eagerly, instantly loving Chad. "How does he

-know me?"

-

-"He says you were a football player at college."

-

-Marley laughed a modest deprecation of his own prowess.

-

-"But I knew your voice," said Lavinia.

-

-"Did you? When did you hear it?"

-

-"As if you didn't know!"

-

-"Honestly," he protested. "Tell me."

-

-"Why, that night that you serenaded me."

-

-He was regretting that she had outdone him in observation, but she

-suddenly looked up and said:

-

-"Oh, Glenn! What a beautiful voice you have!"

-

-It was the first time she had ever called him Glenn, and it produced in

-him a wonderful sensation.

-

-They had come to a little bench, and, sitting there, they could only

-look at each other and smile. Marley noticed that a little line of

-freckles ran up over the bridge of Lavinia's nose. They were very

-beautiful, he thought, and yet he had never heard of freckles as one of

-the elements of a woman's beauty. Then he leaned back and looked about

-the yard.

-

-He had always thought of it as it seemed that first night, enormous,

-enchanted, with wide terraces and fountains, and white statues gleaming

-through the green shrubbery. But now he saw no terraces, no statuary, no

-fountains, and no wide lawns; nothing but a cramped little yard crowded

-with bushes and trees, and surrounded by a weathered fence that had lost

-several pickets. He looked around behind the house where he had fancied

-long stables with big iron lamps over the doors, but now he saw nothing

-but an old woodshed and a barn on the rear end of the lot. The cracks in

-the barn were so wide that he could see the light of day between them as

-through a kinetoscope. He heard a horse stamping fretfully at the flies.

-

-"It was here," he said, "that I first saw you." He did not speak his

-whole thought.

-

-"Yes," she answered. "I remember."

-

-"That was a wonderful night, the most wonderful of my life, except the

-one at the lake."

-

-He drew close to her. "I loved you at first sight," he whispered.

-

-"Did you?" She looked at him in reverence.

-

-"Yes,--from the very first moment. When you came into the room, I knew

-that--"

-

-"What?"

-

-"That you were the woman I had always loved and waited for; that I had

-found my ideal. And yet they say we never discover our ideals in this

-life!"

-

-He laughed at this philosophical absurdity.

-

-"What did you think then?" he asked.

-

-She cast down her eyes, and probed the turf with the toe of her little

-shoe.

-

-"I loved you then too."

-

-He gazed at her tenderly, rapturously.

-

-"Isn't it wonderful?" he said presently, "this love of ours? It came to

-us all at once!"

-

-She looked at him suddenly. Her short upper lip was raised.

-

-"It _was_ love at first sight, wasn't it?"

-

-"Yes. We were intended for each other."

-

-They sat there, and went over that first night of their meeting and that

-other night at Greenwood Lake, finding each moment some new and

-remarkable feature of their love, something that proved its divine and

-providential quality, something that convinced them that no one before

-had ever known such a remarkable experience. They marveled at the

-mystery of it.

-

-But at last they must return to practical questions, and they resumed

-the account of their family relations. Marley told Lavinia about his

-father and mother, about his sister who had died, and then about his

-grandparents, and his uncles and aunts. He told her even of Dolly,

-behind whom she had driven to Greenwood Lake, and of his father's love

-for fast horses, a love which sometimes drew upon his father the

-criticism parishioners ever have ready for their pastor. And he told her

-about his home, and how frequently his mother had to entertain transient

-ministers, and how the church laid missionary work upon her, until he

-feared the heathen would unwittingly break her down.

-

-He was not conscious of it, but he felt it necessary to bring up all at

-once the arrears of her knowledge of him and his family, of all his

-affairs. Meeting as they had so strangely, so romantically, and falling

-in love at first sight, according to the prearrangement of the ages,

-they could excuse this otherwise strange ignorance of each other's

-lives. They bemoaned all the years they had been compelled to live

-without knowing each other, and their one quarrel with fate was that

-they had had to wait until so late in life before meeting; and yet they

-finally consoled themselves for this deprivation by discovering that

-they had really always known and loved each other. They were now able to

-compare strange experiences of soul and, in the new light they

-possessed, to identify them as communings of their spirits across time

-and space.

-

-"I've always believed somehow in the Sweden-borgians," Lavinia said,

-"but I never really understood before what they meant by affinities."

-

-They looked at each other in a silence that became somber, and was

-broken at last by Lavinia.

-

-"I've told mama," she said.

-

-"You have?" Marley gasped.

-

-"Yes."

-

-"And she--?"

-

-"She was sweet about it. She will love you, I know."

-

-Marley felt a sudden love for Lavinia's mother. And then his fear

-returned at Lavinia's sinister,

-

-"But--"

-

-"But what?"

-

-"She says we must wait."

-

-"Oh!" Marley said with a relief. He felt their present happiness so

-great that he could afford to waive any claim on the future. And yet he

-was troubled; he felt that somehow a depression lay on Lavinia. He

-wondered what its cause could be. Presently it came to him suddenly.

-

-"And your father?" he asked.

-

-"He doesn't know--yet."

-

-"Will he--?"

-

-"He's very--" she hesitated, not liking to seem disloyal to her father.

-Finally she said "peculiar," and then further qualified it by adding

-"sometimes."

-

-The sadness that lies so near to the joy in lovers' hearts came over

-them, and yet they found a kind of joy in that too.

-

-"I'll go to him, of course," Marley said presently.

-

-"Oh, you're so brave!"

-

-But this tribute did not tend to reassure Marley. It rather suggested

-terrors he had not thought of. Yet in the necessity of maintaining the

-manly spirit he forced a laugh.

-

-"Of course," he continued, "I'll go to him. I meant to from the first."

-

-"But not just yet," she pleaded.

-

-"Well," he yielded, not at all unwillingly, "it shall be as you say."

-

-He could not dispel her sadness, nor could he conquer his own. A little

-tremor ran through her, and he felt it electrically along his arm.

-

-"What is it, sweetheart?" he pleaded. "Tell me, won't you? We must have

-no secrets, you know."

-

-"Oh, Glenn," she broke out, "I'm afraid!"

-

-She spoke with intuitive apprehension.

-

-"Of what?"

-

-"Our happiness!"

-

-He tried to laugh again.

-

-"Do you think it will ever be?" she asked.

-

-"I know it," he said earnestly. "I have nothing but faith--our love is

-strong enough for anything!"

-

-"You comfort me," she said simply.

-

-Lavinia spent the night with Mayme Carter, and the house sounded until

-long after midnight with the low, monotonous drone of their confidential

-voices.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER VII

-

-                       AN UNNECESSARY OPPOSITION

-

-

-Marley heard on Monday evening that Judge Blair had gone to Cincinnati,

-and the news filled him with a high if somewhat culpable joy. He found

-Lavinia and her mother on the veranda, and Lavinia said, with a grave

-simplicity:

-

-"Mama, this is Glenn."

-

-"I'm very glad to have you come," said Mrs. Blair, trying instantly to

-rob the situation of the embarrassment she felt it must have for the

-young man.

-

-Marley could not say a word, but he put all his gratitude in the

-pressure he gave Mrs. Blair's hand. The light that came from the hall

-was dim, and though Mrs. Blair could see that Marley was straight and

-carried himself well, his face was blurred by the shadows. She turned to

-Lavinia.

-

-"Will you bring out another chair, dear, or would you prefer to go

-indoors?"

-

-Then, seeing an advantage in this latter alternative, she decided for

-them:

-

-"Perhaps we'd better go in, I fear it's cool out here."

-

-She held back the screen door and Lavinia whisked excitedly into the

-hall. Mrs. Blair led the way to the parlor and sent Lavinia for a match.

-Then, turning to Marley, waiting there in the darkness, she said:

-

-"She has told me, Glenn."

-

-Marley felt something tender, maternal in her voice; the way she spoke

-his name affected him.

-

-"But she is young, very young; she is just a girl. We wish, of course,

-for nothing but her happiness, and you must be patient, very patient. It

-must not be, if it is to be, for a long time. What does your own mother

-think of it?"

-

-"I haven't told her."

-

-"You haven't!"

-

-"No. I felt I hardly had the right yet--not before I spoke to Judge

-Blair, you know. I think I shall speak to him just as soon as he gets

-home." He spoke impulsively; until that moment he had been thrusting the

-thought from him, but Mrs. Blair's manner led him into confidences. In

-the immediate fear that he had been precipitant, he looked to her for

-help; she seemed the sort of woman to wish to save others all the

-trouble she could, one whose life was full of sacrifices, none the less

-noble, perhaps, because she made so little of them herself. But a

-perplexity showed in her eyes and before she could reply, Lavinia was

-back. With an intimate, domestic impulse Lavinia pressed the match into

-Marley's hand, and said:

-

-"You do it; I can't reach."

-

-Marley groped with his upheld hand, and when Lavinia guided him to the

-middle of the room, he lighted the gas. Mrs. Blair looked at him for a

-moment and Lavinia, standing by, as if awaiting her decision, glowed

-with happiness. Mrs. Blair's smile completed the fond, maternal

-impression Marley had somehow felt when she was standing by him in the

-darkness. Her full matronly figure, even in the tendency to corpulence

-of her middle years, had preserved its graceful lines; and Marley

-regretted the disappearance of this wholesome, cheerful woman as she

-passed out of the room.

-

-Judge Blair got home from Cincinnati on Sunday morning, worn by his

-work, and maddened by the din of the city to which he was so

-unaccustomed. Walking up the familiar streets, he had been glad of their

-shade and that pervading sense of a Sunday that still remains a Sabbath

-in Macochee. He had been a little piqued, at first, because his wife had

-not met him at the train, though she had not, to be sure, known that he

-was coming. She had gone to Sunday-school, and Connie gave him his

-breakfast--that is, she sat at the table with him, watching him eat and

-answering the questions he put to her about the happenings in Macochee

-while he had been away.

-

-It was not strange that Connie should talk mostly, after she yielded to

-the gnawing temptation to tell him at all, of the nightly visits Marley

-had made to the house. She did this in a certain resentment she felt

-with Lavinia, a resentment that came from an annoying jealousy she was

-beginning to have of Marley, as if, in installing himself in her

-sister's heart, he had evicted all other affections from it.

-

-The judge, with his constant affectation of what he considered the

-judicial attitude of mind, tried to weigh Connie's somewhat prejudiced

-evidence impartially, but he was troubled and annoyed that the peace he

-had been looking forward to all the week should be jeopardized

-immediately on his coming home.

-

-It was not until afternoon that he had an opportunity to question his

-wife, and he began with a severity in his attitude that had as its

-fundamental cause, as much as anything else, her failure to meet him at

-the train that morning, and her remaining to church after Sunday-school.

-

-"What do you know about this business between Lavinia and that young

-Marley?" he asked. "It seems to have developed rapidly during my

-absence."

-

-"Oh, Connie has been talking to you, I suppose!" laughed Mrs. Blair.

-"You know that Connie is apt to be sensational."

-

-Judge Blair eyed his wife narrowly. Connie was his favorite child,

-though he would not, of course, admit as much, and he was ever ready to

-spring to her defense.

-

-"She has very bright eyes," he said.

-

-"Oh, now, dear," said Mrs. Blair, "don't overestimate this thing.

-Lavinia's nothing but a child."

-

-"That's just the point. Has the young man been here much?"

-

-"Yes, he was here quite often--several evenings, in fact."

-

-"Humph! He seems to have taken advantage of the sunshine of my absence

-to make his hay."

-

-"Don't do him an injustice. He didn't meet Lavinia until just about the

-time you went away."

-

-"Well, we'll see about it," said the judge, darkly.

-

-"Now see here, Will, don't make the matter serious by an unnecessary

-opposition; don't drive the children into a position where they will

-consider themselves persecuted lovers."

-

-Mrs. Blair had not until that instant thought of this argument, and she

-was so pleased with it, as justifying her own course with the children,

-as she had artfully called them, that she pressed it.

-

-"No, don't do that. Just let them alone. They're as likely as not to

-outgrow it; that is, if there is anything between them to outgrow.

-They'll probably imagine themselves in love a dozen times before either

-of them is married."

-

-"Don't talk of marriage!" said the judge, with a little shudder.

-

-Mrs. Blair, who had so well dispelled her own fears, could laugh at her

-husband's.

-

-"Just let them alone," she said; "or leave it to me."

-

-"Yes," said the judge peevishly, "leave it to you. You'd probably aid

-and abet them." And then, instantly regretting his ill humor, he added

-hastily: "You're so kind-hearted."

-

-Mrs. Blair kissed his white hair gently and gave his cheek a little pat.

-

-"You'd better take a nap," she said.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER VIII

-

-                          A JUDICIAL DECISION

-

-

-The judge refused to take a nap, though when he sat down on the veranda

-he did take one, lying back in his chair with one of the many sections

-of the Sunday paper spread over his face. It was from this somewhat

-undignified posture that he was aroused by a step; he started up

-hastily.

-

-"I beg your pardon," said the young man, who stood on the steps twirling

-his straw hat round and round in his hands. The young man went on with

-an anxious smile:

-

-"This is Judge Blair, I presume? My name is Marley--Glenn Marley."

-

-If Marley had known that there were men then in the Ohio penitentiary

-serving terms that were longer by years than they would have been had

-Judge Blair digested his breakfast, or been allowed to finish his

-afternoon nap, he would have chosen another hour to press his suit. But

-he had youth's sublime confidence, and its abiding faith in the abstract

-quality of justice. He had dreaded this moment, but it had forced itself

-upon his keen conscience as a duty, and when he heard that morning that

-Judge Blair had returned he resolved to have it out at once.

-

-"May I have a word with you?" he asked, advancing a little.

-

-The judge nodded, but slightly, as if it were necessary for him, as a

-fattening man advanced in middle life, to conserve his energies. His nod

-seemed to include not only an assent, however reluctant, but a

-permission as well, to take the other chair that stood, all ready to

-rock comfortably, on the veranda. Marley took the chair but he did not

-rock, nor did he yield himself to it, but sat somewhat tensely on its

-very edge.

-

-"It's warm this afternoon, isn't it?" he said, trying to keep up his

-smile. He felt hopeless about it, but the thought, darting through his

-mind, that Lavinia was near, braced his purpose. The judge sat hunched

-in his chair, with his short white hair tumbled rather picturesquely,

-and his chin low in his collar. His lips were set firmly, his brows

-contracted. He breathed heavily, and on his strong aquiline nose, Marley

-could see tiny drops of perspiration.

-

-"I have come," said Marley, "to speak to you, Judge Blair, on a matter

-of, that is, importance. That is, I have come to ask you if I

-might--ah--pay my addresses to your daughter."

-

-Marley thought this form of putting it rather fine, and he was glad that

-that much of it, at least, was over. And yet, much as he liked this

-old-fashioned formula about paying his addresses, he instantly felt its

-inadequacy, and so nerved himself to do it all over.

-

-"I mean Lavinia," he said hurriedly, as if to correct any error of

-identification he might have led the judge into. "I want to marry her."

-

-The judge, still breathing heavily, looked at Marley out of his narrowed

-eyes.

-

-"You know," Marley said, in an explanatory way, "I love her."

-

-He waited then, but the judge was motionless, even to the hand that hung

-at his side over the arm of his chair, still holding his paper. Now and

-then, at what seemed to be long, unequal intervals, his eyelids fell

-slowly in heavy winks.

-

-"How long have you and Lavinia known each other?" he asked finally.

-

-"I met her several weeks ago, out at Captain Carter's. But I did not see

-her again, that is to speak to her, until about a week ago. In one way I

-have known her, you might say, but a week; yet I feel that I have known

-her a long time, always, in fact. I--I--well, I loved her at first

-sight." Marley dropped his face at this speech, for it seemed that he

-had made it too sentimental; he had a feeling that the judge so regarded

-it. He sat and picked at the braids of straw in his hat.

-

-"And have you spoken to her?" asked the judge.

-

-"Oh yes!" said Marley, looking up quickly.

-

-"And she--?"

-

-"She loves me."

-

-The judge closed his eyes as if in pain. Then he stirred, the paper

-dropped from his fingers, and he drew himself up in his chair, as if to

-deal with the matter.

-

-"How old are you, Mr. Marley?" he inquired.

-

-"I am twenty-two," said Marley, confidently, as if this maturity must

-incline the judge in his favor. "I cast my first vote for McKinley." He

-thought this, too, would help matters, and possibly it did.

-

-"You have completed your education?"

-

-"I graduated this summer from the Ohio Wesleyan."

-

-"And what are you doing now, or proposing to do?"

-

-"Just now, I am studying law," he announced. "I'm going to make the law

-my profession."

-

-Marley looked up with a high faith in this final appeal, but even that

-did not impress the judge as Marley felt a tribute thus delicately

-implied should affect him.

-

-"You are reading with a preceptor, I take it?"

-

-"Yes, sir, in Mr. Powell's office."

-

-Judge Blair looked at Marley as if he were deciding what to do with him.

-After he had looked a while he gazed off across the street, drumming

-with his finger-tips on the arm of his chair. Presently, without

-turning, and still gazing abstractedly into the distance--and in that

-instant Marley remembered that he had seen the judge stare at the

-ceiling of the court room in exactly the same way while sentencing a

-culprit--he began to speak.

-

-"Lavinia is yet very young, Mr. Marley," he said, "with no knowledge of

-the world, and, perhaps, little of the state of her own mind. You too,

-are young, very young, and as yet without an occupation. You are, it is

-true, studying law, but it will be three years before you can be

-admitted, and many years after that before you can command a practice

-that would warrant you in marrying. In this day, the outlook for the

-young lawyer is not encouraging. I do not think I would wish a son of

-mine to choose that profession; the great changes that have transpired,

-and are transpiring in our industrial development, have greatly reduced

-the chances of the young lawyer's success. The practice in the smaller

-county-seats, like our own, for instance, has almost entirely vanished.

-The settlement of titles to real estate, so lucrative a branch of the

-law in the early days of my own practice, has deprived the later

-practitioners of that source of revenue; the field of criminal law has

-become narrowed, unremunerative and almost disreputable. The corporation

-work can be handled by one or two firms in each town, and all that seems

-to be left is the prosecution of personal injury suits, and that is a

-work that hardly appeals to the man of dignity and self-respect. The

-large cities have a wider, I might say, the only field, but there the

-young lawyer must spend years of the hardest, most unremitting toil

-before he can come to anything like success."

-

-The judge paused. He had not intended to speak at such length, but the

-habit of the courts was on him, and once started, he found his own

-didacticism so pleasing to himself, that it was with reluctance that he

-paused at all. He might not have stopped when he did, but gone on almost

-indefinitely, as he did when he delivered what were always spoken of as

-his beautiful charges to juries, had he not recalled, with something

-like a pang of resentment, that the happiness of his own, instead of

-another's child, lay at the bottom of all this. He turned then to face

-Marley. The young man was sitting there, his eyes wide, and his face

-long. The color that flamed in it when he first appeared, was now quite

-gone. It was gray and cold instead.

-

-"You will see, Mr. Marley," the judge resumed, "that you are hardly in a

-position to ask for my daughter's hand. Of course," the judge allowed a

-smile to soften somewhat the fixity of his lips, "I appreciate your

-manliness in coming to me, and I do not want to be understood as making

-any reflections upon, or in the least questioning, your character, your

-worth, or the honor of your intentions. But in view of your youth and of

-Lavinia's, and in view of your own, as yet, unsettled position in life,

-you must see how impossible it is that anything like an engagement

-should subsist between you. I say this because I wish only for Lavinia's

-happiness. I may say that I am not unmindful of your happiness, too, and

-I esteem it my duty to reach the conclusions I have just presented to

-you."

-

-"And I--I can not even see her?" stammered Marley, in his despair.

-

-"I have not said that," the judge said. "I shall always be pleased to

-extend to you the hospitality of my house, of course; but I would not

-consider it necessary for you to see her regularly, or intimately, and I

-certainly would not want you to monopolize her society to the exclusion

-of other young men with whom she has been in the habit of associating."

-

-Marley sat there, after this long harangue, with his head downcast. He

-sat and turned his hat round and round. At last he did look up with an

-appeal in his eyes, but when he saw that the judge was sitting there, as

-he had at first, sunk in his chair, breathing heavily and looking at him

-out of those sluggish eyes, he arose. He stood a moment, and looked off

-across the street somewhere, anywhere. Then he smote one hand lightly

-into the other, turned, and said:

-

-"Well--good afternoon, Judge Blair."

-

-"Good afternoon, Mr. Marley," the judge replied. He watched Marley go

-down the walk and out of the gate.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER IX

-

-                            A FILIAL REBUKE

-

-

-"Father!"

-

-Judge Blair turned and saw Lavinia standing in the wide front door. Her

-face was red, her eyes were flashing, her arms hung straight and tense

-at her sides.

-

-The judge stirred uneasily in his chair.

-

-"Oh!" she cried, rigidly clenching her little fists. "What have you

-done! You have sent him away!"

-

-"Come here, my daughter," he said.

-

-Lavinia moved toward him, halting each moment, then taking a few nervous

-steps forward. At last she stood before him, challenging, defiant.

-

-"Sit down, Lavinia, and listen," implored the judge.

-

-"You have sent him away!" she repeated. "You were harsh and cruel and

-unkind to him!"

-

-"Lavinia!" cried the judge, flushing with the anger parents call by

-different names. There was now a peremptory quality in his tone. But the

-girl did not heed him.

-

-"Oh, how could you!" she went on, "how could you! Think how you must

-have wounded him! You not only reproached him with being poor, but you

-discouraged him as to his prospects! Do you think I cared for that? Do

-you think I couldn't have waited? Do you think I can't wait anyhow? What

-had you when you proposed to mama? You were poor--you had no prospects;

-you had no more right--"

-

-"Lavinia! Lavinia!" the judge commanded, grasping the arms of his chair

-in an effort to rise. "You are beside yourself! You don't know what you

-are saying!"

-

-"And you pretended to be doing it all for my happiness, too! Oh! oh!

-oh!" Her anger vented itself impotently in these exclamations, and then

-her mother, white and alarmed, appeared in the doorway behind her.

-

-"Lavinia," she said quietly.

-

-The girl trembled violently, then whirled about, pressed her hands to

-her face, and ran in, brushing by her mother in the doorway. Mrs. Blair

-glanced after her irresolutely. Then she went to her husband.

-

-"Be calm, dear," she said.

-

-The judge sank back in his chair and looked at her in amazement.

-

-"What has happened?" She drew the empty chair up and sat down in it. She

-leaned forward and took one of his hands, and pressed it between both of

-her own. She waited for the judge to speak.

-

-"I hardly know," he began. "I never heard Lavinia break out so."

-

-"You must remember how excited and overwrought she is," Mrs. Blair

-exclaimed. "You must make allowances."

-

-"I didn't know the girl had such spirit," he continued.

-

-Mrs. Blair smiled rather wanly, and stroked her husband's hand. It was

-very cold and moist, and it trembled.

-

-"I had no idea it was so serious," he went on, as if summing up the

-catalogue of his surprises.

-

-"Tell me how it all came about," said Mrs. Blair.

-

-"Marley was here, first," the judge began. He had to pause, for he

-seemed to find it difficult to catch his breath. "It was a great

-surprise to me; it was very painful."

-

-The judge withdrew his hand and wiped his brow. Then he gazed again as

-he had done before, across the street. Mrs. Blair, though eying him

-closely and with concern, waited patiently.

-

-"I didn't wish to wound him," the judge resumed, speaking as much to

-himself as to her. "I hope I said nothing harsh; he really was quite

-manly about it."

-

-He paused again.

-

-"I presume I may have seemed cold, unfeeling, unsympathetic," he went

-on; and then as if he needed to reassure and justify himself, he added,

-"but of course it was impossible, utterly impossible."

-

-After another pause, he drew a deep breath, and as if he had already

-outlined his whole interview with Marley, continued:

-

-"And then Lavinia appeared; she must have heard it all, standing there

-in the hall."

-

-The judge leaned heavily against the back of his big chair; his face was

-drawn, his wrinkles were deeper than they had been, and he wore an

-aspect of weariness and pain. His form, too, seemed to have shrunk, and

-he sat there in an almost helpless mass, limp and inert.

-

-"I am only afraid, dear," Mrs. Blair said quietly, "that we have taken

-this thing too seriously."

-

-"Possibly," he said. "But it is serious, very serious. I don't know what

-is to be done."

-

-"We must have patience," Mrs. Blair counseled. "It will require all our

-delicacy and tact, now."

-

-"Perhaps you had better go in to her," the judge said presently. "Poor

-little girl; she is passing through the deep waters. And I tried to act

-only for her interest and happiness."

-

-Mrs. Blair arose.

-

-"She will see that, dear, in time."

-

-"I hope so," said the judge. Mrs. Blair went up to Lavinia's room, and

-listened for a moment at the closed door. She heard a voice, low and

-indistinct, but she knew it for the voice of Connie, and she could tell

-from its tone that the little girl was trying in her way to comfort and

-console her sister. So she stepped away, silently, almost stealthily,

-going on tiptoe.

-

-The judge sat on the veranda all the afternoon. He scarcely moved, and

-never once did he pick up the Sunday paper. Now and then he bowed, in

-his dignified way, to some acquaintance passing in the street. The

-Chenowiths came out on to their front porch, evidently hot and stupefied

-from their Sunday afternoon naps and ready now for the cool refreshment

-of the evening breeze they could usually rely on in Macochee with the

-coming of the evening. The judge bowed to them, and he tried to put into

-his bow an indolent unconcern, lest the Chenowiths should penetrate his

-manner and discover the trouble that lay on his heart. The Chenowiths

-had gone to the end of their porch, and the judge could hear their

-laughter. He thought it strange and unnatural that any one should laugh.

-

-He decided that he would review this whole affair of Lavinia's love

-calmly and judicially. He went back to the beginning of Marley's visit,

-trying to see wherein he himself had been in the wrong, then he went

-over the hot scene with Lavinia. He could not recover from his surprise

-at this; that Lavinia, who was usually so gentle, so mild, so unselfish,

-should have given way to such anger was incomprehensible. He had always

-said that she had her mother's disposition. He could see her, all the

-time, distinctly, as she had stood there, in a rage he had never known

-her to indulge before, and yet, as he looked at the image of her that

-was in his mind, and recalled certain expressions, certain attitudes,

-certain tones of voice, it came over him all at once that she was

-exactly as her mother had been at her age, though he could not reconcile

-Lavinia's mood with the resemblance. Then he went back to his own days

-of courtship, with their emotions, their uncertainties, their doubts and

-illusions. They seemed a long way off.

-

-He was trying to think calmly and logically, but he found that he could

-not then control his mind, for suddenly he saw Lavinia as a little girl,

-with her mother kneeling before her, shaking out and straightening her

-starched frock. And with this thought came the revelation, sudden,

-irresistible, that Lavinia was no longer a child as, with the habit of

-the happy years, he had thought of her, up to that very afternoon, in

-fact, until an hour ago, and he bowed before the changes that hour had

-wrought. He accepted the conviction now that he himself had grown old.

-He forgot his purpose to probe to its first cause this unhappiness that

-had come to him; he saw that what he mourned was the loss of a child,

-the loss of his own youth.

-

-He glanced across at the Chenowiths again, and they seemed remote from

-him, of another generation in fact, though but a few moments before he

-had looked on them as contemporaries. And then suddenly there came to

-him the fear that Mr. Chenowith might run over to chat with him, as was

-his habit, and the judge hastily rose, and almost surreptitiously went

-off the end of the porch and around into the side yard. Under the new

-impression of age that he had grown into, he walked slowly, with a

-senile stoop, and dragged his feet as he went. He wandered about in the

-yard for a long while, looking at the shrubs and bushes and trees he had

-planted himself so long ago, when he was young. It occurred to him that

-here in this garden he would potter around, and pass his declining

-years.

-

-He remained in the yard until his wife came to call him in to the supper

-she had prepared, in the Sunday evening absence of the hired girl, and

-with an effort he brought himself back from the future to the present.

-

-"How is she?"

-

-"Oh, she's all right," said Mrs. Blair, in her usual cheery tone. "I

-didn't go to her, I thought it best to leave her alone."

-

-The judge looked at his wife, with her rosy face, and her full figure

-still youthful in the simple summer gown she wore. He looked at her

-curiously, wondering why it was she seemed so young; a width of years

-seemed all at once to separate them. Mrs. Blair noted this look of her

-husband's. She noted it with pity for him; he looked older to her.

-

-"I think it would be nice for you to take Lavinia with you when you go

-to Put-in-Bay to the Bar Association meeting," she said.

-

-It seemed strange and anomalous to Judge Blair that he should still be

-attending Bar Association meetings.

-

-"I'll see," he said; and then he qualified, "if I go."

-

-"If you go?" his wife exclaimed. "Why, you're down for a paper!"

-

-"So I am," said the judge.

-

-They turned toward the house, and the judge took his wife's arm, leaning

-rather heavily on it.

-

-"Will!" she said, after they had gone a few steps in this fashion. "What

-is the matter with you! You walk like an old man!"

-

-She shook his arm off, and said:

-

-"Hurry up now. The coffee will be getting cold."

-

-Indoors, they passed Connie going through the hall; she had just come

-down the stairs, and the sight of her girlish figure, and her short

-skirts just sweeping the tops of her shoes, gladdened the judge's heart,

-and he smiled. He could rely on Connie, anyway, for sympathy. But the

-girl gave him a sharp reproachful stare from her dark eyes, and the

-judge felt utterly deserted.

-

-Lavinia did not come down to her supper, though her mother, knowing she

-would want it later, kept the coffee warm on the back of the kitchen

-stove. Chad had gone away with one of the Weston boys. So the three, the

-judge, Mrs. Blair and Connie, ate their supper alone.

-

-After supper, Mrs. Blair and Connie went immediately to Lavinia and the

-judge had a sense of exclusion from the mysteries that were enacting up

-there, an exclusion that seemed to proceed from his own culpability. He

-went to his library and tried to read, but he could only sit with his

-head in his hand, and stare before him. But finally he was aroused from

-his reveries by a stir in the hall, and glancing up he saw Lavinia in

-the door. She came straight to him, and said:

-

-"Forgive me, papa, if I was rude and unkind."

-

-He seized her in his arms, hugging her head against his shoulders, and

-he said again and again, while stroking her hair clumsily:

-

-"My little girl! My little girl!"

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER X

-

-                               PUT-IN-BAY

-

-

-The little steamer for the islands rolled out of Sandusky Bay with

-Lavinia sitting by the forward rail. She had yielded to her father's

-wishes with an easy complaisance that made him suspicious, and yet, as

-he stood solicitously by, he was persistent in his determination to

-realize for her all the delights he had so extravagantly predicted for

-the journey. He tried to rouse her interest by pointing out Johnson's

-Island, but it did not possess for her, as the place where the

-Confederate prisoners were confined during the war, the interest an old

-soldier was able to discover in it, and though he tried his best, with

-an effort at entertainment that was well-nigh pathetic, she only smiled

-wanly.

-

-He left her, after a while, her chin in her hands, looking over into the

-light green waters, watching the curve of the waves the steamer tossed

-away from its sharp prow. The lake was in one of its most smiling and

-happy moods, though they were then at a point where storms easily lash

-its shallow depths into billows that might satisfy the rage of the North

-Atlantic. The lighthouse on the rocks at Marblehead had a fascination

-for Lavinia; it seemed waiting for her humor, and she watched it until

-the steamer had gone far on toward Kelly's Island, and left the

-lighthouse behind, a white spot gleaming in the sun.

-

-When they entered the little archipelago of the Wine Islands, with their

-waters a deeper green than those out in the lake and overcast in strange

-ways by mysterious shadows and cool weird reflections of the green of

-the islands all about, Judge Blair came back to her and asked if she had

-been seasick and how she had enjoyed the little journey. As she met him

-with her strange perplexing smile, he began to doubt her again;

-something assured him that she still clung to her purpose of love, and

-he found himself almost wishing that she had kept to her defiant temper

-of the Sunday afternoon that now seemed so far away.

-

-When they had reached Put-in-Bay and bounded on the trolley across the

-island to the huge hotel, they had their dinner and Lavinia perplexed

-the judge further by retiring to her room. She said she would rest,

-though she had persisted all the morning that she was not tired.

-

-As soon as she had closed the door on her father, leaving him in doubt

-and confusion, she began a long letter to Marley. She described her trip

-in detail, jealous of every trifle of experience that had befallen her;

-she told him of the bridal couple she had seen board the train at Clyde,

-and of the showers of rice that had been thrown by the laughing bridal

-party, though she omitted the lone father of the bride standing apart on

-the platform craning his head anxiously for another sight of his

-daughter, and trying to smile. But she gave him a sense of the romance

-that had stirred in her at the sight of the lighthouse on its lonely

-point of rocks and the stone towers that made the wine-cellars on

-Kelly's Island look like castles.

-

-After supper Lavinia left her father to the pleasure of renewing

-acquaintance with the lawyers who thronged the lobby, and stole down to

-the rocks that marked the shelving shore of the island. She saw stately

-schooners, with white sails spread, and she watched, until its black

-banner of smoke was but a light wraith, a big propeller towing its

-convoy of grain barges across the far horizon. This calm serene passing

-of the life of the lakes soothed her, filled her with a thousand

-fancies, and stirred her emotions with deep, hidden hints of the mystery

-of all life. As she sat there and gazed, now and then tears came to her

-eyes. The waters were spread smoothly before her under the last

-reflection of the sun, the twilight was coming across the lake; and as

-the light followed the sun and the darkness crept behind, she looked

-toward the south in the direction, as she felt, of Macochee, and thought

-of her home and of her mother, of Connie and of Chad, and then she

-thought of Glenn.

-

-Far out in the lake a cluster of yellow lights moved swiftly along--one

-of the big passenger steamers that nightly ply between Detroit and

-Buffalo, and she read in that moving girdle of light new meanings; then

-suddenly a fear seized her, a fear that was part of the ache in her

-heart, and she ran into the hotel and up to her room. Then she took up

-her letter again and poured out all her new sensations, her longings,

-and her fears in a lengthy postscript. When she had finished, she began

-to address the envelope; and she wrote on it, with pride:

-

-"Mr. Glenn--"

-

-And then she paused. She did not know whether he spelt his name "Marly,"

-or "Marley," or "Marlay." She tried writing it each way, dozens of

-times, but the oftener she tested it the less able she was to decide. It

-was too ridiculous; she became exasperated with herself; then humiliated

-and ashamed. When she heard her father's step in the hall, she hastily

-locked her letter in her little traveling bag. The judge greeted her

-warmly; he was flushed and happy, and in the highest spirits. During the

-afternoon he had been meeting lawyers from all over Ohio; the evening

-boats from Cleveland and Toledo had brought more of them to the island;

-they were all eminent, respectable, rich, the attorneys of big

-corporations. The judges of the Supreme Court and of the Circuit Courts

-were there, and the excitement had reached its height when the boat from

-Cleveland brought an associate justice of the United States Supreme

-Court to deliver the chief address of the meeting.

-

-Judge Blair reveled in meeting all these distinguished men; he enjoyed

-the flattery in their way of addressing and introducing him. But his

-conscience smote him when he saw Lavinia. He drew up a chair and sat

-beside her, holding his cigar at arm's length. It was an excellent

-cigar, better than he ordinarily smoked, and the thin thread of smoke

-that wavered up from it filled the room almost instantly with its

-delicate perfume.

-

-"Did my little girl think her father had deserted her?" he said,

-speaking of her in the third person, after the affectionate way of

-parents. "He must pay better attention to her. She must come down and

-meet the lawyers; they will be delighted; a justice of the Supreme Court

-has just come on from Washington! She will want to meet him!"

-

-The judge paused and twisted his head about for a puff at his cigar, and

-then waited for Lavinia to glow at the prospect. But when she looked at

-him, and tried to smile again, he saw the glint of tears in her eyes.

-

-"Why come, come, dear!" he said. "What's the matter? Aren't you having a

-good time? Never mind, when this meeting's over we'll go to Detroit, and

-maybe up the lakes for a little trip. That'll bring the roses back!"

-

-He pinched her cheeks playfully, but she did not respond; she looked at

-him pleadingly.

-

-"Why, Lavinia," he cried, "you aren't homesick?"

-

-She winked bravely to stem the flood of tears and then nodded.

-

-"Well!" he said, nonplussed. "You know, dear, we can't--"

-

-The tears were brimming in her blue eyes, and he left his sentence

-uncompleted to go on:

-

-"So you're homesick, eh? For mama, and Connie?"

-

-She nodded, and he studied her closely for a moment, and then he could

-not resist the question that all along had been torturing him.

-

-"And for--?"

-

-She confirmed his fear, with quick decisive little nods. She got out her

-handkerchief and hastily brushed her tears away, and then with an effort

-to control herself, she looked at him and said, as if she were ready to

-have it all out then:

-

-"Yes, father, I haven't treated him right. I came away without telling

-him."

-

-Judge Blair scowled and turned away, and bit the end of his cigar. Then

-he sat and studied it. Lavinia waited; she was ready for the final

-contest. Presently the judge arose.

-

-"Well, dear," he said. "Well--we'll see; of course, we can't go back

-just yet--I have my address to read to-morrow, and besides, some of the

-boys are talking of me for president of the Bar Association. And I had

-thought, I had thought, that a little trip over to Detroit, and maybe up

-to Mackinac--"

-

-"Father," said Lavinia, looking at him now calmly, "I don't want to go

-to Detroit or up to Mackinac. I'll do, of course, as you say; I'll wait

-until the Bar meeting is over, but I want to go home. You might as well

-know now, father--we might as well understand each other--it can be no

-other way."

-

-Judge Blair looked at his daughter a moment, and she kept her eyes

-directly and firmly in his.

-

-"Oh well," he said with a sigh, "of course, dear, if you say. I'd like

-to stay until after the election though. Will you?"

-

-"Of course," she consented.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER XI

-

-                                MACOCHEE

-

-

-Marley had not learned of Lavinia's departure until Monday afternoon; he

-had the news from Lawrence, who had it from the hackman who had taken

-Judge Blair and Lavinia to the train; for whenever any of the quality go

-away from Macochee they always ride to the station in the hack, though

-at other times they walk without difficulty all over the town. When

-Marley reached the office, and found Wade Powell, as he usually found

-him, sitting with his feet on his table, smoking and reading a

-Cincinnati paper, the lawyer looked up casually, but when he saw

-Marley's expression he suddenly exclaimed:

-

-"Hello! What's the matter?"

-

-Marley shook his head.

-

-"Something's troubling you," said Powell.

-

-Marley shook his head again, and Powell looked at him as at a witness he

-was cross-examining.

-

-"I know better," he said.

-

-Marley affected to busy himself at his desk, but after a while, he

-turned about and said:

-

-"Something is troubling me, Mr. Powell; my--prospects." He had been on

-the point of confessing his real trouble, but with the very words on his

-lips, he could not utter them, and so let the conversation take another

-turn.

-

-"Oh, prospects!" said Powell. "I can tell you all about prospects; I've

-had more than any man in Gordon County. When I was your age, opinion was

-unanimous in this community that my prospects were the most numerous and

-the most brilliant of any one here!"

-

-Powell laughed, a little bitterly.

-

-"If I'd only been prudent enough to die then, Glenn," he went on, "I'd

-have been mourned as a potential judge of the Supreme Court, senator and

-president."

-

-"It'll be three years before I can be admitted, won't it?" asked Marley.

-

-"Yes," said Powell; "but that isn't long; and it isn't anything to be

-admitted."

-

-"Well, it takes time, anyway," said Marley, "and then there's the

-practice after that--how long will that take?"

-

-"Well, let's see," said Powell, plucking reflectively at the flabby skin

-that hung between the points of his collar. "Let's see." His brows were

-twitching humorously. "It's taken me about thirty years--I don't know

-how much longer it'll take."

-

-Powell smoked on for a few moments, and then added soberly:

-

-"Of course, I had to fool around in politics for about twenty-five

-years, and save the people."

-

-"Do you think," Marley said, after a moment's silence that paid its own

-respect to Powell's regrets, "that there's an opening for me here in

-Macochee?"

-

-"No, Glenn, I'll tell you. There's no use to think of locating in

-Macochee or any other small town. The business is dead here. It's too

-bad, but it's so. When I began there was plenty of real estate law to

-do, and plenty of criminal law, but the land titles are all settled

-now--"

-

-"That's what Judge Blair said," interrupted Marley.

-

-"So you've been to him, have you?"

-

-Marley blushed.

-

-"Well, not exactly," he said. "I heard him say that."

-

-"Yes," mused Powell. "Well, he feathered his nest pretty well while they

-were being settled. But as I was saying--the criminal business has died

-out, or rather, it has changed. The criminals haven't any money any

-more, that is, the old kind of criminals; the corporations have it all

-now--if you want to make money, you'll have to have them for clients. Of

-course, the money still goes to the criminal lawyer just as it used to."

-

-"I like Macochee," said Marley, his spirits falling fast.

-

-"Well, it's a nice old town to live in," Powell assented. "But the devil

-of it is how're you going to live? Of course, you can study here just as

-well as anywhere; better than anywhere, in fact; you have plenty of

-time, and plenty of quiet. But as for locating here--why, it's utterly

-out of the question for a man who wants to make anything of himself and

-has to get a living while he's doing it--and I don't know any other kind

-that ever do make anything out of themselves."

-

-"I had hoped--" persisted Marley, longing for Powell to relent.

-

-"Oh, I know," the lawyer replied almost impatiently, "but it's no use,

-there's nothing in it. No one with ambition can stay here now. The town,

-like all these old county-seats, is good for nothing but impecunious old

-age and cemeteries. It was nothing but a country cross-roads before the

-railroad came, and since then it's been nothing but a water-tank; if it

-keeps on it'll be nothing but a whistling-post, and the trains won't be

-bothered to stop at all. Its people are industrious in nothing but

-gossip, and genuine in nothing but hypocrisy; they are so mean that they

-hate themselves, and think all the time they're hating each other. Just

-look at our leading citizen, Brother Dudley, over there in his bank; he

-owns the whole town, and he thinks he's a bigger man than old Grant.

-Sundays he sits in his pew with a black coat on, squinting at the

-preacher out of his sore little eyes, and waiting for him to say

-something he can get the bishop to fire him for, and he calls that

-religion. Mondays he goes back to his business of skinning farmers and

-poor widows out of their miserable little pennies, and he calls that

-business; Does he ever look at a flower or a tree, or turn round in the

-street at the laugh of a child? He's the kind of man that runs this

-town, and he makes the rest of the people like it. Well, he don't run

-me! God! If I'd only had some sense twenty years ago I'd have pulled out

-and gone to the city and been somebody to-day."

-

-It pained Marley to hear Powell berate Macochee; he had never heard him

-rage so violently at the town, though he was always sneering at it. To

-Marley the very name of Macochee meant romance; he liked the name the

-Indian village had left behind when it vanished; he liked the old

-high-gabled buildings about the Square; he longed to identify himself

-with Macochee, to think of it as his home.

-

-"But I'll tell you one thing," Powell went on, his tone suddenly

-changing to one of angry resolution as he flung his feet heavily to the

-bare floor and struck his desk a startling blow with his fist, "I'll

-tell you one thing, I'm through working for nothing; they've got to pay

-me! I'm going to squeeze the last cent out of them after this, same as

-old Dudley does, same as old Bill Blair did before he went on the bench;

-that's what I'm going to do. I'm getting old and I've got to quit

-running a legal eleemosynary institution."

-

-Powell's eyes flamed, but a shadow fell in the room, and Powell and

-Marley glanced at the door.

-

-"Well, what do you want?" said Powell.

-

-An old woman, bareheaded in the hurry of a crisis, was on the threshold.

-

-"Oh, Mr. Powell," she began in a wailing voice, "would you come quick!"

-

-"What for?"

-

-"Charlie's in ag'in."

-

-"Got any money?" demanded Powell, in the angry resolution of a moment

-before. He clenched his fist again on the edge of his table. Marley

-glanced at him in surprise, and then at the old woman.

-

-The woman hung her head and stammered:

-

-"Well, you know--I hain't just now, but by the week's end, when I get

-the money for my washin'--"

-

-"Oh, that's all right," said Powell, getting to his feet, "that's all

-right. We won't talk of that now. I beg your pardon. We'll walk down to

-the calaboose and see the boy; we can talk it over with him and see

-what's to be done."

-

-He picked up his slouch hat and clapped it on his head.

-

-"What's he been doing this time?" he said to the old woman as they went

-out the door.

-

-Marley watched them as they passed the open window and disappeared. A

-smile touched his lips an instant, and then he became serious and

-depressed once more.

-

-He had had no word from Lavinia, and her going away immediately after

-his scene with Judge Blair confused him. He tried to think it out, but

-he could reach no conclusion save that it was all at an end. Lavinia's

-sudden, unexplained departure proved that. And yet he could not, he

-would not, think that she had changed; no, her father had borne her

-away--that was it--forcibly and cruelly borne her away. For a long while

-he sat there finding a certain satisfaction in the melancholy that came

-over him, and then suddenly he was aroused by the boom of the town

-clock. The heavy notes of the bell rolled across to him, and he counted

-them--five. It was time to go. And Powell had not returned. It was not

-surprising; Powell often went out that way and did not come back, and,

-often, somehow to Marley's chagrin, men and women sat and waited long

-hours in the dumb patience of the poor and then went away with their

-woes still burdening them. They must have been used to woes, they

-carried them so silently.

-

-Marley was walking moodily down Main Street, feeling that he had no part

-in the bustling happiness of the people going home from their day's

-work, when, lifting his head, he saw Mrs. Blair in her surrey. Instantly

-she jerked the horse in toward the curb and beckoned to him.

-

-"Why, Glenn! I'm so glad I met you!" she said, her face rosy with its

-smile. "I have something for you."

-

-She raised her eyebrows in a significant way and began fumbling in her

-lap. Presently she leaned out of the surrey and pressed something into

-his hand.

-

-"Just between ourselves, you know!" she said, with the delicious mystery

-of a secret, and then gathering up her reins, she clucked at her lazy

-horse.

-

-He looked after her a moment, then at the thick envelope he held in his

-hand. On it was written in the long Anglican characters of a young girl,

-these words:

-

-"For Glenn."

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XII

-

-                        A CONDITIONAL SURRENDER

-

-

-Judge Blair and Lavinia returned home Saturday.

-

-"I guess it's no use," the judge said to Mrs. Blair when she had

-followed him up stairs, where he had gone to wash off the dust he had

-accumulated during the six hours the train had consumed in jerking

-itself from Sandusky to Macochee.

-

-"No, I could see how relieved she was to get home," replied Mrs. Blair,

-musing idly out of the window. She was not so sure that she was pleased

-with the result she had done her part to accomplish.

-

-"I guess you were right," the judge said.

-

-"I?" asked Mrs. Blair, suddenly turning round.

-

-"Yes--in saying that it would be best not to dignify it by too much

-notice. That might only add to its seriousness."

-

-Mrs. Blair looked out of the window again.

-

-"Of course," the judge went on presently, "I wouldn't want it considered

-as an engagement."

-

-"Of course not," Mrs. Blair acquiesced.

-

-"You'd better have a talk with her," he said. She saw that he was

-seeking his usual retreat in such cases, and she was now determined not

-to take the responsibility. Spiritually they tossed this responsibility

-back and forth between them, like a shuttlecock.

-

-"But wouldn't that make it look as if we were taking too much notice of

-it?"

-

-"Well," the judge said, "I don't know. Do just as you think best."

-

-"Didn't you talk to her about it when you were away?" Mrs. Blair asked.

-

-"M-m yes," the judge said slowly.

-

-"And what did she say?"

-

-"Nothing much, only--"

-

-"Only what?"

-

-"Only that she would not give him up."

-

-"Oh!"

-

-Mrs. Blair waited, and the judge dawdled at his toilet. Some compulsion

-she could not resist, though she tried, distrusting her own weakness,

-drove Mrs. Blair to speak first, and even then she sought to minimize

-the effect of her surrender.

-

-"Of course, Will," she said, "I want to be guided by you in this matter.

-It's really quite serious."

-

-"Oh, well," he said, "you're capable of managing it."

-

-"You said you knew his father, didn't you?" she asked after a while.

-

-"Slightly; why?"

-

-"I was just wishing that we knew more of the family. You know they have

-not lived in Macochee long."

-

-"That's true," the judge assented, realizing all that the objection

-meant.

-

-"And yet," Mrs. Blair reassured him, though she was trying to reassure

-herself at the same time, "his father is a minister; that ought to count

-for something."

-

-"Yes, it ought, and still you know they say that ministers' sons are

-always--"

-

-"But," Mrs. Blair interrupted, as if he were wholly missing the point,

-"ministers' families always have a standing, I think."

-

-They were silent, then, until Mrs. Blair began:

-

-"I suppose I really ought to call on Mrs. Marley."

-

-"Why?"

-

-"Well, it seems, you know--it seems to me that I ought."

-

-"But wouldn't that--?"

-

-"I considered that, and still, it might seem more so if I didn't, don't

-you see?"

-

-The judge tried to grasp the attenuated point, and expressed his failure

-in the sigh with which he stooped to fasten his shoes. Then he drew on

-his alpaca coat, and just as he was leaving the room, his wife stopped

-him with:

-

-"But, Will!"

-

-He halted with his hand on the door-knob. For an instant his wife looked

-at him in pleasure. He was rather handsome, with his white hair combed

-gravely, his ruddy face fresh from his shaving, and his stiff, white

-collar about his neck.

-

-"What did you say?" he asked, recalling her from her reverie of him.

-

-"Oh!" she said; "only this--maybe he won't feel like coming around here

-any more. You know you practically sent him away."

-

-The judge gave a little laugh.

-

-"I guess that will work itself out. Anyway I'll leave it to you--or to

-them."

-

-Still smiling at his own humor, he turned the door-knob, and then

-hesitated. His smile had vanished.

-

-"She's so young," he said with a regret. "She's so young. How old did

-you say you were when we were married?"

-

-"Eighteen," Mrs. Blair replied.

-

-"And Lavinia can't be more than--"

-

-"Why, she's twenty," said Mrs. Blair.

-

-"So she is," said the judge. "So she is. But then you--"

-

-Mrs. Blair had come close to him, and stood picking a bit of thread from

-his shoulder.

-

-"It was different with us, wasn't it, dear?" she said, looking up at

-him.

-

-He kissed her.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XIII

-

-                                 SUMMER

-

-

-The dust lay thick in Ward Street, sifting its fine powder on the leaves

-of the cottonwoods that grew at the weedy gutter. The grass in the yard

-grew long, and the bushes languished in the heat. Judge Blair's beans

-clambered up their poles and turned white; and Connie's sweet peas grew

-lush and rank, running, as she complained, mostly to leaves. The house

-seemed to have withdrawn within itself; its green shutters were closed.

-In the evening dim figures could be seen on the veranda, and the drone

-of voices could be heard. At eleven o'clock, the deep siren of the

-Limited could be heard, as it rounded the curve a mile out of town.

-After that it was still, and night lay on Macochee, soft, vast,

-immeasurable. The clock in the Court House tower boomed out the heavy

-hours. Sometimes the harmonies of the singing negroes were borne over

-the town.

-

-And to Marley and Lavinia those days, and those evenings of purple

-shadows and soft brilliant stars, were but the setting of a dream that

-unfolded new wonders constantly. They were but a part of all life, a

-part of the glowing summer itself, innocent of the thousand artificial

-demands man has made on himself. Lavinia went about with a new

-expression, exalted, expectant; a new dignity had come to her and a new

-beauty; all at once, suddenly, as it were, character had set its noble

-mark upon her, and about her slender figure there was the aureola of

-romance.

-

-"Have you noticed Lavinia?" Mrs. Blair asked her husband.

-

-"No, why?" he said, in the alarm that was ever ready to spring within

-him.

-

-"She has changed so; she has grown so beautiful!"

-

-One morning the judge saw a spar of light flash from her finger, and he

-peered anxiously over his glasses.

-

-"What's that, Lavinia?" he asked, and when she stood at his knee, almost

-like a little girl again in all but spirit, he took her finger.

-

-"A ring," she said simply.

-

-"What does it mean?"

-

-"Glenn gave it to me."

-

-"Glenn?"

-

-"Yes."

-

-"But I thought there was to be no engagement?" The judge looked up, as

-if there had been betrayal. But Lavinia only smiled. The judge looked at

-her a moment, then released her hand.

-

-"I wouldn't wear it where any one could see it," he said.

-

-The summer stretched itself long into September; and then came the still

-days of fall, moving slowly by in majestic procession. With the first

-cool air, a new restless energy awoke in Marley. All the summer he had

-neglected his studies; but now a change was working in him as wonderful

-as that which autumn was working in the world. He looked back at that

-happy, self-sufficient summer, and, for an instant, he had a wild,

-impotent desire to detain it, to hold it, to keep things just as they

-were; but the summer was gone, the winter at hand, and he felt all at

-once the impact of practical life. He faced the future, and for an

-instant he recoiled.

-

-Lavinia was standing looking up at him. She laid her hand on his

-shoulder.

-

-"What is it, Glenn?"

-

-"I was just thinking," he said, "that I have a great assurance in asking

-you to marry me."

-

-"What do you mean?"

-

-"Why, dear, just this: I can't get a practice in Macochee; I might as

-well look it in the face now as any time. I have known it all along, but

-I've kept it from you, and I've tried to keep it from myself. There's no

-place here for me; everybody says so, your father, Wade Powell,

-everybody. There's no chance for a young man in the law in these small

-towns. I've tried to make myself think otherwise. I've tried to make

-myself believe that after I'd been admitted I could settle down here and

-get a practice and we could have a little home of our own--but--"

-

-"Can't we?" Lavinia whispered the words, as if she were afraid utterance

-would confirm the fear they imported.

-

-"Well--that's what they all say," Marley insisted.

-

-"But papa's always talking that way," Lavinia protested. "I suppose all

-old men do. They forget that they were ever young, and I don't see what

-right they have to destroy your faith, your confidence, or the

-confidence of any young man!" Lavinia blazed out these words

-indignantly. It was consoling to Marley to hear them, he liked her

-passionate partizanship in his cause. He longed for her to go on, and he

-waited, anxious to be reassured in spite of himself. He could see her

-face dimly in the starlight, and feel her figure rigid with protest

-beside him.

-

-"It's simply wicked in them," she said presently. "I don't care what

-they say. We can and we will!"

-

-"I like to have you put it that way, dear," said Marley. "I like to have

-you say 'we'!"

-

-She drew more closely to him.

-

-"And you think we can?" he said presently.

-

-"I know it."

-

-"And have a little home, here, in one of these quiet streets, with the

-shade, and the happiness--"

-

-"Yes!"

-

-"And it wouldn't matter much if we were poor?"

-

-"No!"

-

-"Just at first, you know. I'd work hard, and we could be so happy, so

-happy, just we two, together!"

-

-"Yes, yes," she whispered.

-

-"I love Macochee so," Marley said presently. "I just couldn't leave it!"

-

-"Don't! Don't!" she protested. "Don't even speak of it!"

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XIV

-

-                           ONE SUNDAY MORNING

-

-

-It was Sunday morning and Marley sat in church looking at a shaft of

-soft light that fell through one of the tall windows. From gazing at the

-shaft of light, he began to study the symbols in the different windows,

-the cross and crown, the lamb, the triangle that represented the

-Trinity, all the Roman symbols that Protestantism still retains in its

-decorations. Then he counted the pipes in the organ, back and forth,

-never certain that he had counted them correctly. All about him the

-people were going through the service, but it had lost all meaning for

-Marley, because he had been accustomed to it from childhood.

-

-Having been reassured by Lavinia, he felt that he should be happy, yet a

-strong sense of dissatisfaction, of uncertainty, flowed persistently

-under all his thoughts, belying his heart's assurance of its happiness.

-When Doctor Marley, advancing to the pulpit, buttoned his coat down

-before him, pushed aside the vase of flowers the ladies' committee

-always put in his way, and stood with his strong, expressive hand laid

-on the open Bible, Marley's thoughts fixed themselves for a moment in

-the pride and love he had always had for his father. There swept before

-him hundreds of scenes like this when his father had stood up to preach,

-and then suddenly he realized that his father had grown old: he was

-white-haired and in his rugged, smooth-shaven face deep lines were

-drawn--the lines of a beautiful character.

-

-He remembered something his father had said to the effect that the

-pulpit was the only place in which inexperienced youth was desired,

-showing the insincerity of what people call their religion, and then he

-remembered the ambitions he had dimly felt in his father in his earlier

-days; it had been predicted that his father would be a bishop. But he

-was not a bishop, and now in all probability never would be one; he was

-not politician enough for that. And Marley wondered whether or not his

-father could be said to have been successful; he had come to know and to

-do high things, he had lived a life full of noble sacrifice and the

-finest faith in humanity and in God; but was this success? He heard his

-father's voice:

-

-"The text will be found in the third chapter of the Lamentations of

-Jeremiah."

-

-But Marley never listened to sermons; now and then he caught a phrase,

-or a period, especially when his father raised his voice, but his

-thoughts were elsewhere, anywhere--not on the sermon. The men and women

-sitting in front of him kept shifting constantly, and he grew tired of

-slipping this way and that and craning his neck in order to see his

-father. And then the constant fluttering of fans hurt his eyes, and they

-wandered here and there, each person they lighted on suggesting some new

-train of thought.

-

-Presently they fell on a girl in a white dress, and in some way she

-suggested Lavinia. And instantly he felt that he should be perfectly

-happy when thinking of Lavinia, but, as suddenly, came that subconscious

-uncertainty, that deep-flowing discontent. He went over his last

-conversation with Lavinia, in which he had found such assurance, but now

-away from her he realized that he had lulled himself into a sense of

-security that was all false; and the conviction that Macochee had no

-place for him, at least as a lawyer, came back. He tried to put it away

-from him, and think of something else.

-

-His eyes fell on old Selah Dudley, sitting like all pillars of the

-church, at the end of his pew. Dudley's back was narrow, and rounded out

-between the shoulders so that Marley wondered how he could sit

-comfortably at all; his head was flat and sheer behind, and Marley could

-see with what care the old banker had plastered the scant hair across

-his bald poll--the only sign of vanity revealed in him, unless it were

-in the brown kid gloves he wore. Marley looked at Dudley with the

-feeling that he was looking at the most successful man in Macochee, and

-yet he had a troubled sense of the phariseeism that is the essential

-element of such success. He remembered what Wade Powell had said;

-immediately he saw Dudley in a new light; the old man sat stolid,

-patient and brutal, waiting for some heterodoxy, or something that could

-be construed as heterodoxy, theological or economic, like a savage with

-a spear waiting to pierce his prey, and glad when the moment came.

-

-But Marley, seeing the young girl in the white dress, again thought of

-Lavinia, who would be sitting at that very moment with her father and

-mother and Connie and Chad over in the Presbyterian church. How long

-would it be before he could sit there beside her, as her husband? Then

-with a flash it came to him that they would, in all likelihood, be

-married in that very church. Instantly he saw the spectators gathered,

-he saw the pulpit and the chancel-rail hidden in flowers, he saw his

-father with his ritual in his hands, waiting; and then while the organ

-played the wedding march, Lavinia coming down the aisle, her eyes

-lowered under her veil. His heart beat faster, he felt a wave of

-emotion, joyous, exciting.

-

-But there was much to do before that moment could come--the long days

-and nights of study; the examination looming like a mountain of

-difficulties, then months and years of waiting for a practice. He tried

-to imagine each detail of the coming of a practice, but he could not; he

-could not conceive how it was possible for a practice to come to any

-one, much less to him. There were many lawyers in Macochee now, and all

-of them were more or less idle. There was certainly no need of more.

-Judge Blair and Wade Powell and every one had told him that, and

-suddenly he felt an impatience with them all, as if they were

-responsible for the conditions they described; they all conspired

-against him, men and conditions, making up the elements of a harsh,

-intractable fate.

-

-And Marley grew bitter against every one in Macochee; they all gossiped

-about him, they were all determined to drive him away; well, let them;

-he would go; but he would come back again some day as a great,

-successful lawyer, looking down on them and their little interests, and

-they would be filled with envy and respect. But what of Lavinia?

-

-What right had he to ask her to marry him? What right had he to place

-her in the position he had? He realized it now, clearly, he told

-himself, for the first time. She had given up all for him. She would go

-out no more, she had foregone her parties, calls, picnics, dances,

-everything; in her devotion she had estranged her friends. He had given

-her parents concern, he had placed her in a false, impossible position.

-He must rescue her from it. But how? By breaking the engagement? He

-blushed for the thought. By going away quietly, silently, without a

-word? That would only increase the difficulty of her position. By

-keeping her waiting, year after year, until he could find a foothold in

-the world? Even that was unfair.

-

-No, he could not give up Lavinia and he could not go away from Macochee,

-hence it followed that he must give up the law. He must get some work to

-do, and at once; something that would pay him enough to support a wife.

-He began to canvass the possibilities in Macochee. He thought of all the

-openings; surely there would be something; there were several thousand

-persons in Macochee, and they lived somehow. He did not wish to give up

-the law; not that he loved it so, but because he disliked to own himself

-beaten. But it was necessary; he could suffer this defeat; he could make

-this sacrifice. There was something almost noble in the attitude, and he

-derived a kind of morbid consolation from the thought.

-

-His father was closing the Bible--sure sign that the sermon was about to

-end. There was another prayer, then a hymn, and while the congregation

-remained standing for the benediction, he heard his father's voice:

-

-"The peace of God which passeth all understanding--"

-

-The words had always comforted him in the sorrows he was constantly

-imagining, but now they brought no peace.

-

-In another moment the congregation was stirring joyously, in unconscious

-relief that the sitting was over. The hum of voices assumed a pleasant

-social air, as friend and acquaintance turned to greet one another. The

-people moved slowly down the aisle. He caught a glimpse of his father,

-smiling and happy--happy that his work was done--passing his

-handkerchief over his reddened brow and bending to take the hands of

-those who came to speak to him and to congratulate him. Just then Selah

-Dudley gave his father his hand; the sight pleased Marley; and suddenly

-an idea came to him.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER XV

-

-                            A SAINT'S ADVICE

-

-

-On Monday morning Marley found Dudley at his post in the First National

-Bank. He halted at the little low gate in the rail that ran round

-Dudley's desk until Dudley looked up and saw him, and then Marley

-smiled. Dudley, conceiving it to be the propitiatory smile of the

-intending borrower, narrowed his eyes as he regarded him.

-

-"Well?" he said.

-

-Marley went in and sat down on the edge of the hard chair that was

-placed near Dudley.

-

-"I wish to have a little talk with you, Mr. Dudley," he said. He waited

-then for Dudley to reply, thinking perhaps he would be interested in the

-son of his pastor. Dudley had turned his chair a little, and seemed to

-have sunk a little lower in its brown leather cushions, worn to a hard

-shine during the long years he had sat there. The lower part of him was

-round and full and heavy, while his shoulders were narrow and sloping,

-and his chest sunken, as if, from sitting there so many years, his

-vitals had settled, giving him the figure of a half emptied bag of

-grain. His legs were thin, and his trousers crept constantly up the legs

-of the boots he wore; the boots were blackened as far as the ankles,

-above the ankles they were wrinkled and scuffed to a dirty brown.

-

-Marley noted these details hurriedly, for it was the face of the man

-that held him. A scant beard, made up of a few harsh, wiry hairs, partly

-covered the banker's cheeks and chin; his upper lip was clean-shaven,

-and his hair, scant but still black, was combed forward at the temples,

-and carefully carried over from one side of his head to the other,

-ineffectually trying to hide the encroaching baldness. His nose was

-large; his eyes narrow under his almost barren brows and red at the

-edges of the lids that lacked lashes.

-

-"What do you want?" said Dudley, never moving, as if to economize his

-energies, as he economized his words and every other thing of value in

-his narrow world.

-

-Marley did not know just what reply to make: this was a critical moment

-to him, and he must make no mistake.

-

-"I came," he began, "to--to ask you for a little advice."

-

-Dudley, at this, settled a little more into his chair, possibly a little

-more comfortably; he seemed to relax somewhat, and his eyes were not

-quite so narrow as they had been. But he blinked a moment, and then

-cautiously asked:

-

-"What about?"

-

-"Well, it's just this," Marley began, smiling persistently; "you see

-I've begun the study of law; I had intended to be a lawyer."

-

-"We've got plenty o' lawyers," said Dudley.

-

-"That's just the conclusion I have come to, and I was thinking somewhat

-of making a change. And so I thought I'd come and ask you, that is, your

-advice."

-

-Dudley, still cautious, made no reply, and Marley almost despaired of

-getting on easy terms. He began to wish he had not come; he might have

-known this, he said to himself, and his smile and the confidence with

-which he had come began to leave him. But he must make another effort.

-

-"You see, Mr. Dudley," he said, "I thought, as things are nowadays, I

-would have to wait years before I could really do anything in the law,

-and as I have my own way to make in the world, I thought, you know, I

-might get into something else."

-

-"What, for instance?" asked Dudley.

-

-"Well, I didn't exactly know; I had hardly thought it out,--that's why I

-came to you, knowing you to be a man of large affairs."

-

-Dudley had an instant's vision of his bank, of his stocks, and of the

-many farms all over Gordon County on which he held mortgages, but he

-checked his impulse; these very possessions must be guarded; people

-envied him them, and while this envy in one way was among the sources of

-his few joys, it nevertheless gave rise to covetousness which was

-prohibited by the tenth commandment.

-

-"So you want my advice, eh?" he asked, looking hard at Marley.

-

-"Yes, sir."

-

-"And that's all?" he asked suspiciously.

-

-"Well--any suggestions," Marley said.

-

-Dudley still hesitated. He continued to study Marley out of his little

-eyes. Presently he inquired, as if by way of getting a basis to start

-on:

-

-"You been to college, ain't you?"

-

-"Yes, sir," Marley answered promptly; "I graduated in June."

-

-"How long was you there?"

-

-"Why," Marley replied in some surprise, "the full four years."

-

-"Four years," Dudley repeated. "How old?"

-

-"Twenty-two."

-

-"Well, that's that much time wasted. If a young man's going to get along

-these times, and make anything of himself, he has to start early, learn

-business ways and habits. He's got to begin at the bottom, and feel his

-way up." The banker was speaking now with a reckless waste of words that

-was surprising. "The main thing at first is to work; it ain't the money.

-Now, when I come to Macochee, forty-seven years ago, I hadn't nothing.

-But I went to work, I was up early, and I went to bed early; I worked

-hard all day, I 'tended to business, and I saved my money. That's it,

-young man, that's the only way--up early, work hard, and save your

-money." Dudley leaned back in his chair to let Marley contemplate him.

-

-"But what did you work at? At first, I mean."

-

-"Why," said Dudley, as if in surprise, "at anything I could get. I wan't

-proud; I wan't 'fraid o' work."

-

-Marley leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and began twirling

-his hat in his hands. Then, thinking the attitude lacking in respect, he

-sat up again.

-

-"Then, I was careful of my habits," Dudley went on. "I never touched a

-bit o' tobacco, nor tasted a drop o' liquor in my life."

-

-He paused, and then:

-

-"Do you use tobacco?" he asked.

-

-"Sometimes," Marley hesitated to confess.

-

-"Cigarettes?"

-

-"Now and then."

-

-"Humph! Learned that at college, I suppose." Marley made no reply.

-

-"Well, you've started wrong, young man. That wan't the way I made

-myself. I never touched a drop of liquor nor tasted tobacco. I worked

-hard and God prospered me--yes, God prospered me."

-

-Dudley's voice sank piously.

-

-"Now, I'll tell you." He seemed to be about to impart the secret of it

-all. "When I was your age, I embraced religion, and I promised God that

-if he'd prosper me I'd give a tenth of all I made to the church; a

-tenth, yes, sir, a full tenth." The banker paused again as if making a

-calculation, and a trouble gathered for an instant at his hairless

-brows, but, as if by an effort, he smoothed them so that they became

-meek and submissive. And then he went on, as if he had found a species

-of relief:

-

-"But it was the best bargain I ever made. It paid; yes, it paid; I kep'

-my word, and the Lord kep' His; He prospered me."

-

-He had folded his hands, and sat blinking at Marley.

-

-"So my advice to you, young man, is to give up tobacco and all your

-other bad habits, to be up early in the morning, to work hard, and

-remember God in all your ways, and He shall direct thy paths."

-

-Dudley stirred, and moved his swivel chair a little, as if it were time

-to resume work. But Marley sat there.

-

-"That's my advice to you, young man," Dudley repeated, "and it won't

-cost you a cent." He said this generously, at the same time implying a

-hint of dismissal. Still Marley did not move, and Dudley eyed him in

-some concern. Marley saw the look and forced a smile.

-

-"I thank you, Mr. Dudley," he said, "for your advice. I am sure it is

-good. I was wondering, though," he went on, with a reluctance that he

-knew impaired the effect of his words, "if you wouldn't have something

-here in your bank for me--"

-

-At this Dudley suddenly seemed to shrink in size. His eyes became small,

-mere inflamed slits beneath his hairless brows, and he said:

-

-"I thought you said you wanted advice?"

-

-"Well, I did," Marley explained, "but I thought maybe--"

-

-He did not finish the sentence. He rose and stood, still twirling his

-hat in his hand. "And you have nothing, you know of nothing?"

-

-Dudley slowly shook his head from side to side, once or twice, having

-resumed his economical habits.

-

-"Good morning," Marley said, and left.

-

-As he went out, the cashier and the assistant cashier looked at him

-through the green wire screen. Then they lifted their heads from their

-tasks cautiously and exchanged surreptitious glances.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XVI

-

-                           LOVE AND A LIVING

-

-

-Marley was not surprised by the result of his visit to Selah Dudley. He

-made an effort to convince himself that there was truth in what Dudley

-had said to him, even if he could not remember exactly what it was that

-Dudley had said. He tried to put down the instinctive feeling of dislike

-he had for the old banker; he told himself that such a feeling was

-unworthy of him, if not unworthy of Dudley, and in thinking the matter

-over he tried to clear himself of all suspicion of envy or jealousy of

-Dudley's success. The whole town considered Dudley its leading man, and

-Marley tried so to consider him; and he tried to consider him in this

-light because he was a good man and not because he was a rich man, just

-as the town pretended to do. He wanted to talk about Dudley with some

-one, but he did not want to talk about him with Lavinia, because he felt

-a shame in his failure with Dudley that he feared Lavinia might share.

-He did talk with his father about him, but his father did not seem to be

-interested; he smiled his tolerant smile, but made no comment. And when

-Marley pressed him for an opinion of Dudley his father said:

-

-"They make broad their phylacteries."

-

-And that was all.

-

-However, Marley found Wade Powell willing to talk of Selah Dudley, as he

-was willing to talk of almost anything. Marley did not tell Powell that

-he had been to Dudley to ask for a position; he merely let it be

-understood that he had met the old man in the course of the day and

-talked with him casually.

-

-"By the way," he asked, as if the thought had just come to him, "how did

-Selah Dudley make his money?"

-

-"He didn't make it," Powell answered.

-

-"He didn't? Did he inherit it?"

-

-"No."

-

-"Then how did he get it?"

-

-"He gathered it."

-

-"Gathered it? I don't know what you mean."

-

-Powell laughed.

-

-"You don't? Well, there's a difference."

-

-"He wasn't in the army, was he?"

-

-"In the army! Great God!" Powell threw into his voice the contempt he

-could not find the word to express. "You think he'd risk his hide in the

-army? Well, I should say not! Though he would have been perfectly

-safe--" Powell said it as a parenthetical afterthought--"no bullet could

-ever have pierced his hide, and he had no blood to shed."

-

-Powell bit the end from his cigar and spat out the damp little pieces of

-tobacco viciously.

-

-"No, I'll tell you, Glenn," he said, "he stayed at home and got his

-start, as he calls it, by skinning the poor. Widows were his big game

-and he gathered a little pile that has been growing ever since. To-day

-he owns Gordon County."

-

-"He seems to be a prominent man in the church," ventured Marley.

-

-"He'll be a prominent man in hell," said Powell, angrily. And then he

-added thoughtfully: "My one regret in going there myself is that I'll

-have to see him every day."

-

-The most curious effect of Marley's visit to Dudley, however, was one he

-did not observe himself. Having been defeated in his plan to secure a

-place in the bank, he felt at first, with a certain consolation, that he

-still had the law to fall back on, and he returned to his studies. But

-he made little headway; once having decided to give up the law, the

-decision remained, and his mind was constantly occupied with schemes for

-securing a foothold in some other occupation. He considered, one after

-another, every possibility in Macochee, and as fast as he thought of

-some opening, he went for it, but invariably to find it either no

-opening at all, or else, if it were an opening, one that closed at his

-approach. Gradually he gave up his studies altogether, and sat idle, his

-book before him; but one day Powell said to him:

-

-"Say, Glenn, you're not getting along very fast, are you?"

-

-Marley started, and flushed with a sense of guilt.

-

-"Well, no," he admitted.

-

-"What's the matter, in love?"

-

-Marley blushed, from another cause this time, though the guilt remained

-in his face. But Powell instantly was gentle.

-

-"I beg your pardon," he said, "I was just joking, of course; I didn't

-mean to be inquisitive. You mustn't mind my boorishness."

-

-Marley looked at him gratefully and Powell, to whom any show of

-affection was confusing, turned away self-consciously. But Marley

-whirled his chair around toward Powell.

-

-"I am in love," he said. "I've wanted to tell you, but I--you know who

-she is."

-

-"Lavinia Blair?"

-

-"Yes. And that's what's troubling me," Marley went on. "I want to get

-married, and I can't. I can't," he repeated, "the law's too slow; I've

-realized it for a long while, but I tried to keep the fact away, I tried

-not to see it. But now I have to face it. Why," he said, rising to his

-feet, "it'll take a thousand years to get a practice in this town, and

-I'm not even admitted yet."

-

-He walked to and fro, his brows pinched together, his lower lip thrust

-out, his teeth nipping his upper one. Powell glanced at him, but said

-nothing. He knew human nature, this lawyer, and the fact made every one

-in the county tremble at the thought of his cross-examinations;

-sometimes he carried too far his love of laying souls bare, and as often

-hurt as helped his cause. He never had been able to turn his knowledge

-to much practical account; in a city he would have had numerous

-retainers as a trial lawyer, though few as a counselor. In Macochee he

-was out of place, and he chafed under a semi-consciousness of the fact.

-He waited, knowing that Marley would burst forth again.

-

-"I'll have to get a job," Marley said at that moment, bitterly, "and go

-to work; that's all." And then he laughed harshly. "Humph, get a

-job--that's the biggest job of all. What can I get here in Macochee, I'd

-like to know?"

-

-He halted and turned suddenly, fiercely, almost menacingly on Powell, as

-if he were the cause of his predicament.

-

-"I've told you already it's no place for you," said Powell, quietly.

-

-"But where'll I go?" Marley held out his hands with a gesture that was

-pleading, pathetic. Thus he waited for Powell's reply.

-

-Powell smoked thoughtfully for a moment and then began:

-

-"When I was going to the law school in Cincinnati, there was a young

-fellow in my class--a great friend of mine. He was poor, and I was

-poor--God! how poor we were!" Powell paused in this retrospect of

-poverty. "That was why we were such friends,--our poverty gave us a

-common interest. This fellow came from up in Hardin County; he was tall,

-lean and gawky, the worst jay you ever saw. When we had graduated, I

-supposed he would go home, maybe to Kenton--that was his county-seat.

-When we were bidding each other good-by--I'll never forget the day, it

-was June, hot as hell; and we had left the old law school in Walnut

-Street and were standing there by the Tyler-Davidson fountain in Fifth

-Street. I said, 'Well, we'll see each other once in a while; we won't be

-far apart.' He looked at me and said, 'I don't know about that.' 'Why?'

-I asked. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm going to Chicago.' I looked at him in

-surprise. He was out at the elbows then, and had hardly enough money to

-get home on. Then the ridiculousness of it struck me, and I laughed.

-'Why, you'll starve to death there!' I said. He only smiled." Powell

-paused, to whet Marley's appetite, perhaps, for the foregone denouement.

-

-"That jay," Powell said, when he had allowed sufficient time to elapse,

-"that jay I laughed at is Judge Johnson, of the United States Circuit

-Court."

-

-The story saddened Marley. With his faculty of conceiving a whole drama

-at once, he caught in an instant the trials Judge Johnson had gone

-through before he won to his station of ease and honor; he saw the

-privations, the sacrifices, the hardships, the endless strivings,

-plottings, schemings; it wearied and depressed him; his frightened mind

-hung back, clung to the real, the present, the known, found a relief in

-picturing the seeming security of a man like Wade Powell, in a town

-where he knew everybody and was known by everybody. He shrank from

-hearing more of the judge; he wished to stay with his thought in

-Macochee.

-

-"How _do_ young men get a start in places like Macochee?" he asked, and

-then he added in despairing argument: "They _do_ stay, they _do_ get

-along somehow, they make livings, and raise families; the town grows and

-does business, the population increases, it doesn't die off."

-

-"Well," said Wade Powell, approaching the problem with the generalities

-its mystery demanded, "some of them marry rich women, but that industry

-is about played out now; the fortunes are divided up; some of them, most

-of them, are content to eke out small livings, clerking in stores and

-that kind of thing; about the only ones that get ahead any are traders;

-they barter around, first in one business, then in another; they run a

-grocery, then sell it out and buy a livery-stable; then they dabble in

-real estate a while; finally they skin some one out of a farm and then

-they go on skinning, a little at a time; by the time they're old, people

-forget their beginnings and they become respectable; then they join the

-church, like Selah Dudley."

-

-Powell stopped a moment, then he began again.

-

-"The lawyers get along God knows how; the doctors, well, they never

-starve, for people will get sick, or think they're sick, which is better

-yet; then there are a few preachers who are supported in a poor way by

-their congregations. When a man fails, he goes into the insurance

-business."

-

-Powell smoked contemplatively for a few moments.

-

-"Sometimes," he resumed presently, "I feel as if I were tottering on the

-verge of the insurance business myself."

-

-Marley looked at Powell, who had relapsed into silence, his head

-lowered, his eyes fixed in the distance, and there was something

-pathetic in the figure, or would have been, but for the humor that saved

-every situation for Powell. There was, however, something appealing, and

-something to inspire affection, too. Marley's gaze recalled Powell, and

-he glanced up with a smile.

-

-"I reckon you've gathered from my remarks," said Powell, "that I

-consider success chiefly from a monetary standpoint, but I don't. The

-main business of life is living, and the trouble with the world is that

-it is too busy getting ready to live to find the time for life; it has

-tied itself up with a thousand chains of its own forging and it has had

-to postpone living from time to time until most people have put the

-beginning of life at the gateway of death; meanwhile they're busy

-gathering things, like magpies, and those that gather the most are

-considered the best; they have come to think that people are divided

-into two classes, good and bad; the good are those who own, the bad

-those who don't, and the good think their business is to put down the

-bad. Now, here in Gordon County, we have about everything a man needs;

-the spring comes and the summer, and the autumn and the winter; the rain

-falls and the winds blow and the sun shines, and I've noticed that

-Lighttown gets about as much rain as Main Street, and Gooseville about

-as much wind as Scioto Street; the sun seems to shine pretty much alike

-on the niggers loafing in Market Space and on old Selah Dudley and Judge

-Blair, bowing like Christians to each other in the Square. The trees are

-the same color wherever they grow, and I don't see any reason why people

-shouldn't be happy if they'd only let one another be happy. Now, I would

-have lived, but I didn't have time. I thought when I began that I'd have

-to do as the rest were doing, get hold of things, and I saw that if I

-did, I'd have to get my share away from them; well, I made a failure of

-that, being too soft inside someway; that was all right too, but

-meanwhile I was wasting time, and putting off living--now it's too

-late."

-

-Marley looked at him in perplexity, not knowing how to take him.

-

-"I know," he said presently. "But what am I going to do? I can live all

-right, but I have to do better than that; I want to get married."

-

-"Married," mused Powell, "married! Well, I got married."

-

-Marley was interested. He had never heard Powell speak of his wife, and

-he feared what he was about to say; for that instant Powell's standing

-in his estimation trembled.

-

-"And that was the only sensible thing I ever did."

-

-Marley felt a great relief.

-

-"But I don't know that I did right by Mary; I didn't do her any good, I

-reckon; still, she's borne up somehow; I wish I had a sky full of

-sunlight to pour over her."

-

-Powell walked to his window, and looked across into the Court-House yard

-where the leaves were falling slowly from the Maple-trees. Marley hoped

-that he would go on, and say more of his wife, but he was silent.

-Presently he turned about.

-

-"Well, Glenn," he said; "I see you're stuck on staying in Macochee, and

-I don't blame you; and you want to get married, and that's all right.

-Maybe I can help you do it."

-

-"How?" said Marley, eagerly.

-

-"I've got a scheme."

-

-"What is it?"

-

-"Well, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. I'd better wait till I see

-whether it will or not before I tell you."

-

-He stood and smiled at Marley a moment, and then said: "You wait here."

-

-And he turned and left the office. Marley watched Powell's fine figure

-as he walked across the street toward the Court House, a great love of

-the man surging within him. He felt secure and safe; a new warmth spread

-through him. At the door of the Court House Marley saw him stop and

-shake hands with Garver, the sheriff. The two talked a moment, then

-turned and went down toward the big iron gate in Main Street, and

-disappeared. Marley waited until noon and then he went home to his

-dinner. He returned, but Powell did not come back to the office all the

-afternoon.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XVII

-

-                            THE COUNTY FAIR

-

-

-Marley did not see Wade Powell again for four days; a Sunday intervened,

-and Powell did not come back to the office until Monday morning. He came

-in with a solemn air upon him, and a new dignity that made impressive

-the seriousness with which he set to work at the pile of papers on his

-desk, as if he were beginning a new week with new resolutions. He was

-freshly shaved, and his hair had been cut; it was shorter at the sides

-and, against his rough sunburnt neck, showed an edge of clean white

-skin. His newly cropped hair gave him a strange, brisk appearance; his

-black clothes were brushed, his linen fresh.

-

-He spoke to Marley but a few times and then from the distant altitude of

-his new dignity. Once he sent Marley on an errand to Snider's drug store

-to buy a large blank book; he said he was going to keep an office docket

-after that. He worked on his new docket half the morning, then he

-carried the docket and the bundle of papers over to Marley's table,

-flung them down and asked Marley if he would not continue the work for

-him. He explained the system he had devised for keeping a record of his

-cases; it was intricate and complete, but in many of his cases the

-numbers and in some instances the names of opposing parties were

-missing; Powell told Marley to go over to the Court House and get the

-missing data from the clerk.

-

-"I've got to go out for a while," Powell explained. Then he hurried

-away; he seemed to be glad to escape from the office and the drudgery of

-the task he had set for himself.

-

-Powell's absence weighed on Marley; he was lonesome in the deserted

-office, and found himself wondering just where Powell was at each

-moment; he pictured him with his companions, Colonel Devlin, Marshall

-Scarff, Sheriff Garver, old man Brockton and Doc Hall; lately it had

-been rumored that George Halliday had been admitted to the merry group,

-and that they played poker nightly in a room in the Coleman Block. Then

-Marley would picture to himself Wade Powell's wife; he had never seen

-her, but he had an idea of her appearance, formed from no description of

-her, but created out of his own fancy. He pictured her as a graceful

-little woman, with a certain droop to her figure; but try as he would,

-he could not see her face; it was a blur to him, yet it gave somehow a

-certain expression of sweetness and patience; sometimes, by an effort,

-he could see her brow, and the hair above it; the hair was dark, and

-parted in the middle with some gray in its rather heavy mass.

-

-Marley could never discuss Wade Powell with any kind of satisfaction

-with Lavinia. When he spoke of him, she would smile and affect an

-interest, but he could detect the affectation, and he could detect,

-also, a certain distance in her attitude toward Wade Powell or the

-thought of him, which he ascribed to the influence of Judge Blair's

-dislike. Marley saw that Lavinia never would accept Wade Powell, and he

-had ceased to mention him except in a casual manner. For some like

-reason he had ceased to mention Wade Powell at home; he found that he

-had many views which he could not share with those nearest him, and his

-inner life at that time was somewhat lonely and aloof.

-

-He had not told Lavinia of Wade Powell's offer of assistance, nor had he

-spoken of it at home. In those four days he had thought much of it and

-built countless hopes upon it; he had thought of all the possibilities,

-and taken a fine delight in examining each one, working it out to its

-logical end in its effect upon Lavinia and him and upon their fortunes.

-He was disappointed when Wade Powell failed to refer to the subject

-again; he would have liked to discuss the disappointment with Lavinia;

-usually, out of her youthful optimism and faith in the life of which she

-was so innocent, she could reassure him; but of late he had had so many

-disappointments and had drawn so heavily on Lavinia's resources of

-comfort and hope that he had grown wary, almost superstitiously wary, of

-making any further drafts.

-

-When Monday came and Powell did not renew the subject, nor even say what

-his scheme had been, Marley concluded that Powell had forgotten all

-about it, and so he relinquished the hope with a sigh, and tried to

-forget it himself. He took up his studies once more; but he made poor

-headway; he saw with chagrin that he had not read ten pages of law in as

-many days, and what he had read he could not remember. When he tried to

-review it, the words had no meaning for him, nor could he wrest any from

-them, even though he ground his elbows in the table with the book

-between them and dug his fists into his hair.

-

-That was the week of the Gordon County fair. For a month every fence

-along the white pikes in the country had borne the bills, flaming from

-afar in red ink the date, "Oct. 15-31." There were, too, lithographs

-everywhere--on boards at the monument, at the Court House, on the town

-hall, on the covered bridge over Mad River--lithographs picturing the

-exciting finish of a trotting race, and a sedate concourse of fat

-cattle. The fair opened Monday, but it was understood that that day

-would be devoted to preparing and arranging the exhibits; the fair would

-not begin in earnest until Tuesday; the big day would be Thursday.

-

-Marley was glad that fair week had come, for the chance of novelty which

-it offered, and, too, for the excuse it gave him; he would not study

-that week, but in the general festivity try to forget the problem that

-so oppressed him. He would have liked to go to the fair every day, but

-he could not, for the expense, insignificant as it seemed to be to every

-one else in the county, was not insignificant to him. He went, however,

-on Wednesday with his father, who, with the love of horses he had

-inherited from the saddle-bag days of Methodism, recklessly attended the

-races. Marley thought that this visit would be his last, but on Thursday

-morning he met Lawrence in the Square.

-

-"Just the man I'm looking for!" said Lawrence.

-

-He was brisk, alert, important, and had an official air which was

-explained when Marley observed, on the lapel of his coat, the badge of

-blue ribbon that proclaimed an officer of the fair.

-

-"I have charge of the tickets this year," he said. "Want to go? I'll

-pass you in."

-

-Marley was glad enough to accept.

-

-"I'll have to go around to the office and tell Powell," he said. "I was

-away all day yesterday."

-

-"Oh, nonsense," replied Lawrence, "that won't make any difference; he's

-been full for two days. This is his big time."

-

-Marley had a pang as he saw with what small seriousness Lawrence

-regarded his relation to the law; it reflected, doubtless, the common

-attitude of the community toward him and his efforts.

-

-"I've got to hurry," Lawrence went on; "I've got a rig waiting here; you

-can ride out with me."

-

-It was one of the incomparable afternoons that autumn brings to Ohio;

-the retreating sun was flashing in the high, blue sky; the air was fresh

-and Marley felt it full of energy and hope. Lawrence drove rapidly

-through the throng of hurrying vehicles that crowded the road to the

-fair-grounds, stirring up a cloud of dust that covered everything with

-its white powder.

-

-Lawrence left him at the gate, being too full of business to engage in

-the weary search for pleasure, and Marley set out alone across the

-scorched and trampled turf for the grand stand, black with people for

-the races. He could hear the nervous clamor of the bell in the judges'

-stand, the notes of the hand-organ at the squeaking merry-go-round, the

-incessant thumping of the bass drum that made its barbaric music for the

-side-show, and the cries of venders, dominating all the voices of the

-thousands bent in their silly way on pleasure. Once, calling him back to

-the real, to the peace of the commonplace, he heard the distant tones of

-the town clock in the tower that stood, a mile away, above the autumnal

-trees.

-

-He pressed into the space between the grand stand and the whitewashed

-fence that surrounded the track; through the palings he could see the

-stoop-shouldered drivers, bent over the heavily breathing trotters they

-jogged to and fro; above him, in the grand stand, he could distinguish

-cries and laughs, now and then complete excited sentences, sometimes

-voices he knew. All around him the farmers, clumsy in their ready-made

-clothes and bearing their buggy whips as some insignia of office,

-solemnly watched the races and talked of horses.

-

-The sense of kinship with the crowd that had unerringly drawn Marley

-left him the moment he was in the crowd, and a loneliness replaced the

-sense of kinship. He looked about for some one he knew. He began, here

-and there, to recognize faces, just as he had recognized voices in the

-din above him; he began to analyze and to classify the crowd, and he

-laughed somewhat cynically when he saw numbers of politicians going

-about among the farmers, shaking their hands, greeting them effusively,

-calling them by their Christian names. Then suddenly he saw Wade Powell.

-The crowd at the point where Powell stood, nucleated with him as its

-center; by the way the men were laughing, and by the way Powell was

-trying not to laugh, Marley knew that he had been telling them one of

-his stories, and from the self-conscious, guilty expressions on certain

-of the faces, Marley knew that the story was probably one that should

-not have been told. Several countrymen hung on the edge of the group,

-not identifying themselves with it, yet anxious to have a look at Wade

-Powell, who enjoyed the fame of the county's best criminal lawyer.

-

-When Powell saw Marley he called to him, and when Marley drew near, he

-introduced him, somehow mysteriously, almost surreptitiously, to the man

-at his elbow. Powell's face was very red, and his eyes were brilliant.

-The mystery he put into his introduction was but a part of his manner.

-

-"This is Mr. Carman, of Pleasant Grove Township, Glenn," he said,

-bending over, as if no one should hear the name; and then he added, in a

-husky whisper: "He's our candidate for county clerk, you know."

-

-Marley saw something strange, forbidding, in Carman's face, but he could

-not tell what it was. It was a red, sunburnt face, closely shaven, with

-a short mustache burned by the sun; the smile it wore seemed to be fixed

-and impersonal. Plainly the man had spent his days out of doors, though,

-it seemed, not healthfully, for his skin was dry and hardened, and his

-neck thin and wrinkled; he seemed to have known the hard work and the

-poor nourishment of a farm. Marley wondered what was the matter with

-Carman's face. But Powell was drawing them aside.

-

-"Come over here," he was saying, "where we can be alone."

-

-He led them to a corner of the little yard; no one was near; they were

-quite out of the crowd which was pressing to the whitewashed picket

-fence, attracted by the excitement of the race for which the horses were

-just then scoring.

-

-"Now, Jake," Powell began, speaking to Carman, "this is the young man I

-was talking to you about."

-

-Carman, still smiling his dry meaningless smile, turned his face half

-away.

-

-"I reckon," Powell went on, "that I might be able to do you some good,

-if I took off my coat." Powell spoke with a pride in his own influence;

-Marley had never known him to come so near to boasting before.

-

-Carman was looking away; and Powell, his own eyes narrowed, was watching

-him closely. Once he winked at Marley, and Marley was mystified; he did

-not know what play was going on here; he looked from Carman to Powell,

-and back to Carman again. There was some strange fascination about

-Carman; Marley felt a slight relief when he discovered that there was

-something peculiar about Carman's eyes.

-

-"I haven't said anything to Marley about the matter, Jake," Powell said.

-"Maybe I'd better tell him. Hell! He might not want it--I don't know."

-

-Carman turned suddenly; his face had been in the shadow; now it came

-into the sunlight, and Marley saw that while the pupil of Carman's right

-eye contracted suddenly, the pupil of his left eye remained fixed; it

-was larger than the pupil of the right eye, which had shrunk to a

-pin-point in the sharp light of the sun. Marley looked closely, the left

-eye seemed to be swimming in liquid; it almost hurt Marley's eyes to

-look at it.

-

-"I've been telling Carman, Glenn," Powell was explaining, "that if he is

-elected--and gets into the Court House--"

-

-Marley looked at Powell expectantly.

-

-"I want him," Powell went on, "to make you his deputy."

-

-Marley saw it all in a flash; this was what Powell had meant that day a

-fortnight ago; he felt his great affection for Powell glow and warm;

-Lavinia would appreciate Powell after this. It meant salary, position, a

-place in which he might complete his law studies at his leisure; it

-meant a living, a home, marriage, Lavinia! He looked all his gratitude

-at Powell, who smiled appreciatively.

-

-Carman had turned his face away again, he was still smiling, and

-plucking now at his chin; Marley waited, and Powell finally grew

-impatient.

-

-"Well, Jake, what do you say?"

-

-Carman waited a moment longer, then slowly turned about. Marley watched

-him narrowly, he saw the pupil of his right eye contract, the pupil of

-the watery left eye remained fixed; then, for the first time, Carman

-looked steadily at Marley and for the first time he spoke.

-

-"Well," he said, and he stopped to spit out his tobacco, "you know I'm

-always ready to do a friend a good turn."

-

-Powell looked Carman over carefully a moment, and then he said,

-

-"All right, Jake."

-

-Just then there was a rush of hoofs, a shock of excitement, and they

-heard a loud yell:

-

-"Go!"

-

-And they rushed to the fence of the whitewashed palings.

-

-

-

-

-                             CHAPTER XVIII

-

-                           THE ROAD TO MINGO

-

-

-Lavinia sat rocking quietly back and forth, and stitched away with her

-colored silks on her tambourine frames, while Marley told her of the

-fortune Wade Powell had brought them. He told the story briefly, and he

-tried to tell it simply; he did not comment on Powell's kindness or

-generosity, but let his deeds speak for themselves in Powell's behalf.

-When he had done, Marley waited for Lavinia's comment, but she rocked on

-a moment and then held her tambourine frames at arm's length to study

-the sweet pea she was making. When she had done so, she dropped her

-sewing suddenly into her lap, and looking up, said:

-

-"He thinks everything of you, doesn't he?"

-

-"I believe he likes me," Marley said, as modestly as he could put it.

-

-"Who could help it?"

-

-Lavinia looked at Marley, and he leaned over, and took her hands.

-

-"I am glad you can't, sweetheart," he said.

-

-"Do you know," she went on, "I think it is because you have been kind

-and good to him--just as you are kind and good to every one. His life is

-lonely; he is an outcast, almost; no one cares for him, and he

-appreciates your goodness."

-

-Pity was the utmost feeling she could produce for Wade Powell out of her

-kindly heart. But Marley, though he could accept her homage to the full

-without embarrassment, could not acquiesce to this length, and he

-laughed at her.

-

-"Nonsense, Lavinia," he said. "You have the thing all topsy-turvy. It is

-Wade Powell who has been kind to me; it is he and not I who is good to

-every one. He has a heart brimful of the milk of human kindness. You

-have no idea, and no one has, of the good he does in a thousand little

-ways. He tries to hide it all; he acts as if he were ashamed of it, but

-there are hundreds of people in Macochee who worship him, and would be

-ready to die for him, if it would help him any. Don't think he has no

-friends! He has them by the score--of course, they are all poor; I

-reckon that's why they are generally unknown."

-

-"But isn't he cruel?"

-

-Marley's eyes widened in astonishment.

-

-"I mean," Lavinia said correctively, "isn't he kind of sarcastic?"

-

-"Well," Marley admitted, "he is that at times. I think he tries to hide

-his better qualities; I think he tries to cloak his finer nature with a

-rough garb. Perhaps it is because he is really so sensitive. But he is,

-to my mind, a truly great man. He is a sort of tribune of the people."

-

-"But, Glenn, what about his drinking?"

-

-"Well, that's the trouble," Marley said, shaking his head. "If he had

-let liquor alone he'd have been away up."

-

-Lavinia was silent a moment, her brow was knit in little wrinkles.

-

-"Glenn," she said presently, "I have been thinking."

-

-"Well?"

-

-"That with your influence you might reform him--out of his liking for

-you, don't you know?"

-

-She raised her blue eyes. He laughed outright, and then took her face

-between his two hands.

-

-"You dear little thing!" he said, with the patronage of a lover.

-

-Lavinia regained her dignity.

-

-"But couldn't you?" she demanded.

-

-"Why, dear heart," Marley said, "he would think it presumption. I

-wouldn't dare."

-

-Lavinia shook her head in the hopelessness of the reformer, and took up

-her tambourine frames again with a sigh.

-

-"It's a pity," she said, relinquishing the subject with the hope, "it's

-such a pity."

-

-"But you haven't told me what you think of the scheme."

-

-"You know, dear, that whatever you think best I think best."

-

-Marley was disappointed.

-

-"You don't seem to be very enthusiastic over the prospect," he

-complained. "I thought you'd be glad as I to know that I can at last

-make a place for myself in the world--and a home and a living for you."

-

-Lavinia looked up.

-

-"I never had any doubt of that, Glenn," she said simply.

-

-He saw the trust and confidence she had in him, a trust and a confidence

-he had never felt himself, and had never before been wholly aware of in

-her. He saw that she had never shared those fears which had so long

-oppressed him, and into his love there came a devout thankfulness. He

-felt strong, hopeful, confident, victorious. He had a sudden fancy that

-it would be like this when they were married; he would sit at his own

-hearth, with a fire crackling merrily, and the rain and wind beating

-outside--for the first time he could indulge such a fancy; it allowed

-him, now that his future was assured, to come up to it and to take hold

-of it; it became a reality.

-

-The judge was not at home that night. Now and then Marley could hear

-Mrs. Blair speak a word to Connie and Chad, over their lessons in the

-sitting-room; school had commenced, and Connie having that year entered

-the High School had taken on a new dignity, in consequence of which she

-was treating Chad with a divine patience that brought its own peace into

-the Blair household.

-

-They talked for a long time of their plans. Marley would take his new

-place in December when the new county clerk went into office, and he

-told Lavinia all the advantages of the position. It would extend his

-acquaintance, it would give him a familiarity with court proceedings

-that otherwise he could not have acquired in years. He meant to study

-hard, and be admitted to the bar. They could have a little cottage and

-live simply and economically; he would save part of his salary, and when

-he hung out his shingle he would have enough money laid by to support

-them, modestly, until he could establish himself in a practice. He laid

-it all before her plainly, convincingly. He was charmed with the

-practicability of the plan, with its conservatism, its common sense.

-They might as well be married.

-

-"Can't we?" he asked. He trembled as he asked; his happiness had never

-come so close before.

-

-Lavinia dropped her embroidery frames into her lap and looked up at him.

-The question in her eyes was almost born of fear.

-

-"Right away?" exclaimed Lavinia.

-

-"Well, almost right away," Marley answered. "Sometime this winter,

-anyway."

-

-"This winter! So soon?"

-

-"So soon!" Marley repeated her words, almost in mockery.

-

-"But we mustn't be married in the winter," she said, "we've always

-planned to be married in June--our month, you know."

-

-"What's the use of waiting?"

-

-"But papa and mama--"

-

-This quick rushing to the parental cover, this clinging to the habit of

-years struck a jealousy through Marley's heart. His face fell and he

-looked hurt.

-

-"Can't we, dear?" he pleaded.

-

-Lavinia looked at him, and she said shyly:

-

-"If you say so, Glenn."

-

-They were solemn in their joy and made their plans in detail. They would

-be married quietly, Lavinia said, and at home. Doctor Marley would

-perform the ceremony, and Marley was touched by this recognition of his

-father.

-

-The fall worked a new energy in Marley, and, with the assurance that his

-labors were now soon to bear fruit, he found that he could study better

-than ever before. He worked faithfully over his books every morning, and

-he worked so hard that he felt himself entitled to a portion of each

-afternoon. He would leave the office at four o'clock. Lavinia would be

-waiting for him, and they would try to get out of sight before Connie

-returned from school. She might be expected any moment to come slowly

-down Ward Street entwined with one of her school-girl friends. They did

-not like, somehow, to meet Connie. The smile she gave them was apt to be

-disconcerting. They met smiles in the faces of others they encountered

-in their walks, but they were of a quality more kindly than Connie's

-smile.

-

-They had walked one afternoon to the edge of town where Ward Street

-climbed a hill and became the road to Mingo. At their feet lay the

-little fields, in the distance they could see a man plowing with two

-white horses; off to the right lay the water-works pond, gleaming in the

-afternoon sun.

-

-"What are you thinking of?" Marley said.

-

-"I was thinking that it would be nice to live in the country."

-

-"I was thinking that very thing myself!" exclaimed Marley. Their eyes

-met, and they thrilled over this unity in their thoughts. It was

-marvelous to them, mysterious, prophetic.

-

-"Some day I could buy a farm," Marley said; "out that way."

-

-"Yes," Lavinia replied, "away off there, beyond those low trees. Do you

-see?"

-

-She pointed, but Marley did not look in the direction of the trees; he

-looked at her finger. It was so small, so round, so white. He bent

-forward, and kissed the finger.

-

-"Oh, but you must look where I'm pointing," said Lavinia.

-

-They drew closely together. Marley took Lavinia's hand and they stood

-long in silence.

-

-"We could have a country home there," Marley said after a while, "with a

-hedge about it and stables and horses and dogs. It would be close to

-town; I could go in in the morning and out again in the afternoon."

-

-"And I could drive you in, and then come for you in the afternoon--when

-court adjourned."

-

-"Oh, I would have a man to drive me," said Marley.

-

-"But couldn't I ride in beside you?"

-

-"Yes; you could sit beside me, on the back seat; we'd have an open

-carriage."

-

-"A victoria!" exclaimed Lavinia. "It would be the only one in Macochee!"

-

-"Is that what they call them?"

-

-"Victorias?"

-

-"Yes."

-

-"You know, with a low seat behind and a high seat for the driver. You

-have a green cushion for your feet. You would look so handsome in one,

-Glenn. You would sit very erect and proud, with your hands on a cane.

-You would have white hair then."

-

-"We would be old?" he asked in some dismay.

-

-"No, no," said Lavinia, trying to reconcile her dreams, "not old

-exactly. But I dote on white hair. It's so distinguished for a lawyer

-with a country home. Of course we'll have to get old sometime."

-

-"We'll grow old together, dear."

-

-"Yes," she whispered, "and think of the long years of happiness!"

-

-They stood and gazed, looking down the long vista of years that

-stretched before them as smooth and peaceful as the white road to Mingo.

-

-A subtile change was passing over the face of the road; shadows were

-stealing toward it, and it was growing gray. The trees that still were

-green were darkening to a deeper green, but the colors of those that had

-changed flamed all the brighter. The sun shone more golden on the shocks

-of corn, the sky was glowing pink in the west, the water-works pond was

-glistening as the sun's shafts struck it more obliquely. A fine powder

-hung in the peaceful air.

-

-"How beautiful the fall is!" said Lavinia.

-

-"Yes, I love it," said Marley. "But do you know, dear, that I never

-liked it before? It always seemed sad to me. But you have taught me to

-love many things. You don't know all that you have done for me!"

-

-She stood in her blue dress, with her hands folded before her. Marley

-looked at her hands, and at her white throat, and at her hair, its brown

-turned to a golden hue by the clear light; then he looked into her eyes.

-A sudden emotion, almost religious in its ecstasy, came over him. He

-bent forward.

-

-"Oh!" he exclaimed. "Do you know how beautiful you are! I worship you!"

-

-"Don't, Glenn," she said, "don't say that!" The reflection of a

-superstitious fear lay in her eyes.

-

-"Why?" he said defiantly. "It's all true. You are my religion."

-

-"You frighten me," she said.

-

-Marley laughed.

-

-"Why!" he exclaimed, "there's nothing to fear. Isn't our future assured

-now?"

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XIX

-

-                                 WAKING

-

-

-Carman was inducted into office the first Monday in December, quietly,

-as the _Republican_ said, as though it reflected credit on the new

-county clerk as a man who modestly avoided the demonstration that might

-have been expected under such circumstances. Marley, in the hope of

-seeing his own name, eagerly ran his eyes down the few lines that were

-devoted to the occurrence, but his name was not there, the

-_Republican's_ reporter, as he felt, being a man who lacked a sense of

-the relative importance of events.

-

-Marley had taken no part in the campaign, though Wade Powell wished him

-to, and suggested every now and then that he speak at some of the

-meetings that were being held in the country schoolhouses. Powell said

-it would be good practice for him in a profession where so much talking

-has to be done, and he found other reasons why Marley should do this, as

-that it would extend his acquaintance, and give him a standing with the

-party; but, though Marley was always promising, he was always

-postponing; the thought of standing up and speaking to the vast

-audiences his imagination was able to crowd into a little school-room

-filled him with fear, and he never could bring himself to consent to any

-definite time. Besides this, he could not find an evening he was willing

-to spend away from Lavinia.

-

-When election was over, he expected that he would hear from Carman, but

-he had no word from him. Several times he was on the point of mentioning

-the subject to Wade Powell, but somehow, with a reticence for which he

-reproached himself, he could not bring himself to do it. He watched the

-papers closely, but he found it quite as hard to find in them any

-information about Carman as on any other subject, except, possibly, the

-banal personalities of the town as they related themselves to the coming

-and going of the trains.

-

-But at last, on the day it had occurred to the reporter to chronicle the

-fact that Carman had been inducted into office, the little item struck

-Marley sadly; he felt a sense of detachment from Carman; he could not

-altogether realize that intimate relationship to Carman in his new

-official position that he felt belonged to one who was to be Carman's

-deputy. In his imagination he saw Carman shambling about in the dingy

-room where the county clerk kept the records of the court, his knees

-unhinging loosely at each step, his shoulders bent, his hands in his

-trousers pockets, his right eye squinting here and there observantly,

-the left fixed, impervious to light and shadow, to all that was going on

-in the world. He wondered if Carman, as he looked about, had been

-thinking in any wise of him or had seen him as a part of the place where

-his life was to be lived for the next three years.

-

-Marley read the paper at supper time; in the evening he went to see

-Lavinia. She too had read the paper.

-

-"I know," she said simply, and he was grateful for her quick intuition.

-"Have you seen him?"

-

-"No."

-

-"Are you going to?"

-

-"Would you?"

-

-"Why, certainly, at once."

-

-Marley went to the Court House the first thing in the morning. He feared

-he might have arrived too early, but Carman had the virtue that goes

-farther perhaps than any other in the affections and approval of men, he

-rose early. He had been at his office since long before seven o'clock.

-

-Marley found the new county clerk at his desk, obviously ready for

-business. The desk was clean, with a cleanness that was rather a

-barrenness than an order. The ink-wells, the pens, with their shining

-new steel points, the fresh blotters, all were laid on the clean pad

-with geometrical exactness. The pigeon holes were empty, but they were

-all lettered as if the mind of the new county clerk had grappled with

-the future, come off victorious, and provided for every possible

-emergency, though there were certain contingencies that had impressed

-him as "Miscellaneous."

-

-Carman looked up with the obliging expression of the new public

-official, but Marley's heart instantly sank with a foreboding that told

-him he might as well turn about then and go. It was plain that Carman

-saw nothing in the call beyond a mere incident of the day's work.

-

-Marley took a chair near Carman's desk. He looked at Carman once, and

-then looked instantly away; the eye that lacked the power of

-accommodation was fixed on him, and it made him nervous.

-

-"Do you remember me, Mr. Carman?" asked Marley; and then fearing the

-reply he hastened to add: "I'm Glenn Marley; Mr. Powell introduced me to

-you out at the fair-grounds last fall."

-

-"Yes, I remember," said Carman.

-

-"I suppose you know what I came for?"

-

-Carman's right eye widened somewhat in an expression of mild surprise.

-

-"You know," urged Marley, "the clerkship."

-

-"What clerkship was that?"

-

-"Why, don't you know? The chief clerkship, I reckon."

-

-"Here?"

-

-"Why, yes. Don't you remember?"

-

-Carman's right eye wore a puzzled look.

-

-"Don't you remember?"

-

-"Well, you've got me," said Carman, with a little laugh of apology.

-

-"Why, I understood," Marley went on, "that in the event of your election

-I was to have a position here."

-

-"What as?"

-

-"Why--as chief deputy."

-

-That right eye of Carman's was fixed on him questioningly.

-

-"Chief deputy?" he said finally. "Here--in my office?"

-

-"Why, yes," said Marley. "Don't you remember?"

-

-The question in the right eye had given way to a surprise that was

-growing in Carman's mind, and spreading contagiously to a surprise,

-deeper and more acute, in Marley's mind. The eye had something

-reproachful in its steady stare. Marley leaned over impulsively.

-

-"Why, surely you haven't forgotten--that day out at the fair-grounds,

-when Mr. Powell introduced me to you? I understood, I always understood

-that I was to have the place. I never mentioned it to you afterward, I

-didn't like to bother you, you know. I waited along, feeling that

-everything was all right. But when election was over--and afterward,

-when you took your office, and I didn't hear anything--I thought I'd

-come around and see you."

-

-Despite the sinister left eye, Marley leaned close to Carman and waited.

-Carman was long in bringing himself to speak. Even then he did not seem

-to be sure of the situation he was dealing with.

-

-"You say you understood you was to have a job under me as chief clerk?"

-

-"Why, yes," replied Marley.

-

-"Who'd you understand it from, me or Wade Powell?"

-

-"Well--" Marley hesitated, "I thought I understood it from you; I

-certainly understood it from Mr. Powell."

-

-"You say you got the idea from something I said out at the

-fair-grounds?"

-

-"Yes, sir, at the fair-grounds."

-

-Carman turned away and knitted his brows.

-

-"At the fair-grounds," he said presently, as though talking more to

-himself than to Marley. "The fair-grounds, h-m. Yes, I do remember--"

-

-Marley's heart stirred with a little hope.

-

-"I do remember seeing you there, and talking to you. But I don't

-remember making you any promises. Did you ask me?"

-

-"No; Mr. Powell did that."

-

-"And what did I say?"

-

-"Well," Marley answered, "I can't recall your exact words, but I got the

-impression, and so did Mr. Powell, I'm sure, that it was all right, I--I

-counted on it."

-

-"Well, say, Glenn," he said; "I'm awfully sorry, honest I am. I remember

-now, come to think of it, that Wade did say something like that, and

-maybe I said something to lead you to think I'd do it; I don't say I

-didn't--I don't just remember. But I reckon you've banked more on what

-Wade told you than on what I did. Course, I reckon I didn't turn you

-down--a feller never does that in a campaign, you know. But Wade takes a

-lot o' things for granted in this life."

-

-He smiled indulgently, as if Powell's weaknesses were commonly known and

-understood.

-

-"I reckon you relied too much on what Wade told you," Carman went on.

-His right eye was fixed on Marley, but Marley did not return the look.

-He had turned half-way round and thrown his arm over the back of his

-chair. He looked out the window, his eyes vacant and sad. He was

-thinking of Lavinia, of their hopes and plans, of the little home that

-had become almost a reality to them; the trees in the Court-House yard

-held their gaunt limbs helplessly up against the cold December day; the

-ugly clouds were hurrying desperately across the sky; he thought of the

-little law office across the street, with the dusty law books lying on

-the table, and the hopelessness of it all overwhelmed him. But there

-beside him Carman still was speaking:

-

-"It's like Wade," he was saying. "I'm sorry, derned if I hain't."

-

-Marley scarcely heard him. He was looking ahead. How many years--

-

-"He hadn't ought to of done it," Carman was going on; "no, sir, he

-hadn't ought."

-

-How many years, Marley was thinking, would they have to wait now? Would

-Lavinia be lost with all the rest? Ought he to ask her to wait any

-longer? But Carman kept on:

-

-"I've got all my arrangements made now, you see."

-

-He swept his arm about the office where the few clerks were bending over

-the big records in which they were copying the pleadings they could not

-understand. Marley did not see; he saw nothing but the ruin of all his

-hopes. It was still in there; the atmosphere held the musty odor of a

-public office; the clock ticked; once a stamping machine clicked sharply

-as a clerk marked a filing date on some document. And then a great

-disgust overwhelmed him, a disgust with himself for being so fatuous, so

-credulous. He had taken so much for granted, he had acted as a child,

-not as a man, and he felt a hatred for himself, he felt almost like

-striking himself.

-

-"I guess I've been a fool," he said suddenly, rising from his chair.

-

-"No, you haven't neither," said Carman, "but Wade Powell has; he had no

-business--"

-

-Marley did not wait to hear Carman finish his sentence. Shame and

-mortification were the final aspects of his defeat; he put on his hat,

-drew it down over his eyes and stalked away. Carman looked at him as he

-disappeared through the lofty door. The pupil of his right eye widened

-as he looked, and when Glenn had passed from his sight he turned to his

-desk, and began to rearrange the tools to which he was so unaccustomed.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER XX

-

-                             HEART OF GRACE

-

-

-Marley sighed in relief when he went up the steps of the Blair house

-that evening. Somehow he had got through the long, desolate day. He was

-sore from his great defeat, but the worst, at any rate, was over; the

-pang had been sharp, but now the pain had been dulled. He had spent the

-day in the office. Wade Powell had been in and out, but never once had

-he spoken of the clerkship, and Marley was too deep in humiliation to

-mention it. His one consolation was in the fact that he had never told

-any one of his prospect, not even his own mother; it had been a secret

-which he and Lavinia had shared luxuriously; though, as Marley now

-looked back on their joy, he realized that what had kept him from

-telling any one was a prudent skepticism, a lack of faith in the

-possibility of human happiness, an inherited dread of the calamity that

-stalks every joy.

-

-Lavinia flung the hall door wide for him before he could ring the bell.

-

-"What is the matter?"

-

-"How did you know anything was?" he asked.

-

-"Why," she exclaimed, "I could tell the minute I heard your step. Tell

-me--what is it?"

-

-Marley, ever sensitive to atmospheres, instantly felt the peace of the

-household. The glow from the living-room, a quiet voice speaking a

-commonplace word now and then, told him that Mrs. Blair was there with

-Connie and Chad, and he knew the children were at their lessons; he

-caught the faint odor of a cigar, and he knew that Judge Blair was in

-his library reading peacefully of the dead and silent past, whose men

-had left all their troubles in the leaves of printed books; all round

-him life was flowing on, unconsciously, and normally; the tumult and

-strife in his own soul were nothing to the world. All this flashed on

-him in an instant--and there was Lavinia, standing before him, her white

-brow knit in perplexity.

-

-"Tell me," she was saying, "what it is."

-

-"Well, I don't get the job, that's all."

-

-He felt a momentary savage pleasure in the pain he inflicted, justifying

-it in the thought that he eased his own suffering by giving it to

-another. Then as quickly he repented, and felt ashamed.

-

-"Is that all?" she said. She had come close to him, smiling in her

-sympathy, and then lifting a hand to his forehead.

-

-"Don't do that," she said, as if she would erase the scowl.

-

-When they were seated he gave her the details of his meeting with

-Carman, and with the recital of his disappointment its sharpness was

-repeated. He leaned over, his elbows on his knees, and clutched his hair

-in his fists. For an instant a kind of relief came to Lavinia, a relief

-that a crisis in her life had been postponed, a crisis from which,

-instinctively, she had shrunk. Her life could go on for a while as it

-had always gone on; change, which mortals dread, was delayed. Then in

-another moment her sympathy went out to him; she was on the floor at his

-knees, her arms about him.

-

-"Don't, dear, don't," she pleaded. "Why, it is nothing. What does it

-matter? What does anything matter, so long as we have each other?"

-

-She stroked his hair, she called him by all her endearing names. She

-tried to take his hands from his face, that she might get him to look at

-her. But he resisted.

-

-"No," he said. "I'm no good; I'm a failure; I'm worse than a failure.

-I'm a fool, a poor, weak, silly fool."

-

-"Hush, Glenn, hush!" she whispered, as if he were uttering blasphemies.

-"You must not, you must not!"

-

-She shook him in a kind of fear.

-

-"Look at me!" she said. "Look at me!"

-

-He remained obdurate, slowly shaking his head from side to side.

-

-"Look at me!" Lavinia repeated. "Don't you see--don't you see that--I

-love you?"

-

-A change came over him, subtile, but distinct. Slowly he raised his

-head, and then he put his arms about her and held her close, and

-gradually a comfort stole over him,--a comfort so delicious that he felt

-himself hardly worthy, because he now saw that all through the day he

-had had a subconsciousness that it would come to him at evening, and

-that he had somehow exaggerated his own grief in order to make this

-certain comfort the sweeter when it came.

-

-It seemed to Marley, after he and Lavinia had sat there for a while,

-that he had come out of some nightmare; sanity returned, things assumed

-once more their proper proportions and relations to each other. He found

-himself smiling, if not laughing just yet, and with Lavinia's hope and

-confidence the future opened to him once more. Now and then, of course,

-his disappointment would roll over him as a great wave, and once he said

-ruefully:

-

-"But think of the little home we were going to have!"

-

-"But we're going to have it," Lavinia replied, smiling on him, "we're

-going to have it, just the same!"

-

-"But we'll have to wait!"

-

-"Well, we're young," said Lavinia, "and it won't be so very long."

-

-"But I wanted it to be in the spring."

-

-"May be it will be, who knows?" Lavinia could smile in this reassurance,

-now that she knew it could not be in the spring.

-

-They discussed their future in all its phases, with the hope that

-Lavinia could so easily inspire in him; Marley was to keep on with his

-law studies; there was nothing else now to do--unless something should

-turn up--there was always that hope.

-

-"And it will, you'll see," said Lavinia.

-

-They discussed, too, Carman and Wade Powell. Marley thought that Lavinia

-might return to her old severity with Powell; when he expected her to do

-this, he was preparing to defend Powell; when she did not, but was

-generous with him, and urged Marley to reflect that he had done all he

-had done out of a spirit of kindness, Marley was disposed to be severe

-with Powell himself. Carman, they agreed, had acted handsomely; they

-could not find cause to blame him.

-

-"No," said Marley, "he treated me all right; I believe he was really

-sorry for me."

-

-And then, at the thought of Carman's having pity for him, his rebellion

-flamed up again.

-

-"It's humiliating, that's what it is. Wade Powell had no business making

-a monkey of me in that way; though it doesn't take much to make a monkey

-of me; I had the job almost completed myself, just waiting for some one

-to come along and put the finishing touches on. And Wade Powell did

-that!"

-

-Marley spoke in the sardonic humor the wounded and beaten spirit likes

-to employ in dealing with itself. But Lavinia hushed him.

-

-"You just can not talk that way about yourself, Glenn," she declared

-with her finest air of ownership. "I won't let you."

-

-"Well, it's so humiliating," he said.

-

-"Why, no, it can't be that," Lavinia argued. "You can not feel

-humiliated. You have done nothing that need cause you any humiliation.

-We are the only ones who can humiliate ourselves; nothing but our own

-actions can humiliate us; no one else can."

-

-Lavinia had a smiling little triumph in her own philosophy, but she

-quickly compromised it by an inconsistency.

-

-"Besides, no one else knows about it."

-

-"No," Marley agreed thoughtfully, and without noticing her

-inconsistency. "No one else knows anything about it. We have that to be

-thankful for, anyway."

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXI

-

-                             CHRISTMAS EVE

-

-

-Lawrence was arranging for a grand ball in the Odd Fellows' Hall, on

-Christmas Eve, and he had, as he came around to the office one day to

-assure Marley, counted him and Lavinia in. Marley, glad enough to close

-the law-book he was finding more and more irksome, listened to

-Lawrence's enthusiasm for a while, but said at last:

-

-"I'm afraid I can't go."

-

-"Why not? Lavinia will want to go; she always does."

-

-"I know that," Marley admitted, "but I can't, that's all."

-

-Lawrence looked at him intently for a moment.

-

-"Say, Glenn, what's the matter with you?" he said. "Anything been going

-wrong lately? You look like you were in the dumps."

-

-Marley shook his head with a negative gesture that admitted all Lawrence

-had said.

-

-"You ain't fretting over that job, are you?"

-

-"What job?"

-

-Marley looked up suddenly.

-

-"Why, with Carman."

-

-"How'd you know?"

-

-"Oh, everybody knows about that," Lawrence replied with a light air that

-added to Marley's gloom; "but what of it? I wouldn't let that cut me up;

-come out and show yourself a little more! You don't want to keep Lavinia

-housed up there, away from all the fun that's going on, do you? Mayme

-and I were talking about it the other night; you and Lavinia haven't

-been to a thing for months; it isn't right, I tell you."

-

-Marley looked sharply at Lawrence for a minute, and Lawrence marking the

-resentment in his eyes, hastened on:

-

-"Don't get mad, now; I don't mean anything. I'm only saying it for your

-good. I think you need a little shaking up, that's all."

-

-"Lavinia can do as she likes," Marley said with dignity. "I shall not

-hinder her; I never have."

-

-"Well, don't get sore now, old man; I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.

-The holidays are here and you want to cut into the game; it's a time to

-forget your troubles and have a little fun; you've only got one life to

-live; what's the use of taking it so seriously?"

-

-Marley looked at Lawrence with a genuine envy for an instant, as at a

-man who never took anything in life very seriously; he looked at the new

-overcoat Lawrence held over his knee, showing its satin lining; and

-then, reflecting that Lawrence's father had left with his estate a block

-of bank stock which had given Lawrence his position in the bank,

-Marley's impatience with him returned and he said:

-

-"Oh, it's easy enough for you to talk; if you were in my place you might

-find it different."

-

-"That's all right," Lawrence went on, a smile on his freckled face. "You

-just come to the party; it'll cost you only five, and Lavinia would like

-it. I know that. So do you."

-

-Marley did know it; and he felt a new disgust with himself that remained

-with him long after Lawrence had put on his new overcoat and left. He

-reproached himself bitterly, and he told himself that the best thing he

-could do would be to go away somewhere, and not tell Lavinia, or

-anybody.

-

-"I'm only in her way, that's all," he thought as he opened his law-book,

-and bent it back viciously, so that it would stay open.

-

-Ever since the fiasco of his plans as to a place with Carman, he had

-been seeking consolation in a new resolution to keep on patiently in the

-law; but it was a consolation that he had to keep active by a constant

-contemplation of himself as a young man who was making a brave and

-determined fight against heavy odds. It was difficult to sustain this

-heroic attitude in his own eyes and at the same time maintain that

-modesty which he knew would become him best in the eyes of others. The

-approach of the holiday season, the visible preparations on every hand

-and the gay spirits everywhere apparent had isolated him more than ever,

-and he had felt his alienation complete whenever he went to see Lavinia

-and found the whole Blair family in an excitement over their own

-festival. Marley would have liked to make Lavinia handsome gifts, but

-his debts were already large, relatively, and he rose to heights of

-self-denial that made him pathetic to himself, when he decided that he

-could give her nothing. Now that Lawrence was getting up a ball to which

-he knew Lavinia would like to go, as she had always gone to the balls

-that were not so frequent in Macochee as Lawrence wished they might be,

-he felt his humiliation deeper than ever. He put the matter honestly to

-Lavinia, however, and she said promptly:

-

-"Why, I wouldn't think of going."

-

-She looked up at him brightly, and then in an instant she looked down

-again. She relished the nobility of the attitude she had so promptly

-taken, but the woman in her prevailed over the saint, and told what a

-moment before she had determined not to tell:

-

-"I've already declined one invitation."

-

-She saw the look of pain come into Marley's eyes, and instantly she

-regretted.

-

-"You have?" he said.

-

-"Why, yes." She looked at him with her head turned to one side; her face

-wore an expression he did not like to see.

-

-It was on Marley's lips to ask who had invited her, but his pride would

-not let him do that; somehow a sense of separation fell suddenly between

-them. He examined with deep interest the arm of his chair.

-

-"Well," he began presently, "I wouldn't have you stay away on my

-account, you know." He looked up suddenly. "Please don't stay away,

-Lavinia. I'd like to have you go."

-

-There was contrition in her voice as she almost flew to reply:

-

-"Why, you dear old thing, it was only George Halliday who asked me; and

-when I told him I wouldn't go he was actually relieved; he said he

-didn't want to go himself; he hates our little functions out here, you

-know, and has ever since he came back from Harvard. I suppose he was

-used to so much more in Cambridge!" Lavinia had a sneer in her tone, and

-it took on a shade of irritation as she added: "He asked me only because

-he was sorry for me."

-

-"Yes, sorry for you," Marley repeated bitterly. "That's another thing

-I've done for you."

-

-"Please don't, dear," said Lavinia, "don't let yourself get bitter.

-It'll be all right. We'll spend Christmas Eve here at home and have ever

-so much more fun by ourselves."

-

-Mrs. Blair told Marley that she wished Lavinia might go to the ball; her

-father wished it, too. Mrs. Blair told him that she could easily get

-George Halliday to take her,--their lifelong intimacy with the Hallidays

-permitted that. Marley assured her that he wished Lavinia to accept

-Halliday's invitation, but that she would not do so.

-

-"I'd take her myself," he added, "only I can't dance, and--I have no

-money. I'd like to have her go, if it would give her pleasure."

-

-"I know you would, you dear boy," said Mrs. Blair, laying her hand on

-his shoulder in her affectionate way.

-

-Mrs. Blair urged Lavinia to go, and so did Marley, and when he saw that

-she was determined not to go, he urged her all the more strongly,

-because, now that he was sure of her position, he could so much more

-enjoy his own disinterestedness and magnanimity. They desisted when

-Lavinia complained that they were making her life miserable.

-

-Though Marley could deny Lavinia the dance, he found, after all, that he

-could not deny himself the distinction of giving her a Christmas

-present. His heroic attitude gradually broke under the temptation of

-Hoffman's jewelry store, glittering with its holiday display. Marley

-already owed Hoffman for Lavinia's ring, but like most of the merchants

-in Macochee, Hoffman had to do business on an elastic credit, if he

-wished to do any business at all, and Marley, after many pains of

-selection, did not have much difficulty in inducing Hoffman to let him

-have the pearl opera-glasses he finally chose in the despair of thinking

-of anything better.

-

-The opera-glasses might have atoned for the deprivation of the ball, had

-Marley been able to think of them with any comfort. The delight Lavinia

-expressed in a gift she could never use in Macochee, and the enthusiasm

-with which Connie admired them, made him nervous and guilty. Connie had

-temporarily foregone her claims to young-ladyhood, and was a child again

-for a little while. Her excitement and that of Chad should have made any

-Christmas Eve merry, but it was not a merry Christmas Eve for Marley.

-

-As Lavinia and he sat in the parlor they caught now and then, or

-imagined they caught, the strains of the orchestra that was playing for

-the dancers in the Odd Fellows' Hall, and they were both conscious that

-life would be tolerable for them only when the music should cease and

-the ball take its place among the things of the past, incapable of

-further trouble in the earth.

-

-"It's very trying," said Judge Blair to his wife that night. "I wish

-there was something we could do."

-

-"So do I," his wife acquiesced.

-

-"I don't like to see Lavinia cut off this way from every enjoyment. The

-strain must be very wearing."

-

-"I suppose it is very wearing with most lovers," said Mrs. Blair. "I

-don't see how they ever endure it; but they all do."

-

-"Have you talked with her about it?" The judge put his question with a

-guarded look, and was not surprised when his wife quickly replied:

-

-"Gracious, no. I'd never dare."

-

-"No, I presume not. I don't know who would, unless it might be Connie."

-

-Mrs. Blair was silent for a while in the trouble that was all the more

-serious because they dared not recognize its seriousness, and then she

-asked:

-

-"Couldn't you help him to something?"

-

-"I don't know what," the judge replied. "There's really no opening in a

-little town."

-

-"If you were off the bench and back in the practice--"

-

-"Great heavens!" he interrupted her. "Don't mention such a thing!"

-

-"I meant that you might take him in with you."

-

-"I'd be looking around for some one to take me in," the judge said. "I'm

-glad I haven't the problem to face." He enjoyed for a moment the snug

-sense he had in his own position and then he sighed.

-

-"He's young, he has that, anyway. He'll work it out somehow, I suppose,

-though I don't know how. As for us, all we can do is to have patience,

-and wait."

-

-"Yes, that's all," said Mrs. Blair. "I don't believe in long

-engagements."

-

-"How long has it been?" he asked.

-

-"Nearly a year now."

-

-"I thought it had been ten."

-

-Mrs. Blair laughed as she said: "Connie was wishing this morning that

-he'd marry her and get it over with."

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXII

-

-                      AN ADVERTISEMENT OF DESTINY

-

-

-The first days of spring contrasted strongly with Marley's mood. Because

-of some mysterious similarity in the two seasons he found the melancholy

-suggestion of fall in this spring, just as, with his high-flown hopes,

-he had found some of the joyous suggestion of spring in the autumn

-before. But as failure followed failure, he began to feel more and more

-an alien in Macochee; he had a sense of exile among his own kind, he was

-tortured by the thought that here, in a world where each man had some

-work to do and where, as it seemed, all men had suddenly grown happy in

-that work, there was no work for him to do.

-

-He was young, healthy, and ambitious; he had given years to what he had

-been taught was a necessary preparation, and then suddenly, just as he

-felt himself ready for life, he found that there was no place in life

-for him. As he went about seeking employment there was borne in on him a

-sense of criticism and opposition, and he was depressed and humiliated.

-By the end of the winter he disliked showing himself anywhere; he no

-longer stopped in the McBriar House of an afternoon to watch Lawrence

-and Halliday at the billiards they played so well; he thought he

-detected a coolness in Lawrence's treatment of him. He felt, or

-imagined, this coolness in everybody's attitude now, and finally began

-to suspect it in the Blairs.

-

-"What's the matter?" asked Powell, one morning. "You ain't sick, are

-you?"

-

-Marley shook his head.

-

-"Well, something ails you. I can see that." He waited for Marley to

-speak. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

-

-"No," said Marley, "thank you. I've just been feeling a little bit blue,

-that's all."

-

-"What about?"

-

-"Oh, I don't know. I'm kind o' discouraged. It seems to me that I'm

-wasting time; I'm not making any headway and then everybody in town

-is--"

-

-"I wouldn't mind that," said Powell, divining the trouble at once.

-"They've had me on the gridiron for about forty years, and they never

-get tired of giving it a twist. It doesn't bother me much any more, and

-I don't see why you should let it bother you, especially as all they say

-about you is a damn lie."

-

-The speech touched Marley, and he lost himself in an impulse of sympathy

-for Powell, but he could not put his sympathy before Powell in the way

-he would like and his mind soon returned to himself.

-

-"I've got to do something," he said. "I wish I knew what."

-

-"Well," said Powell, "you know what I've always told you. I know what

-I'd do if I were your age. Of course--"

-

-Powell did not finish his sentence. He was looking out the window again,

-lost in introspection.

-

-Powell's reiteration of his old advice expressed the very thought that

-had been nebulous in Marley's mind for days, and while he was conscious

-of it, he feared the consciousness, and struggled to prevent it from

-positing itself. But now that Powell had voiced it for him, he could

-escape it no longer, and it filled him with a fear. He went about all

-the day with this fear appalling him; more and more under its perverse

-influence he felt himself an alien, and the people he met in the street

-seemed unreal and strange, outlandish persons whom he had never known.

-They came upon him as ghosts, or if they did something to prove their

-reality, he seemed to be some ghost himself.

-

-In the afternoon he received a note from Lavinia; she said that she was

-going that evening with George Halliday to a concert in the Opera House.

-She did not want to go a bit, she said, but her mother, and especially

-her father, had urged her to go; arguing that she now went out so seldom

-that it must do her good, and besides, they had urged her so often that

-she felt it to be her duty in this instance; she had held out as long as

-she could, and then had yielded.

-

-Marley tried to look upon the note reasonably; he could see the

-influence that had compelled Lavinia to go, and he knew he had no right

-to blame her, and yet, try as he would, he could not escape a feeling of

-bitterness. When he went home at evening his mother instantly noticed

-his depression, and implored him for the reason. He did not answer for a

-while, that is, it seemed a while to Mrs. Marley, but at last he said:

-

-"Mother, I've got to leave."

-

-"Leave?" she repeated, pronouncing the word in a hollow note of fear.

-

-"Yes, leave."

-

-"But what for?"

-

-"Well, you know I'm no good; I'm making no headway; there's no place for

-me here in Macochee; I've got to get out into the world and _make_ a

-place for myself, somewhere."

-

-"But where?"

-

-"I don't know--anywhere."

-

-Marley moved his hand in a wide gesture that included the whole world,

-and yet was without hope of conquest.

-

-"But you must have some plans--some idea--"

-

-"Well, I've thought of going to Cincinnati; maybe to Chicago."

-

-"But what will you do?" Mrs. Marley looked at him with pain and alarm.

-

-"Do!" he said, his voice rising almost angrily. "Why, anything I can get

-to do. Anything, anything, sweeping streets, digging ditches, anything!"

-

-Mrs. Marley looked at her son, sitting there before her with his head

-bowed in his hands. In her own face were reflected the pain and trouble

-that darkened his, and yet she felt herself helpless; she vaguely

-realized that he was engaged in a battle that he must after all fight

-alone; she could not help him, though she wished that she knew how to

-impart to him the faith she had that he would win the battle, somehow,

-in the end.

-

-"Poor boy!" she said at length, rising; "you are not yourself just now.

-Think it all over and talk to your father about it."

-

-It was the first evening in months that Marley had not spent with

-Lavinia, and his existence being now so bound up with hers, he found

-that he could not spend the evening as the other young men in town spent

-their evenings. However, he went down to the McBriar House and there a

-long bill hanging on the wall instantly struck his eye. The bill

-announced an excursion to Chicago. It took away his breath; he stood

-transfixed before it, fascinated and yet repelled; he read it through a

-dozen times. The cheerful way in which the railroad held out this trip

-intensified his own gloom; he wondered how he might escape, but there

-was no way; it was plainly the revelation of his destiny, prophetic,

-absolute, final, and he bowed before it as to a decree of fate; he knew

-now that he must go.

-

-As he went home, as he walked the dark streets in the air that was full

-of the balm of the coming spring, he felt as one to whom a great sorrow

-had come. He thought of leaving Macochee, of leaving his father and

-mother, and then, more than all, of leaving Lavinia, and his throat

-ached with the pain of parting that, even now, before any of his plans

-had been made, began to assail him. His plans were nothing now; they had

-become the merest details; the great decision had been reached, not by

-him, but for him; the destiny toward which all the lines of his

-existence for months had been converging, was on him, the moment had

-arrived, and he had a sense of being the mute and helpless victim of

-forces that were playing with him, hurrying him along to a future as

-dark as the moonless night above him.

-

-He told his father of the excursion, though he gave him no notion of it

-as an expression of his fate, and he was all the more distressed at the

-calm way in which his father acquiesced in what he put before him as a

-decision he would have liked to have appear as less final. His father in

-his mildness could not object to his trying, and he would provide the

-money for the experiment. It gave Marley a moment's respite to have his

-father speak of it as an experiment, for that included the possibility

-of failure, and hence of his return home, but this meager consolation

-was immediately dissipated in the surer sense he felt that this was the

-end--the end of Macochee, the end of home, and the beginning of a new

-life.

-

-

-

-

-                             CHAPTER XXIII

-

-                               THE BREAK

-

-

-Marley went to Lavinia the next morning, and told her as they sat there

-on the veranda in the spring sunlight. She looked at him with distress

-in her wide blue eyes.

-

-"When?" she asked.

-

-"To-night!"

-

-"Tonight? Oh Glenn!"

-

-Her eyes had filled with tears, and she was winking hard to keep them

-back.

-

-"To-night."

-

-She repeated the word over and over again.

-

-"And to think," she managed to say at last, "to think that the last

-night I should have been away from you! How can I ever forgive myself!"

-

-Her lip trembled, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. She drew out her

-handkerchief and said:

-

-"Let's go in."

-

-All that day Marley went about faltering over his preparations. Wade

-Powell was the only one of the few who were interested in him that was

-enthusiastic over his going, and he praised and congratulated him, and

-pierced his already sore heart by declaring that he had known all along

-it was what Marley would be compelled to do. He would give him a letter

-to his old friend, Judge Johnson, he said; the judge would be a great

-man for him to know, and Powell sat down at once, with more energy and

-enterprise than Marley had ever known him to show, and began to

-elaborate his letter of introduction.

-

-Marley dreaded saying good-by; he wished to shirk it as to Powell as he

-intended to shirk it in the cases of his few friends; he was to return

-to the office a last time in the afternoon to get the letter; and then

-he would bid Powell good-by. He had the day before him, but that thought

-could give him no comfort. He would see Lavinia again in the afternoon;

-he would see her once more, for the last time, in the evening, and in

-the meantime he would see his father and his mother, and his home; he

-had still two meals to eat with them, but it was as if he had already

-gone; there was no reality in his presence there among them; the blow

-that fate had decreed had fallen, and all that was to be was then

-actually in being; all about him the men and women of Macochee were

-pursuing their ordinary occupations just as if he were not so soon to go

-away and be of this scene no more; a few hours, and another day, and

-they would be going on with their concerns just the same, and he would

-have disappeared out of their lives and out of their memories.

-

-He looked at everything that had been associated with his life, and

-everything called up some memory,--the little office where he had tried

-to study law, the Court House, and the blind goddess of justice holding

-aloft her scales, the familiar Square, the cloaked cavalryman on the

-monument, every tree, every fence, every brick in the sidewalk somehow

-called out to him--and he was leaving them all. He looked up and down

-Main Street, wide and ugly, littered with refuse, ragged with its

-graceless signs; he thought of the people who had gossiped about him,

-the people whom he had hated, but now he could not find in his heart the

-satisfaction he had expected in leaving them. He felt tenderly, almost

-affectionately, toward them all. But it was worse at home. He wandered

-about the house, looking at every piece of furniture, at every trinket;

-he went into the woodshed, and the old ax, the old saw, everything he

-had known for years, wrung his heart; he went to the barn, he looked at

-the muddy buggy in which he had driven so often with his father; he

-reproached himself because he had not kept the buggy cleaner for him; he

-went into the stall and patted the flank of Dolly, finally he put his

-arms about her warm neck, laid his face against it, and the tears rolled

-down his cheeks.

-

-One of the preachers that were always dropping in on them was there to

-dinner, and in the blessing he invoked on the temporalities, as he

-called them, he prayed with professional unction for the son who was

-about to leave the old roof-tree, and this made the ordeal harder for

-them all. Doctor Marley spoke to the preacher of little things that he

-was to do within the next few days and Marley wondered how he could

-mention them, for they were to be done at a time when he would be there

-no more. Because he conceived of life, as all must conceive of it,

-solely in its relation to himself, he could not imagine life going on in

-Macochee without him.

-

-The afternoon wore on, he passed his hour with Lavinia; they were to

-meet then but once again; he returned home, his mother had packed his

-trunk; it was waiting. He was tender with his mother, and he wondered

-now, with a wild regret, why he had not always been tender with her; he

-was tender now with all things; a tenderness suffused his whole being;

-it seemed as if it might dissolve in tears.

-

-Still he shrank back; there was one thing more to do; he was to go

-up-town and get his ticket, and the letter to Judge Johnson, and bid

-Wade Powell good-by. A wild hope leaped in his heart; perhaps--but no,

-it was irrevocable now. He went, and got his letter, but Powell refused

-to bid him good-by; he said he would be at the train to see him off. He

-bought his ticket and went home. Old man Downing had been there with his

-dray and hauled away his trunk; it was settled. He could only wait and

-watch the minutes tick by.

-

-It seemed to Marley that all things that evening conspired to accentuate

-all that he was leaving behind, and to make the grief of parting more

-poignant. His mother, who was then in that domestic exigency described

-by the ladies of Macochee as being without a girl, had prepared an

-unusually elaborate supper, and while there was no formal observance of

-the fact, it was eaten, so far as any of them could eat that evening,

-under a sense of its significance as a parting ceremonial. They talked,

-or tried to talk, indifferently of commonplace things, and Doctor Marley

-even sought to add merriment to their feast by a jocularity that was

-unusual with him. Marley, who knew his father so well, could easily

-detect the heavy heart that lay under his father's jokes, and he

-suffered a keener misery from the pathos of it. Then he would catch his

-mother looking at him, her eyes deep and sad, and it seemed to him that

-his heart must burst.

-

-Marley's train was to leave at eleven o'clock; he had arranged to go to

-Lavinia's and remain with her until ten o'clock; then he was to stop in

-at his home for his last good-by. Those last two hours with Lavinia were

-an ordeal; into the first hour they tried to crowd a thousand things

-they felt they must say, and a thousand things they could only suggest;

-when the clock struck nine, they looked at each other in anguish; they

-did little after that but mentally count the minutes. The clock ticked

-loudly, aggressively, until in the soul of each, unconfessed, there was

-a desire to hasten the moments they felt they would like to stay; the

-agony was almost beyond endurance; it exhausted them, beat them down,

-and rendered them powerless to speak. Finally the clock struck the

-half-hour; they could only sit and look at each other now; at a quarter

-of ten they began their good-bys.

-

-At ten o'clock Mrs. Blair, Connie and Chad came into the room solemnly,

-and bade Marley farewell; the judge himself came in after them, his

-glasses in his hand and the magazine he had been reading, which, as

-Marley thought with that pang of things going on without him, he would

-in a few moments be reading again as calmly as ever. He took Marley's

-hand, and wished him success; for the first time he spoke gently, almost

-affectionately to him, and although Marley tried to bear himself

-stoically, the judge's farewell touched him more than all the others.

-

-The shameless children would have liked to remain and see the tragedy to

-its close, but Mrs. Blair drew them from the room with her. The last

-moment had come, and Marley held Lavinia in his arms; at last he tore

-himself from her, and it was over. He looked back from out the darkness;

-Lavinia was still standing in the doorway; he saw her slender, girlish

-figure outlined against the hall light behind her; somehow he knew that

-she was bravely smiling through her tears. She stood there until his

-footfall sounded loud in the spring night, then the light went out, the

-door closed as he had heard it close so often, and she was gone.

-

-He saw the light in his father's study as he approached his home, and

-there came again that torturing sense: the sermon his father then was

-working on would be preached when he was far away; his mother, as he

-knew by the light in the sitting-room window, was waiting for him; she

-had waited there so many nights, and now she was waiting for the last

-time. She rose at his step, and took him to her arms the minute he

-entered the door.

-

-"Be brave, dear," he said, stroking her gray hair; "be brave." He was

-trying so hard to be brave himself, and she was crying. He had not often

-seen her cry. She could not speak for many minutes; she could only pat

-him on the shoulder where her head lay.

-

-"Remember, my precious boy," she managed to say at last, "that there's a

-strong Arm to lean upon."

-

-He saw that she was turning now to the great faith that had sustained

-her in every trial of a life that had known so many trials; and the

-tears came to his own eyes. He would have left her for a moment but she

-followed him. He had an impulse he could not resist to torture himself

-by going over the house again; he went into the dining-room which in the

-darkness wore an air of waiting for the breakfast they would eat when he

-was gone; he went to the kitchen and took a drink of water, from the old

-habit he was now breaking; then he went up stairs and looked into his

-own room, at the neatly made bed where he was to sleep no more; at last

-he stood at the door of the study.

-

-He could catch the odor of his father's cigar, just as he had in

-standing there so many times before; he pushed the door open and felt

-the familiar hot, close, smoke-laden atmosphere which his father seemed

-to find so congenial to his studies. Doctor Marley took off his

-spectacles and pushed his manuscript aside, and Marley felt that he

-never would forget that picture of the gray head bent in its earnest

-labors over that worn and littered desk; it was photographed for all

-time on his memory. His words with his father had always been few; there

-were no more now.

-

-"Well, father," he said, "I've come to say good-by."

-

-His father pushed back his chair and turned about. He half-rose, then

-sank back again and took his son's hand.

-

-"Good-by, Glenn," he said. "You'll write?"

-

-"Yes."

-

-"Write often. We'll want to hear."

-

-"Yes, write often," the doctor said. "And take care of yourself."

-

-"I will, father."

-

-"Wait a moment." Doctor Marley was fumbling in his pocket. He drew forth

-a few dollars.

-

-"Here, Glenn," he said. "I wish it could be more."

-

-There was nothing more to do, or say. They went down stairs; Marley's

-bag was waiting for him in the hall. He kissed his mother again and then

-again; he shook his father's hand, and then he went.

-

-"Write often," his father called out to him, as he went down the walk.

-It was all the old man could say.

-

-The door closed, as the door of the Blairs' had closed. Inside Doctor

-Marley looked at his wife a moment.

-

-"Well," he said, "he's gone."

-

-Mrs. Marley made no answer.

-

-"I suppose," he said, "I ought to have gone to the train with him."

-

-Then he toiled up the stairs to his study and the sermon he was to

-preach when Glenn was gone.

-

-Marley walked rapidly down Market Street toward the depot; in the dark

-houses that suddenly had taken on a new significance to him, people were

-sleeping, people who would awake the next morning in Macochee. He could

-not escape the torture of this thought; his mind revolved constantly

-about the mystery of his being still in Macochee, still within calling

-distance, almost, of Lavinia, of his father and mother, of all he loved

-in life, when in reality they had in an instant become as inaccessible

-to him as though the long miles of his exile already separated them.

-

-Twenty minutes later, Lavinia, in her room, Mrs. Marley, at her prayers,

-and Doctor Marley sitting in deep absorption at his desk, heard the

-sonorous whistle of a locomotive sound ominously over the dark and quiet

-town.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXIV

-

-                         THE GATES OF THE CITY

-

-

-It was a relief to Marley when morning came and released him from the

-reclining chair that had held his form so rigidly all the night. He had

-not taken a sleeper because he felt himself too poor, and he had

-somewhere got the false impression that comfort was to be had in the

-chair car. He had stretched himself in the cruel rack when the porter

-came through and turned the lights down to the dismal point of gloom,

-but he had not slept; all through the night the trainmen constantly

-passed through the car talking with each other in low tones; the train,

-too, made long, inexplicable stops; he could hear the escape of the

-weary engine, through his window he could see the lights of some strange

-town; and then the trainmen would run by outside, swinging their

-lanterns in the darkness, and calling to each other, and Marley would

-fear that something had happened, or else was about to happen, which was

-worse.

-

-Finally the train would creak on again, as if it were necessary to

-proceed slowly and cautiously through vague dangers of the night.

-Through his window he could see the glint of rails, the two yards of

-gleaming steel that traveled always abreast of him. Toward morning

-Marley wearily fell asleep, and then the sorrow and heart-ache of his

-parting from Lavinia and his home distorted themselves in fearful

-dreams.

-

-When he awoke at last, and looked out on the ugly prairie that had

-nothing to break its monotony but a few scraggly scrub-oak bushes, and

-some clumps of stunted trees, the dawn was descending from the gray sky.

-The car presented a squalid, hideous sight; all about him were stretched

-the bodies of sleeping passengers, flaccid, inert, having cast aside in

-utter weariness all sense of decency and shame; the men had pulled off

-their boots, and sprawled on the chairs, their stockinged feet

-prominently in view; women lay with open mouths, their faces begrimed,

-their hair in slovenly disarray.

-

-The baby that had been crying in the early part of the night had finally

-gone to sleep while nursing, and its tired mother slept with it at her

-breast. The Jewish drummer across the aisle was sleeping in

-shirt-sleeves; his head had rolled from the little rest on the back of

-his chair and now lolled off his shoulder, his sallow face turned toward

-Marley was greasy with perspiration; his closed eyes filled out their

-blue hemispherical lids, and his cheeks puffed with his intermittent

-snoring. At times his snoring grew so loud and so troubled that it

-seemed as if he must choke; he would reach a torturing climax, then

-suddenly the thick red lips beneath his black mustache would open, his

-sallow cheeks would collapse, and relief would come.

-

-Marley wished the passengers would wake up and end the indecencies they

-had tried to hide earlier in the night. Glancing up and down the long

-car he could recognize none of them as having been there when he had

-boarded the car at Macochee; those who had got on with him had gone

-short distances, and then got off, breaking the last tie that bound him

-to his home. He found it impossible now to conceive of the car as having

-been in Macochee so short a time before.

-

-Presently he saw an old lady sitting up in the remote end of the car;

-she was winding her thin wisp of gray hair in a little knob at the back

-of her head. Then, feeling that he might bestir himself, Marley got up

-and went forward; he washed his face, and tried to escape the discomfort

-of clothes he had worn all the night by readjusting them. The train was

-evidently approaching the city; now and then he saw a building, lonely

-and out of place: on the hideous sand-dunes, as if it waited for the

-city, in the growth it boasted, to catch up with it.

-

-The train ran on; it had reached an ever-widening web of tracks; it

-passed long lines of freight-cars, stock-cars from the west, empty

-gondolas that had come with coal from the Hocking Valley; a switch tower

-swept by, its bell jangling peevishly in alarm; long processions of

-working-men trooped with their dinner-pails between the tracks. The

-train stopped, finally, still far from its destination. The air in the

-car was foul from the feculence of all those bodies that had lain in it

-through the night, and Marley went out on the platform. He could hear

-the engine wheezing--the only sound to break the silence of the dawn.

-The cool morning air was grateful to Marley, though it was not the air

-of the spring they were already having in Macochee. He risked getting

-down off the platform and looked ahead. Beyond the long train, coated

-with its black cinders, he saw Chicago, dim through the morning light,

-lying dark, mysterious and grim under its pall of smoke. He shuddered

-and went back into the car. After a while the train creaked and strained

-and pulled on again.

-

-The passengers had begun to stir, and now were hastening to rehabilitate

-themselves in the eyes of the world; the woman with the baby fastened

-her dress, the drummer put on his collar and coat, the men drew on their

-boots, but it was long before they felt themselves presentable again.

-The women could achieve but half a toilet, and though they were all

-concerned about their hair, they could not make themselves tidy.

-

-The train was running swiftly, now that it was in the city, where it

-seemed it should have run more slowly; the newsboy came in with the

-morning papers, followed by the baggage agent with his jingling bunch of

-brass checks. The porter doffed his white jacket and donned his blue,

-and waited now for the end of his labors, so near at hand. He made no

-pretense of brushing his passengers, for those in his charge were

-plainly not of the kind with tips to bestow.

-

-As the train rushed over unknown streets, Marley caught visions of the

-crowds blockaded by the crossing gates, street-cars already filled with

-people, empty trucks going after the great loads under which they would

-groan all the day; and people, people, people, ready for the new day of

-toil that had come to the earth.

-

-At last the train drew up under the black shed of the Union Station, and

-Marley stood with the passengers that huddled at the door of the car. He

-went out and down; he joined the crowd that passed through the big iron

-gates into the station; and then he turned and glanced back for one last

-look at the train that had brought him; only a few hours before it had

-been in Macochee; a few hours more and it would be there again. In

-leaving the train he felt that he was breaking the last tie that bound

-him to Macochee, and he would have liked to linger and gaze on it. But a

-man in a blue uniform, with the official surliness, ordered him not to

-hold back the crowd. He climbed the steps, went out into Canal Street,

-ran the gantlet of the cabmen, and was caught up in the crowd and swept

-across the bridge into Madison Street.

-

-He was in Chicago, and here among these thousands of people, each

-hurrying along through the sordid crowd to his own task, here in this

-hideous, cruel city, he must make a place for himself, and gain the

-foothold from which he could fight his battle for existence in the

-world.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXV

-

-                              LETTERS HOME

-

-

-"How does she seem since he went away?" asked Judge Blair of his wife

-two days after Marley had gone. He spoke in his usual habit of deference

-to his wife's observation, though his own opportunities for observing

-Lavinia might have been considered as great as hers.

-

-"I haven't noticed any difference in her," said Mrs. Blair, and then she

-added a qualifying and significant "yet."

-

-"Well," observed the judge, "I presume it's too early. Has she heard

-from him?"

-

-"She had a letter this morning; that is, I suppose it was from him; she

-ran to meet the postman, and then went up stairs."

-

-"You didn't mention it to her?"

-

-Mrs. Blair looked at her husband in surprise, and he hastened to make

-amends by acquiescing in the propriety of her conduct, when he said:

-

-"Oh, of course not."

-

-He seemed to drop the subject then, but that it remained uppermost in

-his mind was shown later, when he said:

-

-"I think she will be weaned away from him after a while, don't you? That

-is--if he stays long enough."

-

-Mrs. Blair was not so hopeful; perhaps, too, in her romantic ideal of

-devotion, she did not wish Lavinia to be weaned away. But she avoided a

-direct answer by the suggestion:

-

-"Perhaps he will be weaned away from her."

-

-This possibility had not occurred to the judge.

-

-"Why, the idea!" he said resentfully. "Do you think him capable of such

-baseness?"

-

-Mrs. Blair laughed.

-

-"Would you like to think of _your_ daughter as fickle, and forgetting a

-young man who was eating his heart out for her far away in a big city?"

-

-A condition of such mild romantic sorrow might have attracted Mrs. Blair

-in the abstract, but it could not of course appeal to her when it came

-thus personally. As for the judge, he dismissed the problem, as he had

-so many times before, with the remark:

-

-"Well, we can only wait and see."

-

-The letter which Lavinia received from Marley had been written the day

-he reached Chicago. It was a long letter, conceived largely in a

-facetious spirit, and he had labored over it far into the night in the

-little room of the boarding-house he had found in Ohio Street.

-

-"I chose Ohio Street," he wrote, "because its name reminded me of home.

-Ohio Street may once have been the street of the well-born, but it has

-degenerated and it is now the abode of a long row of boarding--places,

-one of which houses me. My room is a little corner eyrie in the second

-story, back, and from its one window I get an admirable view of the

-garbage dump, the atmosphere and certain intensely red bricks which go

-to make the wall of the house next door. And my landlady, ah, I should

-have to be a Balzac to describe my landlady! She wears large, vociferous

-ear-rings, and she says 'y-e-e-a-a-s' for yes; just kind o' rolls it off

-her tongue as if she didn't care whether it ever got off or not. She is

-truly a beauteous lady, given much to a scarlet hue of her nasal

-appendage; also, her molar system is unduly prominent, too much to the

-fore, as it were. As for form or figure, I'm afraid I couldn't say with

-truth that she goes in for the sinuous, far from it; she leans more to

-the elephantine style of feminine architecture. And she has a way of

-reaching out that is very attractive; probably because of the necessity

-of reaching for room rent. She bears the air of one bent on no earthly

-thing, of a continual soaring in quest of the unexpected; there is about

-her the charm of the intangible, the unknowable.

-

-"The boarding-house itself isn't so bad; I get my room and two meals for

-three-fifty a week; my noon luncheons I have to take down-town. They

-have dinner here, you know, in the evening. I haven't seen much of the

-people in the boarding-house; the men are mostly clerks, and the women

-have bleached hair. They all looked at me when I went into the

-dining-room this evening. There is one young man who sits at my table

-who is in truth a very unwise and immature youth. He is given greatly to

-the use of words of awful and bizarre make-up. For instance, he said

-something about the jokes they get off in the shows here about Irishmen,

-but instead of saying jokes, he said 'traversities'! What do you think

-of that?"

-

-Marley had already described his journey to Chicago in terms similar to

-those in which he described his boarding-house; of Chicago itself he

-said:

-

-"It seems that ages ago when the gods, or maybe the demons, were making

-over plans and specifications of the infernal region, Chicago was

-mentioned and considered by the committee. When it came to a vote for

-choice of sites the place that won had only three more votes than

-Chicago. They didn't locate the brimstone plant here, and from what I

-can learn Chicago was a candidate for both the plant and the honor. It

-was a mistake on somebody's part, as Chicago is certainly an ideal place

-for it."

-

-But the letter discussed mostly the things of Macochee, where Marley's

-spirit still dwelt. The passages Lavinia most liked, of course, were

-those in which he declared his love for her; it was the first

-love-letter she had ever received, and this tender experience went far

-to compensate her for the loneliness she felt in his absence.

-

-It grew upon her after she had read her letter many times, that it would

-be a kindness to take it over and read to Mrs. Marley those parts, at

-least, that were not personal. It was a hard thing for Lavinia to do;

-she had a fear of Mrs. Marley; but she felt more and more the kindness

-of it, and so in the morning she set out. Lavinia was surprised and a

-little disappointed, when Mrs. Marley told her that she too had received

-in the same mail a letter from Glenn. It somehow took away from her own

-act, the more when Mrs. Marley calmly passed her letter over for Lavinia

-to read.

-

-Lavinia, who had not been able to resist a pang that Marley had written

-his mother quite as promptly as he had written her, found some

-consolation in the fact that his letter to his mother was not nearly so

-long as his letter to her, and it contained, too, the same information;

-in some instances, identical phrases, as letters do that are written at

-the same time. She felt that she should be happy in them both, and she

-wished she could determine which of the letters had been written first.

-After she had read Mrs. Marley's letter, she could not speak for a

-moment; the letter closed with a description of the sensations it gave

-Marley to open his trunk and come across the Bible his mother had packed

-in it. But she controlled herself, and when she had finished reading

-parts of her own letter to Mrs. Marley, she said:

-

-"Well, he seems to be in good spirits, doesn't he? He writes so

-amusingly of everything."

-

-Mrs. Marley looked up at Lavinia with a curious smile.

-

-"Why, don't you see?" she said.

-

-"What?" asked Lavinia, glancing in alarm at the two letters which she

-still held in her lap.

-

-"Why, the poor boy is dying of homesickness; that's what makes him write

-in that mocking vein."

-

-"Do you think that is so?" Lavinia leaned forward.

-

-"Why, I know it," replied Mrs. Marley, with a little laugh. "He's just

-like his father."

-

-For a moment Lavinia felt a satisfaction in Marley's loneliness, but she

-denied the satisfaction when she said:

-

-"He'll get over it, after a while."

-

-"Not for a long while, I'm afraid," said Mrs. Marley. "Not until some

-one can be with him."

-

-Lavinia blushed, and before she knew it Mrs. Marley had bent over and

-kissed her cheek.

-

-"He has a long hard battle before him, my dear," she said, "in a great

-cruel city. We must help him all we can."

-

-Lavinia hesitated a moment, then she put her arms about Mrs. Marley and

-drew her down for the kiss which sealed their friendship.

-

-They sat and talked of Marley for a long time, and at last when Lavinia

-rose to go, she held out to Mrs. Marley the letter her son had written

-her. She looked at it a moment before handing it to Mrs. Marley.

-

-"Would you like to keep it?" Mrs. Marley asked.

-

-"May I?"

-

-"If you wish. But you must come often; I shall be lonely now, you know,

-and you must bring his letters and read parts of them. He'll be writing

-so many more to you than he will to me."

-

-Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day; it was not long before

-Clemmons, the postman, smiled significantly when, each morning at the

-sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the door. And Lavinia wrote

-to Marley as regularly herself, sitting at the little desk in her room

-every night long after the house was dark and still.

-

-The judge could find no hope in the observations Mrs. Blair reported to

-him.

-

-"She seems to have developed a new idea of constancy," said Mrs. Blair.

-"She will not allow herself to do a thing, or go to a single place; she

-will hardly accept any pleasure because he isn't here to share it. I

-believe she tries not to have a thought that is not of him. She is

-almost fanatical about it."

-

-"Oh dear!" said the judge. "I thought the nightly calls were a severe

-strain, but they can not compare to the strain of nightly letters."

-

-"He writes excellent letters, however," Mrs. Blair said. "I wish you

-could read the one he wrote his mother. A boy who writes like that to

-his mother--"

-

-"How did you get to see a letter he wrote his mother?" interrupted the

-judge.

-

-"Lavinia showed it to me."

-

-"Has she been over there?"

-

-"Yes. Why?"

-

-The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation were now hopeless,

-indeed.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXVI

-

-                       THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED

-

-

-"I am very tired to-night," Marley wrote to Lavinia a day or so later.

-"I have been making the rounds of the law offices; I have been to all

-the leading firms, but--here I am, still without a place. I thought I

-might get a place in one of them where I could finish my law studies,

-and make enough to live on, meanwhile; I had dreams of working into the

-firm in time, but they were only dreams, and all my hopes have gone

-glimmering. The men who are employed in the law offices are already

-admitted to the bar; most of them are young fellows, but some are old

-and gray-headed, and the sight of them gave me the blues.

-

-"I did not get to see many of the firm members themselves; their offices

-are formidable places. There is no office in Macochee like them; they

-have big outer rooms, full of stenographers and clerks and there is a

-boy at a desk who makes you tell your business before you can get in to

-see any of the lawyers themselves. They seem to be mighty big, important

-fellows. Most of them would not see me at all; several said they had no

-place for me and dismissed me with a kind of pitying smile; one man,

-when I asked him if he thought there was an opening, said he supposed

-there ought to be, as one lawyer in Chicago had died of starvation only

-the day before. But some were kinder; one, whom I shall never forget,

-took pains to sit down and talk with me a long time, but he was no more

-encouraging than the others. He said the profession was terribly

-overcrowded, 'that is,' he corrected himself with a tired smile, 'if you

-can call it a profession any longer. It is more of a business nowadays

-and the only ones who get ahead are those who have big corporations for

-clients. How they all live is a mystery to me!' He thought I had better

-not undertake it and advised me to go into some business. But then most

-of them did that.

-

-"But I must tell you of my visit to Judge Johnson. You will remember my

-telling you of him; he was Wade Powell's chum in the law school in

-Cincinnati, and Mr. Powell had given me a letter to him. I had a hard

-time seeing him; the hardest of all. When I went into the big stone

-government building he was holding court, and a lawyer was making an

-argument before him. I waited till they were all done, and then when the

-crier had adjourned court--he said 'Oyez, Oyez, Oyez,' instead of the

-'Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye' we have in Ohio; it sounded so old and

-quaint, even if he did say 'Oh yes,' for 'Oyez!' It comes from the old

-Norman-French, you know; ask your father about it, he'll explain it--I

-tried to get in to him. I succeeded at last, but it was hard work. He

-didn't seem glad to see me; he looked at me coldly, and made me feel as

-if I ought to hurry up and state my business promptly and get away. When

-I gave him Wade Powell's letter he put on his gold glasses and read it;

-but--what do you think?--I don't believe he remembered Wade Powell at

-all! At least he seemed not to. Of course he may have been putting it

-on. Wouldn't it make Wade Powell mad to know that? I'd give a

-dollar--and I haven't any to spare either--to see him when he hears that

-his old friend, Judge Johnson of the United States Circuit Court,

-couldn't remember him! Well, the judge didn't let me detain him long, he

-looked at his watch a moment, and then he advised me not to try it in

-Chicago; he said there were too many lawyers here anyhow, and that he

-thought a young man made a mistake in coming to a city at all.

-

-"'Why don't you stay in a small town?' he asked, looking at me sternly

-over his glasses. 'Living is cheaper there, and life is much more simple

-than it is in the cities. I've often wished I had stayed in a little

-town.'

-

-"I came away, as you can imagine, feeling pretty much cast down and

-humbled in spirit. There are four thousand lawyers in Chicago; just

-think of it, almost as many lawyers as there are people in Macochee! As

-I walked through the crowded streets with men and women rushing along, I

-wondered how they all lived. What do they do? Where are they all going,

-and how do they get a place to stand on? As I came across the bridge

-over to the North Side I felt that there was no place for me here in

-this great, dirty, ugly city, just as there is no place for me back in

-peaceful Macochee, where every minute of the day I long to be. Anyway, I

-am sure that there is no place for me here in the law, and I shall have

-to look for something else. I see so much wretchedness and poverty and

-squalor; it is in the street everywhere--pale, gaunt men, who look at

-you out of sick, appealing eyes.

-

-"This morning I saw a sight down-town that filled me with horror; it was

-noon, and a great crowd of ragged men were waiting in front of the

-_Daily News_ office in Fifth Avenue. They were all standing idly and yet

-expectantly about; I stood and watched them. Presently, as at some

-signal, they all rushed for the office door, and then all at once they

-seemed to be enveloped in a white, rustling cloud. Each one had a

-newspaper, and they all turned to one page and began to read rapidly;

-sometimes two or three men bent over the same paper; in another moment

-they had scattered, going in all directions. Then it flashed upon me:

-they had been waiting for the noon edition of the paper and the page

-they had all turned to was the page with the 'want ads' on it; they were

-all looking for jobs! It made me inexpressibly sad. I do not wish to

-inflict my own sorrow upon you, dear heart, but it made me shudder; what

-if I--but no, the thought is too horrible to mention. And yet I, too,

-belong to this great army of the unemployed.

-

-"As I write the clock in the steeple of a church a block away chimes the

-hour of midnight; so you see that I've retained my nocturnal habits.

-When the poets of a coming generation sing of me (as they doubtless

-will, after my death) their songs will be called Nocturnes."

-

-That same day Doctor Marley received a letter from his son which Mrs.

-Marley, though her husband passed it over to her to read, did not show

-to Lavinia. It ran:

-

-"It's rather expensive living here, I find; especially for one who

-belongs to the great army of the unemployed. My contract with my

-basiliscine landlady calls for two meals a day and a bed at night--also

-for three-fifty per week in payment of said two meals and bed. My

-lunches I get down-town; that is, I did get them down-town; for two days

-I have gone without lunches, and the aforesaid landlady looks

-reproachfully at me at night when she sees me laying in an extra supply

-of dinner. I don't mind the lack of the lunches, even if she does, but

-I'll have to pay her in a day or so now. I'm in poor spirits to-night,

-so can't write well; cause of said low mental temperature, only eighty

-cents in the world between me, my landlady and ultimate starvation. It's

-funny how much hungrier a fellow gets as the food supply gets low. A

-word to the wise, etc.

-

-"What do you think? I met Charlie Davis on the street this morning. He

-is living here now, working in some big department store. My, it was

-good to see some one from Macochee! How small the world is, after all!

-

-"How are you all? How is Dolly? Does Smith Johnson still clap his hands

-at his dog every evening as he comes home, and does the dog run out to

-meet him as joyously as of yore? And does Hank Delphy still go down-town

-in his shirt-sleeves? And has Charlie Fouly had any fits in the Square

-lately? And, father, has mother got a girl yet? Give her an ocean of

-love and tell her not to work too hard, and to let the heathen shift for

-themselves a while. They haven't any trusts to monopolize the jobs as

-yet, and they ought to be able to get along. Oh, how I'd like to see you

-all! Answer all my questions: I propounded numerous ones to you. I don't

-remember now what all of them were, but I know they were all momentous

-and had much to do with my well-being, spiritual and physical, not to

-say financial. And see that the moss doesn't get too thickly overlaid on

-my memory."

-

-Marley's new life in Chicago, as somewhat vaguely reflected in his

-letters, impressed those who had a sense of having been left behind in

-Macochee, as but a continuation of the life he had led there, that is,

-it was presented to them as one long, hopeless search for employment. He

-told of his daily tramps up and down the city, of his dutiful

-applications for work in every place where the boon of work might be

-bestowed, and of the unvarying refusals of those in whose hands had been

-intrusted, by some inscrutable decree of the providence of economics,

-the right to control the opportunity of labor. It was as if the primal

-curse of earning his bread were in a fair way to be taken from man, had

-not the primal necessity of eating his bread continued unabated.

-

-The routine through which he went each day had begun to weary Marley,

-and it might have begun to weary his readers in Macochee, had they not

-all felt their own fortunes somehow bound up with his. He apologized in

-his nightly letters for the monotony of their recitals, but he hoped it

-might be condoned as the most realistic portrayal of his life that he

-could give. He tried at times to give his letters a lighter tone by

-describing, with a facility that grew with practice, the many incidents

-that attracted him in a city whose life was all so new and strange to

-him; he could not help a growing interest in it all, and while Lavinia

-was probably unconscious of the change, his letters were now less

-concerned with the things of the life he had left in Macochee, and more

-and more with the things of the life he had entered upon in Chicago; as

-on a palimpsest, the old impressions were erased to make way for new

-ones.

-

-But try as he would to give to his letters a cheer that was far from

-expressing his own spirit, he could not save them from the despair that

-was laying hold of him, a despair which finally communicated itself in

-the declaration that it was now no longer with him a question of

-selecting employment.

-

-"I must take," he wrote, "whatever I can get, and that will probably be

-some kind of manual, if not menial, work. Sometimes," so he let himself

-go on, "I feel as if I would give up and go back to Macochee, defeated

-and done for. But I can not come to that yet, though I would like to;

-oh, how I would like to! But I don't dare, my pride won't let me act the

-part of a coward, though I know I am one at heart. One thing keeps me up

-and that is the thought of you; I see your face ever before me, and your

-sweet eyes ever smiling at me--"

-

-Lavinia's eyes were not smiling as she read this; and she poured out her

-own grief and sympathy in a long letter that she promptly tore up, to

-pen in its stead a calmer, braver one, that should hearten him in the

-struggle which, as she proudly assured him, he was making for her.

-

-Marley's description of his straits partly prepared Lavinia for the

-shock of the letter in which he said he had found a job at last, but she

-was hardly prepared to learn that it was anything so far from her

-conception of what was due him as a job trucking freight for a railroad.

-The mockery he put into the picture of himself in a blue jumper and

-overalls could not console her, and she kept the truth from every one,

-except her mother; she preferred rather that they number Marley still

-with the army of the unemployed than to count him among those who toiled

-so desperately with the muscles of their arms and backs. She tried to

-conceal in encouraging congratulations the chagrin of which she felt she

-should be ashamed, and she tried to show her appreciation of his droll

-sarcasms about the preparation his four years of college had given him

-for the task of trundling barrels of sugar and heaving pianos down from

-box-cars.

-

-"I'm sure it's honest work," she wrote, "but do be careful, dear, not to

-hurt yourself in lifting such heavy loads." It was a comfort to remind

-him that he was not intended to do such work.

-

-There was a relief, however, that she did not dare admit, when he told

-her three days later that he had lost his job.

-

-"I realize for the first time my importance in the great scheme of

-things," he wrote. "I was fired because I do not belong to the freight

-handlers' union. It took them three days to find this out, and then they

-threatened to strike if the railroad company did not immediately

-discharge me. The railroad company, after due consideration, decided to

-let me out, and--I'm out. It makes me tremble to think of the

-consequences that would have followed had they decided otherwise. Think

-of it! The railroad tied up, business at a standstill and the commerce

-of the nation paralyzed, and all because of Glenn Marley, A. B. It is

-really encouraging to know that my presence on the earth is actually

-known to my fellow-mortals; it has at least been discovered that I am

-alive and in Chicago, even if my diploma is not recognized by Freight

-Handlers' Union No. 63. And now," he concluded, "as Kipling says, it's

-'back to the army again, Sergeant, back to the army again'--the army of

-the unemployed."

-

-Lavinia was shocked again a day or so later when on opening her letter

-she met the announcement that he had been offered a job with another

-railroad as a freight handler.

-

-"But you need not be alarmed," she was reassured to read--though it was

-not until she thought it all over afterward that she began to wonder how

-he had divined her dislike of his being in such work--"I haughtily

-declined, and turned them down. You see this road is just now in the

-throes of a strike, and all their freight handlers are out.

-Consequently, they have had to employ scabs to do the work of the

-strikers. They take anybody--that's why they were ready to take me. But

-as I said, I declined. Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to take a place

-away from a union man."

-

-Lavinia mistook her satisfaction in Marley's declination of the position

-for a satisfaction in the nobility of his sacrifice, and in her elation

-she related the circumstance at dinner. Now that Marley had declined

-such an employment she felt safe in doing this. But her father did not

-see it in her light, or at least in Marley's light.

-

-"Humph!" he sneered; "so he sympathizes with unionism, does he? Well,

-those unions will own the whole earth if they keep on."

-

-"But he says he thought of the wives and children of the union men--"

-

-"Well, but why doesn't he think of the wives and children of the scabs,

-as he calls them? They have as much right to live and work as the union

-men."

-

-Lavinia, as an opponent of union labor herself, could not answer this

-argument, though she felt it her duty to defend Marley. But before she

-could proceed in his defense, her father, strangely enraged at the mere

-mention of the policies of the unions, hurried on:

-

-"The union didn't show any consideration for him when it took his other

-job away from him."

-

-Lavinia shot a reproachful glance at her mother, who did not see it

-because she was shooting a glance more than reproachful at her husband,

-and it had the effect of silencing and humbling the judge, as all of

-Lavinia's arguments, or all of the arguments known to the propaganda of

-union labor, could not have done.

-

-

-

-

-                             CHAPTER XXVII

-

-                               A FOOTHOLD

-

-

-The next letter the postman gave Lavinia began ecstatically:

-

-"I've got a job at last! I'm now working for the C. C. and P. Railroad,

-in their local freight office, and I'm not trucking freight either, but

-I'm a clerk--a bill clerk, to be more exact. My duties consist in

-sitting at a desk and writing out freight bills, for which by some

-inscrutable design of Providence my study of common carriers and

-contracts in the law was doubtless intended to prepare me.

-

-"To-day I wrote out a bill for freight to Cook and Jennings, Macochee,

-Ohio, and you can imagine my sensations. It made me homesick for a

-while; I wished that by some necromancy I might conceal myself in the

-bill and go to Macochee with it; I had a notion to write a little word

-of greeting on the bill, but I didn't; it might have worried old man

-Cook's brain and he couldn't stand much of a strain of that kind. But

-I'm getting nearer Macochee every day now. I guess I'm to be a railroad

-man after all, and some day you'll be proud to tell your friends that I

-started at the bottom. 'Oh, yes,' you'll be boasting, 'Mr. Marley began

-as a common freight trucker; and worked his way up to general manager.'

-Then we'll go back to Macochee in my private car. I can see it standing

-down by the depot, on the side track close to Market Street, baking in

-the hot sun, and the little boys from across the tracks will be crowding

-about it, gaping at the white-jacketed darky who'll be getting the

-dinner ready. We'll have Jack and Mayme down to dine with us, and your

-father and mother and Chad and Connie, and my folks, too, and maybe, if

-you'll let me, Wade Powell. Then, of course, the Macochee people will

-think better of me; they won't be saying that I'm no good, but instead

-they'll stand around, in an easy, careless way, and say, 'Oh, yes, I

-knew Glenn when he was a boy. I always said he'd get up in the world.'

-

-"But, ah me, just now I'm a bill clerk at fifty dollars a month, thank

-you, and glad of the chance to get it; so is my voluptuous landlady

-glad; she'll get her board money a little more regularly now.

-

-"I suppose you'll want to know something about my surroundings. They are

-not elegant; the office is a big barn of a place, crowded full of desks,

-where we sit and write from eight in the morning until any hour at night

-when it occurs to the boss to tell us we can go. Last night it was ten

-o'clock before the idea struck him. They kindly allow us an hour in

-which to run out to a restaurant for supper. The windows in the office

-were washed, so tradition runs, in 1493, the year after Columbus landed.

-Outside, the freight trains rush by constantly so as to keep the noise

-going. My boss, whose name is Clark, strikes me as being a sort of fool

-of an innocuous sort. He is a conscientious ass, but a poor,

-unfortunate, deluded simpleton. He's one of those close-fisted reubs

-whose chief care is the pennies, and whose only interest in life is the

-C. C. and P. Railroad. He makes his business his own personal affair and

-the C. C. and P. his god. He lunches down-town and pays twenty cents for

-his lunch, never more, often fifteen. One of the first things he told me

-was, now that I had come under his protecting wing, to begin to save

-money. They have a young man in the office here, whose desk is next to

-mine, who was born somewhere in Canada, and is always 'a-servin' of her

-Majesty the Queen,' as Kipling says. He told me with much gusto how he

-had hung out of the office window last New Year's a Canadian flag. He

-seemed proud of having done so, and also told me, boasted to me, in

-fact, that he was going to hang the same flag out of the same window on

-the Fourth of July. 'Oh, yes, you are!' thinks I. So I got the flag and

-ripped it into shreds and started it through the waste-basket on a

-hurried trip to oblivion. _A bas_ the Canadian flag! He'll probably get

-another one, but if I get hold of it, it'll meet the same fate as the

-first one. Then I have something to think of that'll keep my mind off my

-horrible fate in being here in Chicago, while I smile in ghoulish glee

-with a cynical leer overspreading my classic features, at the young

-man's disapproval of my actions. The rest of the men in the office

-aren't much to boast of. They're a diluted mixture of Nijni Norgordian

-and Bill Hoffman the jeweler. I still hate this town; I wish it were

-buried under seven hundred and thirty feet of Lake Michigan."

-

-Marley's next letter to Lavinia opened thus:

-

-"Extract from the diary of J. H. Anderson,

-Esq., Canadian, clerk in the freight office of the

-C. C. and P. Ry., at Chicago, Ill., April 20.

-

-            "'New man on desk next to mine; young, about

-            24. Rather decent fellow, but conceited. Do not

-            think he will last. Took me to lunch with him

-            this evening.'

-

-"Now what do you think of that? The youth I described to you at such

-length keeps a diary, and the foregoing is culled therefrom. He left it

-by some mistake on top of his desk, and I picked it up innocently enough

-to-night, to see what it was, and that was the first thing my eye lit

-on. He is evidently an adept at coming to conclusions, apparently he can

-sum one up in two whisks of a porter's broom. I was much surprised to

-find myself so well done. Done on every side in those few words. I've

-rather enjoyed it; strikes me as being uproariously funny. Maybe his

-dictum is correct. You'll agree with me as to his richness. Tell every

-one about it and see what they will think. Tell your mother and my

-mother. Tell Jack and give him a chance to laugh. Tell Mayme Carter,

-too."

-

-Lavinia ran at once to her mother.

-

-"Listen," she said. And she read it.

-

-Mrs. Blair laughed.

-

-"How funny!" she said, "and how well he writes! I should think he'd go

-into literature."

-

-Lavinia laid the letter down in her lap and looked at her mother as if

-she had been startled by a striking coincidence.

-

-"Why, do you know, I've thought of that very thing myself."

-

-"But read on," urged Mrs. Blair.

-

-Lavinia picked up the letter again and began:

-

-"Well, de--"

-

-"Oh," she exclaimed, blushing hotly, "I can't read you that. Let's

-see--"

-

-She leafed over the letter, one, two, three, four sheets. Mrs. Blair was

-smiling.

-

-"Aren't you leaving out the best parts?" she asked archly.

-

-"Oh, there's nothing," Lavinia said, not looking up. "But--oh, well,

-this is all. He says--

-

-"'There is a good deal of unrest and uneasiness here just now, because

-the first of May is coming. The road is anticipating trouble with the

-freight handlers; they may go out on a strike that day.'

-

-"Oh, dear," sighed Lavinia, "more strikes, and I suppose that means more

-trouble for Glenn."

-

-"Why, the strike of those men can't affect him," Mrs. Blair assured her.

-"He's a clerk now."

-

-"Yes, I know, but what if he gets the notion he ought to help them by

-quitting too?"

-

-

-

-

-                             CHAPTER XXVIII

-

-                          THE TALK OF THE TOWN

-

-

-Macochee's common interest in Marley was sharpened by his leaving town,

-and out of the curiosity that raged, Lawrence and Mayme Carter one

-evening made a call on Lavinia.

-

-"Well, Lavinia," said Lawrence, almost as soon as they were seated in

-the parlor, "what's the news about Glenn? How's he getting along?"

-

-"Oh, pretty well," she said, smiling.

-

-"Does he like Chicago?"

-

-"Oh, yes; that is, fairly well."

-

-"Run get his letters and let us read them."

-

-"Why, Jack! The idea!" Mayme rebuked him.

-

-But Lavinia instantly got up.

-

-"Well, I'll read you part of one or two," she said. "He can tell you

-much better than I all about himself."

-

-She was gone from the room a moment and then returned with two thick

-envelopes.

-

-"My, Lavinia, you don't intend to read all that, do you?" Lawrence made

-a burlesque of looking at his watch.

-

-"Oh, you needn't be afraid," said Lavinia, smiling. She opened a letter.

-

-"Here's one that came several days ago. He mentions you both in this

-one."

-

-"You don't mean to say he connects our names?" Lawrence affected

-consternation.

-

-"Can't you be serious a moment?" Mayme said, "I want to hear what he

-says; do go on, Lavinia, and don't mind Jack."

-

-Lavinia read the extract from the diary and Marley's comment.

-

-"Doesn't he say anything about you?" said Lawrence. "Why don't you read

-that? You skip the most interesting parts. You'd better let me read

-them. Here--" and he held out his hand for the letter.

-

-But Lavinia laid one letter securely in her lap and opened the other.

-

-"Listen to this," she began, and then she glanced over the first page

-and half-way down the second.

-

-"Here you're skipping again," cried Lawrence. "Why don't you play fair?"

-

-"'I have made a friend,' he says," she began, "'and it all came about

-through the strike. You know the freight handlers went out on the first

-of May, and since then there has been more excitement than work in the

-office. The freight house is stacked high with freight, and only a few

-men are working there and they are afraid of their lives. All around the

-outside of the big, long shed are policemen and detectives, and the

-strikers' pickets. All day they walk up and down, up and down, at a safe

-distance, just off the company's ground, and they waylay everybody and

-try to get them not to go to work here. I happened to see the strike

-when it began. It was day before yesterday morning. I had gone out in

-the freight house on some little errand and just at ten o'clock I

-noticed a man walk down by the platform that runs along outside the

-shed. I saw him stop by one of the big doors and look in. Suddenly he

-gave a low whistle, then another. The men in the freight house stopped

-and looked up. Then the man outside raised his arm, and held up two

-fingers--'"

-

-"He wanted them to go swimming probably," interrupted Lawrence.

-

-"Oh, Jack, do stop," said Mayme, irritably. "Right at the most

-interesting part, too! Do go on, Lavinia."

-

-Lavinia read on:

-

-"'Then the man outside raised his arm, and held up two fingers, and

-instantly every truck in the shed dropped to the floor, bang, the men

-all went and put on their coats, marched out of the freight house--and

-the strike was on. Well, after that came the policemen and the

-detectives and the pickets, to say nothing of the reporters. It is about

-these last that I mean to tell you, for among them I have found this new

-friend. The other day a young man came into the office to see Clark, our

-boss. I was attracted by him at once. He was tall, and his smooth-shaven

-face was refined and thoughtful; I call him good-looking; his eyes were

-dark and his nose straight and full of character; his lips were thin and

-level; his hair was not quite black and stopped just on the right side

-of being curly. He was dressed modestly, but stylishly; I remember he

-wore gloves--he always does--and I thought him somewhat dudish. But what

-was my pleasure to see on his waistcoat the little white cross of my

-fraternity! I rushed up to him instantly, and gave him the grip. He was

-a Sig., from an Indiana college, and he is a reporter on the _Courier_.

-His name is James Weston; no, he is no relation to Bob Weston of

-Macochee at all. I asked him that the first thing; but he is some

-relation to the Cliffords, distant, I suppose.'"

-

-"I wonder if that isn't the young man who visited them summer before

-last?" asked Mayme. "I'll bet it is!"

-

-"No, it can't be," said Lavinia, "I thought of that the very first

-thing, but you see he says," and Lavinia read on:

-

-"'He says he hasn't been there for years. We chatted together for a few

-minutes and were friends at once. To-morrow night, if I can get off in

-time, I'm to dine with him at a cafe down-town. My, but it was good to

-see some one wearing that little white cross! You see my college

-training has done me some good after all.'"

-

-In their conversation afterward, Lavinia and Mayme celebrated Marley's

-abilities as a writer, but Lawrence begged Lavinia to read them more,

-particularly, as he assured her, those parts about herself, saying he

-could judge better of Marley's abilities after he heard how he treated

-romantic subjects.

-

-"I want to know how he handles the love interest," he said.

-

-"Oh, you got that from George Halliday," said Mayme. "It sounds just

-like him when he's discussing some book none of us has read, doesn't it,

-Lavinia?"

-

-Lavinia admitted that it did sound like Halliday, and Mayme returned to

-her attack on Lawrence by saying:

-

-"What do you know about writing, anyway?"

-

-They might have gone farther along this line had not Mrs. Blair entered

-with a plate of cake and some ice-cream that had been left over from

-their dessert at supper. These refreshments instantly seemed to affect

-Mayme with the idea that the call had assumed the formality of a social

-function, and as she nibbled at her cake, she asked with a polite

-interest:

-

-"Just what is Mr. Marley's position with the railroad, Lavinia?"

-

-"Oh," Lavinia answered, "he has a place in the office of the freight

-department; he's a clerk there."

-

-"I'm so glad to know," said Mayme, as if in relief.

-

-"Why?" Lavinia looked up in alarm.

-

-"Oh, well, you know--how people talk." Mayme raised her pale eyebrows

-significantly. Lavinia was disturbed, but Lawrence, detecting the

-danger, instantly turned it off in a joke.

-

-"She heard he was a section hand," he said.

-

-"The idea!" laughed Lavinia.

-

-"Isn't this just the worst place for gossip you ever heard of?" said

-Mayme.

-

-"The worst ever," said Lawrence. "If I were you I'd quit and start a

-reform movement."

-

-When they had gone and were strolling toward the Carters', Lawrence

-grumbled at Mayme:

-

-"What did you want to give it all away to Lavinia for?"

-

-"Why, Jack, I didn't say anything, did I?"

-

-"Oh, no, nothing--only you tipped off the whole thing to her."

-

-"Why, what did I say that hinted at it, even?"

-

-"'Oh, you know how people talk!'" Lawrence mimicked her tone as he

-repeated her words.

-

-"Well, you know they do, Jack, and you know all the mean things they've

-been saying about Glenn. And you remember Charlie Davis' mother told

-mama that Charlie ran across him in the street: in Chicago and that--"

-

-"Oh, Charlie Davis!" said Lawrence, as impatiently as he could say

-anything. "What's he? Anyway, you didn't have to tell Lavinia."

-

-"Well, I'm glad we got the truth anyway."

-

-"Yes, so am I."

-

-"We must tell everybody."

-

-"Sure," acquiesced Lawrence, "if we can get the gossips started the

-other way they'll have him president of the road in a few days."

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXIX

-

-                            A MAN OF LETTERS

-

-

-The Macochee gossips, after they were assured he was engaged in

-clerical, and not manual work, might have promoted Marley much more

-rapidly than his railroad would have done, had it not been for the news

-that he had changed his employment. They had gone far enough to noise it

-about that Marley was chief clerk in the office, where he was only a

-bill clerk, when the _Republican_, with the impartial good nature with

-which it treated all of Macochee's folk, so long as they kept out of

-politics, mentioned him for the first time since his departure, and

-then, to tell of the advancement he was rapidly making in the metropolis

-that loomed so large and important in their provincial eyes. Lavinia had

-the facts in a letter from Marley a day or so before the _Republican_

-had them, though she never could imagine, as she told everybody, where

-the _Republican_ got its information.

-

-"I have a big piece of news to tell you," he wrote. "Last night I dined

-with Weston. It was the first really enjoyable evening I have had since

-I struck the town. Luckily, the strikers had everything tied up so tight

-that we could do little work, and I had no trouble in getting off in

-time. I met him about six o'clock, and we went to the swellest

-restaurant in town. Weston is the finest fellow you ever saw; as it was

-pay night, he said he would blow me off to a good dinner. And he did,

-the best dinner I have ever eaten; there were half a dozen courses, and

-as we ate we talked, talked about everything, college days, the hard

-days that come after college, and you, and everything. Weston's

-experience has been about the same as mine--one long, hopeless search

-for a job. He, however, did not wait so long as I did; he said that he

-realized there was no place for him in a small town, and so he set out

-for the city almost at once. His father wanted him to study medicine,

-but he said he hadn't the money or the patience to wait, and he hated

-medicine anyway, and, as newspaper work offered the quickest channel to

-making a living he chose that. His secret ambition, he confessed, is

-literature, and I believe he is writing a book, but he would not, or did

-not, tell me as much. He says he thinks newspaper work a bad business

-for any one to get into, but then I have discovered that that is the way

-every man talks about his own calling.

-

-"After we had finished our dinner, we sat there for a long, long time

-over our coffee and cigarettes, and we finally got to talking about the

-strike. Weston, you know, has been working on it, and I was glad to be

-able to tell him a good many things he said he could use. Finally, I

-don't know just how it came about, but I told him how the strike started

-with us, about the man appearing in the street alongside the freight

-house, whistling, and then holding up two fingers--I think I described

-it to you in a letter the other night. Weston was greatly interested; I

-can see him still, sitting across the table from me, knocking the ashes

-from his cigarette into his empty coffee-cup and looking so intently at

-me out of his brown eyes that he almost embarrassed me. And what was my

-surprise when I finished to have him say:

-

-"'By Jove, Marley, I'll have to use that. I've been wondering how to

-lead my story to-night.'

-

-"Now you know the strike at our place occurred several days ago, but

-since then it has been spreading, and to-day the men on another road

-walked out. This morning when I picked up the _Courier_ and turned to

-the strike news, here is what I read, under big head-lines:

-

-"'A short man with a brown derby hat cocked over his eye walked

-leisurely down Canal Street at ten o'clock yesterday morning. The short

-man walked a block and then turned and walked back. At the open door of

-the C. and A.'s big freight house he stopped. Suddenly he whistled,

-once, twice, thrice, in low notes. Then he raised his hand with a

-gesture that was graceful and yet commanding, and held up two fingers.

-Inside the freight house the men who were heaving away at the big bales

-and boxes, attracted by the whistle, paused in their labor and looked

-up; they saw the man raise his two fingers; and, with the discipline of

-well-trained troops, they dropped their trucks, put on their coats and

-marched out of the freight house. And the Alton had been added to the

-list of railroads whose men were on strike.'

-

-"Of course, I was surprised and puzzled, and a little pleased too, that

-I had had a hand in the article. As I read it, though, I thought of a

-hundred details I might have told Weston, and I began to wish I had

-written the account myself. This afternoon he came around to the office

-again, and the first thing he said was:

-

-"'Did you see your story this morning?'

-

-"I told him I had, of course. 'But,' I added, 'that was the way it

-happened on our road; not on the Alton.'

-

-"But he only laughed, and said something about the tricks of the trade.

-

-"And now for the news I was going to tell you. I told Weston, as we

-talked the story over, of my little wish that I had written the article

-myself, and he looked at me intently for a moment. Then he said:

-

-"'How'd you like to break into newspaper business?'

-

-"My heart leaped; it came to me suddenly that it wasn't the law, nor

-railroad work, but journalism that I wanted to enter. I told him so

-frankly and he said:

-

-"'Well, it's a dog's life and I don't know whether I'm doing you a good

-turn or not, but I'll speak to the city editor tonight. He's a little

-short of men just now.

-

-"My heart is in my mouth. I can hardly wait till to-morrow, when I'm to

-see him again. Think of it, dear, and all it means! It means more money,

-association with men of my own kind, men like Weston, and a fine,

-interesting life; and it means you; oh, it means you!"

-

-Marley was able in this letter to communicate to Lavinia some of his

-enthusiasm and some of his suspense, and she found it difficult to await

-the result of his next interview with Weston. She began to count the

-hours until Marley and Weston should meet again, and then in a flash it

-came over her that they had doubtless already met, that the decision was

-already known, the fate determined, and she was still in ignorance. She

-had a sense of mystery in it, and she grew impatient, wondering why he

-did not telegraph. The next day came, and a letter with it; but the

-letter did not decide anything. Marley wrote that Weston had spoken to

-the city editor, and that he had told him to bring Marley around that

-evening. And so, other hours of waiting, and then, at last, another

-letter. Marley announced the result with what self-repression he could

-command.

-

-"It's settled," he wrote. "I'm to go to work Monday--as a reporter on

-the staff of the _Courier_. The salary to begin with is to be fifteen

-dollars a week. I'm glad to quit railroad work; I'm not built to be a

-railroad man; I can't adhere to rules as they want me to, and I can't

-bow down as it seems I should. I didn't tell you that my boss and I had

-not been getting along very well lately; I thought I wouldn't worry you.

-I was glad to be able to tell him to-day that I'd quit Saturday. I did

-it in a proud and haughty manner; he seemed surprised and shocked--even

-pained. And when I broke the news gently to the young Canuck he

-expressed great sorrow and regret, but in his secret heart I knew he was

-glad, for now as a prophet he can vindicate himself, at least partly, in

-his diary."

-

-Lavinia was glad that Marley had gone into newspaper work; much as she

-had tried she had not been able to conceive of him in exactly the ideal

-light as a clerk in a railroad office; that position, while it may have

-had its own promise, nevertheless did not envelope him in the atmosphere

-she considered native to him. In his new relation to literature, which,

-in her ignorance, she confounded with journalism, she felt a deep

-satisfaction, and a new pride, and she was glad when the _Republican_

-announced the fact of Marley's new position; she felt that it was a

-fitting vindication of her lover in the eyes of the people of Macochee

-and a rebuke for the distrust they had shown in him.

-

-Thereafter her mail was increased, for in addition to his letter Marley

-sent her the _Courier_ with his work marked; often he marked Weston's as

-well, and early in June he wrote: "I want you to read Weston's story in

-Sunday's paper about the Derby; it's a peach; it's the best piece of

-frill writing that the town has seen in many a day."

-

-The tone of Marley's letters now became more cheerful; it was evident to

-Lavinia that he was finding an interest in life, and in his descriptions

-of his daily work and the places all over Chicago it took him to and the

-people of all sorts it brought him in contact with, she found a new

-interest for her own life. When he wrote that his salary had been

-increased because of his story about a Sunday evening service in a

-church of the colored people in Dearborn Street, it seemed to her that

-happiness at last had come to them, and if, with the passing of June,

-she felt a pang at Marley's grieving in one of his letters that this was

-the month in which they had intended to be married, she was consoled by

-the rapid progress he was making in his work. His salary had been raised

-a second time; he was receiving now twenty-five dollars a week; it

-seemed large to her, and she could not understand why it did not seem

-large to Marley, even when he wrote that Weston was paid forty dollars a

-week.

-

-Her chief joy, perhaps, lay in the fact that he seemed to be living more

-comfortably than he had before. Now that he had left his dismal

-boarding-house she found a relief from its subtly communicated influence

-of the stranded wrecks of life, as Marley surely found it in the

-apartments he was sharing with Weston. She parted as gladly from the

-knowledge of his landlady as Marley did himself, assuring her that the

-landlady had "not decreased any in value as a zoo exhibit since first I

-rhapsodized about her." Lavinia felt that she could dispense with much

-of the worry her womanly concern for his comfort had given her, and she

-turned with a new joy to the books he was constantly recommending.

-

-"Did you ever read," he wrote, "Turgenieff's _Fathers and Sons_? I know

-that you didn't and therefore I know what a treat you have coming. I'll

-send you the book if you can't get it in Macochee, and I presume you

-can't. Snider's sign 'Drugs and Books' is a lure to deceive an unwary

-public that doesn't care as much for books as it does for soda-water;

-and the stock there, as I recall it, consists largely of forty-cent

-editions of books on which the copyright has expired, and which, printed

-on cheap, pulp paper, are to be introduced for the first time to the

-natives of Macochee. I wish you could see Weston's little book-case,

-with its rows of his favorites. Besides Turgenieff and Tolstoi--he says

-the Russians are the greatest novel writers the world has yet

-produced--he has all of George Eliot; I have just read over again

-_Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_. He likes Jane Austen, too, and he

-says you would like her; I haven't read any but _Emma_ as yet. I'm going

-to read them all. And if you like, you can read the set of little

-volumes I am sending you to-day; we can read them thus together. And

-Henry James--do read him--_Daisy Miller_ especially; you will like that.

-Besides these, Weston has most of Ibsen's plays, and sometimes he reads

-parts of them aloud to me; he reads them well. Some day, he says, he's

-going to write a play himself; he is fond of the theater, and we often

-go. One of the fine things about being on a newspaper is that we get

-theater tickets, though we can't always get tickets to the theater we

-want. Now and then the dramatic editor--a fine old fellow with a

-magnificent shock of white hair, who may be seen about the office late

-at night looking very _distingue_ in his evening clothes--gets Weston to

-write a criticism on some play; and often the literary editor lets him

-review books. Weston said to-day he'd get the literary editor to let me

-review some books, and when I told him I didn't know how, he laughed in

-a strange way and said that wouldn't make the slightest difference.

-There's another book you _must_ read, and that is _A Modern Instance_.

-The chief character is Bartley Hubbard, a newspaper man. Weston and I

-had a big argument about the character to-day. I said I thought it was a

-libel on the newspaper profession and Weston laughed and said it was

-only the truth, and that I'd agree with him after I'd been in the work

-longer. 'Newspaper work isn't a profession anyway,' he said, 'but a

-business.' He speaks of journalism--though he won't call it journalism,

-nor let me--just as lawyers speak of the law. He is urging me, by the

-way, to keep up my law studies, and I'm thinking of going to the law

-school here, if I find I can carry it on with my other work. Weston

-declares I can; he says a man has to carry water on both shoulders if he

-wants to amount to anything in the world--Wade Powell said something

-like that to me once. Weston says I'll want to get out of newspaper work

-after a while. He disturbed me a little to-day, and he hurt me, too, by

-saying that a newspaper man has no business to be married; and he knows

-all about you, too. Of course, he didn't mean to hurt me, it's merely

-his way of looking at things."

-

-Happy as she was, Lavinia still had to have her woman's worries, and

-they began to express themselves in constant adjuration to Marley to

-guard his health; she feared the effect of night work, and she feared,

-too, that he could not carry on his law studies and do his duty as a

-reporter at the same time. She sympathized with the spirit of pride and

-determination which made him wish to finish his law studies and be

-admitted to the bar, but she found a greater satisfaction in thinking of

-him as a journalist than as a lawyer; the figure he thus presented to

-her mind was so much more romantic than the prosaic one of a lawyer to

-which she had been all her life accustomed; on a large metropolitan

-daily he was almost as romantic to her as an army officer or a naval

-officer would have been. And while she did not like the night work, and

-had her fears of it for Marley, she nevertheless felt strongly its

-picturesque quality.

-

-The picture Marley drew in one of his letters of the strange shifting of

-the scene that is to be observed in the streets of a great city as

-darkness falls, when those that work in the prosaic day disappear and in

-their places appears the vast and mysterious army of the toilers by

-night, many of them in callings demanding the cover of the night,

-thrilled her strangely. But she did not know how from all the

-temptations of the irregular life he was leading he was saved, partly by

-the gentle friend he had found in James Weston, but more by the constant

-thought of the girl whom he had left behind at home.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXX

-

-                               HOME AGAIN

-

-

-Marley, after a year or more in Chicago, found the excitement of his

-first return home growing upon him as he looked out the car window and

-long before the train entered the borders of Gordon County he eagerly

-began watching for familiar things.

-

-In the spirit of holiday which had come in this his first vacation, he

-had felt justified in taking a chair in the parlor car, though from the

-associations he had formed in his newspaper work it was more difficult

-now for him to resist than to yield to extravagances. He had recalled

-with a smile how in those first hard days in the freight office he had

-joked about going home in a private car, and he had had all day a

-childish pleasure in pretending that the empty Pullman was a private

-car; he could almost realize such a distinction when he showed the

-conductor the pass his newspaper had got for him.

-

-But even if he now felt glad that he was a newspaper man instead of a

-railroad man, he was quite willing to return to Macochee on any terms.

-He had tried to convince himself that he knew the very moment the train

-swept across the Indiana line into Ohio, and he felt a fine glow of

-state pride. He held his pride somewhat in check until he heard some one

-speak a name that he recognized as that of an Ohio town and then he

-boasted to the porter:

-

-"Well, I'm back in my own state again."

-

-The porter, though ready to admit that Ohio was a pretty good old state,

-was nevertheless not very responsive, and Marley saw that he would have

-to enjoy his sensations all alone.

-

-He could view with satisfaction the figure of a tolerably well-dressed

-city man reflected in the long mirror that swayed with the rushing of

-the heavy coach. He knew that his return would create a sensation in

-Macochee, though he was resolved to be modest about it. Even if he was

-not returning to Macochee in the ceremony he had dreamed of, he was

-returning in a way that was distinguished enough for him and for

-Macochee.

-

-He was eager to see the old town; he tried to imagine his return in its

-proper order and sequence, first, the little depot, blistering in the

-hot sun of the August afternoon, the rails gleaming in front of it, and

-the air above them trembling in the heat; he could see the baggage

-trucks tilted up on the platform; from the eating-house came the odor of

-boiled ham compromised by the smell of the grease frying on the

-scorching cinders that were heaped about the ties; beyond was the grain

-elevator that once appeared so monstrous in his eyes; across the tracks,

-the weed-grown field; and the only living things in sight the two men

-unloading agricultural machines from a box-car abandoned on a siding,

-the only sound, the ticking of a telegraph instrument; the target was

-set, but the station officials had not yet appeared.

-

-Thence, in thought, he went up Miami Street; he saw the Court House and,

-lounging along the stone base of the fence, the loafers whom no one had

-ever seen move, but who yet must have made some sort of imperceptible

-astronomical progress, for they kept always just in the shadow of the

-building; then the old law office across the way; then Main Street, with

-its crazy signs, its awnings, and the horses hitched to the racks, then

-the Square with its old gabled buildings, the monument and the

-cavalryman, the long street leading to his own home, and at last, Ward

-Street, arched by its cottonwoods,--and he recalled his unfinished

-verses which had taken Ward Street for a subject:

-

-                  "I know a place all pastoral,

-                    Where streams in winter flow,

-                  And where down from the cottonwoods

-                    There falls a summer snow."

-

-And then, at last, the old house of the Blairs' with its cool veranda,

-its dark bricks, its broad overhanging cornices, and Lavinia standing in

-the doorway!

-

-He had never forgotten the anguish of his parting that night in spring,

-and he had looked forward to this return as an experience that would

-expiate it, and restore the lost balance of his life. But now as he

-thought of his life in Chicago, of the new scenes and associations, it

-came to him that that night after all had been final; the youth who had

-then gone forth had indeed gone forth never to return; another being was

-coming back in his stead. He had been successful in a way which at first

-flattered his pride, but a new sense of proportion had been growing in

-him that had lately made him mistrust newspaper work; he had for it a

-dislike almost as definite as that which used to displease him in

-Weston. He was growing tired of his life as a reporter; it had so many

-irregularities, so many hardships; it detached him from wholesome,

-every-day existence. He longed for some calling more definite, more

-permanent, a work in which he might do things, instead of record them in

-an ephemeral way. He had for a while been envious of Weston's progress

-in his literary efforts, and for a while he had emulated him, but he had

-not been long in recognizing that he lacked literary talent.

-

-Out of this dissatisfaction with himself he had lately gone in earnestly

-to complete his law studies, which all along he had pursued in a

-desultory fashion. He found some consolation in the hope that he might

-be admitted to the bar in the fall, though how or when he was to get

-into a practice was still as much of a problem as it had been in the old

-days in Macochee. He clung steadfastly, however, to the feeling that his

-newspaper work was but a makeshift; Weston and he had constantly

-supported each other in this view--it was their one hope.

-

-With thoughts somewhat like these Marley had been whiling away the hours

-of his long day's journey from Chicago to Macochee. He had read

-thoroughly, and with a professionally critical faculty, all the Chicago

-papers, and had long ago thrown them aside in a disorderly pile. Now he

-had the tired sense that his journey was nearing its end.

-

-At last he saw the old mill-pond, and his heart leaped in affection;

-then he got his umbrella and sticks, took off his traveling cap and put

-it in his bag. He stood up for the porter to brush him off, and when he

-had selected a half-dollar as a tip, he asked the porter to get his

-luggage together, and in a conscious affectation he could not forego,

-began to pull on his new gloves. They were nearing Macochee now; and

-suddenly the tears started to his eyes, as in a flash he saw his

-white-haired father standing on the platform, anxiously craning his neck

-for a first glimpse of the boy who was coming home.

-

-Marley's mother did not reproach him when he ate a hurried supper that

-evening and then set off immediately for Lavinia's. He renewed some of

-the emotions of the earlier days of his courtship as the familiar houses

-along the way gradually presented themselves to his recognition; he was

-glad to note the changeless aspect of a town that never now could

-change, at least in the way of progress, and he discovered a novel

-satisfaction--one of the many experiences that were so rapidly crowding

-in with his impressions--in the feeling that here, at least, in

-Macochee, things would remain as they were, and defy that inexorable law

-of change which makes so many tragedies in life. Lavinia must have

-recognized his step, for there she was, standing in the doorway, a smile

-on her face, and her eyelashes somehow moist. Marley felt a strange

-discomposure; there was a little effort, the intimacy of their letters

-must now give way to the intimacy of personal contact. But in another

-second she was in his arms, and her face was hidden against his breast.

-

-"At last," she said, "you're here!"

-

-He felt her tremble, and he held her more closely. When he released her

-she put her hands up to his shoulders and held him away from her, while

-she scanned him critically.

-

-"You've grown broader," she said, "and heavier, and--oh, so much

-handsomer!"

-

-The Blairs filed in presently, and Marley had the curious sense of this

-very scene having been enacted in his presence before, but it lacked the

-usual baffling effect of this psychological experience, for he was able

-to recall, in an incandescent flash of memory, that it was almost a

-repetition of their good-bys that night when he had gone away; Mrs.

-Blair was as tender, and if Connie and Chad were a little shy of his new

-importance, Judge Blair was as dignified, and as anxious as ever to get

-back to his reading. Marley felt once more that permanence of things in

-Macochee; this household had remained the same, and it made him feel

-more than ever the change that had occurred in him.

-

-In lovers' intense subjectivity, he and Lavinia discussed this change

-seriously. They reviewed their old dreams, and now they could laugh at

-their defeated wish to live, even in an humble way, in Macochee.

-

-"It was funny, wasn't it?" said Marley. "I was very young

-then,--nothing, in fact, but a kid."

-

-"Are you so very much older now?" asked Lavinia with a slight hint of

-teasing in her tender voice.

-

-"Well," Marley replied, with a seriousness that impressed him, at least,

-as the ripe wisdom of maturity, "I am not much older in years, but I am

-in experience, and in knowledge of life. You see, dear, you can measure

-time by the calendar, but you can't measure life that way. And Weston

-says that there is no calling that will give a man experience so quickly

-as newspaper work. You know we see everything, and we get a smattering

-of all kinds of knowledge. Weston says that is all that reconciles him

-to the business; he says a man learns more there than he ever does in

-college. He considers the training invaluable; he says it will be of

-great help to him in literature, if he can ever get into literature--he

-isn't sure yet that he can. He can tell better after his book is

-published. And he says a newspaper experience will help me in the law,

-too, that is," Marley added, with a whimsical imitation of Weston's

-despairing uncertainty, "if I can ever get into the law."

-

-"You think a great deal of Mr. Weston, don't you?" said Lavinia.

-

-"He's the finest fellow in the world, and the best friend I ever had."

-

-Marley had a curious intuition that Lavinia was a little jealous of

-Weston. He immediately sought to allay the feeling with this argument:

-

-"You see, when a man does all for a fellow that Jim has done for me, and

-when you have lived with him, and shared your haversack with him, and he

-with you, like two soldier comrades, you get right down to the bottom of

-him. And I want you to know him, dear, I know you'll like him."

-

-Lavinia was silent, and Marley had a fear that she might not accept

-Weston quite so readily.

-

-"He has done me a world of good," he went on. "He has taught me much, he

-has corrected my reckoning in more ways than one. He has taught me much

-about books; and he has taught me to look sanely on a life that isn't,

-he says, always truthfully reflected in books. And besides all, if it

-hadn't been for him, if he had not kept me at it and urged me on, I

-think I should have been doomed for ever to remain a poor newspaper

-man."

-

-"Don't you like newspaper work?" she asked with a shade of

-disappointment in her tone.

-

-"I did, but I like it less every day. It's a hard and unsatisfactory

-life, and it has no promise in it. A man very soon reaches its highest

-point, and then he must be content to stay there. It's the easiest thing

-for a young fellow to get a start in, if he's bright; I suppose I'm

-making more money than any of the young lawyers in Chicago; but because

-it is so easy is the very reason why it is hardly worth while. Things

-that are easily won are not worth striving for."

-

-"And you're going to get out of it?"

-

-"Yes, as soon as I can. As soon as I can, I'm going to get into the law.

-When Weston first began urging me to keep up my studies, and when

-finally he made me go to the night law school, I consented chiefly

-because I had always felt the chagrin of defeat in having been compelled

-to give it up; lately, I've begun to see things differently, and I've

-determined to carry out my first intention and get into the law somehow.

-Of course, it's going to be hard. And one has to have a pull there as

-everywhere else in these days."

-

-Marley was silent for a moment and, Lavinia thought, a little depressed.

-She watched him sympathetically, and yet she was a little troubled by a

-sense of detachment. She felt that Weston was now more closely

-associated with Marley's struggle than she, and she was disturbed, too,

-by the disappointment of finding that his struggles were not at all

-ended.

-

-"Weston says," Marley went on presently, "that newspaper work is a good

-stepping-stone, and by it I may be able to arrange for some place in the

-law which will give me the start I want."

-

-"I thought you liked your work," Lavinia said; "I thought you were happy

-in it."

-

-Marley detected her regret, and was on the point of speaking, when

-Lavinia went on:

-

-"I don't see why you can't go into literature as well as Mr. Weston."

-

-Marley laughed.

-

-"The reason is that I haven't his talent," he said

-

-"I don't see why," Lavinia argued with some resentment of his humility.

-"You haven't enough confidence in your own powers; you let Mr. Weston

-dominate you too much."

-

-"Now, dearest," he pleaded, "you mustn't do Jim that injustice. He

-doesn't dominate me; but he is so much wiser than I, he knows so much

-more. You will understand when you meet him."

-

-"Well," she tentatively admitted, "that is no reason why you shouldn't

-in time be a literary man as well as he. Why can't you?"

-

-"Because I can't write, that's why."

-

-"Why, Glenn, how can you say that? Your letters disprove that. Every one

-who read them said that they were remarkable, and that you should go

-into literature. They said you had such good descriptive powers."

-

-Marley was looking at her in amazement.

-

-"Why, Lavinia, you didn't show them!"

-

-"You simpleton!" she said, with a smile in her eyes, "of course not; but

-I have read parts of them to mama and to your mother now and then."

-

-"Oh, well, that's all right," sighed Marley in relief, and then he

-resumed his defense of Weston and his analysis of himself.

-

-"Of course, I suppose I can write a fairly good newspaper story; at

-least they say so at the office." He indulged a little look of pride,

-and then he went on: "But that isn't literature."

-

-"I don't see why it isn't," she said. "I should think it would be the

-most natural thing in the world to go from one into the other."

-

-"Not at all. Literature requires style, personality, distinction, and

-the artistic temperament."

-

-"I'd say you were talking now like George Halliday if I didn't know you

-were talking like Mr. Weston."

-

-"I wish you could hear Weston talk about literature," he said. "He'd

-convince you."

-

-"He couldn't convince me that he can write any better than you can."

-Lavinia compressed her lips in a defiant loyalty.

-

-Marley paused to kiss the lips for their loyalty, and he compromised the

-validity of his own argument by saying:

-

-"As a matter of fact, the law, in America and in England, has given more

-men to literature than journalism ever has."

-

-"Then maybe you can enter literature through the law," said Lavinia,

-seizing her advantage.

-

-"No," said Marley, shaking his head. "I'm not cut out for it, as Weston

-is. Some day he will be a great man, and we shall be proud to have known

-him so intimately. And we will have him at our home; I have many a dream

-about that."

-

-He looked fondly at her, and her eyes brightened.

-

-"And there is another reason why I want to get out of newspaper work,"

-he went on, speaking tenderly, "and that is because everybody says a

-newspaper man has no more right to be married than a soldier has."

-

-"But they all are," said Lavinia.

-

-"Yes, they all are, or most of them."

-

-"And I suppose it is the married ones who say that."

-

-"Well, I know one who is going to be married just as soon as he can."

-

-"Who is that,--Mr. Weston?"

-

-"No, but Mr. Weston knows him, and knows his intentions, and he has

-promised to be at the wedding and act as best man."

-

-"Oh, it would be fine to have a literary man at the wedding, wouldn't

-it."

-

-They talked then about the wedding, and they found all their old

-delicious joy in it. Marley said it must be soon now, though with a pang

-that laid a weight on his heart, he wondered, as he thought of all the

-extravagances he had allowed himself to drift into, where he was to get

-the money. He could reassure himself only by telling himself that he was

-going to live as an anchorite when he got back to Chicago; even if he

-had to give up the pleasant apartment with Weston and go back to the

-boarding-house in Ohio Street.

-

-"How shall you like living in Chicago?" he asked. "Can you be happy in a

-little flat, without knowing anybody, and without being anybody?"

-

-"I shall be happy anywhere with you, Glenn!" she said, looking

-confidently into his eyes.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXXI

-

-                       ILLUSIONS AND DISILLUSIONS

-

-

-It was a pleasure to Marley to accept the homage the people paid him;

-they confounded his success in journalism with a success in literature,

-and under the impression that all writers are somehow witty, they

-laughed extravagantly at his lightest observation.

-

-But much as Marley relished all this, much as he enjoyed being at home

-again, with Lavinia and with his father and mother, he was disturbed by

-a certain restlessness that came over him after he had been in Macochee

-a few days and the novelty and excitement of his return had worn off.

-The glamour the town had worn for him had left it; it seemed to have

-withered and shrunk away. He could no longer, by any effort of the

-imagination, realize it as the place he had carried affectionately in

-his heart during the long months of his absence; its interests were so

-few and so petty, and he found himself battling with a wish to get away.

-He was fearful of this feeling; he did not dare to own it to himself,

-much less to his father and mother or to Lavinia.

-

-He was glad that Lavinia would not let him mention going back to

-Chicago, and as the days swept by with the swiftness of vacation time,

-he was troubled that he did not feel more acutely the sorrow he felt

-would best become the prospect of another separation. He was comforted,

-finally, when he was able to analyze his sensations sufficiently to

-discover that it was neither his sweetheart nor his parents that had

-changed, but his own attitude toward life in a small town; he was vastly

-relieved when he succeeded in separating his feelings and saw that it

-was Macochee alone that he had lost his affection for, though he could

-not analyze his sensations deeply enough to recognize himself as at that

-period of life when external conditions are accepted for more than their

-real value; he was still too young for that. And so he could spend his

-days happily with Lavinia and grudge the moments which Lawrence and

-Mayme Carter filched from them by their calls, and he was as resentful

-of Mayme's invitation to the supper which she exalted into a dinner with

-a reception afterward, as was Lavinia herself.

-

-When Marley went to pay his call on Wade Powell, he found many

-sensations as he glanced about the dingy little office where he had

-begun his studies. Wade Powell himself, smoking and reading his

-Cincinnati paper, was sitting at his old desk, with the same aspect of

-permanence he had always given the impression of. Marley rushed in on

-him with a face red and smiling and when Powell looked up, he threw down

-his paper, and leaped to his feet, saying:

-

-"Well, I'll be damned!"

-

-But when their first greetings were over, Powell's manner changed; he

-began to show Marley a certain respect, and he paid him the delicate

-tribute of letting him do most of the talking, whereas he used to do

-most of the talking himself. He was not prepared to hear that Marley was

-still studying law; and it cost him an effort to readjust his conception

-of Marley as a successful journalist to the old one of a struggling

-student. He gave Marley some intelligence of this, and of his

-disappointment when he said with a meekness Marley did not like to see

-in him:

-

-"Well, of course, you know your own business best."

-

-But when Marley had taken pains to explain his position and when he had

-described the Chicago law offices, Powell grew more reconciled.

-

-"I've watched you," he said, "I've watched you, and I've asked your

-father about you every time I've seen him; my one regret was that you

-were not working on a Cincinnati paper; then I could have read what you

-were writing. I did try to get a Chicago paper--but you know what this

-town is."

-

-Powell was deeply interested in Marley's description of his old friend,

-Judge Johnson, and as Marley gave him some notion of the judge's

-importance and prosperity Powell could only exclaim from time to time:

-

-"Well, I'll be damned!"

-

-Marley did not tell Powell that Judge Johnson had appeared to have

-forgotten him; he felt that it would be more handsome to accept the

-moral responsibility of a prevarication than to hurt Powell's feelings

-in the way he knew the truth would hurt them. Even as it was, Judge

-Johnson's success, now so keenly realized by Powell when it had been

-brought home to him in this personal way, seemed to subdue him, and he

-was only lifted out of his gloom when Marley said:

-

-"But I'll tell you one thing, there isn't a lawyer in Chicago who can

-try a case with you."

-

-Powell's eye brightened and his face glowed a deeper red; then the look

-died away as he said:

-

-"Well, I made a mistake. I ought to have gone there."

-

-"Is it too late?"

-

-Powell thought a moment, and Marley regretted having tempted him with an

-impossibility. He was relieved when Powell shook his head and said:

-

-"Yes, it's too late now."

-

-Powell, with something of the pathos of age and failure that was

-stealing gradually over him, begged Marley to come in and see him every

-day while he was at home.

-

-"You see I've always kept your desk," he said, in a tone that apologized

-for a weakness he perhaps thought unmanly, "just as it was when you went

-away."

-

-Marley thought cynically that Powell had kept everything else just as it

-was when he went away, but he was instantly ashamed of the thought, and

-ashamed, too, of the fact that he and Lavinia both considered even this

-little morning call a waste of time, and a sacrifice almost too great to

-be borne.

-

-Powell went with Marley out into the street, and it gave him evident

-pride to walk by his side down Main Street and around the Square.

-

-"I want them all to see you," he said frankly.

-

-He made Marley go with him to the McBriar House and then to Con's

-Corner, and, in every place where men stopped him and shook Marley's

-hand and asked him how he was getting along, Powell took the

-responsibility of replying promptly:

-

-"Look at him; how does he seem to be getting along?"

-

-Powell found a delight that must have been keener than Marley's in

-Marley's fidelity to Chicago, expressed quite in the boastful frankness

-of the citizens of that city when abroad, though to Marley it seemed

-that he was putting it on them by doing so. He found them all, however,

-in a spirit of loyalty to Macochee that might easily have become

-combative.

-

-"Well, little old Macochee's good enough for us, eh, Wade?" they would

-say.

-

-Marley would not let them be ahead of him in praise of Macochee, and

-Powell himself softened enough to admit that old Ohio was a pretty good

-place to have come from.

-

-When they suddenly encountered Carman in the street, Marley flushed with

-confusion, first for himself and then vicariously for Powell. But there

-was no escape from a situation that no doubt exaggerated itself to his

-sensitiveness, and he was soon allowing Carman to hold his hand in his

-right palm while with the other Carman solicitously held Marley's left

-elbow, and transfixed him with that left eye which still refused to

-react to light and shade.

-

-"Well, how are you?" asked Carman. "How are you, anyway?"

-

-"Oh, I'm all right."

-

-"Guess you're glad now I didn't give you that job, eh?"

-

-Marley could not look at Powell, but he hastened to say:

-

-"Yes, I'm glad, now."

-

-"Maybe it was for the best," said Carman.

-

-When they had left him Marley quickly and crudely tried to change the

-subject, but Powell insisted on saying:

-

-"I want you to know that I've always felt like a dog over that."

-

-"Oh, don't mention it," Marley begged. "I was honest when I told Carman

-I was glad it turned out as it did."

-

-"Yes," said Powell, "I guess it was all for the best."

-

-To Marley's relief they dropped the matter then, and went over to Con's

-Corner. There Powell lighted a cigar, and Marley could not resist asking

-for a brand of cigarettes, the kind that Weston smoked, though he knew

-that Con would not have them. He felt mean about it afterward, but he

-could not forego some of the petty distinctions of living in a city and

-he indulged a little revenge toward the people who had deserted him in

-what had seemed to him his need, and now, in what seemed to them his

-prosperity, were so ready to rally to him. Marley went home at noon

-feeling that his triumph had been almost as great as if he had come home

-in a private car.

-

-His triumph soon was at an end; they came to the afternoon of the day

-when Marley was to return to Chicago. It was a golden day, with a sun

-shining out of a sky without clouds, and yet a delicious breeze blew out

-of the little hills. Marley and Lavinia walked out the white and dusty

-pike that made the road to Mingo. They walked slowly along the edge of

-the road, in silence, under the sadness of the parting that was before

-them. They longed ineffably that the moments might be stayed; somehow

-they felt they might be stayed by their silence.

-

-But when they had ascended the hill and stood beside the old oak-tree

-which grew by the road, they looked out across the valley of the Mad

-River, miles and miles away--across fields now golden with the wheat, or

-green with the rustling corn that glinted in the sun, off and away to

-the trees that became vague and dim in the hazy distance. Back whence

-they had come lay Macochee; they could see the tower of the Court House,

-the red spire of the Methodist church, the gleam of the sun on some

-great window in the roof of the car-shops; on the other side of town

-crawled a train, trailing its smoke behind it. Marley looked at

-Lavinia--she was leaning against the tree, and as he looked he saw that

-her blue eyes were filling slowly with tears.

-

-"Isn't it beautiful!" he said, looking away from her to the simple

-scenery of Ohio.

-

-"Do you remember that day?"

-

-"When we picked out our farm--where was it?"

-

-"Wasn't it over there?"

-

-"Yes," he said. "We could come and live here when we are old." He knew

-he was but seeking to console himself for what now could not be. "And

-there is the old town," he said. "It looks beautiful from here, nestling

-among those trees, it seems peaceful, and calm, and simple. But it is

-different when you are in it; for there are gossip and envy and spite,

-and I can never quite forgive it because it had no place for me. Well,"

-he went on defiantly, in the relief he had been able to make for himself

-out of his immature reading of Macochee's character; "I don't need it

-any more; it is little and narrow and provincial, and the real life is

-to be lived out in the larger world. It's a hard fight, but it's worth

-it."

-

-"Don't you regret leaving it?" asked Lavinia, in a voice that was

-tenderer than Marley had ever known it. Marley looked at Macochee and

-then he looked at her.

-

-"I regret leaving it, dear heart, because I must leave you behind in

-it."

-

-"Would you never care to come back if it were not for me?" she asked.

-

-"I might," he admitted, "when we are old. We could come back here then

-and settle down on our farm over there." He pointed.

-

-"I'm half-afraid of the city," Lavinia said.

-

-He turned and took her in his arms.

-

-"Dearest," he said, "you must not say that; for the next time I come it

-will be to take you away from Macochee."

-

-"Will it?" she whispered.

-

-"Yes; and it can't be long now. How we have had to wait!"

-

-"Yes," she repeated, "how we have had to wait!"

-

-

-

-

-                             CHAPTER XXXII

-

-                                AT LAST

-

-

-Marley, in that compensatory pleasure we find in difficulties in the

-retrospect, was afterward fond of saying that if he had waited until he

-had the money and the position to warrant his marrying, he never would

-have married at all.

-

-Just what moved him to take the decisive step he did he would have found

-it hard to tell. He had grown accustomed to the life he was living in

-Chicago, he had succumbed, as it were, to his environment; he no longer

-regretted Macochee and he found a satisfaction in declaring, whenever he

-had the chance, that the kindest thing the town had ever done for him

-was to refuse him a place within its borders. As he looked back at all

-the plans he had formed, he marveled at their number, but he marveled

-more that he should have had such regret in the failure of all of them;

-he was glad now that they had failed; had any one of them succeeded his

-life would have been diverted into other channels, and it gave him a

-kind of fear when he tried to imagine his life in those other channels;

-he could see himself in those relations only as some other identity, and

-it gave him a gruesome feeling to do this.

-

-Not that he was satisfied with himself or his surroundings; he did not

-like newspaper work, and he did not like Chicago very well. He was

-determined to get out of newspaper work at any rate, and while he could

-not yet clearly see a way of getting into the law, he had a calm

-assurance that he would do it, in the end. Weston sustained him in this

-hope by saying:

-

-"A man can't control circumstances; they control him; but sometimes he

-can dodge them, and, after all, every sincere prayer is answered."

-

-During the winter that followed the summer when he had paid his visit to

-his home he worked hard at the law, spending in study the hours the

-other men on his newspaper spent in their dissipations, and in the

-spring he stole away almost secretly to Springfield, took the

-examination, and was admitted to the bar.

-

-After it was done, it seemed but a little thing; he wrote Lavinia and he

-wrote Wade Powell, knowing the interest Powell would have in the fact,

-that he felt no different now as a lawyer than he had when he was merely

-a layman. Weston had spent the winter over the book he was writing; in

-the spring he found a publisher, and _The Clutch of Circumstance_ was

-given to the world. Marley thought it a wonderful book, and so did

-Lavinia, and while it made but little noise in the world, Weston said it

-had done better than he expected--so well, in fact, that he was going to

-give up newspaper work, and give his attention wholly to writing another

-book.

-

-It was a shock to Marley when Weston told him they would have to give up

-their apartment; it was a break in the life to which he had grown

-accustomed. But it seemed a time of change, and it was then he wrote

-Lavinia that he thought it useless for them to wait any longer; he

-thought they might as well be married then as at any time.

-

-Unconsciously, perhaps, he wrote this letter as if he and not she had

-been waiting, and if he had known the state of the sensitive public

-opinion in Macochee, he might have felt himself justified in the

-attitude. Ever since his visit there the summer before his apparent

-prosperity had given the sentiment of the town an impetus in his favor;

-the people had turned their criticism toward Lavinia; for months it was

-a common expression that it was a shame she was keeping Marley waiting

-so long. They would nod in a sinister way, and insinuate the worldliest

-of motives; it was generally under stood that she was waiting for Marley

-to make a fortune, and this, they held, was demanding too much. She had

-withdrawn utterly from the society of Macochee; and she had not gone to

-one of the balls Lawrence had arranged that winter at the Odd Fellows'

-Hall; her position, outwardly at least, was as isolated as that of the

-Misses Cramer, the fragile and transparent old maids who lived so many

-years in their house sheltered by the row of cedars behind the High

-School grounds.

-

-When Judge Blair received the formal letter in which Marley told him he

-had asked Lavinia to name the day and requested his approval, the judge

-gave his consent with a promptness that surprised him almost as much as

-it did Mrs. Blair and Lavinia. He justified his inconsistency to his

-wife, in order perhaps, the more thoroughly to justify it to himself, by

-saying that he had long felt Lavinia's position keenly.

-

-"If the strain has been to her anything like what it has been to me," he

-said to his wife, "they could not have endured it much longer."

-

-"It will be lonely here without her," said Mrs. Blair, pensively.

-

-"Yes," the judge assented, and then after a moment's thought he added:

-

-"But we can now begin to worry about Connie."

-

-"Don't you dare mention that, William!" said Mrs. Blair, almost

-viciously. "She mustn't begin to think of such a thing."

-

-"But she's in long dresses now, and she seems to walk home more and more

-slowly every night with those boys from the High School."

-

-"Well, I don't propose to go through such an experience as we have had

-for these last three years, not right away, at any rate."

-

-The judge tried to laugh, as he said:

-

-"Well, I'll turn Connie over to you; I'm going to have a little peace

-now."

-

-The judge complained that he could find no peace, however, anywhere, so

-great was the preparation that raged thereafter in the house, driving

-him with his book and cigar from place to place. Mrs. Blair and Lavinia

-and Connie were in fine excitement over the gowns that were being

-fashioned, and Miss Ryan lived at the Blairs' for weeks, while in every

-room there were billowy clouds of white garments, and threads and

-ravelings over all the floors.

-

-Meanwhile it was understood that Marley, too, was making arrangements in

-Chicago. He had leased a small flat on the South Side, and had arranged

-with Weston to remove most of the furniture of their apartment into the

-new home where the lovers were to set up housekeeping. Mrs. Marley was

-to spare them some of the things from her home, and Mrs. Blair, from

-time to time, designated certain articles which she was willing to

-devote to the cause. Chad's contribution was merely a suggestion; he

-said they could depend on the wedding presents to fill up the gaps.

-

-They were married in the middle of June. The ceremony was pronounced by

-Doctor Marley in the parlor of the Blair home; everybody bore up well

-until, under the stress of his emotion, the doctor's voice broke, and

-then Mrs. Blair wept and the judge wiped his eyes and his reddened,

-anguished face. Mrs. Marley cried too, though every one tried to comfort

-her with the assurance that she was not losing a son, but gaining a

-daughter. Connie, in her first long gown, acted as maid for her sister,

-but it was evident that she was desperately impressed by the young

-author of _The Clutch of Circumstance_, who had come on from Chicago to

-act as groomsman.

-

-The company that had been invited was as much impressed by Weston as

-Connie was; they had never had an author in Macochee before, and though

-most of them had such confused notions of Weston's performances in

-literature that they grew cold with fear when they talked with him, they

-nevertheless braved it out for the sake of an experience they could

-boast of afterward. Most of them took refuge in a discussion of Marley's

-achievements with him, and they gave him the unflattering impression

-that Marley's work was as important as his own.

-

-Many of them had plots they wished him to use in his stories, others

-wished to know if he took his characters from real life; and Mrs. Carter

-was of such an acuteness that she identified Marley as his hero, though

-Weston had tried to keep his book from having any hero. George Halliday,

-however, was able to save the day; he could discriminate; he had read

-_The Clutch of Circumstance_, having borrowed Lavinia's autograph copy,

-and he told Weston that while he did not go in for realism, because it

-was too photographic, too materialistic and lacked personality, he

-nevertheless had enjoyed a pleasant half-hour with the volume, and

-considered it not half-bad.

-

-This conversation was held in plain hearing of all in that difficult

-moment after the ceremony, when the relatives of the bride had solemnly

-kissed her, and her most intimate friends, like Mayme Carter, had wept

-on her neck. The people were standing helplessly about; Marley noticed

-Wade Powell, as dignified as a clergyman, in his black garments and

-white tie standing apart with his wife.

-

-Marley had never seen Mrs. Powell before, but he recalled in a flash

-that she filled his conception of her; and this delicate, sensitive

-little face completed the picture he remembered long ago to have formed.

-When he saw Powell standing there, his hands behind him, unequal to the

-ordeal of being entertained in Judge Blair's house, bowing stiffly and

-forcing a smile on the few occasions when he was spoken to or thought he

-was being spoken to, he had a wish to go to him, but he could not then

-leave his place by Lavinia's side. He was glad a moment later when he

-saw his father and Wade Powell in conversation, and as he and Lavinia

-passed them on their way out to the dining-room he heard his father say:

-

-"Well, I'll tell you, Mr. Powell, when I was young my creed was founded

-on the fact of sin in man; but now that I am old, I find it more and

-more founded on the fact of the good that is in all of them."

-

-When the supper was over, Lawrence gave the cheer that every one wished

-to see come to the wedding by clearing the parlor for a dance, and

-Marley was glad that his position now permitted him to refrain from

-dancing with a valid excuse.

-

-Marley thought that Lavinia never looked so pretty as she did when she

-stood at the head of the stairs after she had donned her blue traveling

-gown, drawing on her gloves and waiting for the carriage that was to

-drive them to the station. Her face was rosy in the light that filled

-the house, and she met his eyes with a fond, contented glance.

-

-"Are you happy?" he asked.

-

-"Don't you see?" she said, looking up at him.

-

-"And will you be happy in that big city, away from every one you know,

-as the wife of a newspaper man?"

-

-"I shall be happy anywhere with you."

-

-"Our dreams are coming true," Marley said, "after a fashion. And yet not

-just as we dreamed them, after all."

-

-"In all the essentials they are, aren't they?"

-

-"Yes, but you know our dream was that I was to practise law."

-

-"Well, we still have that dream."

-

-"Yes, we still have it; maybe it will come true. Weston says that our

-dreams are as much realities in our lives as anything else."

-

-                                THE END

-

-

-

-

-

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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45728 ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                           The Happy Average
+
+                           By BRAND WHITLOCK
+
+                               AUTHOR OF
+                   "Her Infinite Variety," "The 13th
+                            District, etc."
+
+                             ILLUSTRATED BY
+                        HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY
+
+                           A. L. BURT COMPANY
+                         Publishers    New York
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                            COPYRIGHT, 1904
+                       THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
+
+                                OCTOBER
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                           The Happy Average
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+
+                          A YOUNG MAN'S FANCY
+
+"Come on, old man."
+
+Lawrence led the way with a jaunty step that was intended to show his
+easy footing with the Carters. But Marley lagged behind. Even if calling
+on girls had not been such a serious business with him, he could not
+forget that he was just graduated from college and that a certain
+dignity befitted him. He wished Lawrence would not speak so loud; the
+girls might hear, and think he was afraid; he wished to keep the truth
+from them as long as possible. He had already caught a glimpse of the
+girls, or thought he had, but before he could make sure, the vague white
+figures on the veranda stirred; he heard a scurrying, and the loose bang
+of a screen door. Then it was still. Lawrence laughed--somehow, as
+Marley felt, derisively.
+
+The way from the sidewalk up to the Carters' veranda was not long, of
+course, though it seemed long to Marley, and Marley's deliberation made
+it seem long to Lawrence. They paused at the steps of the veranda, and
+Lawrence made a low bow.
+
+"Good evening, Mrs. Carter," he said. "Ah, Captain, you here too?"
+
+Marley had not noticed the captain, or Mrs. Carter; they sat there so
+quietly, enjoying the cool of the evening, or such cool as a July
+evening can find in central Ohio.
+
+"My friend, Mr. Marley, Mrs. Carter--Glenn Marley--you've heard of him,
+Captain."
+
+Marley bowed and said something. The presentation there in the darkness
+made it rather difficult for him, and neither the captain nor his wife
+moved. Lawrence sat down on the steps and fanned himself with his hat.
+
+"Been a hot day, Captain," he said. "Think there's any sign of rain?" He
+sniffed the air. The captain did not need to sniff the air to be able to
+reply, in a voice that rumbled up from his bending figure, that he had
+no hope of any.
+
+"Mayme's home, ain't she?" asked Lawrence, turning to Mrs. Carter.
+
+"I'll go see," said Mrs. Carter, and she rose quickly, as if glad to get
+away, and the screen door slammed again.
+
+"Billy was in the bank to-day," Lawrence went on, speaking to Captain
+Carter. "He said your wheat was ready to cut. Did you get Foose all
+right?"
+
+"Yes," said the captain, "he'll give me next week."
+
+"Do you have to board the threshers?"
+
+"No, not this year; they bring along their own cook, and a tent and
+everything."
+
+"Je-rusalem!" exclaimed Lawrence. "Things _are_ changing in these days,
+ain't they? Harvesting ain't as hard on the women-folks as it used to
+be."
+
+"No," said the captain, "but I pay for it, so much extra a bushel."
+
+His head shook regretfully, but he would have lost his regrets in
+telling of the time when he had swung a cradle all day in the harvest
+field, had not Mrs. Carter's voice just then been heard calling up the
+stairs:
+
+"Mayme!"
+
+"Whoo!" answered a high, feminine voice.
+
+"Come down. There's some one here to see you."
+
+Mrs. Carter turned into the parlor, and the tall windows that opened to
+the floor of the veranda burst into light.
+
+"She'll be right down, John," said Mrs. Carter, appearing in the door.
+"You give me your hats and go right in."
+
+"All right," said Lawrence, and he got to his feet. "Come on, Glenn."
+
+Mrs. Carter took the hats of the young men and hung them on the rack,
+where they might easily have hung them themselves. Then she went back to
+the veranda, letting the screen door bang behind her, and Lawrence and
+Marley entered the parlor. Marley took his seat on one of the haircloth
+chairs that seemed to have ranged themselves permanently along the
+walls, and Lawrence went to the square piano that stood across one
+corner of the room, and sat down tentatively on the stool, swinging from
+side to side.
+
+Marley glanced at the pictures on the walls. One of them was a steel
+engraving of Lincoln and his cabinet; another, in a black oval frame,
+portrayed Captain Carter in uniform, his hair dusting the strapped
+shoulders of a coat made after the pattern that seems to have been worn
+so uncomfortably by the heroes of the Civil War. There was, however, a
+later picture of the captain, a crayon enlargement of a photograph, that
+had taken him in civilian garb. This picture, in its huge gilt frame,
+was the most aggressive thing in the room, except, possibly, the walnut
+what-not. Marley had a great fear of the what-not; it seemed to him that
+if he stirred he must topple it over, and dash its load of trinkets to
+the floor. Presently he heard the swish of skirts. Then a tall girl came
+in, and Lawrence sprang to his feet.
+
+"Hello, Mayme. What'd you run for?" he said.
+
+He had crossed the room and seized the girl's hand. She flashed a rebuke
+at him, though it was evident that the rebuke was more out of deference
+to the strange presence of Marley than for any real resentment she felt.
+
+"This is my friend, Mr. Marley, Miss Carter," Lawrence said. "You've
+heard me speak of him."
+
+Marley edged away from the what-not, rose and took the hand the girl
+gave him. Then Miss Carter crossed to the black haircloth sofa and
+seated herself, smoothing out her skirts.
+
+"Didn't know what to do, so we thought we'd come out and see you," said
+Lawrence.
+
+"Oh, indeed!" said Miss Carter. "Well, it's too bad about you. We'll do
+when you can't find anybody else to put up with you, eh?"
+
+"Oh, yes, you'll do in a pinch," chaffed Lawrence.
+
+"Well, can't you find a comfortable seat?" the girl asked, still
+addressing Lawrence, who had gone back to the piano stool.
+
+"I'm going to play in a minute," said Lawrence, "and sing."
+
+"Well, excuse _me_!" implored Miss Carter. "Do let me get you a seat."
+
+Lawrence promptly went over to the sofa and leaned back in one corner of
+it, affecting a discomfort.
+
+"Can't I get you a pillow, Mr. Lawrence?" Miss Carter asked presently.
+"Or perhaps a cot; I believe there's one somewhere in the attic."
+
+"Oh, I reckon I can stand it," said Lawrence.
+
+Marley had regained his seat on the edge of the slippery chair.
+
+"Where's Vinie?" asked Lawrence.
+
+"She's coming," answered Miss Carter.
+
+"Taking out her curl papers, eh?" said Lawrence. "She needn't mind us."
+
+Miss Carter pretended a disgust, but as she was framing a retort,
+somehow, the eyes of all of them turned toward the hall door. A girl in
+a gown of white stood there clasping and unclasping her hands curiously,
+and looking from one to another of those in the room.
+
+"Come in, Lavinia," said Miss Carter. Something had softened her voice.
+The girl stepped into the room almost timidly.
+
+"Miss Blair," said Miss Carter, "let me introduce Mr. Marley."
+
+The sudden consciousness that he had been sitting--and staring--smote
+Marley, and he sprang to his feet. Embarrassment overpowered him and he
+bowed awkwardly. Lawrence had been silent, and his silence had been a
+long one for him. Seeming to recognize this he hastened to say:
+
+"Well, how's the world using you, Vinie?"
+
+The girl smiled and answered:
+
+"Oh, pretty well, thank you, Jack."
+
+It grated on Marley to hear her called Vinie. Lavinia Blair! Lavinia
+Blair! That was her name. He had heard it before, of course, yet it had
+never sounded as it did now when he repeated it to himself. The girl had
+seated herself in a rocking-chair across the room, almost out of range,
+as it were. He was rather glad of this, if anything. It seemed to
+relieve him of the duty of talking to her. He supposed, of course, they
+would pair off somehow. The young people always did in Macochee. He
+supposed he had been brought there to pair off with Lavinia Blair. He
+liked the thought, yet the position had its responsibilities. Somehow he
+never could forget that he could not dance. He hoped they would not
+propose dancing. He always had a fear of that in making calls, and all
+the calls he made seemed to come to it soon or late; some one always
+proposed it.
+
+Marley was aware that Lawrence and Mayme Carter had resumed the exchange
+of their rude repartee, though he did not know what they had said. They
+kept laughing, too. Lavinia Blair seemed to join in the laughter if not
+in the badinage. Marley wished he might join in it. Jack Lawrence was
+evidently funnier than ever that night; Mayme Carter was convulsed. Now
+and then Lawrence said something to her in a tone too low for the others
+to hear, and these remarks pushed her to the verge of hysterics. Marley
+had a notion they were laughing at him.
+
+Meanwhile Lavinia Blair sat with her hands in her lap, smiling as though
+she were amused. Marley wondered if he amused her. He felt that he ought
+to say something, but he did not know what to say. He thought of several
+things, but, as he turned them over in his mind, he was convinced that
+they were not appropriate. So he sat and looked at Lavinia Blair, looked
+at her eyes, her mouth, her hair. He thought he had never seen such a
+complexion.
+
+Mayme Carter had snatched her handkerchief back from Lawrence, and
+retreated to her end of the sofa. There she sat up stiffly, folded her
+hands, and, though her mirth still shook her spasmodically, she said:
+
+"Now, Jack, behave yourself."
+
+Lawrence burlesqued a surprise, and said:
+
+"I'll leave it to Vine if I've done anything."
+
+Marley wondered how much further abbreviation Lavinia Blair's name would
+stand, but he was suddenly aware that he was being addressed. Miss
+Carter, with an air of dismissing Lawrence, said:
+
+"You have not been in Macochee long, have you, Mr. Marley?"
+
+Marley admitted that he had not, but said that he liked the town. When
+Lawrence explained that Marley was going to settle down there and become
+one of them, Miss Carter said she was awfully glad, but warned him
+against associating too much with Lawrence. This embarrassed Marley, if
+it did not Lawrence, and he immediately gave the scene to Lawrence, who
+guessed he would sing his song. To do so he went to the piano, and began
+to pick over the frayed sheets of music that lay on its green cover. To
+forestall him, however, Miss Carter rushed across the room and slid on
+to the piano stool herself, saying breathlessly:
+
+"Anything to stop that!"
+
+She struck a few vagrant chords, and Marley, glad of a subject on which
+he could express himself, pleaded with her to play. At last she did so.
+When she had finished, Lawrence clapped his hands loudly, and stopped
+only when a voice startled them. It was Mrs. Carter calling through the
+window:
+
+"Play your new piece, Mayme!"
+
+Miss Carter demurred, but after they had argued the question through the
+window, the daughter gave in, and played it. The music soothed Lawrence
+to silence, and when Miss Carter completed her little repertoire, his
+mockery could recover itself no further than to say:
+
+"Won't you favor us, Miss Blair?"
+
+When Lavinia Blair declined, he struck an imploring attitude and said:
+
+"Oh, please do! We're dying to hear you. You didn't leave your music at
+home, did you?"
+
+Marley heard the chairs scraping on the veranda, and the screen door
+slammed once more. Then he heard Captain Carter go up the stairs, while
+Mrs. Carter halted in the doorway of the parlor long enough to say:
+
+"You lock the front door when you come up, Mayme."
+
+Mayme without turning replied "All right," and when her mother had
+disappeared she said:
+
+"It's awful hot in here, let's go outside."
+
+Marley found himself strolling in the yard with Lavinia Blair. The moon
+had not risen, but the girl's throat and arms gleamed in the starlight;
+her white dress seemed to be a cloud of gauze; she floated, rather than
+walked, there by his side. They paused by the gate. About them were the
+voices of the summer night, the crickets, the katydids, far away the
+frogs, chirping musically. They stood a while in the silence, and then
+they turned, and were talking again.
+
+Marley did most of the talking, and all he said was about himself,
+though he did not realize that this was so. He had already told her of
+his life in the towns where his father had preached before he came to
+Macochee, and of his four years in college at Delaware. He tried to give
+her some notion of the sense of alienation he had felt as the son of an
+itinerant Methodist minister; for him no place had ever taken on the
+warm color and expression of home. He explained that as yet he knew
+little of Macochee, having been away at college when his father moved
+there the preceding fall. It was so easy to talk to her, and as he told
+her of his ambitions, the things he was going to do became so many, and
+so easy. He was going to become a lawyer; he thought he should go to
+Cincinnati.
+
+"And leave Macochee?" said Lavinia Blair.
+
+Marley caught his breath.
+
+"Would you care?" he whispered.
+
+She did not answer. He heard the crickets, the katydids, the frogs
+again; there came the perfume of the lilacs, late flowering that year;
+the heavy odor of a shrub almost overpowered him.
+
+"My father is a lawyer," Lavinia said.
+
+They had turned off the path, and were wandering over the lawn. The dew
+sparkled on it; and Marley became solicitous.
+
+"Won't you get your feet wet?" he asked.
+
+The girl laughed at the idea, but she caught up her skirts, and they
+wandered on in the shade of the tall elms. Marley did not know where
+they were. The yard seemed an endless garden, immense, unknown,
+enchanted; the dark trees all around him stood like the forest of some
+park, and the lawn stretched away to fall over endless terraces; he
+imagined statues and fountains gleaming in the heavy shadows of the
+trees. The house seemed lost in the distance, though he felt its
+presence there behind him.
+
+Once he saw the twinkle of a passing light in an upper story. He could
+no longer hear the voices of Mayme and Lawrence, but he caught the
+tinkling notes of a banjo, away off somewhere. Its music was very sweet.
+They strolled on, their feet swishing in the damp grass, then suddenly
+there was a rush, a loud barking, and a dog sprang at them out of the
+darkness. Lavinia gave a little cry. Marley was startled; he felt that
+he must run, yet he thought of the girl beside him. He must not let her
+see his fear. He stepped in front of her. He could feel her draw more
+closely to him, and he thrilled as the sense of his protectorship came
+to him. He must think of some heroic scheme of vanquishing the dog, but
+it stopped in its mad rush, and Lavinia, standing aside, said:
+
+"Why, it's only Sport!"
+
+They laughed, and their laugh was the happier because of the relief from
+their fear.
+
+"We must have wandered around behind the house," said Lavinia. "There's
+the shed."
+
+They turned, and went back. The enchantment of the yard had departed.
+Marley seemed to see things clearly once more, though his heart still
+beat as he felt the delicious sense of protectorship that had come over
+him as Lavinia shrank to his side at the moment the dog rushed at them.
+Nor could he ever forget her face as she smiled up at him in the little
+opening they came into on the side lawn. The young moon was just sailing
+over the trees. As they approached the veranda, Lawrence's voice called
+out of the darkness:
+
+"Well, where have you young folks been stealing away to?"
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+                              WADE POWELL
+
+
+Marley halted at the threshold and glanced up at the sign that swung
+over the doorway. The gilt lettering of the sign had long ago been
+tarnished, and where its black sanded paint had peeled in many weathers
+the original tin was as rusty as the iron arm from which it creaked. Yet
+Macochee had long since lost its need of the shingle to tell it where
+Wade Powell's law office was. It had been for many years in one of the
+little rooms of the low brick building in Miami Street, just across from
+the Court House; it was almost as much of an institution as the Court
+House itself, with which its triumphs and its trials were identified.
+Marley gathered enough courage from his inspection of the sign to enter,
+but once inside, he hesitated. Then a heavy voice spoke.
+
+"Well, come in," it said peremptorily.
+
+Wade Powell, sitting with his feet on his table, held his newspaper
+aside and looked at Marley over his spectacles. Marley had had an ideal
+of Wade Powell, and now he had to pause long enough to relinquish the
+ideal and adjust himself to the reality. The hair was as disordered as
+his young fancy would have had it, but it was thinner than he had known
+it in his dreams, and its black was streaked with gray. The face was
+smooth-shaven, which accorded with his notion, though it had not been
+shaven as recently as he felt it should have been. But he could not
+reconcile himself to the spectacles that rested on Powell's nose, and
+pressed their bows into the flesh of his temples--the eagle eyes of the
+Wade Powell of his imagination had never known glasses.
+
+When Wade Powell slowly pulled his spectacles from his nose and tossed
+them on to the table before him, he bent his eyes on Marley, and their
+gaze, under their heavy brows, somewhat restored him, but it could not
+atone for the disappointment. Perhaps the disappointment that Marley
+felt in this moment came from some dim, unrealized sense that Wade
+Powell was growing old. The spectacles, the gray in his hair, the
+wrinkles in his face, the looseness of the skin at his jaws and at his
+throat--where a fold of it hung between the points of his collar--all
+told that Wade Powell had passed the invisible line which marks life's
+summit, and that his face was turned now toward the evening. There was
+the touch of sadness in the indistinct conception of him as a man who
+had not altogether realized the ambitions of his youth or the
+predictions of his friends, and the sadness came from the intuition that
+the failure or the half-failure was not of the heroic kind.
+
+The office in which he sat, and on which, in the long years, he had
+impressed his character, was untidy; the floor was dirty, the books on
+the shelves were dusty and leaning all awry; the set of the Ohio reports
+had not been kept up to date; one might have told by a study of them at
+just what period enterprise and energy had faltered, while the gaps here
+and there showed how an uncalculating generosity had helped a natural
+indolence by lending indiscriminately to other lawyers, who, with the
+lack of respect for the moral of the laws they pretended to revere, had
+borrowed with no thought of returning.
+
+Two or three pictures hung crookedly on the walls; the table at which
+Powell sat was old and scarred; its ink-stand had long ago gone dry and
+been abandoned; a cheap bottle, with its cork rolling tipsily by its
+side, had taken the ink-stand's place. The papers scattered over the
+table had an air of hopelessness, as though they had grown tired, like
+the clients they represented, in waiting for Powell's attention. The
+half-open door at the back led into a room that had been, and possibly
+might yet be, used as a private office or consulting room, should any
+one care to brave its darkness and its dust; but as for Wade Powell, it
+was plain that he preferred to sit democratically in the outer office,
+where all might see him, and, what was of more importance to him, where
+he might see all.
+
+The one new thing in the room was a typewriter, standing on its little
+sewing-machine table, in the corner of the room. There was no
+stenographer nor any chair for one; Marley imagined Powell, whenever he
+had occasion to write, sitting down to the machine himself, and picking
+out his pleadings painfully, laboriously and slowly, letter by letter,
+using only his index fingers. And this somehow humbled his ideal the
+more. Marley almost wished he hadn't come.
+
+"What's on your mind, young man?" said Wade Powell, leaning back in his
+chair and dropping his long arm at his side until his newspaper swept
+the floor. Marley had seated himself in a wooden chair that was
+evidently intended for clients, and he began nervously.
+
+"Well, I--"
+
+Here he stopped, overcome again by an embarrassment. A smile spread over
+Wade Powell's face, a gentle smile with a winning quality in it, and his
+face to Marley became young again.
+
+"Tell your troubles," he said. "I've confessed all the young men in
+Macochee for twenty-five years. Yes--thirty-five--" He grew suddenly
+sober as he numbered the years and then exclaimed as if to himself:
+
+"My God! Has it been that long?"
+
+He took out his watch and looked at it as if it must somehow correct his
+reckoning. For a moment, then, he thought; his gaze was far away. But
+Marley brought him back when he said:
+
+"I only want--I only want to study law."
+
+"Oh!" said Powell, and he seemed somehow relieved. "Is that all?"
+
+To Marley this seemed quite enough, and the disappointment he felt,
+which was a part of the effect Wade Powell's office had had on him,
+showed suddenly in his face. Powell glanced quickly at him, and hastened
+to reassure him.
+
+"We can fix that easily enough," he said. "Have you ever read any law?"
+
+"No," said Marley.
+
+"Been to college?"
+
+Marley told him that he had just that summer been graduated and when he
+mentioned the name of the college Powell said:
+
+"The Methodists, eh?"
+
+He could hardly conceal a certain contempt in the tone with which he
+said this, and then, as if instantly regretting the unkindness, he
+observed:
+
+"It's a good school, I'm told."
+
+He could not, however, evince an entire approval, and so seeming to
+desert the subject he hastened on:
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+"Glenn Marley."
+
+"Oh!" Wade Powell dropped his feet to the floor and sat upright. "Are
+you Preacher Marley's son?"
+
+Marley did not like to hear his father called "Preacher," and when he
+said that he was the son of Doctor Marley, Powell remarked:
+
+"I've heard him preach, and he's a damn good preacher too, I want to
+tell you."
+
+Marley warmed under this profane indorsement. He had always, from a boy,
+felt somehow that he must defend his father's position as a preacher
+from the world, as with the little world of his boyhood and youth he had
+always had to defend his own position as the son of a preacher.
+
+"Yes, sir, he's a good preacher, and a good man," Powell went on. He had
+taken a cigar from his pocket and was nipping the end from it with his
+teeth. He lighted it, and leaned back comfortably again to smoke, and
+then in tardy hospitality he drew another cigar from his waistcoat
+pocket and held it toward Marley.
+
+"Smoke?" he said, and then he added apologetically, "I didn't think; I
+never do."
+
+Marley declined the cigar, but Powell pressed it on him, saying:
+
+"Well, your father does, I'll bet. Give it to him with Wade Powell's
+compliments. He won't hesitate to smoke with a publican and sinner."
+
+Marley smiled and put the cigar away in his pocket.
+
+"I don't know, though," Powell went on slowly, speaking as much to
+himself as to Marley, while he watched the thick white clouds he rolled
+from his lips, "that he'd want you to be in my office. I know some of
+the _brethren_ wouldn't approve. They'd think I'd contaminate you."
+
+Marley would have hastened to reassure Powell had he known how to do so
+without seeming to recognize the possibility of contamination; but while
+he hesitated Powell avoided the necessity for him by asking:
+
+"Did your father send you to me?"
+
+He looked at Marley eagerly, and with an expression of unfounded hope,
+as he awaited the answer.
+
+"No," replied Marley, "he doesn't know. I haven't talked with him at
+all. I have to do something and I've always thought I'd go into the law.
+I presume it would be better to go to a law school, but father couldn't
+afford that after putting me through college. I thought I could read law
+in some office, and maybe get admitted that way."
+
+"Sure," said Powell, "it's easy enough. You'll have to learn the law
+after you get to practising anyway--and there isn't much to learn at
+that. It's mostly a fake."
+
+Marley looked at him in some alarm, at this new smiting of an idol.
+
+"I began to read law," Powell went on, "under old Judge Colwin--that is,
+what I read. I used to sit at the window with a book in my lap and watch
+the girls go by. Still," he added with a tone of doing himself some
+final justice, "it was a liberal education to sit under the old judge's
+drippings. I learned more that way than I ever did at the law school."
+
+He smoked on a moment, ruminating on his lost youth; then, bringing
+himself around to business again, he said:
+
+"How'd you happen to come to me?"
+
+"Well," said Marley, haltingly, "I'd heard a good deal of you--and I
+thought I'd like you, and then I've heard father speak of you."
+
+"You have?" said Powell, looking up quickly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What'd he say?"
+
+"Well, he said you were a great orator and he said you were always with
+the under dog. He said he liked that."
+
+Powell turned his eyes away and his face reddened.
+
+"Well, let's see. If you think your father would approve of your sitting
+at the feet of such a Gamaliel as I, we can--" He was squinting
+painfully at his book-shelves. "Is that Blackstone over there on the top
+shelf?"
+
+Marley got up and glanced along the backs of the dingy books, their
+calfskin bindings deeply browned by the years, their red and black
+labels peeling off.
+
+"Here's Blackstone," he said, taking down a book, "but it's the second
+volume."
+
+"Second volume, eh? Don't see the first around anywhere, do you?"
+
+Marley looked, without finding it.
+
+"Then see if Walker's there."
+
+Marley looked again.
+
+"Walker's _American Law_," Powell explained.
+
+"I don't see it," Marley said.
+
+"No, I reckon not," assented Powell, "some one's borrowed it. I seem to
+run a sort of circulating library of legal works in this town, without
+fines--though we have statutes against petit larceny. Well, hand me
+Swan's _Treatise_. That's it, on the end of the second shelf."
+
+Marley took down the book, and gave it to Powell. While Marley dusted
+his begrimed fingers with his handkerchief, Powell blew the dust off the
+top of the book; he slapped it on the arm of his chair, the dust flying
+from it at every stroke. He picked up his spectacles, put them on and
+turned over the first few leaves of the book.
+
+"You might begin on that," he said presently, "until we can borrow a
+Blackstone or a Walker for you. This book is the best law-book ever
+written anyway; the law's all there. If you knew all that contains, you
+could go in any court and get along without giving yourself away; which
+is the whole duty of a lawyer."
+
+He closed the book and gave it to Marley, who was somewhat at a loss;
+this was the final disappointment. He had thought that his introduction
+into the mysteries of the noble profession should be attended by some
+sort of ceremony. He looked at the book in his hand quite helplessly and
+then looked up at Powell.
+
+"Is that--all?" he said.
+
+"Why, yes," Powell answered. "Isn't that enough?"
+
+"I thought--that is, that I might have some duties. How am I to begin?"
+
+"Why, just open the book to the first page and read that, then turn over
+to the second page and read that, and so on--till you get to the end."
+
+"What will my hours be?"
+
+"Your hours?" said Powell, as if he did not understand. "Oh, just suit
+yourself."
+
+Marley was looking at the book again.
+
+"Don't you make any entry--any memorandum?" he asked, still unable to
+separate himself from the idea that something formal, something legal,
+should mark the beginning of such an important epoch.
+
+"Oh, you keep track of the date," said Powell, "and at the end of three
+years I'll give you a certificate. You may find that you can do most of
+your reading at home, but come around."
+
+Marley looked about the office, trying to imagine himself in this new
+situation.
+
+"I'd like, you know," he said, "to do something, if I could, to repay
+you for your trouble."
+
+"That's all right, my boy," said Powell. Then he added as if the thought
+had just come to him:
+
+"Say, can you run a typewriter?"
+
+"I can learn."
+
+"Well, that's more than I can do," said Powell, glancing at his new
+machine. "I've tried, but it would take a stationary engineer to operate
+that thing. You might help out with my letters and my pleadings now and
+then. And I'd like to have you around. You'd make good company."
+
+"Well," said Marley, "I'll be here in the morning." He still clung to
+the idea that he was to be a part of the office, to be an identity in
+the local machinery of the law. As he rose to go, a young man appeared
+in the doorway. He was tall, and the English cap and the rough Scotch
+suit he wore, with the trousers rolled up over his heavy tan shoes,
+enabled Marley to identify him instantly as young Halliday. He was
+certain of this when Powell, looking up, said indifferently:
+
+"Hello, George. Raining in London?"
+
+"Oh, I say, Powell," replied Halliday, ignoring a taunt that had grown
+familiar to him, "that Zeller case--we would like to have that go over
+to the fall term, if you don't mind."
+
+"Why don't you settle it?" asked Powell.
+
+Halliday was leaning against the door-post, and had drawn a short brier
+pipe from his pocket. Before he answered, he paused long enough to fill
+it with tobacco. Then he said:
+
+"You'll have to see the governor about that--it's a case he's been
+looking after."
+
+"Oh, well," said Powell, with his easy acquiescence, "all right."
+
+Halliday had pressed the tobacco into the bowl of the pipe and struck a
+match.
+
+"Then, I'll tell old Bill," he said, pausing in his sentence to light
+his pipe, "to mark it off the assignment."
+
+Marley watched Halliday saunter away, with a feeling that mixed
+admiration with amazement. He could not help admiring his clothes, and
+he felt drawn toward him as a college man from a school so much greater
+than his own, though he felt some resentment because Halliday had never
+once given a sign that he was aware of Marley's presence. His amazement
+came from the utter disrespect with which Halliday referred to Judge
+Blair. Old Bill! Marley had caught his breath. He would have liked to
+discuss Halliday with Powell, but the lawyer seemed to be as indifferent
+to Halliday's existence as Halliday had been to Marley's, and when
+Marley saw that Powell was not likely to refer to him, he started toward
+the door. As he went Powell resumptively called after him:
+
+"I'll get a Blackstone for you in a day or two. Be down in the morning."
+
+Marley went away bearing Swan's _Treatise_ under his arm. He looked up
+at the Court House across the way; the trees were stirring in the light
+winds of summer, and their leaves writhed joyously in the sun. The
+windows of the Court House were open, and he could hear the voice of
+some lawyer arguing a cause to the jury. Marley thought of Judge Blair
+sitting there, the jury in its box, the sleepy bailiff drowsing in his
+place, the accustomed attorneys and the angry litigants, and his heart
+began to beat a little more rapidly, for the thought of Judge Blair
+brought the thought of Lavinia Blair. And in the days to come, when he
+should be arguing a cause to a jury, as that lawyer, whose voice came
+pealing and echoing in sudden and surprising shouts through the open
+windows, was arguing a cause now, would Lavinia Blair be interested?
+
+He had imagined that a day so full of importance for him would be marked
+by greater ceremonials, and yet while he was disappointed, he was
+reassured. He had solved a problem, he had done with inaction, he had
+made a beginning, he was entered at last upon a career. As all the
+events of the recent years rushed on him, the years of college life, the
+decisions and indecisions of his classmates, their vague troubles about
+a career, he felt a pride that he had so soon solved that problem. He
+felt a certain superiority too, that made him carry his head high, as he
+turned into Main Street and marched across the Square. It required only
+decision and life was conquered. He saw the years stretching out
+prosperously before him, expanding as his ambitions expanded. He was
+glad that he had tackled life so promptly, that he had come so quickly
+to an issue with it; it was not so bad, viewed thus close, as it had
+been from a distance. He laughed at the folly of all the talk he had
+heard about the difficulty of young men getting a start in these days;
+he must write to his fraternity fellows at once, and tell them what he
+had done and how he was succeeding. They would surely see that at the
+bar he would do, not only himself, but them, the greatest credit, and
+they would be proud.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+
+                             GREENWOOD LAKE
+
+
+The girls, flitting about with nervous laughter and now and then little
+screams, had spread long cloths over the table of plain boards that had
+served so many picnic parties at Greenwood Lake; the table-cloths and
+the dresses of the girls gleamed white in the amber light that streamed
+across the little sheet of water, though the slender trees, freshened by
+the morning shower that threatened to spoil the outing, were beginning
+to darken under the shadows that diffused themselves subtly through the
+grove, as if there were exudations of the heavy foliage.
+
+Lawrence, in his white ducks, stood by the table, assuming to direct the
+laying of the supper. His immense cravat of blue was the only bit of
+color about him, unless it were his red hair, which he had had clipped
+that very morning, and his shorn appearance intensified his comic air.
+Marley, sitting apart on the stump of a small oak, could hear the
+burlesque orders Lawrence shouted at the girls. The girls were convulsed
+by his orders; at times they had to put their dishes down lest in their
+laughter they spill the food or break the china; just then Marley saw
+Mayme Carter double over suddenly, her mass of yellow hair lurching
+forward to her brow, while the woods rang with her laughter. The other
+men were off looking after the horses.
+
+Lavinia moved quickly here and there, smiling joyously, her face
+flushed; though she laughed as the others did at Lawrence's drollery,
+she did not laugh as loudly, and she did not scream. Just now she rose
+from bending over the table, and brushed her brown hair from her brow
+with the back of her hand, while she stood and surveyed the table as if
+to see what it lacked. When she raised her hand the sleeve of her muslin
+gown fell away from her wrist and showed her slender forearm, white in
+the calm light of evening. Marley could not take his eyes from her. She
+ran into the pavilion, her little low shoes flashed below her
+petticoats, and he grew sad; when she reappeared, all her movements
+seemed to be new, to have fresh beauties. Then he suspected that the
+girls were laughing at him and he felt miserable.
+
+He thought of himself sitting alone and apart, an awkward, ungainly
+figure. He longed to go away, yet he feared that, if he did, he would
+not have the courage to come back. He shifted his position, only to make
+matters worse. Then suddenly his feeling took the form of a rage with
+Lawrence; he longed to seize Lawrence and kick him, to pitch him into
+the lake, to humiliate him before the girls. He thought he saw all at
+once that Lawrence had been making fun of him, surreptitiously; that was
+what had made the girls laugh so.
+
+There was some little consolation in the thought that Lavinia did not
+laugh as much as the others; perhaps, if she did not care to defend him,
+she at least pitied him. And then he began to pity himself. The whole
+evening stretched before him; pretty soon he would have to move up to
+the table, and sit down on the narrow little benches that were fastened
+between the trees; then after supper they would begin their dancing and
+when that came he did not see what he could do.
+
+The only pleasure he had had that afternoon had been on the way out; he
+had been alone with Lavinia, and the four miles of pleasant road that
+lay between the town and Greenwood Lake were too short for all the
+happiness Marley found in them. He could feel Lavinia again by his side,
+her hands folded on the thin old linen lap-robe. He could not recall a
+word they had said, but it seemed to him that the conversation had
+flowed on intimately and tranquilly; she had been so close and
+sympathetic; and he would always remember how her eyes had been raised
+to his. The fields with the wheat in shock had swept by in the beauty of
+harvest time; the road, its dust laid by the morning shower, had rolled
+under the wheels of the buggy softly, smoothly and noiselessly; the air
+had been odorous with the scent of green things freshened by the rain,
+and had vibrated with the sounds of summer.
+
+Then suddenly his reverie was broken. The men were gathering about the
+table with the girls; all of them looked at him expectantly.
+
+"Here, you!" called Lawrence. "Do you think we're going to do all the
+work? Come, get in the game, and don't look so solemn--this ain't a
+funeral."
+
+They all laughed, and Marley felt his face flame, but he rose and went
+over to the table, halting in indecision.
+
+"Run get some water," ordered Lawrence, imperatively waving his hand.
+"Mayme," he shouted, "hand him the pitcher! Step lively, now. The
+men-folks are hungry after their day's work. Has any one got a pitcher
+concealed about his person? What did you do with the pitcher, Glenn?
+Take it to water your horse?"
+
+They were laughing uproariously, and Marley was plainly discomfited. But
+Lavinia stepped to his side, a large white pitcher in her hand. "I'll
+show you," she said.
+
+They started away together, and Marley felt a protection in her
+presence. A little way farther he suddenly thought of the pitcher, which
+Lavinia still was bearing, and he took it from her. As he seized the
+handle their fingers became for an instant entangled.
+
+"Did I hurt you?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no!" she assured him, and as they walked on, out of the sight of
+the laughing group behind them, an ease came over him.
+
+"Do you know where the well is?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes," she answered. "It's down here. I could have come just as well
+as not."
+
+"I'm glad to come," he said; and then he added, "with _you_."
+
+They had reached the wooden pump behind the pavilion. The little sheet
+of water curved away like a crescent, following the course of the stream
+of which it was but a widening. Its little islands were mirrored in its
+surface. The sun was just going down, the sky beyond the lake was rosy,
+and the same rosy hue now suffused everything; the waters themselves
+were reddened.
+
+It was very still, and the peace of the evening lay on them both.
+Lavinia stood motionless, and looked out across the water to the little
+Ohio hills that rolled away toward the west. She stood and gazed a long
+time, her hands at her sides, yet with their fingers open and extended,
+as if the beauty of the scene had suddenly transfixed her. Marley did
+not see the lake or the sun, the islands or the hills; he saw only the
+girl before him, the outline of her cheek, the down on it showing fine
+in the pure light, the hair that nestled at her neck, the curve from her
+shoulder to her arms and down to her intent fingers. At last she sighed,
+and looked up at him.
+
+"Isn't it all beautiful?" she said solemnly.
+
+"Beautiful?" he repeated, as if in question, not knowing what she said.
+
+Just then they heard Lawrence hallooing, and Marley began to pump
+vigorously. He rinsed out the pitcher, then filled it, and they went
+back, walking closely side by side, and they did not speak all the way.
+
+Mayme Carter, who, as it seemed, had a local reputation as a compounder
+of lemonade, had the lemons and the sugar all ready when Marley and
+Lavinia rejoined the group, and Lawrence, as he seized the pitcher,
+said:
+
+"I see that, between you, you've spilled nearly all of the water, but I
+guess Mayme and I'll have to make it do."
+
+The others laughed at this, as they did at all of Lawrence's speeches,
+and then they turned and laughed at Marley and Lavinia, though the men,
+who as yet did not feel themselves on terms with Marley, had a subtile
+manner of not including him in their ridicule, however little they
+spared Lavinia.
+
+The supper was eaten with the hunger their spirits and the fresh air had
+given them and Marley, placed, as of course, by Lavinia's side, felt
+sheltered by her, as he felt sheltered by all the talk that raged about
+him. He wished that he could join in the talk, but he could not discover
+what it was all about. Once, in a desperate determination to assert
+himself, he did mention a book he had been reading, but his remark
+seemed to have a chilling effect from which they did not recover until
+Lawrence, out of his own inexhaustible fund of nonsense, restored them
+to their inanities. He tried to hide his embarrassment by eating the
+cold chicken, the ham and sardines, the potato chips and pickles, the
+hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches that went up and down the board in
+endless procession, and he was thankful, when he thought of it, that
+Lawrence seemed to forget him, though Lawrence had forgotten no one else
+there. He seemed to note accurately each mouthful every one took.
+
+"Hand up another dozen eggs for Miss Winters, Joe," he called to one of
+the men, and then they all laughed at Miss Winters.
+
+When the cake came, Lawrence identified each kind with some remark about
+the mother of the girl who had brought it, and tasted all, because, as
+he said, he could not afford to show partiality. The fun lagged somewhat
+as the meal neared its end, but Lawrence revived it instantly and
+sensationally by rising suddenly, bending far over toward Lavinia in a
+tragic attitude and saying:
+
+"Why, Vine, child, you haven't eaten a mouthful! I do believe you're in
+love!"
+
+The company burst into laughter, but they suddenly stopped when they saw
+Marley. His face showed his anger with them, and he made a little
+movement, but Lavinia smiled up at Lawrence, and said:
+
+"Well, Jack, it's evident that _you're_ not."
+
+And then they all laughed at Lawrence, and the girls clapped their
+hands, while Marley, angry now with himself, tried to laugh with them.
+
+When they stopped laughing Lawrence produced his cigarettes, and tossing
+one to Marley in a way that delicately conveyed a sense of intimacy and
+affection, he said:
+
+"When you girls get your dishes done up we'll be back and see if we
+can't think up something to entertain you," and then he called Marley
+and with him and the other men strolled down to the lake.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+
+                               MOONLIGHT
+
+
+The dance was proposed almost immediately. Marley had hoped up to the
+very last minute that something, possibly a miracle, would prevent it,
+but scarcely had the men finished their first cigarettes before Howard
+was saying:
+
+"Well, let's be getting back to the girls. They'll want to dance."
+
+Howard spoke as if the dancing would be a sacrifice on the part of the
+men to the pleasure of the girls, but they all turned at once, some of
+them flinging their cigarettes into the water, as if to complete the
+sacrifice, and started back. When they reached the pavilion, Payson and
+Gallard took instruments out of green bags, Payson a guitar and Gallard
+a mandolin, and Lawrence, bustling about over the floor, shoving the few
+chairs against the unplastered wooden walls, was shouting:
+
+"Tune 'em up, boys, tune 'em up!"
+
+The first tentative notes of the strings twanged in the hollow room, and
+Lawrence was asking the girls for dances, scribbling their names on his
+cuff with a disregard of its white polished linen almost painful.
+
+"I'll have to divide up some of 'em, you know, girls," he said. "Jim and
+Elmer have to play, and that makes us two men shy. But I'll do the best
+I can--wish I could take you all in my arms at once and dance with you."
+
+The girls, standing in an expectant, eager little group, clutched one
+another nervously, and pretended to sneer at Lawrence's patronage.
+
+Marley was standing with Lavinia near the door. He was trying to affect
+an ease; he knew by the way the other girls glanced at him now and then
+that they were speculating on his possibilities as a partner; he tried
+just then to look as if he were going to dance as all the other men
+were, yet he felt the necessity of confessing to Lavinia.
+
+"You know," he said contritely, "that I don't dance."
+
+She looked up, a disappointment springing to her eyes too quickly for
+her to conceal it. She was flushed with pleasure and excitement, and
+tapping her foot in time with the chords Payson and Gallard were trying
+on their instruments. Marley saw her surprise.
+
+"I ought not to have come," he said; "I've no business here."
+
+The look of disappointment in Lavinia's eyes had gone, and in its place
+was now an expression of sympathy.
+
+"It makes no difference," she said. And then she added in a low voice:
+"I'll not dance either; there are too many of us girls anyway."
+
+"Oh, don't let me keep you from it," said Marley, and yet a joy was
+shining in his eyes. She turned away and blushed.
+
+"I'll give you all my dances," she said; "we can sit them out."
+
+"But it won't be any fun for you," protested Marley. And just then
+Lawrence came up.
+
+"Say, Glenn," he said, "if you don't want to dance I'll take Lavinia for
+the first number."
+
+The guitar and mandolin, after a long preliminary strumming to get
+themselves in tune, suddenly burst into _The Georgia Campmeeting_, and
+the couples were instantly springing across the floor.
+
+"Come on, Vine," said Lawrence, his fingers twitching. And Lavinia,
+eager, trembling, alive, casting one last glance at Marley, said "Just
+this one!" and went whirling away with Lawrence.
+
+Marley moved aside, awkwardly, when the couples, sweeping in a long oval
+stream around the little room, whirled past him. Lavinia danced with a
+grace that almost hurt him; she was laughing as she looked up into
+Lawrence's face, talking to him as they danced. Marley felt a gloom,
+almost a rage, settle on him. He looked up and down the room. At the
+farther end, through the door by which the musicians sat swinging their
+feet over their knees in time to the tune they played, he could see the
+man who kept the grounds at the lake, looking on at the dance; his wife
+was with him, and they smiled contentedly at the joy of the young
+people.
+
+Marley could not bear their joy, any more than he could bear the joy of
+the dancers, and he looked away from them. Glancing along the wall he
+saw a girl, sitting alone. It was Grace Winters; she was older than the
+others, and she sat there sullenly, her dark brows contracted under her
+dark hair. Marley felt drawn toward her by a common trouble, and he
+thought, instantly, that he might appear less conspicuous if he went and
+sat beside her. As he approached, her sallow face brightened with a
+brilliant smile of welcome and she drew aside her skirts to make a place
+for him, though there was no one else on all that side of the room.
+Marley sat down.
+
+"It's warm, isn't it?" he said.
+
+"Yes," Miss Winters replied, "almost too warm to dance, don't you
+think?"
+
+Marley tried to express his acquiescence in the polite smile he had seen
+the other men use before the dance began, but he did not feel that he
+carried it off very well.
+
+"I should think you'd be dancing, Mr. Marley," Miss Winters said. "I
+hear you are a splendid dancer. Don't you care to dance this evening?"
+
+"I can't dance," said Marley, crudely.
+
+He was looking at Lavinia, following her young figure as it glided past
+with Lawrence. Miss Winters turned away. Her face became gloomy again,
+and she said nothing more. Marley was absorbed in Lavinia, and they sat
+there together silent, conspicuous and alone, in a wide separation.
+
+Marley thought the dance never would end. It seemed to him that the
+dancers must drop from fatigue; but at last the mandolin and guitar
+ceased suddenly, the girls cried out a disappointed unisonant "Oh!" and
+then they all laughed and clapped their hands. Lavinia and Lawrence were
+coming up, glowing with the joy of the dance.
+
+"Oh, that was splendid, Jack!" Lavinia cried, putting back her hair with
+that wave of her hand.
+
+Lawrence's face was redder than ever. He leaned over and in a whisper
+that was for Lavinia and Marley together he said:
+
+"Lavinia, you're the queen dancer of the town." And then he turned to
+Miss Winters.
+
+"Grace," he said, distributing himself with the impartiality he felt his
+position as a social leader demanded, "you've promised me a dance for a
+long time. Now's my chance."
+
+"Why certainly, Jack," Miss Winters said, with her brilliant smile, and
+then she took Lawrence's arm and drew him away, as if otherwise he might
+escape.
+
+"Take me outdoors!" said Lavinia to Marley. "Those big lamps make it
+_so_ hot in here."
+
+Marley was glad to leave, and they went out on to the little piazza of
+the pavilion. Lavinia stood on the very edge of the steps, and drank in
+the fresh air eagerly.
+
+"Oh!" she said. "Oh! Isn't it delicious!"
+
+The darkness lay thick between the trees. The air was rich with the
+scent of the mown fields that lay beyond the grove. The insects shrilled
+contentedly. Marley stood and looked at Lavinia, standing on the edge of
+the steps, her body bent a little forward, her face upturned. She put
+back her hair again.
+
+"Let's go on down!" she said, a little adventurous quality in her tone.
+She ran lightly down the steps, Marley after her.
+
+"Won't you take cold?" he asked, bending close to her.
+
+She looked up and laughed. They were walking on, unconsciously making
+their way toward the edge of the little lake. Marley felt the white form
+floating there beside him and a happiness, new, unknown before, came to
+him. They were on the edge of the little lake. Before them the water
+lay, dark now, and smooth. A small stage was moored to the shore and a
+boat was fastened to it. They could hear the light lapping of the water
+that barely stirred the boat. Presently Lavinia ran out on to the stage.
+She gave a little spring, and rocked it up and down; then smiled up at
+Marley like a child venturing in forbidden places. Marley stepped
+carefully on to the stage.
+
+"Isn't it a perfect night?" Lavinia said, looking up at the dark purple
+sky, strewn with all the stars. Marley looked at her white throat.
+
+"The most beautiful night I ever knew!" he said. He spoke solemnly,
+devoutly, and Lavinia turned and gazed on him. Marley touched the boat
+with the toe of his shoe.
+
+"We might row," he said almost timidly.
+
+"Could we?" inquired Lavinia.
+
+"If we may take the boat."
+
+"Oh, of course--anybody may. Can you row?"
+
+Marley laughed. He had rowed in the college crew on the old Olentangy at
+Delaware. His laugh was a complete answer to Lavinia. She approached the
+boat, and Marley bent over and drew it alongside the stage.
+
+"Get in," he said. It was good to find something he could do. He helped
+her carefully into the boat, and held it firmly until she had arranged
+herself in the stern, her feet against the cleats, and her white skirts
+tucked about her. Then he took his seat, shipped the oars and shoved
+off. He swept the boat out into the deep water, and rowed away up the
+lake. He rowed precisely, feathering his oars, that she might see how
+much a master he was. They did not speak for a long time. First one,
+then the other, of the little islands swept darkly by; the water slapped
+the bow of the boat as Marley urged it forward. The lights of the
+pavilion on the shore twinkled an instant, then went out behind the
+trees. They could hear the distant mellow thrumming of the guitar and
+the tinkle of the mandolin.
+
+"Are you too cool?" he asked presently.
+
+"Oh, no, not at all!" said Lavinia.
+
+"Hadn't you better take my coat?" Marley persisted. The idea of putting
+his coat about her thrilled him.
+
+"You'll need it," she said.
+
+"No, I'll be warm rowing."
+
+She shook her head, and smiled. They drifted on. Still came the distant
+strumming of the guitar and the tinkle of the mandolin. Marley thought
+of the young people dancing, and then, noting Lavinia's silence, he
+asked, out of the doubt that was his one remaining annoyance:
+
+"Wouldn't you rather be back there dancing?"
+
+"No, no!" she answered softly.
+
+"I'm ashamed of myself."
+
+"Why?" She started a little.
+
+"Because I can't dance!" There was guilt in his tone.
+
+"You mustn't feel that way about it," Lavinia said. "It's nothing."
+
+"Isn't it?"
+
+"No. It's easy to learn."
+
+"I never could learn."
+
+Lavinia was still, and Marley thought she assented to this. But in
+another moment she spoke again.
+
+"I--" she began, and then she hesitated.
+
+Marley stopped rowing and rested on his oars. The water lapped the bows
+of the boat as it slackened its speed.
+
+"I could teach you," Lavinia went on.
+
+"Could you?" Marley leaned forward eagerly.
+
+"I'd like to." She was trailing one white hand in the water.
+
+"Will you?"
+
+"Yes," she said. "We can do it over at Mayme's--any time. She'll play
+for us."
+
+Marley felt a great gratitude, and he wondered how he could pour it
+forth upon her.
+
+"You are too good to me," he exclaimed.
+
+Then, suddenly, a change came over the dark surface of the waters. A
+mellow quality touched them; they seemed to tremble ecstatically, then
+they broke into sparkling ripples; the air quivered with a luminous
+beauty and a light flooded the little valley. Marley and Lavinia turned
+instinctively and looked up, and there, over the tops of the trees,
+black a moment before, now rounded domes of silver, rose the moon. They
+gazed at it a long time. Finally Marley turned and looked at Lavinia.
+Her white dress had become a drapery, her arms gleamed, her eyes were
+lustrous in the transfiguration of the moonlight. He could see that her
+lips were slightly parted, and her fingertips, dipped in the cool water
+over the gunwale of the boat, trailed behind them a long narrow thread
+of silver. They looked into each other's eyes, and neither spoke. They
+drifted on. At last, Marley said:
+
+"Lavinia!"
+
+She stirred.
+
+"Do you know--" he began, and then he stopped. "Don't you know," he went
+on, "can't you see, that I love you?"
+
+He rested his arms on the oars, and leaned over toward her.
+
+"I've loved you ever since that first night--do you remember? I know--I
+know I'm not good enough, but can't you--can't I--love you?"
+
+He saw her eyelids fall, and as she turned and looked over the side of
+the boat, she put forth her hand, and he took it.
+
+They were awakened from the dream by a call, and after what seemed to
+Marley a long time, he finally remembered the voice as Lawrence's.
+
+"We must go back," he said reluctantly. "How long have we been gone?"
+
+"I don't know," said Lavinia. He heard her sigh.
+
+Marley pulled the boat in the direction whence came the hallooing voice;
+he had quite lost all notion of their whereabouts. But presently they
+saw the lights of the pavilion, and then the dark figures of the men,
+and the white figures of the girls on shore.
+
+As they pulled up and Marley sprang out of the boat to the landing
+stage, Lawrence said:
+
+"Well, where have you babes been?"
+
+Marley helped Lavinia out of the boat.
+
+"We've been rowing," he said.
+
+"We thought you'd been drowned," said Lawrence.
+
+Marley and Lavinia drove home together in silence. In the light of the
+moon, the road was silver, and the fields with their shocks of wheat
+were gold.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+
+                              THE SERENADE
+
+
+"I don't know what ails Lavinia," said Mrs. Blair to her husband as he
+sat on the veranda after dinner the next day. The judge laid his paper
+in his lap, and looked up at his wife over his glasses.
+
+"Isn't she well?" he asked.
+
+"M--yes," replied Mrs. Blair, prolonging the word in her lack of
+conviction, "I guess so."
+
+"Don't you know?" the judge demanded in some impatience with her
+uncertainty.
+
+"She says she feels all right."
+
+"Well, then, what makes you think she isn't?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," replied Mrs. Blair, "she seems so quiet, that's
+all."
+
+"Lavinia is not a girl given to excitement or demonstration," said the
+judge, lapsing easily into the manner of speech he had cultivated on the
+bench.
+
+"No, that's so," assented Mrs. Blair. "But she's always cheerful and
+bright."
+
+"Is she gloomy?"
+
+"No, I wouldn't exactly call it that, but she seems preoccupied--rather
+wistful I should say, yes--wistful." She seemed pleased to have found
+the right word.
+
+"Oh, she's all right. That picnic last night may have fatigued her. I
+presume there was dancing."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I don't know that we should let her go out that way." The judge took
+off his glasses and twirled them by their black cord while he gazed
+across the street, apparently at some dogs that were tumbling each other
+about in the Chenowiths' yard. The judge had a subconscious anxiety that
+they would get into Mrs. Chenowith's flower beds.
+
+"You and I used to go to them; they never hurt us," argued Mrs. Blair.
+
+"No, I suppose not. But then--that was different."
+
+Mrs. Blair laughed lightly, and the laugh served to dissipate their
+cares. She went to the edge of the veranda and pulled a few leaves from
+the climbing rose-vine that grew there, and the judge put on his glasses
+and spread out his paper.
+
+"I'll take her out for a drive this afternoon," said Mrs. Blair, turning
+to go indoors.
+
+"She'll be all right," said the judge, already deep in the political
+columns.
+
+That night at supper, the judge looked at Lavinia closely, and after a
+while he said:
+
+"You're not eating, Lavinia. Don't you feel well?"
+
+Lavinia turned to her father and smiled.
+
+"Oh, I'm all right."
+
+Her smile perplexed the judge.
+
+"You look pale," he said.
+
+Mrs. Blair glanced warningly at him the length of the table.
+
+"My girl's losing her color," he forged ahead.
+
+Lavinia dropped her eyelids, and a look of pain appeared in her face,
+causing it to grow paler.
+
+"Please don't worry about me, papa," she said.
+
+Mrs. Blair divined Lavinia's dislike of this personal discussion. She
+tried to catch her husband's eye again, but he was looking at Lavinia
+narrowly through his glasses.
+
+"Did you go riding this afternoon?" he asked as if he were examining a
+witness whom counsel had not drawn out properly.
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Blair hastened to say. "We drove out the Ludlow a long way."
+
+"She was riding last night, too," said Connie.
+
+"Who with?" demanded Chad, turning to Connie with the challenge he
+always had ready for her.
+
+"Who with?" retorted Connie. "Why, Glenn Marley, of course. Who else?"
+
+"Well, what of it?" demanded Chad. "What's it to you?"
+
+"Oh, children, children!" protested Mrs. Blair, wearily. "Do give us a
+little peace!"
+
+"Well, she began it," said Chad.
+
+Connie was eating savagely, but she whirled on Chad, speaking with
+difficulty because her mouth was filled with food:
+
+"You shut up, will you?"
+
+Chad laughed with a contempt almost theatrical, waved his hand lightly
+and said:
+
+"Run away, little girl, run away."
+
+Mrs. Blair asked the judge why he did not correct his children, and
+though the sigh he gave expressed the hopelessness, as it seemed to him,
+of bringing the two younger members of his train into anything like
+decorous behavior, he laid his knife and fork in his plate.
+
+"This must cease," he said. "It is scandalous. One might conclude that
+you were the children of some family in Lighttown."
+
+"It is very trying," said Mrs. Blair, acquiescing in her husband's
+reproof. "They are just like fire and tow." She said this quite
+impersonally and then turned to Connie: "If you can't behave yourself,
+I'll have to send you from the table."
+
+"That's it!" wailed Connie. "That's it! Blame everything on to me!"
+
+Mrs. Blair looked severely at her, and Connie's face reddened. She
+glanced angrily at her mother and began again:
+
+"Well, I--"
+
+The judge rapped the table smartly with his knuckles.
+
+"Now I want this stopped!" he said. "And right away. If it isn't I'll--"
+He was about to say if it wasn't he would clear the room, as he was fond
+of saying whenever the idle spectators in his court showed signs of
+being human, but he did not finish his sentence. Chad was subdued and
+decorous, and Connie drooped her head, and began to gulp her food. Her
+eyes were filling with tears and the tears began to fall, slowly, one by
+one, splashing heavily into her plate.
+
+Lavinia was trembling; she tried to control herself, tried to lift her
+glass, but when she did, her hand shook so that the water was likely to
+spill. This completed the undoing of her nerves, her eyes suddenly
+flooded with tears, and she snatched her handkerchief from her lap, rose
+precipitately, and hurried from the room, dropping her napkin as she
+went. They heard her going up the stairs, and presently the door of her
+room closed.
+
+Connie had followed Lavinia with her misty eyes as she left the table
+and now she too prepared to leave. She felt a sudden pity springing from
+her great love of her older sister, and her great pride in her, and she
+felt a contrition, though she tried to convict Chad, as the latest
+object of her fiery and erratic temper, by glowering at him.
+
+"I'll go to her," she said, "_I_ can comfort her!"
+
+"No, stay where you are," said her mother. "Just leave her alone."
+
+The evening light of the summer day flooded into the dining-room;
+outside a robin was singing. In the room there was constraint and heavy
+silence, broken only by the slight clatter of the silver or the china.
+But after a while the judge spoke:
+
+"Did Lavinia go to the picnic with young Marley?" he asked. He regretted
+instantly that he had revived the topic that had given rise to the
+difficulty, but as it lay on the minds of all, it was impossible, just
+then, to escape its influence.
+
+"I believe so," said Mrs. Blair. "He really seems like a nice young
+man."
+
+The judge scowled.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "He's in the office of Wade Powell--I suppose
+he is the one, isn't he?" He thought it unbecoming that a judge should
+show an intimate knowledge of the relations of young men who were merely
+studying law.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Chad, maintaining his own dignity.
+
+"Everybody seems to speak well of him," said Mrs. Blair.
+
+"But I can't quite reconcile that with his selecting Wade Powell as a
+preceptor. I would hardly consider his influence the best in the world,
+and I would imagine that Doctor Marley would hold to the same opinion."
+
+Judge Blair spoke with a certain disappointment in Doctor Marley. He had
+gone to hear him preach once or twice, and found, as he said, an
+intellectual quality in his utterances that he missed in the sermons Mr.
+Hill had been preaching for twenty years in the Presbyterian church.
+
+"Perhaps he doesn't know Wade Powell," said Mrs. Blair. "Doctor Marley
+is comparatively a stranger here, you know."
+
+"Yes, I presume that explains it. But--" he shook his head. He could not
+forgive any one who showed respect for Wade Powell. "Powell has little
+business except a certain criminal practice, and now and then a personal
+injury case."
+
+"Is there anything wrong in personal injury cases?" asked Mrs. Blair.
+
+The judge looked at his wife in surprise.
+
+"Well, I suppose you know, don't you," he said, "that such cases are
+taken on contingent fees?" He spoke with the natural judicial contempt
+of the poor litigant.
+
+"Of course, dear," she replied, "I shall not undertake to defend Mr.
+Powell. He's a wild sort."
+
+"Yes; a drunkard, practically," said Judge Blair, "and an infidel
+besides. The moral environment there is certainly not one for a young
+man--"
+
+"Is he really an _infidel_?" asked Mrs. Blair, abruptly dropping her
+knife and fork.
+
+"Well," replied the judge with the judicial affectation of fairness,
+"he's at least a free-thinker. Perhaps agnostic were the better word.
+That is one reason why I can not understand Doctor Marley's permitting
+his son to be associated with him. It seems to me to argue a weakness,
+or a lack of observation in the doctor, as it does a certain depravity
+of taste in his son."
+
+They discussed Marley until the meal was done, and Connie and Chad had
+gone out of doors. Judge Blair followed his wife into the sitting-room.
+
+"I'm worried, I'll admit," said the judge. "What could it have been that
+so distressed her?"
+
+"Oh well, the children's little quarrels were too much for her nerves."
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+They were silent and thoughtful, sitting together, rocking gently in
+their chairs as the twilight stole into the room.
+
+"It's too bad he's going to study law," the judge said after a while.
+
+He shook his gray head dubiously.
+
+"But you always say that about any one who's going to study law," Mrs.
+Blair argued. "You even said it about George Halliday when his father
+took him into partnership."
+
+"Well, it's bad business nowadays unless a young man wants to go to the
+city, and it's hard to get a foothold there."
+
+"But you began as a lawyer," she urged, as though he had finished as
+something else.
+
+"It was different in my day."
+
+"And you've always done well in the law," Mrs. Blair went on, ignoring
+his distinction.
+
+"Oh yes," the judge said in a tone that expressed a sense of individual
+exception. "But I went on the bench just in time to save my bacon.
+There's no telling what might have become of us if I had remained in the
+practice."
+
+They were silent long enough for him to feel the relief he had always
+found in his salaried position, and then he said:
+
+"You don't suppose--"
+
+"Oh, certainly not!" his wife hastened to assure him.
+
+"Well, I think it would be well, perhaps, to watch her closely. I don't
+just like the notion."
+
+"But his father is--"
+
+"Yes, but after all, we really know nothing about him."
+
+"That is true."
+
+"And then Lavinia's so young."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I'd go to her."
+
+"After a while," Mrs. Blair said.
+
+They heard steps on the veranda, and then the voices of Mr. and Mrs.
+Chenowith who had run across, as Mrs. Chenowith said, when Mrs. Blair
+met them in the darkness that filled the wide hall, to see how they all
+were. The Chenowiths begged Mrs. Blair not to light the gas; they
+preferred to sit out of doors. The Chenowiths remained all the evening.
+When they had gone, the judge drew the chairs indoors, while Mrs. Blair
+rolled up the wide strip of red carpet that covered the steps of the
+veranda. And when they had gone up to their room, Mrs. Blair stole
+across to Lavinia, softly closing the door behind her.
+
+She found the girl stretched on her bed, her face buried in the pillows,
+which were wet with her tears.
+
+"What is troubling my little girl?" she asked. She sat down on the side
+of the bed, and lightly stroked Lavinia's soft hair. The girl stirred,
+and drew herself close to her mother. Mrs. Blair did not speak, but
+continued to stroke her hair, and waited. Presently Lavinia cried out:
+
+"Oh, mama! mama!"
+
+And then she was in her mother's arms, weeping on her mother's breast.
+
+"I've never kept anything from you before, mama," Lavinia cried.
+
+"No," Mrs. Blair whispered. "Can't you tell mama now?"
+
+And then with her mother's arms about her Lavinia told her all. When she
+had finished she lay tranquilly. Mrs. Blair was relieved and yet her
+troubles had but grown the more complicated. She saw all the intricate
+elements with which she would have to deal, and she quailed before them,
+realizing what tact would be required of her.
+
+"The coming of love should be a time of joy, dear," she said presently.
+Even in the darkness, she could see the white blur of Lavinia's face
+change its expression. A smile had touched it.
+
+"It should, shouldn't it, mama?"
+
+"Yes, indeed."
+
+"But I never kept anything from you before."
+
+Mrs. Blair laughed.
+
+"But you kept this only a day, dear. That doesn't count."
+
+"It was a long day."
+
+"I know, sweetheart." The mother kissed her, and they were silent a
+while.
+
+"I do love him so," said Lavinia, presently. "And you'll love him too,
+mama, I know you will."
+
+"I'm sure of that, dear."
+
+"But what of papa?"
+
+Mrs. Blair felt the girl grow tense in her arms.
+
+"That will all come right in time," said Mrs. Blair.
+
+"Will you tell him?"
+
+"Not just now, dear. We'll have this for a little secret of our own.
+There's plenty of time. You are young, you know, and so is Glenn."
+
+"I love to hear you call him Glenn."
+
+Mrs. Blair remained with Lavinia until she had tucked her into her bed.
+
+"Just my little child," the mother whispered over the girl. "Just my
+little child."
+
+"Yes, always that," said Lavinia. And her mother kissed her again and
+again, and left her in the dark.
+
+When Mrs. Blair rejoined her husband, he laid down the book he always
+read before retiring, and looked up with the question in his eyes.
+
+"She's just a little nervous and tired," Mrs. Blair said. "She'll be all
+right in the morning. I think it best not to notice her."
+
+"Do you think we'd better have Doctor Pierce see her?"
+
+"Oh, not at all!" Mrs. Blair laughed, and the judge, reassured, went
+back to his book.
+
+They were awakened from their first doze that night by voices singing.
+
+"It's some of the darkies from Gooseville," said Mrs. Blair. "They're
+out serenading."
+
+"Yes," said the judge. "It is sweet to fall asleep by."
+
+At the sound of the singing Lavinia had crept from her bed and crouched
+in her white night-dress before the open window; the shutters were
+closed. She heard the melody from far down the street. The singing
+ceased, then began again, drawing nearer and nearer. Presently she heard
+the fall of feet on the sidewalk before the house, and the low tones of
+voices in hurried consultation. And then a clear baritone voice rose,
+and she heard it begin the song:
+
+           "Oh the sun shines bright in my old Kentucky home,
+           'Tis summer, the darkies are gay."
+
+She knew the voice. Her heart swelled and the tears came again and there
+alone in the fragrant night she opened her arms and stretched them out
+into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER VI
+
+                             LOVE'S ARREARS
+
+
+The days following the picnic had been no easier for Marley than they
+had been for Lavinia. As he looked back on that night, a fear took hold
+of him; the whole experience, the most wonderful of his life, grew more
+and more unreal. Much as he longed to see Lavinia again, he was afraid
+to go to her home; he wondered whether he should write her a note;
+perhaps she would think him false, perhaps she would think he had
+already forgotten her; the idea tormented him; he did not know what to
+do. He had seen her but once, and then at a distance; the Blairs'
+well-known surrey had stopped in the middle of the Square, and George
+Halliday stood leaning into the carriage chatting with Lavinia. Marley
+had but a glimpse of Lavinia's face, pink in the shadow of the
+surrey-top. As they drove away she had turned with a smile and a nod at
+Halliday. The sight had affected Marley strangely.
+
+He felt himself so weak and incapable in this affair that he longed to
+discuss it with some one, and on Sunday afternoon he found his mother at
+her window with the _Christian Advocate_, which replaced, in her case,
+the nap nearly every one else took at that hour.
+
+"How old was father when you were married, mother?" he began.
+
+He spoke out of that curious ignorance of the lives of their parents so
+common to children; he had never been able to realize his parents as
+having separate and independent existences before his own. Mrs. Marley
+laid her paper by, and a smile came to her face.
+
+"He was twenty-two," she said.
+
+"Just my age," observed Marley.
+
+Mrs. Marley looked up hastily.
+
+"You're not thinking of getting married, are you, Glenn?" she asked.
+
+"No." he said with a laugh.
+
+"My goodness! You're just a boy!"
+
+"But I'm as old as father was."
+
+"Y--es," said Mrs. Marley, "but then--"
+
+"But then, what?"
+
+"That was different."
+
+Marley smiled.
+
+"Had father entered the ministry yet?" he said presently.
+
+"Yes, we were married in his first year. He had been teaching school,
+and the fall he was admitted to the conference he was sent out to the
+Gibsonburg circuit in Green County. We were married in the spring."
+
+Her face flushed, and she turned the pages of her paper with a dreamy
+deliberation.
+
+"Ah, but your father was a handsome young man, Glenn!" she said
+presently.
+
+"He's handsome yet," Marley replied with the pride he always felt in his
+father. And then he asked:
+
+"Did he have any money?"
+
+"Yes," she said, and she laughed, "just a hundred dollars!"
+
+"A hundred dollars! Well, he had nerve, didn't he? And so did you!"
+
+"We had more than that," said Mrs. Marley, solemnly.
+
+Marley looked at his mother suddenly. Her face seemed for an instant to
+be transfigured in the afternoon glow.
+
+He might have told her then; he was on the point of it, but a footfall
+on the brick walk outside caused him to look up, and he saw Lawrence
+coming into the yard. Lawrence beckoned him and he went out.
+
+"Come on," said Lawrence. "Let's go out to Carters'."
+
+Marley looked a question at him, and the smile which Lawrence never
+could repress long at a time was twitching at the corners of his large
+mouth.
+
+"She'll be there."
+
+"How do you know?" asked Marley.
+
+Lawrence smiled a little more significantly.
+
+When they got to the Carters' they found Mayme and Lavinia together in
+the yard, strolling about in apparent aimlessness, yet with an
+expectancy in their manner that belied its quality of mere idleness. In
+the look Lavinia gave him all of Marley's perplexities vanished.
+Lawrence stood by with a grin on his red face, and Mayme Carter's eyes
+danced. She and Lawrence assumed almost immediately an elder, paternal
+manner, and looked on at the lovers' meeting as from far heights that
+were to be reached only after all such youthful experiences had long
+since become possible in retrospect alone. Still smiling, they edged
+away, and left the lovers alone.
+
+"Is it really true?" Marley asked.
+
+Lavinia colored a little as she smiled up at him.
+
+"And you are happy?" he asked.
+
+"So happy!" she said.
+
+And then all at once a cloud came over her eyes. She closed them an
+instant.
+
+"What is it?" he asked in alarm.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Tell me."
+
+"It's nothing." She was smiling again, as if to show that her happiness
+was complete. "See?" Her eyes were blinking rapidly.
+
+"I'm glad," he said.
+
+As they turned and walked across the yard Marley looked at her
+nervously.
+
+"Do you know," he said, "that I couldn't remember what color your eyes
+were?" He spoke with all the virtue there is in confession.
+
+"What color are they?" she asked, suddenly closing her eyes.
+
+"They're blue," Marley replied, saying the word ecstatically, as if it
+had a new, wonderful meaning for him.
+
+"Connie says they're green."
+
+"Connie?"
+
+"Yes, don't you know? She's my younger sister."
+
+"Oh." He did not know any of her family, and the baffling sense of
+unreality came over him again.
+
+"You'll know her," said Lavinia, and added thoughtfully: "I hope she'll
+like you. Then there's Chad, my little brother."
+
+Marley was growing alarmed at the intricacies of an introduction into a
+large family, the characters of which were as yet like the characters in
+the first few chapters of a novel, but he thought it would not reflect
+on him to admit that he did not know Chad, seeing that he was merely a
+little brother.
+
+"He admires you immensely," said Lavinia.
+
+"Does he?" said Marley, eagerly, instantly loving Chad. "How does he
+know me?"
+
+"He says you were a football player at college."
+
+Marley laughed a modest deprecation of his own prowess.
+
+"But I knew your voice," said Lavinia.
+
+"Did you? When did you hear it?"
+
+"As if you didn't know!"
+
+"Honestly," he protested. "Tell me."
+
+"Why, that night that you serenaded me."
+
+He was regretting that she had outdone him in observation, but she
+suddenly looked up and said:
+
+"Oh, Glenn! What a beautiful voice you have!"
+
+It was the first time she had ever called him Glenn, and it produced in
+him a wonderful sensation.
+
+They had come to a little bench, and, sitting there, they could only
+look at each other and smile. Marley noticed that a little line of
+freckles ran up over the bridge of Lavinia's nose. They were very
+beautiful, he thought, and yet he had never heard of freckles as one of
+the elements of a woman's beauty. Then he leaned back and looked about
+the yard.
+
+He had always thought of it as it seemed that first night, enormous,
+enchanted, with wide terraces and fountains, and white statues gleaming
+through the green shrubbery. But now he saw no terraces, no statuary, no
+fountains, and no wide lawns; nothing but a cramped little yard crowded
+with bushes and trees, and surrounded by a weathered fence that had lost
+several pickets. He looked around behind the house where he had fancied
+long stables with big iron lamps over the doors, but now he saw nothing
+but an old woodshed and a barn on the rear end of the lot. The cracks in
+the barn were so wide that he could see the light of day between them as
+through a kinetoscope. He heard a horse stamping fretfully at the flies.
+
+"It was here," he said, "that I first saw you." He did not speak his
+whole thought.
+
+"Yes," she answered. "I remember."
+
+"That was a wonderful night, the most wonderful of my life, except the
+one at the lake."
+
+He drew close to her. "I loved you at first sight," he whispered.
+
+"Did you?" She looked at him in reverence.
+
+"Yes,--from the very first moment. When you came into the room, I knew
+that--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"That you were the woman I had always loved and waited for; that I had
+found my ideal. And yet they say we never discover our ideals in this
+life!"
+
+He laughed at this philosophical absurdity.
+
+"What did you think then?" he asked.
+
+She cast down her eyes, and probed the turf with the toe of her little
+shoe.
+
+"I loved you then too."
+
+He gazed at her tenderly, rapturously.
+
+"Isn't it wonderful?" he said presently, "this love of ours? It came to
+us all at once!"
+
+She looked at him suddenly. Her short upper lip was raised.
+
+"It _was_ love at first sight, wasn't it?"
+
+"Yes. We were intended for each other."
+
+They sat there, and went over that first night of their meeting and that
+other night at Greenwood Lake, finding each moment some new and
+remarkable feature of their love, something that proved its divine and
+providential quality, something that convinced them that no one before
+had ever known such a remarkable experience. They marveled at the
+mystery of it.
+
+But at last they must return to practical questions, and they resumed
+the account of their family relations. Marley told Lavinia about his
+father and mother, about his sister who had died, and then about his
+grandparents, and his uncles and aunts. He told her even of Dolly,
+behind whom she had driven to Greenwood Lake, and of his father's love
+for fast horses, a love which sometimes drew upon his father the
+criticism parishioners ever have ready for their pastor. And he told her
+about his home, and how frequently his mother had to entertain transient
+ministers, and how the church laid missionary work upon her, until he
+feared the heathen would unwittingly break her down.
+
+He was not conscious of it, but he felt it necessary to bring up all at
+once the arrears of her knowledge of him and his family, of all his
+affairs. Meeting as they had so strangely, so romantically, and falling
+in love at first sight, according to the prearrangement of the ages,
+they could excuse this otherwise strange ignorance of each other's
+lives. They bemoaned all the years they had been compelled to live
+without knowing each other, and their one quarrel with fate was that
+they had had to wait until so late in life before meeting; and yet they
+finally consoled themselves for this deprivation by discovering that
+they had really always known and loved each other. They were now able to
+compare strange experiences of soul and, in the new light they
+possessed, to identify them as communings of their spirits across time
+and space.
+
+"I've always believed somehow in the Sweden-borgians," Lavinia said,
+"but I never really understood before what they meant by affinities."
+
+They looked at each other in a silence that became somber, and was
+broken at last by Lavinia.
+
+"I've told mama," she said.
+
+"You have?" Marley gasped.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And she--?"
+
+"She was sweet about it. She will love you, I know."
+
+Marley felt a sudden love for Lavinia's mother. And then his fear
+returned at Lavinia's sinister,
+
+"But--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"She says we must wait."
+
+"Oh!" Marley said with a relief. He felt their present happiness so
+great that he could afford to waive any claim on the future. And yet he
+was troubled; he felt that somehow a depression lay on Lavinia. He
+wondered what its cause could be. Presently it came to him suddenly.
+
+"And your father?" he asked.
+
+"He doesn't know--yet."
+
+"Will he--?"
+
+"He's very--" she hesitated, not liking to seem disloyal to her father.
+Finally she said "peculiar," and then further qualified it by adding
+"sometimes."
+
+The sadness that lies so near to the joy in lovers' hearts came over
+them, and yet they found a kind of joy in that too.
+
+"I'll go to him, of course," Marley said presently.
+
+"Oh, you're so brave!"
+
+But this tribute did not tend to reassure Marley. It rather suggested
+terrors he had not thought of. Yet in the necessity of maintaining the
+manly spirit he forced a laugh.
+
+"Of course," he continued, "I'll go to him. I meant to from the first."
+
+"But not just yet," she pleaded.
+
+"Well," he yielded, not at all unwillingly, "it shall be as you say."
+
+He could not dispel her sadness, nor could he conquer his own. A little
+tremor ran through her, and he felt it electrically along his arm.
+
+"What is it, sweetheart?" he pleaded. "Tell me, won't you? We must have
+no secrets, you know."
+
+"Oh, Glenn," she broke out, "I'm afraid!"
+
+She spoke with intuitive apprehension.
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"Our happiness!"
+
+He tried to laugh again.
+
+"Do you think it will ever be?" she asked.
+
+"I know it," he said earnestly. "I have nothing but faith--our love is
+strong enough for anything!"
+
+"You comfort me," she said simply.
+
+Lavinia spent the night with Mayme Carter, and the house sounded until
+long after midnight with the low, monotonous drone of their confidential
+voices.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+
+                       AN UNNECESSARY OPPOSITION
+
+
+Marley heard on Monday evening that Judge Blair had gone to Cincinnati,
+and the news filled him with a high if somewhat culpable joy. He found
+Lavinia and her mother on the veranda, and Lavinia said, with a grave
+simplicity:
+
+"Mama, this is Glenn."
+
+"I'm very glad to have you come," said Mrs. Blair, trying instantly to
+rob the situation of the embarrassment she felt it must have for the
+young man.
+
+Marley could not say a word, but he put all his gratitude in the
+pressure he gave Mrs. Blair's hand. The light that came from the hall
+was dim, and though Mrs. Blair could see that Marley was straight and
+carried himself well, his face was blurred by the shadows. She turned to
+Lavinia.
+
+"Will you bring out another chair, dear, or would you prefer to go
+indoors?"
+
+Then, seeing an advantage in this latter alternative, she decided for
+them:
+
+"Perhaps we'd better go in, I fear it's cool out here."
+
+She held back the screen door and Lavinia whisked excitedly into the
+hall. Mrs. Blair led the way to the parlor and sent Lavinia for a match.
+Then, turning to Marley, waiting there in the darkness, she said:
+
+"She has told me, Glenn."
+
+Marley felt something tender, maternal in her voice; the way she spoke
+his name affected him.
+
+"But she is young, very young; she is just a girl. We wish, of course,
+for nothing but her happiness, and you must be patient, very patient. It
+must not be, if it is to be, for a long time. What does your own mother
+think of it?"
+
+"I haven't told her."
+
+"You haven't!"
+
+"No. I felt I hardly had the right yet--not before I spoke to Judge
+Blair, you know. I think I shall speak to him just as soon as he gets
+home." He spoke impulsively; until that moment he had been thrusting the
+thought from him, but Mrs. Blair's manner led him into confidences. In
+the immediate fear that he had been precipitant, he looked to her for
+help; she seemed the sort of woman to wish to save others all the
+trouble she could, one whose life was full of sacrifices, none the less
+noble, perhaps, because she made so little of them herself. But a
+perplexity showed in her eyes and before she could reply, Lavinia was
+back. With an intimate, domestic impulse Lavinia pressed the match into
+Marley's hand, and said:
+
+"You do it; I can't reach."
+
+Marley groped with his upheld hand, and when Lavinia guided him to the
+middle of the room, he lighted the gas. Mrs. Blair looked at him for a
+moment and Lavinia, standing by, as if awaiting her decision, glowed
+with happiness. Mrs. Blair's smile completed the fond, maternal
+impression Marley had somehow felt when she was standing by him in the
+darkness. Her full matronly figure, even in the tendency to corpulence
+of her middle years, had preserved its graceful lines; and Marley
+regretted the disappearance of this wholesome, cheerful woman as she
+passed out of the room.
+
+Judge Blair got home from Cincinnati on Sunday morning, worn by his
+work, and maddened by the din of the city to which he was so
+unaccustomed. Walking up the familiar streets, he had been glad of their
+shade and that pervading sense of a Sunday that still remains a Sabbath
+in Macochee. He had been a little piqued, at first, because his wife had
+not met him at the train, though she had not, to be sure, known that he
+was coming. She had gone to Sunday-school, and Connie gave him his
+breakfast--that is, she sat at the table with him, watching him eat and
+answering the questions he put to her about the happenings in Macochee
+while he had been away.
+
+It was not strange that Connie should talk mostly, after she yielded to
+the gnawing temptation to tell him at all, of the nightly visits Marley
+had made to the house. She did this in a certain resentment she felt
+with Lavinia, a resentment that came from an annoying jealousy she was
+beginning to have of Marley, as if, in installing himself in her
+sister's heart, he had evicted all other affections from it.
+
+The judge, with his constant affectation of what he considered the
+judicial attitude of mind, tried to weigh Connie's somewhat prejudiced
+evidence impartially, but he was troubled and annoyed that the peace he
+had been looking forward to all the week should be jeopardized
+immediately on his coming home.
+
+It was not until afternoon that he had an opportunity to question his
+wife, and he began with a severity in his attitude that had as its
+fundamental cause, as much as anything else, her failure to meet him at
+the train that morning, and her remaining to church after Sunday-school.
+
+"What do you know about this business between Lavinia and that young
+Marley?" he asked. "It seems to have developed rapidly during my
+absence."
+
+"Oh, Connie has been talking to you, I suppose!" laughed Mrs. Blair.
+"You know that Connie is apt to be sensational."
+
+Judge Blair eyed his wife narrowly. Connie was his favorite child,
+though he would not, of course, admit as much, and he was ever ready to
+spring to her defense.
+
+"She has very bright eyes," he said.
+
+"Oh, now, dear," said Mrs. Blair, "don't overestimate this thing.
+Lavinia's nothing but a child."
+
+"That's just the point. Has the young man been here much?"
+
+"Yes, he was here quite often--several evenings, in fact."
+
+"Humph! He seems to have taken advantage of the sunshine of my absence
+to make his hay."
+
+"Don't do him an injustice. He didn't meet Lavinia until just about the
+time you went away."
+
+"Well, we'll see about it," said the judge, darkly.
+
+"Now see here, Will, don't make the matter serious by an unnecessary
+opposition; don't drive the children into a position where they will
+consider themselves persecuted lovers."
+
+Mrs. Blair had not until that instant thought of this argument, and she
+was so pleased with it, as justifying her own course with the children,
+as she had artfully called them, that she pressed it.
+
+"No, don't do that. Just let them alone. They're as likely as not to
+outgrow it; that is, if there is anything between them to outgrow.
+They'll probably imagine themselves in love a dozen times before either
+of them is married."
+
+"Don't talk of marriage!" said the judge, with a little shudder.
+
+Mrs. Blair, who had so well dispelled her own fears, could laugh at her
+husband's.
+
+"Just let them alone," she said; "or leave it to me."
+
+"Yes," said the judge peevishly, "leave it to you. You'd probably aid
+and abet them." And then, instantly regretting his ill humor, he added
+hastily: "You're so kind-hearted."
+
+Mrs. Blair kissed his white hair gently and gave his cheek a little pat.
+
+"You'd better take a nap," she said.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+
+                          A JUDICIAL DECISION
+
+
+The judge refused to take a nap, though when he sat down on the veranda
+he did take one, lying back in his chair with one of the many sections
+of the Sunday paper spread over his face. It was from this somewhat
+undignified posture that he was aroused by a step; he started up
+hastily.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the young man, who stood on the steps twirling
+his straw hat round and round in his hands. The young man went on with
+an anxious smile:
+
+"This is Judge Blair, I presume? My name is Marley--Glenn Marley."
+
+If Marley had known that there were men then in the Ohio penitentiary
+serving terms that were longer by years than they would have been had
+Judge Blair digested his breakfast, or been allowed to finish his
+afternoon nap, he would have chosen another hour to press his suit. But
+he had youth's sublime confidence, and its abiding faith in the abstract
+quality of justice. He had dreaded this moment, but it had forced itself
+upon his keen conscience as a duty, and when he heard that morning that
+Judge Blair had returned he resolved to have it out at once.
+
+"May I have a word with you?" he asked, advancing a little.
+
+The judge nodded, but slightly, as if it were necessary for him, as a
+fattening man advanced in middle life, to conserve his energies. His nod
+seemed to include not only an assent, however reluctant, but a
+permission as well, to take the other chair that stood, all ready to
+rock comfortably, on the veranda. Marley took the chair but he did not
+rock, nor did he yield himself to it, but sat somewhat tensely on its
+very edge.
+
+"It's warm this afternoon, isn't it?" he said, trying to keep up his
+smile. He felt hopeless about it, but the thought, darting through his
+mind, that Lavinia was near, braced his purpose. The judge sat hunched
+in his chair, with his short white hair tumbled rather picturesquely,
+and his chin low in his collar. His lips were set firmly, his brows
+contracted. He breathed heavily, and on his strong aquiline nose, Marley
+could see tiny drops of perspiration.
+
+"I have come," said Marley, "to speak to you, Judge Blair, on a matter
+of, that is, importance. That is, I have come to ask you if I
+might--ah--pay my addresses to your daughter."
+
+Marley thought this form of putting it rather fine, and he was glad that
+that much of it, at least, was over. And yet, much as he liked this
+old-fashioned formula about paying his addresses, he instantly felt its
+inadequacy, and so nerved himself to do it all over.
+
+"I mean Lavinia," he said hurriedly, as if to correct any error of
+identification he might have led the judge into. "I want to marry her."
+
+The judge, still breathing heavily, looked at Marley out of his narrowed
+eyes.
+
+"You know," Marley said, in an explanatory way, "I love her."
+
+He waited then, but the judge was motionless, even to the hand that hung
+at his side over the arm of his chair, still holding his paper. Now and
+then, at what seemed to be long, unequal intervals, his eyelids fell
+slowly in heavy winks.
+
+"How long have you and Lavinia known each other?" he asked finally.
+
+"I met her several weeks ago, out at Captain Carter's. But I did not see
+her again, that is to speak to her, until about a week ago. In one way I
+have known her, you might say, but a week; yet I feel that I have known
+her a long time, always, in fact. I--I--well, I loved her at first
+sight." Marley dropped his face at this speech, for it seemed that he
+had made it too sentimental; he had a feeling that the judge so regarded
+it. He sat and picked at the braids of straw in his hat.
+
+"And have you spoken to her?" asked the judge.
+
+"Oh yes!" said Marley, looking up quickly.
+
+"And she--?"
+
+"She loves me."
+
+The judge closed his eyes as if in pain. Then he stirred, the paper
+dropped from his fingers, and he drew himself up in his chair, as if to
+deal with the matter.
+
+"How old are you, Mr. Marley?" he inquired.
+
+"I am twenty-two," said Marley, confidently, as if this maturity must
+incline the judge in his favor. "I cast my first vote for McKinley." He
+thought this, too, would help matters, and possibly it did.
+
+"You have completed your education?"
+
+"I graduated this summer from the Ohio Wesleyan."
+
+"And what are you doing now, or proposing to do?"
+
+"Just now, I am studying law," he announced. "I'm going to make the law
+my profession."
+
+Marley looked up with a high faith in this final appeal, but even that
+did not impress the judge as Marley felt a tribute thus delicately
+implied should affect him.
+
+"You are reading with a preceptor, I take it?"
+
+"Yes, sir, in Mr. Powell's office."
+
+Judge Blair looked at Marley as if he were deciding what to do with him.
+After he had looked a while he gazed off across the street, drumming
+with his finger-tips on the arm of his chair. Presently, without
+turning, and still gazing abstractedly into the distance--and in that
+instant Marley remembered that he had seen the judge stare at the
+ceiling of the court room in exactly the same way while sentencing a
+culprit--he began to speak.
+
+"Lavinia is yet very young, Mr. Marley," he said, "with no knowledge of
+the world, and, perhaps, little of the state of her own mind. You too,
+are young, very young, and as yet without an occupation. You are, it is
+true, studying law, but it will be three years before you can be
+admitted, and many years after that before you can command a practice
+that would warrant you in marrying. In this day, the outlook for the
+young lawyer is not encouraging. I do not think I would wish a son of
+mine to choose that profession; the great changes that have transpired,
+and are transpiring in our industrial development, have greatly reduced
+the chances of the young lawyer's success. The practice in the smaller
+county-seats, like our own, for instance, has almost entirely vanished.
+The settlement of titles to real estate, so lucrative a branch of the
+law in the early days of my own practice, has deprived the later
+practitioners of that source of revenue; the field of criminal law has
+become narrowed, unremunerative and almost disreputable. The corporation
+work can be handled by one or two firms in each town, and all that seems
+to be left is the prosecution of personal injury suits, and that is a
+work that hardly appeals to the man of dignity and self-respect. The
+large cities have a wider, I might say, the only field, but there the
+young lawyer must spend years of the hardest, most unremitting toil
+before he can come to anything like success."
+
+The judge paused. He had not intended to speak at such length, but the
+habit of the courts was on him, and once started, he found his own
+didacticism so pleasing to himself, that it was with reluctance that he
+paused at all. He might not have stopped when he did, but gone on almost
+indefinitely, as he did when he delivered what were always spoken of as
+his beautiful charges to juries, had he not recalled, with something
+like a pang of resentment, that the happiness of his own, instead of
+another's child, lay at the bottom of all this. He turned then to face
+Marley. The young man was sitting there, his eyes wide, and his face
+long. The color that flamed in it when he first appeared, was now quite
+gone. It was gray and cold instead.
+
+"You will see, Mr. Marley," the judge resumed, "that you are hardly in a
+position to ask for my daughter's hand. Of course," the judge allowed a
+smile to soften somewhat the fixity of his lips, "I appreciate your
+manliness in coming to me, and I do not want to be understood as making
+any reflections upon, or in the least questioning, your character, your
+worth, or the honor of your intentions. But in view of your youth and of
+Lavinia's, and in view of your own, as yet, unsettled position in life,
+you must see how impossible it is that anything like an engagement
+should subsist between you. I say this because I wish only for Lavinia's
+happiness. I may say that I am not unmindful of your happiness, too, and
+I esteem it my duty to reach the conclusions I have just presented to
+you."
+
+"And I--I can not even see her?" stammered Marley, in his despair.
+
+"I have not said that," the judge said. "I shall always be pleased to
+extend to you the hospitality of my house, of course; but I would not
+consider it necessary for you to see her regularly, or intimately, and I
+certainly would not want you to monopolize her society to the exclusion
+of other young men with whom she has been in the habit of associating."
+
+Marley sat there, after this long harangue, with his head downcast. He
+sat and turned his hat round and round. At last he did look up with an
+appeal in his eyes, but when he saw that the judge was sitting there, as
+he had at first, sunk in his chair, breathing heavily and looking at him
+out of those sluggish eyes, he arose. He stood a moment, and looked off
+across the street somewhere, anywhere. Then he smote one hand lightly
+into the other, turned, and said:
+
+"Well--good afternoon, Judge Blair."
+
+"Good afternoon, Mr. Marley," the judge replied. He watched Marley go
+down the walk and out of the gate.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IX
+
+                            A FILIAL REBUKE
+
+
+"Father!"
+
+Judge Blair turned and saw Lavinia standing in the wide front door. Her
+face was red, her eyes were flashing, her arms hung straight and tense
+at her sides.
+
+The judge stirred uneasily in his chair.
+
+"Oh!" she cried, rigidly clenching her little fists. "What have you
+done! You have sent him away!"
+
+"Come here, my daughter," he said.
+
+Lavinia moved toward him, halting each moment, then taking a few nervous
+steps forward. At last she stood before him, challenging, defiant.
+
+"Sit down, Lavinia, and listen," implored the judge.
+
+"You have sent him away!" she repeated. "You were harsh and cruel and
+unkind to him!"
+
+"Lavinia!" cried the judge, flushing with the anger parents call by
+different names. There was now a peremptory quality in his tone. But the
+girl did not heed him.
+
+"Oh, how could you!" she went on, "how could you! Think how you must
+have wounded him! You not only reproached him with being poor, but you
+discouraged him as to his prospects! Do you think I cared for that? Do
+you think I couldn't have waited? Do you think I can't wait anyhow? What
+had you when you proposed to mama? You were poor--you had no prospects;
+you had no more right--"
+
+"Lavinia! Lavinia!" the judge commanded, grasping the arms of his chair
+in an effort to rise. "You are beside yourself! You don't know what you
+are saying!"
+
+"And you pretended to be doing it all for my happiness, too! Oh! oh!
+oh!" Her anger vented itself impotently in these exclamations, and then
+her mother, white and alarmed, appeared in the doorway behind her.
+
+"Lavinia," she said quietly.
+
+The girl trembled violently, then whirled about, pressed her hands to
+her face, and ran in, brushing by her mother in the doorway. Mrs. Blair
+glanced after her irresolutely. Then she went to her husband.
+
+"Be calm, dear," she said.
+
+The judge sank back in his chair and looked at her in amazement.
+
+"What has happened?" She drew the empty chair up and sat down in it. She
+leaned forward and took one of his hands, and pressed it between both of
+her own. She waited for the judge to speak.
+
+"I hardly know," he began. "I never heard Lavinia break out so."
+
+"You must remember how excited and overwrought she is," Mrs. Blair
+exclaimed. "You must make allowances."
+
+"I didn't know the girl had such spirit," he continued.
+
+Mrs. Blair smiled rather wanly, and stroked her husband's hand. It was
+very cold and moist, and it trembled.
+
+"I had no idea it was so serious," he went on, as if summing up the
+catalogue of his surprises.
+
+"Tell me how it all came about," said Mrs. Blair.
+
+"Marley was here, first," the judge began. He had to pause, for he
+seemed to find it difficult to catch his breath. "It was a great
+surprise to me; it was very painful."
+
+The judge withdrew his hand and wiped his brow. Then he gazed again as
+he had done before, across the street. Mrs. Blair, though eying him
+closely and with concern, waited patiently.
+
+"I didn't wish to wound him," the judge resumed, speaking as much to
+himself as to her. "I hope I said nothing harsh; he really was quite
+manly about it."
+
+He paused again.
+
+"I presume I may have seemed cold, unfeeling, unsympathetic," he went
+on; and then as if he needed to reassure and justify himself, he added,
+"but of course it was impossible, utterly impossible."
+
+After another pause, he drew a deep breath, and as if he had already
+outlined his whole interview with Marley, continued:
+
+"And then Lavinia appeared; she must have heard it all, standing there
+in the hall."
+
+The judge leaned heavily against the back of his big chair; his face was
+drawn, his wrinkles were deeper than they had been, and he wore an
+aspect of weariness and pain. His form, too, seemed to have shrunk, and
+he sat there in an almost helpless mass, limp and inert.
+
+"I am only afraid, dear," Mrs. Blair said quietly, "that we have taken
+this thing too seriously."
+
+"Possibly," he said. "But it is serious, very serious. I don't know what
+is to be done."
+
+"We must have patience," Mrs. Blair counseled. "It will require all our
+delicacy and tact, now."
+
+"Perhaps you had better go in to her," the judge said presently. "Poor
+little girl; she is passing through the deep waters. And I tried to act
+only for her interest and happiness."
+
+Mrs. Blair arose.
+
+"She will see that, dear, in time."
+
+"I hope so," said the judge. Mrs. Blair went up to Lavinia's room, and
+listened for a moment at the closed door. She heard a voice, low and
+indistinct, but she knew it for the voice of Connie, and she could tell
+from its tone that the little girl was trying in her way to comfort and
+console her sister. So she stepped away, silently, almost stealthily,
+going on tiptoe.
+
+The judge sat on the veranda all the afternoon. He scarcely moved, and
+never once did he pick up the Sunday paper. Now and then he bowed, in
+his dignified way, to some acquaintance passing in the street. The
+Chenowiths came out on to their front porch, evidently hot and stupefied
+from their Sunday afternoon naps and ready now for the cool refreshment
+of the evening breeze they could usually rely on in Macochee with the
+coming of the evening. The judge bowed to them, and he tried to put into
+his bow an indolent unconcern, lest the Chenowiths should penetrate his
+manner and discover the trouble that lay on his heart. The Chenowiths
+had gone to the end of their porch, and the judge could hear their
+laughter. He thought it strange and unnatural that any one should laugh.
+
+He decided that he would review this whole affair of Lavinia's love
+calmly and judicially. He went back to the beginning of Marley's visit,
+trying to see wherein he himself had been in the wrong, then he went
+over the hot scene with Lavinia. He could not recover from his surprise
+at this; that Lavinia, who was usually so gentle, so mild, so unselfish,
+should have given way to such anger was incomprehensible. He had always
+said that she had her mother's disposition. He could see her, all the
+time, distinctly, as she had stood there, in a rage he had never known
+her to indulge before, and yet, as he looked at the image of her that
+was in his mind, and recalled certain expressions, certain attitudes,
+certain tones of voice, it came over him all at once that she was
+exactly as her mother had been at her age, though he could not reconcile
+Lavinia's mood with the resemblance. Then he went back to his own days
+of courtship, with their emotions, their uncertainties, their doubts and
+illusions. They seemed a long way off.
+
+He was trying to think calmly and logically, but he found that he could
+not then control his mind, for suddenly he saw Lavinia as a little girl,
+with her mother kneeling before her, shaking out and straightening her
+starched frock. And with this thought came the revelation, sudden,
+irresistible, that Lavinia was no longer a child as, with the habit of
+the happy years, he had thought of her, up to that very afternoon, in
+fact, until an hour ago, and he bowed before the changes that hour had
+wrought. He accepted the conviction now that he himself had grown old.
+He forgot his purpose to probe to its first cause this unhappiness that
+had come to him; he saw that what he mourned was the loss of a child,
+the loss of his own youth.
+
+He glanced across at the Chenowiths again, and they seemed remote from
+him, of another generation in fact, though but a few moments before he
+had looked on them as contemporaries. And then suddenly there came to
+him the fear that Mr. Chenowith might run over to chat with him, as was
+his habit, and the judge hastily rose, and almost surreptitiously went
+off the end of the porch and around into the side yard. Under the new
+impression of age that he had grown into, he walked slowly, with a
+senile stoop, and dragged his feet as he went. He wandered about in the
+yard for a long while, looking at the shrubs and bushes and trees he had
+planted himself so long ago, when he was young. It occurred to him that
+here in this garden he would potter around, and pass his declining
+years.
+
+He remained in the yard until his wife came to call him in to the supper
+she had prepared, in the Sunday evening absence of the hired girl, and
+with an effort he brought himself back from the future to the present.
+
+"How is she?"
+
+"Oh, she's all right," said Mrs. Blair, in her usual cheery tone. "I
+didn't go to her, I thought it best to leave her alone."
+
+The judge looked at his wife, with her rosy face, and her full figure
+still youthful in the simple summer gown she wore. He looked at her
+curiously, wondering why it was she seemed so young; a width of years
+seemed all at once to separate them. Mrs. Blair noted this look of her
+husband's. She noted it with pity for him; he looked older to her.
+
+"I think it would be nice for you to take Lavinia with you when you go
+to Put-in-Bay to the Bar Association meeting," she said.
+
+It seemed strange and anomalous to Judge Blair that he should still be
+attending Bar Association meetings.
+
+"I'll see," he said; and then he qualified, "if I go."
+
+"If you go?" his wife exclaimed. "Why, you're down for a paper!"
+
+"So I am," said the judge.
+
+They turned toward the house, and the judge took his wife's arm, leaning
+rather heavily on it.
+
+"Will!" she said, after they had gone a few steps in this fashion. "What
+is the matter with you! You walk like an old man!"
+
+She shook his arm off, and said:
+
+"Hurry up now. The coffee will be getting cold."
+
+Indoors, they passed Connie going through the hall; she had just come
+down the stairs, and the sight of her girlish figure, and her short
+skirts just sweeping the tops of her shoes, gladdened the judge's heart,
+and he smiled. He could rely on Connie, anyway, for sympathy. But the
+girl gave him a sharp reproachful stare from her dark eyes, and the
+judge felt utterly deserted.
+
+Lavinia did not come down to her supper, though her mother, knowing she
+would want it later, kept the coffee warm on the back of the kitchen
+stove. Chad had gone away with one of the Weston boys. So the three, the
+judge, Mrs. Blair and Connie, ate their supper alone.
+
+After supper, Mrs. Blair and Connie went immediately to Lavinia and the
+judge had a sense of exclusion from the mysteries that were enacting up
+there, an exclusion that seemed to proceed from his own culpability. He
+went to his library and tried to read, but he could only sit with his
+head in his hand, and stare before him. But finally he was aroused from
+his reveries by a stir in the hall, and glancing up he saw Lavinia in
+the door. She came straight to him, and said:
+
+"Forgive me, papa, if I was rude and unkind."
+
+He seized her in his arms, hugging her head against his shoulders, and
+he said again and again, while stroking her hair clumsily:
+
+"My little girl! My little girl!"
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X
+
+                               PUT-IN-BAY
+
+
+The little steamer for the islands rolled out of Sandusky Bay with
+Lavinia sitting by the forward rail. She had yielded to her father's
+wishes with an easy complaisance that made him suspicious, and yet, as
+he stood solicitously by, he was persistent in his determination to
+realize for her all the delights he had so extravagantly predicted for
+the journey. He tried to rouse her interest by pointing out Johnson's
+Island, but it did not possess for her, as the place where the
+Confederate prisoners were confined during the war, the interest an old
+soldier was able to discover in it, and though he tried his best, with
+an effort at entertainment that was well-nigh pathetic, she only smiled
+wanly.
+
+He left her, after a while, her chin in her hands, looking over into the
+light green waters, watching the curve of the waves the steamer tossed
+away from its sharp prow. The lake was in one of its most smiling and
+happy moods, though they were then at a point where storms easily lash
+its shallow depths into billows that might satisfy the rage of the North
+Atlantic. The lighthouse on the rocks at Marblehead had a fascination
+for Lavinia; it seemed waiting for her humor, and she watched it until
+the steamer had gone far on toward Kelly's Island, and left the
+lighthouse behind, a white spot gleaming in the sun.
+
+When they entered the little archipelago of the Wine Islands, with their
+waters a deeper green than those out in the lake and overcast in strange
+ways by mysterious shadows and cool weird reflections of the green of
+the islands all about, Judge Blair came back to her and asked if she had
+been seasick and how she had enjoyed the little journey. As she met him
+with her strange perplexing smile, he began to doubt her again;
+something assured him that she still clung to her purpose of love, and
+he found himself almost wishing that she had kept to her defiant temper
+of the Sunday afternoon that now seemed so far away.
+
+When they had reached Put-in-Bay and bounded on the trolley across the
+island to the huge hotel, they had their dinner and Lavinia perplexed
+the judge further by retiring to her room. She said she would rest,
+though she had persisted all the morning that she was not tired.
+
+As soon as she had closed the door on her father, leaving him in doubt
+and confusion, she began a long letter to Marley. She described her trip
+in detail, jealous of every trifle of experience that had befallen her;
+she told him of the bridal couple she had seen board the train at Clyde,
+and of the showers of rice that had been thrown by the laughing bridal
+party, though she omitted the lone father of the bride standing apart on
+the platform craning his head anxiously for another sight of his
+daughter, and trying to smile. But she gave him a sense of the romance
+that had stirred in her at the sight of the lighthouse on its lonely
+point of rocks and the stone towers that made the wine-cellars on
+Kelly's Island look like castles.
+
+After supper Lavinia left her father to the pleasure of renewing
+acquaintance with the lawyers who thronged the lobby, and stole down to
+the rocks that marked the shelving shore of the island. She saw stately
+schooners, with white sails spread, and she watched, until its black
+banner of smoke was but a light wraith, a big propeller towing its
+convoy of grain barges across the far horizon. This calm serene passing
+of the life of the lakes soothed her, filled her with a thousand
+fancies, and stirred her emotions with deep, hidden hints of the mystery
+of all life. As she sat there and gazed, now and then tears came to her
+eyes. The waters were spread smoothly before her under the last
+reflection of the sun, the twilight was coming across the lake; and as
+the light followed the sun and the darkness crept behind, she looked
+toward the south in the direction, as she felt, of Macochee, and thought
+of her home and of her mother, of Connie and of Chad, and then she
+thought of Glenn.
+
+Far out in the lake a cluster of yellow lights moved swiftly along--one
+of the big passenger steamers that nightly ply between Detroit and
+Buffalo, and she read in that moving girdle of light new meanings; then
+suddenly a fear seized her, a fear that was part of the ache in her
+heart, and she ran into the hotel and up to her room. Then she took up
+her letter again and poured out all her new sensations, her longings,
+and her fears in a lengthy postscript. When she had finished, she began
+to address the envelope; and she wrote on it, with pride:
+
+"Mr. Glenn--"
+
+And then she paused. She did not know whether he spelt his name "Marly,"
+or "Marley," or "Marlay." She tried writing it each way, dozens of
+times, but the oftener she tested it the less able she was to decide. It
+was too ridiculous; she became exasperated with herself; then humiliated
+and ashamed. When she heard her father's step in the hall, she hastily
+locked her letter in her little traveling bag. The judge greeted her
+warmly; he was flushed and happy, and in the highest spirits. During the
+afternoon he had been meeting lawyers from all over Ohio; the evening
+boats from Cleveland and Toledo had brought more of them to the island;
+they were all eminent, respectable, rich, the attorneys of big
+corporations. The judges of the Supreme Court and of the Circuit Courts
+were there, and the excitement had reached its height when the boat from
+Cleveland brought an associate justice of the United States Supreme
+Court to deliver the chief address of the meeting.
+
+Judge Blair reveled in meeting all these distinguished men; he enjoyed
+the flattery in their way of addressing and introducing him. But his
+conscience smote him when he saw Lavinia. He drew up a chair and sat
+beside her, holding his cigar at arm's length. It was an excellent
+cigar, better than he ordinarily smoked, and the thin thread of smoke
+that wavered up from it filled the room almost instantly with its
+delicate perfume.
+
+"Did my little girl think her father had deserted her?" he said,
+speaking of her in the third person, after the affectionate way of
+parents. "He must pay better attention to her. She must come down and
+meet the lawyers; they will be delighted; a justice of the Supreme Court
+has just come on from Washington! She will want to meet him!"
+
+The judge paused and twisted his head about for a puff at his cigar, and
+then waited for Lavinia to glow at the prospect. But when she looked at
+him, and tried to smile again, he saw the glint of tears in her eyes.
+
+"Why come, come, dear!" he said. "What's the matter? Aren't you having a
+good time? Never mind, when this meeting's over we'll go to Detroit, and
+maybe up the lakes for a little trip. That'll bring the roses back!"
+
+He pinched her cheeks playfully, but she did not respond; she looked at
+him pleadingly.
+
+"Why, Lavinia," he cried, "you aren't homesick?"
+
+She winked bravely to stem the flood of tears and then nodded.
+
+"Well!" he said, nonplussed. "You know, dear, we can't--"
+
+The tears were brimming in her blue eyes, and he left his sentence
+uncompleted to go on:
+
+"So you're homesick, eh? For mama, and Connie?"
+
+She nodded, and he studied her closely for a moment, and then he could
+not resist the question that all along had been torturing him.
+
+"And for--?"
+
+She confirmed his fear, with quick decisive little nods. She got out her
+handkerchief and hastily brushed her tears away, and then with an effort
+to control herself, she looked at him and said, as if she were ready to
+have it all out then:
+
+"Yes, father, I haven't treated him right. I came away without telling
+him."
+
+Judge Blair scowled and turned away, and bit the end of his cigar. Then
+he sat and studied it. Lavinia waited; she was ready for the final
+contest. Presently the judge arose.
+
+"Well, dear," he said. "Well--we'll see; of course, we can't go back
+just yet--I have my address to read to-morrow, and besides, some of the
+boys are talking of me for president of the Bar Association. And I had
+thought, I had thought, that a little trip over to Detroit, and maybe up
+to Mackinac--"
+
+"Father," said Lavinia, looking at him now calmly, "I don't want to go
+to Detroit or up to Mackinac. I'll do, of course, as you say; I'll wait
+until the Bar meeting is over, but I want to go home. You might as well
+know now, father--we might as well understand each other--it can be no
+other way."
+
+Judge Blair looked at his daughter a moment, and she kept her eyes
+directly and firmly in his.
+
+"Oh well," he said with a sigh, "of course, dear, if you say. I'd like
+to stay until after the election though. Will you?"
+
+"Of course," she consented.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XI
+
+                                MACOCHEE
+
+
+Marley had not learned of Lavinia's departure until Monday afternoon; he
+had the news from Lawrence, who had it from the hackman who had taken
+Judge Blair and Lavinia to the train; for whenever any of the quality go
+away from Macochee they always ride to the station in the hack, though
+at other times they walk without difficulty all over the town. When
+Marley reached the office, and found Wade Powell, as he usually found
+him, sitting with his feet on his table, smoking and reading a
+Cincinnati paper, the lawyer looked up casually, but when he saw
+Marley's expression he suddenly exclaimed:
+
+"Hello! What's the matter?"
+
+Marley shook his head.
+
+"Something's troubling you," said Powell.
+
+Marley shook his head again, and Powell looked at him as at a witness he
+was cross-examining.
+
+"I know better," he said.
+
+Marley affected to busy himself at his desk, but after a while, he
+turned about and said:
+
+"Something is troubling me, Mr. Powell; my--prospects." He had been on
+the point of confessing his real trouble, but with the very words on his
+lips, he could not utter them, and so let the conversation take another
+turn.
+
+"Oh, prospects!" said Powell. "I can tell you all about prospects; I've
+had more than any man in Gordon County. When I was your age, opinion was
+unanimous in this community that my prospects were the most numerous and
+the most brilliant of any one here!"
+
+Powell laughed, a little bitterly.
+
+"If I'd only been prudent enough to die then, Glenn," he went on, "I'd
+have been mourned as a potential judge of the Supreme Court, senator and
+president."
+
+"It'll be three years before I can be admitted, won't it?" asked Marley.
+
+"Yes," said Powell; "but that isn't long; and it isn't anything to be
+admitted."
+
+"Well, it takes time, anyway," said Marley, "and then there's the
+practice after that--how long will that take?"
+
+"Well, let's see," said Powell, plucking reflectively at the flabby skin
+that hung between the points of his collar. "Let's see." His brows were
+twitching humorously. "It's taken me about thirty years--I don't know
+how much longer it'll take."
+
+Powell smoked on for a few moments, and then added soberly:
+
+"Of course, I had to fool around in politics for about twenty-five
+years, and save the people."
+
+"Do you think," Marley said, after a moment's silence that paid its own
+respect to Powell's regrets, "that there's an opening for me here in
+Macochee?"
+
+"No, Glenn, I'll tell you. There's no use to think of locating in
+Macochee or any other small town. The business is dead here. It's too
+bad, but it's so. When I began there was plenty of real estate law to
+do, and plenty of criminal law, but the land titles are all settled
+now--"
+
+"That's what Judge Blair said," interrupted Marley.
+
+"So you've been to him, have you?"
+
+Marley blushed.
+
+"Well, not exactly," he said. "I heard him say that."
+
+"Yes," mused Powell. "Well, he feathered his nest pretty well while they
+were being settled. But as I was saying--the criminal business has died
+out, or rather, it has changed. The criminals haven't any money any
+more, that is, the old kind of criminals; the corporations have it all
+now--if you want to make money, you'll have to have them for clients. Of
+course, the money still goes to the criminal lawyer just as it used to."
+
+"I like Macochee," said Marley, his spirits falling fast.
+
+"Well, it's a nice old town to live in," Powell assented. "But the devil
+of it is how're you going to live? Of course, you can study here just as
+well as anywhere; better than anywhere, in fact; you have plenty of
+time, and plenty of quiet. But as for locating here--why, it's utterly
+out of the question for a man who wants to make anything of himself and
+has to get a living while he's doing it--and I don't know any other kind
+that ever do make anything out of themselves."
+
+"I had hoped--" persisted Marley, longing for Powell to relent.
+
+"Oh, I know," the lawyer replied almost impatiently, "but it's no use,
+there's nothing in it. No one with ambition can stay here now. The town,
+like all these old county-seats, is good for nothing but impecunious old
+age and cemeteries. It was nothing but a country cross-roads before the
+railroad came, and since then it's been nothing but a water-tank; if it
+keeps on it'll be nothing but a whistling-post, and the trains won't be
+bothered to stop at all. Its people are industrious in nothing but
+gossip, and genuine in nothing but hypocrisy; they are so mean that they
+hate themselves, and think all the time they're hating each other. Just
+look at our leading citizen, Brother Dudley, over there in his bank; he
+owns the whole town, and he thinks he's a bigger man than old Grant.
+Sundays he sits in his pew with a black coat on, squinting at the
+preacher out of his sore little eyes, and waiting for him to say
+something he can get the bishop to fire him for, and he calls that
+religion. Mondays he goes back to his business of skinning farmers and
+poor widows out of their miserable little pennies, and he calls that
+business; Does he ever look at a flower or a tree, or turn round in the
+street at the laugh of a child? He's the kind of man that runs this
+town, and he makes the rest of the people like it. Well, he don't run
+me! God! If I'd only had some sense twenty years ago I'd have pulled out
+and gone to the city and been somebody to-day."
+
+It pained Marley to hear Powell berate Macochee; he had never heard him
+rage so violently at the town, though he was always sneering at it. To
+Marley the very name of Macochee meant romance; he liked the name the
+Indian village had left behind when it vanished; he liked the old
+high-gabled buildings about the Square; he longed to identify himself
+with Macochee, to think of it as his home.
+
+"But I'll tell you one thing," Powell went on, his tone suddenly
+changing to one of angry resolution as he flung his feet heavily to the
+bare floor and struck his desk a startling blow with his fist, "I'll
+tell you one thing, I'm through working for nothing; they've got to pay
+me! I'm going to squeeze the last cent out of them after this, same as
+old Dudley does, same as old Bill Blair did before he went on the bench;
+that's what I'm going to do. I'm getting old and I've got to quit
+running a legal eleemosynary institution."
+
+Powell's eyes flamed, but a shadow fell in the room, and Powell and
+Marley glanced at the door.
+
+"Well, what do you want?" said Powell.
+
+An old woman, bareheaded in the hurry of a crisis, was on the threshold.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Powell," she began in a wailing voice, "would you come quick!"
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Charlie's in ag'in."
+
+"Got any money?" demanded Powell, in the angry resolution of a moment
+before. He clenched his fist again on the edge of his table. Marley
+glanced at him in surprise, and then at the old woman.
+
+The woman hung her head and stammered:
+
+"Well, you know--I hain't just now, but by the week's end, when I get
+the money for my washin'--"
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Powell, getting to his feet, "that's all
+right. We won't talk of that now. I beg your pardon. We'll walk down to
+the calaboose and see the boy; we can talk it over with him and see
+what's to be done."
+
+He picked up his slouch hat and clapped it on his head.
+
+"What's he been doing this time?" he said to the old woman as they went
+out the door.
+
+Marley watched them as they passed the open window and disappeared. A
+smile touched his lips an instant, and then he became serious and
+depressed once more.
+
+He had had no word from Lavinia, and her going away immediately after
+his scene with Judge Blair confused him. He tried to think it out, but
+he could reach no conclusion save that it was all at an end. Lavinia's
+sudden, unexplained departure proved that. And yet he could not, he
+would not, think that she had changed; no, her father had borne her
+away--that was it--forcibly and cruelly borne her away. For a long while
+he sat there finding a certain satisfaction in the melancholy that came
+over him, and then suddenly he was aroused by the boom of the town
+clock. The heavy notes of the bell rolled across to him, and he counted
+them--five. It was time to go. And Powell had not returned. It was not
+surprising; Powell often went out that way and did not come back, and,
+often, somehow to Marley's chagrin, men and women sat and waited long
+hours in the dumb patience of the poor and then went away with their
+woes still burdening them. They must have been used to woes, they
+carried them so silently.
+
+Marley was walking moodily down Main Street, feeling that he had no part
+in the bustling happiness of the people going home from their day's
+work, when, lifting his head, he saw Mrs. Blair in her surrey. Instantly
+she jerked the horse in toward the curb and beckoned to him.
+
+"Why, Glenn! I'm so glad I met you!" she said, her face rosy with its
+smile. "I have something for you."
+
+She raised her eyebrows in a significant way and began fumbling in her
+lap. Presently she leaned out of the surrey and pressed something into
+his hand.
+
+"Just between ourselves, you know!" she said, with the delicious mystery
+of a secret, and then gathering up her reins, she clucked at her lazy
+horse.
+
+He looked after her a moment, then at the thick envelope he held in his
+hand. On it was written in the long Anglican characters of a young girl,
+these words:
+
+"For Glenn."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XII
+
+                        A CONDITIONAL SURRENDER
+
+
+Judge Blair and Lavinia returned home Saturday.
+
+"I guess it's no use," the judge said to Mrs. Blair when she had
+followed him up stairs, where he had gone to wash off the dust he had
+accumulated during the six hours the train had consumed in jerking
+itself from Sandusky to Macochee.
+
+"No, I could see how relieved she was to get home," replied Mrs. Blair,
+musing idly out of the window. She was not so sure that she was pleased
+with the result she had done her part to accomplish.
+
+"I guess you were right," the judge said.
+
+"I?" asked Mrs. Blair, suddenly turning round.
+
+"Yes--in saying that it would be best not to dignify it by too much
+notice. That might only add to its seriousness."
+
+Mrs. Blair looked out of the window again.
+
+"Of course," the judge went on presently, "I wouldn't want it considered
+as an engagement."
+
+"Of course not," Mrs. Blair acquiesced.
+
+"You'd better have a talk with her," he said. She saw that he was
+seeking his usual retreat in such cases, and she was now determined not
+to take the responsibility. Spiritually they tossed this responsibility
+back and forth between them, like a shuttlecock.
+
+"But wouldn't that make it look as if we were taking too much notice of
+it?"
+
+"Well," the judge said, "I don't know. Do just as you think best."
+
+"Didn't you talk to her about it when you were away?" Mrs. Blair asked.
+
+"M-m yes," the judge said slowly.
+
+"And what did she say?"
+
+"Nothing much, only--"
+
+"Only what?"
+
+"Only that she would not give him up."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+Mrs. Blair waited, and the judge dawdled at his toilet. Some compulsion
+she could not resist, though she tried, distrusting her own weakness,
+drove Mrs. Blair to speak first, and even then she sought to minimize
+the effect of her surrender.
+
+"Of course, Will," she said, "I want to be guided by you in this matter.
+It's really quite serious."
+
+"Oh, well," he said, "you're capable of managing it."
+
+"You said you knew his father, didn't you?" she asked after a while.
+
+"Slightly; why?"
+
+"I was just wishing that we knew more of the family. You know they have
+not lived in Macochee long."
+
+"That's true," the judge assented, realizing all that the objection
+meant.
+
+"And yet," Mrs. Blair reassured him, though she was trying to reassure
+herself at the same time, "his father is a minister; that ought to count
+for something."
+
+"Yes, it ought, and still you know they say that ministers' sons are
+always--"
+
+"But," Mrs. Blair interrupted, as if he were wholly missing the point,
+"ministers' families always have a standing, I think."
+
+They were silent, then, until Mrs. Blair began:
+
+"I suppose I really ought to call on Mrs. Marley."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Well, it seems, you know--it seems to me that I ought."
+
+"But wouldn't that--?"
+
+"I considered that, and still, it might seem more so if I didn't, don't
+you see?"
+
+The judge tried to grasp the attenuated point, and expressed his failure
+in the sigh with which he stooped to fasten his shoes. Then he drew on
+his alpaca coat, and just as he was leaving the room, his wife stopped
+him with:
+
+"But, Will!"
+
+He halted with his hand on the door-knob. For an instant his wife looked
+at him in pleasure. He was rather handsome, with his white hair combed
+gravely, his ruddy face fresh from his shaving, and his stiff, white
+collar about his neck.
+
+"What did you say?" he asked, recalling her from her reverie of him.
+
+"Oh!" she said; "only this--maybe he won't feel like coming around here
+any more. You know you practically sent him away."
+
+The judge gave a little laugh.
+
+"I guess that will work itself out. Anyway I'll leave it to you--or to
+them."
+
+Still smiling at his own humor, he turned the door-knob, and then
+hesitated. His smile had vanished.
+
+"She's so young," he said with a regret. "She's so young. How old did
+you say you were when we were married?"
+
+"Eighteen," Mrs. Blair replied.
+
+"And Lavinia can't be more than--"
+
+"Why, she's twenty," said Mrs. Blair.
+
+"So she is," said the judge. "So she is. But then you--"
+
+Mrs. Blair had come close to him, and stood picking a bit of thread from
+his shoulder.
+
+"It was different with us, wasn't it, dear?" she said, looking up at
+him.
+
+He kissed her.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIII
+
+                                 SUMMER
+
+
+The dust lay thick in Ward Street, sifting its fine powder on the leaves
+of the cottonwoods that grew at the weedy gutter. The grass in the yard
+grew long, and the bushes languished in the heat. Judge Blair's beans
+clambered up their poles and turned white; and Connie's sweet peas grew
+lush and rank, running, as she complained, mostly to leaves. The house
+seemed to have withdrawn within itself; its green shutters were closed.
+In the evening dim figures could be seen on the veranda, and the drone
+of voices could be heard. At eleven o'clock, the deep siren of the
+Limited could be heard, as it rounded the curve a mile out of town.
+After that it was still, and night lay on Macochee, soft, vast,
+immeasurable. The clock in the Court House tower boomed out the heavy
+hours. Sometimes the harmonies of the singing negroes were borne over
+the town.
+
+And to Marley and Lavinia those days, and those evenings of purple
+shadows and soft brilliant stars, were but the setting of a dream that
+unfolded new wonders constantly. They were but a part of all life, a
+part of the glowing summer itself, innocent of the thousand artificial
+demands man has made on himself. Lavinia went about with a new
+expression, exalted, expectant; a new dignity had come to her and a new
+beauty; all at once, suddenly, as it were, character had set its noble
+mark upon her, and about her slender figure there was the aureola of
+romance.
+
+"Have you noticed Lavinia?" Mrs. Blair asked her husband.
+
+"No, why?" he said, in the alarm that was ever ready to spring within
+him.
+
+"She has changed so; she has grown so beautiful!"
+
+One morning the judge saw a spar of light flash from her finger, and he
+peered anxiously over his glasses.
+
+"What's that, Lavinia?" he asked, and when she stood at his knee, almost
+like a little girl again in all but spirit, he took her finger.
+
+"A ring," she said simply.
+
+"What does it mean?"
+
+"Glenn gave it to me."
+
+"Glenn?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But I thought there was to be no engagement?" The judge looked up, as
+if there had been betrayal. But Lavinia only smiled. The judge looked at
+her a moment, then released her hand.
+
+"I wouldn't wear it where any one could see it," he said.
+
+The summer stretched itself long into September; and then came the still
+days of fall, moving slowly by in majestic procession. With the first
+cool air, a new restless energy awoke in Marley. All the summer he had
+neglected his studies; but now a change was working in him as wonderful
+as that which autumn was working in the world. He looked back at that
+happy, self-sufficient summer, and, for an instant, he had a wild,
+impotent desire to detain it, to hold it, to keep things just as they
+were; but the summer was gone, the winter at hand, and he felt all at
+once the impact of practical life. He faced the future, and for an
+instant he recoiled.
+
+Lavinia was standing looking up at him. She laid her hand on his
+shoulder.
+
+"What is it, Glenn?"
+
+"I was just thinking," he said, "that I have a great assurance in asking
+you to marry me."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Why, dear, just this: I can't get a practice in Macochee; I might as
+well look it in the face now as any time. I have known it all along, but
+I've kept it from you, and I've tried to keep it from myself. There's no
+place here for me; everybody says so, your father, Wade Powell,
+everybody. There's no chance for a young man in the law in these small
+towns. I've tried to make myself think otherwise. I've tried to make
+myself believe that after I'd been admitted I could settle down here and
+get a practice and we could have a little home of our own--but--"
+
+"Can't we?" Lavinia whispered the words, as if she were afraid utterance
+would confirm the fear they imported.
+
+"Well--that's what they all say," Marley insisted.
+
+"But papa's always talking that way," Lavinia protested. "I suppose all
+old men do. They forget that they were ever young, and I don't see what
+right they have to destroy your faith, your confidence, or the
+confidence of any young man!" Lavinia blazed out these words
+indignantly. It was consoling to Marley to hear them, he liked her
+passionate partizanship in his cause. He longed for her to go on, and he
+waited, anxious to be reassured in spite of himself. He could see her
+face dimly in the starlight, and feel her figure rigid with protest
+beside him.
+
+"It's simply wicked in them," she said presently. "I don't care what
+they say. We can and we will!"
+
+"I like to have you put it that way, dear," said Marley. "I like to have
+you say 'we'!"
+
+She drew more closely to him.
+
+"And you think we can?" he said presently.
+
+"I know it."
+
+"And have a little home, here, in one of these quiet streets, with the
+shade, and the happiness--"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"And it wouldn't matter much if we were poor?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Just at first, you know. I'd work hard, and we could be so happy, so
+happy, just we two, together!"
+
+"Yes, yes," she whispered.
+
+"I love Macochee so," Marley said presently. "I just couldn't leave it!"
+
+"Don't! Don't!" she protested. "Don't even speak of it!"
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIV
+
+                           ONE SUNDAY MORNING
+
+
+It was Sunday morning and Marley sat in church looking at a shaft of
+soft light that fell through one of the tall windows. From gazing at the
+shaft of light, he began to study the symbols in the different windows,
+the cross and crown, the lamb, the triangle that represented the
+Trinity, all the Roman symbols that Protestantism still retains in its
+decorations. Then he counted the pipes in the organ, back and forth,
+never certain that he had counted them correctly. All about him the
+people were going through the service, but it had lost all meaning for
+Marley, because he had been accustomed to it from childhood.
+
+Having been reassured by Lavinia, he felt that he should be happy, yet a
+strong sense of dissatisfaction, of uncertainty, flowed persistently
+under all his thoughts, belying his heart's assurance of its happiness.
+When Doctor Marley, advancing to the pulpit, buttoned his coat down
+before him, pushed aside the vase of flowers the ladies' committee
+always put in his way, and stood with his strong, expressive hand laid
+on the open Bible, Marley's thoughts fixed themselves for a moment in
+the pride and love he had always had for his father. There swept before
+him hundreds of scenes like this when his father had stood up to preach,
+and then suddenly he realized that his father had grown old: he was
+white-haired and in his rugged, smooth-shaven face deep lines were
+drawn--the lines of a beautiful character.
+
+He remembered something his father had said to the effect that the
+pulpit was the only place in which inexperienced youth was desired,
+showing the insincerity of what people call their religion, and then he
+remembered the ambitions he had dimly felt in his father in his earlier
+days; it had been predicted that his father would be a bishop. But he
+was not a bishop, and now in all probability never would be one; he was
+not politician enough for that. And Marley wondered whether or not his
+father could be said to have been successful; he had come to know and to
+do high things, he had lived a life full of noble sacrifice and the
+finest faith in humanity and in God; but was this success? He heard his
+father's voice:
+
+"The text will be found in the third chapter of the Lamentations of
+Jeremiah."
+
+But Marley never listened to sermons; now and then he caught a phrase,
+or a period, especially when his father raised his voice, but his
+thoughts were elsewhere, anywhere--not on the sermon. The men and women
+sitting in front of him kept shifting constantly, and he grew tired of
+slipping this way and that and craning his neck in order to see his
+father. And then the constant fluttering of fans hurt his eyes, and they
+wandered here and there, each person they lighted on suggesting some new
+train of thought.
+
+Presently they fell on a girl in a white dress, and in some way she
+suggested Lavinia. And instantly he felt that he should be perfectly
+happy when thinking of Lavinia, but, as suddenly, came that subconscious
+uncertainty, that deep-flowing discontent. He went over his last
+conversation with Lavinia, in which he had found such assurance, but now
+away from her he realized that he had lulled himself into a sense of
+security that was all false; and the conviction that Macochee had no
+place for him, at least as a lawyer, came back. He tried to put it away
+from him, and think of something else.
+
+His eyes fell on old Selah Dudley, sitting like all pillars of the
+church, at the end of his pew. Dudley's back was narrow, and rounded out
+between the shoulders so that Marley wondered how he could sit
+comfortably at all; his head was flat and sheer behind, and Marley could
+see with what care the old banker had plastered the scant hair across
+his bald poll--the only sign of vanity revealed in him, unless it were
+in the brown kid gloves he wore. Marley looked at Dudley with the
+feeling that he was looking at the most successful man in Macochee, and
+yet he had a troubled sense of the phariseeism that is the essential
+element of such success. He remembered what Wade Powell had said;
+immediately he saw Dudley in a new light; the old man sat stolid,
+patient and brutal, waiting for some heterodoxy, or something that could
+be construed as heterodoxy, theological or economic, like a savage with
+a spear waiting to pierce his prey, and glad when the moment came.
+
+But Marley, seeing the young girl in the white dress, again thought of
+Lavinia, who would be sitting at that very moment with her father and
+mother and Connie and Chad over in the Presbyterian church. How long
+would it be before he could sit there beside her, as her husband? Then
+with a flash it came to him that they would, in all likelihood, be
+married in that very church. Instantly he saw the spectators gathered,
+he saw the pulpit and the chancel-rail hidden in flowers, he saw his
+father with his ritual in his hands, waiting; and then while the organ
+played the wedding march, Lavinia coming down the aisle, her eyes
+lowered under her veil. His heart beat faster, he felt a wave of
+emotion, joyous, exciting.
+
+But there was much to do before that moment could come--the long days
+and nights of study; the examination looming like a mountain of
+difficulties, then months and years of waiting for a practice. He tried
+to imagine each detail of the coming of a practice, but he could not; he
+could not conceive how it was possible for a practice to come to any
+one, much less to him. There were many lawyers in Macochee now, and all
+of them were more or less idle. There was certainly no need of more.
+Judge Blair and Wade Powell and every one had told him that, and
+suddenly he felt an impatience with them all, as if they were
+responsible for the conditions they described; they all conspired
+against him, men and conditions, making up the elements of a harsh,
+intractable fate.
+
+And Marley grew bitter against every one in Macochee; they all gossiped
+about him, they were all determined to drive him away; well, let them;
+he would go; but he would come back again some day as a great,
+successful lawyer, looking down on them and their little interests, and
+they would be filled with envy and respect. But what of Lavinia?
+
+What right had he to ask her to marry him? What right had he to place
+her in the position he had? He realized it now, clearly, he told
+himself, for the first time. She had given up all for him. She would go
+out no more, she had foregone her parties, calls, picnics, dances,
+everything; in her devotion she had estranged her friends. He had given
+her parents concern, he had placed her in a false, impossible position.
+He must rescue her from it. But how? By breaking the engagement? He
+blushed for the thought. By going away quietly, silently, without a
+word? That would only increase the difficulty of her position. By
+keeping her waiting, year after year, until he could find a foothold in
+the world? Even that was unfair.
+
+No, he could not give up Lavinia and he could not go away from Macochee,
+hence it followed that he must give up the law. He must get some work to
+do, and at once; something that would pay him enough to support a wife.
+He began to canvass the possibilities in Macochee. He thought of all the
+openings; surely there would be something; there were several thousand
+persons in Macochee, and they lived somehow. He did not wish to give up
+the law; not that he loved it so, but because he disliked to own himself
+beaten. But it was necessary; he could suffer this defeat; he could make
+this sacrifice. There was something almost noble in the attitude, and he
+derived a kind of morbid consolation from the thought.
+
+His father was closing the Bible--sure sign that the sermon was about to
+end. There was another prayer, then a hymn, and while the congregation
+remained standing for the benediction, he heard his father's voice:
+
+"The peace of God which passeth all understanding--"
+
+The words had always comforted him in the sorrows he was constantly
+imagining, but now they brought no peace.
+
+In another moment the congregation was stirring joyously, in unconscious
+relief that the sitting was over. The hum of voices assumed a pleasant
+social air, as friend and acquaintance turned to greet one another. The
+people moved slowly down the aisle. He caught a glimpse of his father,
+smiling and happy--happy that his work was done--passing his
+handkerchief over his reddened brow and bending to take the hands of
+those who came to speak to him and to congratulate him. Just then Selah
+Dudley gave his father his hand; the sight pleased Marley; and suddenly
+an idea came to him.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XV
+
+                            A SAINT'S ADVICE
+
+
+On Monday morning Marley found Dudley at his post in the First National
+Bank. He halted at the little low gate in the rail that ran round
+Dudley's desk until Dudley looked up and saw him, and then Marley
+smiled. Dudley, conceiving it to be the propitiatory smile of the
+intending borrower, narrowed his eyes as he regarded him.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+Marley went in and sat down on the edge of the hard chair that was
+placed near Dudley.
+
+"I wish to have a little talk with you, Mr. Dudley," he said. He waited
+then for Dudley to reply, thinking perhaps he would be interested in the
+son of his pastor. Dudley had turned his chair a little, and seemed to
+have sunk a little lower in its brown leather cushions, worn to a hard
+shine during the long years he had sat there. The lower part of him was
+round and full and heavy, while his shoulders were narrow and sloping,
+and his chest sunken, as if, from sitting there so many years, his
+vitals had settled, giving him the figure of a half emptied bag of
+grain. His legs were thin, and his trousers crept constantly up the legs
+of the boots he wore; the boots were blackened as far as the ankles,
+above the ankles they were wrinkled and scuffed to a dirty brown.
+
+Marley noted these details hurriedly, for it was the face of the man
+that held him. A scant beard, made up of a few harsh, wiry hairs, partly
+covered the banker's cheeks and chin; his upper lip was clean-shaven,
+and his hair, scant but still black, was combed forward at the temples,
+and carefully carried over from one side of his head to the other,
+ineffectually trying to hide the encroaching baldness. His nose was
+large; his eyes narrow under his almost barren brows and red at the
+edges of the lids that lacked lashes.
+
+"What do you want?" said Dudley, never moving, as if to economize his
+energies, as he economized his words and every other thing of value in
+his narrow world.
+
+Marley did not know just what reply to make: this was a critical moment
+to him, and he must make no mistake.
+
+"I came," he began, "to--to ask you for a little advice."
+
+Dudley, at this, settled a little more into his chair, possibly a little
+more comfortably; he seemed to relax somewhat, and his eyes were not
+quite so narrow as they had been. But he blinked a moment, and then
+cautiously asked:
+
+"What about?"
+
+"Well, it's just this," Marley began, smiling persistently; "you see
+I've begun the study of law; I had intended to be a lawyer."
+
+"We've got plenty o' lawyers," said Dudley.
+
+"That's just the conclusion I have come to, and I was thinking somewhat
+of making a change. And so I thought I'd come and ask you, that is, your
+advice."
+
+Dudley, still cautious, made no reply, and Marley almost despaired of
+getting on easy terms. He began to wish he had not come; he might have
+known this, he said to himself, and his smile and the confidence with
+which he had come began to leave him. But he must make another effort.
+
+"You see, Mr. Dudley," he said, "I thought, as things are nowadays, I
+would have to wait years before I could really do anything in the law,
+and as I have my own way to make in the world, I thought, you know, I
+might get into something else."
+
+"What, for instance?" asked Dudley.
+
+"Well, I didn't exactly know; I had hardly thought it out,--that's why I
+came to you, knowing you to be a man of large affairs."
+
+Dudley had an instant's vision of his bank, of his stocks, and of the
+many farms all over Gordon County on which he held mortgages, but he
+checked his impulse; these very possessions must be guarded; people
+envied him them, and while this envy in one way was among the sources of
+his few joys, it nevertheless gave rise to covetousness which was
+prohibited by the tenth commandment.
+
+"So you want my advice, eh?" he asked, looking hard at Marley.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And that's all?" he asked suspiciously.
+
+"Well--any suggestions," Marley said.
+
+Dudley still hesitated. He continued to study Marley out of his little
+eyes. Presently he inquired, as if by way of getting a basis to start
+on:
+
+"You been to college, ain't you?"
+
+"Yes, sir," Marley answered promptly; "I graduated in June."
+
+"How long was you there?"
+
+"Why," Marley replied in some surprise, "the full four years."
+
+"Four years," Dudley repeated. "How old?"
+
+"Twenty-two."
+
+"Well, that's that much time wasted. If a young man's going to get along
+these times, and make anything of himself, he has to start early, learn
+business ways and habits. He's got to begin at the bottom, and feel his
+way up." The banker was speaking now with a reckless waste of words that
+was surprising. "The main thing at first is to work; it ain't the money.
+Now, when I come to Macochee, forty-seven years ago, I hadn't nothing.
+But I went to work, I was up early, and I went to bed early; I worked
+hard all day, I 'tended to business, and I saved my money. That's it,
+young man, that's the only way--up early, work hard, and save your
+money." Dudley leaned back in his chair to let Marley contemplate him.
+
+"But what did you work at? At first, I mean."
+
+"Why," said Dudley, as if in surprise, "at anything I could get. I wan't
+proud; I wan't 'fraid o' work."
+
+Marley leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and began twirling
+his hat in his hands. Then, thinking the attitude lacking in respect, he
+sat up again.
+
+"Then, I was careful of my habits," Dudley went on. "I never touched a
+bit o' tobacco, nor tasted a drop o' liquor in my life."
+
+He paused, and then:
+
+"Do you use tobacco?" he asked.
+
+"Sometimes," Marley hesitated to confess.
+
+"Cigarettes?"
+
+"Now and then."
+
+"Humph! Learned that at college, I suppose." Marley made no reply.
+
+"Well, you've started wrong, young man. That wan't the way I made
+myself. I never touched a drop of liquor nor tasted tobacco. I worked
+hard and God prospered me--yes, God prospered me."
+
+Dudley's voice sank piously.
+
+"Now, I'll tell you." He seemed to be about to impart the secret of it
+all. "When I was your age, I embraced religion, and I promised God that
+if he'd prosper me I'd give a tenth of all I made to the church; a
+tenth, yes, sir, a full tenth." The banker paused again as if making a
+calculation, and a trouble gathered for an instant at his hairless
+brows, but, as if by an effort, he smoothed them so that they became
+meek and submissive. And then he went on, as if he had found a species
+of relief:
+
+"But it was the best bargain I ever made. It paid; yes, it paid; I kep'
+my word, and the Lord kep' His; He prospered me."
+
+He had folded his hands, and sat blinking at Marley.
+
+"So my advice to you, young man, is to give up tobacco and all your
+other bad habits, to be up early in the morning, to work hard, and
+remember God in all your ways, and He shall direct thy paths."
+
+Dudley stirred, and moved his swivel chair a little, as if it were time
+to resume work. But Marley sat there.
+
+"That's my advice to you, young man," Dudley repeated, "and it won't
+cost you a cent." He said this generously, at the same time implying a
+hint of dismissal. Still Marley did not move, and Dudley eyed him in
+some concern. Marley saw the look and forced a smile.
+
+"I thank you, Mr. Dudley," he said, "for your advice. I am sure it is
+good. I was wondering, though," he went on, with a reluctance that he
+knew impaired the effect of his words, "if you wouldn't have something
+here in your bank for me--"
+
+At this Dudley suddenly seemed to shrink in size. His eyes became small,
+mere inflamed slits beneath his hairless brows, and he said:
+
+"I thought you said you wanted advice?"
+
+"Well, I did," Marley explained, "but I thought maybe--"
+
+He did not finish the sentence. He rose and stood, still twirling his
+hat in his hand. "And you have nothing, you know of nothing?"
+
+Dudley slowly shook his head from side to side, once or twice, having
+resumed his economical habits.
+
+"Good morning," Marley said, and left.
+
+As he went out, the cashier and the assistant cashier looked at him
+through the green wire screen. Then they lifted their heads from their
+tasks cautiously and exchanged surreptitious glances.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVI
+
+                           LOVE AND A LIVING
+
+
+Marley was not surprised by the result of his visit to Selah Dudley. He
+made an effort to convince himself that there was truth in what Dudley
+had said to him, even if he could not remember exactly what it was that
+Dudley had said. He tried to put down the instinctive feeling of dislike
+he had for the old banker; he told himself that such a feeling was
+unworthy of him, if not unworthy of Dudley, and in thinking the matter
+over he tried to clear himself of all suspicion of envy or jealousy of
+Dudley's success. The whole town considered Dudley its leading man, and
+Marley tried so to consider him; and he tried to consider him in this
+light because he was a good man and not because he was a rich man, just
+as the town pretended to do. He wanted to talk about Dudley with some
+one, but he did not want to talk about him with Lavinia, because he felt
+a shame in his failure with Dudley that he feared Lavinia might share.
+He did talk with his father about him, but his father did not seem to be
+interested; he smiled his tolerant smile, but made no comment. And when
+Marley pressed him for an opinion of Dudley his father said:
+
+"They make broad their phylacteries."
+
+And that was all.
+
+However, Marley found Wade Powell willing to talk of Selah Dudley, as he
+was willing to talk of almost anything. Marley did not tell Powell that
+he had been to Dudley to ask for a position; he merely let it be
+understood that he had met the old man in the course of the day and
+talked with him casually.
+
+"By the way," he asked, as if the thought had just come to him, "how did
+Selah Dudley make his money?"
+
+"He didn't make it," Powell answered.
+
+"He didn't? Did he inherit it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then how did he get it?"
+
+"He gathered it."
+
+"Gathered it? I don't know what you mean."
+
+Powell laughed.
+
+"You don't? Well, there's a difference."
+
+"He wasn't in the army, was he?"
+
+"In the army! Great God!" Powell threw into his voice the contempt he
+could not find the word to express. "You think he'd risk his hide in the
+army? Well, I should say not! Though he would have been perfectly
+safe--" Powell said it as a parenthetical afterthought--"no bullet could
+ever have pierced his hide, and he had no blood to shed."
+
+Powell bit the end from his cigar and spat out the damp little pieces of
+tobacco viciously.
+
+"No, I'll tell you, Glenn," he said, "he stayed at home and got his
+start, as he calls it, by skinning the poor. Widows were his big game
+and he gathered a little pile that has been growing ever since. To-day
+he owns Gordon County."
+
+"He seems to be a prominent man in the church," ventured Marley.
+
+"He'll be a prominent man in hell," said Powell, angrily. And then he
+added thoughtfully: "My one regret in going there myself is that I'll
+have to see him every day."
+
+The most curious effect of Marley's visit to Dudley, however, was one he
+did not observe himself. Having been defeated in his plan to secure a
+place in the bank, he felt at first, with a certain consolation, that he
+still had the law to fall back on, and he returned to his studies. But
+he made little headway; once having decided to give up the law, the
+decision remained, and his mind was constantly occupied with schemes for
+securing a foothold in some other occupation. He considered, one after
+another, every possibility in Macochee, and as fast as he thought of
+some opening, he went for it, but invariably to find it either no
+opening at all, or else, if it were an opening, one that closed at his
+approach. Gradually he gave up his studies altogether, and sat idle, his
+book before him; but one day Powell said to him:
+
+"Say, Glenn, you're not getting along very fast, are you?"
+
+Marley started, and flushed with a sense of guilt.
+
+"Well, no," he admitted.
+
+"What's the matter, in love?"
+
+Marley blushed, from another cause this time, though the guilt remained
+in his face. But Powell instantly was gentle.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, "I was just joking, of course; I didn't
+mean to be inquisitive. You mustn't mind my boorishness."
+
+Marley looked at him gratefully and Powell, to whom any show of
+affection was confusing, turned away self-consciously. But Marley
+whirled his chair around toward Powell.
+
+"I am in love," he said. "I've wanted to tell you, but I--you know who
+she is."
+
+"Lavinia Blair?"
+
+"Yes. And that's what's troubling me," Marley went on. "I want to get
+married, and I can't. I can't," he repeated, "the law's too slow; I've
+realized it for a long while, but I tried to keep the fact away, I tried
+not to see it. But now I have to face it. Why," he said, rising to his
+feet, "it'll take a thousand years to get a practice in this town, and
+I'm not even admitted yet."
+
+He walked to and fro, his brows pinched together, his lower lip thrust
+out, his teeth nipping his upper one. Powell glanced at him, but said
+nothing. He knew human nature, this lawyer, and the fact made every one
+in the county tremble at the thought of his cross-examinations;
+sometimes he carried too far his love of laying souls bare, and as often
+hurt as helped his cause. He never had been able to turn his knowledge
+to much practical account; in a city he would have had numerous
+retainers as a trial lawyer, though few as a counselor. In Macochee he
+was out of place, and he chafed under a semi-consciousness of the fact.
+He waited, knowing that Marley would burst forth again.
+
+"I'll have to get a job," Marley said at that moment, bitterly, "and go
+to work; that's all." And then he laughed harshly. "Humph, get a
+job--that's the biggest job of all. What can I get here in Macochee, I'd
+like to know?"
+
+He halted and turned suddenly, fiercely, almost menacingly on Powell, as
+if he were the cause of his predicament.
+
+"I've told you already it's no place for you," said Powell, quietly.
+
+"But where'll I go?" Marley held out his hands with a gesture that was
+pleading, pathetic. Thus he waited for Powell's reply.
+
+Powell smoked thoughtfully for a moment and then began:
+
+"When I was going to the law school in Cincinnati, there was a young
+fellow in my class--a great friend of mine. He was poor, and I was
+poor--God! how poor we were!" Powell paused in this retrospect of
+poverty. "That was why we were such friends,--our poverty gave us a
+common interest. This fellow came from up in Hardin County; he was tall,
+lean and gawky, the worst jay you ever saw. When we had graduated, I
+supposed he would go home, maybe to Kenton--that was his county-seat.
+When we were bidding each other good-by--I'll never forget the day, it
+was June, hot as hell; and we had left the old law school in Walnut
+Street and were standing there by the Tyler-Davidson fountain in Fifth
+Street. I said, 'Well, we'll see each other once in a while; we won't be
+far apart.' He looked at me and said, 'I don't know about that.' 'Why?'
+I asked. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm going to Chicago.' I looked at him in
+surprise. He was out at the elbows then, and had hardly enough money to
+get home on. Then the ridiculousness of it struck me, and I laughed.
+'Why, you'll starve to death there!' I said. He only smiled." Powell
+paused, to whet Marley's appetite, perhaps, for the foregone dénouement.
+
+"That jay," Powell said, when he had allowed sufficient time to elapse,
+"that jay I laughed at is Judge Johnson, of the United States Circuit
+Court."
+
+The story saddened Marley. With his faculty of conceiving a whole drama
+at once, he caught in an instant the trials Judge Johnson had gone
+through before he won to his station of ease and honor; he saw the
+privations, the sacrifices, the hardships, the endless strivings,
+plottings, schemings; it wearied and depressed him; his frightened mind
+hung back, clung to the real, the present, the known, found a relief in
+picturing the seeming security of a man like Wade Powell, in a town
+where he knew everybody and was known by everybody. He shrank from
+hearing more of the judge; he wished to stay with his thought in
+Macochee.
+
+"How _do_ young men get a start in places like Macochee?" he asked, and
+then he added in despairing argument: "They _do_ stay, they _do_ get
+along somehow, they make livings, and raise families; the town grows and
+does business, the population increases, it doesn't die off."
+
+"Well," said Wade Powell, approaching the problem with the generalities
+its mystery demanded, "some of them marry rich women, but that industry
+is about played out now; the fortunes are divided up; some of them, most
+of them, are content to eke out small livings, clerking in stores and
+that kind of thing; about the only ones that get ahead any are traders;
+they barter around, first in one business, then in another; they run a
+grocery, then sell it out and buy a livery-stable; then they dabble in
+real estate a while; finally they skin some one out of a farm and then
+they go on skinning, a little at a time; by the time they're old, people
+forget their beginnings and they become respectable; then they join the
+church, like Selah Dudley."
+
+Powell stopped a moment, then he began again.
+
+"The lawyers get along God knows how; the doctors, well, they never
+starve, for people will get sick, or think they're sick, which is better
+yet; then there are a few preachers who are supported in a poor way by
+their congregations. When a man fails, he goes into the insurance
+business."
+
+Powell smoked contemplatively for a few moments.
+
+"Sometimes," he resumed presently, "I feel as if I were tottering on the
+verge of the insurance business myself."
+
+Marley looked at Powell, who had relapsed into silence, his head
+lowered, his eyes fixed in the distance, and there was something
+pathetic in the figure, or would have been, but for the humor that saved
+every situation for Powell. There was, however, something appealing, and
+something to inspire affection, too. Marley's gaze recalled Powell, and
+he glanced up with a smile.
+
+"I reckon you've gathered from my remarks," said Powell, "that I
+consider success chiefly from a monetary standpoint, but I don't. The
+main business of life is living, and the trouble with the world is that
+it is too busy getting ready to live to find the time for life; it has
+tied itself up with a thousand chains of its own forging and it has had
+to postpone living from time to time until most people have put the
+beginning of life at the gateway of death; meanwhile they're busy
+gathering things, like magpies, and those that gather the most are
+considered the best; they have come to think that people are divided
+into two classes, good and bad; the good are those who own, the bad
+those who don't, and the good think their business is to put down the
+bad. Now, here in Gordon County, we have about everything a man needs;
+the spring comes and the summer, and the autumn and the winter; the rain
+falls and the winds blow and the sun shines, and I've noticed that
+Lighttown gets about as much rain as Main Street, and Gooseville about
+as much wind as Scioto Street; the sun seems to shine pretty much alike
+on the niggers loafing in Market Space and on old Selah Dudley and Judge
+Blair, bowing like Christians to each other in the Square. The trees are
+the same color wherever they grow, and I don't see any reason why people
+shouldn't be happy if they'd only let one another be happy. Now, I would
+have lived, but I didn't have time. I thought when I began that I'd have
+to do as the rest were doing, get hold of things, and I saw that if I
+did, I'd have to get my share away from them; well, I made a failure of
+that, being too soft inside someway; that was all right too, but
+meanwhile I was wasting time, and putting off living--now it's too
+late."
+
+Marley looked at him in perplexity, not knowing how to take him.
+
+"I know," he said presently. "But what am I going to do? I can live all
+right, but I have to do better than that; I want to get married."
+
+"Married," mused Powell, "married! Well, I got married."
+
+Marley was interested. He had never heard Powell speak of his wife, and
+he feared what he was about to say; for that instant Powell's standing
+in his estimation trembled.
+
+"And that was the only sensible thing I ever did."
+
+Marley felt a great relief.
+
+"But I don't know that I did right by Mary; I didn't do her any good, I
+reckon; still, she's borne up somehow; I wish I had a sky full of
+sunlight to pour over her."
+
+Powell walked to his window, and looked across into the Court-House yard
+where the leaves were falling slowly from the Maple-trees. Marley hoped
+that he would go on, and say more of his wife, but he was silent.
+Presently he turned about.
+
+"Well, Glenn," he said; "I see you're stuck on staying in Macochee, and
+I don't blame you; and you want to get married, and that's all right.
+Maybe I can help you do it."
+
+"How?" said Marley, eagerly.
+
+"I've got a scheme."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Well, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. I'd better wait till I see
+whether it will or not before I tell you."
+
+He stood and smiled at Marley a moment, and then said: "You wait here."
+
+And he turned and left the office. Marley watched Powell's fine figure
+as he walked across the street toward the Court House, a great love of
+the man surging within him. He felt secure and safe; a new warmth spread
+through him. At the door of the Court House Marley saw him stop and
+shake hands with Garver, the sheriff. The two talked a moment, then
+turned and went down toward the big iron gate in Main Street, and
+disappeared. Marley waited until noon and then he went home to his
+dinner. He returned, but Powell did not come back to the office all the
+afternoon.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVII
+
+                            THE COUNTY FAIR
+
+
+Marley did not see Wade Powell again for four days; a Sunday intervened,
+and Powell did not come back to the office until Monday morning. He came
+in with a solemn air upon him, and a new dignity that made impressive
+the seriousness with which he set to work at the pile of papers on his
+desk, as if he were beginning a new week with new resolutions. He was
+freshly shaved, and his hair had been cut; it was shorter at the sides
+and, against his rough sunburnt neck, showed an edge of clean white
+skin. His newly cropped hair gave him a strange, brisk appearance; his
+black clothes were brushed, his linen fresh.
+
+He spoke to Marley but a few times and then from the distant altitude of
+his new dignity. Once he sent Marley on an errand to Snider's drug store
+to buy a large blank book; he said he was going to keep an office docket
+after that. He worked on his new docket half the morning, then he
+carried the docket and the bundle of papers over to Marley's table,
+flung them down and asked Marley if he would not continue the work for
+him. He explained the system he had devised for keeping a record of his
+cases; it was intricate and complete, but in many of his cases the
+numbers and in some instances the names of opposing parties were
+missing; Powell told Marley to go over to the Court House and get the
+missing data from the clerk.
+
+"I've got to go out for a while," Powell explained. Then he hurried
+away; he seemed to be glad to escape from the office and the drudgery of
+the task he had set for himself.
+
+Powell's absence weighed on Marley; he was lonesome in the deserted
+office, and found himself wondering just where Powell was at each
+moment; he pictured him with his companions, Colonel Devlin, Marshall
+Scarff, Sheriff Garver, old man Brockton and Doc Hall; lately it had
+been rumored that George Halliday had been admitted to the merry group,
+and that they played poker nightly in a room in the Coleman Block. Then
+Marley would picture to himself Wade Powell's wife; he had never seen
+her, but he had an idea of her appearance, formed from no description of
+her, but created out of his own fancy. He pictured her as a graceful
+little woman, with a certain droop to her figure; but try as he would,
+he could not see her face; it was a blur to him, yet it gave somehow a
+certain expression of sweetness and patience; sometimes, by an effort,
+he could see her brow, and the hair above it; the hair was dark, and
+parted in the middle with some gray in its rather heavy mass.
+
+Marley could never discuss Wade Powell with any kind of satisfaction
+with Lavinia. When he spoke of him, she would smile and affect an
+interest, but he could detect the affectation, and he could detect,
+also, a certain distance in her attitude toward Wade Powell or the
+thought of him, which he ascribed to the influence of Judge Blair's
+dislike. Marley saw that Lavinia never would accept Wade Powell, and he
+had ceased to mention him except in a casual manner. For some like
+reason he had ceased to mention Wade Powell at home; he found that he
+had many views which he could not share with those nearest him, and his
+inner life at that time was somewhat lonely and aloof.
+
+He had not told Lavinia of Wade Powell's offer of assistance, nor had he
+spoken of it at home. In those four days he had thought much of it and
+built countless hopes upon it; he had thought of all the possibilities,
+and taken a fine delight in examining each one, working it out to its
+logical end in its effect upon Lavinia and him and upon their fortunes.
+He was disappointed when Wade Powell failed to refer to the subject
+again; he would have liked to discuss the disappointment with Lavinia;
+usually, out of her youthful optimism and faith in the life of which she
+was so innocent, she could reassure him; but of late he had had so many
+disappointments and had drawn so heavily on Lavinia's resources of
+comfort and hope that he had grown wary, almost superstitiously wary, of
+making any further drafts.
+
+When Monday came and Powell did not renew the subject, nor even say what
+his scheme had been, Marley concluded that Powell had forgotten all
+about it, and so he relinquished the hope with a sigh, and tried to
+forget it himself. He took up his studies once more; but he made poor
+headway; he saw with chagrin that he had not read ten pages of law in as
+many days, and what he had read he could not remember. When he tried to
+review it, the words had no meaning for him, nor could he wrest any from
+them, even though he ground his elbows in the table with the book
+between them and dug his fists into his hair.
+
+That was the week of the Gordon County fair. For a month every fence
+along the white pikes in the country had borne the bills, flaming from
+afar in red ink the date, "Oct. 15-31." There were, too, lithographs
+everywhere--on boards at the monument, at the Court House, on the town
+hall, on the covered bridge over Mad River--lithographs picturing the
+exciting finish of a trotting race, and a sedate concourse of fat
+cattle. The fair opened Monday, but it was understood that that day
+would be devoted to preparing and arranging the exhibits; the fair would
+not begin in earnest until Tuesday; the big day would be Thursday.
+
+Marley was glad that fair week had come, for the chance of novelty which
+it offered, and, too, for the excuse it gave him; he would not study
+that week, but in the general festivity try to forget the problem that
+so oppressed him. He would have liked to go to the fair every day, but
+he could not, for the expense, insignificant as it seemed to be to every
+one else in the county, was not insignificant to him. He went, however,
+on Wednesday with his father, who, with the love of horses he had
+inherited from the saddle-bag days of Methodism, recklessly attended the
+races. Marley thought that this visit would be his last, but on Thursday
+morning he met Lawrence in the Square.
+
+"Just the man I'm looking for!" said Lawrence.
+
+He was brisk, alert, important, and had an official air which was
+explained when Marley observed, on the lapel of his coat, the badge of
+blue ribbon that proclaimed an officer of the fair.
+
+"I have charge of the tickets this year," he said. "Want to go? I'll
+pass you in."
+
+Marley was glad enough to accept.
+
+"I'll have to go around to the office and tell Powell," he said. "I was
+away all day yesterday."
+
+"Oh, nonsense," replied Lawrence, "that won't make any difference; he's
+been full for two days. This is his big time."
+
+Marley had a pang as he saw with what small seriousness Lawrence
+regarded his relation to the law; it reflected, doubtless, the common
+attitude of the community toward him and his efforts.
+
+"I've got to hurry," Lawrence went on; "I've got a rig waiting here; you
+can ride out with me."
+
+It was one of the incomparable afternoons that autumn brings to Ohio;
+the retreating sun was flashing in the high, blue sky; the air was fresh
+and Marley felt it full of energy and hope. Lawrence drove rapidly
+through the throng of hurrying vehicles that crowded the road to the
+fair-grounds, stirring up a cloud of dust that covered everything with
+its white powder.
+
+Lawrence left him at the gate, being too full of business to engage in
+the weary search for pleasure, and Marley set out alone across the
+scorched and trampled turf for the grand stand, black with people for
+the races. He could hear the nervous clamor of the bell in the judges'
+stand, the notes of the hand-organ at the squeaking merry-go-round, the
+incessant thumping of the bass drum that made its barbaric music for the
+side-show, and the cries of venders, dominating all the voices of the
+thousands bent in their silly way on pleasure. Once, calling him back to
+the real, to the peace of the commonplace, he heard the distant tones of
+the town clock in the tower that stood, a mile away, above the autumnal
+trees.
+
+He pressed into the space between the grand stand and the whitewashed
+fence that surrounded the track; through the palings he could see the
+stoop-shouldered drivers, bent over the heavily breathing trotters they
+jogged to and fro; above him, in the grand stand, he could distinguish
+cries and laughs, now and then complete excited sentences, sometimes
+voices he knew. All around him the farmers, clumsy in their ready-made
+clothes and bearing their buggy whips as some insignia of office,
+solemnly watched the races and talked of horses.
+
+The sense of kinship with the crowd that had unerringly drawn Marley
+left him the moment he was in the crowd, and a loneliness replaced the
+sense of kinship. He looked about for some one he knew. He began, here
+and there, to recognize faces, just as he had recognized voices in the
+din above him; he began to analyze and to classify the crowd, and he
+laughed somewhat cynically when he saw numbers of politicians going
+about among the farmers, shaking their hands, greeting them effusively,
+calling them by their Christian names. Then suddenly he saw Wade Powell.
+The crowd at the point where Powell stood, nucleated with him as its
+center; by the way the men were laughing, and by the way Powell was
+trying not to laugh, Marley knew that he had been telling them one of
+his stories, and from the self-conscious, guilty expressions on certain
+of the faces, Marley knew that the story was probably one that should
+not have been told. Several countrymen hung on the edge of the group,
+not identifying themselves with it, yet anxious to have a look at Wade
+Powell, who enjoyed the fame of the county's best criminal lawyer.
+
+When Powell saw Marley he called to him, and when Marley drew near, he
+introduced him, somehow mysteriously, almost surreptitiously, to the man
+at his elbow. Powell's face was very red, and his eyes were brilliant.
+The mystery he put into his introduction was but a part of his manner.
+
+"This is Mr. Carman, of Pleasant Grove Township, Glenn," he said,
+bending over, as if no one should hear the name; and then he added, in a
+husky whisper: "He's our candidate for county clerk, you know."
+
+Marley saw something strange, forbidding, in Carman's face, but he could
+not tell what it was. It was a red, sunburnt face, closely shaven, with
+a short mustache burned by the sun; the smile it wore seemed to be fixed
+and impersonal. Plainly the man had spent his days out of doors, though,
+it seemed, not healthfully, for his skin was dry and hardened, and his
+neck thin and wrinkled; he seemed to have known the hard work and the
+poor nourishment of a farm. Marley wondered what was the matter with
+Carman's face. But Powell was drawing them aside.
+
+"Come over here," he was saying, "where we can be alone."
+
+He led them to a corner of the little yard; no one was near; they were
+quite out of the crowd which was pressing to the whitewashed picket
+fence, attracted by the excitement of the race for which the horses were
+just then scoring.
+
+"Now, Jake," Powell began, speaking to Carman, "this is the young man I
+was talking to you about."
+
+Carman, still smiling his dry meaningless smile, turned his face half
+away.
+
+"I reckon," Powell went on, "that I might be able to do you some good,
+if I took off my coat." Powell spoke with a pride in his own influence;
+Marley had never known him to come so near to boasting before.
+
+Carman was looking away; and Powell, his own eyes narrowed, was watching
+him closely. Once he winked at Marley, and Marley was mystified; he did
+not know what play was going on here; he looked from Carman to Powell,
+and back to Carman again. There was some strange fascination about
+Carman; Marley felt a slight relief when he discovered that there was
+something peculiar about Carman's eyes.
+
+"I haven't said anything to Marley about the matter, Jake," Powell said.
+"Maybe I'd better tell him. Hell! He might not want it--I don't know."
+
+Carman turned suddenly; his face had been in the shadow; now it came
+into the sunlight, and Marley saw that while the pupil of Carman's right
+eye contracted suddenly, the pupil of his left eye remained fixed; it
+was larger than the pupil of the right eye, which had shrunk to a
+pin-point in the sharp light of the sun. Marley looked closely, the left
+eye seemed to be swimming in liquid; it almost hurt Marley's eyes to
+look at it.
+
+"I've been telling Carman, Glenn," Powell was explaining, "that if he is
+elected--and gets into the Court House--"
+
+Marley looked at Powell expectantly.
+
+"I want him," Powell went on, "to make you his deputy."
+
+Marley saw it all in a flash; this was what Powell had meant that day a
+fortnight ago; he felt his great affection for Powell glow and warm;
+Lavinia would appreciate Powell after this. It meant salary, position, a
+place in which he might complete his law studies at his leisure; it
+meant a living, a home, marriage, Lavinia! He looked all his gratitude
+at Powell, who smiled appreciatively.
+
+Carman had turned his face away again, he was still smiling, and
+plucking now at his chin; Marley waited, and Powell finally grew
+impatient.
+
+"Well, Jake, what do you say?"
+
+Carman waited a moment longer, then slowly turned about. Marley watched
+him narrowly, he saw the pupil of his right eye contract, the pupil of
+the watery left eye remained fixed; then, for the first time, Carman
+looked steadily at Marley and for the first time he spoke.
+
+"Well," he said, and he stopped to spit out his tobacco, "you know I'm
+always ready to do a friend a good turn."
+
+Powell looked Carman over carefully a moment, and then he said,
+
+"All right, Jake."
+
+Just then there was a rush of hoofs, a shock of excitement, and they
+heard a loud yell:
+
+"Go!"
+
+And they rushed to the fence of the whitewashed palings.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVIII
+
+                           THE ROAD TO MINGO
+
+
+Lavinia sat rocking quietly back and forth, and stitched away with her
+colored silks on her tambourine frames, while Marley told her of the
+fortune Wade Powell had brought them. He told the story briefly, and he
+tried to tell it simply; he did not comment on Powell's kindness or
+generosity, but let his deeds speak for themselves in Powell's behalf.
+When he had done, Marley waited for Lavinia's comment, but she rocked on
+a moment and then held her tambourine frames at arm's length to study
+the sweet pea she was making. When she had done so, she dropped her
+sewing suddenly into her lap, and looking up, said:
+
+"He thinks everything of you, doesn't he?"
+
+"I believe he likes me," Marley said, as modestly as he could put it.
+
+"Who could help it?"
+
+Lavinia looked at Marley, and he leaned over, and took her hands.
+
+"I am glad you can't, sweetheart," he said.
+
+"Do you know," she went on, "I think it is because you have been kind
+and good to him--just as you are kind and good to every one. His life is
+lonely; he is an outcast, almost; no one cares for him, and he
+appreciates your goodness."
+
+Pity was the utmost feeling she could produce for Wade Powell out of her
+kindly heart. But Marley, though he could accept her homage to the full
+without embarrassment, could not acquiesce to this length, and he
+laughed at her.
+
+"Nonsense, Lavinia," he said. "You have the thing all topsy-turvy. It is
+Wade Powell who has been kind to me; it is he and not I who is good to
+every one. He has a heart brimful of the milk of human kindness. You
+have no idea, and no one has, of the good he does in a thousand little
+ways. He tries to hide it all; he acts as if he were ashamed of it, but
+there are hundreds of people in Macochee who worship him, and would be
+ready to die for him, if it would help him any. Don't think he has no
+friends! He has them by the score--of course, they are all poor; I
+reckon that's why they are generally unknown."
+
+"But isn't he cruel?"
+
+Marley's eyes widened in astonishment.
+
+"I mean," Lavinia said correctively, "isn't he kind of sarcastic?"
+
+"Well," Marley admitted, "he is that at times. I think he tries to hide
+his better qualities; I think he tries to cloak his finer nature with a
+rough garb. Perhaps it is because he is really so sensitive. But he is,
+to my mind, a truly great man. He is a sort of tribune of the people."
+
+"But, Glenn, what about his drinking?"
+
+"Well, that's the trouble," Marley said, shaking his head. "If he had
+let liquor alone he'd have been away up."
+
+Lavinia was silent a moment, her brow was knit in little wrinkles.
+
+"Glenn," she said presently, "I have been thinking."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"That with your influence you might reform him--out of his liking for
+you, don't you know?"
+
+She raised her blue eyes. He laughed outright, and then took her face
+between his two hands.
+
+"You dear little thing!" he said, with the patronage of a lover.
+
+Lavinia regained her dignity.
+
+"But couldn't you?" she demanded.
+
+"Why, dear heart," Marley said, "he would think it presumption. I
+wouldn't dare."
+
+Lavinia shook her head in the hopelessness of the reformer, and took up
+her tambourine frames again with a sigh.
+
+"It's a pity," she said, relinquishing the subject with the hope, "it's
+such a pity."
+
+"But you haven't told me what you think of the scheme."
+
+"You know, dear, that whatever you think best I think best."
+
+Marley was disappointed.
+
+"You don't seem to be very enthusiastic over the prospect," he
+complained. "I thought you'd be glad as I to know that I can at last
+make a place for myself in the world--and a home and a living for you."
+
+Lavinia looked up.
+
+"I never had any doubt of that, Glenn," she said simply.
+
+He saw the trust and confidence she had in him, a trust and a confidence
+he had never felt himself, and had never before been wholly aware of in
+her. He saw that she had never shared those fears which had so long
+oppressed him, and into his love there came a devout thankfulness. He
+felt strong, hopeful, confident, victorious. He had a sudden fancy that
+it would be like this when they were married; he would sit at his own
+hearth, with a fire crackling merrily, and the rain and wind beating
+outside--for the first time he could indulge such a fancy; it allowed
+him, now that his future was assured, to come up to it and to take hold
+of it; it became a reality.
+
+The judge was not at home that night. Now and then Marley could hear
+Mrs. Blair speak a word to Connie and Chad, over their lessons in the
+sitting-room; school had commenced, and Connie having that year entered
+the High School had taken on a new dignity, in consequence of which she
+was treating Chad with a divine patience that brought its own peace into
+the Blair household.
+
+They talked for a long time of their plans. Marley would take his new
+place in December when the new county clerk went into office, and he
+told Lavinia all the advantages of the position. It would extend his
+acquaintance, it would give him a familiarity with court proceedings
+that otherwise he could not have acquired in years. He meant to study
+hard, and be admitted to the bar. They could have a little cottage and
+live simply and economically; he would save part of his salary, and when
+he hung out his shingle he would have enough money laid by to support
+them, modestly, until he could establish himself in a practice. He laid
+it all before her plainly, convincingly. He was charmed with the
+practicability of the plan, with its conservatism, its common sense.
+They might as well be married.
+
+"Can't we?" he asked. He trembled as he asked; his happiness had never
+come so close before.
+
+Lavinia dropped her embroidery frames into her lap and looked up at him.
+The question in her eyes was almost born of fear.
+
+"Right away?" exclaimed Lavinia.
+
+"Well, almost right away," Marley answered. "Sometime this winter,
+anyway."
+
+"This winter! So soon?"
+
+"So soon!" Marley repeated her words, almost in mockery.
+
+"But we mustn't be married in the winter," she said, "we've always
+planned to be married in June--our month, you know."
+
+"What's the use of waiting?"
+
+"But papa and mama--"
+
+This quick rushing to the parental cover, this clinging to the habit of
+years struck a jealousy through Marley's heart. His face fell and he
+looked hurt.
+
+"Can't we, dear?" he pleaded.
+
+Lavinia looked at him, and she said shyly:
+
+"If you say so, Glenn."
+
+They were solemn in their joy and made their plans in detail. They would
+be married quietly, Lavinia said, and at home. Doctor Marley would
+perform the ceremony, and Marley was touched by this recognition of his
+father.
+
+The fall worked a new energy in Marley, and, with the assurance that his
+labors were now soon to bear fruit, he found that he could study better
+than ever before. He worked faithfully over his books every morning, and
+he worked so hard that he felt himself entitled to a portion of each
+afternoon. He would leave the office at four o'clock. Lavinia would be
+waiting for him, and they would try to get out of sight before Connie
+returned from school. She might be expected any moment to come slowly
+down Ward Street entwined with one of her school-girl friends. They did
+not like, somehow, to meet Connie. The smile she gave them was apt to be
+disconcerting. They met smiles in the faces of others they encountered
+in their walks, but they were of a quality more kindly than Connie's
+smile.
+
+They had walked one afternoon to the edge of town where Ward Street
+climbed a hill and became the road to Mingo. At their feet lay the
+little fields, in the distance they could see a man plowing with two
+white horses; off to the right lay the water-works pond, gleaming in the
+afternoon sun.
+
+"What are you thinking of?" Marley said.
+
+"I was thinking that it would be nice to live in the country."
+
+"I was thinking that very thing myself!" exclaimed Marley. Their eyes
+met, and they thrilled over this unity in their thoughts. It was
+marvelous to them, mysterious, prophetic.
+
+"Some day I could buy a farm," Marley said; "out that way."
+
+"Yes," Lavinia replied, "away off there, beyond those low trees. Do you
+see?"
+
+She pointed, but Marley did not look in the direction of the trees; he
+looked at her finger. It was so small, so round, so white. He bent
+forward, and kissed the finger.
+
+"Oh, but you must look where I'm pointing," said Lavinia.
+
+They drew closely together. Marley took Lavinia's hand and they stood
+long in silence.
+
+"We could have a country home there," Marley said after a while, "with a
+hedge about it and stables and horses and dogs. It would be close to
+town; I could go in in the morning and out again in the afternoon."
+
+"And I could drive you in, and then come for you in the afternoon--when
+court adjourned."
+
+"Oh, I would have a man to drive me," said Marley.
+
+"But couldn't I ride in beside you?"
+
+"Yes; you could sit beside me, on the back seat; we'd have an open
+carriage."
+
+"A victoria!" exclaimed Lavinia. "It would be the only one in Macochee!"
+
+"Is that what they call them?"
+
+"Victorias?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You know, with a low seat behind and a high seat for the driver. You
+have a green cushion for your feet. You would look so handsome in one,
+Glenn. You would sit very erect and proud, with your hands on a cane.
+You would have white hair then."
+
+"We would be old?" he asked in some dismay.
+
+"No, no," said Lavinia, trying to reconcile her dreams, "not old
+exactly. But I dote on white hair. It's so distinguished for a lawyer
+with a country home. Of course we'll have to get old sometime."
+
+"We'll grow old together, dear."
+
+"Yes," she whispered, "and think of the long years of happiness!"
+
+They stood and gazed, looking down the long vista of years that
+stretched before them as smooth and peaceful as the white road to Mingo.
+
+A subtile change was passing over the face of the road; shadows were
+stealing toward it, and it was growing gray. The trees that still were
+green were darkening to a deeper green, but the colors of those that had
+changed flamed all the brighter. The sun shone more golden on the shocks
+of corn, the sky was glowing pink in the west, the water-works pond was
+glistening as the sun's shafts struck it more obliquely. A fine powder
+hung in the peaceful air.
+
+"How beautiful the fall is!" said Lavinia.
+
+"Yes, I love it," said Marley. "But do you know, dear, that I never
+liked it before? It always seemed sad to me. But you have taught me to
+love many things. You don't know all that you have done for me!"
+
+She stood in her blue dress, with her hands folded before her. Marley
+looked at her hands, and at her white throat, and at her hair, its brown
+turned to a golden hue by the clear light; then he looked into her eyes.
+A sudden emotion, almost religious in its ecstasy, came over him. He
+bent forward.
+
+"Oh!" he exclaimed. "Do you know how beautiful you are! I worship you!"
+
+"Don't, Glenn," she said, "don't say that!" The reflection of a
+superstitious fear lay in her eyes.
+
+"Why?" he said defiantly. "It's all true. You are my religion."
+
+"You frighten me," she said.
+
+Marley laughed.
+
+"Why!" he exclaimed, "there's nothing to fear. Isn't our future assured
+now?"
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIX
+
+                                 WAKING
+
+
+Carman was inducted into office the first Monday in December, quietly,
+as the _Republican_ said, as though it reflected credit on the new
+county clerk as a man who modestly avoided the demonstration that might
+have been expected under such circumstances. Marley, in the hope of
+seeing his own name, eagerly ran his eyes down the few lines that were
+devoted to the occurrence, but his name was not there, the
+_Republican's_ reporter, as he felt, being a man who lacked a sense of
+the relative importance of events.
+
+Marley had taken no part in the campaign, though Wade Powell wished him
+to, and suggested every now and then that he speak at some of the
+meetings that were being held in the country schoolhouses. Powell said
+it would be good practice for him in a profession where so much talking
+has to be done, and he found other reasons why Marley should do this, as
+that it would extend his acquaintance, and give him a standing with the
+party; but, though Marley was always promising, he was always
+postponing; the thought of standing up and speaking to the vast
+audiences his imagination was able to crowd into a little school-room
+filled him with fear, and he never could bring himself to consent to any
+definite time. Besides this, he could not find an evening he was willing
+to spend away from Lavinia.
+
+When election was over, he expected that he would hear from Carman, but
+he had no word from him. Several times he was on the point of mentioning
+the subject to Wade Powell, but somehow, with a reticence for which he
+reproached himself, he could not bring himself to do it. He watched the
+papers closely, but he found it quite as hard to find in them any
+information about Carman as on any other subject, except, possibly, the
+banal personalities of the town as they related themselves to the coming
+and going of the trains.
+
+But at last, on the day it had occurred to the reporter to chronicle the
+fact that Carman had been inducted into office, the little item struck
+Marley sadly; he felt a sense of detachment from Carman; he could not
+altogether realize that intimate relationship to Carman in his new
+official position that he felt belonged to one who was to be Carman's
+deputy. In his imagination he saw Carman shambling about in the dingy
+room where the county clerk kept the records of the court, his knees
+unhinging loosely at each step, his shoulders bent, his hands in his
+trousers pockets, his right eye squinting here and there observantly,
+the left fixed, impervious to light and shadow, to all that was going on
+in the world. He wondered if Carman, as he looked about, had been
+thinking in any wise of him or had seen him as a part of the place where
+his life was to be lived for the next three years.
+
+Marley read the paper at supper time; in the evening he went to see
+Lavinia. She too had read the paper.
+
+"I know," she said simply, and he was grateful for her quick intuition.
+"Have you seen him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Are you going to?"
+
+"Would you?"
+
+"Why, certainly, at once."
+
+Marley went to the Court House the first thing in the morning. He feared
+he might have arrived too early, but Carman had the virtue that goes
+farther perhaps than any other in the affections and approval of men, he
+rose early. He had been at his office since long before seven o'clock.
+
+Marley found the new county clerk at his desk, obviously ready for
+business. The desk was clean, with a cleanness that was rather a
+barrenness than an order. The ink-wells, the pens, with their shining
+new steel points, the fresh blotters, all were laid on the clean pad
+with geometrical exactness. The pigeon holes were empty, but they were
+all lettered as if the mind of the new county clerk had grappled with
+the future, come off victorious, and provided for every possible
+emergency, though there were certain contingencies that had impressed
+him as "Miscellaneous."
+
+Carman looked up with the obliging expression of the new public
+official, but Marley's heart instantly sank with a foreboding that told
+him he might as well turn about then and go. It was plain that Carman
+saw nothing in the call beyond a mere incident of the day's work.
+
+Marley took a chair near Carman's desk. He looked at Carman once, and
+then looked instantly away; the eye that lacked the power of
+accommodation was fixed on him, and it made him nervous.
+
+"Do you remember me, Mr. Carman?" asked Marley; and then fearing the
+reply he hastened to add: "I'm Glenn Marley; Mr. Powell introduced me to
+you out at the fair-grounds last fall."
+
+"Yes, I remember," said Carman.
+
+"I suppose you know what I came for?"
+
+Carman's right eye widened somewhat in an expression of mild surprise.
+
+"You know," urged Marley, "the clerkship."
+
+"What clerkship was that?"
+
+"Why, don't you know? The chief clerkship, I reckon."
+
+"Here?"
+
+"Why, yes. Don't you remember?"
+
+Carman's right eye wore a puzzled look.
+
+"Don't you remember?"
+
+"Well, you've got me," said Carman, with a little laugh of apology.
+
+"Why, I understood," Marley went on, "that in the event of your election
+I was to have a position here."
+
+"What as?"
+
+"Why--as chief deputy."
+
+That right eye of Carman's was fixed on him questioningly.
+
+"Chief deputy?" he said finally. "Here--in my office?"
+
+"Why, yes," said Marley. "Don't you remember?"
+
+The question in the right eye had given way to a surprise that was
+growing in Carman's mind, and spreading contagiously to a surprise,
+deeper and more acute, in Marley's mind. The eye had something
+reproachful in its steady stare. Marley leaned over impulsively.
+
+"Why, surely you haven't forgotten--that day out at the fair-grounds,
+when Mr. Powell introduced me to you? I understood, I always understood
+that I was to have the place. I never mentioned it to you afterward, I
+didn't like to bother you, you know. I waited along, feeling that
+everything was all right. But when election was over--and afterward,
+when you took your office, and I didn't hear anything--I thought I'd
+come around and see you."
+
+Despite the sinister left eye, Marley leaned close to Carman and waited.
+Carman was long in bringing himself to speak. Even then he did not seem
+to be sure of the situation he was dealing with.
+
+"You say you understood you was to have a job under me as chief clerk?"
+
+"Why, yes," replied Marley.
+
+"Who'd you understand it from, me or Wade Powell?"
+
+"Well--" Marley hesitated, "I thought I understood it from you; I
+certainly understood it from Mr. Powell."
+
+"You say you got the idea from something I said out at the
+fair-grounds?"
+
+"Yes, sir, at the fair-grounds."
+
+Carman turned away and knitted his brows.
+
+"At the fair-grounds," he said presently, as though talking more to
+himself than to Marley. "The fair-grounds, h-m. Yes, I do remember--"
+
+Marley's heart stirred with a little hope.
+
+"I do remember seeing you there, and talking to you. But I don't
+remember making you any promises. Did you ask me?"
+
+"No; Mr. Powell did that."
+
+"And what did I say?"
+
+"Well," Marley answered, "I can't recall your exact words, but I got the
+impression, and so did Mr. Powell, I'm sure, that it was all right, I--I
+counted on it."
+
+"Well, say, Glenn," he said; "I'm awfully sorry, honest I am. I remember
+now, come to think of it, that Wade did say something like that, and
+maybe I said something to lead you to think I'd do it; I don't say I
+didn't--I don't just remember. But I reckon you've banked more on what
+Wade told you than on what I did. Course, I reckon I didn't turn you
+down--a feller never does that in a campaign, you know. But Wade takes a
+lot o' things for granted in this life."
+
+He smiled indulgently, as if Powell's weaknesses were commonly known and
+understood.
+
+"I reckon you relied too much on what Wade told you," Carman went on.
+His right eye was fixed on Marley, but Marley did not return the look.
+He had turned half-way round and thrown his arm over the back of his
+chair. He looked out the window, his eyes vacant and sad. He was
+thinking of Lavinia, of their hopes and plans, of the little home that
+had become almost a reality to them; the trees in the Court-House yard
+held their gaunt limbs helplessly up against the cold December day; the
+ugly clouds were hurrying desperately across the sky; he thought of the
+little law office across the street, with the dusty law books lying on
+the table, and the hopelessness of it all overwhelmed him. But there
+beside him Carman still was speaking:
+
+"It's like Wade," he was saying. "I'm sorry, derned if I hain't."
+
+Marley scarcely heard him. He was looking ahead. How many years--
+
+"He hadn't ought to of done it," Carman was going on; "no, sir, he
+hadn't ought."
+
+How many years, Marley was thinking, would they have to wait now? Would
+Lavinia be lost with all the rest? Ought he to ask her to wait any
+longer? But Carman kept on:
+
+"I've got all my arrangements made now, you see."
+
+He swept his arm about the office where the few clerks were bending over
+the big records in which they were copying the pleadings they could not
+understand. Marley did not see; he saw nothing but the ruin of all his
+hopes. It was still in there; the atmosphere held the musty odor of a
+public office; the clock ticked; once a stamping machine clicked sharply
+as a clerk marked a filing date on some document. And then a great
+disgust overwhelmed him, a disgust with himself for being so fatuous, so
+credulous. He had taken so much for granted, he had acted as a child,
+not as a man, and he felt a hatred for himself, he felt almost like
+striking himself.
+
+"I guess I've been a fool," he said suddenly, rising from his chair.
+
+"No, you haven't neither," said Carman, "but Wade Powell has; he had no
+business--"
+
+Marley did not wait to hear Carman finish his sentence. Shame and
+mortification were the final aspects of his defeat; he put on his hat,
+drew it down over his eyes and stalked away. Carman looked at him as he
+disappeared through the lofty door. The pupil of his right eye widened
+as he looked, and when Glenn had passed from his sight he turned to his
+desk, and began to rearrange the tools to which he was so unaccustomed.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XX
+
+                             HEART OF GRACE
+
+
+Marley sighed in relief when he went up the steps of the Blair house
+that evening. Somehow he had got through the long, desolate day. He was
+sore from his great defeat, but the worst, at any rate, was over; the
+pang had been sharp, but now the pain had been dulled. He had spent the
+day in the office. Wade Powell had been in and out, but never once had
+he spoken of the clerkship, and Marley was too deep in humiliation to
+mention it. His one consolation was in the fact that he had never told
+any one of his prospect, not even his own mother; it had been a secret
+which he and Lavinia had shared luxuriously; though, as Marley now
+looked back on their joy, he realized that what had kept him from
+telling any one was a prudent skepticism, a lack of faith in the
+possibility of human happiness, an inherited dread of the calamity that
+stalks every joy.
+
+Lavinia flung the hall door wide for him before he could ring the bell.
+
+"What is the matter?"
+
+"How did you know anything was?" he asked.
+
+"Why," she exclaimed, "I could tell the minute I heard your step. Tell
+me--what is it?"
+
+Marley, ever sensitive to atmospheres, instantly felt the peace of the
+household. The glow from the living-room, a quiet voice speaking a
+commonplace word now and then, told him that Mrs. Blair was there with
+Connie and Chad, and he knew the children were at their lessons; he
+caught the faint odor of a cigar, and he knew that Judge Blair was in
+his library reading peacefully of the dead and silent past, whose men
+had left all their troubles in the leaves of printed books; all round
+him life was flowing on, unconsciously, and normally; the tumult and
+strife in his own soul were nothing to the world. All this flashed on
+him in an instant--and there was Lavinia, standing before him, her white
+brow knit in perplexity.
+
+"Tell me," she was saying, "what it is."
+
+"Well, I don't get the job, that's all."
+
+He felt a momentary savage pleasure in the pain he inflicted, justifying
+it in the thought that he eased his own suffering by giving it to
+another. Then as quickly he repented, and felt ashamed.
+
+"Is that all?" she said. She had come close to him, smiling in her
+sympathy, and then lifting a hand to his forehead.
+
+"Don't do that," she said, as if she would erase the scowl.
+
+When they were seated he gave her the details of his meeting with
+Carman, and with the recital of his disappointment its sharpness was
+repeated. He leaned over, his elbows on his knees, and clutched his hair
+in his fists. For an instant a kind of relief came to Lavinia, a relief
+that a crisis in her life had been postponed, a crisis from which,
+instinctively, she had shrunk. Her life could go on for a while as it
+had always gone on; change, which mortals dread, was delayed. Then in
+another moment her sympathy went out to him; she was on the floor at his
+knees, her arms about him.
+
+"Don't, dear, don't," she pleaded. "Why, it is nothing. What does it
+matter? What does anything matter, so long as we have each other?"
+
+She stroked his hair, she called him by all her endearing names. She
+tried to take his hands from his face, that she might get him to look at
+her. But he resisted.
+
+"No," he said. "I'm no good; I'm a failure; I'm worse than a failure.
+I'm a fool, a poor, weak, silly fool."
+
+"Hush, Glenn, hush!" she whispered, as if he were uttering blasphemies.
+"You must not, you must not!"
+
+She shook him in a kind of fear.
+
+"Look at me!" she said. "Look at me!"
+
+He remained obdurate, slowly shaking his head from side to side.
+
+"Look at me!" Lavinia repeated. "Don't you see--don't you see that--I
+love you?"
+
+A change came over him, subtile, but distinct. Slowly he raised his
+head, and then he put his arms about her and held her close, and
+gradually a comfort stole over him,--a comfort so delicious that he felt
+himself hardly worthy, because he now saw that all through the day he
+had had a subconsciousness that it would come to him at evening, and
+that he had somehow exaggerated his own grief in order to make this
+certain comfort the sweeter when it came.
+
+It seemed to Marley, after he and Lavinia had sat there for a while,
+that he had come out of some nightmare; sanity returned, things assumed
+once more their proper proportions and relations to each other. He found
+himself smiling, if not laughing just yet, and with Lavinia's hope and
+confidence the future opened to him once more. Now and then, of course,
+his disappointment would roll over him as a great wave, and once he said
+ruefully:
+
+"But think of the little home we were going to have!"
+
+"But we're going to have it," Lavinia replied, smiling on him, "we're
+going to have it, just the same!"
+
+"But we'll have to wait!"
+
+"Well, we're young," said Lavinia, "and it won't be so very long."
+
+"But I wanted it to be in the spring."
+
+"May be it will be, who knows?" Lavinia could smile in this reassurance,
+now that she knew it could not be in the spring.
+
+They discussed their future in all its phases, with the hope that
+Lavinia could so easily inspire in him; Marley was to keep on with his
+law studies; there was nothing else now to do--unless something should
+turn up--there was always that hope.
+
+"And it will, you'll see," said Lavinia.
+
+They discussed, too, Carman and Wade Powell. Marley thought that Lavinia
+might return to her old severity with Powell; when he expected her to do
+this, he was preparing to defend Powell; when she did not, but was
+generous with him, and urged Marley to reflect that he had done all he
+had done out of a spirit of kindness, Marley was disposed to be severe
+with Powell himself. Carman, they agreed, had acted handsomely; they
+could not find cause to blame him.
+
+"No," said Marley, "he treated me all right; I believe he was really
+sorry for me."
+
+And then, at the thought of Carman's having pity for him, his rebellion
+flamed up again.
+
+"It's humiliating, that's what it is. Wade Powell had no business making
+a monkey of me in that way; though it doesn't take much to make a monkey
+of me; I had the job almost completed myself, just waiting for some one
+to come along and put the finishing touches on. And Wade Powell did
+that!"
+
+Marley spoke in the sardonic humor the wounded and beaten spirit likes
+to employ in dealing with itself. But Lavinia hushed him.
+
+"You just can not talk that way about yourself, Glenn," she declared
+with her finest air of ownership. "I won't let you."
+
+"Well, it's so humiliating," he said.
+
+"Why, no, it can't be that," Lavinia argued. "You can not feel
+humiliated. You have done nothing that need cause you any humiliation.
+We are the only ones who can humiliate ourselves; nothing but our own
+actions can humiliate us; no one else can."
+
+Lavinia had a smiling little triumph in her own philosophy, but she
+quickly compromised it by an inconsistency.
+
+"Besides, no one else knows about it."
+
+"No," Marley agreed thoughtfully, and without noticing her
+inconsistency. "No one else knows anything about it. We have that to be
+thankful for, anyway."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXI
+
+                             CHRISTMAS EVE
+
+
+Lawrence was arranging for a grand ball in the Odd Fellows' Hall, on
+Christmas Eve, and he had, as he came around to the office one day to
+assure Marley, counted him and Lavinia in. Marley, glad enough to close
+the law-book he was finding more and more irksome, listened to
+Lawrence's enthusiasm for a while, but said at last:
+
+"I'm afraid I can't go."
+
+"Why not? Lavinia will want to go; she always does."
+
+"I know that," Marley admitted, "but I can't, that's all."
+
+Lawrence looked at him intently for a moment.
+
+"Say, Glenn, what's the matter with you?" he said. "Anything been going
+wrong lately? You look like you were in the dumps."
+
+Marley shook his head with a negative gesture that admitted all Lawrence
+had said.
+
+"You ain't fretting over that job, are you?"
+
+"What job?"
+
+Marley looked up suddenly.
+
+"Why, with Carman."
+
+"How'd you know?"
+
+"Oh, everybody knows about that," Lawrence replied with a light air that
+added to Marley's gloom; "but what of it? I wouldn't let that cut me up;
+come out and show yourself a little more! You don't want to keep Lavinia
+housed up there, away from all the fun that's going on, do you? Mayme
+and I were talking about it the other night; you and Lavinia haven't
+been to a thing for months; it isn't right, I tell you."
+
+Marley looked sharply at Lawrence for a minute, and Lawrence marking the
+resentment in his eyes, hastened on:
+
+"Don't get mad, now; I don't mean anything. I'm only saying it for your
+good. I think you need a little shaking up, that's all."
+
+"Lavinia can do as she likes," Marley said with dignity. "I shall not
+hinder her; I never have."
+
+"Well, don't get sore now, old man; I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.
+The holidays are here and you want to cut into the game; it's a time to
+forget your troubles and have a little fun; you've only got one life to
+live; what's the use of taking it so seriously?"
+
+Marley looked at Lawrence with a genuine envy for an instant, as at a
+man who never took anything in life very seriously; he looked at the new
+overcoat Lawrence held over his knee, showing its satin lining; and
+then, reflecting that Lawrence's father had left with his estate a block
+of bank stock which had given Lawrence his position in the bank,
+Marley's impatience with him returned and he said:
+
+"Oh, it's easy enough for you to talk; if you were in my place you might
+find it different."
+
+"That's all right," Lawrence went on, a smile on his freckled face. "You
+just come to the party; it'll cost you only five, and Lavinia would like
+it. I know that. So do you."
+
+Marley did know it; and he felt a new disgust with himself that remained
+with him long after Lawrence had put on his new overcoat and left. He
+reproached himself bitterly, and he told himself that the best thing he
+could do would be to go away somewhere, and not tell Lavinia, or
+anybody.
+
+"I'm only in her way, that's all," he thought as he opened his law-book,
+and bent it back viciously, so that it would stay open.
+
+Ever since the fiasco of his plans as to a place with Carman, he had
+been seeking consolation in a new resolution to keep on patiently in the
+law; but it was a consolation that he had to keep active by a constant
+contemplation of himself as a young man who was making a brave and
+determined fight against heavy odds. It was difficult to sustain this
+heroic attitude in his own eyes and at the same time maintain that
+modesty which he knew would become him best in the eyes of others. The
+approach of the holiday season, the visible preparations on every hand
+and the gay spirits everywhere apparent had isolated him more than ever,
+and he had felt his alienation complete whenever he went to see Lavinia
+and found the whole Blair family in an excitement over their own
+festival. Marley would have liked to make Lavinia handsome gifts, but
+his debts were already large, relatively, and he rose to heights of
+self-denial that made him pathetic to himself, when he decided that he
+could give her nothing. Now that Lawrence was getting up a ball to which
+he knew Lavinia would like to go, as she had always gone to the balls
+that were not so frequent in Macochee as Lawrence wished they might be,
+he felt his humiliation deeper than ever. He put the matter honestly to
+Lavinia, however, and she said promptly:
+
+"Why, I wouldn't think of going."
+
+She looked up at him brightly, and then in an instant she looked down
+again. She relished the nobility of the attitude she had so promptly
+taken, but the woman in her prevailed over the saint, and told what a
+moment before she had determined not to tell:
+
+"I've already declined one invitation."
+
+She saw the look of pain come into Marley's eyes, and instantly she
+regretted.
+
+"You have?" he said.
+
+"Why, yes." She looked at him with her head turned to one side; her face
+wore an expression he did not like to see.
+
+It was on Marley's lips to ask who had invited her, but his pride would
+not let him do that; somehow a sense of separation fell suddenly between
+them. He examined with deep interest the arm of his chair.
+
+"Well," he began presently, "I wouldn't have you stay away on my
+account, you know." He looked up suddenly. "Please don't stay away,
+Lavinia. I'd like to have you go."
+
+There was contrition in her voice as she almost flew to reply:
+
+"Why, you dear old thing, it was only George Halliday who asked me; and
+when I told him I wouldn't go he was actually relieved; he said he
+didn't want to go himself; he hates our little functions out here, you
+know, and has ever since he came back from Harvard. I suppose he was
+used to so much more in Cambridge!" Lavinia had a sneer in her tone, and
+it took on a shade of irritation as she added: "He asked me only because
+he was sorry for me."
+
+"Yes, sorry for you," Marley repeated bitterly. "That's another thing
+I've done for you."
+
+"Please don't, dear," said Lavinia, "don't let yourself get bitter.
+It'll be all right. We'll spend Christmas Eve here at home and have ever
+so much more fun by ourselves."
+
+Mrs. Blair told Marley that she wished Lavinia might go to the ball; her
+father wished it, too. Mrs. Blair told him that she could easily get
+George Halliday to take her,--their lifelong intimacy with the Hallidays
+permitted that. Marley assured her that he wished Lavinia to accept
+Halliday's invitation, but that she would not do so.
+
+"I'd take her myself," he added, "only I can't dance, and--I have no
+money. I'd like to have her go, if it would give her pleasure."
+
+"I know you would, you dear boy," said Mrs. Blair, laying her hand on
+his shoulder in her affectionate way.
+
+Mrs. Blair urged Lavinia to go, and so did Marley, and when he saw that
+she was determined not to go, he urged her all the more strongly,
+because, now that he was sure of her position, he could so much more
+enjoy his own disinterestedness and magnanimity. They desisted when
+Lavinia complained that they were making her life miserable.
+
+Though Marley could deny Lavinia the dance, he found, after all, that he
+could not deny himself the distinction of giving her a Christmas
+present. His heroic attitude gradually broke under the temptation of
+Hoffman's jewelry store, glittering with its holiday display. Marley
+already owed Hoffman for Lavinia's ring, but like most of the merchants
+in Macochee, Hoffman had to do business on an elastic credit, if he
+wished to do any business at all, and Marley, after many pains of
+selection, did not have much difficulty in inducing Hoffman to let him
+have the pearl opera-glasses he finally chose in the despair of thinking
+of anything better.
+
+The opera-glasses might have atoned for the deprivation of the ball, had
+Marley been able to think of them with any comfort. The delight Lavinia
+expressed in a gift she could never use in Macochee, and the enthusiasm
+with which Connie admired them, made him nervous and guilty. Connie had
+temporarily foregone her claims to young-ladyhood, and was a child again
+for a little while. Her excitement and that of Chad should have made any
+Christmas Eve merry, but it was not a merry Christmas Eve for Marley.
+
+As Lavinia and he sat in the parlor they caught now and then, or
+imagined they caught, the strains of the orchestra that was playing for
+the dancers in the Odd Fellows' Hall, and they were both conscious that
+life would be tolerable for them only when the music should cease and
+the ball take its place among the things of the past, incapable of
+further trouble in the earth.
+
+"It's very trying," said Judge Blair to his wife that night. "I wish
+there was something we could do."
+
+"So do I," his wife acquiesced.
+
+"I don't like to see Lavinia cut off this way from every enjoyment. The
+strain must be very wearing."
+
+"I suppose it is very wearing with most lovers," said Mrs. Blair. "I
+don't see how they ever endure it; but they all do."
+
+"Have you talked with her about it?" The judge put his question with a
+guarded look, and was not surprised when his wife quickly replied:
+
+"Gracious, no. I'd never dare."
+
+"No, I presume not. I don't know who would, unless it might be Connie."
+
+Mrs. Blair was silent for a while in the trouble that was all the more
+serious because they dared not recognize its seriousness, and then she
+asked:
+
+"Couldn't you help him to something?"
+
+"I don't know what," the judge replied. "There's really no opening in a
+little town."
+
+"If you were off the bench and back in the practice--"
+
+"Great heavens!" he interrupted her. "Don't mention such a thing!"
+
+"I meant that you might take him in with you."
+
+"I'd be looking around for some one to take me in," the judge said. "I'm
+glad I haven't the problem to face." He enjoyed for a moment the snug
+sense he had in his own position and then he sighed.
+
+"He's young, he has that, anyway. He'll work it out somehow, I suppose,
+though I don't know how. As for us, all we can do is to have patience,
+and wait."
+
+"Yes, that's all," said Mrs. Blair. "I don't believe in long
+engagements."
+
+"How long has it been?" he asked.
+
+"Nearly a year now."
+
+"I thought it had been ten."
+
+Mrs. Blair laughed as she said: "Connie was wishing this morning that
+he'd marry her and get it over with."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXII
+
+                      AN ADVERTISEMENT OF DESTINY
+
+
+The first days of spring contrasted strongly with Marley's mood. Because
+of some mysterious similarity in the two seasons he found the melancholy
+suggestion of fall in this spring, just as, with his high-flown hopes,
+he had found some of the joyous suggestion of spring in the autumn
+before. But as failure followed failure, he began to feel more and more
+an alien in Macochee; he had a sense of exile among his own kind, he was
+tortured by the thought that here, in a world where each man had some
+work to do and where, as it seemed, all men had suddenly grown happy in
+that work, there was no work for him to do.
+
+He was young, healthy, and ambitious; he had given years to what he had
+been taught was a necessary preparation, and then suddenly, just as he
+felt himself ready for life, he found that there was no place in life
+for him. As he went about seeking employment there was borne in on him a
+sense of criticism and opposition, and he was depressed and humiliated.
+By the end of the winter he disliked showing himself anywhere; he no
+longer stopped in the McBriar House of an afternoon to watch Lawrence
+and Halliday at the billiards they played so well; he thought he
+detected a coolness in Lawrence's treatment of him. He felt, or
+imagined, this coolness in everybody's attitude now, and finally began
+to suspect it in the Blairs.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Powell, one morning. "You ain't sick, are
+you?"
+
+Marley shook his head.
+
+"Well, something ails you. I can see that." He waited for Marley to
+speak. "Is there anything I can do for you?"
+
+"No," said Marley, "thank you. I've just been feeling a little bit blue,
+that's all."
+
+"What about?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I'm kind o' discouraged. It seems to me that I'm
+wasting time; I'm not making any headway and then everybody in town
+is--"
+
+"I wouldn't mind that," said Powell, divining the trouble at once.
+"They've had me on the gridiron for about forty years, and they never
+get tired of giving it a twist. It doesn't bother me much any more, and
+I don't see why you should let it bother you, especially as all they say
+about you is a damn lie."
+
+The speech touched Marley, and he lost himself in an impulse of sympathy
+for Powell, but he could not put his sympathy before Powell in the way
+he would like and his mind soon returned to himself.
+
+"I've got to do something," he said. "I wish I knew what."
+
+"Well," said Powell, "you know what I've always told you. I know what
+I'd do if I were your age. Of course--"
+
+Powell did not finish his sentence. He was looking out the window again,
+lost in introspection.
+
+Powell's reiteration of his old advice expressed the very thought that
+had been nebulous in Marley's mind for days, and while he was conscious
+of it, he feared the consciousness, and struggled to prevent it from
+positing itself. But now that Powell had voiced it for him, he could
+escape it no longer, and it filled him with a fear. He went about all
+the day with this fear appalling him; more and more under its perverse
+influence he felt himself an alien, and the people he met in the street
+seemed unreal and strange, outlandish persons whom he had never known.
+They came upon him as ghosts, or if they did something to prove their
+reality, he seemed to be some ghost himself.
+
+In the afternoon he received a note from Lavinia; she said that she was
+going that evening with George Halliday to a concert in the Opera House.
+She did not want to go a bit, she said, but her mother, and especially
+her father, had urged her to go; arguing that she now went out so seldom
+that it must do her good, and besides, they had urged her so often that
+she felt it to be her duty in this instance; she had held out as long as
+she could, and then had yielded.
+
+Marley tried to look upon the note reasonably; he could see the
+influence that had compelled Lavinia to go, and he knew he had no right
+to blame her, and yet, try as he would, he could not escape a feeling of
+bitterness. When he went home at evening his mother instantly noticed
+his depression, and implored him for the reason. He did not answer for a
+while, that is, it seemed a while to Mrs. Marley, but at last he said:
+
+"Mother, I've got to leave."
+
+"Leave?" she repeated, pronouncing the word in a hollow note of fear.
+
+"Yes, leave."
+
+"But what for?"
+
+"Well, you know I'm no good; I'm making no headway; there's no place for
+me here in Macochee; I've got to get out into the world and _make_ a
+place for myself, somewhere."
+
+"But where?"
+
+"I don't know--anywhere."
+
+Marley moved his hand in a wide gesture that included the whole world,
+and yet was without hope of conquest.
+
+"But you must have some plans--some idea--"
+
+"Well, I've thought of going to Cincinnati; maybe to Chicago."
+
+"But what will you do?" Mrs. Marley looked at him with pain and alarm.
+
+"Do!" he said, his voice rising almost angrily. "Why, anything I can get
+to do. Anything, anything, sweeping streets, digging ditches, anything!"
+
+Mrs. Marley looked at her son, sitting there before her with his head
+bowed in his hands. In her own face were reflected the pain and trouble
+that darkened his, and yet she felt herself helpless; she vaguely
+realized that he was engaged in a battle that he must after all fight
+alone; she could not help him, though she wished that she knew how to
+impart to him the faith she had that he would win the battle, somehow,
+in the end.
+
+"Poor boy!" she said at length, rising; "you are not yourself just now.
+Think it all over and talk to your father about it."
+
+It was the first evening in months that Marley had not spent with
+Lavinia, and his existence being now so bound up with hers, he found
+that he could not spend the evening as the other young men in town spent
+their evenings. However, he went down to the McBriar House and there a
+long bill hanging on the wall instantly struck his eye. The bill
+announced an excursion to Chicago. It took away his breath; he stood
+transfixed before it, fascinated and yet repelled; he read it through a
+dozen times. The cheerful way in which the railroad held out this trip
+intensified his own gloom; he wondered how he might escape, but there
+was no way; it was plainly the revelation of his destiny, prophetic,
+absolute, final, and he bowed before it as to a decree of fate; he knew
+now that he must go.
+
+As he went home, as he walked the dark streets in the air that was full
+of the balm of the coming spring, he felt as one to whom a great sorrow
+had come. He thought of leaving Macochee, of leaving his father and
+mother, and then, more than all, of leaving Lavinia, and his throat
+ached with the pain of parting that, even now, before any of his plans
+had been made, began to assail him. His plans were nothing now; they had
+become the merest details; the great decision had been reached, not by
+him, but for him; the destiny toward which all the lines of his
+existence for months had been converging, was on him, the moment had
+arrived, and he had a sense of being the mute and helpless victim of
+forces that were playing with him, hurrying him along to a future as
+dark as the moonless night above him.
+
+He told his father of the excursion, though he gave him no notion of it
+as an expression of his fate, and he was all the more distressed at the
+calm way in which his father acquiesced in what he put before him as a
+decision he would have liked to have appear as less final. His father in
+his mildness could not object to his trying, and he would provide the
+money for the experiment. It gave Marley a moment's respite to have his
+father speak of it as an experiment, for that included the possibility
+of failure, and hence of his return home, but this meager consolation
+was immediately dissipated in the surer sense he felt that this was the
+end--the end of Macochee, the end of home, and the beginning of a new
+life.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXIII
+
+                               THE BREAK
+
+
+Marley went to Lavinia the next morning, and told her as they sat there
+on the veranda in the spring sunlight. She looked at him with distress
+in her wide blue eyes.
+
+"When?" she asked.
+
+"To-night!"
+
+"Tonight? Oh Glenn!"
+
+Her eyes had filled with tears, and she was winking hard to keep them
+back.
+
+"To-night."
+
+She repeated the word over and over again.
+
+"And to think," she managed to say at last, "to think that the last
+night I should have been away from you! How can I ever forgive myself!"
+
+Her lip trembled, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. She drew out her
+handkerchief and said:
+
+"Let's go in."
+
+All that day Marley went about faltering over his preparations. Wade
+Powell was the only one of the few who were interested in him that was
+enthusiastic over his going, and he praised and congratulated him, and
+pierced his already sore heart by declaring that he had known all along
+it was what Marley would be compelled to do. He would give him a letter
+to his old friend, Judge Johnson, he said; the judge would be a great
+man for him to know, and Powell sat down at once, with more energy and
+enterprise than Marley had ever known him to show, and began to
+elaborate his letter of introduction.
+
+Marley dreaded saying good-by; he wished to shirk it as to Powell as he
+intended to shirk it in the cases of his few friends; he was to return
+to the office a last time in the afternoon to get the letter; and then
+he would bid Powell good-by. He had the day before him, but that thought
+could give him no comfort. He would see Lavinia again in the afternoon;
+he would see her once more, for the last time, in the evening, and in
+the meantime he would see his father and his mother, and his home; he
+had still two meals to eat with them, but it was as if he had already
+gone; there was no reality in his presence there among them; the blow
+that fate had decreed had fallen, and all that was to be was then
+actually in being; all about him the men and women of Macochee were
+pursuing their ordinary occupations just as if he were not so soon to go
+away and be of this scene no more; a few hours, and another day, and
+they would be going on with their concerns just the same, and he would
+have disappeared out of their lives and out of their memories.
+
+He looked at everything that had been associated with his life, and
+everything called up some memory,--the little office where he had tried
+to study law, the Court House, and the blind goddess of justice holding
+aloft her scales, the familiar Square, the cloaked cavalryman on the
+monument, every tree, every fence, every brick in the sidewalk somehow
+called out to him--and he was leaving them all. He looked up and down
+Main Street, wide and ugly, littered with refuse, ragged with its
+graceless signs; he thought of the people who had gossiped about him,
+the people whom he had hated, but now he could not find in his heart the
+satisfaction he had expected in leaving them. He felt tenderly, almost
+affectionately, toward them all. But it was worse at home. He wandered
+about the house, looking at every piece of furniture, at every trinket;
+he went into the woodshed, and the old ax, the old saw, everything he
+had known for years, wrung his heart; he went to the barn, he looked at
+the muddy buggy in which he had driven so often with his father; he
+reproached himself because he had not kept the buggy cleaner for him; he
+went into the stall and patted the flank of Dolly, finally he put his
+arms about her warm neck, laid his face against it, and the tears rolled
+down his cheeks.
+
+One of the preachers that were always dropping in on them was there to
+dinner, and in the blessing he invoked on the temporalities, as he
+called them, he prayed with professional unction for the son who was
+about to leave the old roof-tree, and this made the ordeal harder for
+them all. Doctor Marley spoke to the preacher of little things that he
+was to do within the next few days and Marley wondered how he could
+mention them, for they were to be done at a time when he would be there
+no more. Because he conceived of life, as all must conceive of it,
+solely in its relation to himself, he could not imagine life going on in
+Macochee without him.
+
+The afternoon wore on, he passed his hour with Lavinia; they were to
+meet then but once again; he returned home, his mother had packed his
+trunk; it was waiting. He was tender with his mother, and he wondered
+now, with a wild regret, why he had not always been tender with her; he
+was tender now with all things; a tenderness suffused his whole being;
+it seemed as if it might dissolve in tears.
+
+Still he shrank back; there was one thing more to do; he was to go
+up-town and get his ticket, and the letter to Judge Johnson, and bid
+Wade Powell good-by. A wild hope leaped in his heart; perhaps--but no,
+it was irrevocable now. He went, and got his letter, but Powell refused
+to bid him good-by; he said he would be at the train to see him off. He
+bought his ticket and went home. Old man Downing had been there with his
+dray and hauled away his trunk; it was settled. He could only wait and
+watch the minutes tick by.
+
+It seemed to Marley that all things that evening conspired to accentuate
+all that he was leaving behind, and to make the grief of parting more
+poignant. His mother, who was then in that domestic exigency described
+by the ladies of Macochee as being without a girl, had prepared an
+unusually elaborate supper, and while there was no formal observance of
+the fact, it was eaten, so far as any of them could eat that evening,
+under a sense of its significance as a parting ceremonial. They talked,
+or tried to talk, indifferently of commonplace things, and Doctor Marley
+even sought to add merriment to their feast by a jocularity that was
+unusual with him. Marley, who knew his father so well, could easily
+detect the heavy heart that lay under his father's jokes, and he
+suffered a keener misery from the pathos of it. Then he would catch his
+mother looking at him, her eyes deep and sad, and it seemed to him that
+his heart must burst.
+
+Marley's train was to leave at eleven o'clock; he had arranged to go to
+Lavinia's and remain with her until ten o'clock; then he was to stop in
+at his home for his last good-by. Those last two hours with Lavinia were
+an ordeal; into the first hour they tried to crowd a thousand things
+they felt they must say, and a thousand things they could only suggest;
+when the clock struck nine, they looked at each other in anguish; they
+did little after that but mentally count the minutes. The clock ticked
+loudly, aggressively, until in the soul of each, unconfessed, there was
+a desire to hasten the moments they felt they would like to stay; the
+agony was almost beyond endurance; it exhausted them, beat them down,
+and rendered them powerless to speak. Finally the clock struck the
+half-hour; they could only sit and look at each other now; at a quarter
+of ten they began their good-bys.
+
+At ten o'clock Mrs. Blair, Connie and Chad came into the room solemnly,
+and bade Marley farewell; the judge himself came in after them, his
+glasses in his hand and the magazine he had been reading, which, as
+Marley thought with that pang of things going on without him, he would
+in a few moments be reading again as calmly as ever. He took Marley's
+hand, and wished him success; for the first time he spoke gently, almost
+affectionately to him, and although Marley tried to bear himself
+stoically, the judge's farewell touched him more than all the others.
+
+The shameless children would have liked to remain and see the tragedy to
+its close, but Mrs. Blair drew them from the room with her. The last
+moment had come, and Marley held Lavinia in his arms; at last he tore
+himself from her, and it was over. He looked back from out the darkness;
+Lavinia was still standing in the doorway; he saw her slender, girlish
+figure outlined against the hall light behind her; somehow he knew that
+she was bravely smiling through her tears. She stood there until his
+footfall sounded loud in the spring night, then the light went out, the
+door closed as he had heard it close so often, and she was gone.
+
+He saw the light in his father's study as he approached his home, and
+there came again that torturing sense: the sermon his father then was
+working on would be preached when he was far away; his mother, as he
+knew by the light in the sitting-room window, was waiting for him; she
+had waited there so many nights, and now she was waiting for the last
+time. She rose at his step, and took him to her arms the minute he
+entered the door.
+
+"Be brave, dear," he said, stroking her gray hair; "be brave." He was
+trying so hard to be brave himself, and she was crying. He had not often
+seen her cry. She could not speak for many minutes; she could only pat
+him on the shoulder where her head lay.
+
+"Remember, my precious boy," she managed to say at last, "that there's a
+strong Arm to lean upon."
+
+He saw that she was turning now to the great faith that had sustained
+her in every trial of a life that had known so many trials; and the
+tears came to his own eyes. He would have left her for a moment but she
+followed him. He had an impulse he could not resist to torture himself
+by going over the house again; he went into the dining-room which in the
+darkness wore an air of waiting for the breakfast they would eat when he
+was gone; he went to the kitchen and took a drink of water, from the old
+habit he was now breaking; then he went up stairs and looked into his
+own room, at the neatly made bed where he was to sleep no more; at last
+he stood at the door of the study.
+
+He could catch the odor of his father's cigar, just as he had in
+standing there so many times before; he pushed the door open and felt
+the familiar hot, close, smoke-laden atmosphere which his father seemed
+to find so congenial to his studies. Doctor Marley took off his
+spectacles and pushed his manuscript aside, and Marley felt that he
+never would forget that picture of the gray head bent in its earnest
+labors over that worn and littered desk; it was photographed for all
+time on his memory. His words with his father had always been few; there
+were no more now.
+
+"Well, father," he said, "I've come to say good-by."
+
+His father pushed back his chair and turned about. He half-rose, then
+sank back again and took his son's hand.
+
+"Good-by, Glenn," he said. "You'll write?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Write often. We'll want to hear."
+
+"Yes, write often," the doctor said. "And take care of yourself."
+
+"I will, father."
+
+"Wait a moment." Doctor Marley was fumbling in his pocket. He drew forth
+a few dollars.
+
+"Here, Glenn," he said. "I wish it could be more."
+
+There was nothing more to do, or say. They went down stairs; Marley's
+bag was waiting for him in the hall. He kissed his mother again and then
+again; he shook his father's hand, and then he went.
+
+"Write often," his father called out to him, as he went down the walk.
+It was all the old man could say.
+
+The door closed, as the door of the Blairs' had closed. Inside Doctor
+Marley looked at his wife a moment.
+
+"Well," he said, "he's gone."
+
+Mrs. Marley made no answer.
+
+"I suppose," he said, "I ought to have gone to the train with him."
+
+Then he toiled up the stairs to his study and the sermon he was to
+preach when Glenn was gone.
+
+Marley walked rapidly down Market Street toward the depot; in the dark
+houses that suddenly had taken on a new significance to him, people were
+sleeping, people who would awake the next morning in Macochee. He could
+not escape the torture of this thought; his mind revolved constantly
+about the mystery of his being still in Macochee, still within calling
+distance, almost, of Lavinia, of his father and mother, of all he loved
+in life, when in reality they had in an instant become as inaccessible
+to him as though the long miles of his exile already separated them.
+
+Twenty minutes later, Lavinia, in her room, Mrs. Marley, at her prayers,
+and Doctor Marley sitting in deep absorption at his desk, heard the
+sonorous whistle of a locomotive sound ominously over the dark and quiet
+town.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXIV
+
+                         THE GATES OF THE CITY
+
+
+It was a relief to Marley when morning came and released him from the
+reclining chair that had held his form so rigidly all the night. He had
+not taken a sleeper because he felt himself too poor, and he had
+somewhere got the false impression that comfort was to be had in the
+chair car. He had stretched himself in the cruel rack when the porter
+came through and turned the lights down to the dismal point of gloom,
+but he had not slept; all through the night the trainmen constantly
+passed through the car talking with each other in low tones; the train,
+too, made long, inexplicable stops; he could hear the escape of the
+weary engine, through his window he could see the lights of some strange
+town; and then the trainmen would run by outside, swinging their
+lanterns in the darkness, and calling to each other, and Marley would
+fear that something had happened, or else was about to happen, which was
+worse.
+
+Finally the train would creak on again, as if it were necessary to
+proceed slowly and cautiously through vague dangers of the night.
+Through his window he could see the glint of rails, the two yards of
+gleaming steel that traveled always abreast of him. Toward morning
+Marley wearily fell asleep, and then the sorrow and heart-ache of his
+parting from Lavinia and his home distorted themselves in fearful
+dreams.
+
+When he awoke at last, and looked out on the ugly prairie that had
+nothing to break its monotony but a few scraggly scrub-oak bushes, and
+some clumps of stunted trees, the dawn was descending from the gray sky.
+The car presented a squalid, hideous sight; all about him were stretched
+the bodies of sleeping passengers, flaccid, inert, having cast aside in
+utter weariness all sense of decency and shame; the men had pulled off
+their boots, and sprawled on the chairs, their stockinged feet
+prominently in view; women lay with open mouths, their faces begrimed,
+their hair in slovenly disarray.
+
+The baby that had been crying in the early part of the night had finally
+gone to sleep while nursing, and its tired mother slept with it at her
+breast. The Jewish drummer across the aisle was sleeping in
+shirt-sleeves; his head had rolled from the little rest on the back of
+his chair and now lolled off his shoulder, his sallow face turned toward
+Marley was greasy with perspiration; his closed eyes filled out their
+blue hemispherical lids, and his cheeks puffed with his intermittent
+snoring. At times his snoring grew so loud and so troubled that it
+seemed as if he must choke; he would reach a torturing climax, then
+suddenly the thick red lips beneath his black mustache would open, his
+sallow cheeks would collapse, and relief would come.
+
+Marley wished the passengers would wake up and end the indecencies they
+had tried to hide earlier in the night. Glancing up and down the long
+car he could recognize none of them as having been there when he had
+boarded the car at Macochee; those who had got on with him had gone
+short distances, and then got off, breaking the last tie that bound him
+to his home. He found it impossible now to conceive of the car as having
+been in Macochee so short a time before.
+
+Presently he saw an old lady sitting up in the remote end of the car;
+she was winding her thin wisp of gray hair in a little knob at the back
+of her head. Then, feeling that he might bestir himself, Marley got up
+and went forward; he washed his face, and tried to escape the discomfort
+of clothes he had worn all the night by readjusting them. The train was
+evidently approaching the city; now and then he saw a building, lonely
+and out of place: on the hideous sand-dunes, as if it waited for the
+city, in the growth it boasted, to catch up with it.
+
+The train ran on; it had reached an ever-widening web of tracks; it
+passed long lines of freight-cars, stock-cars from the west, empty
+gondolas that had come with coal from the Hocking Valley; a switch tower
+swept by, its bell jangling peevishly in alarm; long processions of
+working-men trooped with their dinner-pails between the tracks. The
+train stopped, finally, still far from its destination. The air in the
+car was foul from the feculence of all those bodies that had lain in it
+through the night, and Marley went out on the platform. He could hear
+the engine wheezing--the only sound to break the silence of the dawn.
+The cool morning air was grateful to Marley, though it was not the air
+of the spring they were already having in Macochee. He risked getting
+down off the platform and looked ahead. Beyond the long train, coated
+with its black cinders, he saw Chicago, dim through the morning light,
+lying dark, mysterious and grim under its pall of smoke. He shuddered
+and went back into the car. After a while the train creaked and strained
+and pulled on again.
+
+The passengers had begun to stir, and now were hastening to rehabilitate
+themselves in the eyes of the world; the woman with the baby fastened
+her dress, the drummer put on his collar and coat, the men drew on their
+boots, but it was long before they felt themselves presentable again.
+The women could achieve but half a toilet, and though they were all
+concerned about their hair, they could not make themselves tidy.
+
+The train was running swiftly, now that it was in the city, where it
+seemed it should have run more slowly; the newsboy came in with the
+morning papers, followed by the baggage agent with his jingling bunch of
+brass checks. The porter doffed his white jacket and donned his blue,
+and waited now for the end of his labors, so near at hand. He made no
+pretense of brushing his passengers, for those in his charge were
+plainly not of the kind with tips to bestow.
+
+As the train rushed over unknown streets, Marley caught visions of the
+crowds blockaded by the crossing gates, street-cars already filled with
+people, empty trucks going after the great loads under which they would
+groan all the day; and people, people, people, ready for the new day of
+toil that had come to the earth.
+
+At last the train drew up under the black shed of the Union Station, and
+Marley stood with the passengers that huddled at the door of the car. He
+went out and down; he joined the crowd that passed through the big iron
+gates into the station; and then he turned and glanced back for one last
+look at the train that had brought him; only a few hours before it had
+been in Macochee; a few hours more and it would be there again. In
+leaving the train he felt that he was breaking the last tie that bound
+him to Macochee, and he would have liked to linger and gaze on it. But a
+man in a blue uniform, with the official surliness, ordered him not to
+hold back the crowd. He climbed the steps, went out into Canal Street,
+ran the gantlet of the cabmen, and was caught up in the crowd and swept
+across the bridge into Madison Street.
+
+He was in Chicago, and here among these thousands of people, each
+hurrying along through the sordid crowd to his own task, here in this
+hideous, cruel city, he must make a place for himself, and gain the
+foothold from which he could fight his battle for existence in the
+world.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXV
+
+                              LETTERS HOME
+
+
+"How does she seem since he went away?" asked Judge Blair of his wife
+two days after Marley had gone. He spoke in his usual habit of deference
+to his wife's observation, though his own opportunities for observing
+Lavinia might have been considered as great as hers.
+
+"I haven't noticed any difference in her," said Mrs. Blair, and then she
+added a qualifying and significant "yet."
+
+"Well," observed the judge, "I presume it's too early. Has she heard
+from him?"
+
+"She had a letter this morning; that is, I suppose it was from him; she
+ran to meet the postman, and then went up stairs."
+
+"You didn't mention it to her?"
+
+Mrs. Blair looked at her husband in surprise, and he hastened to make
+amends by acquiescing in the propriety of her conduct, when he said:
+
+"Oh, of course not."
+
+He seemed to drop the subject then, but that it remained uppermost in
+his mind was shown later, when he said:
+
+"I think she will be weaned away from him after a while, don't you? That
+is--if he stays long enough."
+
+Mrs. Blair was not so hopeful; perhaps, too, in her romantic ideal of
+devotion, she did not wish Lavinia to be weaned away. But she avoided a
+direct answer by the suggestion:
+
+"Perhaps he will be weaned away from her."
+
+This possibility had not occurred to the judge.
+
+"Why, the idea!" he said resentfully. "Do you think him capable of such
+baseness?"
+
+Mrs. Blair laughed.
+
+"Would you like to think of _your_ daughter as fickle, and forgetting a
+young man who was eating his heart out for her far away in a big city?"
+
+A condition of such mild romantic sorrow might have attracted Mrs. Blair
+in the abstract, but it could not of course appeal to her when it came
+thus personally. As for the judge, he dismissed the problem, as he had
+so many times before, with the remark:
+
+"Well, we can only wait and see."
+
+The letter which Lavinia received from Marley had been written the day
+he reached Chicago. It was a long letter, conceived largely in a
+facetious spirit, and he had labored over it far into the night in the
+little room of the boarding-house he had found in Ohio Street.
+
+"I chose Ohio Street," he wrote, "because its name reminded me of home.
+Ohio Street may once have been the street of the well-born, but it has
+degenerated and it is now the abode of a long row of boarding--places,
+one of which houses me. My room is a little corner eyrie in the second
+story, back, and from its one window I get an admirable view of the
+garbage dump, the atmosphere and certain intensely red bricks which go
+to make the wall of the house next door. And my landlady, ah, I should
+have to be a Balzac to describe my landlady! She wears large, vociferous
+ear-rings, and she says 'y-e-e-a-a-s' for yes; just kind o' rolls it off
+her tongue as if she didn't care whether it ever got off or not. She is
+truly a beauteous lady, given much to a scarlet hue of her nasal
+appendage; also, her molar system is unduly prominent, too much to the
+fore, as it were. As for form or figure, I'm afraid I couldn't say with
+truth that she goes in for the sinuous, far from it; she leans more to
+the elephantine style of feminine architecture. And she has a way of
+reaching out that is very attractive; probably because of the necessity
+of reaching for room rent. She bears the air of one bent on no earthly
+thing, of a continual soaring in quest of the unexpected; there is about
+her the charm of the intangible, the unknowable.
+
+"The boarding-house itself isn't so bad; I get my room and two meals for
+three-fifty a week; my noon luncheons I have to take down-town. They
+have dinner here, you know, in the evening. I haven't seen much of the
+people in the boarding-house; the men are mostly clerks, and the women
+have bleached hair. They all looked at me when I went into the
+dining-room this evening. There is one young man who sits at my table
+who is in truth a very unwise and immature youth. He is given greatly to
+the use of words of awful and bizarre make-up. For instance, he said
+something about the jokes they get off in the shows here about Irishmen,
+but instead of saying jokes, he said 'traversities'! What do you think
+of that?"
+
+Marley had already described his journey to Chicago in terms similar to
+those in which he described his boarding-house; of Chicago itself he
+said:
+
+"It seems that ages ago when the gods, or maybe the demons, were making
+over plans and specifications of the infernal region, Chicago was
+mentioned and considered by the committee. When it came to a vote for
+choice of sites the place that won had only three more votes than
+Chicago. They didn't locate the brimstone plant here, and from what I
+can learn Chicago was a candidate for both the plant and the honor. It
+was a mistake on somebody's part, as Chicago is certainly an ideal place
+for it."
+
+But the letter discussed mostly the things of Macochee, where Marley's
+spirit still dwelt. The passages Lavinia most liked, of course, were
+those in which he declared his love for her; it was the first
+love-letter she had ever received, and this tender experience went far
+to compensate her for the loneliness she felt in his absence.
+
+It grew upon her after she had read her letter many times, that it would
+be a kindness to take it over and read to Mrs. Marley those parts, at
+least, that were not personal. It was a hard thing for Lavinia to do;
+she had a fear of Mrs. Marley; but she felt more and more the kindness
+of it, and so in the morning she set out. Lavinia was surprised and a
+little disappointed, when Mrs. Marley told her that she too had received
+in the same mail a letter from Glenn. It somehow took away from her own
+act, the more when Mrs. Marley calmly passed her letter over for Lavinia
+to read.
+
+Lavinia, who had not been able to resist a pang that Marley had written
+his mother quite as promptly as he had written her, found some
+consolation in the fact that his letter to his mother was not nearly so
+long as his letter to her, and it contained, too, the same information;
+in some instances, identical phrases, as letters do that are written at
+the same time. She felt that she should be happy in them both, and she
+wished she could determine which of the letters had been written first.
+After she had read Mrs. Marley's letter, she could not speak for a
+moment; the letter closed with a description of the sensations it gave
+Marley to open his trunk and come across the Bible his mother had packed
+in it. But she controlled herself, and when she had finished reading
+parts of her own letter to Mrs. Marley, she said:
+
+"Well, he seems to be in good spirits, doesn't he? He writes so
+amusingly of everything."
+
+Mrs. Marley looked up at Lavinia with a curious smile.
+
+"Why, don't you see?" she said.
+
+"What?" asked Lavinia, glancing in alarm at the two letters which she
+still held in her lap.
+
+"Why, the poor boy is dying of homesickness; that's what makes him write
+in that mocking vein."
+
+"Do you think that is so?" Lavinia leaned forward.
+
+"Why, I know it," replied Mrs. Marley, with a little laugh. "He's just
+like his father."
+
+For a moment Lavinia felt a satisfaction in Marley's loneliness, but she
+denied the satisfaction when she said:
+
+"He'll get over it, after a while."
+
+"Not for a long while, I'm afraid," said Mrs. Marley. "Not until some
+one can be with him."
+
+Lavinia blushed, and before she knew it Mrs. Marley had bent over and
+kissed her cheek.
+
+"He has a long hard battle before him, my dear," she said, "in a great
+cruel city. We must help him all we can."
+
+Lavinia hesitated a moment, then she put her arms about Mrs. Marley and
+drew her down for the kiss which sealed their friendship.
+
+They sat and talked of Marley for a long time, and at last when Lavinia
+rose to go, she held out to Mrs. Marley the letter her son had written
+her. She looked at it a moment before handing it to Mrs. Marley.
+
+"Would you like to keep it?" Mrs. Marley asked.
+
+"May I?"
+
+"If you wish. But you must come often; I shall be lonely now, you know,
+and you must bring his letters and read parts of them. He'll be writing
+so many more to you than he will to me."
+
+Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day; it was not long before
+Clemmons, the postman, smiled significantly when, each morning at the
+sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the door. And Lavinia wrote
+to Marley as regularly herself, sitting at the little desk in her room
+every night long after the house was dark and still.
+
+The judge could find no hope in the observations Mrs. Blair reported to
+him.
+
+"She seems to have developed a new idea of constancy," said Mrs. Blair.
+"She will not allow herself to do a thing, or go to a single place; she
+will hardly accept any pleasure because he isn't here to share it. I
+believe she tries not to have a thought that is not of him. She is
+almost fanatical about it."
+
+"Oh dear!" said the judge. "I thought the nightly calls were a severe
+strain, but they can not compare to the strain of nightly letters."
+
+"He writes excellent letters, however," Mrs. Blair said. "I wish you
+could read the one he wrote his mother. A boy who writes like that to
+his mother--"
+
+"How did you get to see a letter he wrote his mother?" interrupted the
+judge.
+
+"Lavinia showed it to me."
+
+"Has she been over there?"
+
+"Yes. Why?"
+
+The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation were now hopeless,
+indeed.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXVI
+
+                       THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED
+
+
+"I am very tired to-night," Marley wrote to Lavinia a day or so later.
+"I have been making the rounds of the law offices; I have been to all
+the leading firms, but--here I am, still without a place. I thought I
+might get a place in one of them where I could finish my law studies,
+and make enough to live on, meanwhile; I had dreams of working into the
+firm in time, but they were only dreams, and all my hopes have gone
+glimmering. The men who are employed in the law offices are already
+admitted to the bar; most of them are young fellows, but some are old
+and gray-headed, and the sight of them gave me the blues.
+
+"I did not get to see many of the firm members themselves; their offices
+are formidable places. There is no office in Macochee like them; they
+have big outer rooms, full of stenographers and clerks and there is a
+boy at a desk who makes you tell your business before you can get in to
+see any of the lawyers themselves. They seem to be mighty big, important
+fellows. Most of them would not see me at all; several said they had no
+place for me and dismissed me with a kind of pitying smile; one man,
+when I asked him if he thought there was an opening, said he supposed
+there ought to be, as one lawyer in Chicago had died of starvation only
+the day before. But some were kinder; one, whom I shall never forget,
+took pains to sit down and talk with me a long time, but he was no more
+encouraging than the others. He said the profession was terribly
+overcrowded, 'that is,' he corrected himself with a tired smile, 'if you
+can call it a profession any longer. It is more of a business nowadays
+and the only ones who get ahead are those who have big corporations for
+clients. How they all live is a mystery to me!' He thought I had better
+not undertake it and advised me to go into some business. But then most
+of them did that.
+
+"But I must tell you of my visit to Judge Johnson. You will remember my
+telling you of him; he was Wade Powell's chum in the law school in
+Cincinnati, and Mr. Powell had given me a letter to him. I had a hard
+time seeing him; the hardest of all. When I went into the big stone
+government building he was holding court, and a lawyer was making an
+argument before him. I waited till they were all done, and then when the
+crier had adjourned court--he said 'Oyez, Oyez, Oyez,' instead of the
+'Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye' we have in Ohio; it sounded so old and
+quaint, even if he did say 'Oh yes,' for 'Oyez!' It comes from the old
+Norman-French, you know; ask your father about it, he'll explain it--I
+tried to get in to him. I succeeded at last, but it was hard work. He
+didn't seem glad to see me; he looked at me coldly, and made me feel as
+if I ought to hurry up and state my business promptly and get away. When
+I gave him Wade Powell's letter he put on his gold glasses and read it;
+but--what do you think?--I don't believe he remembered Wade Powell at
+all! At least he seemed not to. Of course he may have been putting it
+on. Wouldn't it make Wade Powell mad to know that? I'd give a
+dollar--and I haven't any to spare either--to see him when he hears that
+his old friend, Judge Johnson of the United States Circuit Court,
+couldn't remember him! Well, the judge didn't let me detain him long, he
+looked at his watch a moment, and then he advised me not to try it in
+Chicago; he said there were too many lawyers here anyhow, and that he
+thought a young man made a mistake in coming to a city at all.
+
+"'Why don't you stay in a small town?' he asked, looking at me sternly
+over his glasses. 'Living is cheaper there, and life is much more simple
+than it is in the cities. I've often wished I had stayed in a little
+town.'
+
+"I came away, as you can imagine, feeling pretty much cast down and
+humbled in spirit. There are four thousand lawyers in Chicago; just
+think of it, almost as many lawyers as there are people in Macochee! As
+I walked through the crowded streets with men and women rushing along, I
+wondered how they all lived. What do they do? Where are they all going,
+and how do they get a place to stand on? As I came across the bridge
+over to the North Side I felt that there was no place for me here in
+this great, dirty, ugly city, just as there is no place for me back in
+peaceful Macochee, where every minute of the day I long to be. Anyway, I
+am sure that there is no place for me here in the law, and I shall have
+to look for something else. I see so much wretchedness and poverty and
+squalor; it is in the street everywhere--pale, gaunt men, who look at
+you out of sick, appealing eyes.
+
+"This morning I saw a sight down-town that filled me with horror; it was
+noon, and a great crowd of ragged men were waiting in front of the
+_Daily News_ office in Fifth Avenue. They were all standing idly and yet
+expectantly about; I stood and watched them. Presently, as at some
+signal, they all rushed for the office door, and then all at once they
+seemed to be enveloped in a white, rustling cloud. Each one had a
+newspaper, and they all turned to one page and began to read rapidly;
+sometimes two or three men bent over the same paper; in another moment
+they had scattered, going in all directions. Then it flashed upon me:
+they had been waiting for the noon edition of the paper and the page
+they had all turned to was the page with the 'want ads' on it; they were
+all looking for jobs! It made me inexpressibly sad. I do not wish to
+inflict my own sorrow upon you, dear heart, but it made me shudder; what
+if I--but no, the thought is too horrible to mention. And yet I, too,
+belong to this great army of the unemployed.
+
+"As I write the clock in the steeple of a church a block away chimes the
+hour of midnight; so you see that I've retained my nocturnal habits.
+When the poets of a coming generation sing of me (as they doubtless
+will, after my death) their songs will be called Nocturnes."
+
+That same day Doctor Marley received a letter from his son which Mrs.
+Marley, though her husband passed it over to her to read, did not show
+to Lavinia. It ran:
+
+"It's rather expensive living here, I find; especially for one who
+belongs to the great army of the unemployed. My contract with my
+basiliscine landlady calls for two meals a day and a bed at night--also
+for three-fifty per week in payment of said two meals and bed. My
+lunches I get down-town; that is, I did get them down-town; for two days
+I have gone without lunches, and the aforesaid landlady looks
+reproachfully at me at night when she sees me laying in an extra supply
+of dinner. I don't mind the lack of the lunches, even if she does, but
+I'll have to pay her in a day or so now. I'm in poor spirits to-night,
+so can't write well; cause of said low mental temperature, only eighty
+cents in the world between me, my landlady and ultimate starvation. It's
+funny how much hungrier a fellow gets as the food supply gets low. A
+word to the wise, etc.
+
+"What do you think? I met Charlie Davis on the street this morning. He
+is living here now, working in some big department store. My, it was
+good to see some one from Macochee! How small the world is, after all!
+
+"How are you all? How is Dolly? Does Smith Johnson still clap his hands
+at his dog every evening as he comes home, and does the dog run out to
+meet him as joyously as of yore? And does Hank Delphy still go down-town
+in his shirt-sleeves? And has Charlie Fouly had any fits in the Square
+lately? And, father, has mother got a girl yet? Give her an ocean of
+love and tell her not to work too hard, and to let the heathen shift for
+themselves a while. They haven't any trusts to monopolize the jobs as
+yet, and they ought to be able to get along. Oh, how I'd like to see you
+all! Answer all my questions: I propounded numerous ones to you. I don't
+remember now what all of them were, but I know they were all momentous
+and had much to do with my well-being, spiritual and physical, not to
+say financial. And see that the moss doesn't get too thickly overlaid on
+my memory."
+
+Marley's new life in Chicago, as somewhat vaguely reflected in his
+letters, impressed those who had a sense of having been left behind in
+Macochee, as but a continuation of the life he had led there, that is,
+it was presented to them as one long, hopeless search for employment. He
+told of his daily tramps up and down the city, of his dutiful
+applications for work in every place where the boon of work might be
+bestowed, and of the unvarying refusals of those in whose hands had been
+intrusted, by some inscrutable decree of the providence of economics,
+the right to control the opportunity of labor. It was as if the primal
+curse of earning his bread were in a fair way to be taken from man, had
+not the primal necessity of eating his bread continued unabated.
+
+The routine through which he went each day had begun to weary Marley,
+and it might have begun to weary his readers in Macochee, had they not
+all felt their own fortunes somehow bound up with his. He apologized in
+his nightly letters for the monotony of their recitals, but he hoped it
+might be condoned as the most realistic portrayal of his life that he
+could give. He tried at times to give his letters a lighter tone by
+describing, with a facility that grew with practice, the many incidents
+that attracted him in a city whose life was all so new and strange to
+him; he could not help a growing interest in it all, and while Lavinia
+was probably unconscious of the change, his letters were now less
+concerned with the things of the life he had left in Macochee, and more
+and more with the things of the life he had entered upon in Chicago; as
+on a palimpsest, the old impressions were erased to make way for new
+ones.
+
+But try as he would to give to his letters a cheer that was far from
+expressing his own spirit, he could not save them from the despair that
+was laying hold of him, a despair which finally communicated itself in
+the declaration that it was now no longer with him a question of
+selecting employment.
+
+"I must take," he wrote, "whatever I can get, and that will probably be
+some kind of manual, if not menial, work. Sometimes," so he let himself
+go on, "I feel as if I would give up and go back to Macochee, defeated
+and done for. But I can not come to that yet, though I would like to;
+oh, how I would like to! But I don't dare, my pride won't let me act the
+part of a coward, though I know I am one at heart. One thing keeps me up
+and that is the thought of you; I see your face ever before me, and your
+sweet eyes ever smiling at me--"
+
+Lavinia's eyes were not smiling as she read this; and she poured out her
+own grief and sympathy in a long letter that she promptly tore up, to
+pen in its stead a calmer, braver one, that should hearten him in the
+struggle which, as she proudly assured him, he was making for her.
+
+Marley's description of his straits partly prepared Lavinia for the
+shock of the letter in which he said he had found a job at last, but she
+was hardly prepared to learn that it was anything so far from her
+conception of what was due him as a job trucking freight for a railroad.
+The mockery he put into the picture of himself in a blue jumper and
+overalls could not console her, and she kept the truth from every one,
+except her mother; she preferred rather that they number Marley still
+with the army of the unemployed than to count him among those who toiled
+so desperately with the muscles of their arms and backs. She tried to
+conceal in encouraging congratulations the chagrin of which she felt she
+should be ashamed, and she tried to show her appreciation of his droll
+sarcasms about the preparation his four years of college had given him
+for the task of trundling barrels of sugar and heaving pianos down from
+box-cars.
+
+"I'm sure it's honest work," she wrote, "but do be careful, dear, not to
+hurt yourself in lifting such heavy loads." It was a comfort to remind
+him that he was not intended to do such work.
+
+There was a relief, however, that she did not dare admit, when he told
+her three days later that he had lost his job.
+
+"I realize for the first time my importance in the great scheme of
+things," he wrote. "I was fired because I do not belong to the freight
+handlers' union. It took them three days to find this out, and then they
+threatened to strike if the railroad company did not immediately
+discharge me. The railroad company, after due consideration, decided to
+let me out, and--I'm out. It makes me tremble to think of the
+consequences that would have followed had they decided otherwise. Think
+of it! The railroad tied up, business at a standstill and the commerce
+of the nation paralyzed, and all because of Glenn Marley, A. B. It is
+really encouraging to know that my presence on the earth is actually
+known to my fellow-mortals; it has at least been discovered that I am
+alive and in Chicago, even if my diploma is not recognized by Freight
+Handlers' Union No. 63. And now," he concluded, "as Kipling says, it's
+'back to the army again, Sergeant, back to the army again'--the army of
+the unemployed."
+
+Lavinia was shocked again a day or so later when on opening her letter
+she met the announcement that he had been offered a job with another
+railroad as a freight handler.
+
+"But you need not be alarmed," she was reassured to read--though it was
+not until she thought it all over afterward that she began to wonder how
+he had divined her dislike of his being in such work--"I haughtily
+declined, and turned them down. You see this road is just now in the
+throes of a strike, and all their freight handlers are out.
+Consequently, they have had to employ scabs to do the work of the
+strikers. They take anybody--that's why they were ready to take me. But
+as I said, I declined. Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to take a place
+away from a union man."
+
+Lavinia mistook her satisfaction in Marley's declination of the position
+for a satisfaction in the nobility of his sacrifice, and in her elation
+she related the circumstance at dinner. Now that Marley had declined
+such an employment she felt safe in doing this. But her father did not
+see it in her light, or at least in Marley's light.
+
+"Humph!" he sneered; "so he sympathizes with unionism, does he? Well,
+those unions will own the whole earth if they keep on."
+
+"But he says he thought of the wives and children of the union men--"
+
+"Well, but why doesn't he think of the wives and children of the scabs,
+as he calls them? They have as much right to live and work as the union
+men."
+
+Lavinia, as an opponent of union labor herself, could not answer this
+argument, though she felt it her duty to defend Marley. But before she
+could proceed in his defense, her father, strangely enraged at the mere
+mention of the policies of the unions, hurried on:
+
+"The union didn't show any consideration for him when it took his other
+job away from him."
+
+Lavinia shot a reproachful glance at her mother, who did not see it
+because she was shooting a glance more than reproachful at her husband,
+and it had the effect of silencing and humbling the judge, as all of
+Lavinia's arguments, or all of the arguments known to the propaganda of
+union labor, could not have done.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXVII
+
+                               A FOOTHOLD
+
+
+The next letter the postman gave Lavinia began ecstatically:
+
+"I've got a job at last! I'm now working for the C. C. and P. Railroad,
+in their local freight office, and I'm not trucking freight either, but
+I'm a clerk--a bill clerk, to be more exact. My duties consist in
+sitting at a desk and writing out freight bills, for which by some
+inscrutable design of Providence my study of common carriers and
+contracts in the law was doubtless intended to prepare me.
+
+"To-day I wrote out a bill for freight to Cook and Jennings, Macochee,
+Ohio, and you can imagine my sensations. It made me homesick for a
+while; I wished that by some necromancy I might conceal myself in the
+bill and go to Macochee with it; I had a notion to write a little word
+of greeting on the bill, but I didn't; it might have worried old man
+Cook's brain and he couldn't stand much of a strain of that kind. But
+I'm getting nearer Macochee every day now. I guess I'm to be a railroad
+man after all, and some day you'll be proud to tell your friends that I
+started at the bottom. 'Oh, yes,' you'll be boasting, 'Mr. Marley began
+as a common freight trucker; and worked his way up to general manager.'
+Then we'll go back to Macochee in my private car. I can see it standing
+down by the depot, on the side track close to Market Street, baking in
+the hot sun, and the little boys from across the tracks will be crowding
+about it, gaping at the white-jacketed darky who'll be getting the
+dinner ready. We'll have Jack and Mayme down to dine with us, and your
+father and mother and Chad and Connie, and my folks, too, and maybe, if
+you'll let me, Wade Powell. Then, of course, the Macochee people will
+think better of me; they won't be saying that I'm no good, but instead
+they'll stand around, in an easy, careless way, and say, 'Oh, yes, I
+knew Glenn when he was a boy. I always said he'd get up in the world.'
+
+"But, ah me, just now I'm a bill clerk at fifty dollars a month, thank
+you, and glad of the chance to get it; so is my voluptuous landlady
+glad; she'll get her board money a little more regularly now.
+
+"I suppose you'll want to know something about my surroundings. They are
+not elegant; the office is a big barn of a place, crowded full of desks,
+where we sit and write from eight in the morning until any hour at night
+when it occurs to the boss to tell us we can go. Last night it was ten
+o'clock before the idea struck him. They kindly allow us an hour in
+which to run out to a restaurant for supper. The windows in the office
+were washed, so tradition runs, in 1493, the year after Columbus landed.
+Outside, the freight trains rush by constantly so as to keep the noise
+going. My boss, whose name is Clark, strikes me as being a sort of fool
+of an innocuous sort. He is a conscientious ass, but a poor,
+unfortunate, deluded simpleton. He's one of those close-fisted reubs
+whose chief care is the pennies, and whose only interest in life is the
+C. C. and P. Railroad. He makes his business his own personal affair and
+the C. C. and P. his god. He lunches down-town and pays twenty cents for
+his lunch, never more, often fifteen. One of the first things he told me
+was, now that I had come under his protecting wing, to begin to save
+money. They have a young man in the office here, whose desk is next to
+mine, who was born somewhere in Canada, and is always 'a-servin' of her
+Majesty the Queen,' as Kipling says. He told me with much gusto how he
+had hung out of the office window last New Year's a Canadian flag. He
+seemed proud of having done so, and also told me, boasted to me, in
+fact, that he was going to hang the same flag out of the same window on
+the Fourth of July. 'Oh, yes, you are!' thinks I. So I got the flag and
+ripped it into shreds and started it through the waste-basket on a
+hurried trip to oblivion. _À bas_ the Canadian flag! He'll probably get
+another one, but if I get hold of it, it'll meet the same fate as the
+first one. Then I have something to think of that'll keep my mind off my
+horrible fate in being here in Chicago, while I smile in ghoulish glee
+with a cynical leer overspreading my classic features, at the young
+man's disapproval of my actions. The rest of the men in the office
+aren't much to boast of. They're a diluted mixture of Nijni Norgordian
+and Bill Hoffman the jeweler. I still hate this town; I wish it were
+buried under seven hundred and thirty feet of Lake Michigan."
+
+Marley's next letter to Lavinia opened thus:
+
+"Extract from the diary of J. H. Anderson,
+Esq., Canadian, clerk in the freight office of the
+C. C. and P. Ry., at Chicago, Ill., April 20.
+
+            "'New man on desk next to mine; young, about
+            24. Rather decent fellow, but conceited. Do not
+            think he will last. Took me to lunch with him
+            this evening.'
+
+"Now what do you think of that? The youth I described to you at such
+length keeps a diary, and the foregoing is culled therefrom. He left it
+by some mistake on top of his desk, and I picked it up innocently enough
+to-night, to see what it was, and that was the first thing my eye lit
+on. He is evidently an adept at coming to conclusions, apparently he can
+sum one up in two whisks of a porter's broom. I was much surprised to
+find myself so well done. Done on every side in those few words. I've
+rather enjoyed it; strikes me as being uproariously funny. Maybe his
+dictum is correct. You'll agree with me as to his richness. Tell every
+one about it and see what they will think. Tell your mother and my
+mother. Tell Jack and give him a chance to laugh. Tell Mayme Carter,
+too."
+
+Lavinia ran at once to her mother.
+
+"Listen," she said. And she read it.
+
+Mrs. Blair laughed.
+
+"How funny!" she said, "and how well he writes! I should think he'd go
+into literature."
+
+Lavinia laid the letter down in her lap and looked at her mother as if
+she had been startled by a striking coincidence.
+
+"Why, do you know, I've thought of that very thing myself."
+
+"But read on," urged Mrs. Blair.
+
+Lavinia picked up the letter again and began:
+
+"Well, de--"
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed, blushing hotly, "I can't read you that. Let's
+see--"
+
+She leafed over the letter, one, two, three, four sheets. Mrs. Blair was
+smiling.
+
+"Aren't you leaving out the best parts?" she asked archly.
+
+"Oh, there's nothing," Lavinia said, not looking up. "But--oh, well,
+this is all. He says--
+
+"'There is a good deal of unrest and uneasiness here just now, because
+the first of May is coming. The road is anticipating trouble with the
+freight handlers; they may go out on a strike that day.'
+
+"Oh, dear," sighed Lavinia, "more strikes, and I suppose that means more
+trouble for Glenn."
+
+"Why, the strike of those men can't affect him," Mrs. Blair assured her.
+"He's a clerk now."
+
+"Yes, I know, but what if he gets the notion he ought to help them by
+quitting too?"
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+                          THE TALK OF THE TOWN
+
+
+Macochee's common interest in Marley was sharpened by his leaving town,
+and out of the curiosity that raged, Lawrence and Mayme Carter one
+evening made a call on Lavinia.
+
+"Well, Lavinia," said Lawrence, almost as soon as they were seated in
+the parlor, "what's the news about Glenn? How's he getting along?"
+
+"Oh, pretty well," she said, smiling.
+
+"Does he like Chicago?"
+
+"Oh, yes; that is, fairly well."
+
+"Run get his letters and let us read them."
+
+"Why, Jack! The idea!" Mayme rebuked him.
+
+But Lavinia instantly got up.
+
+"Well, I'll read you part of one or two," she said. "He can tell you
+much better than I all about himself."
+
+She was gone from the room a moment and then returned with two thick
+envelopes.
+
+"My, Lavinia, you don't intend to read all that, do you?" Lawrence made
+a burlesque of looking at his watch.
+
+"Oh, you needn't be afraid," said Lavinia, smiling. She opened a letter.
+
+"Here's one that came several days ago. He mentions you both in this
+one."
+
+"You don't mean to say he connects our names?" Lawrence affected
+consternation.
+
+"Can't you be serious a moment?" Mayme said, "I want to hear what he
+says; do go on, Lavinia, and don't mind Jack."
+
+Lavinia read the extract from the diary and Marley's comment.
+
+"Doesn't he say anything about you?" said Lawrence. "Why don't you read
+that? You skip the most interesting parts. You'd better let me read
+them. Here--" and he held out his hand for the letter.
+
+But Lavinia laid one letter securely in her lap and opened the other.
+
+"Listen to this," she began, and then she glanced over the first page
+and half-way down the second.
+
+"Here you're skipping again," cried Lawrence. "Why don't you play fair?"
+
+"'I have made a friend,' he says," she began, "'and it all came about
+through the strike. You know the freight handlers went out on the first
+of May, and since then there has been more excitement than work in the
+office. The freight house is stacked high with freight, and only a few
+men are working there and they are afraid of their lives. All around the
+outside of the big, long shed are policemen and detectives, and the
+strikers' pickets. All day they walk up and down, up and down, at a safe
+distance, just off the company's ground, and they waylay everybody and
+try to get them not to go to work here. I happened to see the strike
+when it began. It was day before yesterday morning. I had gone out in
+the freight house on some little errand and just at ten o'clock I
+noticed a man walk down by the platform that runs along outside the
+shed. I saw him stop by one of the big doors and look in. Suddenly he
+gave a low whistle, then another. The men in the freight house stopped
+and looked up. Then the man outside raised his arm, and held up two
+fingers--'"
+
+"He wanted them to go swimming probably," interrupted Lawrence.
+
+"Oh, Jack, do stop," said Mayme, irritably. "Right at the most
+interesting part, too! Do go on, Lavinia."
+
+Lavinia read on:
+
+"'Then the man outside raised his arm, and held up two fingers, and
+instantly every truck in the shed dropped to the floor, bang, the men
+all went and put on their coats, marched out of the freight house--and
+the strike was on. Well, after that came the policemen and the
+detectives and the pickets, to say nothing of the reporters. It is about
+these last that I mean to tell you, for among them I have found this new
+friend. The other day a young man came into the office to see Clark, our
+boss. I was attracted by him at once. He was tall, and his smooth-shaven
+face was refined and thoughtful; I call him good-looking; his eyes were
+dark and his nose straight and full of character; his lips were thin and
+level; his hair was not quite black and stopped just on the right side
+of being curly. He was dressed modestly, but stylishly; I remember he
+wore gloves--he always does--and I thought him somewhat dudish. But what
+was my pleasure to see on his waistcoat the little white cross of my
+fraternity! I rushed up to him instantly, and gave him the grip. He was
+a Sig., from an Indiana college, and he is a reporter on the _Courier_.
+His name is James Weston; no, he is no relation to Bob Weston of
+Macochee at all. I asked him that the first thing; but he is some
+relation to the Cliffords, distant, I suppose.'"
+
+"I wonder if that isn't the young man who visited them summer before
+last?" asked Mayme. "I'll bet it is!"
+
+"No, it can't be," said Lavinia, "I thought of that the very first
+thing, but you see he says," and Lavinia read on:
+
+"'He says he hasn't been there for years. We chatted together for a few
+minutes and were friends at once. To-morrow night, if I can get off in
+time, I'm to dine with him at a café down-town. My, but it was good to
+see some one wearing that little white cross! You see my college
+training has done me some good after all.'"
+
+In their conversation afterward, Lavinia and Mayme celebrated Marley's
+abilities as a writer, but Lawrence begged Lavinia to read them more,
+particularly, as he assured her, those parts about herself, saying he
+could judge better of Marley's abilities after he heard how he treated
+romantic subjects.
+
+"I want to know how he handles the love interest," he said.
+
+"Oh, you got that from George Halliday," said Mayme. "It sounds just
+like him when he's discussing some book none of us has read, doesn't it,
+Lavinia?"
+
+Lavinia admitted that it did sound like Halliday, and Mayme returned to
+her attack on Lawrence by saying:
+
+"What do you know about writing, anyway?"
+
+They might have gone farther along this line had not Mrs. Blair entered
+with a plate of cake and some ice-cream that had been left over from
+their dessert at supper. These refreshments instantly seemed to affect
+Mayme with the idea that the call had assumed the formality of a social
+function, and as she nibbled at her cake, she asked with a polite
+interest:
+
+"Just what is Mr. Marley's position with the railroad, Lavinia?"
+
+"Oh," Lavinia answered, "he has a place in the office of the freight
+department; he's a clerk there."
+
+"I'm so glad to know," said Mayme, as if in relief.
+
+"Why?" Lavinia looked up in alarm.
+
+"Oh, well, you know--how people talk." Mayme raised her pale eyebrows
+significantly. Lavinia was disturbed, but Lawrence, detecting the
+danger, instantly turned it off in a joke.
+
+"She heard he was a section hand," he said.
+
+"The idea!" laughed Lavinia.
+
+"Isn't this just the worst place for gossip you ever heard of?" said
+Mayme.
+
+"The worst ever," said Lawrence. "If I were you I'd quit and start a
+reform movement."
+
+When they had gone and were strolling toward the Carters', Lawrence
+grumbled at Mayme:
+
+"What did you want to give it all away to Lavinia for?"
+
+"Why, Jack, I didn't say anything, did I?"
+
+"Oh, no, nothing--only you tipped off the whole thing to her."
+
+"Why, what did I say that hinted at it, even?"
+
+"'Oh, you know how people talk!'" Lawrence mimicked her tone as he
+repeated her words.
+
+"Well, you know they do, Jack, and you know all the mean things they've
+been saying about Glenn. And you remember Charlie Davis' mother told
+mama that Charlie ran across him in the street: in Chicago and that--"
+
+"Oh, Charlie Davis!" said Lawrence, as impatiently as he could say
+anything. "What's he? Anyway, you didn't have to tell Lavinia."
+
+"Well, I'm glad we got the truth anyway."
+
+"Yes, so am I."
+
+"We must tell everybody."
+
+"Sure," acquiesced Lawrence, "if we can get the gossips started the
+other way they'll have him president of the road in a few days."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXIX
+
+                            A MAN OF LETTERS
+
+
+The Macochee gossips, after they were assured he was engaged in
+clerical, and not manual work, might have promoted Marley much more
+rapidly than his railroad would have done, had it not been for the news
+that he had changed his employment. They had gone far enough to noise it
+about that Marley was chief clerk in the office, where he was only a
+bill clerk, when the _Republican_, with the impartial good nature with
+which it treated all of Macochee's folk, so long as they kept out of
+politics, mentioned him for the first time since his departure, and
+then, to tell of the advancement he was rapidly making in the metropolis
+that loomed so large and important in their provincial eyes. Lavinia had
+the facts in a letter from Marley a day or so before the _Republican_
+had them, though she never could imagine, as she told everybody, where
+the _Republican_ got its information.
+
+"I have a big piece of news to tell you," he wrote. "Last night I dined
+with Weston. It was the first really enjoyable evening I have had since
+I struck the town. Luckily, the strikers had everything tied up so tight
+that we could do little work, and I had no trouble in getting off in
+time. I met him about six o'clock, and we went to the swellest
+restaurant in town. Weston is the finest fellow you ever saw; as it was
+pay night, he said he would blow me off to a good dinner. And he did,
+the best dinner I have ever eaten; there were half a dozen courses, and
+as we ate we talked, talked about everything, college days, the hard
+days that come after college, and you, and everything. Weston's
+experience has been about the same as mine--one long, hopeless search
+for a job. He, however, did not wait so long as I did; he said that he
+realized there was no place for him in a small town, and so he set out
+for the city almost at once. His father wanted him to study medicine,
+but he said he hadn't the money or the patience to wait, and he hated
+medicine anyway, and, as newspaper work offered the quickest channel to
+making a living he chose that. His secret ambition, he confessed, is
+literature, and I believe he is writing a book, but he would not, or did
+not, tell me as much. He says he thinks newspaper work a bad business
+for any one to get into, but then I have discovered that that is the way
+every man talks about his own calling.
+
+"After we had finished our dinner, we sat there for a long, long time
+over our coffee and cigarettes, and we finally got to talking about the
+strike. Weston, you know, has been working on it, and I was glad to be
+able to tell him a good many things he said he could use. Finally, I
+don't know just how it came about, but I told him how the strike started
+with us, about the man appearing in the street alongside the freight
+house, whistling, and then holding up two fingers--I think I described
+it to you in a letter the other night. Weston was greatly interested; I
+can see him still, sitting across the table from me, knocking the ashes
+from his cigarette into his empty coffee-cup and looking so intently at
+me out of his brown eyes that he almost embarrassed me. And what was my
+surprise when I finished to have him say:
+
+"'By Jove, Marley, I'll have to use that. I've been wondering how to
+lead my story to-night.'
+
+"Now you know the strike at our place occurred several days ago, but
+since then it has been spreading, and to-day the men on another road
+walked out. This morning when I picked up the _Courier_ and turned to
+the strike news, here is what I read, under big head-lines:
+
+"'A short man with a brown derby hat cocked over his eye walked
+leisurely down Canal Street at ten o'clock yesterday morning. The short
+man walked a block and then turned and walked back. At the open door of
+the C. and A.'s big freight house he stopped. Suddenly he whistled,
+once, twice, thrice, in low notes. Then he raised his hand with a
+gesture that was graceful and yet commanding, and held up two fingers.
+Inside the freight house the men who were heaving away at the big bales
+and boxes, attracted by the whistle, paused in their labor and looked
+up; they saw the man raise his two fingers; and, with the discipline of
+well-trained troops, they dropped their trucks, put on their coats and
+marched out of the freight house. And the Alton had been added to the
+list of railroads whose men were on strike.'
+
+"Of course, I was surprised and puzzled, and a little pleased too, that
+I had had a hand in the article. As I read it, though, I thought of a
+hundred details I might have told Weston, and I began to wish I had
+written the account myself. This afternoon he came around to the office
+again, and the first thing he said was:
+
+"'Did you see your story this morning?'
+
+"I told him I had, of course. 'But,' I added, 'that was the way it
+happened on our road; not on the Alton.'
+
+"But he only laughed, and said something about the tricks of the trade.
+
+"And now for the news I was going to tell you. I told Weston, as we
+talked the story over, of my little wish that I had written the article
+myself, and he looked at me intently for a moment. Then he said:
+
+"'How'd you like to break into newspaper business?'
+
+"My heart leaped; it came to me suddenly that it wasn't the law, nor
+railroad work, but journalism that I wanted to enter. I told him so
+frankly and he said:
+
+"'Well, it's a dog's life and I don't know whether I'm doing you a good
+turn or not, but I'll speak to the city editor tonight. He's a little
+short of men just now.
+
+"My heart is in my mouth. I can hardly wait till to-morrow, when I'm to
+see him again. Think of it, dear, and all it means! It means more money,
+association with men of my own kind, men like Weston, and a fine,
+interesting life; and it means you; oh, it means you!"
+
+Marley was able in this letter to communicate to Lavinia some of his
+enthusiasm and some of his suspense, and she found it difficult to await
+the result of his next interview with Weston. She began to count the
+hours until Marley and Weston should meet again, and then in a flash it
+came over her that they had doubtless already met, that the decision was
+already known, the fate determined, and she was still in ignorance. She
+had a sense of mystery in it, and she grew impatient, wondering why he
+did not telegraph. The next day came, and a letter with it; but the
+letter did not decide anything. Marley wrote that Weston had spoken to
+the city editor, and that he had told him to bring Marley around that
+evening. And so, other hours of waiting, and then, at last, another
+letter. Marley announced the result with what self-repression he could
+command.
+
+"It's settled," he wrote. "I'm to go to work Monday--as a reporter on
+the staff of the _Courier_. The salary to begin with is to be fifteen
+dollars a week. I'm glad to quit railroad work; I'm not built to be a
+railroad man; I can't adhere to rules as they want me to, and I can't
+bow down as it seems I should. I didn't tell you that my boss and I had
+not been getting along very well lately; I thought I wouldn't worry you.
+I was glad to be able to tell him to-day that I'd quit Saturday. I did
+it in a proud and haughty manner; he seemed surprised and shocked--even
+pained. And when I broke the news gently to the young Canuck he
+expressed great sorrow and regret, but in his secret heart I knew he was
+glad, for now as a prophet he can vindicate himself, at least partly, in
+his diary."
+
+Lavinia was glad that Marley had gone into newspaper work; much as she
+had tried she had not been able to conceive of him in exactly the ideal
+light as a clerk in a railroad office; that position, while it may have
+had its own promise, nevertheless did not envelope him in the atmosphere
+she considered native to him. In his new relation to literature, which,
+in her ignorance, she confounded with journalism, she felt a deep
+satisfaction, and a new pride, and she was glad when the _Republican_
+announced the fact of Marley's new position; she felt that it was a
+fitting vindication of her lover in the eyes of the people of Macochee
+and a rebuke for the distrust they had shown in him.
+
+Thereafter her mail was increased, for in addition to his letter Marley
+sent her the _Courier_ with his work marked; often he marked Weston's as
+well, and early in June he wrote: "I want you to read Weston's story in
+Sunday's paper about the Derby; it's a peach; it's the best piece of
+frill writing that the town has seen in many a day."
+
+The tone of Marley's letters now became more cheerful; it was evident to
+Lavinia that he was finding an interest in life, and in his descriptions
+of his daily work and the places all over Chicago it took him to and the
+people of all sorts it brought him in contact with, she found a new
+interest for her own life. When he wrote that his salary had been
+increased because of his story about a Sunday evening service in a
+church of the colored people in Dearborn Street, it seemed to her that
+happiness at last had come to them, and if, with the passing of June,
+she felt a pang at Marley's grieving in one of his letters that this was
+the month in which they had intended to be married, she was consoled by
+the rapid progress he was making in his work. His salary had been raised
+a second time; he was receiving now twenty-five dollars a week; it
+seemed large to her, and she could not understand why it did not seem
+large to Marley, even when he wrote that Weston was paid forty dollars a
+week.
+
+Her chief joy, perhaps, lay in the fact that he seemed to be living more
+comfortably than he had before. Now that he had left his dismal
+boarding-house she found a relief from its subtly communicated influence
+of the stranded wrecks of life, as Marley surely found it in the
+apartments he was sharing with Weston. She parted as gladly from the
+knowledge of his landlady as Marley did himself, assuring her that the
+landlady had "not decreased any in value as a zoo exhibit since first I
+rhapsodized about her." Lavinia felt that she could dispense with much
+of the worry her womanly concern for his comfort had given her, and she
+turned with a new joy to the books he was constantly recommending.
+
+"Did you ever read," he wrote, "Turgenieff's _Fathers and Sons_? I know
+that you didn't and therefore I know what a treat you have coming. I'll
+send you the book if you can't get it in Macochee, and I presume you
+can't. Snider's sign 'Drugs and Books' is a lure to deceive an unwary
+public that doesn't care as much for books as it does for soda-water;
+and the stock there, as I recall it, consists largely of forty-cent
+editions of books on which the copyright has expired, and which, printed
+on cheap, pulp paper, are to be introduced for the first time to the
+natives of Macochee. I wish you could see Weston's little book-case,
+with its rows of his favorites. Besides Turgenieff and Tolstoi--he says
+the Russians are the greatest novel writers the world has yet
+produced--he has all of George Eliot; I have just read over again
+_Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_. He likes Jane Austen, too, and he
+says you would like her; I haven't read any but _Emma_ as yet. I'm going
+to read them all. And if you like, you can read the set of little
+volumes I am sending you to-day; we can read them thus together. And
+Henry James--do read him--_Daisy Miller_ especially; you will like that.
+Besides these, Weston has most of Ibsen's plays, and sometimes he reads
+parts of them aloud to me; he reads them well. Some day, he says, he's
+going to write a play himself; he is fond of the theater, and we often
+go. One of the fine things about being on a newspaper is that we get
+theater tickets, though we can't always get tickets to the theater we
+want. Now and then the dramatic editor--a fine old fellow with a
+magnificent shock of white hair, who may be seen about the office late
+at night looking very _distingué_ in his evening clothes--gets Weston to
+write a criticism on some play; and often the literary editor lets him
+review books. Weston said to-day he'd get the literary editor to let me
+review some books, and when I told him I didn't know how, he laughed in
+a strange way and said that wouldn't make the slightest difference.
+There's another book you _must_ read, and that is _A Modern Instance_.
+The chief character is Bartley Hubbard, a newspaper man. Weston and I
+had a big argument about the character to-day. I said I thought it was a
+libel on the newspaper profession and Weston laughed and said it was
+only the truth, and that I'd agree with him after I'd been in the work
+longer. 'Newspaper work isn't a profession anyway,' he said, 'but a
+business.' He speaks of journalism--though he won't call it journalism,
+nor let me--just as lawyers speak of the law. He is urging me, by the
+way, to keep up my law studies, and I'm thinking of going to the law
+school here, if I find I can carry it on with my other work. Weston
+declares I can; he says a man has to carry water on both shoulders if he
+wants to amount to anything in the world--Wade Powell said something
+like that to me once. Weston says I'll want to get out of newspaper work
+after a while. He disturbed me a little to-day, and he hurt me, too, by
+saying that a newspaper man has no business to be married; and he knows
+all about you, too. Of course, he didn't mean to hurt me, it's merely
+his way of looking at things."
+
+Happy as she was, Lavinia still had to have her woman's worries, and
+they began to express themselves in constant adjuration to Marley to
+guard his health; she feared the effect of night work, and she feared,
+too, that he could not carry on his law studies and do his duty as a
+reporter at the same time. She sympathized with the spirit of pride and
+determination which made him wish to finish his law studies and be
+admitted to the bar, but she found a greater satisfaction in thinking of
+him as a journalist than as a lawyer; the figure he thus presented to
+her mind was so much more romantic than the prosaic one of a lawyer to
+which she had been all her life accustomed; on a large metropolitan
+daily he was almost as romantic to her as an army officer or a naval
+officer would have been. And while she did not like the night work, and
+had her fears of it for Marley, she nevertheless felt strongly its
+picturesque quality.
+
+The picture Marley drew in one of his letters of the strange shifting of
+the scene that is to be observed in the streets of a great city as
+darkness falls, when those that work in the prosaic day disappear and in
+their places appears the vast and mysterious army of the toilers by
+night, many of them in callings demanding the cover of the night,
+thrilled her strangely. But she did not know how from all the
+temptations of the irregular life he was leading he was saved, partly by
+the gentle friend he had found in James Weston, but more by the constant
+thought of the girl whom he had left behind at home.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXX
+
+                               HOME AGAIN
+
+
+Marley, after a year or more in Chicago, found the excitement of his
+first return home growing upon him as he looked out the car window and
+long before the train entered the borders of Gordon County he eagerly
+began watching for familiar things.
+
+In the spirit of holiday which had come in this his first vacation, he
+had felt justified in taking a chair in the parlor car, though from the
+associations he had formed in his newspaper work it was more difficult
+now for him to resist than to yield to extravagances. He had recalled
+with a smile how in those first hard days in the freight office he had
+joked about going home in a private car, and he had had all day a
+childish pleasure in pretending that the empty Pullman was a private
+car; he could almost realize such a distinction when he showed the
+conductor the pass his newspaper had got for him.
+
+But even if he now felt glad that he was a newspaper man instead of a
+railroad man, he was quite willing to return to Macochee on any terms.
+He had tried to convince himself that he knew the very moment the train
+swept across the Indiana line into Ohio, and he felt a fine glow of
+state pride. He held his pride somewhat in check until he heard some one
+speak a name that he recognized as that of an Ohio town and then he
+boasted to the porter:
+
+"Well, I'm back in my own state again."
+
+The porter, though ready to admit that Ohio was a pretty good old state,
+was nevertheless not very responsive, and Marley saw that he would have
+to enjoy his sensations all alone.
+
+He could view with satisfaction the figure of a tolerably well-dressed
+city man reflected in the long mirror that swayed with the rushing of
+the heavy coach. He knew that his return would create a sensation in
+Macochee, though he was resolved to be modest about it. Even if he was
+not returning to Macochee in the ceremony he had dreamed of, he was
+returning in a way that was distinguished enough for him and for
+Macochee.
+
+He was eager to see the old town; he tried to imagine his return in its
+proper order and sequence, first, the little depot, blistering in the
+hot sun of the August afternoon, the rails gleaming in front of it, and
+the air above them trembling in the heat; he could see the baggage
+trucks tilted up on the platform; from the eating-house came the odor of
+boiled ham compromised by the smell of the grease frying on the
+scorching cinders that were heaped about the ties; beyond was the grain
+elevator that once appeared so monstrous in his eyes; across the tracks,
+the weed-grown field; and the only living things in sight the two men
+unloading agricultural machines from a box-car abandoned on a siding,
+the only sound, the ticking of a telegraph instrument; the target was
+set, but the station officials had not yet appeared.
+
+Thence, in thought, he went up Miami Street; he saw the Court House and,
+lounging along the stone base of the fence, the loafers whom no one had
+ever seen move, but who yet must have made some sort of imperceptible
+astronomical progress, for they kept always just in the shadow of the
+building; then the old law office across the way; then Main Street, with
+its crazy signs, its awnings, and the horses hitched to the racks, then
+the Square with its old gabled buildings, the monument and the
+cavalryman, the long street leading to his own home, and at last, Ward
+Street, arched by its cottonwoods,--and he recalled his unfinished
+verses which had taken Ward Street for a subject:
+
+                  "I know a place all pastoral,
+                    Where streams in winter flow,
+                  And where down from the cottonwoods
+                    There falls a summer snow."
+
+And then, at last, the old house of the Blairs' with its cool veranda,
+its dark bricks, its broad overhanging cornices, and Lavinia standing in
+the doorway!
+
+He had never forgotten the anguish of his parting that night in spring,
+and he had looked forward to this return as an experience that would
+expiate it, and restore the lost balance of his life. But now as he
+thought of his life in Chicago, of the new scenes and associations, it
+came to him that that night after all had been final; the youth who had
+then gone forth had indeed gone forth never to return; another being was
+coming back in his stead. He had been successful in a way which at first
+flattered his pride, but a new sense of proportion had been growing in
+him that had lately made him mistrust newspaper work; he had for it a
+dislike almost as definite as that which used to displease him in
+Weston. He was growing tired of his life as a reporter; it had so many
+irregularities, so many hardships; it detached him from wholesome,
+every-day existence. He longed for some calling more definite, more
+permanent, a work in which he might do things, instead of record them in
+an ephemeral way. He had for a while been envious of Weston's progress
+in his literary efforts, and for a while he had emulated him, but he had
+not been long in recognizing that he lacked literary talent.
+
+Out of this dissatisfaction with himself he had lately gone in earnestly
+to complete his law studies, which all along he had pursued in a
+desultory fashion. He found some consolation in the hope that he might
+be admitted to the bar in the fall, though how or when he was to get
+into a practice was still as much of a problem as it had been in the old
+days in Macochee. He clung steadfastly, however, to the feeling that his
+newspaper work was but a makeshift; Weston and he had constantly
+supported each other in this view--it was their one hope.
+
+With thoughts somewhat like these Marley had been whiling away the hours
+of his long day's journey from Chicago to Macochee. He had read
+thoroughly, and with a professionally critical faculty, all the Chicago
+papers, and had long ago thrown them aside in a disorderly pile. Now he
+had the tired sense that his journey was nearing its end.
+
+At last he saw the old mill-pond, and his heart leaped in affection;
+then he got his umbrella and sticks, took off his traveling cap and put
+it in his bag. He stood up for the porter to brush him off, and when he
+had selected a half-dollar as a tip, he asked the porter to get his
+luggage together, and in a conscious affectation he could not forego,
+began to pull on his new gloves. They were nearing Macochee now; and
+suddenly the tears started to his eyes, as in a flash he saw his
+white-haired father standing on the platform, anxiously craning his neck
+for a first glimpse of the boy who was coming home.
+
+Marley's mother did not reproach him when he ate a hurried supper that
+evening and then set off immediately for Lavinia's. He renewed some of
+the emotions of the earlier days of his courtship as the familiar houses
+along the way gradually presented themselves to his recognition; he was
+glad to note the changeless aspect of a town that never now could
+change, at least in the way of progress, and he discovered a novel
+satisfaction--one of the many experiences that were so rapidly crowding
+in with his impressions--in the feeling that here, at least, in
+Macochee, things would remain as they were, and defy that inexorable law
+of change which makes so many tragedies in life. Lavinia must have
+recognized his step, for there she was, standing in the doorway, a smile
+on her face, and her eyelashes somehow moist. Marley felt a strange
+discomposure; there was a little effort, the intimacy of their letters
+must now give way to the intimacy of personal contact. But in another
+second she was in his arms, and her face was hidden against his breast.
+
+"At last," she said, "you're here!"
+
+He felt her tremble, and he held her more closely. When he released her
+she put her hands up to his shoulders and held him away from her, while
+she scanned him critically.
+
+"You've grown broader," she said, "and heavier, and--oh, so much
+handsomer!"
+
+The Blairs filed in presently, and Marley had the curious sense of this
+very scene having been enacted in his presence before, but it lacked the
+usual baffling effect of this psychological experience, for he was able
+to recall, in an incandescent flash of memory, that it was almost a
+repetition of their good-bys that night when he had gone away; Mrs.
+Blair was as tender, and if Connie and Chad were a little shy of his new
+importance, Judge Blair was as dignified, and as anxious as ever to get
+back to his reading. Marley felt once more that permanence of things in
+Macochee; this household had remained the same, and it made him feel
+more than ever the change that had occurred in him.
+
+In lovers' intense subjectivity, he and Lavinia discussed this change
+seriously. They reviewed their old dreams, and now they could laugh at
+their defeated wish to live, even in an humble way, in Macochee.
+
+"It was funny, wasn't it?" said Marley. "I was very young
+then,--nothing, in fact, but a kid."
+
+"Are you so very much older now?" asked Lavinia with a slight hint of
+teasing in her tender voice.
+
+"Well," Marley replied, with a seriousness that impressed him, at least,
+as the ripe wisdom of maturity, "I am not much older in years, but I am
+in experience, and in knowledge of life. You see, dear, you can measure
+time by the calendar, but you can't measure life that way. And Weston
+says that there is no calling that will give a man experience so quickly
+as newspaper work. You know we see everything, and we get a smattering
+of all kinds of knowledge. Weston says that is all that reconciles him
+to the business; he says a man learns more there than he ever does in
+college. He considers the training invaluable; he says it will be of
+great help to him in literature, if he can ever get into literature--he
+isn't sure yet that he can. He can tell better after his book is
+published. And he says a newspaper experience will help me in the law,
+too, that is," Marley added, with a whimsical imitation of Weston's
+despairing uncertainty, "if I can ever get into the law."
+
+"You think a great deal of Mr. Weston, don't you?" said Lavinia.
+
+"He's the finest fellow in the world, and the best friend I ever had."
+
+Marley had a curious intuition that Lavinia was a little jealous of
+Weston. He immediately sought to allay the feeling with this argument:
+
+"You see, when a man does all for a fellow that Jim has done for me, and
+when you have lived with him, and shared your haversack with him, and he
+with you, like two soldier comrades, you get right down to the bottom of
+him. And I want you to know him, dear, I know you'll like him."
+
+Lavinia was silent, and Marley had a fear that she might not accept
+Weston quite so readily.
+
+"He has done me a world of good," he went on. "He has taught me much, he
+has corrected my reckoning in more ways than one. He has taught me much
+about books; and he has taught me to look sanely on a life that isn't,
+he says, always truthfully reflected in books. And besides all, if it
+hadn't been for him, if he had not kept me at it and urged me on, I
+think I should have been doomed for ever to remain a poor newspaper
+man."
+
+"Don't you like newspaper work?" she asked with a shade of
+disappointment in her tone.
+
+"I did, but I like it less every day. It's a hard and unsatisfactory
+life, and it has no promise in it. A man very soon reaches its highest
+point, and then he must be content to stay there. It's the easiest thing
+for a young fellow to get a start in, if he's bright; I suppose I'm
+making more money than any of the young lawyers in Chicago; but because
+it is so easy is the very reason why it is hardly worth while. Things
+that are easily won are not worth striving for."
+
+"And you're going to get out of it?"
+
+"Yes, as soon as I can. As soon as I can, I'm going to get into the law.
+When Weston first began urging me to keep up my studies, and when
+finally he made me go to the night law school, I consented chiefly
+because I had always felt the chagrin of defeat in having been compelled
+to give it up; lately, I've begun to see things differently, and I've
+determined to carry out my first intention and get into the law somehow.
+Of course, it's going to be hard. And one has to have a pull there as
+everywhere else in these days."
+
+Marley was silent for a moment and, Lavinia thought, a little depressed.
+She watched him sympathetically, and yet she was a little troubled by a
+sense of detachment. She felt that Weston was now more closely
+associated with Marley's struggle than she, and she was disturbed, too,
+by the disappointment of finding that his struggles were not at all
+ended.
+
+"Weston says," Marley went on presently, "that newspaper work is a good
+stepping-stone, and by it I may be able to arrange for some place in the
+law which will give me the start I want."
+
+"I thought you liked your work," Lavinia said; "I thought you were happy
+in it."
+
+Marley detected her regret, and was on the point of speaking, when
+Lavinia went on:
+
+"I don't see why you can't go into literature as well as Mr. Weston."
+
+Marley laughed.
+
+"The reason is that I haven't his talent," he said
+
+"I don't see why," Lavinia argued with some resentment of his humility.
+"You haven't enough confidence in your own powers; you let Mr. Weston
+dominate you too much."
+
+"Now, dearest," he pleaded, "you mustn't do Jim that injustice. He
+doesn't dominate me; but he is so much wiser than I, he knows so much
+more. You will understand when you meet him."
+
+"Well," she tentatively admitted, "that is no reason why you shouldn't
+in time be a literary man as well as he. Why can't you?"
+
+"Because I can't write, that's why."
+
+"Why, Glenn, how can you say that? Your letters disprove that. Every one
+who read them said that they were remarkable, and that you should go
+into literature. They said you had such good descriptive powers."
+
+Marley was looking at her in amazement.
+
+"Why, Lavinia, you didn't show them!"
+
+"You simpleton!" she said, with a smile in her eyes, "of course not; but
+I have read parts of them to mama and to your mother now and then."
+
+"Oh, well, that's all right," sighed Marley in relief, and then he
+resumed his defense of Weston and his analysis of himself.
+
+"Of course, I suppose I can write a fairly good newspaper story; at
+least they say so at the office." He indulged a little look of pride,
+and then he went on: "But that isn't literature."
+
+"I don't see why it isn't," she said. "I should think it would be the
+most natural thing in the world to go from one into the other."
+
+"Not at all. Literature requires style, personality, distinction, and
+the artistic temperament."
+
+"I'd say you were talking now like George Halliday if I didn't know you
+were talking like Mr. Weston."
+
+"I wish you could hear Weston talk about literature," he said. "He'd
+convince you."
+
+"He couldn't convince me that he can write any better than you can."
+Lavinia compressed her lips in a defiant loyalty.
+
+Marley paused to kiss the lips for their loyalty, and he compromised the
+validity of his own argument by saying:
+
+"As a matter of fact, the law, in America and in England, has given more
+men to literature than journalism ever has."
+
+"Then maybe you can enter literature through the law," said Lavinia,
+seizing her advantage.
+
+"No," said Marley, shaking his head. "I'm not cut out for it, as Weston
+is. Some day he will be a great man, and we shall be proud to have known
+him so intimately. And we will have him at our home; I have many a dream
+about that."
+
+He looked fondly at her, and her eyes brightened.
+
+"And there is another reason why I want to get out of newspaper work,"
+he went on, speaking tenderly, "and that is because everybody says a
+newspaper man has no more right to be married than a soldier has."
+
+"But they all are," said Lavinia.
+
+"Yes, they all are, or most of them."
+
+"And I suppose it is the married ones who say that."
+
+"Well, I know one who is going to be married just as soon as he can."
+
+"Who is that,--Mr. Weston?"
+
+"No, but Mr. Weston knows him, and knows his intentions, and he has
+promised to be at the wedding and act as best man."
+
+"Oh, it would be fine to have a literary man at the wedding, wouldn't
+it."
+
+They talked then about the wedding, and they found all their old
+delicious joy in it. Marley said it must be soon now, though with a pang
+that laid a weight on his heart, he wondered, as he thought of all the
+extravagances he had allowed himself to drift into, where he was to get
+the money. He could reassure himself only by telling himself that he was
+going to live as an anchorite when he got back to Chicago; even if he
+had to give up the pleasant apartment with Weston and go back to the
+boarding-house in Ohio Street.
+
+"How shall you like living in Chicago?" he asked. "Can you be happy in a
+little flat, without knowing anybody, and without being anybody?"
+
+"I shall be happy anywhere with you, Glenn!" she said, looking
+confidently into his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXXI
+
+                       ILLUSIONS AND DISILLUSIONS
+
+
+It was a pleasure to Marley to accept the homage the people paid him;
+they confounded his success in journalism with a success in literature,
+and under the impression that all writers are somehow witty, they
+laughed extravagantly at his lightest observation.
+
+But much as Marley relished all this, much as he enjoyed being at home
+again, with Lavinia and with his father and mother, he was disturbed by
+a certain restlessness that came over him after he had been in Macochee
+a few days and the novelty and excitement of his return had worn off.
+The glamour the town had worn for him had left it; it seemed to have
+withered and shrunk away. He could no longer, by any effort of the
+imagination, realize it as the place he had carried affectionately in
+his heart during the long months of his absence; its interests were so
+few and so petty, and he found himself battling with a wish to get away.
+He was fearful of this feeling; he did not dare to own it to himself,
+much less to his father and mother or to Lavinia.
+
+He was glad that Lavinia would not let him mention going back to
+Chicago, and as the days swept by with the swiftness of vacation time,
+he was troubled that he did not feel more acutely the sorrow he felt
+would best become the prospect of another separation. He was comforted,
+finally, when he was able to analyze his sensations sufficiently to
+discover that it was neither his sweetheart nor his parents that had
+changed, but his own attitude toward life in a small town; he was vastly
+relieved when he succeeded in separating his feelings and saw that it
+was Macochee alone that he had lost his affection for, though he could
+not analyze his sensations deeply enough to recognize himself as at that
+period of life when external conditions are accepted for more than their
+real value; he was still too young for that. And so he could spend his
+days happily with Lavinia and grudge the moments which Lawrence and
+Mayme Carter filched from them by their calls, and he was as resentful
+of Mayme's invitation to the supper which she exalted into a dinner with
+a reception afterward, as was Lavinia herself.
+
+When Marley went to pay his call on Wade Powell, he found many
+sensations as he glanced about the dingy little office where he had
+begun his studies. Wade Powell himself, smoking and reading his
+Cincinnati paper, was sitting at his old desk, with the same aspect of
+permanence he had always given the impression of. Marley rushed in on
+him with a face red and smiling and when Powell looked up, he threw down
+his paper, and leaped to his feet, saying:
+
+"Well, I'll be damned!"
+
+But when their first greetings were over, Powell's manner changed; he
+began to show Marley a certain respect, and he paid him the delicate
+tribute of letting him do most of the talking, whereas he used to do
+most of the talking himself. He was not prepared to hear that Marley was
+still studying law; and it cost him an effort to readjust his conception
+of Marley as a successful journalist to the old one of a struggling
+student. He gave Marley some intelligence of this, and of his
+disappointment when he said with a meekness Marley did not like to see
+in him:
+
+"Well, of course, you know your own business best."
+
+But when Marley had taken pains to explain his position and when he had
+described the Chicago law offices, Powell grew more reconciled.
+
+"I've watched you," he said, "I've watched you, and I've asked your
+father about you every time I've seen him; my one regret was that you
+were not working on a Cincinnati paper; then I could have read what you
+were writing. I did try to get a Chicago paper--but you know what this
+town is."
+
+Powell was deeply interested in Marley's description of his old friend,
+Judge Johnson, and as Marley gave him some notion of the judge's
+importance and prosperity Powell could only exclaim from time to time:
+
+"Well, I'll be damned!"
+
+Marley did not tell Powell that Judge Johnson had appeared to have
+forgotten him; he felt that it would be more handsome to accept the
+moral responsibility of a prevarication than to hurt Powell's feelings
+in the way he knew the truth would hurt them. Even as it was, Judge
+Johnson's success, now so keenly realized by Powell when it had been
+brought home to him in this personal way, seemed to subdue him, and he
+was only lifted out of his gloom when Marley said:
+
+"But I'll tell you one thing, there isn't a lawyer in Chicago who can
+try a case with you."
+
+Powell's eye brightened and his face glowed a deeper red; then the look
+died away as he said:
+
+"Well, I made a mistake. I ought to have gone there."
+
+"Is it too late?"
+
+Powell thought a moment, and Marley regretted having tempted him with an
+impossibility. He was relieved when Powell shook his head and said:
+
+"Yes, it's too late now."
+
+Powell, with something of the pathos of age and failure that was
+stealing gradually over him, begged Marley to come in and see him every
+day while he was at home.
+
+"You see I've always kept your desk," he said, in a tone that apologized
+for a weakness he perhaps thought unmanly, "just as it was when you went
+away."
+
+Marley thought cynically that Powell had kept everything else just as it
+was when he went away, but he was instantly ashamed of the thought, and
+ashamed, too, of the fact that he and Lavinia both considered even this
+little morning call a waste of time, and a sacrifice almost too great to
+be borne.
+
+Powell went with Marley out into the street, and it gave him evident
+pride to walk by his side down Main Street and around the Square.
+
+"I want them all to see you," he said frankly.
+
+He made Marley go with him to the McBriar House and then to Con's
+Corner, and, in every place where men stopped him and shook Marley's
+hand and asked him how he was getting along, Powell took the
+responsibility of replying promptly:
+
+"Look at him; how does he seem to be getting along?"
+
+Powell found a delight that must have been keener than Marley's in
+Marley's fidelity to Chicago, expressed quite in the boastful frankness
+of the citizens of that city when abroad, though to Marley it seemed
+that he was putting it on them by doing so. He found them all, however,
+in a spirit of loyalty to Macochee that might easily have become
+combative.
+
+"Well, little old Macochee's good enough for us, eh, Wade?" they would
+say.
+
+Marley would not let them be ahead of him in praise of Macochee, and
+Powell himself softened enough to admit that old Ohio was a pretty good
+place to have come from.
+
+When they suddenly encountered Carman in the street, Marley flushed with
+confusion, first for himself and then vicariously for Powell. But there
+was no escape from a situation that no doubt exaggerated itself to his
+sensitiveness, and he was soon allowing Carman to hold his hand in his
+right palm while with the other Carman solicitously held Marley's left
+elbow, and transfixed him with that left eye which still refused to
+react to light and shade.
+
+"Well, how are you?" asked Carman. "How are you, anyway?"
+
+"Oh, I'm all right."
+
+"Guess you're glad now I didn't give you that job, eh?"
+
+Marley could not look at Powell, but he hastened to say:
+
+"Yes, I'm glad, now."
+
+"Maybe it was for the best," said Carman.
+
+When they had left him Marley quickly and crudely tried to change the
+subject, but Powell insisted on saying:
+
+"I want you to know that I've always felt like a dog over that."
+
+"Oh, don't mention it," Marley begged. "I was honest when I told Carman
+I was glad it turned out as it did."
+
+"Yes," said Powell, "I guess it was all for the best."
+
+To Marley's relief they dropped the matter then, and went over to Con's
+Corner. There Powell lighted a cigar, and Marley could not resist asking
+for a brand of cigarettes, the kind that Weston smoked, though he knew
+that Con would not have them. He felt mean about it afterward, but he
+could not forego some of the petty distinctions of living in a city and
+he indulged a little revenge toward the people who had deserted him in
+what had seemed to him his need, and now, in what seemed to them his
+prosperity, were so ready to rally to him. Marley went home at noon
+feeling that his triumph had been almost as great as if he had come home
+in a private car.
+
+His triumph soon was at an end; they came to the afternoon of the day
+when Marley was to return to Chicago. It was a golden day, with a sun
+shining out of a sky without clouds, and yet a delicious breeze blew out
+of the little hills. Marley and Lavinia walked out the white and dusty
+pike that made the road to Mingo. They walked slowly along the edge of
+the road, in silence, under the sadness of the parting that was before
+them. They longed ineffably that the moments might be stayed; somehow
+they felt they might be stayed by their silence.
+
+But when they had ascended the hill and stood beside the old oak-tree
+which grew by the road, they looked out across the valley of the Mad
+River, miles and miles away--across fields now golden with the wheat, or
+green with the rustling corn that glinted in the sun, off and away to
+the trees that became vague and dim in the hazy distance. Back whence
+they had come lay Macochee; they could see the tower of the Court House,
+the red spire of the Methodist church, the gleam of the sun on some
+great window in the roof of the car-shops; on the other side of town
+crawled a train, trailing its smoke behind it. Marley looked at
+Lavinia--she was leaning against the tree, and as he looked he saw that
+her blue eyes were filling slowly with tears.
+
+"Isn't it beautiful!" he said, looking away from her to the simple
+scenery of Ohio.
+
+"Do you remember that day?"
+
+"When we picked out our farm--where was it?"
+
+"Wasn't it over there?"
+
+"Yes," he said. "We could come and live here when we are old." He knew
+he was but seeking to console himself for what now could not be. "And
+there is the old town," he said. "It looks beautiful from here, nestling
+among those trees, it seems peaceful, and calm, and simple. But it is
+different when you are in it; for there are gossip and envy and spite,
+and I can never quite forgive it because it had no place for me. Well,"
+he went on defiantly, in the relief he had been able to make for himself
+out of his immature reading of Macochee's character; "I don't need it
+any more; it is little and narrow and provincial, and the real life is
+to be lived out in the larger world. It's a hard fight, but it's worth
+it."
+
+"Don't you regret leaving it?" asked Lavinia, in a voice that was
+tenderer than Marley had ever known it. Marley looked at Macochee and
+then he looked at her.
+
+"I regret leaving it, dear heart, because I must leave you behind in
+it."
+
+"Would you never care to come back if it were not for me?" she asked.
+
+"I might," he admitted, "when we are old. We could come back here then
+and settle down on our farm over there." He pointed.
+
+"I'm half-afraid of the city," Lavinia said.
+
+He turned and took her in his arms.
+
+"Dearest," he said, "you must not say that; for the next time I come it
+will be to take you away from Macochee."
+
+"Will it?" she whispered.
+
+"Yes; and it can't be long now. How we have had to wait!"
+
+"Yes," she repeated, "how we have had to wait!"
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXXII
+
+                                AT LAST
+
+
+Marley, in that compensatory pleasure we find in difficulties in the
+retrospect, was afterward fond of saying that if he had waited until he
+had the money and the position to warrant his marrying, he never would
+have married at all.
+
+Just what moved him to take the decisive step he did he would have found
+it hard to tell. He had grown accustomed to the life he was living in
+Chicago, he had succumbed, as it were, to his environment; he no longer
+regretted Macochee and he found a satisfaction in declaring, whenever he
+had the chance, that the kindest thing the town had ever done for him
+was to refuse him a place within its borders. As he looked back at all
+the plans he had formed, he marveled at their number, but he marveled
+more that he should have had such regret in the failure of all of them;
+he was glad now that they had failed; had any one of them succeeded his
+life would have been diverted into other channels, and it gave him a
+kind of fear when he tried to imagine his life in those other channels;
+he could see himself in those relations only as some other identity, and
+it gave him a gruesome feeling to do this.
+
+Not that he was satisfied with himself or his surroundings; he did not
+like newspaper work, and he did not like Chicago very well. He was
+determined to get out of newspaper work at any rate, and while he could
+not yet clearly see a way of getting into the law, he had a calm
+assurance that he would do it, in the end. Weston sustained him in this
+hope by saying:
+
+"A man can't control circumstances; they control him; but sometimes he
+can dodge them, and, after all, every sincere prayer is answered."
+
+During the winter that followed the summer when he had paid his visit to
+his home he worked hard at the law, spending in study the hours the
+other men on his newspaper spent in their dissipations, and in the
+spring he stole away almost secretly to Springfield, took the
+examination, and was admitted to the bar.
+
+After it was done, it seemed but a little thing; he wrote Lavinia and he
+wrote Wade Powell, knowing the interest Powell would have in the fact,
+that he felt no different now as a lawyer than he had when he was merely
+a layman. Weston had spent the winter over the book he was writing; in
+the spring he found a publisher, and _The Clutch of Circumstance_ was
+given to the world. Marley thought it a wonderful book, and so did
+Lavinia, and while it made but little noise in the world, Weston said it
+had done better than he expected--so well, in fact, that he was going to
+give up newspaper work, and give his attention wholly to writing another
+book.
+
+It was a shock to Marley when Weston told him they would have to give up
+their apartment; it was a break in the life to which he had grown
+accustomed. But it seemed a time of change, and it was then he wrote
+Lavinia that he thought it useless for them to wait any longer; he
+thought they might as well be married then as at any time.
+
+Unconsciously, perhaps, he wrote this letter as if he and not she had
+been waiting, and if he had known the state of the sensitive public
+opinion in Macochee, he might have felt himself justified in the
+attitude. Ever since his visit there the summer before his apparent
+prosperity had given the sentiment of the town an impetus in his favor;
+the people had turned their criticism toward Lavinia; for months it was
+a common expression that it was a shame she was keeping Marley waiting
+so long. They would nod in a sinister way, and insinuate the worldliest
+of motives; it was generally under stood that she was waiting for Marley
+to make a fortune, and this, they held, was demanding too much. She had
+withdrawn utterly from the society of Macochee; and she had not gone to
+one of the balls Lawrence had arranged that winter at the Odd Fellows'
+Hall; her position, outwardly at least, was as isolated as that of the
+Misses Cramer, the fragile and transparent old maids who lived so many
+years in their house sheltered by the row of cedars behind the High
+School grounds.
+
+When Judge Blair received the formal letter in which Marley told him he
+had asked Lavinia to name the day and requested his approval, the judge
+gave his consent with a promptness that surprised him almost as much as
+it did Mrs. Blair and Lavinia. He justified his inconsistency to his
+wife, in order perhaps, the more thoroughly to justify it to himself, by
+saying that he had long felt Lavinia's position keenly.
+
+"If the strain has been to her anything like what it has been to me," he
+said to his wife, "they could not have endured it much longer."
+
+"It will be lonely here without her," said Mrs. Blair, pensively.
+
+"Yes," the judge assented, and then after a moment's thought he added:
+
+"But we can now begin to worry about Connie."
+
+"Don't you dare mention that, William!" said Mrs. Blair, almost
+viciously. "She mustn't begin to think of such a thing."
+
+"But she's in long dresses now, and she seems to walk home more and more
+slowly every night with those boys from the High School."
+
+"Well, I don't propose to go through such an experience as we have had
+for these last three years, not right away, at any rate."
+
+The judge tried to laugh, as he said:
+
+"Well, I'll turn Connie over to you; I'm going to have a little peace
+now."
+
+The judge complained that he could find no peace, however, anywhere, so
+great was the preparation that raged thereafter in the house, driving
+him with his book and cigar from place to place. Mrs. Blair and Lavinia
+and Connie were in fine excitement over the gowns that were being
+fashioned, and Miss Ryan lived at the Blairs' for weeks, while in every
+room there were billowy clouds of white garments, and threads and
+ravelings over all the floors.
+
+Meanwhile it was understood that Marley, too, was making arrangements in
+Chicago. He had leased a small flat on the South Side, and had arranged
+with Weston to remove most of the furniture of their apartment into the
+new home where the lovers were to set up housekeeping. Mrs. Marley was
+to spare them some of the things from her home, and Mrs. Blair, from
+time to time, designated certain articles which she was willing to
+devote to the cause. Chad's contribution was merely a suggestion; he
+said they could depend on the wedding presents to fill up the gaps.
+
+They were married in the middle of June. The ceremony was pronounced by
+Doctor Marley in the parlor of the Blair home; everybody bore up well
+until, under the stress of his emotion, the doctor's voice broke, and
+then Mrs. Blair wept and the judge wiped his eyes and his reddened,
+anguished face. Mrs. Marley cried too, though every one tried to comfort
+her with the assurance that she was not losing a son, but gaining a
+daughter. Connie, in her first long gown, acted as maid for her sister,
+but it was evident that she was desperately impressed by the young
+author of _The Clutch of Circumstance_, who had come on from Chicago to
+act as groomsman.
+
+The company that had been invited was as much impressed by Weston as
+Connie was; they had never had an author in Macochee before, and though
+most of them had such confused notions of Weston's performances in
+literature that they grew cold with fear when they talked with him, they
+nevertheless braved it out for the sake of an experience they could
+boast of afterward. Most of them took refuge in a discussion of Marley's
+achievements with him, and they gave him the unflattering impression
+that Marley's work was as important as his own.
+
+Many of them had plots they wished him to use in his stories, others
+wished to know if he took his characters from real life; and Mrs. Carter
+was of such an acuteness that she identified Marley as his hero, though
+Weston had tried to keep his book from having any hero. George Halliday,
+however, was able to save the day; he could discriminate; he had read
+_The Clutch of Circumstance_, having borrowed Lavinia's autograph copy,
+and he told Weston that while he did not go in for realism, because it
+was too photographic, too materialistic and lacked personality, he
+nevertheless had enjoyed a pleasant half-hour with the volume, and
+considered it not half-bad.
+
+This conversation was held in plain hearing of all in that difficult
+moment after the ceremony, when the relatives of the bride had solemnly
+kissed her, and her most intimate friends, like Mayme Carter, had wept
+on her neck. The people were standing helplessly about; Marley noticed
+Wade Powell, as dignified as a clergyman, in his black garments and
+white tie standing apart with his wife.
+
+Marley had never seen Mrs. Powell before, but he recalled in a flash
+that she filled his conception of her; and this delicate, sensitive
+little face completed the picture he remembered long ago to have formed.
+When he saw Powell standing there, his hands behind him, unequal to the
+ordeal of being entertained in Judge Blair's house, bowing stiffly and
+forcing a smile on the few occasions when he was spoken to or thought he
+was being spoken to, he had a wish to go to him, but he could not then
+leave his place by Lavinia's side. He was glad a moment later when he
+saw his father and Wade Powell in conversation, and as he and Lavinia
+passed them on their way out to the dining-room he heard his father say:
+
+"Well, I'll tell you, Mr. Powell, when I was young my creed was founded
+on the fact of sin in man; but now that I am old, I find it more and
+more founded on the fact of the good that is in all of them."
+
+When the supper was over, Lawrence gave the cheer that every one wished
+to see come to the wedding by clearing the parlor for a dance, and
+Marley was glad that his position now permitted him to refrain from
+dancing with a valid excuse.
+
+Marley thought that Lavinia never looked so pretty as she did when she
+stood at the head of the stairs after she had donned her blue traveling
+gown, drawing on her gloves and waiting for the carriage that was to
+drive them to the station. Her face was rosy in the light that filled
+the house, and she met his eyes with a fond, contented glance.
+
+"Are you happy?" he asked.
+
+"Don't you see?" she said, looking up at him.
+
+"And will you be happy in that big city, away from every one you know,
+as the wife of a newspaper man?"
+
+"I shall be happy anywhere with you."
+
+"Our dreams are coming true," Marley said, "after a fashion. And yet not
+just as we dreamed them, after all."
+
+"In all the essentials they are, aren't they?"
+
+"Yes, but you know our dream was that I was to practise law."
+
+"Well, we still have that dream."
+
+"Yes, we still have it; maybe it will come true. Weston says that our
+dreams are as much realities in our lives as anything else."
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Average, by Brand Whitlock
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45728 ***
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Average, by Brand Whitlock

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-Title: The Happy Average

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-Author: Brand Whitlock

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-Illustrator: Howard Chandler Christy

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-Release Date: May 23, 2014 [EBook #45728]

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-  <div class='nf-center'>

-    <div><span class='xlarge'><i>The Happy Average</i></span></div>

-    <div class='c000'><i>By</i> BRAND WHITLOCK</div>

-    <div class='c000'><span class='sc'>Author of</span></div>

-    <div>“Her Infinite Variety,� “The 13th</div>

-    <div>District, etc.�</div>

-    <div class='c000'><span class='sc'>Illustrated By</span></div>

-    <div>HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY</div>

-    <div class='c000'><i>A. L. BURT COMPANY</i></div>

-    <div><i>Publishers&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;New York</i></div>

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-    <div><span class='sc'>Copyright, 1904</span></div>

-    <div><span class='sc'>The Bobbs-Merrill Company</span></div>

-    <div class='c000'><span class='sc'>October</span></div>

-  </div>

-</div>

-

-<div class='pbb'></div>

-<hr class='pb' />

-

-<div>

-  <h1 class='c001'>The Happy Average</h1>

-</div>

-

-<div>

-  <h2 class='c002'>CHAPTER I<br /> <br />A YOUNG MAN’S FANCY</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Come on, old man.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lawrence led the way with a jaunty step that

-was intended to show his easy footing with the

-Carters. But Marley lagged behind. Even if calling

-on girls had not been such a serious business

-with him, he could not forget that he was just graduated

-from college and that a certain dignity befitted

-him. He wished Lawrence would not speak so

-loud; the girls might hear, and think he was

-afraid; he wished to keep the truth from them as

-long as possible. He had already caught a glimpse

-of the girls, or thought he had, but before he could

-make sure, the vague white figures on the veranda

-stirred; he heard a scurrying, and the loose bang

-of a screen door. Then it was still. Lawrence

-laughed—somehow, as Marley felt, derisively.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The way from the sidewalk up to the Carters’

-veranda was not long, of course, though it seemed

-long to Marley, and Marley’s deliberation made

-it seem long to Lawrence. They paused at the

-steps of the veranda, and Lawrence made a low

-bow.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Good evening, Mrs. Carter,� he said. “Ah,

-Captain, you here too?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley had not noticed the captain, or Mrs.

-Carter; they sat there so quietly, enjoying the

-cool of the evening, or such cool as a July evening

-can find in central Ohio.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“My friend, Mr. Marley, Mrs. Carter—Glenn

-Marley—you’ve heard of him, Captain.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley bowed and said something. The presentation

-there in the darkness made it rather difficult

-for him, and neither the captain nor his wife

-moved. Lawrence sat down on the steps and

-fanned himself with his hat.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Been a hot day, Captain,� he said. “Think

-there’s any sign of rain?� He sniffed the air.

-The captain did not need to sniff the air to be able

-to reply, in a voice that rumbled up from his

-bending figure, that he had no hope of any.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Mayme’s home, ain’t she?� asked Lawrence,

-turning to Mrs. Carter.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll go see,� said Mrs. Carter, and she rose

-quickly, as if glad to get away, and the screen

-door slammed again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Billy was in the bank to-day,� Lawrence went

-on, speaking to Captain Carter. “He said your

-wheat was ready to cut. Did you get Foose all

-right?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� said the captain, “he’ll give me next

-week.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you have to board the threshers?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, not this year; they bring along their own

-cook, and a tent and everything.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Je-rusalem!� exclaimed Lawrence. “Things

-<em>are</em> changing in these days, ain’t they? Harvesting

-ain’t as hard on the women-folks as it used

-to be.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No,� said the captain, “but I pay for it, so

-much extra a bushel.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>His head shook regretfully, but he would have

-lost his regrets in telling of the time when he had

-swung a cradle all day in the harvest field, had

-not Mrs. Carter’s voice just then been heard calling

-up the stairs:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Mayme!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Whoo!� answered a high, feminine voice.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Come down. There’s some one here to see

-you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Carter turned into the parlor, and the tall

-windows that opened to the floor of the veranda

-burst into light.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She’ll be right down, John,� said Mrs. Carter,

-appearing in the door. “You give me your

-hats and go right in.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“All right,� said Lawrence, and he got to his

-feet. “Come on, Glenn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Carter took the hats of the young men

-and hung them on the rack, where they might

-easily have hung them themselves. Then she

-went back to the veranda, letting the screen door

-bang behind her, and Lawrence and Marley entered

-the parlor. Marley took his seat on one of

-the haircloth chairs that seemed to have ranged

-themselves permanently along the walls, and

-Lawrence went to the square piano that stood across

-one corner of the room, and sat down tentatively

-on the stool, swinging from side to side.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley glanced at the pictures on the walls.

-One of them was a steel engraving of Lincoln and

-his cabinet; another, in a black oval frame, portrayed

-Captain Carter in uniform, his hair dusting

-the strapped shoulders of a coat made after

-the pattern that seems to have been worn so uncomfortably

-by the heroes of the Civil War. There

-was, however, a later picture of the captain, a crayon

-enlargement of a photograph, that had taken

-him in civilian garb. This picture, in its huge

-gilt frame, was the most aggressive thing in the

-room, except, possibly, the walnut what-not. Marley

-had a great fear of the what-not; it seemed

-to him that if he stirred he must topple it over,

-and dash its load of trinkets to the floor.

-Presently he heard the swish of skirts. Then a

-tall girl came in, and Lawrence sprang to his

-feet.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Hello, Mayme. What’d you run for?� he

-said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He had crossed the room and seized the girl’s

-hand. She flashed a rebuke at him, though it

-was evident that the rebuke was more out of deference

-to the strange presence of Marley than for

-any real resentment she felt.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“This is my friend, Mr. Marley, Miss Carter,�

-Lawrence said. “You’ve heard me speak of him.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley edged away from the what-not, rose and

-took the hand the girl gave him. Then Miss Carter

-crossed to the black haircloth sofa and seated

-herself, smoothing out her skirts.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Didn’t know what to do, so we thought we’d

-come out and see you,� said Lawrence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, indeed!� said Miss Carter. “Well, it’s

-too bad about you. We’ll do when you can’t find

-anybody else to put up with you, eh?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, yes, you’ll do in a pinch,� chaffed Lawrence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, can’t you find a comfortable seat?� the

-girl asked, still addressing Lawrence, who had

-gone back to the piano stool.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m going to play in a minute,� said Lawrence,

-“and sing.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, excuse <em>me</em>!� implored Miss Carter. “Do

-let me get you a seat.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lawrence promptly went over to the sofa and

-leaned back in one corner of it, affecting a discomfort.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Can’t I get you a pillow, Mr. Lawrence?�

-Miss Carter asked presently. “Or perhaps a cot;

-I believe there’s one somewhere in the attic.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, I reckon I can stand it,� said Lawrence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley had regained his seat on the edge of the

-slippery chair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Where’s Vinie?� asked Lawrence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She’s coming,� answered Miss Carter.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Taking out her curl papers, eh?� said Lawrence.

-“She needn’t mind us.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Miss Carter pretended a disgust, but as she was

-framing a retort, somehow, the eyes of all of them

-turned toward the hall door. A girl in a gown of

-white stood there clasping and unclasping her

-hands curiously, and looking from one to another

-of those in the room.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Come in, Lavinia,� said Miss Carter. Something

-had softened her voice. The girl stepped

-into the room almost timidly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Miss Blair,� said Miss Carter, “let me introduce

-Mr. Marley.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The sudden consciousness that he had been sitting—and

-staring—smote Marley, and he sprang

-to his feet. Embarrassment overpowered him and

-he bowed awkwardly. Lawrence had been silent,

-and his silence had been a long one for him. Seeming

-to recognize this he hastened to say:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, how’s the world using you, Vinie?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The girl smiled and answered:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, pretty well, thank you, Jack.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It grated on Marley to hear her called Vinie.

-Lavinia Blair! Lavinia Blair! That was her

-name. He had heard it before, of course, yet it

-had never sounded as it did now when he repeated

-it to himself. The girl had seated herself in a

-rocking-chair across the room, almost out of range,

-as it were. He was rather glad of this, if anything.

-It seemed to relieve him of the duty of

-talking to her. He supposed, of course, they

-would pair off somehow. The young people always

-did in Macochee. He supposed he had been

-brought there to pair off with Lavinia Blair. He

-liked the thought, yet the position had its responsibilities.

-Somehow he never could forget that he

-could not dance. He hoped they would not

-propose dancing. He always had a fear of that in

-making calls, and all the calls he made seemed

-to come to it soon or late; some one always proposed

-it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was aware that Lawrence and Mayme

-Carter had resumed the exchange of their rude

-repartee, though he did not know what they had

-said. They kept laughing, too. Lavinia Blair

-seemed to join in the laughter if not in the badinage.

-Marley wished he might join in it. Jack

-Lawrence was evidently funnier than ever that

-night; Mayme Carter was convulsed. Now and

-then Lawrence said something to her in a tone too

-low for the others to hear, and these remarks

-pushed her to the verge of hysterics. Marley had

-a notion they were laughing at him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Meanwhile Lavinia Blair sat with her hands

-in her lap, smiling as though she were amused.

-Marley wondered if he amused her. He felt that

-he ought to say something, but he did not know

-what to say. He thought of several things, but, as

-he turned them over in his mind, he was convinced

-that they were not appropriate. So he sat

-and looked at Lavinia Blair, looked at her eyes, her

-mouth, her hair. He thought he had never seen

-such a complexion.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mayme Carter had snatched her handkerchief

-back from Lawrence, and retreated to her end

-of the sofa. There she sat up stiffly, folded her

-hands, and, though her mirth still shook her spasmodically,

-she said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Now, Jack, behave yourself.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lawrence burlesqued a surprise, and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll leave it to Vine if I’ve done anything.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley wondered how much further abbreviation

-Lavinia Blair’s name would stand, but he was suddenly

-aware that he was being addressed. Miss

-Carter, with an air of dismissing Lawrence,

-said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You have not been in Macochee long, have

-you, Mr. Marley?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley admitted that he had not, but said that

-he liked the town. When Lawrence explained

-that Marley was going to settle down there and

-become one of them, Miss Carter said she was

-awfully glad, but warned him against associating

-too much with Lawrence. This embarrassed Marley,

-if it did not Lawrence, and he immediately

-gave the scene to Lawrence, who guessed he would

-sing his song. To do so he went to the piano, and

-began to pick over the frayed sheets of music that

-lay on its green cover. To forestall him, however,

-Miss Carter rushed across the room and slid on to

-the piano stool herself, saying breathlessly:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Anything to stop that!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She struck a few vagrant chords, and Marley,

-glad of a subject on which he could express himself,

-pleaded with her to play. At last she did so.

-When she had finished, Lawrence clapped his

-hands loudly, and stopped only when a voice

-startled them. It was Mrs. Carter calling through

-the window:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Play your new piece, Mayme!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Miss Carter demurred, but after they had argued

-the question through the window, the daughter

-gave in, and played it. The music soothed

-Lawrence to silence, and when Miss Carter completed

-her little repertoire, his mockery could recover

-itself no further than to say:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Won’t you favor us, Miss Blair?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When Lavinia Blair declined, he struck an imploring

-attitude and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, please do! We’re dying to hear you. You

-didn’t leave your music at home, did you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley heard the chairs scraping on the

-veranda, and the screen door slammed once more.

-Then he heard Captain Carter go up the stairs,

-while Mrs. Carter halted in the doorway of the

-parlor long enough to say:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You lock the front door when you come up,

-Mayme.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mayme without turning replied “All right,�

-and when her mother had disappeared she said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s awful hot in here, let’s go outside.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley found himself strolling in the yard with

-Lavinia Blair. The moon had not risen, but the

-girl’s throat and arms gleamed in the starlight;

-her white dress seemed to be a cloud of gauze; she

-floated, rather than walked, there by his side.

-They paused by the gate. About them were the

-voices of the summer night, the crickets, the katydids,

-far away the frogs, chirping musically. They

-stood a while in the silence, and then they turned,

-and were talking again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley did most of the talking, and all he

-said was about himself, though he did not realize

-that this was so. He had already told her of

-his life in the towns where his father had preached

-before he came to Macochee, and of his four years

-in college at Delaware. He tried to give her some

-notion of the sense of alienation he had felt as the

-son of an itinerant Methodist minister; for him

-no place had ever taken on the warm color and expression

-of home. He explained that as yet

-he knew little of Macochee, having been away at

-college when his father moved there the preceding

-fall. It was so easy to talk to her, and as he told

-her of his ambitions, the things he was going to do

-became so many, and so easy. He was going

-to become a lawyer; he thought he should go to

-Cincinnati.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And leave Macochee?� said Lavinia Blair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley caught his breath.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Would you care?� he whispered.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She did not answer. He heard the crickets, the

-katydids, the frogs again; there came the perfume

-of the lilacs, late flowering that year; the

-heavy odor of a shrub almost overpowered him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“My father is a lawyer,� Lavinia said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They had turned off the path, and were

-wandering over the lawn. The dew sparkled on it; and

-Marley became solicitous.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Won’t you get your feet wet?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The girl laughed at the idea, but she caught up

-her skirts, and they wandered on in the shade of

-the tall elms. Marley did not know where they

-were. The yard seemed an endless garden, immense,

-unknown, enchanted; the dark trees all

-around him stood like the forest of some park, and

-the lawn stretched away to fall over endless terraces;

-he imagined statues and fountains gleaming

-in the heavy shadows of the trees. The house

-seemed lost in the distance, though he felt its presence

-there behind him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Once he saw the twinkle of a passing light in

-an upper story. He could no longer hear the

-voices of Mayme and Lawrence, but he caught

-the tinkling notes of a banjo, away off somewhere.

-Its music was very sweet. They strolled on, their

-feet swishing in the damp grass, then suddenly

-there was a rush, a loud barking, and a dog sprang

-at them out of the darkness. Lavinia gave a little

-cry. Marley was startled; he felt that he must

-run, yet he thought of the girl beside him. He

-must not let her see his fear. He stepped in front

-of her. He could feel her draw more closely to

-him, and he thrilled as the sense of his protectorship

-came to him. He must think of some heroic

-scheme of vanquishing the dog, but it stopped in

-its mad rush, and Lavinia, standing aside, said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, it’s only Sport!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They laughed, and their laugh was the happier

-because of the relief from their fear.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We must have wandered around behind the

-house,� said Lavinia. “There’s the shed.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They turned, and went back. The enchantment

-of the yard had departed. Marley seemed to

-see things clearly once more, though his heart still

-beat as he felt the delicious sense of protectorship

-that had come over him as Lavinia shrank to his

-side at the moment the dog rushed at them. Nor

-could he ever forget her face as she smiled up at

-him in the little opening they came into on the side

-lawn. The young moon was just sailing over the

-trees. As they approached the veranda, Lawrence’s

-voice called out of the darkness:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, where have you young folks been stealing

-away to?�</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER II<br /> <br />WADE POWELL</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Marley halted at the threshold and glanced

-up at the sign that swung over the doorway.

-The gilt lettering of the sign had long ago

-been tarnished, and where its black sanded

-paint had peeled in many weathers the original

-tin was as rusty as the iron arm from

-which it creaked. Yet Macochee had long since

-lost its need of the shingle to tell it where Wade

-Powell’s law office was. It had been for many

-years in one of the little rooms of the low brick

-building in Miami Street, just across from the

-Court House; it was almost as much of an institution

-as the Court House itself, with which its

-triumphs and its trials were identified. Marley

-gathered enough courage from his inspection of

-the sign to enter, but once inside, he hesitated.

-Then a heavy voice spoke.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, come in,� it said peremptorily.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Wade Powell, sitting with his feet on his table,

-held his newspaper aside and looked at Marley

-over his spectacles. Marley had had an ideal of

-Wade Powell, and now he had to pause long enough

-to relinquish the ideal and adjust himself to the

-reality. The hair was as disordered as his young

-fancy would have had it, but it was thinner than

-he had known it in his dreams, and its black

-was streaked with gray. The face was smooth-shaven,

-which accorded with his notion, though

-it had not been shaven as recently as he felt it

-should have been. But he could not reconcile himself

-to the spectacles that rested on Powell’s nose,

-and pressed their bows into the flesh of his temples—the

-eagle eyes of the Wade Powell of his imagination

-had never known glasses.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When Wade Powell slowly pulled his spectacles

-from his nose and tossed them on to the

-table before him, he bent his eyes on Marley,

-and their gaze, under their heavy brows, somewhat

-restored him, but it could not atone for the

-disappointment. Perhaps the disappointment that

-Marley felt in this moment came from some dim,

-unrealized sense that Wade Powell was growing

-old. The spectacles, the gray in his hair, the

-wrinkles in his face, the looseness of the skin at

-his jaws and at his throat—where a fold of it hung

-between the points of his collar—all told that Wade

-Powell had passed the invisible line which marks

-life’s summit, and that his face was turned now

-toward the evening. There was the touch of sadness

-in the indistinct conception of him as a man

-who had not altogether realized the ambitions of

-his youth or the predictions of his friends, and

-the sadness came from the intuition that the failure

-or the half-failure was not of the heroic kind.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The office in which he sat, and on which, in

-the long years, he had impressed his character, was

-untidy; the floor was dirty, the books on the shelves

-were dusty and leaning all awry; the set of the

-Ohio reports had not been kept up to date; one

-might have told by a study of them at just what

-period enterprise and energy had faltered, while

-the gaps here and there showed how an uncalculating

-generosity had helped a natural indolence by

-lending indiscriminately to other lawyers, who,

-with the lack of respect for the moral of the laws

-they pretended to revere, had borrowed with no

-thought of returning.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Two or three pictures hung crookedly on the

-walls; the table at which Powell sat was old and

-scarred; its ink-stand had long ago gone dry and

-been abandoned; a cheap bottle, with its cork rolling

-tipsily by its side, had taken the ink-stand’s

-place. The papers scattered over the table had an

-air of hopelessness, as though they had grown

-tired, like the clients they represented, in waiting

-for Powell’s attention. The half-open door at the

-back led into a room that had been, and possibly

-might yet be, used as a private office or consulting

-room, should any one care to brave its darkness

-and its dust; but as for Wade Powell, it was

-plain that he preferred to sit democratically in

-the outer office, where all might see him, and, what

-was of more importance to him, where he might

-see all.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The one new thing in the room was a typewriter,

-standing on its little sewing-machine table, in the

-corner of the room. There was no stenographer

-nor any chair for one; Marley imagined Powell,

-whenever he had occasion to write, sitting down

-to the machine himself, and picking out his pleadings

-painfully, laboriously and slowly, letter by

-letter, using only his index fingers. And this

-somehow humbled his ideal the more. Marley

-almost wished he hadn’t come.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What’s on your mind, young man?� said Wade

-Powell, leaning back in his chair and dropping

-his long arm at his side until his newspaper swept

-the floor. Marley had seated himself in a wooden

-chair that was evidently intended for clients, and

-he began nervously.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Here he stopped, overcome again by an embarrassment.

-A smile spread over Wade Powell’s face,

-a gentle smile with a winning quality in it, and

-his face to Marley became young again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Tell your troubles,� he said. “I’ve confessed

-all the young men in Macochee for twenty-five

-years. Yes—thirty-five—� He grew suddenly

-sober as he numbered the years and then exclaimed

-as if to himself:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“My God! Has it been that long?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He took out his watch and looked at it as if it

-must somehow correct his reckoning. For a

-moment, then, he thought; his gaze was far away.

-But Marley brought him back when he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I only want—I only want to study law.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh!� said Powell, and he seemed somehow relieved.

-“Is that all?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>To Marley this seemed quite enough, and the

-disappointment he felt, which was a part of the

-effect Wade Powell’s office had had on him, showed

-suddenly in his face. Powell glanced quickly at

-him, and hastened to reassure him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We can fix that easily enough,� he said. “Have

-you ever read any law?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No,� said Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Been to college?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley told him that he had just that summer

-been graduated and when he mentioned the name of

-the college Powell said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The Methodists, eh?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He could hardly conceal a certain contempt in

-the tone with which he said this, and then, as if

-instantly regretting the unkindness, he observed:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s a good school, I’m told.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He could not, however, evince an entire

-approval, and so seeming to desert the subject he

-hastened on:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What’s your name?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Glenn Marley.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh!� Wade Powell dropped his feet to the

-floor and sat upright. “Are you Preacher Marley’s

-son?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley did not like to hear his father called

-“Preacher,� and when he said that he was the

-son of Doctor Marley, Powell remarked:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve heard him preach, and he’s a damn good

-preacher too, I want to tell you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley warmed under this profane indorsement.

-He had always, from a boy, felt somehow that he

-must defend his father’s position as a preacher

-from the world, as with the little world of his boyhood

-and youth he had always had to defend his

-own position as the son of a preacher.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir, he’s a good preacher, and a good

-man,� Powell went on. He had taken a cigar from

-his pocket and was nipping the end from it with

-his teeth. He lighted it, and leaned back comfortably

-again to smoke, and then in tardy hospitality

-he drew another cigar from his waistcoat pocket

-and held it toward Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Smoke?� he said, and then he added apologetically,

-“I didn’t think; I never do.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley declined the cigar, but Powell pressed

-it on him, saying:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, your father does, I’ll bet. Give it to him

-with Wade Powell’s compliments. He won’t hesitate

-to smoke with a publican and sinner.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley smiled and put the cigar away in his

-pocket.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t know, though,� Powell went on slowly,

-speaking as much to himself as to Marley, while

-he watched the thick white clouds he rolled from

-his lips, “that he’d want you to be in my office.

-I know some of the <em>brethren</em> wouldn’t approve.

-They’d think I’d contaminate you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley would have hastened to reassure Powell

-had he known how to do so without seeming to

-recognize the possibility of contamination; but

-while he hesitated Powell avoided the necessity

-for him by asking:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Did your father send you to me?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He looked at Marley eagerly, and with an

-expression of unfounded hope, as he awaited the

-answer.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No,� replied Marley, “he doesn’t know. I

-haven’t talked with him at all. I have to do something

-and I’ve always thought I’d go into the

-law. I presume it would be better to go to a law

-school, but father couldn’t afford that after putting

-me through college. I thought I could read law

-in some office, and maybe get admitted that way.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Sure,� said Powell, “it’s easy enough. You’ll

-have to learn the law after you get to practising

-anyway—and there isn’t much to learn at that. It’s

-mostly a fake.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked at him in some alarm, at this new

-smiting of an idol.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I began to read law,� Powell went on, “under

-old Judge Colwin—that is, what I read. I used

-to sit at the window with a book in my lap and

-watch the girls go by. Still,� he added with a

-tone of doing himself some final justice, “it was a

-liberal education to sit under the old judge’s drippings.

-I learned more that way than I ever did at

-the law school.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He smoked on a moment, ruminating on his lost

-youth; then, bringing himself around to business

-again, he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How’d you happen to come to me?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� said Marley, haltingly, “I’d heard a

-good deal of you—and I thought I’d like you, and

-then I’ve heard father speak of you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You have?� said Powell, looking up quickly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What’d he say?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, he said you were a great orator and he

-said you were always with the under dog. He

-said he liked that.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell turned his eyes away and his face reddened.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, let’s see. If you think your father

-would approve of your sitting at the feet of such

-a Gamaliel as I, we can—� He was squinting

-painfully at his book-shelves. “Is that Blackstone

-over there on the top shelf?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley got up and glanced along the backs of the

-dingy books, their calfskin bindings deeply

-browned by the years, their red and black labels

-peeling off.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Here’s Blackstone,� he said, taking down a

-book, “but it’s the second volume.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Second volume, eh? Don’t see the first around

-anywhere, do you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked, without finding it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Then see if Walker’s there.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Walker’s <em>American Law</em>,� Powell explained.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t see it,� Marley said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, I reckon not,� assented Powell, “some one’s

-borrowed it. I seem to run a sort of circulating

-library of legal works in this town, without fines—though

-we have statutes against petit larceny. Well,

-hand me Swan’s <em>Treatise</em>. That’s it, on the end

-of the second shelf.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley took down the book, and gave it to

-Powell. While Marley dusted his begrimed fingers

-with his handkerchief, Powell blew the dust off

-the top of the book; he slapped it on the arm of

-his chair, the dust flying from it at every stroke.

-He picked up his spectacles, put them on and

-turned over the first few leaves of the book.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You might begin on that,� he said presently,

-“until we can borrow a Blackstone or a Walker

-for you. This book is the best law-book ever written

-anyway; the law’s all there. If you knew all

-that contains, you could go in any court and get

-along without giving yourself away; which is the

-whole duty of a lawyer.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He closed the book and gave it to Marley, who

-was somewhat at a loss; this was the final disappointment.

-He had thought that his introduction

-into the mysteries of the noble profession should

-be attended by some sort of ceremony. He looked

-at the book in his hand quite helplessly and then

-looked up at Powell.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Is that—all?� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, yes,� Powell answered. “Isn’t that

-enough?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I thought—that is, that I might have some duties.

-How am I to begin?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, just open the book to the first page and

-read that, then turn over to the second page and

-read that, and so on—till you get to the end.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What will my hours be?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Your hours?� said Powell, as if he did not understand.

-“Oh, just suit yourself.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was looking at the book again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t you make any entry—any memorandum?�

-he asked, still unable to separate himself

-from the idea that something formal, something

-legal, should mark the beginning of such an important

-epoch.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, you keep track of the date,� said Powell,

-“and at the end of three years I’ll give you a certificate.

-You may find that you can do most of

-your reading at home, but come around.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked about the office, trying to imagine

-himself in this new situation.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’d like, you know,� he said, “to do something,

-if I could, to repay you for your trouble.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That’s all right, my boy,� said Powell. Then

-he added as if the thought had just come to him:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Say, can you run a typewriter?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I can learn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, that’s more than I can do,� said Powell,

-glancing at his new machine. “I’ve tried, but it

-would take a stationary engineer to operate that

-thing. You might help out with my letters and

-my pleadings now and then. And I’d like to have

-you around. You’d make good company.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� said Marley, “I’ll be here in the

-morning.� He still clung to the idea that he was to be a

-part of the office, to be an identity in the local machinery

-of the law. As he rose to go, a young

-man appeared in the doorway. He was tall, and

-the English cap and the rough Scotch suit he wore,

-with the trousers rolled up over his heavy tan

-shoes, enabled Marley to identify him instantly as

-young Halliday. He was certain of this when

-Powell, looking up, said indifferently:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Hello, George. Raining in London?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, I say, Powell,� replied Halliday, ignoring

-a taunt that had grown familiar to him, “that

-Zeller case—we would like to have that go over

-to the fall term, if you don’t mind.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why don’t you settle it?� asked Powell.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Halliday was leaning against the door-post, and

-had drawn a short brier pipe from his pocket. Before

-he answered, he paused long enough to fill it

-with tobacco. Then he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You’ll have to see the governor about that—it’s

-a case he’s been looking after.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, well,� said Powell, with his easy acquiescence,

-“all right.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Halliday had pressed the tobacco into the bowl

-of the pipe and struck a match.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Then, I’ll tell old Bill,� he said, pausing in

-his sentence to light his pipe, “to mark it off

-the assignment.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley watched Halliday saunter away, with

-a feeling that mixed admiration with amazement.

-He could not help admiring his clothes, and he

-felt drawn toward him as a college man from a

-school so much greater than his own, though he

-felt some resentment because Halliday had never

-once given a sign that he was aware of Marley’s

-presence. His amazement came from the utter

-disrespect with which Halliday referred to Judge

-Blair. Old Bill! Marley had caught his breath.

-He would have liked to discuss Halliday with

-Powell, but the lawyer seemed to be as indifferent

-to Halliday’s existence as Halliday had been

-to Marley’s, and when Marley saw that Powell

-was not likely to refer to him, he started toward

-the door. As he went Powell resumptively called

-after him:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll get a Blackstone for you in a day or two.

-Be down in the morning.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley went away bearing Swan’s <em>Treatise</em> under

-his arm. He looked up at the Court House

-across the way; the trees were stirring in the

-light winds of summer, and their leaves writhed

-joyously in the sun. The windows of the Court

-House were open, and he could hear the voice of

-some lawyer arguing a cause to the jury. Marley

-thought of Judge Blair sitting there, the jury in

-its box, the sleepy bailiff drowsing in his place,

-the accustomed attorneys and the angry litigants,

-and his heart began to beat a little more rapidly,

-for the thought of Judge Blair brought the thought

-of Lavinia Blair. And in the days to come, when

-he should be arguing a cause to a jury, as that

-lawyer, whose voice came pealing and echoing in

-sudden and surprising shouts through the open

-windows, was arguing a cause now, would Lavinia

-Blair be interested?</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He had imagined that a day so full of importance

-for him would be marked by greater ceremonials,

-and yet while he was disappointed, he was

-reassured. He had solved a problem, he had done

-with inaction, he had made a beginning, he was

-entered at last upon a career. As all the events

-of the recent years rushed on him, the years of college

-life, the decisions and indecisions of his classmates,

-their vague troubles about a career, he felt

-a pride that he had so soon solved that problem.

-He felt a certain superiority too, that made him

-carry his head high, as he turned into Main

-Street and marched across the Square. It required

-only decision and life was conquered. He saw

-the years stretching out prosperously before him,

-expanding as his ambitions expanded. He was

-glad that he had tackled life so promptly, that he

-had come so quickly to an issue with it; it was not

-so bad, viewed thus close, as it had been from

-a distance. He laughed at the folly of all the talk

-he had heard about the difficulty of young men

-getting a start in these days; he must write to

-his fraternity fellows at once, and tell them what

-he had done and how he was succeeding. They

-would surely see that at the bar he would do, not

-only himself, but them, the greatest credit, and

-they would be proud.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER III<br /> <br />GREENWOOD LAKE</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>The girls, flitting about with nervous laughter

-and now and then little screams, had spread

-long cloths over the table of plain boards

-that had served so many picnic parties at

-Greenwood Lake; the table-cloths and the dresses

-of the girls gleamed white in the amber light that

-streamed across the little sheet of water, though

-the slender trees, freshened by the morning shower

-that threatened to spoil the outing, were beginning

-to darken under the shadows that diffused themselves

-subtly through the grove, as if there were

-exudations of the heavy foliage.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lawrence, in his white ducks, stood by the table,

-assuming to direct the laying of the supper. His

-immense cravat of blue was the only bit of color

-about him, unless it were his red hair, which he

-had had clipped that very morning, and his shorn

-appearance intensified his comic air. Marley, sitting

-apart on the stump of a small oak, could hear

-the burlesque orders Lawrence shouted at the girls.

-The girls were convulsed by his orders; at times

-they had to put their dishes down lest in their

-laughter they spill the food or break the china;

-just then Marley saw Mayme Carter double over

-suddenly, her mass of yellow hair lurching forward

-to her brow, while the woods rang with her laughter.

-The other men were off looking after the

-horses.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia moved quickly here and there, smiling

-joyously, her face flushed; though she laughed

-as the others did at Lawrence’s drollery, she did not

-laugh as loudly, and she did not scream. Just

-now she rose from bending over the table, and

-brushed her brown hair from her brow with the

-back of her hand, while she stood and surveyed

-the table as if to see what it lacked. When she

-raised her hand the sleeve of her muslin gown

-fell away from her wrist and showed her

-slender forearm, white in the calm light of evening.

-Marley could not take his eyes from her.

-She ran into the pavilion, her little low shoes

-flashed below her petticoats, and he grew sad; when

-she reappeared, all her movements seemed to be

-new, to have fresh beauties. Then he suspected

-that the girls were laughing at him and he felt

-miserable.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He thought of himself sitting alone and apart,

-an awkward, ungainly figure. He longed to go

-away, yet he feared that, if he did, he would not

-have the courage to come back. He shifted his position,

-only to make matters worse. Then suddenly

-his feeling took the form of a rage with

-Lawrence; he longed to seize Lawrence and kick

-him, to pitch him into the lake, to humiliate him

-before the girls. He thought he saw all at once

-that Lawrence had been making fun of him, surreptitiously;

-that was what had made the girls

-laugh so.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>There was some little consolation in the thought

-that Lavinia did not laugh as much as the others;

-perhaps, if she did not care to defend him, she

-at least pitied him. And then he began to pity

-himself. The whole evening stretched before him;

-pretty soon he would have to move up to the table,

-and sit down on the narrow little benches that

-were fastened between the trees; then after supper

-they would begin their dancing and when that

-came he did not see what he could do.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The only pleasure he had had that afternoon had

-been on the way out; he had been alone with Lavinia,

-and the four miles of pleasant road that

-lay between the town and Greenwood Lake were

-too short for all the happiness Marley found in

-them. He could feel Lavinia again by his side, her

-hands folded on the thin old linen lap-robe. He

-could not recall a word they had said, but it seemed

-to him that the conversation had flowed on intimately

-and tranquilly; she had been so close and

-sympathetic; and he would always remember how

-her eyes had been raised to his. The fields with the

-wheat in shock had swept by in the beauty of harvest

-time; the road, its dust laid by the morning

-shower, had rolled under the wheels of the buggy

-softly, smoothly and noiselessly; the air had been

-odorous with the scent of green things freshened

-by the rain, and had vibrated with the sounds of

-summer.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Then suddenly his reverie was broken. The

-men were gathering about the table with the girls;

-all of them looked at him expectantly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Here, you!� called Lawrence. “Do you think

-we’re going to do all the work? Come, get in

-the game, and don’t look so solemn—this ain’t a

-funeral.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They all laughed, and Marley felt his face flame,

-but he rose and went over to the table, halting in

-indecision.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Run get some water,� ordered Lawrence, imperatively

-waving his hand. “Mayme,� he

-shouted, “hand him the pitcher! Step lively, now.

-The men-folks are hungry after their day’s work.

-Has any one got a pitcher concealed about his

-person? What did you do with the pitcher, Glenn?

-Take it to water your horse?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They were laughing uproariously, and Marley

-was plainly discomfited. But Lavinia stepped to

-his side, a large white pitcher in her hand. “I’ll

-show you,� she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They started away together, and Marley felt a

-protection in her presence. A little way farther

-he suddenly thought of the pitcher, which Lavinia

-still was bearing, and he took it from her. As he

-seized the handle their fingers became for an instant

-entangled.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Did I hurt you?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, no!� she assured him, and as they walked

-on, out of the sight of the laughing group behind

-them, an ease came over him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you know where the well is?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, yes,� she answered. “It’s down here. I

-could have come just as well as not.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m glad to come,� he said; and then he

-added, “with <em>you</em>.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They had reached the wooden pump behind the

-pavilion. The little sheet of water curved away

-like a crescent, following the course of the stream

-of which it was but a widening. Its little islands

-were mirrored in its surface. The sun was just

-going down, the sky beyond the lake was rosy, and

-the same rosy hue now suffused everything; the

-waters themselves were reddened.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It was very still, and the peace of the evening lay

-on them both. Lavinia stood motionless, and

-looked out across the water to the little Ohio hills

-that rolled away toward the west. She stood and

-gazed a long time, her hands at her sides, yet

-with their fingers open and extended, as if the

-beauty of the scene had suddenly transfixed her.

-Marley did not see the lake or the sun, the islands

-or the hills; he saw only the girl before him, the

-outline of her cheek, the down on it showing fine

-in the pure light, the hair that nestled at her

-neck, the curve from her shoulder to her arms and

-down to her intent fingers. At last she sighed, and

-looked up at him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Isn’t it all beautiful?� she said solemnly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Beautiful?� he repeated, as if in question, not

-knowing what she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Just then they heard Lawrence hallooing, and

-Marley began to pump vigorously. He rinsed out

-the pitcher, then filled it, and they went back, walking

-closely side by side, and they did not speak all

-the way.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mayme Carter, who, as it seemed, had a local

-reputation as a compounder of lemonade, had the

-lemons and the sugar all ready when Marley and

-Lavinia rejoined the group, and Lawrence, as he

-seized the pitcher, said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I see that, between you, you’ve spilled nearly

-all of the water, but I guess Mayme and I’ll have

-to make it do.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The others laughed at this, as they did at all of

-Lawrence’s speeches, and then they turned and

-laughed at Marley and Lavinia, though the men,

-who as yet did not feel themselves on terms with

-Marley, had a subtile manner of not including

-him in their ridicule, however little they spared

-Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The supper was eaten with the hunger their spirits

-and the fresh air had given them and Marley,

-placed, as of course, by Lavinia’s side, felt sheltered

-by her, as he felt sheltered by all the talk that

-raged about him. He wished that he could join in

-the talk, but he could not discover what it was all

-about. Once, in a desperate determination to

-assert himself, he did mention a book he had been

-reading, but his remark seemed to have a chilling

-effect from which they did not recover until Lawrence,

-out of his own inexhaustible fund of nonsense,

-restored them to their inanities. He tried to

-hide his embarrassment by eating the cold chicken,

-the ham and sardines, the potato chips and pickles,

-the hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches that went up

-and down the board in endless procession, and he

-was thankful, when he thought of it, that Lawrence

-seemed to forget him, though Lawrence

-had forgotten no one else there. He seemed

-to note accurately each mouthful every one took.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Hand up another dozen eggs for Miss Winters,

-Joe,� he called to one of the men, and then

-they all laughed at Miss Winters.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When the cake came, Lawrence identified each

-kind with some remark about the mother of the

-girl who had brought it, and tasted all, because, as

-he said, he could not afford to show partiality.

-The fun lagged somewhat as the meal neared its

-end, but Lawrence revived it instantly and sensationally

-by rising suddenly, bending far over

-toward Lavinia in a tragic attitude and saying:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, Vine, child, you haven’t eaten a mouthful!

-I do believe you’re in love!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The company burst into laughter, but they suddenly

-stopped when they saw Marley. His face

-showed his anger with them, and he made a little

-movement, but Lavinia smiled up at Lawrence, and

-said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, Jack, it’s evident that <em>you’re</em> not.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And then they all laughed at Lawrence, and

-the girls clapped their hands, while Marley, angry

-now with himself, tried to laugh with them.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When they stopped laughing Lawrence produced

-his cigarettes, and tossing one to Marley in a way

-that delicately conveyed a sense of intimacy and

-affection, he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“When you girls get your dishes done up we’ll

-be back and see if we can’t think up something to

-entertain you,� and then he called Marley and

-with him and the other men strolled down to the

-lake.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER IV<br /> <br />MOONLIGHT</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>The dance was proposed almost immediately.

-Marley had hoped up to the very last minute

-that something, possibly a miracle, would prevent

-it, but scarcely had the men finished their

-first cigarettes before Howard was saying:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, let’s be getting back to the girls. They’ll

-want to dance.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Howard spoke as if the dancing would be a sacrifice

-on the part of the men to the pleasure of the

-girls, but they all turned at once, some of them

-flinging their cigarettes into the water, as if to complete

-the sacrifice, and started back. When they

-reached the pavilion, Payson and Gallard took instruments

-out of green bags, Payson a guitar and

-Gallard a mandolin, and Lawrence, bustling about

-over the floor, shoving the few chairs against the

-unplastered wooden walls, was shouting:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Tune ’em up, boys, tune ’em up!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The first tentative notes of the strings twanged

-in the hollow room, and Lawrence was asking the

-girls for dances, scribbling their names on his cuff

-with a disregard of its white polished linen almost

-painful.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll have to divide up some of ’em, you know,

-girls,� he said. “Jim and Elmer have to play, and

-that makes us two men shy. But I’ll do the best

-I can—wish I could take you all in my arms at once

-and dance with you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The girls, standing in an expectant, eager little

-group, clutched one another nervously, and pretended

-to sneer at Lawrence’s patronage.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was standing with Lavinia near the door.

-He was trying to affect an ease; he knew by the

-way the other girls glanced at him now and then

-that they were speculating on his possibilities as a

-partner; he tried just then to look as if he were

-going to dance as all the other men were, yet he

-felt the necessity of confessing to Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You know,� he said contritely, “that I don’t

-dance.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She looked up, a disappointment springing to her

-eyes too quickly for her to conceal it. She was

-flushed with pleasure and excitement, and tapping

-her foot in time with the chords Payson and Gallard

-were trying on their instruments. Marley

-saw her surprise.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I ought not to have come,� he said; “I’ve no

-business here.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The look of disappointment in Lavinia’s eyes

-had gone, and in its place was now an expression

-of sympathy.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It makes no difference,� she said. And then

-she added in a low voice: “I’ll not dance either;

-there are too many of us girls anyway.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, don’t let me keep you from it,� said Marley,

-and yet a joy was shining in his eyes. She

-turned away and blushed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll give you all my dances,� she said; “we

-can sit them out.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But it won’t be any fun for you,� protested

-Marley. And just then Lawrence came up.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Say, Glenn,� he said, “if you don’t want to

-dance I’ll take Lavinia for the first number.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The guitar and mandolin, after a long preliminary

-strumming to get themselves in tune,

-suddenly burst into <em>The Georgia Campmeeting</em>, and

-the couples were instantly springing across the

-floor.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Come on, Vine,� said Lawrence, his fingers

-twitching. And Lavinia, eager, trembling, alive,

-casting one last glance at Marley, said “Just this

-one!� and went whirling away with Lawrence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley moved aside, awkwardly, when the couples,

-sweeping in a long oval stream around the

-little room, whirled past him. Lavinia danced

-with a grace that almost hurt him; she was laughing

-as she looked up into Lawrence’s face, talking

-to him as they danced. Marley felt a gloom, almost

-a rage, settle on him. He looked up and down the

-room. At the farther end, through the door by

-which the musicians sat swinging their feet over

-their knees in time to the tune they played, he

-could see the man who kept the grounds at the lake,

-looking on at the dance; his wife was with him,

-and they smiled contentedly at the joy of the young

-people.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley could not bear their joy, any more than

-he could bear the joy of the dancers, and he looked

-away from them. Glancing along the wall he saw

-a girl, sitting alone. It was Grace Winters; she

-was older than the others, and she sat there sullenly,

-her dark brows contracted under her dark

-hair. Marley felt drawn toward her by a common

-trouble, and he thought, instantly, that he might

-appear less conspicuous if he went and sat beside

-her. As he approached, her sallow face brightened

-with a brilliant smile of welcome and she drew

-aside her skirts to make a place for him, though

-there was no one else on all that side of the room.

-Marley sat down.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s warm, isn’t it?� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� Miss Winters replied, “almost too warm

-to dance, don’t you think?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley tried to express his acquiescence in the

-polite smile he had seen the other men use before

-the dance began, but he did not feel that he carried

-it off very well.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I should think you’d be dancing, Mr. Marley,�

-Miss Winters said. “I hear you are a splendid

-dancer. Don’t you care to dance this evening?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I can’t dance,� said Marley, crudely.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He was looking at Lavinia, following her young

-figure as it glided past with Lawrence. Miss

-Winters turned away. Her face became gloomy

-again, and she said nothing more. Marley was

-absorbed in Lavinia, and they sat there together

-silent, conspicuous and alone, in a wide separation.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley thought the dance never would end. It

-seemed to him that the dancers must drop from

-fatigue; but at last the mandolin and guitar ceased

-suddenly, the girls cried out a disappointed unisonant

-“Oh!� and then they all laughed and

-clapped their hands. Lavinia and Lawrence were

-coming up, glowing with the joy of the dance.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, that was splendid, Jack!� Lavinia cried,

-putting back her hair with that wave of her hand.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lawrence’s face was redder than ever. He

-leaned over and in a whisper that was for Lavinia

-and Marley together he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Lavinia, you’re the queen dancer of the town.�

-And then he turned to Miss Winters.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Grace,� he said, distributing himself with the

-impartiality he felt his position as a social leader

-demanded, “you’ve promised me a dance for a long

-time. Now’s my chance.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why certainly, Jack,� Miss Winters said, with

-her brilliant smile, and then she took Lawrence’s

-arm and drew him away, as if otherwise he might

-escape.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Take me outdoors!� said Lavinia to Marley.

-“Those big lamps make it <em>so</em> hot in here.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was glad to leave, and they went out on

-to the little piazza of the pavilion. Lavinia stood

-on the very edge of the steps, and drank in the fresh

-air eagerly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh!� she said. “Oh! Isn’t it delicious!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The darkness lay thick between the trees. The

-air was rich with the scent of the mown fields that

-lay beyond the grove. The insects shrilled contentedly.

-Marley stood and looked at Lavinia, standing

-on the edge of the steps, her body bent a little

-forward, her face upturned. She put back her hair

-again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Let’s go on down!� she said, a little adventurous

-quality in her tone. She ran lightly down the

-steps, Marley after her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Won’t you take cold?� he asked, bending close

-to her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She looked up and laughed. They were walking

-on, unconsciously making their way toward the

-edge of the little lake. Marley felt the white form

-floating there beside him and a happiness, new,

-unknown before, came to him. They were on the

-edge of the little lake. Before them the water

-lay, dark now, and smooth. A small stage was

-moored to the shore and a boat was fastened to

-it. They could hear the light lapping of the water

-that barely stirred the boat. Presently Lavinia

-ran out on to the stage. She gave a little spring,

-and rocked it up and down; then smiled up at

-Marley like a child venturing in forbidden places.

-Marley stepped carefully on to the stage.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Isn’t it a perfect night?� Lavinia said, looking

-up at the dark purple sky, strewn with all the

-stars. Marley looked at her white throat.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The most beautiful night I ever knew!� he

-said. He spoke solemnly, devoutly, and Lavinia

-turned and gazed on him. Marley touched the boat

-with the toe of his shoe.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We might row,� he said almost timidly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Could we?� inquired Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“If we may take the boat.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, of course—anybody may. Can you row?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley laughed. He had rowed in the college

-crew on the old Olentangy at Delaware. His

-laugh was a complete answer to Lavinia. She approached

-the boat, and Marley bent over and drew

-it alongside the stage.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Get in,� he said. It was good to find something

-he could do. He helped her carefully into the

-boat, and held it firmly until she had arranged herself

-in the stern, her feet against the cleats, and

-her white skirts tucked about her. Then he took

-his seat, shipped the oars and shoved off. He swept

-the boat out into the deep water, and rowed away

-up the lake. He rowed precisely, feathering his

-oars, that she might see how much a master he was.

-They did not speak for a long time. First one, then

-the other, of the little islands swept darkly by;

-the water slapped the bow of the boat as Marley

-urged it forward. The lights of the pavilion on

-the shore twinkled an instant, then went out behind

-the trees. They could hear the distant mellow

-thrumming of the guitar and the tinkle of the

-mandolin.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Are you too cool?� he asked presently.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, no, not at all!� said Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Hadn’t you better take my coat?� Marley

-persisted. The idea of putting his coat about her

-thrilled him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You’ll need it,� she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, I’ll be warm rowing.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She shook her head, and smiled. They drifted

-on. Still came the distant strumming of the guitar

-and the tinkle of the mandolin. Marley thought of

-the young people dancing, and then, noting Lavinia’s

-silence, he asked, out of the doubt that was his

-one remaining annoyance:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Wouldn’t you rather be back there dancing?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, no!� she answered softly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m ashamed of myself.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why?� She started a little.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Because I can’t dance!� There was guilt in

-his tone.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You mustn’t feel that way about it,� Lavinia

-said. “It’s nothing.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Isn’t it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No. It’s easy to learn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I never could learn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia was still, and Marley thought she assented

-to this. But in another moment she spoke

-again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I—� she began, and then she hesitated.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley stopped rowing and rested on his oars.

-The water lapped the bows of the boat as it slackened

-its speed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I could teach you,� Lavinia went on.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Could you?� Marley leaned forward eagerly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’d like to.� She was trailing one white hand

-in the water.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Will you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� she said. “We can do it over at Mayme’s—any

-time. She’ll play for us.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley felt a great gratitude, and he wondered

-how he could pour it forth upon her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You are too good to me,� he exclaimed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Then, suddenly, a change came over the dark

-surface of the waters. A mellow quality touched

-them; they seemed to tremble ecstatically, then they

-broke into sparkling ripples; the air quivered with

-a luminous beauty and a light flooded the little

-valley. Marley and Lavinia turned instinctively

-and looked up, and there, over the tops of the

-trees, black a moment before, now rounded domes

-of silver, rose the moon. They gazed at it a long

-time. Finally Marley turned and looked at

-Lavinia. Her white dress had become a drapery,

-her arms gleamed, her eyes were lustrous in the

-transfiguration of the moonlight. He could see

-that her lips were slightly parted, and her fingertips,

-dipped in the cool water over the gunwale of

-the boat, trailed behind them a long narrow thread

-of silver. They looked into each other’s eyes, and

-neither spoke. They drifted on. At last, Marley

-said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Lavinia!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She stirred.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you know—� he began, and then he stopped.

-“Don’t you know,� he went on, “can’t you see,

-that I love you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He rested his arms on the oars, and leaned over

-toward her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve loved you ever since that first night—do

-you remember? I know—I know I’m not good

-enough, but can’t you—can’t I—love you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He saw her eyelids fall, and as she turned and

-looked over the side of the boat, she put forth

-her hand, and he took it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They were awakened from the dream by a call,

-and after what seemed to Marley a long time, he

-finally remembered the voice as Lawrence’s.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We must go back,� he said reluctantly. “How

-long have we been gone?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t know,� said Lavinia. He heard her

-sigh.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley pulled the boat in the direction whence

-came the hallooing voice; he had quite lost all notion

-of their whereabouts. But presently they saw

-the lights of the pavilion, and then the dark figures

-of the men, and the white figures of the girls

-on shore.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>As they pulled up and Marley sprang out of the

-boat to the landing stage, Lawrence said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, where have you babes been?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley helped Lavinia out of the boat.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We’ve been rowing,� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We thought you’d been drowned,� said Lawrence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley and Lavinia drove home together in silence.

-In the light of the moon, the road was silver,

-and the fields with their shocks of wheat

-were gold.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER V<br /> <br />THE SERENADE</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>“I don’t know what ails Lavinia,� said Mrs.

-Blair to her husband as he sat on the veranda

-after dinner the next day. The judge laid his

-paper in his lap, and looked up at his wife over

-his glasses.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Isn’t she well?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“M—yes,� replied Mrs. Blair, prolonging the

-word in her lack of conviction, “I guess so.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t you know?� the judge demanded in some

-impatience with her uncertainty.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She says she feels all right.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, then, what makes you think she isn’t?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, I don’t know,� replied Mrs. Blair, “she

-seems so quiet, that’s all.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Lavinia is not a girl given to excitement or

-demonstration,� said the judge, lapsing easily into

-the manner of speech he had cultivated on the

-bench.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, that’s so,� assented Mrs. Blair. “But

-she’s always cheerful and bright.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Is she gloomy?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, I wouldn’t exactly call it that, but she

-seems preoccupied—rather wistful I should say,

-yes—wistful.� She seemed pleased to have found

-the right word.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, she’s all right. That picnic last night may

-have fatigued her. I presume there was dancing.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t know that we should let her go out that

-way.� The judge took off his glasses and twirled

-them by their black cord while he gazed across the

-street, apparently at some dogs that were tumbling

-each other about in the Chenowiths’ yard. The

-judge had a subconscious anxiety that they would

-get into Mrs. Chenowith’s flower beds.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You and I used to go to them; they never

-hurt us,� argued Mrs. Blair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, I suppose not. But then—that was different.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair laughed lightly, and the laugh served

-to dissipate their cares. She went to the edge of

-the veranda and pulled a few leaves from

-the climbing rose-vine that grew there, and the

-judge put on his glasses and spread out his paper.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll take her out for a drive this afternoon,�

-said Mrs. Blair, turning to go indoors.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She’ll be all right,� said the judge, already

-deep in the political columns.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>That night at supper, the judge looked at Lavinia

-closely, and after a while he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You’re not eating, Lavinia. Don’t you feel

-well?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia turned to her father and smiled.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, I’m all right.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Her smile perplexed the judge.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You look pale,� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair glanced warningly at him the length

-of the table.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“My girl’s losing her color,� he forged ahead.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia dropped her eyelids, and a look of

-pain appeared in her face, causing it to grow paler.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Please don’t worry about me, papa,� she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair divined Lavinia’s dislike of this

-personal discussion. She tried to catch her

-husband’s eye again, but he was looking at Lavinia

-narrowly through his glasses.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Did you go riding this afternoon?� he asked

-as if he were examining a witness whom counsel

-had not drawn out properly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� Mrs. Blair hastened to say. “We drove

-out the Ludlow a long way.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She was riding last night, too,� said Connie.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Who with?� demanded Chad, turning to Connie

-with the challenge he always had ready for

-her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Who with?� retorted Connie. “Why, Glenn

-Marley, of course. Who else?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, what of it?� demanded Chad. “What’s

-it to you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, children, children!� protested Mrs. Blair,

-wearily. “Do give us a little peace!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, she began it,� said Chad.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Connie was eating savagely, but she whirled on

-Chad, speaking with difficulty because her mouth

-was filled with food:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You shut up, will you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Chad laughed with a contempt almost theatrical,

-waved his hand lightly and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Run away, little girl, run away.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair asked the judge why he did not correct

-his children, and though the sigh he gave expressed

-the hopelessness, as it seemed to him, of

-bringing the two younger members of his train

-into anything like decorous behavior, he laid his

-knife and fork in his plate.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“This must cease,� he said. “It is scandalous.

-One might conclude that you were the children of

-some family in Lighttown.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It is very trying,� said Mrs. Blair, acquiescing

-in her husband’s reproof. “They are just like fire

-and tow.� She said this quite impersonally and

-then turned to Connie: “If you can’t behave yourself,

-I’ll have to send you from the table.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That’s it!� wailed Connie. “That’s it! Blame

-everything on to me!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair looked severely at her, and Connie’s

-face reddened. She glanced angrily at her mother

-and began again:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge rapped the table smartly with his

-knuckles.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Now I want this stopped!� he said. “And

-right away. If it isn’t I’ll—� He was about to

-say if it wasn’t he would clear the room, as he was

-fond of saying whenever the idle spectators in his

-court showed signs of being human, but he did

-not finish his sentence. Chad was subdued and

-decorous, and Connie drooped her head, and began

-to gulp her food. Her eyes were filling with tears

-and the tears began to fall, slowly, one by one,

-splashing heavily into her plate.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia was trembling; she tried to control herself,

-tried to lift her glass, but when she did, her

-hand shook so that the water was likely to spill.

-This completed the undoing of her nerves, her

-eyes suddenly flooded with tears, and she snatched

-her handkerchief from her lap, rose precipitately,

-and hurried from the room, dropping her napkin

-as she went. They heard her going up the stairs,

-and presently the door of her room closed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Connie had followed Lavinia with her misty

-eyes as she left the table and now she too prepared

-to leave. She felt a sudden pity springing

-from her great love of her older sister, and her

-great pride in her, and she felt a contrition, though

-she tried to convict Chad, as the latest object of her

-fiery and erratic temper, by glowering at him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll go to her,� she said, “<em>I</em> can comfort her!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, stay where you are,� said her mother.

-“Just leave her alone.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The evening light of the summer day flooded

-into the dining-room; outside a robin was singing.

-In the room there was constraint and heavy silence,

-broken only by the slight clatter of the silver

-or the china. But after a while the judge spoke:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Did Lavinia go to the picnic with young Marley?�

-he asked. He regretted instantly that he

-had revived the topic that had given rise to the difficulty,

-but as it lay on the minds of all, it was impossible,

-just then, to escape its influence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I believe so,� said Mrs. Blair. “He really

-seems like a nice young man.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge scowled.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t know,� he said. “He’s in the office of

-Wade Powell—I suppose he is the one, isn’t he?�

-He thought it unbecoming that a judge should show

-an intimate knowledge of the relations of young

-men who were merely studying law.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir,� said Chad, maintaining his own dignity.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Everybody seems to speak well of him,� said

-Mrs. Blair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But I can’t quite reconcile that with his selecting

-Wade Powell as a preceptor. I would hardly

-consider his influence the best in the world, and I

-would imagine that Doctor Marley would hold to

-the same opinion.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Judge Blair spoke with a certain disappointment

-in Doctor Marley. He had gone to hear him

-preach once or twice, and found, as he said, an

-intellectual quality in his utterances that he missed

-in the sermons Mr. Hill had been preaching for

-twenty years in the Presbyterian church.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Perhaps he doesn’t know Wade Powell,� said

-Mrs. Blair. “Doctor Marley is comparatively a

-stranger here, you know.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, I presume that explains it. But—� he

-shook his head. He could not forgive any one who

-showed respect for Wade Powell. “Powell has little

-business except a certain criminal practice, and

-now and then a personal injury case.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Is there anything wrong in personal injury

-cases?� asked Mrs. Blair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge looked at his wife in surprise.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I suppose you know, don’t you,� he said,

-“that such cases are taken on contingent fees?�

-He spoke with the natural judicial contempt of the

-poor litigant.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Of course, dear,� she replied, “I shall not undertake

-to defend Mr. Powell. He’s a wild sort.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes; a drunkard, practically,� said Judge

-Blair, “and an infidel besides. The moral environment

-there is certainly not one for a young

-man—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Is he really an <em>infidel</em>?� asked Mrs. Blair,

-abruptly dropping her knife and fork.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� replied the judge with the judicial affectation

-of fairness, “he’s at least a free-thinker.

-Perhaps agnostic were the better word. That is

-one reason why I can not understand Doctor Marley’s

-permitting his son to be associated with him.

-It seems to me to argue a weakness, or a lack of

-observation in the doctor, as it does a certain depravity

-of taste in his son.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They discussed Marley until the meal was done,

-and Connie and Chad had gone out of doors.

-Judge Blair followed his wife into the sitting-room.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m worried, I’ll admit,� said the judge.

-“What could it have been that so distressed her?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh well, the children’s little quarrels were too

-much for her nerves.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I suppose so.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They were silent and thoughtful, sitting together,

-rocking gently in their chairs as the twilight stole

-into the room.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s too bad he’s going to study law,� the judge

-said after a while.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He shook his gray head dubiously.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But you always say that about any one who’s

-going to study law,� Mrs. Blair argued. “You

-even said it about George Halliday when his father

-took him into partnership.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, it’s bad business nowadays unless a

-young man wants to go to the city, and it’s hard

-to get a foothold there.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But you began as a lawyer,� she urged, as

-though he had finished as something else.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It was different in my day.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And you’ve always done well in the law,� Mrs.

-Blair went on, ignoring his distinction.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh yes,� the judge said in a tone that expressed

-a sense of individual exception. “But I went on

-the bench just in time to save my bacon. There’s

-no telling what might have become of us if I had remained

-in the practice.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They were silent long enough for him to feel

-the relief he had always found in his salaried position,

-and then he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You don’t suppose—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, certainly not!� his wife hastened to assure

-him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I think it would be well, perhaps, to

-watch her closely. I don’t just like the notion.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But his father is—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, but after all, we really know nothing

-about him.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That is true.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And then Lavinia’s so young.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’d go to her.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“After a while,� Mrs. Blair said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They heard steps on the veranda, and then the

-voices of Mr. and Mrs. Chenowith who had run

-across, as Mrs. Chenowith said, when Mrs. Blair

-met them in the darkness that filled the wide hall,

-to see how they all were. The Chenowiths begged

-Mrs. Blair not to light the gas; they preferred

-to sit out of doors. The Chenowiths remained all

-the evening. When they had gone, the judge drew

-the chairs indoors, while Mrs. Blair rolled up

-the wide strip of red carpet that covered the steps

-of the veranda. And when they had gone up to

-their room, Mrs. Blair stole across to Lavinia,

-softly closing the door behind her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She found the girl stretched on her bed, her face

-buried in the pillows, which were wet with her

-tears.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What is troubling my little girl?� she asked.

-She sat down on the side of the bed, and lightly

-stroked Lavinia’s soft hair. The girl stirred, and

-drew herself close to her mother. Mrs. Blair did

-not speak, but continued to stroke her hair, and

-waited. Presently Lavinia cried out:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, mama! mama!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And then she was in her mother’s arms, weeping

-on her mother’s breast.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve never kept anything from you before,

-mama,� Lavinia cried.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No,� Mrs. Blair whispered. “Can’t you tell

-mama now?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And then with her mother’s arms about her Lavinia

-told her all. When she had finished she

-lay tranquilly. Mrs. Blair was relieved and yet

-her troubles had but grown the more complicated.

-She saw all the intricate elements with which she

-would have to deal, and she quailed before them,

-realizing what tact would be required of her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The coming of love should be a time of joy,

-dear,� she said presently. Even in the darkness,

-she could see the white blur of Lavinia’s face

-change its expression. A smile had touched it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It should, shouldn’t it, mama?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, indeed.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But I never kept anything from you before.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair laughed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But you kept this only a day, dear. That

-doesn’t count.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It was a long day.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I know, sweetheart.� The mother kissed her,

-and they were silent a while.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I do love him so,� said Lavinia, presently.

-“And you’ll love him too, mama, I know you will.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m sure of that, dear.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But what of papa?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair felt the girl grow tense in her arms.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That will all come right in time,� said Mrs.

-Blair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Will you tell him?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Not just now, dear. We’ll have this for a little

-secret of our own. There’s plenty of time. You

-are young, you know, and so is Glenn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I love to hear you call him Glenn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair remained with Lavinia until she had

-tucked her into her bed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Just my little child,� the mother whispered

-over the girl. “Just my little child.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, always that,� said Lavinia. And her

-mother kissed her again and again, and left her in

-the dark.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When Mrs. Blair rejoined her husband, he laid

-down the book he always read before retiring, and

-looked up with the question in his eyes.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She’s just a little nervous and tired,� Mrs.

-Blair said. “She’ll be all right in the morning.

-I think it best not to notice her.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you think we’d better have Doctor Pierce

-see her?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, not at all!� Mrs. Blair laughed, and the

-judge, reassured, went back to his book.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They were awakened from their first doze that

-night by voices singing.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s some of the darkies from Gooseville,� said

-Mrs. Blair. “They’re out serenading.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� said the judge. “It is sweet to fall

-asleep by.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>At the sound of the singing Lavinia had crept

-from her bed and crouched in her white night-dress

-before the open window; the shutters were closed.

-She heard the melody from far down the street.

-The singing ceased, then began again, drawing

-nearer and nearer. Presently she heard the fall of

-feet on the sidewalk before the house, and the low

-tones of voices in hurried consultation. And then

-a clear baritone voice rose, and she heard it begin

-the song:</p>

-

-<div class='lg-container-b'>

-  <div class='linegroup'>

-    <div class='group'>

-      <div class='line'>“Oh the sun shines bright in my old Kentucky home,</div>

-      <div class='line'>’Tis summer, the darkies are gay.�</div>

-    </div>

-  </div>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c003'>She knew the voice. Her heart swelled and the

-tears came again and there alone in the fragrant

-night she opened her arms and stretched them out

-into the darkness.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER VI<br /> <br />LOVE’S ARREARS</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>The days following the picnic had been no

-easier for Marley than they had been for

-Lavinia. As he looked back on that night, a

-fear took hold of him; the whole experience, the

-most wonderful of his life, grew more and more unreal.

-Much as he longed to see Lavinia again, he

-was afraid to go to her home; he wondered whether

-he should write her a note; perhaps she would

-think him false, perhaps she would think he had

-already forgotten her; the idea tormented him; he

-did not know what to do. He had seen her but

-once, and then at a distance; the Blairs’ well-known

-surrey had stopped in the middle of the Square,

-and George Halliday stood leaning into the carriage

-chatting with Lavinia. Marley had but a

-glimpse of Lavinia’s face, pink in the shadow of

-the surrey-top. As they drove away she had

-turned with a smile and a nod at Halliday. The

-sight had affected Marley strangely.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He felt himself so weak and incapable in this

-affair that he longed to discuss it with some one,

-and on Sunday afternoon he found his mother at

-her window with the <em>Christian Advocate</em>, which

-replaced, in her case, the nap nearly every one

-else took at that hour.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How old was father when you were married,

-mother?� he began.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He spoke out of that curious ignorance of the

-lives of their parents so common to children; he

-had never been able to realize his parents as having

-separate and independent existences before his

-own. Mrs. Marley laid her paper by, and a smile

-came to her face.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He was twenty-two,� she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Just my age,� observed Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Marley looked up hastily.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You’re not thinking of getting married, are

-you, Glenn?� she asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No.� he said with a laugh.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“My goodness! You’re just a boy!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But I’m as old as father was.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Y—es,� said Mrs. Marley, “but then—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But then, what?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That was different.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley smiled.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Had father entered the ministry yet?� he said

-presently.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, we were married in his first year. He

-had been teaching school, and the fall he was admitted

-to the conference he was sent out to the

-Gibsonburg circuit in Green County. We were

-married in the spring.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Her face flushed, and she turned the pages of her

-paper with a dreamy deliberation.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Ah, but your father was a handsome young

-man, Glenn!� she said presently.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He’s handsome yet,� Marley replied with the

-pride he always felt in his father. And then he

-asked:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Did he have any money?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� she said, and she laughed, “just a hundred

-dollars!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“A hundred dollars! Well, he had nerve, didn’t

-he? And so did you!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We had more than that,� said Mrs. Marley,

-solemnly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked at his mother suddenly. Her

-face seemed for an instant to be transfigured in

-the afternoon glow.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He might have told her then; he was on the

-point of it, but a footfall on the brick walk outside

-caused him to look up, and he saw Lawrence

-coming into the yard. Lawrence beckoned him and

-he went out.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Come on,� said Lawrence. “Let’s go out to

-Carters’.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked a question at him, and the smile

-which Lawrence never could repress long at a time

-was twitching at the corners of his large mouth.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She’ll be there.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How do you know?� asked Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lawrence smiled a little more significantly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When they got to the Carters’ they found Mayme

-and Lavinia together in the yard, strolling about

-in apparent aimlessness, yet with an expectancy

-in their manner that belied its quality of mere idleness.

-In the look Lavinia gave him all of Marley’s

-perplexities vanished. Lawrence stood by with a

-grin on his red face, and Mayme Carter’s eyes

-danced. She and Lawrence assumed almost immediately

-an elder, paternal manner, and looked on

-at the lovers’ meeting as from far heights that

-were to be reached only after all such youthful

-experiences had long since become possible in retrospect

-alone. Still smiling, they edged away, and

-left the lovers alone.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Is it really true?� Marley asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia colored a little as she smiled up at him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And you are happy?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“So happy!� she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And then all at once a cloud came over her eyes.

-She closed them an instant.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What is it?� he asked in alarm.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Nothing.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Tell me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s nothing.� She was smiling again, as if to

-show that her happiness was complete. “See?�

-Her eyes were blinking rapidly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m glad,� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>As they turned and walked across the yard Marley

-looked at her nervously.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you know,� he said, “that I couldn’t

-remember what color your eyes were?� He spoke

-with all the virtue there is in confession.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What color are they?� she asked, suddenly closing

-her eyes.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“They’re blue,� Marley replied, saying the word

-ecstatically, as if it had a new, wonderful meaning

-for him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Connie says they’re green.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Connie?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, don’t you know? She’s my younger sister.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh.� He did not know any of her family, and

-the baffling sense of unreality came over him again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You’ll know her,� said Lavinia, and added

-thoughtfully: “I hope she’ll like you. Then there’s

-Chad, my little brother.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was growing alarmed at the intricacies

-of an introduction into a large family, the characters

-of which were as yet like the characters in

-the first few chapters of a novel, but he thought it

-would not reflect on him to admit that he did not

-know Chad, seeing that he was merely a little

-brother.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He admires you immensely,� said Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Does he?� said Marley, eagerly, instantly loving

-Chad. “How does he know me?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He says you were a football player at college.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley laughed a modest deprecation of his own

-prowess.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But I knew your voice,� said Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Did you? When did you hear it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“As if you didn’t know!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Honestly,� he protested. “Tell me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, that night that you serenaded me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He was regretting that she had outdone him in

-observation, but she suddenly looked up and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, Glenn! What a beautiful voice you have!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It was the first time she had ever called him

-Glenn, and it produced in him a wonderful sensation.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They had come to a little bench, and, sitting

-there, they could only look at each other and smile.

-Marley noticed that a little line of freckles ran up

-over the bridge of Lavinia’s nose. They were very

-beautiful, he thought, and yet he had never heard

-of freckles as one of the elements of a woman’s

-beauty. Then he leaned back and looked about the

-yard.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He had always thought of it as it seemed that

-first night, enormous, enchanted, with wide terraces

-and fountains, and white statues gleaming

-through the green shrubbery. But now he saw no

-terraces, no statuary, no fountains, and no wide

-lawns; nothing but a cramped little yard crowded

-with bushes and trees, and surrounded by a weathered

-fence that had lost several pickets. He looked

-around behind the house where he had fancied long

-stables with big iron lamps over the doors, but

-now he saw nothing but an old woodshed and a

-barn on the rear end of the lot. The cracks in the

-barn were so wide that he could see the light of day

-between them as through a kinetoscope. He heard

-a horse stamping fretfully at the flies.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It was here,� he said, “that I first saw you.�

-He did not speak his whole thought.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� she answered. “I remember.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That was a wonderful night, the most wonderful

-of my life, except the one at the lake.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He drew close to her. “I loved you at first

-sight,� he whispered.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Did you?� She looked at him in reverence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,—from the very first moment. When you

-came into the room, I knew that—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That you were the woman I had always loved

-and waited for; that I had found my ideal. And

-yet they say we never discover our ideals in this

-life!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He laughed at this philosophical absurdity.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What did you think then?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She cast down her eyes, and probed the turf

-with the toe of her little shoe.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I loved you then too.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He gazed at her tenderly, rapturously.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Isn’t it wonderful?� he said presently, “this

-love of ours? It came to us all at once!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She looked at him suddenly. Her short upper

-lip was raised.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It <em>was</em> love at first sight, wasn’t it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes. We were intended for each other.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They sat there, and went over that first night of

-their meeting and that other night at Greenwood

-Lake, finding each moment some new and remarkable

-feature of their love, something that proved

-its divine and providential quality, something that

-convinced them that no one before had ever known

-such a remarkable experience. They marveled at

-the mystery of it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But at last they must return to practical questions,

-and they resumed the account of their family

-relations. Marley told Lavinia about his father

-and mother, about his sister who had died, and then

-about his grandparents, and his uncles and aunts.

-He told her even of Dolly, behind whom she had

-driven to Greenwood Lake, and of his father’s

-love for fast horses, a love which sometimes drew

-upon his father the criticism parishioners ever have

-ready for their pastor. And he told her about his

-home, and how frequently his mother had to entertain

-transient ministers, and how the church laid

-missionary work upon her, until he feared the

-heathen would unwittingly break her down.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He was not conscious of it, but he felt it necessary

-to bring up all at once the arrears of her

-knowledge of him and his family, of all his affairs.

-Meeting as they had so strangely, so romantically,

-and falling in love at first sight, according

-to the prearrangement of the ages, they could

-excuse this otherwise strange ignorance of each

-other’s lives. They bemoaned all the years they

-had been compelled to live without knowing each

-other, and their one quarrel with fate was that

-they had had to wait until so late in life before

-meeting; and yet they finally consoled themselves

-for this deprivation by discovering that they had

-really always known and loved each other. They

-were now able to compare strange experiences of

-soul and, in the new light they possessed, to

-identify them as communings of their spirits

-across time and space.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve always believed somehow in the Sweden-borgians,�

-Lavinia said, “but I never really understood

-before what they meant by affinities.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They looked at each other in a silence that

-became somber, and was broken at last by Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve told mama,� she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You have?� Marley gasped.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And she—?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She was sweet about it. She will love you,

-I know.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley felt a sudden love for Lavinia’s mother.

-And then his fear returned at Lavinia’s sinister,</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But what?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She says we must wait.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh!� Marley said with a relief. He felt their

-present happiness so great that he could afford

-to waive any claim on the future. And yet he

-was troubled; he felt that somehow a depression

-lay on Lavinia. He wondered what its cause could

-be. Presently it came to him suddenly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And your father?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He doesn’t know—yet.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Will he—?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He’s very—� she hesitated, not liking to seem

-disloyal to her father. Finally she said “peculiar,�

-and then further qualified it by adding

-“sometimes.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The sadness that lies so near to the joy in lovers’

-hearts came over them, and yet they found a kind

-of joy in that too.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll go to him, of course,� Marley said presently.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, you’re so brave!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But this tribute did not tend to reassure Marley.

-It rather suggested terrors he had not thought of.

-Yet in the necessity of maintaining the manly

-spirit he forced a laugh.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Of course,� he continued, “I’ll go to him. I

-meant to from the first.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But not just yet,� she pleaded.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� he yielded, not at all unwillingly, “it

-shall be as you say.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He could not dispel her sadness, nor could he

-conquer his own. A little tremor ran through her,

-and he felt it electrically along his arm.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What is it, sweetheart?� he pleaded. “Tell

-me, won’t you? We must have no secrets, you

-know.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, Glenn,� she broke out, “I’m afraid!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She spoke with intuitive apprehension.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Of what?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Our happiness!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He tried to laugh again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you think it will ever be?� she asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I know it,� he said earnestly. “I have nothing

-but faith—our love is strong enough for anything!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You comfort me,� she said simply.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia spent the night with Mayme Carter, and

-the house sounded until long after midnight with

-the low, monotonous drone of their confidential

-voices.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER VII<br /> <br />AN UNNECESSARY OPPOSITION</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Marley heard on Monday evening that Judge

-Blair had gone to Cincinnati, and the news filled

-him with a high if somewhat culpable joy. He

-found Lavinia and her mother on the veranda,

-and Lavinia said, with a grave simplicity:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Mama, this is Glenn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m very glad to have you come,� said Mrs.

-Blair, trying instantly to rob the situation of the

-embarrassment she felt it must have for the

-young man.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley could not say a word, but he put all his

-gratitude in the pressure he gave Mrs. Blair’s hand.

-The light that came from the hall was dim, and

-though Mrs. Blair could see that Marley was

-straight and carried himself well, his face was

-blurred by the shadows. She turned to Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Will you bring out another chair, dear, or

-would you prefer to go indoors?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Then, seeing an advantage in this latter alternative,

-she decided for them:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Perhaps we’d better go in, I fear it’s cool

-out here.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She held back the screen door and Lavinia

-whisked excitedly into the hall. Mrs. Blair led

-the way to the parlor and sent Lavinia for a match.

-Then, turning to Marley, waiting there in the darkness,

-she said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She has told me, Glenn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley felt something tender, maternal in her

-voice; the way she spoke his name affected him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But she is young, very young; she is just a

-girl. We wish, of course, for nothing but her happiness,

-and you must be patient, very patient. It

-must not be, if it is to be, for a long time. What

-does your own mother think of it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I haven’t told her.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You haven’t!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No. I felt I hardly had the right yet—not

-before I spoke to Judge Blair, you know. I think

-I shall speak to him just as soon as he gets home.�

-He spoke impulsively; until that moment he had

-been thrusting the thought from him, but Mrs.

-Blair’s manner led him into confidences. In the

-immediate fear that he had been precipitant, he

-looked to her for help; she seemed the sort of woman

-to wish to save others all the trouble she

-could, one whose life was full of sacrifices, none

-the less noble, perhaps, because she made so little

-of them herself. But a perplexity showed in her

-eyes and before she could reply, Lavinia was

-back. With an intimate, domestic impulse Lavinia

-pressed the match into Marley’s hand, and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You do it; I can’t reach.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley groped with his upheld hand, and when

-Lavinia guided him to the middle of the room, he

-lighted the gas. Mrs. Blair looked at him for a moment

-and Lavinia, standing by, as if awaiting her

-decision, glowed with happiness. Mrs. Blair’s

-smile completed the fond, maternal impression

-Marley had somehow felt when she was standing

-by him in the darkness. Her full matronly figure,

-even in the tendency to corpulence of her middle

-years, had preserved its graceful lines; and Marley

-regretted the disappearance of this wholesome,

-cheerful woman as she passed out of the room.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Judge Blair got home from Cincinnati on Sunday

-morning, worn by his work, and maddened by

-the din of the city to which he was so unaccustomed.

-Walking up the familiar streets, he had been

-glad of their shade and that pervading sense of a

-Sunday that still remains a Sabbath in Macochee.

-He had been a little piqued, at first, because his

-wife had not met him at the train, though she

-had not, to be sure, known that he was coming.

-She had gone to Sunday-school, and Connie gave

-him his breakfast—that is, she sat at the table

-with him, watching him eat and answering the

-questions he put to her about the happenings in

-Macochee while he had been away.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It was not strange that Connie should talk mostly,

-after she yielded to the gnawing temptation to

-tell him at all, of the nightly visits Marley had

-made to the house. She did this in a certain resentment

-she felt with Lavinia, a resentment that

-came from an annoying jealousy she was beginning

-to have of Marley, as if, in installing himself in

-her sister’s heart, he had evicted all other affections

-from it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge, with his constant affectation of what

-he considered the judicial attitude of mind, tried

-to weigh Connie’s somewhat prejudiced evidence

-impartially, but he was troubled and annoyed that

-the peace he had been looking forward to all the

-week should be jeopardized immediately on his

-coming home.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It was not until afternoon that he had an opportunity

-to question his wife, and he began with a

-severity in his attitude that had as its fundamental

-cause, as much as anything else, her failure to

-meet him at the train that morning, and her remaining

-to church after Sunday-school.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What do you know about this business between

-Lavinia and that young Marley?� he asked. “It

-seems to have developed rapidly during my absence.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, Connie has been talking to you, I suppose!�

-laughed Mrs. Blair. “You know that Connie is

-apt to be sensational.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Judge Blair eyed his wife narrowly. Connie

-was his favorite child, though he would not, of

-course, admit as much, and he was ever ready to

-spring to her defense.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She has very bright eyes,� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, now, dear,� said Mrs. Blair, “don’t overestimate

-this thing. Lavinia’s nothing but a child.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That’s just the point. Has the young man been

-here much?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, he was here quite often—several evenings,

-in fact.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Humph! He seems to have taken advantage of

-the sunshine of my absence to make his hay.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t do him an injustice. He didn’t meet

-Lavinia until just about the time you went away.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, we’ll see about it,� said the judge, darkly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Now see here, Will, don’t make the matter serious

-by an unnecessary opposition; don’t drive

-the children into a position where they will consider

-themselves persecuted lovers.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair had not until that instant thought of

-this argument, and she was so pleased with it, as

-justifying her own course with the children, as she

-had artfully called them, that she pressed it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, don’t do that. Just let them alone. They’re

-as likely as not to outgrow it; that is, if there is

-anything between them to outgrow. They’ll probably

-imagine themselves in love a dozen times before

-either of them is married.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t talk of marriage!� said the judge, with

-a little shudder.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair, who had so well dispelled her own

-fears, could laugh at her husband’s.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Just let them alone,� she said; “or leave it to

-me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� said the judge peevishly, “leave it to

-you. You’d probably aid and abet them.� And

-then, instantly regretting his ill humor, he added

-hastily: “You’re so kind-hearted.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair kissed his white hair gently and

-gave his cheek a little pat.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You’d better take a nap,� she said.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER VIII<br /> <br />A JUDICIAL DECISION</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>The judge refused to take a nap, though

-when he sat down on the veranda he did take

-one, lying back in his chair with one of the

-many sections of the Sunday paper spread over

-his face. It was from this somewhat undignified

-posture that he was aroused by a step; he started

-up hastily.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I beg your pardon,� said the young man, who

-stood on the steps twirling his straw hat round and

-round in his hands. The young man went on with

-an anxious smile:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“This is Judge Blair, I presume? My name is

-Marley—Glenn Marley.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>If Marley had known that there were men then

-in the Ohio penitentiary serving terms that were

-longer by years than they would have been had

-Judge Blair digested his breakfast, or been allowed

-to finish his afternoon nap, he would have chosen

-another hour to press his suit. But he had youth’s

-sublime confidence, and its abiding faith in the abstract

-quality of justice. He had dreaded this

-moment, but it had forced itself upon his keen

-conscience as a duty, and when he heard that morning

-that Judge Blair had returned he resolved to

-have it out at once.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“May I have a word with you?� he asked, advancing

-a little.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge nodded, but slightly, as if it were

-necessary for him, as a fattening man advanced in

-middle life, to conserve his energies. His nod

-seemed to include not only an assent, however reluctant,

-but a permission as well, to take the other

-chair that stood, all ready to rock comfortably, on

-the veranda. Marley took the chair but he did not

-rock, nor did he yield himself to it, but sat somewhat

-tensely on its very edge.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s warm this afternoon, isn’t it?� he said, trying

-to keep up his smile. He felt hopeless about it,

-but the thought, darting through his mind, that Lavinia

-was near, braced his purpose. The judge sat

-hunched in his chair, with his short white hair

-tumbled rather picturesquely, and his chin low in

-his collar. His lips were set firmly, his brows contracted.

-He breathed heavily, and on his strong

-aquiline nose, Marley could see tiny drops of

-perspiration.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I have come,� said Marley, “to speak to you,

-Judge Blair, on a matter of, that is, importance.

-That is, I have come to ask you if I might—ah—pay

-my addresses to your daughter.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley thought this form of putting it rather

-fine, and he was glad that that much of it, at least,

-was over. And yet, much as he liked this old-fashioned

-formula about paying his addresses, he

-instantly felt its inadequacy, and so nerved himself

-to do it all over.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I mean Lavinia,� he said hurriedly, as if to

-correct any error of identification he might have

-led the judge into. “I want to marry her.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge, still breathing heavily, looked at

-Marley out of his narrowed eyes.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You know,� Marley said, in an explanatory

-way, “I love her.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He waited then, but the judge was motionless,

-even to the hand that hung at his side over the arm

-of his chair, still holding his paper. Now and

-then, at what seemed to be long, unequal intervals,

-his eyelids fell slowly in heavy winks.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How long have you and Lavinia known each

-other?� he asked finally.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I met her several weeks ago, out at Captain

-Carter’s. But I did not see her again, that is to

-speak to her, until about a week ago. In one way

-I have known her, you might say, but a week; yet I

-feel that I have known her a long time, always, in

-fact. I—I—well, I loved her at first sight.� Marley

-dropped his face at this speech, for it seemed

-that he had made it too sentimental; he had a feeling

-that the judge so regarded it. He sat and

-picked at the braids of straw in his hat.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And have you spoken to her?� asked the judge.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh yes!� said Marley, looking up quickly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And she—?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She loves me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge closed his eyes as if in pain. Then

-he stirred, the paper dropped from his fingers, and

-he drew himself up in his chair, as if to deal with

-the matter.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How old are you, Mr. Marley?� he inquired.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I am twenty-two,� said Marley, confidently, as

-if this maturity must incline the judge in his favor.

-“I cast my first vote for McKinley.� He

-thought this, too, would help matters, and possibly

-it did.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You have completed your education?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I graduated this summer from the Ohio Wesleyan.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And what are you doing now, or proposing to

-do?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Just now, I am studying law,� he announced.

-“I’m going to make the law my profession.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked up with a high faith in this final

-appeal, but even that did not impress the judge as

-Marley felt a tribute thus delicately implied should

-affect him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You are reading with a preceptor, I take it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir, in Mr. Powell’s office.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Judge Blair looked at Marley as if he were deciding

-what to do with him. After he had looked

-a while he gazed off across the street, drumming

-with his finger-tips on the arm of his chair. Presently,

-without turning, and still gazing abstractedly

-into the distance—and in that instant Marley remembered

-that he had seen the judge stare at the

-ceiling of the court room in exactly the same way

-while sentencing a culprit—he began to speak.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Lavinia is yet very young, Mr. Marley,� he

-said, “with no knowledge of the world, and, perhaps,

-little of the state of her own mind. You too,

-are young, very young, and as yet without an occupation.

-You are, it is true, studying law, but it

-will be three years before you can be admitted, and

-many years after that before you can command a

-practice that would warrant you in marrying. In

-this day, the outlook for the young lawyer is not encouraging.

-I do not think I would wish a son of

-mine to choose that profession; the great changes

-that have transpired, and are transpiring in our industrial

-development, have greatly reduced the

-chances of the young lawyer’s success. The practice

-in the smaller county-seats, like our own, for

-instance, has almost entirely vanished. The settlement

-of titles to real estate, so lucrative a branch of

-the law in the early days of my own practice, has

-deprived the later practitioners of that source of

-revenue; the field of criminal law has become

-narrowed, unremunerative and almost disreputable.

-The corporation work can be handled by one or two

-firms in each town, and all that seems to be left is

-the prosecution of personal injury suits, and that

-is a work that hardly appeals to the man of dignity

-and self-respect. The large cities have a wider, I

-might say, the only field, but there the young lawyer

-must spend years of the hardest, most unremitting

-toil before he can come to anything like success.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge paused. He had not intended to

-speak at such length, but the habit of the courts was

-on him, and once started, he found his own didacticism

-so pleasing to himself, that it was with reluctance

-that he paused at all. He might not have

-stopped when he did, but gone on almost indefinitely,

-as he did when he delivered what were always

-spoken of as his beautiful charges to juries,

-had he not recalled, with something like a pang of

-resentment, that the happiness of his own, instead

-of another’s child, lay at the bottom of all this. He

-turned then to face Marley. The young man was

-sitting there, his eyes wide, and his face long. The

-color that flamed in it when he first appeared, was

-now quite gone. It was gray and cold instead.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You will see, Mr. Marley,� the judge resumed,

-“that you are hardly in a position to ask for my

-daughter’s hand. Of course,� the judge allowed a

-smile to soften somewhat the fixity of his lips, “I

-appreciate your manliness in coming to me, and I

-do not want to be understood as making any reflections

-upon, or in the least questioning, your character,

-your worth, or the honor of your intentions.

-But in view of your youth and of Lavinia’s, and in

-view of your own, as yet, unsettled position in life,

-you must see how impossible it is that anything like

-an engagement should subsist between you. I say

-this because I wish only for Lavinia’s happiness.

-I may say that I am not unmindful of your happiness,

-too, and I esteem it my duty to reach the conclusions

-I have just presented to you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And I—I can not even see her?� stammered

-Marley, in his despair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I have not said that,� the judge said. “I shall

-always be pleased to extend to you the hospitality

-of my house, of course; but I would not consider it

-necessary for you to see her regularly, or intimately,

-and I certainly would not want you to

-monopolize her society to the exclusion of other young

-men with whom she has been in the habit of associating.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley sat there, after this long harangue, with

-his head downcast. He sat and turned his hat round

-and round. At last he did look up with an appeal

-in his eyes, but when he saw that the judge was sitting

-there, as he had at first, sunk in his chair,

-breathing heavily and looking at him out of those

-sluggish eyes, he arose. He stood a moment, and

-looked off across the street somewhere, anywhere.

-Then he smote one hand lightly into the other,

-turned, and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well—good afternoon, Judge Blair.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Good afternoon, Mr. Marley,� the judge replied.

-He watched Marley go down the walk and

-out of the gate.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER IX<br /> <br />A FILIAL REBUKE</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>“Father!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Judge Blair turned and saw Lavinia standing

-in the wide front door. Her face was red, her

-eyes were flashing, her arms hung straight and

-tense at her sides.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge stirred uneasily in his chair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh!� she cried, rigidly clenching her little fists.

-“What have you done! You have sent him away!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Come here, my daughter,� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia moved toward him, halting each moment,

-then taking a few nervous steps forward.

-At last she stood before him, challenging, defiant.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Sit down, Lavinia, and listen,� implored the

-judge.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You have sent him away!� she repeated. “You

-were harsh and cruel and unkind to him!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Lavinia!� cried the judge, flushing with the

-anger parents call by different names. There was

-now a peremptory quality in his tone. But the

-girl did not heed him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, how could you!� she went on, “how could

-you! Think how you must have wounded him!

-You not only reproached him with being poor, but

-you discouraged him as to his prospects! Do you

-think I cared for that? Do you think I couldn’t

-have waited? Do you think I can’t wait anyhow?

-What had you when you proposed to mama? You

-were poor—you had no prospects; you had no

-more right—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Lavinia! Lavinia!� the judge commanded,

-grasping the arms of his chair in an effort to rise.

-“You are beside yourself! You don’t know what

-you are saying!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And you pretended to be doing it all for my

-happiness, too! Oh! oh! oh!� Her anger vented

-itself impotently in these exclamations, and then

-her mother, white and alarmed, appeared in the

-doorway behind her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Lavinia,� she said quietly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The girl trembled violently, then whirled about,

-pressed her hands to her face, and ran in, brushing

-by her mother in the doorway. Mrs. Blair glanced

-after her irresolutely. Then she went to her husband.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Be calm, dear,� she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge sank back in his chair and looked at

-her in amazement.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What has happened?� She drew the empty

-chair up and sat down in it. She leaned forward

-and took one of his hands, and pressed it between

-both of her own. She waited for the judge to

-speak.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I hardly know,� he began. “I never heard Lavinia

-break out so.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You must remember how excited and overwrought

-she is,� Mrs. Blair exclaimed. “You must

-make allowances.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I didn’t know the girl had such spirit,� he continued.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair smiled rather wanly, and stroked her

-husband’s hand. It was very cold and moist, and

-it trembled.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I had no idea it was so serious,� he went on, as

-if summing up the catalogue of his surprises.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Tell me how it all came about,� said Mrs.

-Blair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Marley was here, first,� the judge began. He

-had to pause, for he seemed to find it difficult to

-catch his breath. “It was a great surprise to me;

-it was very painful.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge withdrew his hand and wiped his

-brow. Then he gazed again as he had done before,

-across the street. Mrs. Blair, though eying him

-closely and with concern, waited patiently.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I didn’t wish to wound him,� the judge resumed,

-speaking as much to himself as to her. “I

-hope I said nothing harsh; he really was quite

-manly about it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He paused again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I presume I may have seemed cold, unfeeling,

-unsympathetic,� he went on; and then as if he

-needed to reassure and justify himself, he added,

-“but of course it was impossible, utterly impossible.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>After another pause, he drew a deep breath, and

-as if he had already outlined his whole interview

-with Marley, continued:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And then Lavinia appeared; she must have

-heard it all, standing there in the hall.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge leaned heavily against the back of his

-big chair; his face was drawn, his wrinkles were

-deeper than they had been, and he wore an aspect

-of weariness and pain. His form, too, seemed to

-have shrunk, and he sat there in an almost helpless

-mass, limp and inert.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I am only afraid, dear,� Mrs. Blair said

-quietly, “that we have taken this thing too seriously.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Possibly,� he said. “But it is serious, very

-serious. I don’t know what is to be done.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We must have patience,� Mrs. Blair counseled.

-“It will require all our delicacy and tact, now.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Perhaps you had better go in to her,� the judge

-said presently. “Poor little girl; she is passing

-through the deep waters. And I tried to act only

-for her interest and happiness.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair arose.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She will see that, dear, in time.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I hope so,� said the judge. Mrs. Blair went up

-to Lavinia’s room, and listened for a moment at the

-closed door. She heard a voice, low and indistinct,

-but she knew it for the voice of Connie, and she

-could tell from its tone that the little girl was trying

-in her way to comfort and console her sister.

-So she stepped away, silently, almost stealthily,

-going on tiptoe.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge sat on the veranda all the afternoon.

-He scarcely moved, and never once did he pick up

-the Sunday paper. Now and then he bowed, in his

-dignified way, to some acquaintance passing in the

-street. The Chenowiths came out on to their front

-porch, evidently hot and stupefied from their Sunday

-afternoon naps and ready now for the cool refreshment

-of the evening breeze they could usually

-rely on in Macochee with the coming of the evening.

-The judge bowed to them, and he tried to

-put into his bow an indolent unconcern, lest the

-Chenowiths should penetrate his manner and discover

-the trouble that lay on his heart. The Chenowiths

-had gone to the end of their porch, and the

-judge could hear their laughter. He thought it

-strange and unnatural that any one should laugh.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He decided that he would review this whole affair

-of Lavinia’s love calmly and judicially. He

-went back to the beginning of Marley’s visit, trying

-to see wherein he himself had been in the wrong,

-then he went over the hot scene with Lavinia.

-He could not recover from his surprise at this;

-that Lavinia, who was usually so gentle, so mild,

-so unselfish, should have given way to such anger

-was incomprehensible. He had always said that

-she had her mother’s disposition. He could see

-her, all the time, distinctly, as she had stood there,

-in a rage he had never known her to indulge before,

-and yet, as he looked at the image of her that

-was in his mind, and recalled certain expressions,

-certain attitudes, certain tones of voice, it came

-over him all at once that she was exactly as her

-mother had been at her age, though he could not

-reconcile Lavinia’s mood with the resemblance.

-Then he went back to his own days of courtship,

-with their emotions, their uncertainties, their

-doubts and illusions. They seemed a long way off.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He was trying to think calmly and logically,

-but he found that he could not then control his

-mind, for suddenly he saw Lavinia as a little girl,

-with her mother kneeling before her, shaking out

-and straightening her starched frock. And with

-this thought came the revelation, sudden,

-irresistible, that Lavinia was no longer a child as, with

-the habit of the happy years, he had thought of

-her, up to that very afternoon, in fact, until an

-hour ago, and he bowed before the changes that

-hour had wrought. He accepted the conviction

-now that he himself had grown old. He forgot

-his purpose to probe to its first cause this unhappiness

-that had come to him; he saw that what he

-mourned was the loss of a child, the loss of his

-own youth.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He glanced across at the Chenowiths again,

-and they seemed remote from him, of another generation

-in fact, though but a few moments before

-he had looked on them as contemporaries. And

-then suddenly there came to him the fear that Mr.

-Chenowith might run over to chat with him, as was

-his habit, and the judge hastily rose, and almost

-surreptitiously went off the end of the porch and

-around into the side yard. Under the new impression

-of age that he had grown into, he walked

-slowly, with a senile stoop, and dragged his feet

-as he went. He wandered about in the yard for

-a long while, looking at the shrubs and bushes and

-trees he had planted himself so long ago, when he

-was young. It occurred to him that here in this

-garden he would potter around, and pass his declining

-years.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He remained in the yard until his wife came

-to call him in to the supper she had prepared, in

-the Sunday evening absence of the hired girl, and

-with an effort he brought himself back from the

-future to the present.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How is she?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, she’s all right,� said Mrs. Blair, in her

-usual cheery tone. “I didn’t go to her, I thought

-it best to leave her alone.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge looked at his wife, with her rosy

-face, and her full figure still youthful in the simple

-summer gown she wore. He looked at her curiously,

-wondering why it was she seemed so young;

-a width of years seemed all at once to separate

-them. Mrs. Blair noted this look of her husband’s.

-She noted it with pity for him; he looked older

-to her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I think it would be nice for you to take Lavinia

-with you when you go to Put-in-Bay to the

-Bar Association meeting,� she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It seemed strange and anomalous to Judge

-Blair that he should still be attending Bar Association

-meetings.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll see,� he said; and then he qualified, “if

-I go.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“If you go?� his wife exclaimed. “Why,

-you’re down for a paper!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“So I am,� said the judge.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They turned toward the house, and the judge

-took his wife’s arm, leaning rather heavily on it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Will!� she said, after they had gone a few

-steps in this fashion. “What is the matter with

-you! You walk like an old man!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She shook his arm off, and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Hurry up now. The coffee will be getting

-cold.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Indoors, they passed Connie going through the

-hall; she had just come down the stairs, and the

-sight of her girlish figure, and her short skirts

-just sweeping the tops of her shoes, gladdened the

-judge’s heart, and he smiled. He could rely on

-Connie, anyway, for sympathy. But the girl

-gave him a sharp reproachful stare from her dark

-eyes, and the judge felt utterly deserted.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia did not come down to her supper,

-though her mother, knowing she would want it

-later, kept the coffee warm on the back of the

-kitchen stove. Chad had gone away with one of

-the Weston boys. So the three, the judge, Mrs.

-Blair and Connie, ate their supper alone.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>After supper, Mrs. Blair and Connie went immediately

-to Lavinia and the judge had a sense

-of exclusion from the mysteries that were enacting

-up there, an exclusion that seemed to proceed from

-his own culpability. He went to his library and

-tried to read, but he could only sit with his head

-in his hand, and stare before him. But finally

-he was aroused from his reveries by a stir in the

-hall, and glancing up he saw Lavinia in the door.

-She came straight to him, and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Forgive me, papa, if I was rude and unkind.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He seized her in his arms, hugging her head

-against his shoulders, and he said again and again,

-while stroking her hair clumsily:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“My little girl! My little girl!�</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER X<br /> <br />PUT-IN-BAY</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>The little steamer for the islands rolled out

-of Sandusky Bay with Lavinia sitting by the

-forward rail. She had yielded to her father’s

-wishes with an easy complaisance that made

-him suspicious, and yet, as he stood solicitously

-by, he was persistent in his determination

-to realize for her all the delights he had so

-extravagantly predicted for the journey. He tried

-to rouse her interest by pointing out Johnson’s

-Island, but it did not possess for her, as the place

-where the Confederate prisoners were confined during

-the war, the interest an old soldier was able

-to discover in it, and though he tried his best, with

-an effort at entertainment that was well-nigh pathetic,

-she only smiled wanly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He left her, after a while, her chin in her hands,

-looking over into the light green waters, watching

-the curve of the waves the steamer tossed away

-from its sharp prow. The lake was in one of its

-most smiling and happy moods, though they were

-then at a point where storms easily lash its shallow

-depths into billows that might satisfy the rage of

-the North Atlantic. The lighthouse on the rocks

-at Marblehead had a fascination for Lavinia; it

-seemed waiting for her humor, and she watched it

-until the steamer had gone far on toward Kelly’s

-Island, and left the lighthouse behind, a white

-spot gleaming in the sun.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When they entered the little archipelago of

-the Wine Islands, with their waters a deeper

-green than those out in the lake and overcast in

-strange ways by mysterious shadows and cool weird

-reflections of the green of the islands all about,

-Judge Blair came back to her and asked if she had

-been seasick and how she had enjoyed the little

-journey. As she met him with her strange perplexing

-smile, he began to doubt her again; something

-assured him that she still clung to her purpose

-of love, and he found himself almost wishing

-that she had kept to her defiant temper of the

-Sunday afternoon that now seemed so far away.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When they had reached Put-in-Bay and bounded

-on the trolley across the island to the huge hotel,

-they had their dinner and Lavinia perplexed the

-judge further by retiring to her room. She said

-she would rest, though she had persisted all the

-morning that she was not tired.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>As soon as she had closed the door on her father,

-leaving him in doubt and confusion, she began a

-long letter to Marley. She described her trip in

-detail, jealous of every trifle of experience that

-had befallen her; she told him of the bridal

-couple she had seen board the train at Clyde, and

-of the showers of rice that had been thrown by

-the laughing bridal party, though she omitted the

-lone father of the bride standing apart on the

-platform craning his head anxiously for another

-sight of his daughter, and trying to smile. But

-she gave him a sense of the romance that had

-stirred in her at the sight of the lighthouse on

-its lonely point of rocks and the stone towers that

-made the wine-cellars on Kelly’s Island look like

-castles.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>After supper Lavinia left her father to the

-pleasure of renewing acquaintance with the lawyers

-who thronged the lobby, and stole down to the rocks

-that marked the shelving shore of the island. She

-saw stately schooners, with white sails spread, and

-she watched, until its black banner of smoke was

-but a light wraith, a big propeller towing its convoy

-of grain barges across the far horizon. This calm

-serene passing of the life of the lakes soothed her,

-filled her with a thousand fancies, and stirred her

-emotions with deep, hidden hints of the mystery

-of all life. As she sat there and gazed, now and

-then tears came to her eyes. The waters were

-spread smoothly before her under the last reflection

-of the sun, the twilight was coming across the

-lake; and as the light followed the sun and the

-darkness crept behind, she looked toward the south

-in the direction, as she felt, of Macochee, and

-thought of her home and of her mother, of Connie

-and of Chad, and then she thought of Glenn.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Far out in the lake a cluster of yellow lights

-moved swiftly along—one of the big passenger

-steamers that nightly ply between Detroit and

-Buffalo, and she read in that moving girdle of

-light new meanings; then suddenly a fear seized

-her, a fear that was part of the ache in her heart,

-and she ran into the hotel and up to her room.

-Then she took up her letter again and poured

-out all her new sensations, her longings, and her

-fears in a lengthy postscript. When she had

-finished, she began to address the envelope; and

-she wrote on it, with pride:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Mr. Glenn—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And then she paused. She did not know

-whether he spelt his name “Marly,� or “Marley,�

-or “Marlay.� She tried writing it each way,

-dozens of times, but the oftener she tested it the

-less able she was to decide. It was too ridiculous;

-she became exasperated with herself; then humiliated

-and ashamed. When she heard her

-father’s step in the hall, she hastily locked her

-letter in her little traveling bag. The judge

-greeted her warmly; he was flushed and happy,

-and in the highest spirits. During the afternoon

-he had been meeting lawyers from all over Ohio;

-the evening boats from Cleveland and Toledo had

-brought more of them to the island; they were all

-eminent, respectable, rich, the attorneys of big

-corporations. The judges of the Supreme Court and

-of the Circuit Courts were there, and the excitement

-had reached its height when the boat from

-Cleveland brought an associate justice of the United

-States Supreme Court to deliver the chief

-address of the meeting.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Judge Blair reveled in meeting all these distinguished

-men; he enjoyed the flattery in

-their way of addressing and introducing him.

-But his conscience smote him when he saw Lavinia.

-He drew up a chair and sat beside her, holding

-his cigar at arm’s length. It was an excellent

-cigar, better than he ordinarily smoked, and the

-thin thread of smoke that wavered up from it

-filled the room almost instantly with its delicate

-perfume.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Did my little girl think her father had deserted

-her?� he said, speaking of her in the third person,

-after the affectionate way of parents. “He must

-pay better attention to her. She must come down

-and meet the lawyers; they will be delighted; a

-justice of the Supreme Court has just come on from

-Washington! She will want to meet him!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge paused and twisted his head about for

-a puff at his cigar, and then waited for Lavinia

-to glow at the prospect. But when she looked at

-him, and tried to smile again, he saw the glint of

-tears in her eyes.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why come, come, dear!� he said. “What’s

-the matter? Aren’t you having a good time?

-Never mind, when this meeting’s over we’ll go to

-Detroit, and maybe up the lakes for a little trip.

-That’ll bring the roses back!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He pinched her cheeks playfully, but she did

-not respond; she looked at him pleadingly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, Lavinia,� he cried, “you aren’t homesick?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She winked bravely to stem the flood of tears

-and then nodded.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well!� he said, nonplussed. “You know, dear,

-we can’t—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The tears were brimming in her blue eyes, and

-he left his sentence uncompleted to go on:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“So you’re homesick, eh? For mama, and

-Connie?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She nodded, and he studied her closely for a

-moment, and then he could not resist the question

-that all along had been torturing him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And for—?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She confirmed his fear, with quick decisive little

-nods. She got out her handkerchief and hastily

-brushed her tears away, and then with an effort to

-control herself, she looked at him and said, as if

-she were ready to have it all out then:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, father, I haven’t treated him right. I

-came away without telling him.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Judge Blair scowled and turned away, and bit

-the end of his cigar. Then he sat and studied it.

-Lavinia waited; she was ready for the final contest.

-Presently the judge arose.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, dear,� he said. “Well—we’ll see; of

-course, we can’t go back just yet—I have my address

-to read to-morrow, and besides, some of the

-boys are talking of me for president of the Bar

-Association. And I had thought, I had thought,

-that a little trip over to Detroit, and maybe up to

-Mackinac—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Father,� said Lavinia, looking at him now

-calmly, “I don’t want to go to Detroit or up to

-Mackinac. I’ll do, of course, as you say; I’ll wait

-until the Bar meeting is over, but I want to go

-home. You might as well know now, father—we

-might as well understand each other—it can be

-no other way.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Judge Blair looked at his daughter a moment,

-and she kept her eyes directly and firmly in his.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh well,� he said with a sigh, “of course, dear,

-if you say. I’d like to stay until after the election

-though. Will you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Of course,� she consented.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XI<br /> <br />MACOCHEE</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Marley had not learned of Lavinia’s departure

-until Monday afternoon; he had the

-news from Lawrence, who had it from the hackman

-who had taken Judge Blair and Lavinia

-to the train; for whenever any of the quality go

-away from Macochee they always ride to the station

-in the hack, though at other times they walk

-without difficulty all over the town. When Marley

-reached the office, and found Wade Powell, as

-he usually found him, sitting with his feet on his

-table, smoking and reading a Cincinnati paper,

-the lawyer looked up casually, but when he saw

-Marley’s expression he suddenly exclaimed:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Hello! What’s the matter?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley shook his head.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Something’s troubling you,� said Powell.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley shook his head again, and Powell looked

-at him as at a witness he was cross-examining.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I know better,� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley affected to busy himself at his desk, but

-after a while, he turned about and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Something is troubling me, Mr. Powell; my—prospects.�

-He had been on the point of confessing

-his real trouble, but with the very words

-on his lips, he could not utter them, and so let

-the conversation take another turn.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, prospects!� said Powell. “I can tell you

-all about prospects; I’ve had more than any man

-in Gordon County. When I was your age, opinion

-was unanimous in this community that my prospects

-were the most numerous and the most brilliant

-of any one here!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell laughed, a little bitterly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“If I’d only been prudent enough to die then,

-Glenn,� he went on, “I’d have been mourned as a

-potential judge of the Supreme Court, senator

-and president.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’ll be three years before I can be admitted,

-won’t it?� asked Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� said Powell; “but that isn’t long; and

-it isn’t anything to be admitted.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, it takes time, anyway,� said Marley,

-“and then there’s the practice after that—how

-long will that take?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, let’s see,� said Powell, plucking reflectively

-at the flabby skin that hung between the

-points of his collar. “Let’s see.� His brows were

-twitching humorously. “It’s taken me about

-thirty years—I don’t know how much longer it’ll

-take.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell smoked on for a few moments, and then

-added soberly:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Of course, I had to fool around in politics for

-about twenty-five years, and save the people.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you think,� Marley said, after a moment’s

-silence that paid its own respect to Powell’s regrets,

-“that there’s an opening for me here in Macochee?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, Glenn, I’ll tell you. There’s no use to

-think of locating in Macochee or any other small

-town. The business is dead here. It’s too bad,

-but it’s so. When I began there was plenty of

-real estate law to do, and plenty of criminal law,

-but the land titles are all settled now—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That’s what Judge Blair said,� interrupted

-Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“So you’ve been to him, have you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley blushed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, not exactly,� he said. “I heard him

-say that.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� mused Powell. “Well, he feathered his

-nest pretty well while they were being settled.

-But as I was saying—the criminal business has

-died out, or rather, it has changed. The criminals

-haven’t any money any more, that is, the old kind

-of criminals; the corporations have it all now—if

-you want to make money, you’ll have to have

-them for clients. Of course, the money still goes

-to the criminal lawyer just as it used to.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I like Macochee,� said Marley, his spirits

-falling fast.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, it’s a nice old town to live in,� Powell

-assented. “But the devil of it is how’re you going

-to live? Of course, you can study here just as

-well as anywhere; better than anywhere, in fact;

-you have plenty of time, and plenty of quiet. But

-as for locating here—why, it’s utterly out of the

-question for a man who wants to make anything

-of himself and has to get a living while he’s doing

-it—and I don’t know any other kind that ever do

-make anything out of themselves.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I had hoped—� persisted Marley, longing for

-Powell to relent.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, I know,� the lawyer replied almost impatiently,

-“but it’s no use, there’s nothing in it.

-No one with ambition can stay here now. The

-town, like all these old county-seats, is good for

-nothing but impecunious old age and cemeteries.

-It was nothing but a country cross-roads before the

-railroad came, and since then it’s been nothing but

-a water-tank; if it keeps on it’ll be nothing but a

-whistling-post, and the trains won’t be bothered

-to stop at all. Its people are industrious in nothing

-but gossip, and genuine in nothing but hypocrisy;

-they are so mean that they hate themselves,

-and think all the time they’re hating each other.

-Just look at our leading citizen, Brother Dudley,

-over there in his bank; he owns the whole town,

-and he thinks he’s a bigger man than old Grant.

-Sundays he sits in his pew with a black coat on,

-squinting at the preacher out of his sore little eyes,

-and waiting for him to say something he can get

-the bishop to fire him for, and he calls that religion.

-Mondays he goes back to his business of skinning

-farmers and poor widows out of their miserable

-little pennies, and he calls that business; Does he

-ever look at a flower or a tree, or turn round in the

-street at the laugh of a child? He’s the kind of

-man that runs this town, and he makes the rest of

-the people like it. Well, he don’t run me! God!

-If I’d only had some sense twenty years ago I’d

-have pulled out and gone to the city and been somebody

-to-day.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It pained Marley to hear Powell berate Macochee;

-he had never heard him rage so violently at

-the town, though he was always sneering at it.

-To Marley the very name of Macochee meant romance;

-he liked the name the Indian village had

-left behind when it vanished; he liked the old

-high-gabled buildings about the Square; he longed

-to identify himself with Macochee, to think of it

-as his home.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But I’ll tell you one thing,� Powell went on,

-his tone suddenly changing to one of angry resolution

-as he flung his feet heavily to the bare floor

-and struck his desk a startling blow with his fist,

-“I’ll tell you one thing, I’m through working for

-nothing; they’ve got to pay me! I’m going to

-squeeze the last cent out of them after this, same

-as old Dudley does, same as old Bill Blair did before

-he went on the bench; that’s what I’m going

-to do. I’m getting old and I’ve got to quit running

-a legal eleemosynary institution.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell’s eyes flamed, but a shadow fell in the

-room, and Powell and Marley glanced at the door.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, what do you want?� said Powell.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>An old woman, bareheaded in the hurry of a

-crisis, was on the threshold.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, Mr. Powell,� she began in a wailing

-voice, “would you come quick!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What for?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Charlie’s in ag’in.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Got any money?� demanded Powell, in the

-angry resolution of a moment before. He clenched

-his fist again on the edge of his table. Marley

-glanced at him in surprise, and then at the old

-woman.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The woman hung her head and stammered:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, you know—I hain’t just now, but by the

-week’s end, when I get the money for my

-washin’—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, that’s all right,� said Powell, getting to

-his feet, “that’s all right. We won’t talk of that

-now. I beg your pardon. We’ll walk down to

-the calaboose and see the boy; we can talk it over

-with him and see what’s to be done.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He picked up his slouch hat and clapped it on

-his head.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What’s he been doing this time?� he said to

-the old woman as they went out the door.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley watched them as they passed the open

-window and disappeared. A smile touched his

-lips an instant, and then he became serious and

-depressed once more.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He had had no word from Lavinia, and her

-going away immediately after his scene with

-Judge Blair confused him. He tried to think it

-out, but he could reach no conclusion save that it

-was all at an end. Lavinia’s sudden, unexplained

-departure proved that. And yet he could not, he

-would not, think that she had changed; no, her

-father had borne her away—that was it—forcibly

-and cruelly borne her away. For a long while he

-sat there finding a certain satisfaction in the melancholy

-that came over him, and then suddenly he

-was aroused by the boom of the town clock. The

-heavy notes of the bell rolled across to him, and

-he counted them—five. It was time to go. And

-Powell had not returned. It was not surprising;

-Powell often went out that way and did not come

-back, and, often, somehow to Marley’s chagrin,

-men and women sat and waited long hours in the

-dumb patience of the poor and then went away

-with their woes still burdening them. They must

-have been used to woes, they carried them so silently.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was walking moodily down Main Street,

-feeling that he had no part in the bustling happiness

-of the people going home from their day’s

-work, when, lifting his head, he saw Mrs. Blair in

-her surrey. Instantly she jerked the horse in

-toward the curb and beckoned to him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, Glenn! I’m so glad I met you!� she

-said, her face rosy with its smile. “I have something

-for you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She raised her eyebrows in a significant way

-and began fumbling in her lap. Presently she

-leaned out of the surrey and pressed something

-into his hand.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Just between ourselves, you know!� she said,

-with the delicious mystery of a secret, and then

-gathering up her reins, she clucked at her lazy

-horse.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He looked after her a moment, then at the

-thick envelope he held in his hand. On it was

-written in the long Anglican characters of a young

-girl, these words:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“For Glenn.�</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XII<br /> <br />A CONDITIONAL SURRENDER</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Judge Blair and Lavinia returned home Saturday.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I guess it’s no use,� the judge said to Mrs.

-Blair when she had followed him up stairs, where

-he had gone to wash off the dust he had accumulated

-during the six hours the train had consumed

-in jerking itself from Sandusky to Macochee.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, I could see how relieved she was to get

-home,� replied Mrs. Blair, musing idly out of the

-window. She was not so sure that she was pleased

-with the result she had done her part to accomplish.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I guess you were right,� the judge said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I?� asked Mrs. Blair, suddenly turning round.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes—in saying that it would be best not to dignify

-it by too much notice. That might only add

-to its seriousness.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair looked out of the window again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Of course,� the judge went on presently, “I

-wouldn’t want it considered as an engagement.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Of course not,� Mrs. Blair acquiesced.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You’d better have a talk with her,� he said.

-She saw that he was seeking his usual retreat in

-such cases, and she was now determined not to take

-the responsibility. Spiritually they tossed this

-responsibility back and forth between them, like

-a shuttlecock.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But wouldn’t that make it look as if we were

-taking too much notice of it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� the judge said, “I don’t know. Do

-just as you think best.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Didn’t you talk to her about it when you were

-away?� Mrs. Blair asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“M-m yes,� the judge said slowly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And what did she say?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Nothing much, only—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Only what?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Only that she would not give him up.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair waited, and the judge dawdled at his

-toilet. Some compulsion she could not resist,

-though she tried, distrusting her own weakness,

-drove Mrs. Blair to speak first, and even then she

-sought to minimize the effect of her surrender.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Of course, Will,� she said, “I want to be

-guided by you in this matter. It’s really quite serious.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, well,� he said, “you’re capable of managing

-it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You said you knew his father, didn’t you?�

-she asked after a while.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Slightly; why?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I was just wishing that we knew more of the

-family. You know they have not lived in Macochee

-long.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That’s true,� the judge assented, realizing all

-that the objection meant.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And yet,� Mrs. Blair reassured him, though

-she was trying to reassure herself at the same time,

-“his father is a minister; that ought to count for

-something.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, it ought, and still you know they say that

-ministers’ sons are always—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But,� Mrs. Blair interrupted, as if he were

-wholly missing the point, “ministers’ families always

-have a standing, I think.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They were silent, then, until Mrs. Blair began:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I suppose I really ought to call on Mrs. Marley.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, it seems, you know—it seems to me that

-I ought.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But wouldn’t that—?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I considered that, and still, it might seem more

-so if I didn’t, don’t you see?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge tried to grasp the attenuated point,

-and expressed his failure in the sigh with which he

-stooped to fasten his shoes. Then he drew on his

-alpaca coat, and just as he was leaving the room,

-his wife stopped him with:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But, Will!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He halted with his hand on the door-knob. For

-an instant his wife looked at him in pleasure. He

-was rather handsome, with his white hair combed

-gravely, his ruddy face fresh from his shaving,

-and his stiff, white collar about his neck.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What did you say?� he asked, recalling her

-from her reverie of him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh!� she said; “only this—maybe he won’t

-feel like coming around here any more. You

-know you practically sent him away.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge gave a little laugh.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I guess that will work itself out. Anyway I’ll

-leave it to you—or to them.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Still smiling at his own humor, he turned the

-door-knob, and then hesitated. His smile had

-vanished.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She’s so young,� he said with a regret. “She’s

-so young. How old did you say you were when we

-were married?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Eighteen,� Mrs. Blair replied.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And Lavinia can’t be more than—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, she’s twenty,� said Mrs. Blair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“So she is,� said the judge. “So she is. But

-then you—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair had come close to him, and stood

-picking a bit of thread from his shoulder.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It was different with us, wasn’t it, dear?�

-she said, looking up at him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He kissed her.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XIII<br /> <br />SUMMER</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>The dust lay thick in Ward Street, sifting

-its fine powder on the leaves of the cottonwoods

-that grew at the weedy gutter. The

-grass in the yard grew long, and the bushes languished

-in the heat. Judge Blair’s beans clambered

-up their poles and turned white; and Connie’s

-sweet peas grew lush and rank, running,

-as she complained, mostly to leaves. The house

-seemed to have withdrawn within itself; its green

-shutters were closed. In the evening dim figures

-could be seen on the veranda, and the drone of

-voices could be heard. At eleven o’clock, the deep

-siren of the Limited could be heard, as it rounded

-the curve a mile out of town. After that it was

-still, and night lay on Macochee, soft, vast, immeasurable.

-The clock in the Court House tower

-boomed out the heavy hours. Sometimes the harmonies

-of the singing negroes were borne over the

-town.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And to Marley and Lavinia those days, and

-those evenings of purple shadows and soft brilliant

-stars, were but the setting of a dream that unfolded

-new wonders constantly. They were but a part of

-all life, a part of the glowing summer itself, innocent

-of the thousand artificial demands man has

-made on himself. Lavinia went about with a new

-expression, exalted, expectant; a new dignity had

-come to her and a new beauty; all at once, suddenly,

-as it were, character had set its noble mark

-upon her, and about her slender figure there was

-the aureola of romance.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Have you noticed Lavinia?� Mrs. Blair asked

-her husband.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, why?� he said, in the alarm that was ever

-ready to spring within him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She has changed so; she has grown so beautiful!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>One morning the judge saw a spar of light flash

-from her finger, and he peered anxiously over his

-glasses.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What’s that, Lavinia?� he asked, and when she

-stood at his knee, almost like a little girl again

-in all but spirit, he took her finger.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“A ring,� she said simply.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What does it mean?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Glenn gave it to me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Glenn?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But I thought there was to be no engagement?�

-The judge looked up, as if there had been betrayal.

-But Lavinia only smiled. The judge

-looked at her a moment, then released her hand.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I wouldn’t wear it where any one could see it,�

-he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The summer stretched itself long into September;

-and then came the still days of fall, moving

-slowly by in majestic procession. With the first

-cool air, a new restless energy awoke in Marley.

-All the summer he had neglected his

-studies; but now a change was working in him as

-wonderful as that which autumn was working in

-the world. He looked back at that happy, self-sufficient

-summer, and, for an instant, he had a

-wild, impotent desire to detain it, to hold it, to

-keep things just as they were; but the summer was

-gone, the winter at hand, and he felt all at once

-the impact of practical life. He faced the future,

-and for an instant he recoiled.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia was standing looking up at him. She

-laid her hand on his shoulder.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What is it, Glenn?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I was just thinking,� he said, “that I have a

-great assurance in asking you to marry me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What do you mean?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, dear, just this: I can’t get a practice in

-Macochee; I might as well look it in the face now

-as any time. I have known it all along, but I’ve

-kept it from you, and I’ve tried to keep it from

-myself. There’s no place here for me; everybody

-says so, your father, Wade Powell, everybody.

-There’s no chance for a young man in the

-law in these small towns. I’ve tried to make myself

-think otherwise. I’ve tried to make myself believe

-that after I’d been admitted I could settle

-down here and get a practice and we could have a

-little home of our own—but—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Can’t we?� Lavinia whispered the words, as if

-she were afraid utterance would confirm the fear

-they imported.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well—that’s what they all say,� Marley insisted.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But papa’s always talking that way,� Lavinia

-protested. “I suppose all old men do. They forget

-that they were ever young, and I don’t see

-what right they have to destroy your faith, your

-confidence, or the confidence of any young man!�

-Lavinia blazed out these words indignantly. It

-was consoling to Marley to hear them, he liked her

-passionate partizanship in his cause. He longed

-for her to go on, and he waited, anxious to be reassured

-in spite of himself. He could see her

-face dimly in the starlight, and feel her figure rigid

-with protest beside him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s simply wicked in them,� she said presently.

-“I don’t care what they say. We can and we will!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I like to have you put it that way, dear,� said

-Marley. “I like to have you say ‘we’!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She drew more closely to him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And you think we can?� he said presently.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I know it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And have a little home, here, in one of these

-quiet streets, with the shade, and the happiness—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And it wouldn’t matter much if we were poor?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Just at first, you know. I’d work hard, and we

-could be so happy, so happy, just we two, together!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, yes,� she whispered.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I love Macochee so,� Marley said presently. “I

-just couldn’t leave it!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t! Don’t!� she protested. “Don’t even

-speak of it!�</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XIV<br /> <br />ONE SUNDAY MORNING</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>It was Sunday morning and Marley sat in

-church looking at a shaft of soft light that fell

-through one of the tall windows. From gazing at

-the shaft of light, he began to study the symbols

-in the different windows, the cross and crown, the

-lamb, the triangle that represented the Trinity, all

-the Roman symbols that Protestantism still retains

-in its decorations. Then he counted the pipes in

-the organ, back and forth, never certain that he

-had counted them correctly. All about him the

-people were going through the service, but it had

-lost all meaning for Marley, because he had been

-accustomed to it from childhood.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Having been reassured by Lavinia, he felt that

-he should be happy, yet a strong sense of dissatisfaction,

-of uncertainty, flowed persistently under

-all his thoughts, belying his heart’s assurance of

-its happiness. When Doctor Marley, advancing

-to the pulpit, buttoned his coat down before him,

-pushed aside the vase of flowers the ladies’ committee

-always put in his way, and stood with his

-strong, expressive hand laid on the open Bible,

-Marley’s thoughts fixed themselves for a moment in

-the pride and love he had always had for his father.

-There swept before him hundreds of scenes like this

-when his father had stood up to preach, and then

-suddenly he realized that his father had grown old:

-he was white-haired and in his rugged, smooth-shaven

-face deep lines were drawn—the lines of a

-beautiful character.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He remembered something his father had said to

-the effect that the pulpit was the only place in

-which inexperienced youth was desired, showing

-the insincerity of what people call their religion,

-and then he remembered the ambitions he

-had dimly felt in his father in his earlier days; it

-had been predicted that his father would be a

-bishop. But he was not a bishop, and now in all

-probability never would be one; he was not politician

-enough for that. And Marley wondered

-whether or not his father could be said to have

-been successful; he had come to know and to do

-high things, he had lived a life full of noble sacrifice

-and the finest faith in humanity and in God;

-but was this success? He heard his father’s voice:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The text will be found in the third chapter

-of the Lamentations of Jeremiah.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But Marley never listened to sermons; now and

-then he caught a phrase, or a period, especially

-when his father raised his voice, but his thoughts

-were elsewhere, anywhere—not on the sermon.

-The men and women sitting in front of him kept

-shifting constantly, and he grew tired of slipping

-this way and that and craning his neck in order to

-see his father. And then the constant fluttering of

-fans hurt his eyes, and they wandered here and

-there, each person they lighted on suggesting some

-new train of thought.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Presently they fell on a girl in a white dress, and

-in some way she suggested Lavinia. And instantly

-he felt that he should be perfectly happy when

-thinking of Lavinia, but, as suddenly, came that

-subconscious uncertainty, that deep-flowing discontent.

-He went over his last conversation with

-Lavinia, in which he had found such assurance,

-but now away from her he realized that he had

-lulled himself into a sense of security that was all

-false; and the conviction that Macochee had no

-place for him, at least as a lawyer, came back.

-He tried to put it away from him, and think of

-something else.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>His eyes fell on old Selah Dudley, sitting like all

-pillars of the church, at the end of his pew. Dudley’s

-back was narrow, and rounded out between

-the shoulders so that Marley wondered how he

-could sit comfortably at all; his head was flat and

-sheer behind, and Marley could see with what care

-the old banker had plastered the scant hair across

-his bald poll—the only sign of vanity revealed in

-him, unless it were in the brown kid gloves

-he wore. Marley looked at Dudley with the feeling

-that he was looking at the most successful man

-in Macochee, and yet he had a troubled sense of

-the phariseeism that is the essential element of

-such success. He remembered what Wade Powell

-had said; immediately he saw Dudley in a new

-light; the old man sat stolid, patient and brutal,

-waiting for some heterodoxy, or something that

-could be construed as heterodoxy, theological or

-economic, like a savage with a spear waiting to

-pierce his prey, and glad when the moment came.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But Marley, seeing the young girl in the white

-dress, again thought of Lavinia, who would be sitting

-at that very moment with her father and

-mother and Connie and Chad over in the Presbyterian

-church. How long would it be before he could

-sit there beside her, as her husband? Then with

-a flash it came to him that they would, in all

-likelihood, be married in that very church. Instantly

-he saw the spectators gathered, he saw the

-pulpit and the chancel-rail hidden in flowers, he

-saw his father with his ritual in his hands, waiting;

-and then while the organ played the wedding

-march, Lavinia coming down the aisle, her eyes

-lowered under her veil. His heart beat faster, he

-felt a wave of emotion, joyous, exciting.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But there was much to do before that moment

-could come—the long days and nights of study; the

-examination looming like a mountain of difficulties,

-then months and years of waiting for a practice.

-He tried to imagine each detail of the coming of

-a practice, but he could not; he could not conceive

-how it was possible for a practice to come to any

-one, much less to him. There were many lawyers

-in Macochee now, and all of them were more or

-less idle. There was certainly no need of more.

-Judge Blair and Wade Powell and every one

-had told him that, and suddenly he felt an impatience

-with them all, as if they were responsible

-for the conditions they described; they all conspired

-against him, men and conditions, making

-up the elements of a harsh, intractable fate.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And Marley grew bitter against every one in

-Macochee; they all gossiped about him, they were

-all determined to drive him away; well, let them;

-he would go; but he would come back again some

-day as a great, successful lawyer, looking down on

-them and their little interests, and they would be

-filled with envy and respect. But what of Lavinia?</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>What right had he to ask her to marry him?

-What right had he to place her in the position he

-had? He realized it now, clearly, he told himself,

-for the first time. She had given up all for

-him. She would go out no more, she had foregone

-her parties, calls, picnics, dances, everything; in

-her devotion she had estranged her friends. He

-had given her parents concern, he had placed her

-in a false, impossible position. He must rescue

-her from it. But how? By breaking the engagement?

-He blushed for the thought. By going

-away quietly, silently, without a word? That

-would only increase the difficulty of her position.

-By keeping her waiting, year after year, until he

-could find a foothold in the world? Even that

-was unfair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>No, he could not give up Lavinia and he could

-not go away from Macochee, hence it followed that

-he must give up the law. He must get some work

-to do, and at once; something that would pay him

-enough to support a wife. He began to canvass

-the possibilities in Macochee. He thought of all

-the openings; surely there would be something;

-there were several thousand persons in Macochee,

-and they lived somehow. He did not wish to give

-up the law; not that he loved it so, but because he

-disliked to own himself beaten. But it was necessary;

-he could suffer this defeat; he could make

-this sacrifice. There was something almost noble

-in the attitude, and he derived a kind of morbid

-consolation from the thought.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>His father was closing the Bible—sure sign that

-the sermon was about to end. There was another

-prayer, then a hymn, and while the congregation

-remained standing for the benediction, he heard

-his father’s voice:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The peace of God which passeth all understanding—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The words had always comforted him in the sorrows

-he was constantly imagining, but now they

-brought no peace.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>In another moment the congregation was stirring

-joyously, in unconscious relief that the sitting

-was over. The hum of voices assumed a pleasant

-social air, as friend and acquaintance turned to

-greet one another. The people moved slowly down

-the aisle. He caught a glimpse of his father,

-smiling and happy—happy that his work was done—passing

-his handkerchief over his reddened brow

-and bending to take the hands of those who came

-to speak to him and to congratulate him. Just then

-Selah Dudley gave his father his hand; the sight

-pleased Marley; and suddenly an idea came to him.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XV<br /> <br />A SAINT’S ADVICE</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>On Monday morning Marley found Dudley

-at his post in the First National Bank. He

-halted at the little low gate in the rail that

-ran round Dudley’s desk until Dudley looked

-up and saw him, and then Marley smiled.

-Dudley, conceiving it to be the propitiatory smile

-of the intending borrower, narrowed his eyes as

-he regarded him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well?� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley went in and sat down on the edge of the

-hard chair that was placed near Dudley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I wish to have a little talk with you, Mr. Dudley,�

-he said. He waited then for Dudley to reply,

-thinking perhaps he would be interested in the

-son of his pastor. Dudley had turned his chair a

-little, and seemed to have sunk a little lower in its

-brown leather cushions, worn to a hard shine during

-the long years he had sat there. The lower part

-of him was round and full and heavy, while his

-shoulders were narrow and sloping, and his chest

-sunken, as if, from sitting there so many years,

-his vitals had settled, giving him the figure of a

-half emptied bag of grain. His legs were thin, and

-his trousers crept constantly up the legs of the boots

-he wore; the boots were blackened as far as the

-ankles, above the ankles they were wrinkled and

-scuffed to a dirty brown.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley noted these details hurriedly, for it was

-the face of the man that held him. A scant beard,

-made up of a few harsh, wiry hairs, partly covered

-the banker’s cheeks and chin; his upper lip was

-clean-shaven, and his hair, scant but still black,

-was combed forward at the temples, and carefully

-carried over from one side of his head to the other,

-ineffectually trying to hide the encroaching baldness.

-His nose was large; his eyes narrow under

-his almost barren brows and red at the edges of

-the lids that lacked lashes.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What do you want?� said Dudley, never moving,

-as if to economize his energies, as he

-economized his words and every other thing of value in

-his narrow world.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley did not know just what reply to make:

-this was a critical moment to him, and he must

-make no mistake.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I came,� he began, “to—to ask you for a little

-advice.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Dudley, at this, settled a little more into his

-chair, possibly a little more comfortably; he seemed

-to relax somewhat, and his eyes were not quite

-so narrow as they had been. But he blinked

-a moment, and then cautiously asked:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What about?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, it’s just this,� Marley began, smiling

-persistently; “you see I’ve begun the study of law;

-I had intended to be a lawyer.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We’ve got plenty o’ lawyers,� said Dudley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That’s just the conclusion I have come to, and

-I was thinking somewhat of making a change.

-And so I thought I’d come and ask you, that is,

-your advice.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Dudley, still cautious, made no reply, and Marley

-almost despaired of getting on easy terms. He

-began to wish he had not come; he might have

-known this, he said to himself, and his smile and

-the confidence with which he had come began to

-leave him. But he must make another effort.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You see, Mr. Dudley,� he said, “I thought,

-as things are nowadays, I would have to wait years

-before I could really do anything in the law, and

-as I have my own way to make in the world, I

-thought, you know, I might get into something

-else.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What, for instance?� asked Dudley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I didn’t exactly know; I had hardly

-thought it out,—that’s why I came to you, knowing

-you to be a man of large affairs.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Dudley had an instant’s vision of his bank, of

-his stocks, and of the many farms all over Gordon

-County on which he held mortgages, but he checked

-his impulse; these very possessions must be guarded;

-people envied him them, and while this envy

-in one way was among the sources of his few joys,

-it nevertheless gave rise to covetousness which was

-prohibited by the tenth commandment.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“So you want my advice, eh?� he asked, looking

-hard at Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And that’s all?� he asked suspiciously.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well—any suggestions,� Marley said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Dudley still hesitated. He continued to study

-Marley out of his little eyes. Presently he inquired,

-as if by way of getting a basis to start on:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You been to college, ain’t you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir,� Marley answered promptly; “I graduated

-in June.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How long was you there?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why,� Marley replied in some surprise, “the

-full four years.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Four years,� Dudley repeated. “How old?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Twenty-two.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, that’s that much time wasted. If a young

-man’s going to get along these times, and make

-anything of himself, he has to start early, learn

-business ways and habits. He’s got to begin at

-the bottom, and feel his way up.� The banker was

-speaking now with a reckless waste of words that

-was surprising. “The main thing at first is to

-work; it ain’t the money. Now, when I come to

-Macochee, forty-seven years ago, I hadn’t nothing.

-But I went to work, I was up early, and I

-went to bed early; I worked hard all day, I ’tended

-to business, and I saved my money. That’s it,

-young man, that’s the only way—up early, work

-hard, and save your money.� Dudley leaned back

-in his chair to let Marley contemplate him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But what did you work at? At first, I mean.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why,� said Dudley, as if in surprise, “at anything

-I could get. I wan’t proud; I wan’t ’fraid

-o’ work.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley leaned forward with his elbows on his

-knees and began twirling his hat in his hands.

-Then, thinking the attitude lacking in respect, he

-sat up again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Then, I was careful of my habits,� Dudley

-went on. “I never touched a bit o’ tobacco, nor

-tasted a drop o’ liquor in my life.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He paused, and then:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you use tobacco?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Sometimes,� Marley hesitated to confess.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Cigarettes?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Now and then.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Humph! Learned that at college, I suppose.�

-Marley made no reply.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, you’ve started wrong, young man. That

-wan’t the way I made myself. I never touched a

-drop of liquor nor tasted tobacco. I worked hard

-and God prospered me—yes, God prospered me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Dudley’s voice sank piously.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Now, I’ll tell you.� He seemed to be about to

-impart the secret of it all. “When I was your

-age, I embraced religion, and I promised God

-that if he’d prosper me I’d give a tenth of all I

-made to the church; a tenth, yes, sir, a full tenth.�

-The banker paused again as if making a calculation,

-and a trouble gathered for an instant at his

-hairless brows, but, as if by an effort, he smoothed

-them so that they became meek and submissive.

-And then he went on, as if he had found a species

-of relief:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But it was the best bargain I ever made. It

-paid; yes, it paid; I kep’ my word, and the Lord

-kep’ His; He prospered me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He had folded his hands, and sat blinking at

-Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“So my advice to you, young man, is to give up

-tobacco and all your other bad habits, to be up early

-in the morning, to work hard, and remember God

-in all your ways, and He shall direct thy paths.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Dudley stirred, and moved his swivel chair a

-little, as if it were time to resume work. But Marley

-sat there.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That’s my advice to you, young man,� Dudley

-repeated, “and it won’t cost you a cent.� He said

-this generously, at the same time implying a hint

-of dismissal. Still Marley did not move, and Dudley

-eyed him in some concern. Marley saw the

-look and forced a smile.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I thank you, Mr. Dudley,� he said, “for your

-advice. I am sure it is good. I was wondering,

-though,� he went on, with a reluctance that he knew

-impaired the effect of his words, “if you wouldn’t

-have something here in your bank for me—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>At this Dudley suddenly seemed to shrink in

-size. His eyes became small, mere inflamed slits

-beneath his hairless brows, and he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I thought you said you wanted advice?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I did,� Marley explained, “but I thought

-maybe—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He did not finish the sentence. He rose and

-stood, still twirling his hat in his hand. “And

-you have nothing, you know of nothing?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Dudley slowly shook his head from side to side,

-once or twice, having resumed his economical

-habits.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Good morning,� Marley said, and left.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>As he went out, the cashier and the assistant

-cashier looked at him through the green wire

-screen. Then they lifted their heads from their

-tasks cautiously and exchanged surreptitious

-glances.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XVI<br /> <br />LOVE AND A LIVING</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Marley was not surprised by the result of

-his visit to Selah Dudley. He made an effort

-to convince himself that there was truth in

-what Dudley had said to him, even if he could

-not remember exactly what it was that Dudley

-had said. He tried to put down the instinctive feeling

-of dislike he had for the old banker; he told

-himself that such a feeling was unworthy of him,

-if not unworthy of Dudley, and in thinking the

-matter over he tried to clear himself of all suspicion

-of envy or jealousy of Dudley’s success. The whole

-town considered Dudley its leading man, and

-Marley tried so to consider him; and he tried to

-consider him in this light because he was a good

-man and not because he was a rich man, just as

-the town pretended to do. He wanted to talk about

-Dudley with some one, but he did not want to talk

-about him with Lavinia, because he felt a shame in

-his failure with Dudley that he feared Lavinia

-might share. He did talk with his father about

-him, but his father did not seem to be interested;

-he smiled his tolerant smile, but made no comment.

-And when Marley pressed him for an opinion

-of Dudley his father said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“They make broad their phylacteries.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And that was all.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>However, Marley found Wade Powell willing

-to talk of Selah Dudley, as he was willing to talk of

-almost anything. Marley did not tell Powell that

-he had been to Dudley to ask for a position; he

-merely let it be understood that he had met the

-old man in the course of the day and talked with

-him casually.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“By the way,� he asked, as if the thought had

-just come to him, “how did Selah Dudley make his

-money?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He didn’t make it,� Powell answered.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He didn’t? Did he inherit it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Then how did he get it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He gathered it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Gathered it? I don’t know what you mean.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell laughed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You don’t? Well, there’s a difference.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He wasn’t in the army, was he?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“In the army! Great God!� Powell threw into

-his voice the contempt he could not find the word

-to express. “You think he’d risk his hide in

-the army? Well, I should say not! Though

-he would have been perfectly safe—� Powell said

-it as a parenthetical afterthought—“no bullet could

-ever have pierced his hide, and he had no blood to

-shed.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell bit the end from his cigar and spat out

-the damp little pieces of tobacco viciously.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, I’ll tell you, Glenn,� he said, “he stayed

-at home and got his start, as he calls it, by skinning

-the poor. Widows were his big game and he

-gathered a little pile that has been growing ever

-since. To-day he owns Gordon County.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He seems to be a prominent man in the church,�

-ventured Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He’ll be a prominent man in hell,� said Powell,

-angrily. And then he added thoughtfully: “My

-one regret in going there myself is that I’ll have to

-see him every day.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The most curious effect of Marley’s visit to Dudley,

-however, was one he did not observe himself.

-Having been defeated in his plan to secure a place

-in the bank, he felt at first, with a certain consolation,

-that he still had the law to fall back on, and

-he returned to his studies. But he made little headway;

-once having decided to give up the law, the

-decision remained, and his mind was constantly

-occupied with schemes for securing a foothold in

-some other occupation. He considered, one after

-another, every possibility in Macochee, and as fast

-as he thought of some opening, he went for it, but

-invariably to find it either no opening at all, or

-else, if it were an opening, one that closed at his

-approach. Gradually he gave up his studies altogether,

-and sat idle, his book before him; but one

-day Powell said to him:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Say, Glenn, you’re not getting along very fast,

-are you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley started, and flushed with a sense of guilt.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, no,� he admitted.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What’s the matter, in love?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley blushed, from another cause this time,

-though the guilt remained in his face. But Powell

-instantly was gentle.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I beg your pardon,� he said, “I was just joking,

-of course; I didn’t mean to be inquisitive. You

-mustn’t mind my boorishness.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked at him gratefully and Powell, to

-whom any show of affection was confusing, turned

-away self-consciously. But Marley whirled his

-chair around toward Powell.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I am in love,� he said. “I’ve wanted to tell

-you, but I—you know who she is.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Lavinia Blair?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes. And that’s what’s troubling me,� Marley

-went on. “I want to get married, and I can’t. I

-can’t,� he repeated, “the law’s too slow; I’ve realized

-it for a long while, but I tried to keep the

-fact away, I tried not to see it. But now I have

-to face it. Why,� he said, rising to his feet, “it’ll

-take a thousand years to get a practice in this town,

-and I’m not even admitted yet.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He walked to and fro, his brows pinched together,

-his lower lip thrust out, his teeth nipping

-his upper one. Powell glanced at him, but said

-nothing. He knew human nature, this lawyer, and

-the fact made every one in the county tremble at

-the thought of his cross-examinations; sometimes he

-carried too far his love of laying souls bare, and

-as often hurt as helped his cause. He never had

-been able to turn his knowledge to much practical

-account; in a city he would have had numerous

-retainers as a trial lawyer, though few as a counselor.

-In Macochee he was out of place, and he

-chafed under a semi-consciousness of the fact. He

-waited, knowing that Marley would burst forth

-again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll have to get a job,� Marley said at that

-moment, bitterly, “and go to work; that’s all.� And

-then he laughed harshly. “Humph, get a job—that’s

-the biggest job of all. What can I get here

-in Macochee, I’d like to know?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He halted and turned suddenly, fiercely, almost

-menacingly on Powell, as if he were the cause of

-his predicament.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve told you already it’s no place for you,� said

-Powell, quietly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But where’ll I go?� Marley held out his hands

-with a gesture that was pleading, pathetic. Thus

-he waited for Powell’s reply.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell smoked thoughtfully for a moment and

-then began:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“When I was going to the law school in Cincinnati,

-there was a young fellow in my class—a

-great friend of mine. He was poor, and I was poor—God!

-how poor we were!� Powell paused in this

-retrospect of poverty. “That was why we were

-such friends,—our poverty gave us a common interest.

-This fellow came from up in Hardin

-County; he was tall, lean and gawky, the worst

-jay you ever saw. When we had graduated, I

-supposed he would go home, maybe to Kenton—that

-was his county-seat. When we were bidding

-each other good-by—I’ll never forget the day, it

-was June, hot as hell; and we had left the old law

-school in Walnut Street and were standing there

-by the Tyler-Davidson fountain in Fifth Street.

-I said, ‘Well, we’ll see each other once in a while;

-we won’t be far apart.’ He looked at me and said,

-‘I don’t know about that.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Well,’

-he said, ‘I’m going to Chicago.’ I looked at him

-in surprise. He was out at the elbows then, and

-had hardly enough money to get home on. Then

-the ridiculousness of it struck me, and I laughed.

-‘Why, you’ll starve to death there!’ I said. He

-only smiled.� Powell paused, to whet Marley’s

-appetite, perhaps, for the foregone dénouement.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That jay,� Powell said, when he had allowed

-sufficient time to elapse, “that jay I laughed at is

-Judge Johnson, of the United States Circuit

-Court.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The story saddened Marley. With his faculty of

-conceiving a whole drama at once, he caught in an

-instant the trials Judge Johnson had gone through

-before he won to his station of ease and honor; he

-saw the privations, the sacrifices, the hardships,

-the endless strivings, plottings, schemings; it wearied

-and depressed him; his frightened mind hung

-back, clung to the real, the present, the known,

-found a relief in picturing the seeming security of

-a man like Wade Powell, in a town where he knew

-everybody and was known by everybody. He

-shrank from hearing more of the judge; he wished

-to stay with his thought in Macochee.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How <em>do</em> young men get a start in places like

-Macochee?� he asked, and then he added in

-despairing argument: “They <em>do</em> stay, they <em>do</em> get

-along somehow, they make livings, and raise families;

-the town grows and does business, the population

-increases, it doesn’t die off.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� said Wade Powell, approaching the

-problem with the generalities its mystery demanded,

-“some of them marry rich women, but

-that industry is about played out now; the fortunes

-are divided up; some of them, most of them,

-are content to eke out small livings, clerking in

-stores and that kind of thing; about the only ones

-that get ahead any are traders; they barter around,

-first in one business, then in another; they run a

-grocery, then sell it out and buy a livery-stable;

-then they dabble in real estate a while; finally they

-skin some one out of a farm and then they go on

-skinning, a little at a time; by the time they’re

-old, people forget their beginnings and they become

-respectable; then they join the church, like

-Selah Dudley.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell stopped a moment, then he began again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The lawyers get along God knows how; the

-doctors, well, they never starve, for people will

-get sick, or think they’re sick, which is better yet;

-then there are a few preachers who are supported in

-a poor way by their congregations. When a man

-fails, he goes into the insurance business.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell smoked contemplatively for a few moments.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Sometimes,� he resumed presently, “I feel as

-if I were tottering on the verge of the insurance

-business myself.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked at Powell, who had relapsed into

-silence, his head lowered, his eyes fixed in the distance,

-and there was something pathetic in the figure,

-or would have been, but for the humor that

-saved every situation for Powell. There was, however,

-something appealing, and something to inspire

-affection, too. Marley’s gaze recalled Powell, and

-he glanced up with a smile.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I reckon you’ve gathered from my remarks,�

-said Powell, “that I consider success chiefly from

-a monetary standpoint, but I don’t. The main

-business of life is living, and the trouble with the

-world is that it is too busy getting ready to live

-to find the time for life; it has tied itself up with

-a thousand chains of its own forging and it has had

-to postpone living from time to time until most

-people have put the beginning of life at the gateway

-of death; meanwhile they’re busy gathering

-things, like magpies, and those that gather the

-most are considered the best; they have come to

-think that people are divided into two classes, good

-and bad; the good are those who own, the bad those

-who don’t, and the good think their business is to

-put down the bad. Now, here in Gordon County,

-we have about everything a man needs; the spring

-comes and the summer, and the autumn and the

-winter; the rain falls and the winds blow and the

-sun shines, and I’ve noticed that Lighttown gets

-about as much rain as Main Street, and Gooseville

-about as much wind as Scioto Street; the sun seems

-to shine pretty much alike on the niggers loafing

-in Market Space and on old Selah Dudley and

-Judge Blair, bowing like Christians to each other

-in the Square. The trees are the same color wherever

-they grow, and I don’t see any reason why

-people shouldn’t be happy if they’d only let one

-another be happy. Now, I would have lived, but I

-didn’t have time. I thought when I began that

-I’d have to do as the rest were doing, get hold of

-things, and I saw that if I did, I’d have to get

-my share away from them; well, I made a failure

-of that, being too soft inside someway; that was

-all right too, but meanwhile I was wasting time,

-and putting off living—now it’s too late.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked at him in perplexity, not knowing

-how to take him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I know,� he said presently. “But what am I

-going to do? I can live all right, but I have to do

-better than that; I want to get married.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Married,� mused Powell, “married! Well, I

-got married.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was interested. He had never heard

-Powell speak of his wife, and he feared what he

-was about to say; for that instant Powell’s standing

-in his estimation trembled.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And that was the only sensible thing I ever

-did.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley felt a great relief.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But I don’t know that I did right by Mary; I

-didn’t do her any good, I reckon; still, she’s borne

-up somehow; I wish I had a sky full of sunlight to

-pour over her.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell walked to his window, and looked across

-into the Court-House yard where the leaves were

-falling slowly from the Maple-trees. Marley hoped

-that he would go on, and say more of his wife, but

-he was silent. Presently he turned about.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, Glenn,� he said; “I see you’re stuck on

-staying in Macochee, and I don’t blame you; and

-you want to get married, and that’s all right. Maybe

-I can help you do it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How?� said Marley, eagerly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve got a scheme.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What is it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. I’d

-better wait till I see whether it will or not before I

-tell you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He stood and smiled at Marley a moment, and

-then said: “You wait here.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And he turned and left the office. Marley

-watched Powell’s fine figure as he walked across

-the street toward the Court House, a great love of

-the man surging within him. He felt secure and

-safe; a new warmth spread through him. At the

-door of the Court House Marley saw him stop

-and shake hands with Garver, the sheriff. The two

-talked a moment, then turned and went down

-toward the big iron gate in Main Street, and

-disappeared. Marley waited until noon and then he

-went home to his dinner. He returned, but Powell

-did not come back to the office all the afternoon.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XVII<br /> <br />THE COUNTY FAIR</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Marley did not see Wade Powell again for

-four days; a Sunday intervened, and Powell

-did not come back to the office until Monday

-morning. He came in with a solemn air upon

-him, and a new dignity that made impressive

-the seriousness with which he set to work at

-the pile of papers on his desk, as if he were beginning

-a new week with new resolutions. He

-was freshly shaved, and his hair had been cut; it

-was shorter at the sides and, against his rough sunburnt

-neck, showed an edge of clean white skin.

-His newly cropped hair gave him a strange, brisk

-appearance; his black clothes were brushed, his

-linen fresh.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He spoke to Marley but a few times and then

-from the distant altitude of his new dignity. Once

-he sent Marley on an errand to Snider’s drug store

-to buy a large blank book; he said he was going to

-keep an office docket after that. He worked on his

-new docket half the morning, then he carried the

-docket and the bundle of papers over to Marley’s

-table, flung them down and asked Marley if he

-would not continue the work for him. He explained

-the system he had devised for keeping a

-record of his cases; it was intricate and complete,

-but in many of his cases the numbers and in some

-instances the names of opposing parties were missing;

-Powell told Marley to go over to the Court

-House and get the missing data from the clerk.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve got to go out for a while,� Powell explained.

-Then he hurried away; he seemed to be

-glad to escape from the office and the drudgery of

-the task he had set for himself.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell’s absence weighed on Marley; he was

-lonesome in the deserted office, and found himself

-wondering just where Powell was at each moment;

-he pictured him with his companions, Colonel

-Devlin, Marshall Scarff, Sheriff Garver, old

-man Brockton and Doc Hall; lately it had been

-rumored that George Halliday had been admitted

-to the merry group, and that they played poker

-nightly in a room in the Coleman Block. Then

-Marley would picture to himself Wade Powell’s

-wife; he had never seen her, but he had an idea

-of her appearance, formed from no description

-of her, but created out of his own fancy. He pictured

-her as a graceful little woman, with a certain

-droop to her figure; but try as he would,

-he could not see her face; it was a blur to him, yet

-it gave somehow a certain expression of sweetness

-and patience; sometimes, by an effort, he could see

-her brow, and the hair above it; the hair was dark,

-and parted in the middle with some gray in its

-rather heavy mass.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley could never discuss Wade Powell with

-any kind of satisfaction with Lavinia. When he

-spoke of him, she would smile and affect an interest,

-but he could detect the affectation, and he

-could detect, also, a certain distance in her attitude

-toward Wade Powell or the thought of him,

-which he ascribed to the influence of Judge Blair’s

-dislike. Marley saw that Lavinia never would accept

-Wade Powell, and he had ceased to mention

-him except in a casual manner. For some like

-reason he had ceased to mention Wade Powell at

-home; he found that he had many views which he

-could not share with those nearest him, and his

-inner life at that time was somewhat lonely and

-aloof.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He had not told Lavinia of Wade Powell’s offer

-of assistance, nor had he spoken of it at home.

-In those four days he had thought much of it and

-built countless hopes upon it; he had thought of

-all the possibilities, and taken a fine delight in examining

-each one, working it out to its logical end

-in its effect upon Lavinia and him and upon their

-fortunes. He was disappointed when Wade Powell

-failed to refer to the subject again; he would have

-liked to discuss the disappointment with Lavinia;

-usually, out of her youthful optimism and faith in

-the life of which she was so innocent, she could reassure

-him; but of late he had had so many disappointments

-and had drawn so heavily on Lavinia’s

-resources of comfort and hope that he had

-grown wary, almost superstitiously wary, of making

-any further drafts.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When Monday came and Powell did not renew

-the subject, nor even say what his scheme had been,

-Marley concluded that Powell had forgotten all

-about it, and so he relinquished the hope with a

-sigh, and tried to forget it himself. He took up

-his studies once more; but he made poor headway;

-he saw with chagrin that he had not read ten

-pages of law in as many days, and what he had

-read he could not remember. When he tried to

-review it, the words had no meaning for him, nor

-could he wrest any from them, even though he

-ground his elbows in the table with the book between

-them and dug his fists into his hair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>That was the week of the Gordon County fair.

-For a month every fence along the white pikes in

-the country had borne the bills, flaming from afar

-in red ink the date, “Oct. 15-31.� There were,

-too, lithographs everywhere—on boards at the

-monument, at the Court House, on the town hall,

-on the covered bridge over Mad River—lithographs

-picturing the exciting finish of a trotting

-race, and a sedate concourse of fat cattle. The

-fair opened Monday, but it was understood that

-that day would be devoted to preparing and arranging

-the exhibits; the fair would not begin in earnest

-until Tuesday; the big day would be Thursday.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was glad that fair week had come, for

-the chance of novelty which it offered, and, too, for

-the excuse it gave him; he would not study that

-week, but in the general festivity try to forget

-the problem that so oppressed him. He would have

-liked to go to the fair every day, but he could not,

-for the expense, insignificant as it seemed to be to

-every one else in the county, was not insignificant

-to him. He went, however, on Wednesday with

-his father, who, with the love of horses he had inherited

-from the saddle-bag days of Methodism,

-recklessly attended the races. Marley thought that

-this visit would be his last, but on Thursday morning

-he met Lawrence in the Square.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Just the man I’m looking for!� said Lawrence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He was brisk, alert, important, and had an official

-air which was explained when Marley observed,

-on the lapel of his coat, the badge of blue

-ribbon that proclaimed an officer of the fair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I have charge of the tickets this year,� he said.

-“Want to go? I’ll pass you in.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was glad enough to accept.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ll have to go around to the office and tell

-Powell,� he said. “I was away all day yesterday.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, nonsense,� replied Lawrence, “that won’t

-make any difference; he’s been full for two days.

-This is his big time.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley had a pang as he saw with what small

-seriousness Lawrence regarded his relation to the

-law; it reflected, doubtless, the common attitude

-of the community toward him and his efforts.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve got to hurry,� Lawrence went on; “I’ve

-got a rig waiting here; you can ride out with me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It was one of the incomparable afternoons that

-autumn brings to Ohio; the retreating sun was

-flashing in the high, blue sky; the air was fresh and

-Marley felt it full of energy and hope. Lawrence

-drove rapidly through the throng of hurrying vehicles

-that crowded the road to the fair-grounds,

-stirring up a cloud of dust that covered everything

-with its white powder.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lawrence left him at the gate, being too full of

-business to engage in the weary search for pleasure,

-and Marley set out alone across the scorched

-and trampled turf for the grand stand, black with

-people for the races. He could hear the nervous

-clamor of the bell in the judges’ stand, the notes

-of the hand-organ at the squeaking merry-go-round,

-the incessant thumping of the bass drum that made

-its barbaric music for the side-show, and the cries

-of venders, dominating all the voices of the thousands

-bent in their silly way on pleasure. Once,

-calling him back to the real, to the peace of the

-commonplace, he heard the distant tones of the

-town clock in the tower that stood, a mile away,

-above the autumnal trees.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He pressed into the space between the grand

-stand and the whitewashed fence that surrounded

-the track; through the palings he could see the

-stoop-shouldered drivers, bent over the heavily

-breathing trotters they jogged to and fro; above

-him, in the grand stand, he could distinguish cries

-and laughs, now and then complete excited sentences,

-sometimes voices he knew. All around

-him the farmers, clumsy in their ready-made

-clothes and bearing their buggy whips as some

-insignia of office, solemnly watched the races and

-talked of horses.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The sense of kinship with the crowd that had unerringly

-drawn Marley left him the moment he

-was in the crowd, and a loneliness replaced the

-sense of kinship. He looked about for some one

-he knew. He began, here and there, to recognize

-faces, just as he had recognized voices in the din

-above him; he began to analyze and to classify the

-crowd, and he laughed somewhat cynically when he

-saw numbers of politicians going about among the

-farmers, shaking their hands, greeting them effusively,

-calling them by their Christian names.

-Then suddenly he saw Wade Powell. The crowd

-at the point where Powell stood, nucleated with

-him as its center; by the way the men were laughing,

-and by the way Powell was trying not to

-laugh, Marley knew that he had been telling them

-one of his stories, and from the self-conscious,

-guilty expressions on certain of the faces, Marley

-knew that the story was probably one that should

-not have been told. Several countrymen hung on

-the edge of the group, not identifying themselves

-with it, yet anxious to have a look at Wade Powell,

-who enjoyed the fame of the county’s best criminal

-lawyer.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When Powell saw Marley he called to him, and

-when Marley drew near, he introduced him, somehow

-mysteriously, almost surreptitiously, to the

-man at his elbow. Powell’s face was very red, and

-his eyes were brilliant. The mystery he put into

-his introduction was but a part of his manner.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“This is Mr. Carman, of Pleasant Grove Township,

-Glenn,� he said, bending over, as if no one

-should hear the name; and then he added, in a

-husky whisper: “He’s our candidate for county

-clerk, you know.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley saw something strange, forbidding, in

-Carman’s face, but he could not tell what it was.

-It was a red, sunburnt face, closely shaven, with

-a short mustache burned by the sun; the smile it

-wore seemed to be fixed and impersonal. Plainly

-the man had spent his days out of doors, though, it

-seemed, not healthfully, for his skin was dry and

-hardened, and his neck thin and wrinkled; he

-seemed to have known the hard work and the poor

-nourishment of a farm. Marley wondered what

-was the matter with Carman’s face. But Powell

-was drawing them aside.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Come over here,� he was saying, “where we

-can be alone.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He led them to a corner of the little yard; no one

-was near; they were quite out of the crowd which

-was pressing to the whitewashed picket fence,

-attracted by the excitement of the race for which

-the horses were just then scoring.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Now, Jake,� Powell began, speaking to Carman,

-“this is the young man I was talking to you

-about.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Carman, still smiling his dry meaningless smile,

-turned his face half away.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I reckon,� Powell went on, “that I might be

-able to do you some good, if I took off my coat.�

-Powell spoke with a pride in his own influence;

-Marley had never known him to come so near

-to boasting before.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Carman was looking away; and Powell, his own

-eyes narrowed, was watching him closely. Once

-he winked at Marley, and Marley was mystified;

-he did not know what play was going on here; he

-looked from Carman to Powell, and back to Carman

-again. There was some strange fascination

-about Carman; Marley felt a slight relief when he

-discovered that there was something peculiar

-about Carman’s eyes.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I haven’t said anything to Marley about the

-matter, Jake,� Powell said. “Maybe I’d better

-tell him. Hell! He might not want it—I don’t

-know.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Carman turned suddenly; his face had been in

-the shadow; now it came into the sunlight, and

-Marley saw that while the pupil of Carman’s right

-eye contracted suddenly, the pupil of his left eye

-remained fixed; it was larger than the pupil of

-the right eye, which had shrunk to a pin-point in

-the sharp light of the sun. Marley looked closely,

-the left eye seemed to be swimming in liquid; it

-almost hurt Marley’s eyes to look at it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve been telling Carman, Glenn,� Powell was

-explaining, “that if he is elected—and gets into

-the Court House—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked at Powell expectantly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I want him,� Powell went on, “to make you

-his deputy.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley saw it all in a flash; this was what

-Powell had meant that day a fortnight ago; he

-felt his great affection for Powell glow and

-warm; Lavinia would appreciate Powell after

-this. It meant salary, position, a place in which

-he might complete his law studies at his leisure;

-it meant a living, a home, marriage, Lavinia!

-He looked all his gratitude at Powell, who smiled

-appreciatively.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Carman had turned his face away again, he

-was still smiling, and plucking now at his chin;

-Marley waited, and Powell finally grew impatient.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, Jake, what do you say?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Carman waited a moment longer, then slowly

-turned about. Marley watched him narrowly, he

-saw the pupil of his right eye contract, the pupil

-of the watery left eye remained fixed; then, for

-the first time, Carman looked steadily at Marley

-and for the first time he spoke.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� he said, and he stopped to spit out his

-tobacco, “you know I’m always ready to do a friend

-a good turn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell looked Carman over carefully a moment,

-and then he said,</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“All right, Jake.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Just then there was a rush of hoofs, a shock of

-excitement, and they heard a loud yell:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Go!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And they rushed to the fence of the whitewashed

-palings.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XVIII<br /> <br />THE ROAD TO MINGO</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Lavinia sat rocking quietly back and forth,

-and stitched away with her colored silks on

-her tambourine frames, while Marley told her

-of the fortune Wade Powell had brought them.

-He told the story briefly, and he tried to tell it

-simply; he did not comment on Powell’s kindness

-or generosity, but let his deeds speak for themselves

-in Powell’s behalf. When he had done, Marley

-waited for Lavinia’s comment, but she rocked on

-a moment and then held her tambourine frames at

-arm’s length to study the sweet pea she was making.

-When she had done so, she dropped her sewing

-suddenly into her lap, and looking up, said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He thinks everything of you, doesn’t he?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I believe he likes me,� Marley said, as modestly

-as he could put it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Who could help it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia looked at Marley, and he leaned over,

-and took her hands.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I am glad you can’t, sweetheart,� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you know,� she went on, “I think it is because

-you have been kind and good to him—just

-as you are kind and good to every one. His life

-is lonely; he is an outcast, almost; no one cares

-for him, and he appreciates your goodness.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Pity was the utmost feeling she could produce

-for Wade Powell out of her kindly heart. But

-Marley, though he could accept her homage to the

-full without embarrassment, could not acquiesce

-to this length, and he laughed at her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Nonsense, Lavinia,� he said. “You have the

-thing all topsy-turvy. It is Wade Powell who has

-been kind to me; it is he and not I who is good

-to every one. He has a heart brimful of the milk

-of human kindness. You have no idea, and no

-one has, of the good he does in a thousand little

-ways. He tries to hide it all; he acts as if he

-were ashamed of it, but there are hundreds of

-people in Macochee who worship him, and would

-be ready to die for him, if it would help him any.

-Don’t think he has no friends! He has them by

-the score—of course, they are all poor; I reckon

-that’s why they are generally unknown.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But isn’t he cruel?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley’s eyes widened in astonishment.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I mean,� Lavinia said correctively, “isn’t he

-kind of sarcastic?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� Marley admitted, “he is that at times.

-I think he tries to hide his better qualities; I

-think he tries to cloak his finer nature with a

-rough garb. Perhaps it is because he is really so

-sensitive. But he is, to my mind, a truly great

-man. He is a sort of tribune of the people.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But, Glenn, what about his drinking?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, that’s the trouble,� Marley said, shaking

-his head. “If he had let liquor alone he’d have

-been away up.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia was silent a moment, her brow was knit

-in little wrinkles.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Glenn,� she said presently, “I have been thinking.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That with your influence you might reform him—out

-of his liking for you, don’t you know?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She raised her blue eyes. He laughed outright,

-and then took her face between his two hands.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You dear little thing!� he said, with the patronage

-of a lover.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia regained her dignity.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But couldn’t you?� she demanded.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, dear heart,� Marley said, “he would

-think it presumption. I wouldn’t dare.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia shook her head in the hopelessness of

-the reformer, and took up her tambourine frames

-again with a sigh.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s a pity,� she said, relinquishing the subject

-with the hope, “it’s such a pity.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But you haven’t told me what you think

-of the scheme.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You know, dear, that whatever you think best

-I think best.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was disappointed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You don’t seem to be very enthusiastic over

-the prospect,� he complained. “I thought you’d

-be glad as I to know that I can at last make a

-place for myself in the world—and a home and a

-living for you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia looked up.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I never had any doubt of that, Glenn,� she

-said simply.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He saw the trust and confidence she had in him,

-a trust and a confidence he had never felt himself,

-and had never before been wholly aware of

-in her. He saw that she had never shared those

-fears which had so long oppressed him, and into

-his love there came a devout thankfulness. He

-felt strong, hopeful, confident, victorious. He had

-a sudden fancy that it would be like this when

-they were married; he would sit at his own hearth,

-with a fire crackling merrily, and the rain and

-wind beating outside—for the first time he could

-indulge such a fancy; it allowed him, now that his

-future was assured, to come up to it and to take

-hold of it; it became a reality.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge was not at home that night. Now

-and then Marley could hear Mrs. Blair speak a

-word to Connie and Chad, over their lessons in

-the sitting-room; school had commenced, and Connie

-having that year entered the High School had

-taken on a new dignity, in consequence of which

-she was treating Chad with a divine patience

-that brought its own peace into the Blair household.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They talked for a long time of their plans.

-Marley would take his new place in December

-when the new county clerk went into office, and

-he told Lavinia all the advantages of the position.

-It would extend his acquaintance, it would give

-him a familiarity with court proceedings that otherwise

-he could not have acquired in years. He

-meant to study hard, and be admitted to the bar.

-They could have a little cottage and live simply

-and economically; he would save part of his salary,

-and when he hung out his shingle he would have

-enough money laid by to support them, modestly,

-until he could establish himself in a practice.

-He laid it all before her plainly, convincingly.

-He was charmed with the practicability of the

-plan, with its conservatism, its common sense.

-They might as well be married.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Can’t we?� he asked. He trembled as he

-asked; his happiness had never come so close before.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia dropped her embroidery frames into her

-lap and looked up at him. The question in her

-eyes was almost born of fear.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Right away?� exclaimed Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, almost right away,� Marley answered.

-“Sometime this winter, anyway.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“This winter! So soon?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“So soon!� Marley repeated her words, almost

-in mockery.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But we mustn’t be married in the winter,�

-she said, “we’ve always planned to be married in

-June—our month, you know.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What’s the use of waiting?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But papa and mama—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>This quick rushing to the parental cover, this

-clinging to the habit of years struck a jealousy

-through Marley’s heart. His face fell and he

-looked hurt.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Can’t we, dear?� he pleaded.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia looked at him, and she said shyly:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“If you say so, Glenn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They were solemn in their joy and made their

-plans in detail. They would be married quietly,

-Lavinia said, and at home. Doctor Marley would

-perform the ceremony, and Marley was touched

-by this recognition of his father.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The fall worked a new energy in Marley, and,

-with the assurance that his labors were now soon

-to bear fruit, he found that he could study better

-than ever before. He worked faithfully over his

-books every morning, and he worked so hard that

-he felt himself entitled to a portion of each afternoon.

-He would leave the office at four o’clock.

-Lavinia would be waiting for him, and they would

-try to get out of sight before Connie returned from

-school. She might be expected any moment to

-come slowly down Ward Street entwined with

-one of her school-girl friends. They did not like,

-somehow, to meet Connie. The smile she gave

-them was apt to be disconcerting. They met

-smiles in the faces of others they encountered in

-their walks, but they were of a quality more kindly

-than Connie’s smile.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They had walked one afternoon to the edge of

-town where Ward Street climbed a hill and became

-the road to Mingo. At their feet lay the

-little fields, in the distance they could see a man

-plowing with two white horses; off to the right

-lay the water-works pond, gleaming in the afternoon

-sun.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What are you thinking of?� Marley said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I was thinking that it would be nice to live in

-the country.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I was thinking that very thing myself!� exclaimed

-Marley. Their eyes met, and they thrilled

-over this unity in their thoughts. It was marvelous

-to them, mysterious, prophetic.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Some day I could buy a farm,� Marley said;

-“out that way.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� Lavinia replied, “away off there, beyond

-those low trees. Do you see?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She pointed, but Marley did not look in the direction

-of the trees; he looked at her finger. It

-was so small, so round, so white. He bent forward,

-and kissed the finger.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, but you must look where I’m pointing,�

-said Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They drew closely together. Marley took Lavinia’s

-hand and they stood long in silence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We could have a country home there,� Marley

-said after a while, “with a hedge about it and

-stables and horses and dogs. It would be close to

-town; I could go in in the morning and out again

-in the afternoon.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And I could drive you in, and then come for

-you in the afternoon—when court adjourned.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, I would have a man to drive me,� said

-Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But couldn’t I ride in beside you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes; you could sit beside me, on the back

-seat; we’d have an open carriage.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“A victoria!� exclaimed Lavinia. “It would

-be the only one in Macochee!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Is that what they call them?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Victorias?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You know, with a low seat behind and a high

-seat for the driver. You have a green cushion

-for your feet. You would look so handsome in

-one, Glenn. You would sit very erect and proud,

-with your hands on a cane. You would have white

-hair then.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We would be old?� he asked in some dismay.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, no,� said Lavinia, trying to reconcile her

-dreams, “not old exactly. But I dote on white

-hair. It’s so distinguished for a lawyer with a

-country home. Of course we’ll have to get old

-sometime.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We’ll grow old together, dear.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� she whispered, “and think of the long

-years of happiness!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They stood and gazed, looking down the long

-vista of years that stretched before them as smooth

-and peaceful as the white road to Mingo.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>A subtile change was passing over the face of

-the road; shadows were stealing toward it, and

-it was growing gray. The trees that still were

-green were darkening to a deeper green, but the

-colors of those that had changed flamed all the

-brighter. The sun shone more golden on the shocks

-of corn, the sky was glowing pink in the west, the

-water-works pond was glistening as the sun’s shafts

-struck it more obliquely. A fine powder hung in

-the peaceful air.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How beautiful the fall is!� said Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, I love it,� said Marley. “But do you

-know, dear, that I never liked it before? It always

-seemed sad to me. But you have taught me to

-love many things. You don’t know all that you

-have done for me!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She stood in her blue dress, with her hands

-folded before her. Marley looked at her hands,

-and at her white throat, and at her hair, its brown

-turned to a golden hue by the clear light; then

-he looked into her eyes. A sudden emotion, almost

-religious in its ecstasy, came over him. He bent

-forward.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh!� he exclaimed. “Do you know how beautiful

-you are! I worship you!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t, Glenn,� she said, “don’t say that!� The

-reflection of a superstitious fear lay in her eyes.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why?� he said defiantly. “It’s all true. You

-are my religion.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You frighten me,� she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley laughed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why!� he exclaimed, “there’s nothing to fear.

-Isn’t our future assured now?�</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XIX<br /> <br />WAKING</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Carman was inducted into office the first

-Monday in December, quietly, as the <em>Republican</em>

-said, as though it reflected credit on

-the new county clerk as a man who modestly

-avoided the demonstration that might have been

-expected under such circumstances. Marley, in

-the hope of seeing his own name, eagerly ran his

-eyes down the few lines that were devoted to the

-occurrence, but his name was not there, the <em>Republican’s</em>

-reporter, as he felt, being a man who lacked

-a sense of the relative importance of events.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley had taken no part in the campaign,

-though Wade Powell wished him to, and suggested

-every now and then that he speak at some of the

-meetings that were being held in the country schoolhouses.

-Powell said it would be good practice for

-him in a profession where so much talking has to

-be done, and he found other reasons why Marley

-should do this, as that it would extend his acquaintance,

-and give him a standing with the party; but,

-though Marley was always promising, he was

-always postponing; the thought of standing up and

-speaking to the vast audiences his imagination was

-able to crowd into a little school-room filled him

-with fear, and he never could bring himself to consent

-to any definite time. Besides this, he could

-not find an evening he was willing to spend away

-from Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When election was over, he expected that he

-would hear from Carman, but he had no word

-from him. Several times he was on the point of

-mentioning the subject to Wade Powell, but somehow,

-with a reticence for which he reproached

-himself, he could not bring himself to do it. He

-watched the papers closely, but he found it quite

-as hard to find in them any information about Carman

-as on any other subject, except, possibly, the

-banal personalities of the town as they related

-themselves to the coming and going of the trains.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But at last, on the day it had occurred to the

-reporter to chronicle the fact that Carman had been

-inducted into office, the little item struck Marley

-sadly; he felt a sense of detachment from Carman;

-he could not altogether realize that intimate relationship

-to Carman in his new official position that

-he felt belonged to one who was to be Carman’s

-deputy. In his imagination he saw Carman shambling

-about in the dingy room where the county

-clerk kept the records of the court, his knees unhinging

-loosely at each step, his shoulders bent, his

-hands in his trousers pockets, his right eye squinting

-here and there observantly, the left fixed, impervious

-to light and shadow, to all that was going

-on in the world. He wondered if Carman, as he

-looked about, had been thinking in any wise of

-him or had seen him as a part of the place where

-his life was to be lived for the next three years.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley read the paper at supper time; in the

-evening he went to see Lavinia. She too had read

-the paper.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I know,� she said simply, and he was grateful

-for her quick intuition. “Have you seen him?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Are you going to?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Would you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, certainly, at once.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley went to the Court House the first thing

-in the morning. He feared he might have arrived

-too early, but Carman had the virtue that goes

-farther perhaps than any other in the affections

-and approval of men, he rose early. He had been

-at his office since long before seven o’clock.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley found the new county clerk at his desk,

-obviously ready for business. The desk was clean,

-with a cleanness that was rather a barrenness than

-an order. The ink-wells, the pens, with their shining

-new steel points, the fresh blotters, all were

-laid on the clean pad with geometrical exactness.

-The pigeon holes were empty, but they were all

-lettered as if the mind of the new county clerk

-had grappled with the future, come off victorious,

-and provided for every possible emergency, though

-there were certain contingencies that had impressed

-him as “Miscellaneous.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Carman looked up with the obliging expression

-of the new public official, but Marley’s heart instantly

-sank with a foreboding that told him he

-might as well turn about then and go. It was

-plain that Carman saw nothing in the call beyond

-a mere incident of the day’s work.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley took a chair near Carman’s desk. He

-looked at Carman once, and then looked instantly

-away; the eye that lacked the power of accommodation

-was fixed on him, and it made him nervous.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you remember me, Mr. Carman?� asked

-Marley; and then fearing the reply he hastened to

-add: “I’m Glenn Marley; Mr. Powell introduced

-me to you out at the fair-grounds last fall.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, I remember,� said Carman.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I suppose you know what I came for?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Carman’s right eye widened somewhat in an expression

-of mild surprise.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You know,� urged Marley, “the clerkship.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What clerkship was that?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, don’t you know? The chief clerkship, I

-reckon.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Here?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, yes. Don’t you remember?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Carman’s right eye wore a puzzled look.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t you remember?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, you’ve got me,� said Carman, with a

-little laugh of apology.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, I understood,� Marley went on, “that

-in the event of your election I was to have a position

-here.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What as?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why—as chief deputy.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>That right eye of Carman’s was fixed on him

-questioningly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Chief deputy?� he said finally. “Here—in

-my office?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, yes,� said Marley. “Don’t you remember?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The question in the right eye had given way to a

-surprise that was growing in Carman’s mind, and

-spreading contagiously to a surprise, deeper and

-more acute, in Marley’s mind. The eye had

-something reproachful in its steady stare. Marley

-leaned over impulsively.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, surely you haven’t forgotten—that day

-out at the fair-grounds, when Mr. Powell introduced

-me to you? I understood, I always understood

-that I was to have the place. I never mentioned

-it to you afterward, I didn’t like to bother

-you, you know. I waited along, feeling that everything

-was all right. But when election was over—and

-afterward, when you took your office, and I

-didn’t hear anything—I thought I’d come around

-and see you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Despite the sinister left eye, Marley leaned

-close to Carman and waited. Carman was long in

-bringing himself to speak. Even then he did not

-seem to be sure of the situation he was dealing

-with.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You say you understood you was to have a job

-under me as chief clerk?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, yes,� replied Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Who’d you understand it from, me or Wade

-Powell?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well—� Marley hesitated, “I thought I understood

-it from you; I certainly understood it

-from Mr. Powell.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You say you got the idea from something I

-said out at the fair-grounds?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir, at the fair-grounds.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Carman turned away and knitted his brows.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“At the fair-grounds,� he said presently, as

-though talking more to himself than to Marley.

-“The fair-grounds, h-m. Yes, I do remember—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley’s heart stirred with a little hope.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I do remember seeing you there, and talking

-to you. But I don’t remember making you any

-promises. Did you ask me?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No; Mr. Powell did that.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And what did I say?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� Marley answered, “I can’t recall your

-exact words, but I got the impression, and so did

-Mr. Powell, I’m sure, that it was all right, I—I

-counted on it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, say, Glenn,� he said; “I’m awfully sorry,

-honest I am. I remember now, come to think of

-it, that Wade did say something like that, and

-maybe I said something to lead you to think I’d do

-it; I don’t say I didn’t—I don’t just remember.

-But I reckon you’ve banked more on what Wade

-told you than on what I did. Course, I reckon

-I didn’t turn you down—a feller never does that

-in a campaign, you know. But Wade takes a lot

-o’ things for granted in this life.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He smiled indulgently, as if Powell’s weaknesses

-were commonly known and understood.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I reckon you relied too much on what Wade

-told you,� Carman went on. His right eye was fixed

-on Marley, but Marley did not return the look.

-He had turned half-way round and thrown his

-arm over the back of his chair. He looked out

-the window, his eyes vacant and sad. He was

-thinking of Lavinia, of their hopes and plans, of

-the little home that had become almost a reality to

-them; the trees in the Court-House yard held

-their gaunt limbs helplessly up against the cold

-December day; the ugly clouds were hurrying

-desperately across the sky; he thought of the little

-law office across the street, with the dusty law books

-lying on the table, and the hopelessness of it

-all overwhelmed him. But there beside him Carman

-still was speaking:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s like Wade,� he was saying. “I’m sorry,

-derned if I hain’t.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley scarcely heard him. He was looking

-ahead. How many years—</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He hadn’t ought to of done it,� Carman was

-going on; “no, sir, he hadn’t ought.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>How many years, Marley was thinking, would

-they have to wait now? Would Lavinia be lost

-with all the rest? Ought he to ask her to wait any

-longer? But Carman kept on:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve got all my arrangements made now, you

-see.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He swept his arm about the office where the few

-clerks were bending over the big records in which

-they were copying the pleadings they could not

-understand. Marley did not see; he saw nothing

-but the ruin of all his hopes. It was still in there;

-the atmosphere held the musty odor of a public office;

-the clock ticked; once a stamping machine

-clicked sharply as a clerk marked a filing date on

-some document. And then a great disgust overwhelmed

-him, a disgust with himself for being so

-fatuous, so credulous. He had taken so much for

-granted, he had acted as a child, not as a man,

-and he felt a hatred for himself, he felt almost

-like striking himself.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I guess I’ve been a fool,� he said suddenly,

-rising from his chair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, you haven’t neither,� said Carman, “but

-Wade Powell has; he had no business—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley did not wait to hear Carman finish his

-sentence. Shame and mortification were the final

-aspects of his defeat; he put on his hat, drew it

-down over his eyes and stalked away. Carman

-looked at him as he disappeared through the lofty

-door. The pupil of his right eye widened as he

-looked, and when Glenn had passed from his

-sight he turned to his desk, and began to rearrange

-the tools to which he was so unaccustomed.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XX<br /> <br />HEART OF GRACE</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Marley sighed in relief when he went up

-the steps of the Blair house that evening.

-Somehow he had got through the long, desolate

-day. He was sore from his great defeat, but the

-worst, at any rate, was over; the pang had been

-sharp, but now the pain had been dulled. He

-had spent the day in the office. Wade Powell had

-been in and out, but never once had he spoken of

-the clerkship, and Marley was too deep in humiliation

-to mention it. His one consolation was in

-the fact that he had never told any one of his prospect,

-not even his own mother; it had been a secret

-which he and Lavinia had shared luxuriously;

-though, as Marley now looked back on their joy,

-he realized that what had kept him from telling

-any one was a prudent skepticism, a lack of faith

-in the possibility of human happiness, an inherited

-dread of the calamity that stalks every joy.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia flung the hall door wide for him before

-he could ring the bell.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What is the matter?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How did you know anything was?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why,� she exclaimed, “I could tell the minute

-I heard your step. Tell me—what is it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley, ever sensitive to atmospheres, instantly

-felt the peace of the household. The glow from the

-living-room, a quiet voice speaking a commonplace

-word now and then, told him that Mrs. Blair was

-there with Connie and Chad, and he knew the children

-were at their lessons; he caught the faint

-odor of a cigar, and he knew that Judge Blair

-was in his library reading peacefully of the dead

-and silent past, whose men had left all their troubles

-in the leaves of printed books; all round him

-life was flowing on, unconsciously, and normally;

-the tumult and strife in his own soul were nothing

-to the world. All this flashed on him in an instant—and

-there was Lavinia, standing before him,

-her white brow knit in perplexity.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Tell me,� she was saying, “what it is.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I don’t get the job, that’s all.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He felt a momentary savage pleasure in the pain

-he inflicted, justifying it in the thought that he

-eased his own suffering by giving it to another.

-Then as quickly he repented, and felt ashamed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Is that all?� she said. She had come close to

-him, smiling in her sympathy, and then lifting a

-hand to his forehead.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t do that,� she said, as if she would erase

-the scowl.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When they were seated he gave her the details of

-his meeting with Carman, and with the recital of

-his disappointment its sharpness was repeated. He

-leaned over, his elbows on his knees, and clutched

-his hair in his fists. For an instant a kind of relief

-came to Lavinia, a relief that a crisis in her

-life had been postponed, a crisis from which, instinctively,

-she had shrunk. Her life could go

-on for a while as it had always gone on; change,

-which mortals dread, was delayed. Then in

-another moment her sympathy went out to him; she

-was on the floor at his knees, her arms about him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t, dear, don’t,� she pleaded. “Why, it is

-nothing. What does it matter? What does anything

-matter, so long as we have each other?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She stroked his hair, she called him by all her

-endearing names. She tried to take his hands from

-his face, that she might get him to look at her.

-But he resisted.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No,� he said. “I’m no good; I’m a failure;

-I’m worse than a failure. I’m a fool, a poor,

-weak, silly fool.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Hush, Glenn, hush!� she whispered, as if he

-were uttering blasphemies. “You must not, you

-must not!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She shook him in a kind of fear.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Look at me!� she said. “Look at me!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He remained obdurate, slowly shaking his head

-from side to side.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Look at me!� Lavinia repeated. “Don’t you

-see—don’t you see that—I love you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>A change came over him, subtile, but distinct.

-Slowly he raised his head, and then he put his

-arms about her and held her close, and gradually

-a comfort stole over him,—a comfort so delicious

-that he felt himself hardly worthy, because he now

-saw that all through the day he had had a

-subconsciousness that it would come to him at evening,

-and that he had somehow exaggerated his own grief

-in order to make this certain comfort the sweeter

-when it came.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It seemed to Marley, after he and Lavinia had

-sat there for a while, that he had come out of some

-nightmare; sanity returned, things assumed once

-more their proper proportions and relations to each

-other. He found himself smiling, if not laughing

-just yet, and with Lavinia’s hope and confidence

-the future opened to him once more. Now and

-then, of course, his disappointment would roll

-over him as a great wave, and once he said ruefully:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But think of the little home we were going to

-have!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But we’re going to have it,� Lavinia replied,

-smiling on him, “we’re going to have it, just the

-same!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But we’ll have to wait!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, we’re young,� said Lavinia, “and it

-won’t be so very long.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But I wanted it to be in the spring.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“May be it will be, who knows?� Lavinia could

-smile in this reassurance, now that she knew it

-could not be in the spring.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They discussed their future in all its phases,

-with the hope that Lavinia could so easily inspire

-in him; Marley was to keep on with his law

-studies; there was nothing else now to do—unless

-something should turn up—there was always that

-hope.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And it will, you’ll see,� said Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They discussed, too, Carman and Wade Powell.

-Marley thought that Lavinia might return to her

-old severity with Powell; when he expected her to

-do this, he was preparing to defend Powell; when

-she did not, but was generous with him, and urged

-Marley to reflect that he had done all he had done

-out of a spirit of kindness, Marley was disposed to

-be severe with Powell himself. Carman, they

-agreed, had acted handsomely; they could not find

-cause to blame him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No,� said Marley, “he treated me all right; I

-believe he was really sorry for me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>And then, at the thought of Carman’s having

-pity for him, his rebellion flamed up again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s humiliating, that’s what it is. Wade

-Powell had no business making a monkey of me in

-that way; though it doesn’t take much to make a

-monkey of me; I had the job almost completed

-myself, just waiting for some one to come along

-and put the finishing touches on. And Wade

-Powell did that!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley spoke in the sardonic humor the wounded

-and beaten spirit likes to employ in dealing with

-itself. But Lavinia hushed him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You just can not talk that way about yourself,

-Glenn,� she declared with her finest air of ownership.

-“I won’t let you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, it’s so humiliating,� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, no, it can’t be that,� Lavinia argued.

-“You can not feel humiliated. You have done

-nothing that need cause you any humiliation. We

-are the only ones who can humiliate ourselves;

-nothing but our own actions can humiliate us; no

-one else can.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia had a smiling little triumph in her own

-philosophy, but she quickly compromised it by an

-inconsistency.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Besides, no one else knows about it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No,� Marley agreed thoughtfully, and without

-noticing her inconsistency. “No one else knows

-anything about it. We have that to be thankful

-for, anyway.�</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXI<br /> <br />CHRISTMAS EVE</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Lawrence was arranging for a grand ball in

-the Odd Fellows’ Hall, on Christmas Eve, and

-he had, as he came around to the office one

-day to assure Marley, counted him and Lavinia

-in. Marley, glad enough to close the law-book he

-was finding more and more irksome, listened to

-Lawrence’s enthusiasm for a while, but said at

-last:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m afraid I can’t go.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why not? Lavinia will want to go; she always

-does.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I know that,� Marley admitted, “but I can’t,

-that’s all.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lawrence looked at him intently for a moment.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Say, Glenn, what’s the matter with you?� he

-said. “Anything been going wrong lately? You

-look like you were in the dumps.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley shook his head with a negative gesture

-that admitted all Lawrence had said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You ain’t fretting over that job, are you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What job?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked up suddenly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, with Carman.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How’d you know?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, everybody knows about that,� Lawrence

-replied with a light air that added to Marley’s

-gloom; “but what of it? I wouldn’t let that cut

-me up; come out and show yourself a little more!

-You don’t want to keep Lavinia housed up there,

-away from all the fun that’s going on, do you?

-Mayme and I were talking about it the other

-night; you and Lavinia haven’t been to a thing for

-months; it isn’t right, I tell you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked sharply at Lawrence for a minute,

-and Lawrence marking the resentment in his

-eyes, hastened on:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t get mad, now; I don’t mean anything.

-I’m only saying it for your good. I think you

-need a little shaking up, that’s all.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Lavinia can do as she likes,� Marley said with

-dignity. “I shall not hinder her; I never have.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, don’t get sore now, old man; I didn’t

-mean to hurt your feelings. The holidays are here

-and you want to cut into the game; it’s a time to

-forget your troubles and have a little fun; you’ve

-only got one life to live; what’s the use of taking

-it so seriously?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley looked at Lawrence with a genuine envy

-for an instant, as at a man who never took anything

-in life very seriously; he looked at the new

-overcoat Lawrence held over his knee, showing its

-satin lining; and then, reflecting that Lawrence’s

-father had left with his estate a block of bank

-stock which had given Lawrence his position in

-the bank, Marley’s impatience with him returned

-and he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, it’s easy enough for you to talk; if you were

-in my place you might find it different.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“That’s all right,� Lawrence went on, a smile on

-his freckled face. “You just come to the party;

-it’ll cost you only five, and Lavinia would like it.

-I know that. So do you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley did know it; and he felt a new disgust

-with himself that remained with him long after

-Lawrence had put on his new overcoat and left. He

-reproached himself bitterly, and he told himself

-that the best thing he could do would be to go

-away somewhere, and not tell Lavinia, or anybody.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m only in her way, that’s all,� he thought

-as he opened his law-book, and bent it back viciously,

-so that it would stay open.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Ever since the fiasco of his plans as to a place

-with Carman, he had been seeking consolation in

-a new resolution to keep on patiently in the law;

-but it was a consolation that he had to keep active

-by a constant contemplation of himself as a young

-man who was making a brave and determined fight

-against heavy odds. It was difficult to sustain this

-heroic attitude in his own eyes and at the same time

-maintain that modesty which he knew would become

-him best in the eyes of others. The approach

-of the holiday season, the visible preparations on

-every hand and the gay spirits everywhere apparent

-had isolated him more than ever, and he had felt

-his alienation complete whenever he went to see

-Lavinia and found the whole Blair family in an

-excitement over their own festival. Marley would

-have liked to make Lavinia handsome gifts, but

-his debts were already large, relatively, and he

-rose to heights of self-denial that made him pathetic

-to himself, when he decided that he could

-give her nothing. Now that Lawrence was getting

-up a ball to which he knew Lavinia would like to

-go, as she had always gone to the balls that were

-not so frequent in Macochee as Lawrence wished

-they might be, he felt his humiliation deeper

-than ever. He put the matter honestly to Lavinia,

-however, and she said promptly:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, I wouldn’t think of going.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She looked up at him brightly, and then in an

-instant she looked down again. She relished the

-nobility of the attitude she had so promptly taken,

-but the woman in her prevailed over the saint, and

-told what a moment before she had determined not

-to tell:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve already declined one invitation.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She saw the look of pain come into Marley’s eyes,

-and instantly she regretted.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You have?� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, yes.� She looked at him with her head

-turned to one side; her face wore an expression

-he did not like to see.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It was on Marley’s lips to ask who had invited

-her, but his pride would not let him do that; somehow

-a sense of separation fell suddenly between

-them. He examined with deep interest the arm

-of his chair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� he began presently, “I wouldn’t have

-you stay away on my account, you know.� He

-looked up suddenly. “Please don’t stay away, Lavinia.

-I’d like to have you go.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>There was contrition in her voice as she almost

-flew to reply:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, you dear old thing, it was only George

-Halliday who asked me; and when I told him I

-wouldn’t go he was actually relieved; he said he

-didn’t want to go himself; he hates our little

-functions out here, you know, and has ever since

-he came back from Harvard. I suppose he was

-used to so much more in Cambridge!� Lavinia had

-a sneer in her tone, and it took on a shade of irritation

-as she added: “He asked me only because

-he was sorry for me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, sorry for you,� Marley repeated bitterly.

-“That’s another thing I’ve done for you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Please don’t, dear,� said Lavinia, “don’t let

-yourself get bitter. It’ll be all right. We’ll spend

-Christmas Eve here at home and have ever so much

-more fun by ourselves.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair told Marley that she wished Lavinia

-might go to the ball; her father wished it, too.

-Mrs. Blair told him that she could easily get

-George Halliday to take her,—their lifelong intimacy

-with the Hallidays permitted that. Marley

-assured her that he wished Lavinia to accept Halliday’s

-invitation, but that she would not do so.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’d take her myself,� he added, “only I can’t

-dance, and—I have no money. I’d like to have

-her go, if it would give her pleasure.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I know you would, you dear boy,� said Mrs.

-Blair, laying her hand on his shoulder in her affectionate

-way.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair urged Lavinia to go, and so did Marley,

-and when he saw that she was determined not

-to go, he urged her all the more strongly, because,

-now that he was sure of her position, he could so

-much more enjoy his own disinterestedness and

-magnanimity. They desisted when Lavinia complained

-that they were making her life miserable.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Though Marley could deny Lavinia the dance,

-he found, after all, that he could not deny himself

-the distinction of giving her a Christmas present.

-His heroic attitude gradually broke under the temptation

-of Hoffman’s jewelry store, glittering with

-its holiday display. Marley already owed Hoffman

-for Lavinia’s ring, but like most of the merchants

-in Macochee, Hoffman had to do business on an

-elastic credit, if he wished to do any business at all,

-and Marley, after many pains of selection, did not

-have much difficulty in inducing Hoffman to let

-him have the pearl opera-glasses he finally chose in

-the despair of thinking of anything better.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The opera-glasses might have atoned for the

-deprivation of the ball, had Marley been able to

-think of them with any comfort. The delight Lavinia

-expressed in a gift she could never use in

-Macochee, and the enthusiasm with which Connie

-admired them, made him nervous and guilty.

-Connie had temporarily foregone her claims to

-young-ladyhood, and was a child again for a little

-while. Her excitement and that of Chad should

-have made any Christmas Eve merry, but it was not

-a merry Christmas Eve for Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>As Lavinia and he sat in the parlor they caught

-now and then, or imagined they caught, the strains

-of the orchestra that was playing for the dancers in

-the Odd Fellows’ Hall, and they were both conscious

-that life would be tolerable for them only

-when the music should cease and the ball take its

-place among the things of the past, incapable of

-further trouble in the earth.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s very trying,� said Judge Blair to his wife

-that night. “I wish there was something we could

-do.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“So do I,� his wife acquiesced.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t like to see Lavinia cut off this way from

-every enjoyment. The strain must be very wearing.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I suppose it is very wearing with most lovers,�

-said Mrs. Blair. “I don’t see how they ever endure

-it; but they all do.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Have you talked with her about it?� The judge

-put his question with a guarded look, and was not

-surprised when his wife quickly replied:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Gracious, no. I’d never dare.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, I presume not. I don’t know who would,

-unless it might be Connie.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair was silent for a while in the trouble

-that was all the more serious because they dared not

-recognize its seriousness, and then she asked:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Couldn’t you help him to something?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t know what,� the judge replied.

-“There’s really no opening in a little town.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“If you were off the bench and back in the practice—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Great heavens!� he interrupted her. “Don’t

-mention such a thing!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I meant that you might take him in with you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’d be looking around for some one to take me

-in,� the judge said. “I’m glad I haven’t the problem

-to face.� He enjoyed for a moment the snug

-sense he had in his own position and then he

-sighed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He’s young, he has that, anyway. He’ll work it

-out somehow, I suppose, though I don’t know how.

-As for us, all we can do is to have patience, and

-wait.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, that’s all,� said Mrs. Blair. “I don’t believe

-in long engagements.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How long has it been?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Nearly a year now.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I thought it had been ten.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair laughed as she said: “Connie was

-wishing this morning that he’d marry her and get

-it over with.�</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXII<br /> <br />AN ADVERTISEMENT OF DESTINY</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>The first days of spring contrasted strongly

-with Marley’s mood. Because of some mysterious

-similarity in the two seasons he found

-the melancholy suggestion of fall in this spring,

-just as, with his high-flown hopes, he had

-found some of the joyous suggestion of spring in

-the autumn before. But as failure followed failure,

-he began to feel more and more an alien in Macochee;

-he had a sense of exile among his own kind,

-he was tortured by the thought that here, in a

-world where each man had some work to do and

-where, as it seemed, all men had suddenly grown

-happy in that work, there was no work for him to

-do.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He was young, healthy, and ambitious; he had

-given years to what he had been taught was a

-necessary preparation, and then suddenly, just as

-he felt himself ready for life, he found that

-there was no place in life for him. As he went

-about seeking employment there was borne in on

-him a sense of criticism and opposition, and he was

-depressed and humiliated. By the end of the winter

-he disliked showing himself anywhere; he no longer

-stopped in the McBriar House of an afternoon to

-watch Lawrence and Halliday at the billiards they

-played so well; he thought he detected a coolness in

-Lawrence’s treatment of him. He felt, or imagined,

-this coolness in everybody’s attitude now,

-and finally began to suspect it in the Blairs.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What’s the matter?� asked Powell, one morning.

-“You ain’t sick, are you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley shook his head.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, something ails you. I can see that.� He

-waited for Marley to speak. “Is there anything I

-can do for you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No,� said Marley, “thank you. I’ve just been

-feeling a little bit blue, that’s all.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What about?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, I don’t know. I’m kind o’ discouraged. It

-seems to me that I’m wasting time; I’m not making

-any headway and then everybody in town is—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I wouldn’t mind that,� said Powell, divining

-the trouble at once. “They’ve had me on the gridiron

-for about forty years, and they never get tired

-of giving it a twist. It doesn’t bother me much

-any more, and I don’t see why you should let it

-bother you, especially as all they say about you is a

-damn lie.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The speech touched Marley, and he lost himself

-in an impulse of sympathy for Powell, but he

-could not put his sympathy before Powell in the

-way he would like and his mind soon returned to

-himself.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve got to do something,� he said. “I wish I

-knew what.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� said Powell, “you know what I’ve always

-told you. I know what I’d do if I were your

-age. Of course—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell did not finish his sentence. He was looking

-out the window again, lost in introspection.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell’s reiteration of his old advice expressed

-the very thought that had been nebulous in Marley’s

-mind for days, and while he was conscious of

-it, he feared the consciousness, and struggled to

-prevent it from positing itself. But now that

-Powell had voiced it for him, he could escape it no

-longer, and it filled him with a fear. He went

-about all the day with this fear appalling him;

-more and more under its perverse influence he felt

-himself an alien, and the people he met in the street

-seemed unreal and strange, outlandish persons

-whom he had never known. They came upon him as

-ghosts, or if they did something to prove their reality,

-he seemed to be some ghost himself.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>In the afternoon he received a note from Lavinia;

-she said that she was going that evening with

-George Halliday to a concert in the Opera House.

-She did not want to go a bit, she said, but her

-mother, and especially her father, had urged her to

-go; arguing that she now went out so seldom that it

-must do her good, and besides, they had urged her

-so often that she felt it to be her duty in this instance;

-she had held out as long as she could, and

-then had yielded.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley tried to look upon the note reasonably;

-he could see the influence that had compelled Lavinia

-to go, and he knew he had no right to blame

-her, and yet, try as he would, he could not escape a

-feeling of bitterness. When he went home at evening

-his mother instantly noticed his depression,

-and implored him for the reason. He did not answer

-for a while, that is, it seemed a while to Mrs.

-Marley, but at last he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Mother, I’ve got to leave.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Leave?� she repeated, pronouncing the word in

-a hollow note of fear.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, leave.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But what for?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, you know I’m no good; I’m making no

-headway; there’s no place for me here in Macochee;

-I’ve got to get out into the world and <em>make</em> a place

-for myself, somewhere.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But where?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t know—anywhere.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley moved his hand in a wide gesture that

-included the whole world, and yet was without hope

-of conquest.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But you must have some plans—some idea—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ve thought of going to Cincinnati;

-maybe to Chicago.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But what will you do?� Mrs. Marley looked at

-him with pain and alarm.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do!� he said, his voice rising almost angrily.

-“Why, anything I can get to do. Anything, anything,

-sweeping streets, digging ditches, anything!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Marley looked at her son, sitting there before

-her with his head bowed in his hands. In her

-own face were reflected the pain and trouble that

-darkened his, and yet she felt herself helpless; she

-vaguely realized that he was engaged in a battle

-that he must after all fight alone; she could not

-help him, though she wished that she knew how to

-impart to him the faith she had that he would

-win the battle, somehow, in the end.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Poor boy!� she said at length, rising; “you are

-not yourself just now. Think it all over and talk

-to your father about it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It was the first evening in months that Marley

-had not spent with Lavinia, and his existence being

-now so bound up with hers, he found that he could

-not spend the evening as the other young men in

-town spent their evenings. However, he went

-down to the McBriar House and there a long bill

-hanging on the wall instantly struck his eye. The

-bill announced an excursion to Chicago. It took

-away his breath; he stood transfixed before it,

-fascinated and yet repelled; he read it through a

-dozen times. The cheerful way in which the railroad

-held out this trip intensified his own gloom; he

-wondered how he might escape, but there was no

-way; it was plainly the revelation of his destiny,

-prophetic, absolute, final, and he bowed before it as

-to a decree of fate; he knew now that he must go.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>As he went home, as he walked the dark streets

-in the air that was full of the balm of the coming

-spring, he felt as one to whom a great sorrow had

-come. He thought of leaving Macochee, of leaving

-his father and mother, and then, more than all, of

-leaving Lavinia, and his throat ached with the

-pain of parting that, even now, before any of his

-plans had been made, began to assail him. His

-plans were nothing now; they had become the

-merest details; the great decision had been reached,

-not by him, but for him; the destiny toward which

-all the lines of his existence for months had been

-converging, was on him, the moment had arrived,

-and he had a sense of being the mute and helpless

-victim of forces that were playing with him,

-hurrying him along to a future as dark as the moonless

-night above him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He told his father of the excursion, though he

-gave him no notion of it as an expression of his

-fate, and he was all the more distressed at the calm

-way in which his father acquiesced in what he put

-before him as a decision he would have liked to

-have appear as less final. His father in his mildness

-could not object to his trying, and he would

-provide the money for the experiment. It gave

-Marley a moment’s respite to have his father speak

-of it as an experiment, for that included the possibility

-of failure, and hence of his return home,

-but this meager consolation was immediately dissipated

-in the surer sense he felt that this was the

-end—the end of Macochee, the end of home, and

-the beginning of a new life.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXIII<br /> <br />THE BREAK</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Marley went to Lavinia the next morning,

-and told her as they sat there on the veranda in

-the spring sunlight. She looked at him with distress

-in her wide blue eyes.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“When?� she asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“To-night!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Tonight? Oh Glenn!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Her eyes had filled with tears, and she was winking

-hard to keep them back.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“To-night.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She repeated the word over and over again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And to think,� she managed to say at last, “to

-think that the last night I should have been away

-from you! How can I ever forgive myself!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Her lip trembled, and the tears rolled down her

-cheeks. She drew out her handkerchief and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Let’s go in.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>All that day Marley went about faltering over his

-preparations. Wade Powell was the only one of

-the few who were interested in him that was enthusiastic

-over his going, and he praised and congratulated

-him, and pierced his already sore heart by

-declaring that he had known all along it was what

-Marley would be compelled to do. He would give

-him a letter to his old friend, Judge Johnson, he

-said; the judge would be a great man for him to

-know, and Powell sat down at once, with more energy

-and enterprise than Marley had ever known

-him to show, and began to elaborate his letter of introduction.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley dreaded saying good-by; he wished to

-shirk it as to Powell as he intended to shirk it in

-the cases of his few friends; he was to return to the

-office a last time in the afternoon to get the letter;

-and then he would bid Powell good-by. He had

-the day before him, but that thought could give him

-no comfort. He would see Lavinia again in the

-afternoon; he would see her once more, for the last

-time, in the evening, and in the meantime he would

-see his father and his mother, and his home; he had

-still two meals to eat with them, but it was as if he

-had already gone; there was no reality in his presence

-there among them; the blow that fate had decreed

-had fallen, and all that was to be was then

-actually in being; all about him the men and

-women of Macochee were pursuing their ordinary

-occupations just as if he were not so soon to go

-away and be of this scene no more; a few hours, and

-another day, and they would be going on with their

-concerns just the same, and he would have disappeared

-out of their lives and out of their memories.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He looked at everything that had been associated

-with his life, and everything called up some

-memory,—the little office where he had tried to

-study law, the Court House, and the blind goddess

-of justice holding aloft her scales, the familiar

-Square, the cloaked cavalryman on the monument,

-every tree, every fence, every brick in the sidewalk

-somehow called out to him—and he was leaving

-them all. He looked up and down Main Street,

-wide and ugly, littered with refuse, ragged with its

-graceless signs; he thought of the people who had

-gossiped about him, the people whom he had hated,

-but now he could not find in his heart the satisfaction

-he had expected in leaving them. He felt tenderly,

-almost affectionately, toward them all. But

-it was worse at home. He wandered about the

-house, looking at every piece of furniture, at every

-trinket; he went into the woodshed, and the old ax,

-the old saw, everything he had known for years,

-wrung his heart; he went to the barn, he looked at

-the muddy buggy in which he had driven so often

-with his father; he reproached himself because he

-had not kept the buggy cleaner for him; he went

-into the stall and patted the flank of Dolly, finally

-he put his arms about her warm neck, laid his face

-against it, and the tears rolled down his cheeks.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>One of the preachers that were always dropping

-in on them was there to dinner, and in the blessing

-he invoked on the temporalities, as he called them,

-he prayed with professional unction for the son

-who was about to leave the old roof-tree, and this

-made the ordeal harder for them all. Doctor Marley

-spoke to the preacher of little things that he

-was to do within the next few days and Marley wondered

-how he could mention them, for they were to

-be done at a time when he would be there no more.

-Because he conceived of life, as all must conceive of

-it, solely in its relation to himself, he could not imagine

-life going on in Macochee without him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The afternoon wore on, he passed his hour with

-Lavinia; they were to meet then but once again; he

-returned home, his mother had packed his trunk;

-it was waiting. He was tender with his mother,

-and he wondered now, with a wild regret, why he

-had not always been tender with her; he was tender

-now with all things; a tenderness suffused his whole

-being; it seemed as if it might dissolve in tears.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Still he shrank back; there was one thing more

-to do; he was to go up-town and get his ticket, and

-the letter to Judge Johnson, and bid Wade Powell

-good-by. A wild hope leaped in his heart; perhaps—but

-no, it was irrevocable now. He went,

-and got his letter, but Powell refused to bid him

-good-by; he said he would be at the train to see him

-off. He bought his ticket and went home. Old

-man Downing had been there with his dray and

-hauled away his trunk; it was settled. He could

-only wait and watch the minutes tick by.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It seemed to Marley that all things that evening

-conspired to accentuate all that he was leaving

-behind, and to make the grief of parting more poignant.

-His mother, who was then in that domestic

-exigency described by the ladies of Macochee as being

-without a girl, had prepared an unusually

-elaborate supper, and while there was no formal

-observance of the fact, it was eaten, so far as any of

-them could eat that evening, under a sense of its

-significance as a parting ceremonial. They talked,

-or tried to talk, indifferently of commonplace

-things, and Doctor Marley even sought to add

-merriment to their feast by a jocularity that was

-unusual with him. Marley, who knew his father

-so well, could easily detect the heavy heart that lay

-under his father’s jokes, and he suffered a keener

-misery from the pathos of it. Then he would

-catch his mother looking at him, her eyes deep and

-sad, and it seemed to him that his heart must burst.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley’s train was to leave at eleven o’clock; he

-had arranged to go to Lavinia’s and remain with

-her until ten o’clock; then he was to stop in at his

-home for his last good-by. Those last two hours

-with Lavinia were an ordeal; into the first hour

-they tried to crowd a thousand things they felt they

-must say, and a thousand things they could only

-suggest; when the clock struck nine, they looked at

-each other in anguish; they did little after that

-but mentally count the minutes. The clock ticked

-loudly, aggressively, until in the soul of each, unconfessed,

-there was a desire to hasten the moments

-they felt they would like to stay; the agony

-was almost beyond endurance; it exhausted them,

-beat them down, and rendered them powerless to

-speak. Finally the clock struck the half-hour; they

-could only sit and look at each other now; at a

-quarter of ten they began their good-bys.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>At ten o’clock Mrs. Blair, Connie and Chad

-came into the room solemnly, and bade Marley

-farewell; the judge himself came in after them, his

-glasses in his hand and the magazine he had been

-reading, which, as Marley thought with that pang

-of things going on without him, he would in a few

-moments be reading again as calmly as ever.

-He took Marley’s hand, and wished him success;

-for the first time he spoke gently, almost affectionately

-to him, and although Marley tried to bear

-himself stoically, the judge’s farewell touched him

-more than all the others.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The shameless children would have liked to

-remain and see the tragedy to its close, but Mrs. Blair

-drew them from the room with her. The last moment

-had come, and Marley held Lavinia in his

-arms; at last he tore himself from her, and it was

-over. He looked back from out the darkness;

-Lavinia was still standing in the doorway; he saw

-her slender, girlish figure outlined against the hall

-light behind her; somehow he knew that she was

-bravely smiling through her tears. She stood

-there until his footfall sounded loud in the spring

-night, then the light went out, the door closed as he

-had heard it close so often, and she was gone.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He saw the light in his father’s study as he approached

-his home, and there came again that torturing

-sense: the sermon his father then was working

-on would be preached when he was far away;

-his mother, as he knew by the light in the sitting-room

-window, was waiting for him; she had waited

-there so many nights, and now she was waiting for

-the last time. She rose at his step, and took him to

-her arms the minute he entered the door.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Be brave, dear,� he said, stroking her gray

-hair; “be brave.� He was trying so hard to be

-brave himself, and she was crying. He had not

-often seen her cry. She could not speak for many

-minutes; she could only pat him on the shoulder

-where her head lay.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Remember, my precious boy,� she managed to

-say at last, “that there’s a strong Arm to lean

-upon.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He saw that she was turning now to the great

-faith that had sustained her in every trial of a life

-that had known so many trials; and the tears

-came to his own eyes. He would have left her for

-a moment but she followed him. He had an impulse

-he could not resist to torture himself by going

-over the house again; he went into the dining-room

-which in the darkness wore an air of waiting for

-the breakfast they would eat when he was gone; he

-went to the kitchen and took a drink of water,

-from the old habit he was now breaking; then

-he went up stairs and looked into his own room,

-at the neatly made bed where he was to sleep no

-more; at last he stood at the door of the study.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He could catch the odor of his father’s cigar, just

-as he had in standing there so many times before;

-he pushed the door open and felt the familiar hot,

-close, smoke-laden atmosphere which his father

-seemed to find so congenial to his studies. Doctor

-Marley took off his spectacles and pushed his manuscript

-aside, and Marley felt that he never would

-forget that picture of the gray head bent in its

-earnest labors over that worn and littered desk; it

-was photographed for all time on his memory. His

-words with his father had always been few; there

-were no more now.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, father,� he said, “I’ve come to say good-by.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>His father pushed back his chair and turned

-about. He half-rose, then sank back again and took

-his son’s hand.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Good-by, Glenn,� he said. “You’ll write?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Write often. We’ll want to hear.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, write often,� the doctor said. “And take

-care of yourself.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I will, father.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Wait a moment.� Doctor Marley was fumbling

-in his pocket. He drew forth a few dollars.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Here, Glenn,� he said. “I wish it could be

-more.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>There was nothing more to do, or say. They

-went down stairs; Marley’s bag was waiting for

-him in the hall. He kissed his mother again and

-then again; he shook his father’s hand, and then he

-went.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Write often,� his father called out to him, as

-he went down the walk. It was all the old man

-could say.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The door closed, as the door of the Blairs’ had

-closed. Inside Doctor Marley looked at his wife a

-moment.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� he said, “he’s gone.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Marley made no answer.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I suppose,� he said, “I ought to have gone to

-the train with him.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Then he toiled up the stairs to his study and the

-sermon he was to preach when Glenn was gone.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley walked rapidly down Market Street toward

-the depot; in the dark houses that suddenly

-had taken on a new significance to him, people were

-sleeping, people who would awake the next morning

-in Macochee. He could not escape the torture

-of this thought; his mind revolved constantly about

-the mystery of his being still in Macochee, still

-within calling distance, almost, of Lavinia, of his

-father and mother, of all he loved in life, when in

-reality they had in an instant become as inaccessible

-to him as though the long miles of his exile

-already separated them.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Twenty minutes later, Lavinia, in her room,

-Mrs. Marley, at her prayers, and Doctor Marley

-sitting in deep absorption at his desk, heard the sonorous

-whistle of a locomotive sound ominously

-over the dark and quiet town.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXIV<br /> <br />THE GATES OF THE CITY</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>It was a relief to Marley when morning came

-and released him from the reclining chair that

-had held his form so rigidly all the night. He

-had not taken a sleeper because he felt himself too

-poor, and he had somewhere got the false impression

-that comfort was to be had in the chair car.

-He had stretched himself in the cruel rack when

-the porter came through and turned the lights down

-to the dismal point of gloom, but he had not slept;

-all through the night the trainmen constantly

-passed through the car talking with each other in

-low tones; the train, too, made long, inexplicable

-stops; he could hear the escape of the weary engine,

-through his window he could see the lights of

-some strange town; and then the trainmen would

-run by outside, swinging their lanterns in the

-darkness, and calling to each other, and Marley would

-fear that something had happened, or else was

-about to happen, which was worse.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Finally the train would creak on again, as if it

-were necessary to proceed slowly and cautiously

-through vague dangers of the night. Through his

-window he could see the glint of rails, the two

-yards of gleaming steel that traveled always abreast

-of him. Toward morning Marley wearily fell

-asleep, and then the sorrow and heart-ache of his

-parting from Lavinia and his home distorted themselves

-in fearful dreams.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When he awoke at last, and looked out on the

-ugly prairie that had nothing to break its monotony

-but a few scraggly scrub-oak bushes, and some

-clumps of stunted trees, the dawn was descending

-from the gray sky. The car presented a squalid,

-hideous sight; all about him were stretched the

-bodies of sleeping passengers, flaccid, inert, having

-cast aside in utter weariness all sense of decency

-and shame; the men had pulled off their

-boots, and sprawled on the chairs, their stockinged

-feet prominently in view; women lay with open

-mouths, their faces begrimed, their hair in slovenly

-disarray.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The baby that had been crying in the early part

-of the night had finally gone to sleep while nursing,

-and its tired mother slept with it at her

-breast. The Jewish drummer across the aisle was

-sleeping in shirt-sleeves; his head had rolled

-from the little rest on the back of his chair and now

-lolled off his shoulder, his sallow face turned

-toward Marley was greasy with perspiration; his

-closed eyes filled out their blue hemispherical lids,

-and his cheeks puffed with his intermittent snoring.

-At times his snoring grew so loud and so

-troubled that it seemed as if he must choke; he

-would reach a torturing climax, then suddenly the

-thick red lips beneath his black mustache would

-open, his sallow cheeks would collapse, and relief

-would come.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley wished the passengers would wake up

-and end the indecencies they had tried to hide

-earlier in the night. Glancing up and down the

-long car he could recognize none of them as having

-been there when he had boarded the car at

-Macochee; those who had got on with him had gone

-short distances, and then got off, breaking the last

-tie that bound him to his home. He found it impossible

-now to conceive of the car as having been in

-Macochee so short a time before.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Presently he saw an old lady sitting up in the

-remote end of the car; she was winding her thin

-wisp of gray hair in a little knob at the back of her

-head. Then, feeling that he might bestir himself,

-Marley got up and went forward; he washed his

-face, and tried to escape the discomfort of clothes

-he had worn all the night by readjusting them.

-The train was evidently approaching the city; now

-and then he saw a building, lonely and out of place:

-on the hideous sand-dunes, as if it waited for the

-city, in the growth it boasted, to catch up with it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The train ran on; it had reached an ever-widening

-web of tracks; it passed long lines of freight-cars,

-stock-cars from the west, empty gondolas that

-had come with coal from the Hocking Valley; a

-switch tower swept by, its bell jangling peevishly in

-alarm; long processions of working-men trooped

-with their dinner-pails between the tracks. The

-train stopped, finally, still far from its destination.

-The air in the car was foul from the feculence of

-all those bodies that had lain in it through the

-night, and Marley went out on the platform. He

-could hear the engine wheezing—the only sound to

-break the silence of the dawn. The cool morning

-air was grateful to Marley, though it was not the

-air of the spring they were already having in

-Macochee. He risked getting down off the platform

-and looked ahead. Beyond the long train,

-coated with its black cinders, he saw Chicago, dim

-through the morning light, lying dark, mysterious

-and grim under its pall of smoke. He shuddered

-and went back into the car. After a while the

-train creaked and strained and pulled on again.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The passengers had begun to stir, and now were

-hastening to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of

-the world; the woman with the baby fastened her

-dress, the drummer put on his collar and coat, the

-men drew on their boots, but it was long before they

-felt themselves presentable again. The women

-could achieve but half a toilet, and though they

-were all concerned about their hair, they could not

-make themselves tidy.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The train was running swiftly, now that it was

-in the city, where it seemed it should have run more

-slowly; the newsboy came in with the morning papers,

-followed by the baggage agent with his jingling

-bunch of brass checks. The porter doffed his

-white jacket and donned his blue, and waited now

-for the end of his labors, so near at hand. He made

-no pretense of brushing his passengers, for those in

-his charge were plainly not of the kind with tips to

-bestow.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>As the train rushed over unknown streets, Marley

-caught visions of the crowds blockaded by the crossing

-gates, street-cars already filled with people,

-empty trucks going after the great loads under

-which they would groan all the day; and people,

-people, people, ready for the new day of toil that

-had come to the earth.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>At last the train drew up under the black shed of

-the Union Station, and Marley stood with the

-passengers that huddled at the door of the car. He

-went out and down; he joined the crowd that passed

-through the big iron gates into the station; and

-then he turned and glanced back for one last look at

-the train that had brought him; only a few hours

-before it had been in Macochee; a few hours more

-and it would be there again. In leaving the train

-he felt that he was breaking the last tie that bound

-him to Macochee, and he would have liked to linger

-and gaze on it. But a man in a blue uniform, with

-the official surliness, ordered him not to hold back

-the crowd. He climbed the steps, went out into

-Canal Street, ran the gantlet of the cabmen, and

-was caught up in the crowd and swept across the

-bridge into Madison Street.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He was in Chicago, and here among these thousands

-of people, each hurrying along through the

-sordid crowd to his own task, here in this hideous,

-cruel city, he must make a place for himself, and

-gain the foothold from which he could fight his battle

-for existence in the world.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXV<br /> <br />LETTERS HOME</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>“How does she seem since he went away?�

-asked Judge Blair of his wife two days after

-Marley had gone. He spoke in his usual habit

-of deference to his wife’s observation, though his

-own opportunities for observing Lavinia might

-have been considered as great as hers.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I haven’t noticed any difference in her,� said

-Mrs. Blair, and then she added a qualifying and

-significant “yet.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� observed the judge, “I presume it’s too

-early. Has she heard from him?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She had a letter this morning; that is, I suppose

-it was from him; she ran to meet the postman,

-and then went up stairs.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You didn’t mention it to her?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair looked at her husband in surprise, and

-he hastened to make amends by acquiescing in the

-propriety of her conduct, when he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, of course not.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He seemed to drop the subject then, but that it

-remained uppermost in his mind was shown later,

-when he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I think she will be weaned away from him after

-a while, don’t you? That is—if he stays long

-enough.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair was not so hopeful; perhaps, too, in

-her romantic ideal of devotion, she did not wish

-Lavinia to be weaned away. But she avoided a direct

-answer by the suggestion:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Perhaps he will be weaned away from her.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>This possibility had not occurred to the judge.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, the idea!� he said resentfully. “Do you

-think him capable of such baseness?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair laughed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Would you like to think of <em>your</em> daughter as

-fickle, and forgetting a young man who was eating

-his heart out for her far away in a big city?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>A condition of such mild romantic sorrow might

-have attracted Mrs. Blair in the abstract, but it

-could not of course appeal to her when it came thus

-personally. As for the judge, he dismissed the

-problem, as he had so many times before, with the

-remark:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, we can only wait and see.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The letter which Lavinia received from Marley

-had been written the day he reached Chicago. It

-was a long letter, conceived largely in a facetious

-spirit, and he had labored over it far into the

-night in the little room of the boarding-house he

-had found in Ohio Street.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I chose Ohio Street,� he wrote, “because its

-name reminded me of home. Ohio Street may once

-have been the street of the well-born, but it has degenerated

-and it is now the abode of a long row of

-boarding—places, one of which houses me. My room

-is a little corner eyrie in the second story, back,

-and from its one window I get an admirable view

-of the garbage dump, the atmosphere and certain

-intensely red bricks which go to make the wall of

-the house next door. And my landlady, ah, I

-should have to be a Balzac to describe my landlady!

-She wears large, vociferous ear-rings, and she says

-‘y-e-e-a-a-s’ for yes; just kind o’ rolls it off her

-tongue as if she didn’t care whether it ever got off

-or not. She is truly a beauteous lady, given much

-to a scarlet hue of her nasal appendage; also, her

-molar system is unduly prominent, too much to the

-fore, as it were. As for form or figure, I’m afraid

-I couldn’t say with truth that she goes in for the

-sinuous, far from it; she leans more to the elephantine

-style of feminine architecture. And she

-has a way of reaching out that is very attractive;

-probably because of the necessity of reaching for

-room rent. She bears the air of one bent on no

-earthly thing, of a continual soaring in quest of the

-unexpected; there is about her the charm of the intangible,

-the unknowable.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The boarding-house itself isn’t so bad; I get my

-room and two meals for three-fifty a week; my

-noon luncheons I have to take down-town. They

-have dinner here, you know, in the evening. I

-haven’t seen much of the people in the boarding-house;

-the men are mostly clerks, and the women

-have bleached hair. They all looked at me when I

-went into the dining-room this evening. There is

-one young man who sits at my table who is in truth

-a very unwise and immature youth. He is given

-greatly to the use of words of awful and bizarre

-make-up. For instance, he said something about

-the jokes they get off in the shows here about Irishmen,

-but instead of saying jokes, he said ‘traversities’!

-What do you think of that?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley had already described his journey to

-Chicago in terms similar to those in which he described

-his boarding-house; of Chicago itself he

-said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It seems that ages ago when the gods, or maybe

-the demons, were making over plans and specifications

-of the infernal region, Chicago was mentioned

-and considered by the committee. When it came to

-a vote for choice of sites the place that won had only

-three more votes than Chicago. They didn’t locate

-the brimstone plant here, and from what I can

-learn Chicago was a candidate for both the plant

-and the honor. It was a mistake on somebody’s

-part, as Chicago is certainly an ideal place for it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But the letter discussed mostly the things of

-Macochee, where Marley’s spirit still dwelt. The

-passages Lavinia most liked, of course, were those

-in which he declared his love for her; it was the

-first love-letter she had ever received, and this

-tender experience went far to compensate her for the

-loneliness she felt in his absence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It grew upon her after she had read her letter

-many times, that it would be a kindness to take it

-over and read to Mrs. Marley those parts, at

-least, that were not personal. It was a hard thing

-for Lavinia to do; she had a fear of Mrs. Marley;

-but she felt more and more the kindness of it, and

-so in the morning she set out. Lavinia was surprised

-and a little disappointed, when Mrs. Marley

-told her that she too had received in the same mail

-a letter from Glenn. It somehow took away from

-her own act, the more when Mrs. Marley calmly

-passed her letter over for Lavinia to read.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia, who had not been able to resist a pang

-that Marley had written his mother quite as

-promptly as he had written her, found some consolation

-in the fact that his letter to his mother was

-not nearly so long as his letter to her, and it contained,

-too, the same information; in some instances,

-identical phrases, as letters do that are written

-at the same time. She felt that she should be

-happy in them both, and she wished she could determine

-which of the letters had been written first.

-After she had read Mrs. Marley’s letter, she could

-not speak for a moment; the letter closed with a description

-of the sensations it gave Marley to open

-his trunk and come across the Bible his mother had

-packed in it. But she controlled herself, and when

-she had finished reading parts of her own letter to

-Mrs. Marley, she said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, he seems to be in good spirits, doesn’t he?

-He writes so amusingly of everything.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Marley looked up at Lavinia with a curious

-smile.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, don’t you see?� she said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What?� asked Lavinia, glancing in alarm at the

-two letters which she still held in her lap.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, the poor boy is dying of homesickness;

-that’s what makes him write in that mocking vein.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you think that is so?� Lavinia leaned forward.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, I know it,� replied Mrs. Marley, with a

-little laugh. “He’s just like his father.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>For a moment Lavinia felt a satisfaction in

-Marley’s loneliness, but she denied the satisfaction

-when she said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He’ll get over it, after a while.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Not for a long while, I’m afraid,� said Mrs.

-Marley. “Not until some one can be with him.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia blushed, and before she knew it Mrs.

-Marley had bent over and kissed her cheek.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He has a long hard battle before him, my dear,�

-she said, “in a great cruel city. We must help him

-all we can.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia hesitated a moment, then she put her

-arms about Mrs. Marley and drew her down for the

-kiss which sealed their friendship.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They sat and talked of Marley for a long time,

-and at last when Lavinia rose to go, she held out to

-Mrs. Marley the letter her son had written her.

-She looked at it a moment before handing it to Mrs.

-Marley.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Would you like to keep it?� Mrs. Marley asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“May I?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“If you wish. But you must come often; I shall

-be lonely now, you know, and you must bring his

-letters and read parts of them. He’ll be writing

-so many more to you than he will to me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day;

-it was not long before Clemmons, the postman,

-smiled significantly when, each morning at the

-sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the

-door. And Lavinia wrote to Marley as regularly

-herself, sitting at the little desk in her room every

-night long after the house was dark and still.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge could find no hope in the observations

-Mrs. Blair reported to him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She seems to have developed a new idea of

-constancy,� said Mrs. Blair. “She will not allow

-herself to do a thing, or go to a single place; she

-will hardly accept any pleasure because he isn’t

-here to share it. I believe she tries not to have a

-thought that is not of him. She is almost fanatical

-about it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh dear!� said the judge. “I thought the

-nightly calls were a severe strain, but they can not

-compare to the strain of nightly letters.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He writes excellent letters, however,� Mrs.

-Blair said. “I wish you could read the one he

-wrote his mother. A boy who writes like that to

-his mother—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How did you get to see a letter he wrote his

-mother?� interrupted the judge.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Lavinia showed it to me.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Has she been over there?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes. Why?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation

-were now hopeless, indeed.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXVI<br /> <br />THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>“I am very tired to-night,� Marley wrote to

-Lavinia a day or so later. “I have been making

-the rounds of the law offices; I have been

-to all the leading firms, but—here I am, still

-without a place. I thought I might get a place in

-one of them where I could finish my law studies,

-and make enough to live on, meanwhile; I had

-dreams of working into the firm in time, but they

-were only dreams, and all my hopes have gone

-glimmering. The men who are employed in the law

-offices are already admitted to the bar; most of

-them are young fellows, but some are old and gray-headed,

-and the sight of them gave me the blues.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I did not get to see many of the firm members

-themselves; their offices are formidable places.

-There is no office in Macochee like them; they have

-big outer rooms, full of stenographers and clerks

-and there is a boy at a desk who makes you tell your

-business before you can get in to see any of the

-lawyers themselves. They seem to be mighty big,

-important fellows. Most of them would not see me

-at all; several said they had no place for me and

-dismissed me with a kind of pitying smile; one

-man, when I asked him if he thought there was an

-opening, said he supposed there ought to be, as one

-lawyer in Chicago had died of starvation only the

-day before. But some were kinder; one, whom I

-shall never forget, took pains to sit down and talk

-with me a long time, but he was no more encouraging

-than the others. He said the profession

-was terribly overcrowded, ‘that is,’ he corrected

-himself with a tired smile, ‘if you can call it a profession

-any longer. It is more of a business nowadays

-and the only ones who get ahead are those who

-have big corporations for clients. How they all live

-is a mystery to me!’ He thought I had better not

-undertake it and advised me to go into some

-business. But then most of them did that.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But I must tell you of my visit to Judge Johnson.

-You will remember my telling you of him;

-he was Wade Powell’s chum in the law school in

-Cincinnati, and Mr. Powell had given me a letter

-to him. I had a hard time seeing him; the hardest

-of all. When I went into the big stone government

-building he was holding court, and a lawyer was

-making an argument before him. I waited till they

-were all done, and then when the crier had adjourned

-court—he said ‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez,’ instead

-of the ‘Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye’ we have in Ohio;

-it sounded so old and quaint, even if he did say

-‘Oh yes,’ for ‘Oyez!’ It comes from the old Norman-French,

-you know; ask your father about it,

-he’ll explain it—I tried to get in to him. I succeeded

-at last, but it was hard work. He didn’t

-seem glad to see me; he looked at me coldly, and

-made me feel as if I ought to hurry up and state my

-business promptly and get away. When I gave him

-Wade Powell’s letter he put on his gold glasses and

-read it; but—what do you think?—I don’t believe

-he remembered Wade Powell at all! At least he

-seemed not to. Of course he may have been putting

-it on. Wouldn’t it make Wade Powell mad to

-know that? I’d give a dollar—and I haven’t any to

-spare either—to see him when he hears that his old

-friend, Judge Johnson of the United States Circuit

-Court, couldn’t remember him! Well, the

-judge didn’t let me detain him long, he looked at

-his watch a moment, and then he advised me not

-to try it in Chicago; he said there were too many

-lawyers here anyhow, and that he thought a young

-man made a mistake in coming to a city at all.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘Why don’t you stay in a small town?’ he

-asked, looking at me sternly over his glasses. ‘Living

-is cheaper there, and life is much more simple

-than it is in the cities. I’ve often wished I had

-stayed in a little town.’</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I came away, as you can imagine, feeling pretty

-much cast down and humbled in spirit. There are

-four thousand lawyers in Chicago; just think of it,

-almost as many lawyers as there are people in

-Macochee! As I walked through the crowded

-streets with men and women rushing along, I

-wondered how they all lived. What do they do?

-Where are they all going, and how do they get a

-place to stand on? As I came across the bridge

-over to the North Side I felt that there was no

-place for me here in this great, dirty, ugly city,

-just as there is no place for me back in peaceful

-Macochee, where every minute of the day I long to

-be. Anyway, I am sure that there is no place for

-me here in the law, and I shall have to look for

-something else. I see so much wretchedness and

-poverty and squalor; it is in the street everywhere—pale,

-gaunt men, who look at you out of

-sick, appealing eyes.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“This morning I saw a sight down-town that

-filled me with horror; it was noon, and a great

-crowd of ragged men were waiting in front of the

-<em>Daily News</em> office in Fifth Avenue. They were all

-standing idly and yet expectantly about; I stood

-and watched them. Presently, as at some signal,

-they all rushed for the office door, and then all at

-once they seemed to be enveloped in a white, rustling

-cloud. Each one had a newspaper, and they all

-turned to one page and began to read rapidly; sometimes

-two or three men bent over the same paper; in

-another moment they had scattered, going in all directions.

-Then it flashed upon me: they had been

-waiting for the noon edition of the paper and the

-page they had all turned to was the page with the

-‘want ads’ on it; they were all looking for jobs! It

-made me inexpressibly sad. I do not wish to inflict

-my own sorrow upon you, dear heart, but it made

-me shudder; what if I—but no, the thought is too

-horrible to mention. And yet I, too, belong to this

-great army of the unemployed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“As I write the clock in the steeple of a church

-a block away chimes the hour of midnight; so you

-see that I’ve retained my nocturnal habits. When

-the poets of a coming generation sing of me (as

-they doubtless will, after my death) their songs

-will be called Nocturnes.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>That same day Doctor Marley received a letter

-from his son which Mrs. Marley, though her husband

-passed it over to her to read, did not show

-to Lavinia. It ran:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s rather expensive living here, I find; especially

-for one who belongs to the great army of the

-unemployed. My contract with my basiliscine

-landlady calls for two meals a day and a bed at

-night—also for three-fifty per week in payment of

-said two meals and bed. My lunches I get down-town;

-that is, I did get them down-town; for two

-days I have gone without lunches, and the aforesaid

-landlady looks reproachfully at me at night when

-she sees me laying in an extra supply of dinner. I

-don’t mind the lack of the lunches, even if she

-does, but I’ll have to pay her in a day or so now.

-I’m in poor spirits to-night, so can’t write well;

-cause of said low mental temperature, only eighty

-cents in the world between me, my landlady and

-ultimate starvation. It’s funny how much hungrier

-a fellow gets as the food supply gets low.

-A word to the wise, etc.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What do you think? I met Charlie Davis

-on the street this morning. He is living here now,

-working in some big department store. My, it was

-good to see some one from Macochee! How small

-the world is, after all!</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How are you all? How is Dolly? Does Smith

-Johnson still clap his hands at his dog every evening

-as he comes home, and does the dog run out

-to meet him as joyously as of yore? And does

-Hank Delphy still go down-town in his shirt-sleeves?

-And has Charlie Fouly had any fits in the

-Square lately? And, father, has mother got a girl

-yet? Give her an ocean of love and tell her not to

-work too hard, and to let the heathen shift for

-themselves a while. They haven’t any trusts to

-monopolize the jobs as yet, and they ought to be

-able to get along. Oh, how I’d like to see you

-all! Answer all my questions: I propounded numerous

-ones to you. I don’t remember now what

-all of them were, but I know they were all momentous

-and had much to do with my well-being, spiritual

-and physical, not to say financial. And see

-that the moss doesn’t get too thickly overlaid on

-my memory.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley’s new life in Chicago, as somewhat

-vaguely reflected in his letters, impressed those

-who had a sense of having been left behind in Macochee,

-as but a continuation of the life he had led

-there, that is, it was presented to them as one long,

-hopeless search for employment. He told of his

-daily tramps up and down the city, of his dutiful

-applications for work in every place where the boon

-of work might be bestowed, and of the unvarying

-refusals of those in whose hands had been intrusted,

-by some inscrutable decree of the providence of

-economics, the right to control the opportunity

-of labor. It was as if the primal curse of earning

-his bread were in a fair way to be taken from

-man, had not the primal necessity of eating his

-bread continued unabated.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The routine through which he went each day

-had begun to weary Marley, and it might have begun

-to weary his readers in Macochee, had they

-not all felt their own fortunes somehow bound up

-with his. He apologized in his nightly letters for

-the monotony of their recitals, but he hoped it

-might be condoned as the most realistic portrayal

-of his life that he could give. He tried at times

-to give his letters a lighter tone by describing, with

-a facility that grew with practice, the many incidents

-that attracted him in a city whose life was

-all so new and strange to him; he could not help

-a growing interest in it all, and while Lavinia was

-probably unconscious of the change, his letters

-were now less concerned with the things of the life

-he had left in Macochee, and more and more with

-the things of the life he had entered upon in Chicago;

-as on a palimpsest, the old impressions were

-erased to make way for new ones.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But try as he would to give to his letters a cheer

-that was far from expressing his own spirit, he

-could not save them from the despair that was

-laying hold of him, a despair which finally communicated

-itself in the declaration that it was now

-no longer with him a question of selecting employment.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I must take,� he wrote, “whatever I can get,

-and that will probably be some kind of manual, if

-not menial, work. Sometimes,� so he let himself go

-on, “I feel as if I would give up and go back to

-Macochee, defeated and done for. But I can not

-come to that yet, though I would like to; oh, how

-I would like to! But I don’t dare, my pride won’t

-let me act the part of a coward, though I know I

-am one at heart. One thing keeps me up and that

-is the thought of you; I see your face ever before

-me, and your sweet eyes ever smiling at me—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia’s eyes were not smiling as she read this;

-and she poured out her own grief and sympathy in

-a long letter that she promptly tore up, to pen in

-its stead a calmer, braver one, that should hearten

-him in the struggle which, as she proudly assured

-him, he was making for her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley’s description of his straits partly prepared

-Lavinia for the shock of the letter in which

-he said he had found a job at last, but she was

-hardly prepared to learn that it was anything so far

-from her conception of what was due him as a

-job trucking freight for a railroad. The mockery

-he put into the picture of himself in a blue jumper

-and overalls could not console her, and she kept

-the truth from every one, except her mother; she

-preferred rather that they number Marley still with

-the army of the unemployed than to count him

-among those who toiled so desperately with the

-muscles of their arms and backs. She tried to conceal

-in encouraging congratulations the chagrin of

-which she felt she should be ashamed, and she

-tried to show her appreciation of his droll sarcasms

-about the preparation his four years of college had

-given him for the task of trundling barrels of

-sugar and heaving pianos down from box-cars.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m sure it’s honest work,� she wrote, “but

-do be careful, dear, not to hurt yourself in lifting

-such heavy loads.� It was a comfort to remind

-him that he was not intended to do such work.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>There was a relief, however, that she did not dare

-admit, when he told her three days later that he

-had lost his job.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I realize for the first time my importance in

-the great scheme of things,� he wrote. “I was

-fired because I do not belong to the freight

-handlers’ union. It took them three days to find this

-out, and then they threatened to strike if the railroad

-company did not immediately discharge me.

-The railroad company, after due consideration,

-decided to let me out, and—I’m out. It makes me

-tremble to think of the consequences that would

-have followed had they decided otherwise. Think

-of it! The railroad tied up, business at a standstill

-and the commerce of the nation paralyzed,

-and all because of Glenn Marley, A. B. It is

-really encouraging to know that my presence on

-the earth is actually known to my fellow-mortals;

-it has at least been discovered that I am alive and

-in Chicago, even if my diploma is not recognized by

-Freight Handlers’ Union No. 63. And now,� he

-concluded, “as Kipling says, it’s ‘back to the army

-again, Sergeant, back to the army again’—the

-army of the unemployed.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia was shocked again a day or so later

-when on opening her letter she met the announcement

-that he had been offered a job with another

-railroad as a freight handler.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But you need not be alarmed,� she was reassured

-to read—though it was not until she thought

-it all over afterward that she began to wonder how

-he had divined her dislike of his being in such

-work—“I haughtily declined, and turned them

-down. You see this road is just now in the throes

-of a strike, and all their freight handlers are out.

-Consequently, they have had to employ scabs to do

-the work of the strikers. They take anybody—that’s

-why they were ready to take me. But as I

-said, I declined. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself

-to take a place away from a union man.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia mistook her satisfaction in Marley’s declination

-of the position for a satisfaction in the

-nobility of his sacrifice, and in her elation she related

-the circumstance at dinner. Now that Marley

-had declined such an employment she felt safe in

-doing this. But her father did not see it in her

-light, or at least in Marley’s light.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Humph!� he sneered; “so he sympathizes with

-unionism, does he? Well, those unions will own

-the whole earth if they keep on.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But he says he thought of the wives and children

-of the union men—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, but why doesn’t he think of the wives and

-children of the scabs, as he calls them? They have

-as much right to live and work as the union

-men.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia, as an opponent of union labor herself,

-could not answer this argument, though she

-felt it her duty to defend Marley. But before

-she could proceed in his defense, her father,

-strangely enraged at the mere mention of the policies

-of the unions, hurried on:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The union didn’t show any consideration for

-him when it took his other job away from him.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia shot a reproachful glance at her mother,

-who did not see it because she was shooting a

-glance more than reproachful at her husband, and

-it had the effect of silencing and humbling the

-judge, as all of Lavinia’s arguments, or all of

-the arguments known to the propaganda of union

-labor, could not have done.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXVII<br /> <br />A FOOTHOLD</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>The next letter the postman gave Lavinia began

-ecstatically:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve got a job at last! I’m now working for

-the C. C. and P. Railroad, in their local

-freight office, and I’m not trucking freight either,

-but I’m a clerk—a bill clerk, to be more exact.

-My duties consist in sitting at a desk and writing

-out freight bills, for which by some inscrutable

-design of Providence my study of common carriers

-and contracts in the law was doubtless intended to

-prepare me.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“To-day I wrote out a bill for freight to Cook and

-Jennings, Macochee, Ohio, and you can imagine

-my sensations. It made me homesick for a while;

-I wished that by some necromancy I might conceal

-myself in the bill and go to Macochee with it;

-I had a notion to write a little word of greeting on

-the bill, but I didn’t; it might have worried old

-man Cook’s brain and he couldn’t stand much of

-a strain of that kind. But I’m getting nearer Macochee

-every day now. I guess I’m to be a railroad

-man after all, and some day you’ll be proud to

-tell your friends that I started at the bottom. ‘Oh,

-yes,’ you’ll be boasting, ‘Mr. Marley began as a

-common freight trucker; and worked his way up to

-general manager.’ Then we’ll go back to Macochee

-in my private car. I can see it standing down by

-the depot, on the side track close to Market Street,

-baking in the hot sun, and the little boys from

-across the tracks will be crowding about it, gaping

-at the white-jacketed darky who’ll be getting the

-dinner ready. We’ll have Jack and Mayme down

-to dine with us, and your father and mother and

-Chad and Connie, and my folks, too, and maybe,

-if you’ll let me, Wade Powell. Then, of course,

-the Macochee people will think better of me; they

-won’t be saying that I’m no good, but instead they’ll

-stand around, in an easy, careless way, and say,

-‘Oh, yes, I knew Glenn when he was a boy. I

-always said he’d get up in the world.’</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But, ah me, just now I’m a bill clerk at fifty

-dollars a month, thank you, and glad of the chance

-to get it; so is my voluptuous landlady glad; she’ll

-get her board money a little more regularly now.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I suppose you’ll want to know something about

-my surroundings. They are not elegant; the office

-is a big barn of a place, crowded full of desks,

-where we sit and write from eight in the morning

-until any hour at night when it occurs to the boss

-to tell us we can go. Last night it was ten o’clock

-before the idea struck him. They kindly allow us

-an hour in which to run out to a restaurant for

-supper. The windows in the office were washed, so

-tradition runs, in 1493, the year after Columbus

-landed. Outside, the freight trains rush by constantly

-so as to keep the noise going. My boss,

-whose name is Clark, strikes me as being a sort

-of fool of an innocuous sort. He is a conscientious

-ass, but a poor, unfortunate, deluded simpleton.

-He’s one of those close-fisted reubs whose chief

-care is the pennies, and whose only interest in

-life is the C. C. and P. Railroad. He makes his

-business his own personal affair and the C. C.

-and P. his god. He lunches down-town and pays

-twenty cents for his lunch, never more, often fifteen.

-One of the first things he told me was, now

-that I had come under his protecting wing, to begin

-to save money. They have a young man in the

-office here, whose desk is next to mine, who was born

-somewhere in Canada, and is always ’a-servin’ of

-her Majesty the Queen,’ as Kipling says. He told

-me with much gusto how he had hung out of the

-office window last New Year’s a Canadian flag.

-He seemed proud of having done so, and also told

-me, boasted to me, in fact, that he was going to

-hang the same flag out of the same window on the

-Fourth of July. ‘Oh, yes, you are!’ thinks I. So

-I got the flag and ripped it into shreds and started

-it through the waste-basket on a hurried trip to

-oblivion. <em>À bas</em> the Canadian flag! He’ll probably

-get another one, but if I get hold of it, it’ll

-meet the same fate as the first one. Then I have

-something to think of that’ll keep my mind off my

-horrible fate in being here in Chicago, while I

-smile in ghoulish glee with a cynical leer overspreading

-my classic features, at the young man’s

-disapproval of my actions. The rest of the men in

-the office aren’t much to boast of. They’re a

-diluted mixture of Nijni Norgordian and Bill Hoffman

-the jeweler. I still hate this town; I wish it

-were buried under seven hundred and thirty feet

-of Lake Michigan.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley’s next letter to Lavinia opened thus:</p>

-

-<div class='lg-container-l'>

-  <div class='linegroup'>

-    <div class='group'>

-      <div class='line'>“Extract from the diary of J. H. Anderson,</div>

-      <div class='line'>Esq., Canadian, clerk in the freight office of the</div>

-      <div class='line'>C. C. and P. Ry., at Chicago, Ill., April 20.</div>

-    </div>

-  </div>

-</div>

-

-<div class='lg-container-b'>

-  <div class='linegroup'>

-    <div class='group'>

-      <div class='line'>“‘New man on desk next to mine; young, about</div>

-      <div class='line'>24. Rather decent fellow, but conceited. Do not</div>

-      <div class='line'>think he will last. Took me to lunch with him</div>

-      <div class='line'>this evening.’</div>

-    </div>

-  </div>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Now what do you think of that? The youth

-I described to you at such length keeps a diary,

-and the foregoing is culled therefrom. He left it

-by some mistake on top of his desk, and I picked it

-up innocently enough to-night, to see what it was,

-and that was the first thing my eye lit on. He

-is evidently an adept at coming to conclusions, apparently

-he can sum one up in two whisks of a porter’s

-broom. I was much surprised to find myself

-so well done. Done on every side in those few

-words. I’ve rather enjoyed it; strikes me as being

-uproariously funny. Maybe his dictum is correct.

-You’ll agree with me as to his richness. Tell

-every one about it and see what they will think.

-Tell your mother and my mother. Tell Jack and

-give him a chance to laugh. Tell Mayme Carter,

-too.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia ran at once to her mother.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Listen,� she said. And she read it.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair laughed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How funny!� she said, “and how well he

-writes! I should think he’d go into literature.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia laid the letter down in her lap and

-looked at her mother as if she had been startled by a

-striking coincidence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, do you know, I’ve thought of that very

-thing myself.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But read on,� urged Mrs. Blair.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia picked up the letter again and began:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, de—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh,� she exclaimed, blushing hotly, “I can’t

-read you that. Let’s see—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She leafed over the letter, one, two, three, four

-sheets. Mrs. Blair was smiling.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Aren’t you leaving out the best parts?� she

-asked archly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, there’s nothing,� Lavinia said, not looking

-up. “But—oh, well, this is all. He says—</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘There is a good deal of unrest and uneasiness

-here just now, because the first of May is coming.

-The road is anticipating trouble with the freight

-handlers; they may go out on a strike that day.’</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, dear,� sighed Lavinia, “more strikes, and

-I suppose that means more trouble for Glenn.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, the strike of those men can’t affect him,�

-Mrs. Blair assured her. “He’s a clerk now.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, I know, but what if he gets the notion he

-ought to help them by quitting too?�</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXVIII<br /> <br />THE TALK OF THE TOWN</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Macochee’s common interest in Marley was

-sharpened by his leaving town, and out of the

-curiosity that raged, Lawrence and Mayme Carter

-one evening made a call on Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, Lavinia,� said Lawrence, almost as soon

-as they were seated in the parlor, “what’s the news

-about Glenn? How’s he getting along?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, pretty well,� she said, smiling.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Does he like Chicago?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, yes; that is, fairly well.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Run get his letters and let us read them.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, Jack! The idea!� Mayme rebuked him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But Lavinia instantly got up.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ll read you part of one or two,� she

-said. “He can tell you much better than I all

-about himself.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>She was gone from the room a moment and then

-returned with two thick envelopes.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“My, Lavinia, you don’t intend to read all that,

-do you?� Lawrence made a burlesque of looking

-at his watch.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, you needn’t be afraid,� said Lavinia, smiling.

-She opened a letter.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Here’s one that came several days ago. He

-mentions you both in this one.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You don’t mean to say he connects our names?�

-Lawrence affected consternation.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Can’t you be serious a moment?� Mayme said,

-“I want to hear what he says; do go on, Lavinia,

-and don’t mind Jack.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia read the extract from the diary and

-Marley’s comment.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Doesn’t he say anything about you?� said

-Lawrence. “Why don’t you read that? You skip

-the most interesting parts. You’d better let me

-read them. Here—� and he held out his hand

-for the letter.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But Lavinia laid one letter securely in her lap

-and opened the other.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Listen to this,� she began, and then she glanced

-over the first page and half-way down the second.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Here you’re skipping again,� cried Lawrence.

-“Why don’t you play fair?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘I have made a friend,’ he says,� she began,

-“‘and it all came about through the strike. You

-know the freight handlers went out on the first of

-May, and since then there has been more excitement

-than work in the office. The freight house is stacked

-high with freight, and only a few men are working

-there and they are afraid of their lives. All

-around the outside of the big, long shed are policemen

-and detectives, and the strikers’ pickets. All

-day they walk up and down, up and down, at a

-safe distance, just off the company’s ground, and

-they waylay everybody and try to get them not to

-go to work here. I happened to see the strike

-when it began. It was day before yesterday morning.

-I had gone out in the freight house on some

-little errand and just at ten o’clock I noticed a

-man walk down by the platform that runs along

-outside the shed. I saw him stop by one of the

-big doors and look in. Suddenly he gave a low

-whistle, then another. The men in the freight

-house stopped and looked up. Then the man outside

-raised his arm, and held up two fingers—’�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He wanted them to go swimming probably,� interrupted

-Lawrence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, Jack, do stop,� said Mayme, irritably.

-“Right at the most interesting part, too! Do go

-on, Lavinia.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia read on:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘Then the man outside raised his arm, and held

-up two fingers, and instantly every truck in the

-shed dropped to the floor, bang, the men all went

-and put on their coats, marched out of the freight

-house—and the strike was on. Well, after that

-came the policemen and the detectives and the

-pickets, to say nothing of the reporters. It is about

-these last that I mean to tell you, for among them

-I have found this new friend. The other day a

-young man came into the office to see Clark, our

-boss. I was attracted by him at once. He was

-tall, and his smooth-shaven face was refined and

-thoughtful; I call him good-looking; his eyes were

-dark and his nose straight and full of character;

-his lips were thin and level; his hair was not quite

-black and stopped just on the right side of being

-curly. He was dressed modestly, but stylishly; I

-remember he wore gloves—he always does—and I

-thought him somewhat dudish. But what was my

-pleasure to see on his waistcoat the little white cross

-of my fraternity! I rushed up to him instantly,

-and gave him the grip. He was a Sig., from an Indiana

-college, and he is a reporter on the <em>Courier</em>.

-His name is James Weston; no, he is no relation to

-Bob Weston of Macochee at all. I asked him that

-the first thing; but he is some relation to the

-Cliffords, distant, I suppose.’�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I wonder if that isn’t the young man who

-visited them summer before last?� asked Mayme.

-“I’ll bet it is!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, it can’t be,� said Lavinia, “I thought of

-that the very first thing, but you see he says,�

-and Lavinia read on:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘He says he hasn’t been there for years. We

-chatted together for a few minutes and were friends

-at once. To-morrow night, if I can get off in time,

-I’m to dine with him at a café down-town. My,

-but it was good to see some one wearing that little

-white cross! You see my college training has

-done me some good after all.’�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>In their conversation afterward, Lavinia and

-Mayme celebrated Marley’s abilities as a writer,

-but Lawrence begged Lavinia to read them more,

-particularly, as he assured her, those parts about

-herself, saying he could judge better of Marley’s

-abilities after he heard how he treated romantic

-subjects.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I want to know how he handles the love interest,�

-he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, you got that from George Halliday,� said

-Mayme. “It sounds just like him when he’s discussing

-some book none of us has read, doesn’t it,

-Lavinia?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia admitted that it did sound like Halliday,

-and Mayme returned to her attack on Lawrence

-by saying:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What do you know about writing, anyway?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They might have gone farther along this line

-had not Mrs. Blair entered with a plate of cake

-and some ice-cream that had been left over from

-their dessert at supper. These refreshments instantly

-seemed to affect Mayme with the idea that

-the call had assumed the formality of a social

-function, and as she nibbled at her cake, she asked

-with a polite interest:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Just what is Mr. Marley’s position with the

-railroad, Lavinia?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh,� Lavinia answered, “he has a place in the

-office of the freight department; he’s a clerk there.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m so glad to know,� said Mayme, as if in

-relief.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why?� Lavinia looked up in alarm.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, well, you know—how people talk.� Mayme

-raised her pale eyebrows significantly. Lavinia

-was disturbed, but Lawrence, detecting the danger,

-instantly turned it off in a joke.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“She heard he was a section hand,� he said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The idea!� laughed Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Isn’t this just the worst place for gossip you

-ever heard of?� said Mayme.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The worst ever,� said Lawrence. “If I were

-you I’d quit and start a reform movement.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When they had gone and were strolling toward

-the Carters’, Lawrence grumbled at Mayme:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“What did you want to give it all away to Lavinia

-for?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, Jack, I didn’t say anything, did I?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, no, nothing—only you tipped off the whole

-thing to her.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, what did I say that hinted at it, even?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘Oh, you know how people talk!’� Lawrence

-mimicked her tone as he repeated her words.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, you know they do, Jack, and you know

-all the mean things they’ve been saying about

-Glenn. And you remember Charlie Davis’ mother

-told mama that Charlie ran across him in the street:

-in Chicago and that—�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, Charlie Davis!� said Lawrence, as impatiently

-as he could say anything. “What’s he?

-Anyway, you didn’t have to tell Lavinia.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I’m glad we got the truth anyway.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, so am I.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“We must tell everybody.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Sure,� acquiesced Lawrence, “if we can get the

-gossips started the other way they’ll have him

-president of the road in a few days.�</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXIX<br /> <br />A MAN OF LETTERS</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>The Macochee gossips, after they were assured

-he was engaged in clerical, and not manual

-work, might have promoted Marley much

-more rapidly than his railroad would have done,

-had it not been for the news that he had changed

-his employment. They had gone far enough to

-noise it about that Marley was chief clerk in the

-office, where he was only a bill clerk, when the <em>Republican</em>,

-with the impartial good nature with

-which it treated all of Macochee’s folk, so long as

-they kept out of politics, mentioned him for the

-first time since his departure, and then, to tell of

-the advancement he was rapidly making in the

-metropolis that loomed so large and important

-in their provincial eyes. Lavinia had the

-facts in a letter from Marley a day or so before the

-<em>Republican</em> had them, though she never could imagine,

-as she told everybody, where the <em>Republican</em>

-got its information.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I have a big piece of news to tell you,� he

-wrote. “Last night I dined with Weston. It was

-the first really enjoyable evening I have had since I

-struck the town. Luckily, the strikers had everything

-tied up so tight that we could do little work,

-and I had no trouble in getting off in time. I met

-him about six o’clock, and we went to the swellest

-restaurant in town. Weston is the finest fellow

-you ever saw; as it was pay night, he said he would

-blow me off to a good dinner. And he did, the

-best dinner I have ever eaten; there were half a

-dozen courses, and as we ate we talked, talked

-about everything, college days, the hard days that

-come after college, and you, and everything. Weston’s

-experience has been about the same as mine—one

-long, hopeless search for a job. He, however,

-did not wait so long as I did; he said that he realized

-there was no place for him in a small town,

-and so he set out for the city almost at once. His

-father wanted him to study medicine, but he said

-he hadn’t the money or the patience to wait, and he

-hated medicine anyway, and, as newspaper work

-offered the quickest channel to making a living he

-chose that. His secret ambition, he confessed, is

-literature, and I believe he is writing a book, but

-he would not, or did not, tell me as much. He says

-he thinks newspaper work a bad business for any

-one to get into, but then I have discovered that

-that is the way every man talks about his own

-calling.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“After we had finished our dinner, we sat there

-for a long, long time over our coffee and cigarettes,

-and we finally got to talking about the strike.

-Weston, you know, has been working on it, and

-I was glad to be able to tell him a good many things

-he said he could use. Finally, I don’t know just

-how it came about, but I told him how the strike

-started with us, about the man appearing in the

-street alongside the freight house, whistling, and

-then holding up two fingers—I think I described it

-to you in a letter the other night. Weston was

-greatly interested; I can see him still, sitting across

-the table from me, knocking the ashes from his

-cigarette into his empty coffee-cup and looking so

-intently at me out of his brown eyes that he almost

-embarrassed me. And what was my surprise when

-I finished to have him say:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘By Jove, Marley, I’ll have to use that. I’ve

-been wondering how to lead my story to-night.’</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Now you know the strike at our place occurred

-several days ago, but since then it has been spreading,

-and to-day the men on another road walked

-out. This morning when I picked up the <em>Courier</em>

-and turned to the strike news, here is what I read,

-under big head-lines:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘A short man with a brown derby hat cocked

-over his eye walked leisurely down Canal Street

-at ten o’clock yesterday morning. The short man

-walked a block and then turned and walked back.

-At the open door of the C. and A.’s big freight

-house he stopped. Suddenly he whistled, once,

-twice, thrice, in low notes. Then he raised his hand

-with a gesture that was graceful and yet commanding,

-and held up two fingers. Inside the freight

-house the men who were heaving away at the big

-bales and boxes, attracted by the whistle, paused

-in their labor and looked up; they saw the man

-raise his two fingers; and, with the discipline of

-well-trained troops, they dropped their trucks, put

-on their coats and marched out of the freight

-house. And the Alton had been added to the list

-of railroads whose men were on strike.’</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Of course, I was surprised and puzzled, and a

-little pleased too, that I had had a hand in the article.

-As I read it, though, I thought of a hundred

-details I might have told Weston, and I began to

-wish I had written the account myself. This afternoon

-he came around to the office again, and the

-first thing he said was:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘Did you see your story this morning?’</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I told him I had, of course. ‘But,’ I added,

-‘that was the way it happened on our road; not on

-the Alton.’</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But he only laughed, and said something about

-the tricks of the trade.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And now for the news I was going to tell you.

-I told Weston, as we talked the story over, of my

-little wish that I had written the article myself, and

-he looked at me intently for a moment. Then he

-said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘How’d you like to break into newspaper business?’</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“My heart leaped; it came to me suddenly that

-it wasn’t the law, nor railroad work, but journalism

-that I wanted to enter. I told him so frankly

-and he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“‘Well, it’s a dog’s life and I don’t know

-whether I’m doing you a good turn or not, but

-I’ll speak to the city editor tonight. He’s a little

-short of men just now.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“My heart is in my mouth. I can hardly wait

-till to-morrow, when I’m to see him again. Think

-of it, dear, and all it means! It means more money,

-association with men of my own kind, men like

-Weston, and a fine, interesting life; and it means

-you; oh, it means you!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was able in this letter to communicate

-to Lavinia some of his enthusiasm and some of

-his suspense, and she found it difficult to await the

-result of his next interview with Weston. She began

-to count the hours until Marley and Weston

-should meet again, and then in a flash it came over

-her that they had doubtless already met, that the

-decision was already known, the fate determined,

-and she was still in ignorance. She had a sense of

-mystery in it, and she grew impatient, wondering

-why he did not telegraph. The next day came, and

-a letter with it; but the letter did not decide anything.

-Marley wrote that Weston had spoken to

-the city editor, and that he had told him to bring

-Marley around that evening. And so, other hours

-of waiting, and then, at last, another letter. Marley

-announced the result with what self-repression

-he could command.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It’s settled,� he wrote. “I’m to go to work

-Monday—as a reporter on the staff of the <em>Courier</em>.

-The salary to begin with is to be fifteen dollars a

-week. I’m glad to quit railroad work; I’m not

-built to be a railroad man; I can’t adhere to rules

-as they want me to, and I can’t bow down as it

-seems I should. I didn’t tell you that my boss

-and I had not been getting along very well lately;

-I thought I wouldn’t worry you. I was glad to be

-able to tell him to-day that I’d quit Saturday. I

-did it in a proud and haughty manner; he seemed

-surprised and shocked—even pained. And when I

-broke the news gently to the young Canuck he expressed

-great sorrow and regret, but in his secret

-heart I knew he was glad, for now as a prophet he

-can vindicate himself, at least partly, in his

-diary.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia was glad that Marley had gone into

-newspaper work; much as she had tried she had not

-been able to conceive of him in exactly the ideal

-light as a clerk in a railroad office; that position,

-while it may have had its own promise, nevertheless

-did not envelope him in the atmosphere she considered

-native to him. In his new relation to literature,

-which, in her ignorance, she confounded

-with journalism, she felt a deep satisfaction, and a

-new pride, and she was glad when the <em>Republican</em>

-announced the fact of Marley’s new position; she

-felt that it was a fitting vindication of her lover

-in the eyes of the people of Macochee and a rebuke

-for the distrust they had shown in him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Thereafter her mail was increased, for in addition

-to his letter Marley sent her the <em>Courier</em> with

-his work marked; often he marked Weston’s as

-well, and early in June he wrote: “I want you to

-read Weston’s story in Sunday’s paper about the

-Derby; it’s a peach; it’s the best piece of frill

-writing that the town has seen in many a day.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The tone of Marley’s letters now became more

-cheerful; it was evident to Lavinia that he was

-finding an interest in life, and in his descriptions

-of his daily work and the places all over Chicago

-it took him to and the people of all sorts it brought

-him in contact with, she found a new interest for

-her own life. When he wrote that his salary had

-been increased because of his story about a Sunday

-evening service in a church of the colored people

-in Dearborn Street, it seemed to her that happiness

-at last had come to them, and if, with the passing

-of June, she felt a pang at Marley’s grieving in

-one of his letters that this was the month in which

-they had intended to be married, she was consoled

-by the rapid progress he was making in his work.

-His salary had been raised a second time; he was

-receiving now twenty-five dollars a week; it seemed

-large to her, and she could not understand why it

-did not seem large to Marley, even when he wrote

-that Weston was paid forty dollars a week.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Her chief joy, perhaps, lay in the fact that he

-seemed to be living more comfortably than he had

-before. Now that he had left his dismal boarding-house

-she found a relief from its subtly communicated

-influence of the stranded wrecks of life, as

-Marley surely found it in the apartments he was

-sharing with Weston. She parted as gladly from

-the knowledge of his landlady as Marley did himself,

-assuring her that the landlady had “not decreased

-any in value as a zoo exhibit since first I

-rhapsodized about her.� Lavinia felt that she could

-dispense with much of the worry her womanly

-concern for his comfort had given her, and she

-turned with a new joy to the books he was constantly

-recommending.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Did you ever read,� he wrote, “Turgenieff’s

-<em>Fathers and Sons</em>? I know that you didn’t and

-therefore I know what a treat you have coming.

-I’ll send you the book if you can’t get it in Macochee,

-and I presume you can’t. Snider’s sign

-‘Drugs and Books’ is a lure to deceive an unwary

-public that doesn’t care as much for books as it

-does for soda-water; and the stock there, as I recall

-it, consists largely of forty-cent editions of

-books on which the copyright has expired, and

-which, printed on cheap, pulp paper, are to be introduced

-for the first time to the natives of Macochee.

-I wish you could see Weston’s little book-case,

-with its rows of his favorites. Besides Turgenieff

-and Tolstoi—he says the Russians are the greatest

-novel writers the world has yet produced—he has

-all of George Eliot; I have just read over again

-<em>Middlemarch</em> and <em>Daniel Deronda</em>. He likes

-Jane Austen, too, and he says you would like her;

-I haven’t read any but <em>Emma</em> as yet. I’m going to

-read them all. And if you like, you can read the

-set of little volumes I am sending you to-day; we

-can read them thus together. And Henry James—do

-read him—<em>Daisy Miller</em> especially; you will

-like that. Besides these, Weston has most of Ibsen’s

-plays, and sometimes he reads parts of them

-aloud to me; he reads them well. Some day, he

-says, he’s going to write a play himself; he is fond

-of the theater, and we often go. One of the fine

-things about being on a newspaper is that we get

-theater tickets, though we can’t always get tickets

-to the theater we want. Now and then the dramatic

-editor—a fine old fellow with a magnificent shock

-of white hair, who may be seen about the office late

-at night looking very <em>distingué</em> in his evening

-clothes—gets Weston to write a criticism on some

-play; and often the literary editor lets him review

-books. Weston said to-day he’d get the literary

-editor to let me review some books, and when I

-told him I didn’t know how, he laughed in a

-strange way and said that wouldn’t make the

-slightest difference. There’s another book you <em>must</em>

-read, and that is <em>A Modern Instance</em>. The chief

-character is Bartley Hubbard, a newspaper man.

-Weston and I had a big argument about the character

-to-day. I said I thought it was a libel on the

-newspaper profession and Weston laughed and

-said it was only the truth, and that I’d agree with

-him after I’d been in the work longer. ‘Newspaper

-work isn’t a profession anyway,’ he said, ‘but a

-business.’ He speaks of journalism—though he

-won’t call it journalism, nor let me—just as lawyers

-speak of the law. He is urging me, by the

-way, to keep up my law studies, and I’m thinking

-of going to the law school here, if I find I can

-carry it on with my other work. Weston declares

-I can; he says a man has to carry water on both

-shoulders if he wants to amount to anything in

-the world—Wade Powell said something like that

-to me once. Weston says I’ll want to get out of

-newspaper work after a while. He disturbed me

-a little to-day, and he hurt me, too, by saying that

-a newspaper man has no business to be married;

-and he knows all about you, too. Of course, he

-didn’t mean to hurt me, it’s merely his way of

-looking at things.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Happy as she was, Lavinia still had to have her

-woman’s worries, and they began to express themselves

-in constant adjuration to Marley to guard his

-health; she feared the effect of night work, and she

-feared, too, that he could not carry on his law

-studies and do his duty as a reporter at the same

-time. She sympathized with the spirit of pride

-and determination which made him wish to finish

-his law studies and be admitted to the bar, but

-she found a greater satisfaction in thinking of

-him as a journalist than as a lawyer; the figure

-he thus presented to her mind was so much more

-romantic than the prosaic one of a lawyer to which

-she had been all her life accustomed; on a large

-metropolitan daily he was almost as romantic to her

-as an army officer or a naval officer would have

-been. And while she did not like the night work,

-and had her fears of it for Marley, she nevertheless

-felt strongly its picturesque quality.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The picture Marley drew in one of his letters

-of the strange shifting of the scene that is to be

-observed in the streets of a great city as darkness

-falls, when those that work in the prosaic day disappear

-and in their places appears the vast and

-mysterious army of the toilers by night, many of

-them in callings demanding the cover of the night,

-thrilled her strangely. But she did not know

-how from all the temptations of the irregular life

-he was leading he was saved, partly by the gentle

-friend he had found in James Weston, but more

-by the constant thought of the girl whom he had

-left behind at home.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXX<br /> <br />HOME AGAIN</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Marley, after a year or more in Chicago, found

-the excitement of his first return home growing

-upon him as he looked out the car window and

-long before the train entered the borders of Gordon

-County he eagerly began watching for familiar

-things.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>In the spirit of holiday which had come in this

-his first vacation, he had felt justified in taking a

-chair in the parlor car, though from the associations

-he had formed in his newspaper work it was

-more difficult now for him to resist than to yield

-to extravagances. He had recalled with a smile

-how in those first hard days in the freight office

-he had joked about going home in a private car,

-and he had had all day a childish pleasure in pretending

-that the empty Pullman was a private

-car; he could almost realize such a distinction

-when he showed the conductor the pass his newspaper

-had got for him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But even if he now felt glad that he was a newspaper

-man instead of a railroad man, he was quite

-willing to return to Macochee on any terms. He

-had tried to convince himself that he knew the very

-moment the train swept across the Indiana line into

-Ohio, and he felt a fine glow of state pride.

-He held his pride somewhat in check until he heard

-some one speak a name that he recognized as that

-of an Ohio town and then he boasted to the porter:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I’m back in my own state again.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The porter, though ready to admit that Ohio was

-a pretty good old state, was nevertheless not very

-responsive, and Marley saw that he would have to

-enjoy his sensations all alone.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He could view with satisfaction the figure of a

-tolerably well-dressed city man reflected in the long

-mirror that swayed with the rushing of the heavy

-coach. He knew that his return would create a

-sensation in Macochee, though he was resolved to

-be modest about it. Even if he was not returning

-to Macochee in the ceremony he had dreamed of,

-he was returning in a way that was distinguished

-enough for him and for Macochee.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He was eager to see the old town; he tried to

-imagine his return in its proper order and sequence,

-first, the little depot, blistering in the hot

-sun of the August afternoon, the rails gleaming

-in front of it, and the air above them trembling in

-the heat; he could see the baggage trucks tilted

-up on the platform; from the eating-house came the

-odor of boiled ham compromised by the smell of

-the grease frying on the scorching cinders that

-were heaped about the ties; beyond was the grain elevator

-that once appeared so monstrous in his

-eyes; across the tracks, the weed-grown field; and

-the only living things in sight the two men unloading

-agricultural machines from a box-car abandoned

-on a siding, the only sound, the ticking of a

-telegraph instrument; the target was set, but the

-station officials had not yet appeared.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Thence, in thought, he went up Miami Street;

-he saw the Court House and, lounging along the

-stone base of the fence, the loafers whom no one

-had ever seen move, but who yet must have made

-some sort of imperceptible astronomical progress,

-for they kept always just in the shadow of the

-building; then the old law office across the way;

-then Main Street, with its crazy signs, its awnings,

-and the horses hitched to the racks, then the Square

-with its old gabled buildings, the monument and

-the cavalryman, the long street leading to his own

-home, and at last, Ward Street, arched by its cottonwoods,—and

-he recalled his unfinished verses

-which had taken Ward Street for a subject:</p>

-

-<div class='lg-container-b'>

-  <div class='linegroup'>

-    <div class='group'>

-      <div class='line'>“I know a place all pastoral,</div>

-      <div class='line in2'>Where streams in winter flow,</div>

-      <div class='line'>And where down from the cottonwoods</div>

-      <div class='line in2'>There falls a summer snow.�</div>

-    </div>

-  </div>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c003'>And then, at last, the old house of the Blairs’

-with its cool veranda, its dark bricks, its broad

-overhanging cornices, and Lavinia standing in the

-doorway!</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He had never forgotten the anguish of his parting

-that night in spring, and he had looked forward

-to this return as an experience that would

-expiate it, and restore the lost balance of his life.

-But now as he thought of his life in Chicago, of the

-new scenes and associations, it came to him that

-that night after all had been final; the youth who

-had then gone forth had indeed gone forth never

-to return; another being was coming back in his

-stead. He had been successful in a way which at

-first flattered his pride, but a new sense of proportion

-had been growing in him that had lately made

-him mistrust newspaper work; he had for it a dislike

-almost as definite as that which used to displease

-him in Weston. He was growing tired of his

-life as a reporter; it had so many irregularities,

-so many hardships; it detached him from wholesome,

-every-day existence. He longed for some calling

-more definite, more permanent, a work in

-which he might do things, instead of record them

-in an ephemeral way. He had for a while been envious

-of Weston’s progress in his literary efforts,

-and for a while he had emulated him, but he had

-not been long in recognizing that he lacked literary

-talent.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Out of this dissatisfaction with himself he had

-lately gone in earnestly to complete his law studies,

-which all along he had pursued in a desultory

-fashion. He found some consolation in the hope

-that he might be admitted to the bar in the fall,

-though how or when he was to get into a practice

-was still as much of a problem as it had been in the

-old days in Macochee. He clung steadfastly, however,

-to the feeling that his newspaper work was

-but a makeshift; Weston and he had constantly

-supported each other in this view—it was their

-one hope.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>With thoughts somewhat like these Marley had

-been whiling away the hours of his long day’s

-journey from Chicago to Macochee. He had read

-thoroughly, and with a professionally critical

-faculty, all the Chicago papers, and had long ago

-thrown them aside in a disorderly pile. Now he

-had the tired sense that his journey was nearing its

-end.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>At last he saw the old mill-pond, and his heart

-leaped in affection; then he got his umbrella and

-sticks, took off his traveling cap and put it in his

-bag. He stood up for the porter to brush him off,

-and when he had selected a half-dollar as a tip, he

-asked the porter to get his luggage together, and

-in a conscious affectation he could not forego, began

-to pull on his new gloves. They were nearing

-Macochee now; and suddenly the tears started to

-his eyes, as in a flash he saw his white-haired

-father standing on the platform, anxiously craning

-his neck for a first glimpse of the boy who was

-coming home.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley’s mother did not reproach him when he

-ate a hurried supper that evening and then set

-off immediately for Lavinia’s. He renewed

-some of the emotions of the earlier days of his

-courtship as the familiar houses along the way

-gradually presented themselves to his recognition;

-he was glad to note the changeless aspect of a town

-that never now could change, at least in the way of

-progress, and he discovered a novel satisfaction—one

-of the many experiences that were so rapidly

-crowding in with his impressions—in the feeling

-that here, at least, in Macochee, things would remain

-as they were, and defy that inexorable law of

-change which makes so many tragedies in life. Lavinia

-must have recognized his step, for there she

-was, standing in the doorway, a smile on her face,

-and her eyelashes somehow moist. Marley felt

-a strange discomposure; there was a little effort,

-the intimacy of their letters must now give way to

-the intimacy of personal contact. But in another

-second she was in his arms, and her face was hidden

-against his breast.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“At last,� she said, “you’re here!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He felt her tremble, and he held her more

-closely. When he released her she put her hands up

-to his shoulders and held him away from her,

-while she scanned him critically.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You’ve grown broader,� she said, “and heavier,

-and—oh, so much handsomer!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The Blairs filed in presently, and Marley had

-the curious sense of this very scene having been

-enacted in his presence before, but it lacked the

-usual baffling effect of this psychological experience,

-for he was able to recall, in an incandescent

-flash of memory, that it was almost a repetition of

-their good-bys that night when he had gone away;

-Mrs. Blair was as tender, and if Connie and Chad

-were a little shy of his new importance, Judge Blair

-was as dignified, and as anxious as ever to get back

-to his reading. Marley felt once more that permanence

-of things in Macochee; this household had

-remained the same, and it made him feel more than

-ever the change that had occurred in him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>In lovers’ intense subjectivity, he and Lavinia

-discussed this change seriously. They reviewed

-their old dreams, and now they could laugh at

-their defeated wish to live, even in an humble

-way, in Macochee.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It was funny, wasn’t it?� said Marley. “I

-was very young then,—nothing, in fact, but a kid.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Are you so very much older now?� asked

-Lavinia with a slight hint of teasing in her tender

-voice.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� Marley replied, with a seriousness that

-impressed him, at least, as the ripe wisdom of

-maturity, “I am not much older in years, but I am

-in experience, and in knowledge of life. You see,

-dear, you can measure time by the calendar, but

-you can’t measure life that way. And Weston says

-that there is no calling that will give a man experience

-so quickly as newspaper work. You know

-we see everything, and we get a smattering of all

-kinds of knowledge. Weston says that is all that

-reconciles him to the business; he says a man learns

-more there than he ever does in college. He considers

-the training invaluable; he says it will be of

-great help to him in literature, if he can ever get

-into literature—he isn’t sure yet that he can. He

-can tell better after his book is published. And he

-says a newspaper experience will help me in the

-law, too, that is,� Marley added, with a whimsical

-imitation of Weston’s despairing uncertainty, “if

-I can ever get into the law.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You think a great deal of Mr. Weston, don’t

-you?� said Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He’s the finest fellow in the world, and the

-best friend I ever had.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley had a curious intuition that Lavinia

-was a little jealous of Weston. He immediately

-sought to allay the feeling with this argument:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You see, when a man does all for a fellow that

-Jim has done for me, and when you have lived

-with him, and shared your haversack with him,

-and he with you, like two soldier comrades, you

-get right down to the bottom of him. And I want

-you to know him, dear, I know you’ll like him.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Lavinia was silent, and Marley had a fear that

-she might not accept Weston quite so readily.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He has done me a world of good,� he went on.

-“He has taught me much, he has corrected my reckoning

-in more ways than one. He has taught me

-much about books; and he has taught me to look

-sanely on a life that isn’t, he says, always truthfully

-reflected in books. And besides all, if it hadn’t

-been for him, if he had not kept me at it and

-urged me on, I think I should have been doomed

-for ever to remain a poor newspaper man.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t you like newspaper work?� she asked

-with a shade of disappointment in her tone.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I did, but I like it less every day. It’s a hard

-and unsatisfactory life, and it has no promise in it.

-A man very soon reaches its highest point, and

-then he must be content to stay there. It’s the

-easiest thing for a young fellow to get a start in,

-if he’s bright; I suppose I’m making more money

-than any of the young lawyers in Chicago; but because

-it is so easy is the very reason why it is

-hardly worth while. Things that are easily won

-are not worth striving for.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And you’re going to get out of it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, as soon as I can. As soon as I can, I’m

-going to get into the law. When Weston first began

-urging me to keep up my studies, and when

-finally he made me go to the night law school, I

-consented chiefly because I had always felt the

-chagrin of defeat in having been compelled to give

-it up; lately, I’ve begun to see things differently,

-and I’ve determined to carry out my first intention

-and get into the law somehow. Of course,

-it’s going to be hard. And one has to have a pull

-there as everywhere else in these days.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was silent for a moment and, Lavinia

-thought, a little depressed. She watched him sympathetically,

-and yet she was a little troubled by

-a sense of detachment. She felt that Weston was

-now more closely associated with Marley’s struggle

-than she, and she was disturbed, too, by the disappointment

-of finding that his struggles were not

-at all ended.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Weston says,� Marley went on presently, “that

-newspaper work is a good stepping-stone, and by it

-I may be able to arrange for some place in the

-law which will give me the start I want.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I thought you liked your work,� Lavinia said;

-“I thought you were happy in it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley detected her regret, and was on the point

-of speaking, when Lavinia went on:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t see why you can’t go into literature as

-well as Mr. Weston.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley laughed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“The reason is that I haven’t his talent,� he

-said</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t see why,� Lavinia argued with some

-resentment of his humility. “You haven’t enough

-confidence in your own powers; you let Mr. Weston

-dominate you too much.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Now, dearest,� he pleaded, “you mustn’t do

-Jim that injustice. He doesn’t dominate me; but

-he is so much wiser than I, he knows so much

-more. You will understand when you meet him.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well,� she tentatively admitted, “that is no

-reason why you shouldn’t in time be a literary man

-as well as he. Why can’t you?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Because I can’t write, that’s why.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, Glenn, how can you say that? Your letters

-disprove that. Every one who read them said

-that they were remarkable, and that you should go

-into literature. They said you had such good descriptive

-powers.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley was looking at her in amazement.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Why, Lavinia, you didn’t show them!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You simpleton!� she said, with a smile in her

-eyes, “of course not; but I have read parts of

-them to mama and to your mother now and then.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, well, that’s all right,� sighed Marley in

-relief, and then he resumed his defense of Weston

-and his analysis of himself.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Of course, I suppose I can write a fairly good

-newspaper story; at least they say so at the office.�

-He indulged a little look of pride, and then he

-went on: “But that isn’t literature.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I don’t see why it isn’t,� she said. “I should

-think it would be the most natural thing in the

-world to go from one into the other.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Not at all. Literature requires style, personality,

-distinction, and the artistic temperament.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’d say you were talking now like George

-Halliday if I didn’t know you were talking like

-Mr. Weston.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I wish you could hear Weston talk about literature,�

-he said. “He’d convince you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“He couldn’t convince me that he can write any

-better than you can.� Lavinia compressed her

-lips in a defiant loyalty.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley paused to kiss the lips for their loyalty,

-and he compromised the validity of his own argument

-by saying:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“As a matter of fact, the law, in America and

-in England, has given more men to literature

-than journalism ever has.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Then maybe you can enter literature through

-the law,� said Lavinia, seizing her advantage.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No,� said Marley, shaking his head. “I’m

-not cut out for it, as Weston is. Some day he

-will be a great man, and we shall be proud to

-have known him so intimately. And we will have

-him at our home; I have many a dream about

-that.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He looked fondly at her, and her eyes brightened.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And there is another reason why I want to get

-out of newspaper work,� he went on, speaking tenderly,

-“and that is because everybody says a newspaper

-man has no more right to be married than

-a soldier has.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But they all are,� said Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, they all are, or most of them.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And I suppose it is the married ones who say

-that.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I know one who is going to be married

-just as soon as he can.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Who is that,—Mr. Weston?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“No, but Mr. Weston knows him, and knows his

-intentions, and he has promised to be at the wedding

-and act as best man.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, it would be fine to have a literary man at

-the wedding, wouldn’t it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They talked then about the wedding, and they

-found all their old delicious joy in it. Marley

-said it must be soon now, though with a pang that

-laid a weight on his heart, he wondered, as he

-thought of all the extravagances he had allowed

-himself to drift into, where he was to get the

-money. He could reassure himself only by telling

-himself that he was going to live as an anchorite

-when he got back to Chicago; even if he had to

-give up the pleasant apartment with Weston and

-go back to the boarding-house in Ohio Street.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“How shall you like living in Chicago?� he

-asked. “Can you be happy in a little flat, without

-knowing anybody, and without being anybody?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I shall be happy anywhere with you, Glenn!�

-she said, looking confidently into his eyes.</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXXI<br /> <br />ILLUSIONS AND DISILLUSIONS</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>It was a pleasure to Marley to accept the homage

-the people paid him; they confounded his

-success in journalism with a success in literature,

-and under the impression that all writers are somehow

-witty, they laughed extravagantly at his lightest

-observation.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But much as Marley relished all this, much as

-he enjoyed being at home again, with Lavinia and

-with his father and mother, he was disturbed by

-a certain restlessness that came over him after

-he had been in Macochee a few days and the novelty

-and excitement of his return had worn off. The

-glamour the town had worn for him had left it;

-it seemed to have withered and shrunk away. He

-could no longer, by any effort of the imagination,

-realize it as the place he had carried affectionately

-in his heart during the long months of his absence;

-its interests were so few and so petty, and he found

-himself battling with a wish to get away. He was

-fearful of this feeling; he did not dare to own

-it to himself, much less to his father and mother

-or to Lavinia.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He was glad that Lavinia would not let him

-mention going back to Chicago, and as the days

-swept by with the swiftness of vacation time, he

-was troubled that he did not feel more acutely the

-sorrow he felt would best become the prospect of

-another separation. He was comforted, finally,

-when he was able to analyze his sensations sufficiently

-to discover that it was neither his sweetheart

-nor his parents that had changed, but his own

-attitude toward life in a small town; he was vastly

-relieved when he succeeded in separating his feelings

-and saw that it was Macochee alone that he

-had lost his affection for, though he could not

-analyze his sensations deeply enough to recognize

-himself as at that period of life when external

-conditions are accepted for more than their real

-value; he was still too young for that. And so he

-could spend his days happily with Lavinia and

-grudge the moments which Lawrence and Mayme

-Carter filched from them by their calls, and he was

-as resentful of Mayme’s invitation to the supper

-which she exalted into a dinner with a reception

-afterward, as was Lavinia herself.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When Marley went to pay his call on Wade

-Powell, he found many sensations as he glanced

-about the dingy little office where he had begun his

-studies. Wade Powell himself, smoking and reading

-his Cincinnati paper, was sitting at his old

-desk, with the same aspect of permanence he had

-always given the impression of. Marley rushed in

-on him with a face red and smiling and when

-Powell looked up, he threw down his paper, and

-leaped to his feet, saying:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ll be damned!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But when their first greetings were over, Powell’s

-manner changed; he began to show Marley a

-certain respect, and he paid him the delicate tribute

-of letting him do most of the talking, whereas

-he used to do most of the talking himself. He was

-not prepared to hear that Marley was still studying

-law; and it cost him an effort to readjust his conception

-of Marley as a successful journalist to the

-old one of a struggling student. He gave Marley

-some intelligence of this, and of his disappointment

-when he said with a meekness Marley did not like

-to see in him:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, of course, you know your own business

-best.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But when Marley had taken pains to explain his

-position and when he had described the Chicago

-law offices, Powell grew more reconciled.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’ve watched you,� he said, “I’ve watched you,

-and I’ve asked your father about you every time

-I’ve seen him; my one regret was that you were

-not working on a Cincinnati paper; then I could

-have read what you were writing. I did try to get

-a Chicago paper—but you know what this town is.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell was deeply interested in Marley’s description

-of his old friend, Judge Johnson, and

-as Marley gave him some notion of the judge’s

-importance and prosperity Powell could only exclaim

-from time to time:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ll be damned!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley did not tell Powell that Judge Johnson

-had appeared to have forgotten him; he felt that

-it would be more handsome to accept the moral

-responsibility of a prevarication than to hurt Powell’s

-feelings in the way he knew the truth would hurt

-them. Even as it was, Judge Johnson’s success,

-now so keenly realized by Powell when it had

-been brought home to him in this personal way,

-seemed to subdue him, and he was only lifted out

-of his gloom when Marley said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But I’ll tell you one thing, there isn’t a lawyer

-in Chicago who can try a case with you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell’s eye brightened and his face glowed a

-deeper red; then the look died away as he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I made a mistake. I ought to have gone

-there.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Is it too late?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell thought a moment, and Marley regretted

-having tempted him with an impossibility. He

-was relieved when Powell shook his head and said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, it’s too late now.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell, with something of the pathos of age

-and failure that was stealing gradually over him,

-begged Marley to come in and see him every day

-while he was at home.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“You see I’ve always kept your desk,� he said,

-in a tone that apologized for a weakness he

-perhaps thought unmanly, “just as it was when you

-went away.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley thought cynically that Powell had kept

-everything else just as it was when he went away,

-but he was instantly ashamed of the thought, and

-ashamed, too, of the fact that he and Lavinia both

-considered even this little morning call a waste of

-time, and a sacrifice almost too great to be borne.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell went with Marley out into the street,

-and it gave him evident pride to walk by his side

-down Main Street and around the Square.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I want them all to see you,� he said frankly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He made Marley go with him to the McBriar

-House and then to Con’s Corner, and, in every

-place where men stopped him and shook Marley’s

-hand and asked him how he was getting along,

-Powell took the responsibility of replying promptly:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Look at him; how does he seem to be getting

-along?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Powell found a delight that must have been

-keener than Marley’s in Marley’s fidelity to Chicago,

-expressed quite in the boastful frankness

-of the citizens of that city when abroad, though to

-Marley it seemed that he was putting it on them by

-doing so. He found them all, however, in a spirit

-of loyalty to Macochee that might easily have

-become combative.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, little old Macochee’s good enough for us,

-eh, Wade?� they would say.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley would not let them be ahead of him in

-praise of Macochee, and Powell himself softened

-enough to admit that old Ohio was a pretty good

-place to have come from.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When they suddenly encountered Carman in the

-street, Marley flushed with confusion, first for

-himself and then vicariously for Powell. But

-there was no escape from a situation that no doubt

-exaggerated itself to his sensitiveness, and he was

-soon allowing Carman to hold his hand in his

-right palm while with the other Carman solicitously

-held Marley’s left elbow, and transfixed him

-with that left eye which still refused to react to

-light and shade.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, how are you?� asked Carman. “How

-are you, anyway?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, I’m all right.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Guess you’re glad now I didn’t give you that

-job, eh?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley could not look at Powell, but he hastened

-to say:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, I’m glad, now.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Maybe it was for the best,� said Carman.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When they had left him Marley quickly and

-crudely tried to change the subject, but Powell

-insisted on saying:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I want you to know that I’ve always felt like

-a dog over that.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Oh, don’t mention it,� Marley begged. “I

-was honest when I told Carman I was glad it

-turned out as it did.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� said Powell, “I guess it was all for the

-best.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>To Marley’s relief they dropped the matter then,

-and went over to Con’s Corner. There Powell

-lighted a cigar, and Marley could not resist asking

-for a brand of cigarettes, the kind that Weston

-smoked, though he knew that Con would not have

-them. He felt mean about it afterward, but he

-could not forego some of the petty distinctions of

-living in a city and he indulged a little revenge

-toward the people who had deserted him in what

-had seemed to him his need, and now, in what

-seemed to them his prosperity, were so ready to

-rally to him. Marley went home at noon feeling

-that his triumph had been almost as great as if

-he had come home in a private car.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>His triumph soon was at an end; they came to

-the afternoon of the day when Marley was to return

-to Chicago. It was a golden day, with a sun

-shining out of a sky without clouds, and yet a

-delicious breeze blew out of the little hills. Marley

-and Lavinia walked out the white and dusty

-pike that made the road to Mingo. They walked

-slowly along the edge of the road, in silence,

-under the sadness of the parting that was before

-them. They longed ineffably that the moments

-might be stayed; somehow they felt they might be

-stayed by their silence.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>But when they had ascended the hill and stood

-beside the old oak-tree which grew by the road,

-they looked out across the valley of the Mad River,

-miles and miles away—across fields now golden

-with the wheat, or green with the rustling corn

-that glinted in the sun, off and away to the trees

-that became vague and dim in the hazy distance.

-Back whence they had come lay Macochee; they

-could see the tower of the Court House, the red

-spire of the Methodist church, the gleam of the sun

-on some great window in the roof of the car-shops;

-on the other side of town crawled a train, trailing

-its smoke behind it. Marley looked at Lavinia—she

-was leaning against the tree, and as he looked

-he saw that her blue eyes were filling slowly with

-tears.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Isn’t it beautiful!� he said, looking away from

-her to the simple scenery of Ohio.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Do you remember that day?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“When we picked out our farm—where was it?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Wasn’t it over there?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� he said. “We could come and live here

-when we are old.� He knew he was but seeking to

-console himself for what now could not be.

-“And there is the old town,� he said. “It looks

-beautiful from here, nestling among those trees,

-it seems peaceful, and calm, and simple. But it is

-different when you are in it; for there are gossip

-and envy and spite, and I can never quite forgive

-it because it had no place for me. Well,� he went

-on defiantly, in the relief he had been able to make

-for himself out of his immature reading of Macochee’s

-character; “I don’t need it any more; it is

-little and narrow and provincial, and the real life

-is to be lived out in the larger world. It’s a hard

-fight, but it’s worth it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t you regret leaving it?� asked Lavinia,

-in a voice that was tenderer than Marley had ever

-known it. Marley looked at Macochee and then he

-looked at her.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I regret leaving it, dear heart, because I must

-leave you behind in it.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Would you never care to come back if it were

-not for me?� she asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I might,� he admitted, “when we are old. We

-could come back here then and settle down on our

-farm over there.� He pointed.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I’m half-afraid of the city,� Lavinia said.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>He turned and took her in his arms.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Dearest,� he said, “you must not say that;

-for the next time I come it will be to take you

-away from Macochee.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Will it?� she whispered.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes; and it can’t be long now. How we have

-had to wait!�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� she repeated, “how we have had to wait!�</p>

-

-<div class='chapter'>

-  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXXII<br /> <br />AT LAST</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class='c005'>Marley, in that compensatory pleasure we

-find in difficulties in the retrospect, was afterward

-fond of saying that if he had waited until

-he had the money and the position to warrant

-his marrying, he never would have married at

-all.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Just what moved him to take the decisive step

-he did he would have found it hard to tell. He

-had grown accustomed to the life he was living in

-Chicago, he had succumbed, as it were, to his environment;

-he no longer regretted Macochee and

-he found a satisfaction in declaring, whenever he

-had the chance, that the kindest thing the town had

-ever done for him was to refuse him a place within

-its borders. As he looked back at all the plans he

-had formed, he marveled at their number, but he

-marveled more that he should have had such regret

-in the failure of all of them; he was glad

-now that they had failed; had any one of them succeeded

-his life would have been diverted into other

-channels, and it gave him a kind of fear when he

-tried to imagine his life in those other channels;

-he could see himself in those relations only as some

-other identity, and it gave him a gruesome feeling

-to do this.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Not that he was satisfied with himself or his

-surroundings; he did not like newspaper work, and

-he did not like Chicago very well. He was determined

-to get out of newspaper work at any rate,

-and while he could not yet clearly see a way of getting

-into the law, he had a calm assurance that he

-would do it, in the end. Weston sustained him in

-this hope by saying:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“A man can’t control circumstances; they control

-him; but sometimes he can dodge them, and,

-after all, every sincere prayer is answered.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>During the winter that followed the summer

-when he had paid his visit to his home he worked

-hard at the law, spending in study the hours the

-other men on his newspaper spent in their

-dissipations, and in the spring he stole away almost

-secretly to Springfield, took the examination, and

-was admitted to the bar.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>After it was done, it seemed but a little thing;

-he wrote Lavinia and he wrote Wade Powell, knowing

-the interest Powell would have in the fact, that

-he felt no different now as a lawyer than he had

-when he was merely a layman. Weston had spent

-the winter over the book he was writing; in the

-spring he found a publisher, and <em>The Clutch of

-Circumstance</em> was given to the world. Marley

-thought it a wonderful book, and so did Lavinia,

-and while it made but little noise in the world,

-Weston said it had done better than he expected—so

-well, in fact, that he was going to give up newspaper

-work, and give his attention wholly to writing

-another book.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>It was a shock to Marley when Weston told him

-they would have to give up their apartment; it was

-a break in the life to which he had grown accustomed.

-But it seemed a time of change, and it

-was then he wrote Lavinia that he thought it useless

-for them to wait any longer; he thought they might

-as well be married then as at any time.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Unconsciously, perhaps, he wrote this letter as if

-he and not she had been waiting, and if he had

-known the state of the sensitive public opinion in

-Macochee, he might have felt himself justified in

-the attitude. Ever since his visit there the summer

-before his apparent prosperity had given the sentiment

-of the town an impetus in his favor; the

-people had turned their criticism toward Lavinia;

-for months it was a common expression that it was

-a shame she was keeping Marley waiting so long.

-They would nod in a sinister way, and insinuate

-the worldliest of motives; it was generally under

-stood that she was waiting for Marley to make a

-fortune, and this, they held, was demanding too

-much. She had withdrawn utterly from the society

-of Macochee; and she had not gone to one

-of the balls Lawrence had arranged that winter at

-the Odd Fellows’ Hall; her position, outwardly

-at least, was as isolated as that of the Misses Cramer,

-the fragile and transparent old maids who

-lived so many years in their house sheltered by the

-row of cedars behind the High School grounds.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When Judge Blair received the formal letter in

-which Marley told him he had asked Lavinia to

-name the day and requested his approval, the judge

-gave his consent with a promptness that surprised

-him almost as much as it did Mrs. Blair and Lavinia.

-He justified his inconsistency to his wife,

-in order perhaps, the more thoroughly to justify it

-to himself, by saying that he had long felt Lavinia’s

-position keenly.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“If the strain has been to her anything like

-what it has been to me,� he said to his wife, “they

-could not have endured it much longer.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“It will be lonely here without her,� said

-Mrs. Blair, pensively.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes,� the judge assented, and then after a moment’s

-thought he added:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But we can now begin to worry about Connie.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t you dare mention that, William!� said

-Mrs. Blair, almost viciously. “She mustn’t begin

-to think of such a thing.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“But she’s in long dresses now, and she seems

-to walk home more and more slowly every night

-with those boys from the High School.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I don’t propose to go through such an

-experience as we have had for these last three

-years, not right away, at any rate.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge tried to laugh, as he said:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ll turn Connie over to you; I’m going

-to have a little peace now.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The judge complained that he could find no

-peace, however, anywhere, so great was the preparation

-that raged thereafter in the house, driving

-him with his book and cigar from place to place.

-Mrs. Blair and Lavinia and Connie were in fine

-excitement over the gowns that were being fashioned,

-and Miss Ryan lived at the Blairs’ for

-weeks, while in every room there were billowy

-clouds of white garments, and threads and ravelings

-over all the floors.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Meanwhile it was understood that Marley, too,

-was making arrangements in Chicago. He had

-leased a small flat on the South Side, and had arranged

-with Weston to remove most of the furniture

-of their apartment into the new home where

-the lovers were to set up housekeeping. Mrs.

-Marley was to spare them some of the things from

-her home, and Mrs. Blair, from time to time, designated

-certain articles which she was willing to devote

-to the cause. Chad’s contribution was merely

-a suggestion; he said they could depend on the wedding

-presents to fill up the gaps.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>They were married in the middle of June. The

-ceremony was pronounced by Doctor Marley in

-the parlor of the Blair home; everybody bore up

-well until, under the stress of his emotion, the

-doctor’s voice broke, and then Mrs. Blair wept and

-the judge wiped his eyes and his reddened, anguished

-face. Mrs. Marley cried too, though every

-one tried to comfort her with the assurance that

-she was not losing a son, but gaining a daughter.

-Connie, in her first long gown, acted as maid

-for her sister, but it was evident that she was

-desperately impressed by the young author of <em>The

-Clutch of Circumstance</em>, who had come on from

-Chicago to act as groomsman.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>The company that had been invited was as

-much impressed by Weston as Connie was;

-they had never had an author in Macochee before,

-and though most of them had such confused notions

-of Weston’s performances in literature that

-they grew cold with fear when they talked with

-him, they nevertheless braved it out for the sake of

-an experience they could boast of afterward. Most

-of them took refuge in a discussion of Marley’s

-achievements with him, and they gave him the

-unflattering impression that Marley’s work was as

-important as his own.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Many of them had plots they wished him to use

-in his stories, others wished to know if he

-took his characters from real life; and Mrs. Carter

-was of such an acuteness that she identified

-Marley as his hero, though Weston had tried to

-keep his book from having any hero. George

-Halliday, however, was able to save the day; he

-could discriminate; he had read <em>The Clutch of

-Circumstance</em>, having borrowed Lavinia’s autograph

-copy, and he told Weston that while he did

-not go in for realism, because it was too photographic,

-too materialistic and lacked personality,

-he nevertheless had enjoyed a pleasant half-hour

-with the volume, and considered it not half-bad.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>This conversation was held in plain hearing of

-all in that difficult moment after the ceremony,

-when the relatives of the bride had solemnly kissed

-her, and her most intimate friends, like Mayme

-Carter, had wept on her neck. The people were

-standing helplessly about; Marley noticed Wade

-Powell, as dignified as a clergyman, in his black

-garments and white tie standing apart with his

-wife.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley had never seen Mrs. Powell before, but

-he recalled in a flash that she filled his conception

-of her; and this delicate, sensitive little face

-completed the picture he remembered long ago to

-have formed. When he saw Powell standing there,

-his hands behind him, unequal to the ordeal of

-being entertained in Judge Blair’s house, bowing

-stiffly and forcing a smile on the few occasions when

-he was spoken to or thought he was being spoken

-to, he had a wish to go to him, but he could not

-then leave his place by Lavinia’s side. He was glad

-a moment later when he saw his father and Wade

-Powell in conversation, and as he and Lavinia

-passed them on their way out to the dining-room

-he heard his father say:</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Powell, when I was

-young my creed was founded on the fact of sin in

-man; but now that I am old, I find it more and

-more founded on the fact of the good that is in all

-of them.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>When the supper was over, Lawrence gave the

-cheer that every one wished to see come to the

-wedding by clearing the parlor for a dance, and

-Marley was glad that his position now permitted

-him to refrain from dancing with a valid excuse.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>Marley thought that Lavinia never looked so

-pretty as she did when she stood at the head of

-the stairs after she had donned her blue traveling

-gown, drawing on her gloves and waiting for the

-carriage that was to drive them to the station.

-Her face was rosy in the light that filled the house,

-and she met his eyes with a fond, contented glance.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Are you happy?� he asked.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Don’t you see?� she said, looking up at him.</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“And will you be happy in that big city, away

-from every one you know, as the wife of a newspaper

-man?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“I shall be happy anywhere with you.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Our dreams are coming true,� Marley said,

-“after a fashion. And yet not just as we dreamed

-them, after all.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“In all the essentials they are, aren’t they?�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, but you know our dream was that I was to

-practise law.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Well, we still have that dream.�</p>

-

-<p class='c003'>“Yes, we still have it; maybe it will come true.

-Weston says that our dreams are as much realities

-in our lives as anything else.�</p>

-

-<div class='c006'>THE END</div>

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-<pre>

-

-

-

-

-

-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Average, by Brand Whitlock

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-</pre>

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-  </body>

-  <!-- created with fpn.py 1.87 on 2014-05-23 09:49:33 GMT -->

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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>The Happy Average, by Brand Whitlock</title>
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+      .nf-center { text-align:center; }
+      .nf-center-c1 { text-align:left;margin:1em 0; }
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45728 ***</div>
+
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<img src='images/illus-fpc.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' />
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'></div>
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<div class='nf-center-c1'>
+  <div class='nf-center'>
+    <div><span class='xlarge'><i>The Happy Average</i></span></div>
+    <div class='c000'><i>By</i> BRAND WHITLOCK</div>
+    <div class='c000'><span class='sc'>Author of</span></div>
+    <div>“Her Infinite Variety,� “The 13th</div>
+    <div>District, etc.�</div>
+    <div class='c000'><span class='sc'>Illustrated By</span></div>
+    <div>HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY</div>
+    <div class='c000'><i>A. L. BURT COMPANY</i></div>
+    <div><i>Publishers&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;New York</i></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'></div>
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<div class='nf-center-c1'>
+  <div class='nf-center'>
+    <div><span class='sc'>Copyright, 1904</span></div>
+    <div><span class='sc'>The Bobbs-Merrill Company</span></div>
+    <div class='c000'><span class='sc'>October</span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'></div>
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<div>
+  <h1 class='c001'>The Happy Average</h1>
+</div>
+
+<div>
+  <h2 class='c002'>CHAPTER I<br /> <br />A YOUNG MAN’S FANCY</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Come on, old man.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lawrence led the way with a jaunty step that
+was intended to show his easy footing with the
+Carters. But Marley lagged behind. Even if calling
+on girls had not been such a serious business
+with him, he could not forget that he was just graduated
+from college and that a certain dignity befitted
+him. He wished Lawrence would not speak so
+loud; the girls might hear, and think he was
+afraid; he wished to keep the truth from them as
+long as possible. He had already caught a glimpse
+of the girls, or thought he had, but before he could
+make sure, the vague white figures on the veranda
+stirred; he heard a scurrying, and the loose bang
+of a screen door. Then it was still. Lawrence
+laughed—somehow, as Marley felt, derisively.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The way from the sidewalk up to the Carters’
+veranda was not long, of course, though it seemed
+long to Marley, and Marley’s deliberation made
+it seem long to Lawrence. They paused at the
+steps of the veranda, and Lawrence made a low
+bow.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Good evening, Mrs. Carter,� he said. “Ah,
+Captain, you here too?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley had not noticed the captain, or Mrs.
+Carter; they sat there so quietly, enjoying the
+cool of the evening, or such cool as a July evening
+can find in central Ohio.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“My friend, Mr. Marley, Mrs. Carter—Glenn
+Marley—you’ve heard of him, Captain.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley bowed and said something. The presentation
+there in the darkness made it rather difficult
+for him, and neither the captain nor his wife
+moved. Lawrence sat down on the steps and
+fanned himself with his hat.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Been a hot day, Captain,� he said. “Think
+there’s any sign of rain?� He sniffed the air.
+The captain did not need to sniff the air to be able
+to reply, in a voice that rumbled up from his
+bending figure, that he had no hope of any.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Mayme’s home, ain’t she?� asked Lawrence,
+turning to Mrs. Carter.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll go see,� said Mrs. Carter, and she rose
+quickly, as if glad to get away, and the screen
+door slammed again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Billy was in the bank to-day,� Lawrence went
+on, speaking to Captain Carter. “He said your
+wheat was ready to cut. Did you get Foose all
+right?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� said the captain, “he’ll give me next
+week.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you have to board the threshers?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, not this year; they bring along their own
+cook, and a tent and everything.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Je-rusalem!� exclaimed Lawrence. “Things
+<em>are</em> changing in these days, ain’t they? Harvesting
+ain’t as hard on the women-folks as it used
+to be.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No,� said the captain, “but I pay for it, so
+much extra a bushel.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>His head shook regretfully, but he would have
+lost his regrets in telling of the time when he had
+swung a cradle all day in the harvest field, had
+not Mrs. Carter’s voice just then been heard calling
+up the stairs:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Mayme!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Whoo!� answered a high, feminine voice.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Come down. There’s some one here to see
+you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Carter turned into the parlor, and the tall
+windows that opened to the floor of the veranda
+burst into light.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She’ll be right down, John,� said Mrs. Carter,
+appearing in the door. “You give me your
+hats and go right in.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“All right,� said Lawrence, and he got to his
+feet. “Come on, Glenn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Carter took the hats of the young men
+and hung them on the rack, where they might
+easily have hung them themselves. Then she
+went back to the veranda, letting the screen door
+bang behind her, and Lawrence and Marley entered
+the parlor. Marley took his seat on one of
+the haircloth chairs that seemed to have ranged
+themselves permanently along the walls, and
+Lawrence went to the square piano that stood across
+one corner of the room, and sat down tentatively
+on the stool, swinging from side to side.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley glanced at the pictures on the walls.
+One of them was a steel engraving of Lincoln and
+his cabinet; another, in a black oval frame, portrayed
+Captain Carter in uniform, his hair dusting
+the strapped shoulders of a coat made after
+the pattern that seems to have been worn so uncomfortably
+by the heroes of the Civil War. There
+was, however, a later picture of the captain, a crayon
+enlargement of a photograph, that had taken
+him in civilian garb. This picture, in its huge
+gilt frame, was the most aggressive thing in the
+room, except, possibly, the walnut what-not. Marley
+had a great fear of the what-not; it seemed
+to him that if he stirred he must topple it over,
+and dash its load of trinkets to the floor.
+Presently he heard the swish of skirts. Then a
+tall girl came in, and Lawrence sprang to his
+feet.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Hello, Mayme. What’d you run for?� he
+said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He had crossed the room and seized the girl’s
+hand. She flashed a rebuke at him, though it
+was evident that the rebuke was more out of deference
+to the strange presence of Marley than for
+any real resentment she felt.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“This is my friend, Mr. Marley, Miss Carter,�
+Lawrence said. “You’ve heard me speak of him.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley edged away from the what-not, rose and
+took the hand the girl gave him. Then Miss Carter
+crossed to the black haircloth sofa and seated
+herself, smoothing out her skirts.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Didn’t know what to do, so we thought we’d
+come out and see you,� said Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, indeed!� said Miss Carter. “Well, it’s
+too bad about you. We’ll do when you can’t find
+anybody else to put up with you, eh?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, yes, you’ll do in a pinch,� chaffed Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, can’t you find a comfortable seat?� the
+girl asked, still addressing Lawrence, who had
+gone back to the piano stool.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m going to play in a minute,� said Lawrence,
+“and sing.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, excuse <em>me</em>!� implored Miss Carter. “Do
+let me get you a seat.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lawrence promptly went over to the sofa and
+leaned back in one corner of it, affecting a discomfort.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Can’t I get you a pillow, Mr. Lawrence?�
+Miss Carter asked presently. “Or perhaps a cot;
+I believe there’s one somewhere in the attic.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, I reckon I can stand it,� said Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley had regained his seat on the edge of the
+slippery chair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Where’s Vinie?� asked Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She’s coming,� answered Miss Carter.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Taking out her curl papers, eh?� said Lawrence.
+“She needn’t mind us.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Miss Carter pretended a disgust, but as she was
+framing a retort, somehow, the eyes of all of them
+turned toward the hall door. A girl in a gown of
+white stood there clasping and unclasping her
+hands curiously, and looking from one to another
+of those in the room.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Come in, Lavinia,� said Miss Carter. Something
+had softened her voice. The girl stepped
+into the room almost timidly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Miss Blair,� said Miss Carter, “let me introduce
+Mr. Marley.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The sudden consciousness that he had been sitting—and
+staring—smote Marley, and he sprang
+to his feet. Embarrassment overpowered him and
+he bowed awkwardly. Lawrence had been silent,
+and his silence had been a long one for him. Seeming
+to recognize this he hastened to say:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, how’s the world using you, Vinie?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The girl smiled and answered:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, pretty well, thank you, Jack.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It grated on Marley to hear her called Vinie.
+Lavinia Blair! Lavinia Blair! That was her
+name. He had heard it before, of course, yet it
+had never sounded as it did now when he repeated
+it to himself. The girl had seated herself in a
+rocking-chair across the room, almost out of range,
+as it were. He was rather glad of this, if anything.
+It seemed to relieve him of the duty of
+talking to her. He supposed, of course, they
+would pair off somehow. The young people always
+did in Macochee. He supposed he had been
+brought there to pair off with Lavinia Blair. He
+liked the thought, yet the position had its responsibilities.
+Somehow he never could forget that he
+could not dance. He hoped they would not
+propose dancing. He always had a fear of that in
+making calls, and all the calls he made seemed
+to come to it soon or late; some one always proposed
+it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was aware that Lawrence and Mayme
+Carter had resumed the exchange of their rude
+repartee, though he did not know what they had
+said. They kept laughing, too. Lavinia Blair
+seemed to join in the laughter if not in the badinage.
+Marley wished he might join in it. Jack
+Lawrence was evidently funnier than ever that
+night; Mayme Carter was convulsed. Now and
+then Lawrence said something to her in a tone too
+low for the others to hear, and these remarks
+pushed her to the verge of hysterics. Marley had
+a notion they were laughing at him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Meanwhile Lavinia Blair sat with her hands
+in her lap, smiling as though she were amused.
+Marley wondered if he amused her. He felt that
+he ought to say something, but he did not know
+what to say. He thought of several things, but, as
+he turned them over in his mind, he was convinced
+that they were not appropriate. So he sat
+and looked at Lavinia Blair, looked at her eyes, her
+mouth, her hair. He thought he had never seen
+such a complexion.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mayme Carter had snatched her handkerchief
+back from Lawrence, and retreated to her end
+of the sofa. There she sat up stiffly, folded her
+hands, and, though her mirth still shook her spasmodically,
+she said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Now, Jack, behave yourself.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lawrence burlesqued a surprise, and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll leave it to Vine if I’ve done anything.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley wondered how much further abbreviation
+Lavinia Blair’s name would stand, but he was suddenly
+aware that he was being addressed. Miss
+Carter, with an air of dismissing Lawrence,
+said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You have not been in Macochee long, have
+you, Mr. Marley?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley admitted that he had not, but said that
+he liked the town. When Lawrence explained
+that Marley was going to settle down there and
+become one of them, Miss Carter said she was
+awfully glad, but warned him against associating
+too much with Lawrence. This embarrassed Marley,
+if it did not Lawrence, and he immediately
+gave the scene to Lawrence, who guessed he would
+sing his song. To do so he went to the piano, and
+began to pick over the frayed sheets of music that
+lay on its green cover. To forestall him, however,
+Miss Carter rushed across the room and slid on to
+the piano stool herself, saying breathlessly:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Anything to stop that!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She struck a few vagrant chords, and Marley,
+glad of a subject on which he could express himself,
+pleaded with her to play. At last she did so.
+When she had finished, Lawrence clapped his
+hands loudly, and stopped only when a voice
+startled them. It was Mrs. Carter calling through
+the window:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Play your new piece, Mayme!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Miss Carter demurred, but after they had argued
+the question through the window, the daughter
+gave in, and played it. The music soothed
+Lawrence to silence, and when Miss Carter completed
+her little repertoire, his mockery could recover
+itself no further than to say:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Won’t you favor us, Miss Blair?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When Lavinia Blair declined, he struck an imploring
+attitude and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, please do! We’re dying to hear you. You
+didn’t leave your music at home, did you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley heard the chairs scraping on the
+veranda, and the screen door slammed once more.
+Then he heard Captain Carter go up the stairs,
+while Mrs. Carter halted in the doorway of the
+parlor long enough to say:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You lock the front door when you come up,
+Mayme.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mayme without turning replied “All right,�
+and when her mother had disappeared she said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s awful hot in here, let’s go outside.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley found himself strolling in the yard with
+Lavinia Blair. The moon had not risen, but the
+girl’s throat and arms gleamed in the starlight;
+her white dress seemed to be a cloud of gauze; she
+floated, rather than walked, there by his side.
+They paused by the gate. About them were the
+voices of the summer night, the crickets, the katydids,
+far away the frogs, chirping musically. They
+stood a while in the silence, and then they turned,
+and were talking again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley did most of the talking, and all he
+said was about himself, though he did not realize
+that this was so. He had already told her of
+his life in the towns where his father had preached
+before he came to Macochee, and of his four years
+in college at Delaware. He tried to give her some
+notion of the sense of alienation he had felt as the
+son of an itinerant Methodist minister; for him
+no place had ever taken on the warm color and expression
+of home. He explained that as yet
+he knew little of Macochee, having been away at
+college when his father moved there the preceding
+fall. It was so easy to talk to her, and as he told
+her of his ambitions, the things he was going to do
+became so many, and so easy. He was going
+to become a lawyer; he thought he should go to
+Cincinnati.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And leave Macochee?� said Lavinia Blair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley caught his breath.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Would you care?� he whispered.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She did not answer. He heard the crickets, the
+katydids, the frogs again; there came the perfume
+of the lilacs, late flowering that year; the
+heavy odor of a shrub almost overpowered him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“My father is a lawyer,� Lavinia said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They had turned off the path, and were
+wandering over the lawn. The dew sparkled on it; and
+Marley became solicitous.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Won’t you get your feet wet?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The girl laughed at the idea, but she caught up
+her skirts, and they wandered on in the shade of
+the tall elms. Marley did not know where they
+were. The yard seemed an endless garden, immense,
+unknown, enchanted; the dark trees all
+around him stood like the forest of some park, and
+the lawn stretched away to fall over endless terraces;
+he imagined statues and fountains gleaming
+in the heavy shadows of the trees. The house
+seemed lost in the distance, though he felt its presence
+there behind him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Once he saw the twinkle of a passing light in
+an upper story. He could no longer hear the
+voices of Mayme and Lawrence, but he caught
+the tinkling notes of a banjo, away off somewhere.
+Its music was very sweet. They strolled on, their
+feet swishing in the damp grass, then suddenly
+there was a rush, a loud barking, and a dog sprang
+at them out of the darkness. Lavinia gave a little
+cry. Marley was startled; he felt that he must
+run, yet he thought of the girl beside him. He
+must not let her see his fear. He stepped in front
+of her. He could feel her draw more closely to
+him, and he thrilled as the sense of his protectorship
+came to him. He must think of some heroic
+scheme of vanquishing the dog, but it stopped in
+its mad rush, and Lavinia, standing aside, said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, it’s only Sport!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They laughed, and their laugh was the happier
+because of the relief from their fear.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We must have wandered around behind the
+house,� said Lavinia. “There’s the shed.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They turned, and went back. The enchantment
+of the yard had departed. Marley seemed to
+see things clearly once more, though his heart still
+beat as he felt the delicious sense of protectorship
+that had come over him as Lavinia shrank to his
+side at the moment the dog rushed at them. Nor
+could he ever forget her face as she smiled up at
+him in the little opening they came into on the side
+lawn. The young moon was just sailing over the
+trees. As they approached the veranda, Lawrence’s
+voice called out of the darkness:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, where have you young folks been stealing
+away to?�</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER II<br /> <br />WADE POWELL</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Marley halted at the threshold and glanced
+up at the sign that swung over the doorway.
+The gilt lettering of the sign had long ago
+been tarnished, and where its black sanded
+paint had peeled in many weathers the original
+tin was as rusty as the iron arm from
+which it creaked. Yet Macochee had long since
+lost its need of the shingle to tell it where Wade
+Powell’s law office was. It had been for many
+years in one of the little rooms of the low brick
+building in Miami Street, just across from the
+Court House; it was almost as much of an institution
+as the Court House itself, with which its
+triumphs and its trials were identified. Marley
+gathered enough courage from his inspection of
+the sign to enter, but once inside, he hesitated.
+Then a heavy voice spoke.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, come in,� it said peremptorily.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Wade Powell, sitting with his feet on his table,
+held his newspaper aside and looked at Marley
+over his spectacles. Marley had had an ideal of
+Wade Powell, and now he had to pause long enough
+to relinquish the ideal and adjust himself to the
+reality. The hair was as disordered as his young
+fancy would have had it, but it was thinner than
+he had known it in his dreams, and its black
+was streaked with gray. The face was smooth-shaven,
+which accorded with his notion, though
+it had not been shaven as recently as he felt it
+should have been. But he could not reconcile himself
+to the spectacles that rested on Powell’s nose,
+and pressed their bows into the flesh of his temples—the
+eagle eyes of the Wade Powell of his imagination
+had never known glasses.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When Wade Powell slowly pulled his spectacles
+from his nose and tossed them on to the
+table before him, he bent his eyes on Marley,
+and their gaze, under their heavy brows, somewhat
+restored him, but it could not atone for the
+disappointment. Perhaps the disappointment that
+Marley felt in this moment came from some dim,
+unrealized sense that Wade Powell was growing
+old. The spectacles, the gray in his hair, the
+wrinkles in his face, the looseness of the skin at
+his jaws and at his throat—where a fold of it hung
+between the points of his collar—all told that Wade
+Powell had passed the invisible line which marks
+life’s summit, and that his face was turned now
+toward the evening. There was the touch of sadness
+in the indistinct conception of him as a man
+who had not altogether realized the ambitions of
+his youth or the predictions of his friends, and
+the sadness came from the intuition that the failure
+or the half-failure was not of the heroic kind.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The office in which he sat, and on which, in
+the long years, he had impressed his character, was
+untidy; the floor was dirty, the books on the shelves
+were dusty and leaning all awry; the set of the
+Ohio reports had not been kept up to date; one
+might have told by a study of them at just what
+period enterprise and energy had faltered, while
+the gaps here and there showed how an uncalculating
+generosity had helped a natural indolence by
+lending indiscriminately to other lawyers, who,
+with the lack of respect for the moral of the laws
+they pretended to revere, had borrowed with no
+thought of returning.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Two or three pictures hung crookedly on the
+walls; the table at which Powell sat was old and
+scarred; its ink-stand had long ago gone dry and
+been abandoned; a cheap bottle, with its cork rolling
+tipsily by its side, had taken the ink-stand’s
+place. The papers scattered over the table had an
+air of hopelessness, as though they had grown
+tired, like the clients they represented, in waiting
+for Powell’s attention. The half-open door at the
+back led into a room that had been, and possibly
+might yet be, used as a private office or consulting
+room, should any one care to brave its darkness
+and its dust; but as for Wade Powell, it was
+plain that he preferred to sit democratically in
+the outer office, where all might see him, and, what
+was of more importance to him, where he might
+see all.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The one new thing in the room was a typewriter,
+standing on its little sewing-machine table, in the
+corner of the room. There was no stenographer
+nor any chair for one; Marley imagined Powell,
+whenever he had occasion to write, sitting down
+to the machine himself, and picking out his pleadings
+painfully, laboriously and slowly, letter by
+letter, using only his index fingers. And this
+somehow humbled his ideal the more. Marley
+almost wished he hadn’t come.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What’s on your mind, young man?� said Wade
+Powell, leaning back in his chair and dropping
+his long arm at his side until his newspaper swept
+the floor. Marley had seated himself in a wooden
+chair that was evidently intended for clients, and
+he began nervously.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Here he stopped, overcome again by an embarrassment.
+A smile spread over Wade Powell’s face,
+a gentle smile with a winning quality in it, and
+his face to Marley became young again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Tell your troubles,� he said. “I’ve confessed
+all the young men in Macochee for twenty-five
+years. Yes—thirty-five—� He grew suddenly
+sober as he numbered the years and then exclaimed
+as if to himself:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“My God! Has it been that long?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He took out his watch and looked at it as if it
+must somehow correct his reckoning. For a
+moment, then, he thought; his gaze was far away.
+But Marley brought him back when he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I only want—I only want to study law.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh!� said Powell, and he seemed somehow relieved.
+“Is that all?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>To Marley this seemed quite enough, and the
+disappointment he felt, which was a part of the
+effect Wade Powell’s office had had on him, showed
+suddenly in his face. Powell glanced quickly at
+him, and hastened to reassure him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We can fix that easily enough,� he said. “Have
+you ever read any law?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No,� said Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Been to college?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley told him that he had just that summer
+been graduated and when he mentioned the name of
+the college Powell said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The Methodists, eh?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He could hardly conceal a certain contempt in
+the tone with which he said this, and then, as if
+instantly regretting the unkindness, he observed:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s a good school, I’m told.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He could not, however, evince an entire
+approval, and so seeming to desert the subject he
+hastened on:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What’s your name?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Glenn Marley.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh!� Wade Powell dropped his feet to the
+floor and sat upright. “Are you Preacher Marley’s
+son?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley did not like to hear his father called
+“Preacher,� and when he said that he was the
+son of Doctor Marley, Powell remarked:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve heard him preach, and he’s a damn good
+preacher too, I want to tell you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley warmed under this profane indorsement.
+He had always, from a boy, felt somehow that he
+must defend his father’s position as a preacher
+from the world, as with the little world of his boyhood
+and youth he had always had to defend his
+own position as the son of a preacher.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir, he’s a good preacher, and a good
+man,� Powell went on. He had taken a cigar from
+his pocket and was nipping the end from it with
+his teeth. He lighted it, and leaned back comfortably
+again to smoke, and then in tardy hospitality
+he drew another cigar from his waistcoat pocket
+and held it toward Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Smoke?� he said, and then he added apologetically,
+“I didn’t think; I never do.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley declined the cigar, but Powell pressed
+it on him, saying:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, your father does, I’ll bet. Give it to him
+with Wade Powell’s compliments. He won’t hesitate
+to smoke with a publican and sinner.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley smiled and put the cigar away in his
+pocket.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t know, though,� Powell went on slowly,
+speaking as much to himself as to Marley, while
+he watched the thick white clouds he rolled from
+his lips, “that he’d want you to be in my office.
+I know some of the <em>brethren</em> wouldn’t approve.
+They’d think I’d contaminate you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley would have hastened to reassure Powell
+had he known how to do so without seeming to
+recognize the possibility of contamination; but
+while he hesitated Powell avoided the necessity
+for him by asking:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Did your father send you to me?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He looked at Marley eagerly, and with an
+expression of unfounded hope, as he awaited the
+answer.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No,� replied Marley, “he doesn’t know. I
+haven’t talked with him at all. I have to do something
+and I’ve always thought I’d go into the
+law. I presume it would be better to go to a law
+school, but father couldn’t afford that after putting
+me through college. I thought I could read law
+in some office, and maybe get admitted that way.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Sure,� said Powell, “it’s easy enough. You’ll
+have to learn the law after you get to practising
+anyway—and there isn’t much to learn at that. It’s
+mostly a fake.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked at him in some alarm, at this new
+smiting of an idol.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I began to read law,� Powell went on, “under
+old Judge Colwin—that is, what I read. I used
+to sit at the window with a book in my lap and
+watch the girls go by. Still,� he added with a
+tone of doing himself some final justice, “it was a
+liberal education to sit under the old judge’s drippings.
+I learned more that way than I ever did at
+the law school.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He smoked on a moment, ruminating on his lost
+youth; then, bringing himself around to business
+again, he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How’d you happen to come to me?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� said Marley, haltingly, “I’d heard a
+good deal of you—and I thought I’d like you, and
+then I’ve heard father speak of you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You have?� said Powell, looking up quickly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What’d he say?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, he said you were a great orator and he
+said you were always with the under dog. He
+said he liked that.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell turned his eyes away and his face reddened.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, let’s see. If you think your father
+would approve of your sitting at the feet of such
+a Gamaliel as I, we can—� He was squinting
+painfully at his book-shelves. “Is that Blackstone
+over there on the top shelf?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley got up and glanced along the backs of the
+dingy books, their calfskin bindings deeply
+browned by the years, their red and black labels
+peeling off.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Here’s Blackstone,� he said, taking down a
+book, “but it’s the second volume.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Second volume, eh? Don’t see the first around
+anywhere, do you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked, without finding it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Then see if Walker’s there.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Walker’s <em>American Law</em>,� Powell explained.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t see it,� Marley said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, I reckon not,� assented Powell, “some one’s
+borrowed it. I seem to run a sort of circulating
+library of legal works in this town, without fines—though
+we have statutes against petit larceny. Well,
+hand me Swan’s <em>Treatise</em>. That’s it, on the end
+of the second shelf.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley took down the book, and gave it to
+Powell. While Marley dusted his begrimed fingers
+with his handkerchief, Powell blew the dust off
+the top of the book; he slapped it on the arm of
+his chair, the dust flying from it at every stroke.
+He picked up his spectacles, put them on and
+turned over the first few leaves of the book.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You might begin on that,� he said presently,
+“until we can borrow a Blackstone or a Walker
+for you. This book is the best law-book ever written
+anyway; the law’s all there. If you knew all
+that contains, you could go in any court and get
+along without giving yourself away; which is the
+whole duty of a lawyer.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He closed the book and gave it to Marley, who
+was somewhat at a loss; this was the final disappointment.
+He had thought that his introduction
+into the mysteries of the noble profession should
+be attended by some sort of ceremony. He looked
+at the book in his hand quite helplessly and then
+looked up at Powell.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Is that—all?� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, yes,� Powell answered. “Isn’t that
+enough?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I thought—that is, that I might have some duties.
+How am I to begin?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, just open the book to the first page and
+read that, then turn over to the second page and
+read that, and so on—till you get to the end.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What will my hours be?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Your hours?� said Powell, as if he did not understand.
+“Oh, just suit yourself.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was looking at the book again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t you make any entry—any memorandum?�
+he asked, still unable to separate himself
+from the idea that something formal, something
+legal, should mark the beginning of such an important
+epoch.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, you keep track of the date,� said Powell,
+“and at the end of three years I’ll give you a certificate.
+You may find that you can do most of
+your reading at home, but come around.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked about the office, trying to imagine
+himself in this new situation.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’d like, you know,� he said, “to do something,
+if I could, to repay you for your trouble.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That’s all right, my boy,� said Powell. Then
+he added as if the thought had just come to him:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Say, can you run a typewriter?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I can learn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, that’s more than I can do,� said Powell,
+glancing at his new machine. “I’ve tried, but it
+would take a stationary engineer to operate that
+thing. You might help out with my letters and
+my pleadings now and then. And I’d like to have
+you around. You’d make good company.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� said Marley, “I’ll be here in the
+morning.� He still clung to the idea that he was to be a
+part of the office, to be an identity in the local machinery
+of the law. As he rose to go, a young
+man appeared in the doorway. He was tall, and
+the English cap and the rough Scotch suit he wore,
+with the trousers rolled up over his heavy tan
+shoes, enabled Marley to identify him instantly as
+young Halliday. He was certain of this when
+Powell, looking up, said indifferently:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Hello, George. Raining in London?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, I say, Powell,� replied Halliday, ignoring
+a taunt that had grown familiar to him, “that
+Zeller case—we would like to have that go over
+to the fall term, if you don’t mind.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why don’t you settle it?� asked Powell.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Halliday was leaning against the door-post, and
+had drawn a short brier pipe from his pocket. Before
+he answered, he paused long enough to fill it
+with tobacco. Then he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You’ll have to see the governor about that—it’s
+a case he’s been looking after.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, well,� said Powell, with his easy acquiescence,
+“all right.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Halliday had pressed the tobacco into the bowl
+of the pipe and struck a match.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Then, I’ll tell old Bill,� he said, pausing in
+his sentence to light his pipe, “to mark it off
+the assignment.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley watched Halliday saunter away, with
+a feeling that mixed admiration with amazement.
+He could not help admiring his clothes, and he
+felt drawn toward him as a college man from a
+school so much greater than his own, though he
+felt some resentment because Halliday had never
+once given a sign that he was aware of Marley’s
+presence. His amazement came from the utter
+disrespect with which Halliday referred to Judge
+Blair. Old Bill! Marley had caught his breath.
+He would have liked to discuss Halliday with
+Powell, but the lawyer seemed to be as indifferent
+to Halliday’s existence as Halliday had been
+to Marley’s, and when Marley saw that Powell
+was not likely to refer to him, he started toward
+the door. As he went Powell resumptively called
+after him:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll get a Blackstone for you in a day or two.
+Be down in the morning.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley went away bearing Swan’s <em>Treatise</em> under
+his arm. He looked up at the Court House
+across the way; the trees were stirring in the
+light winds of summer, and their leaves writhed
+joyously in the sun. The windows of the Court
+House were open, and he could hear the voice of
+some lawyer arguing a cause to the jury. Marley
+thought of Judge Blair sitting there, the jury in
+its box, the sleepy bailiff drowsing in his place,
+the accustomed attorneys and the angry litigants,
+and his heart began to beat a little more rapidly,
+for the thought of Judge Blair brought the thought
+of Lavinia Blair. And in the days to come, when
+he should be arguing a cause to a jury, as that
+lawyer, whose voice came pealing and echoing in
+sudden and surprising shouts through the open
+windows, was arguing a cause now, would Lavinia
+Blair be interested?</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He had imagined that a day so full of importance
+for him would be marked by greater ceremonials,
+and yet while he was disappointed, he was
+reassured. He had solved a problem, he had done
+with inaction, he had made a beginning, he was
+entered at last upon a career. As all the events
+of the recent years rushed on him, the years of college
+life, the decisions and indecisions of his classmates,
+their vague troubles about a career, he felt
+a pride that he had so soon solved that problem.
+He felt a certain superiority too, that made him
+carry his head high, as he turned into Main
+Street and marched across the Square. It required
+only decision and life was conquered. He saw
+the years stretching out prosperously before him,
+expanding as his ambitions expanded. He was
+glad that he had tackled life so promptly, that he
+had come so quickly to an issue with it; it was not
+so bad, viewed thus close, as it had been from
+a distance. He laughed at the folly of all the talk
+he had heard about the difficulty of young men
+getting a start in these days; he must write to
+his fraternity fellows at once, and tell them what
+he had done and how he was succeeding. They
+would surely see that at the bar he would do, not
+only himself, but them, the greatest credit, and
+they would be proud.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER III<br /> <br />GREENWOOD LAKE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>The girls, flitting about with nervous laughter
+and now and then little screams, had spread
+long cloths over the table of plain boards
+that had served so many picnic parties at
+Greenwood Lake; the table-cloths and the dresses
+of the girls gleamed white in the amber light that
+streamed across the little sheet of water, though
+the slender trees, freshened by the morning shower
+that threatened to spoil the outing, were beginning
+to darken under the shadows that diffused themselves
+subtly through the grove, as if there were
+exudations of the heavy foliage.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lawrence, in his white ducks, stood by the table,
+assuming to direct the laying of the supper. His
+immense cravat of blue was the only bit of color
+about him, unless it were his red hair, which he
+had had clipped that very morning, and his shorn
+appearance intensified his comic air. Marley, sitting
+apart on the stump of a small oak, could hear
+the burlesque orders Lawrence shouted at the girls.
+The girls were convulsed by his orders; at times
+they had to put their dishes down lest in their
+laughter they spill the food or break the china;
+just then Marley saw Mayme Carter double over
+suddenly, her mass of yellow hair lurching forward
+to her brow, while the woods rang with her laughter.
+The other men were off looking after the
+horses.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia moved quickly here and there, smiling
+joyously, her face flushed; though she laughed
+as the others did at Lawrence’s drollery, she did not
+laugh as loudly, and she did not scream. Just
+now she rose from bending over the table, and
+brushed her brown hair from her brow with the
+back of her hand, while she stood and surveyed
+the table as if to see what it lacked. When she
+raised her hand the sleeve of her muslin gown
+fell away from her wrist and showed her
+slender forearm, white in the calm light of evening.
+Marley could not take his eyes from her.
+She ran into the pavilion, her little low shoes
+flashed below her petticoats, and he grew sad; when
+she reappeared, all her movements seemed to be
+new, to have fresh beauties. Then he suspected
+that the girls were laughing at him and he felt
+miserable.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He thought of himself sitting alone and apart,
+an awkward, ungainly figure. He longed to go
+away, yet he feared that, if he did, he would not
+have the courage to come back. He shifted his position,
+only to make matters worse. Then suddenly
+his feeling took the form of a rage with
+Lawrence; he longed to seize Lawrence and kick
+him, to pitch him into the lake, to humiliate him
+before the girls. He thought he saw all at once
+that Lawrence had been making fun of him, surreptitiously;
+that was what had made the girls
+laugh so.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>There was some little consolation in the thought
+that Lavinia did not laugh as much as the others;
+perhaps, if she did not care to defend him, she
+at least pitied him. And then he began to pity
+himself. The whole evening stretched before him;
+pretty soon he would have to move up to the table,
+and sit down on the narrow little benches that
+were fastened between the trees; then after supper
+they would begin their dancing and when that
+came he did not see what he could do.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The only pleasure he had had that afternoon had
+been on the way out; he had been alone with Lavinia,
+and the four miles of pleasant road that
+lay between the town and Greenwood Lake were
+too short for all the happiness Marley found in
+them. He could feel Lavinia again by his side, her
+hands folded on the thin old linen lap-robe. He
+could not recall a word they had said, but it seemed
+to him that the conversation had flowed on intimately
+and tranquilly; she had been so close and
+sympathetic; and he would always remember how
+her eyes had been raised to his. The fields with the
+wheat in shock had swept by in the beauty of harvest
+time; the road, its dust laid by the morning
+shower, had rolled under the wheels of the buggy
+softly, smoothly and noiselessly; the air had been
+odorous with the scent of green things freshened
+by the rain, and had vibrated with the sounds of
+summer.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Then suddenly his reverie was broken. The
+men were gathering about the table with the girls;
+all of them looked at him expectantly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Here, you!� called Lawrence. “Do you think
+we’re going to do all the work? Come, get in
+the game, and don’t look so solemn—this ain’t a
+funeral.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They all laughed, and Marley felt his face flame,
+but he rose and went over to the table, halting in
+indecision.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Run get some water,� ordered Lawrence, imperatively
+waving his hand. “Mayme,� he
+shouted, “hand him the pitcher! Step lively, now.
+The men-folks are hungry after their day’s work.
+Has any one got a pitcher concealed about his
+person? What did you do with the pitcher, Glenn?
+Take it to water your horse?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They were laughing uproariously, and Marley
+was plainly discomfited. But Lavinia stepped to
+his side, a large white pitcher in her hand. “I’ll
+show you,� she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They started away together, and Marley felt a
+protection in her presence. A little way farther
+he suddenly thought of the pitcher, which Lavinia
+still was bearing, and he took it from her. As he
+seized the handle their fingers became for an instant
+entangled.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Did I hurt you?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, no!� she assured him, and as they walked
+on, out of the sight of the laughing group behind
+them, an ease came over him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you know where the well is?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, yes,� she answered. “It’s down here. I
+could have come just as well as not.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m glad to come,� he said; and then he
+added, “with <em>you</em>.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They had reached the wooden pump behind the
+pavilion. The little sheet of water curved away
+like a crescent, following the course of the stream
+of which it was but a widening. Its little islands
+were mirrored in its surface. The sun was just
+going down, the sky beyond the lake was rosy, and
+the same rosy hue now suffused everything; the
+waters themselves were reddened.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It was very still, and the peace of the evening lay
+on them both. Lavinia stood motionless, and
+looked out across the water to the little Ohio hills
+that rolled away toward the west. She stood and
+gazed a long time, her hands at her sides, yet
+with their fingers open and extended, as if the
+beauty of the scene had suddenly transfixed her.
+Marley did not see the lake or the sun, the islands
+or the hills; he saw only the girl before him, the
+outline of her cheek, the down on it showing fine
+in the pure light, the hair that nestled at her
+neck, the curve from her shoulder to her arms and
+down to her intent fingers. At last she sighed, and
+looked up at him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Isn’t it all beautiful?� she said solemnly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Beautiful?� he repeated, as if in question, not
+knowing what she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Just then they heard Lawrence hallooing, and
+Marley began to pump vigorously. He rinsed out
+the pitcher, then filled it, and they went back, walking
+closely side by side, and they did not speak all
+the way.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mayme Carter, who, as it seemed, had a local
+reputation as a compounder of lemonade, had the
+lemons and the sugar all ready when Marley and
+Lavinia rejoined the group, and Lawrence, as he
+seized the pitcher, said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I see that, between you, you’ve spilled nearly
+all of the water, but I guess Mayme and I’ll have
+to make it do.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The others laughed at this, as they did at all of
+Lawrence’s speeches, and then they turned and
+laughed at Marley and Lavinia, though the men,
+who as yet did not feel themselves on terms with
+Marley, had a subtile manner of not including
+him in their ridicule, however little they spared
+Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The supper was eaten with the hunger their spirits
+and the fresh air had given them and Marley,
+placed, as of course, by Lavinia’s side, felt sheltered
+by her, as he felt sheltered by all the talk that
+raged about him. He wished that he could join in
+the talk, but he could not discover what it was all
+about. Once, in a desperate determination to
+assert himself, he did mention a book he had been
+reading, but his remark seemed to have a chilling
+effect from which they did not recover until Lawrence,
+out of his own inexhaustible fund of nonsense,
+restored them to their inanities. He tried to
+hide his embarrassment by eating the cold chicken,
+the ham and sardines, the potato chips and pickles,
+the hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches that went up
+and down the board in endless procession, and he
+was thankful, when he thought of it, that Lawrence
+seemed to forget him, though Lawrence
+had forgotten no one else there. He seemed
+to note accurately each mouthful every one took.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Hand up another dozen eggs for Miss Winters,
+Joe,� he called to one of the men, and then
+they all laughed at Miss Winters.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When the cake came, Lawrence identified each
+kind with some remark about the mother of the
+girl who had brought it, and tasted all, because, as
+he said, he could not afford to show partiality.
+The fun lagged somewhat as the meal neared its
+end, but Lawrence revived it instantly and sensationally
+by rising suddenly, bending far over
+toward Lavinia in a tragic attitude and saying:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, Vine, child, you haven’t eaten a mouthful!
+I do believe you’re in love!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The company burst into laughter, but they suddenly
+stopped when they saw Marley. His face
+showed his anger with them, and he made a little
+movement, but Lavinia smiled up at Lawrence, and
+said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, Jack, it’s evident that <em>you’re</em> not.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And then they all laughed at Lawrence, and
+the girls clapped their hands, while Marley, angry
+now with himself, tried to laugh with them.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When they stopped laughing Lawrence produced
+his cigarettes, and tossing one to Marley in a way
+that delicately conveyed a sense of intimacy and
+affection, he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“When you girls get your dishes done up we’ll
+be back and see if we can’t think up something to
+entertain you,� and then he called Marley and
+with him and the other men strolled down to the
+lake.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER IV<br /> <br />MOONLIGHT</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>The dance was proposed almost immediately.
+Marley had hoped up to the very last minute
+that something, possibly a miracle, would prevent
+it, but scarcely had the men finished their
+first cigarettes before Howard was saying:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, let’s be getting back to the girls. They’ll
+want to dance.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Howard spoke as if the dancing would be a sacrifice
+on the part of the men to the pleasure of the
+girls, but they all turned at once, some of them
+flinging their cigarettes into the water, as if to complete
+the sacrifice, and started back. When they
+reached the pavilion, Payson and Gallard took instruments
+out of green bags, Payson a guitar and
+Gallard a mandolin, and Lawrence, bustling about
+over the floor, shoving the few chairs against the
+unplastered wooden walls, was shouting:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Tune ’em up, boys, tune ’em up!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The first tentative notes of the strings twanged
+in the hollow room, and Lawrence was asking the
+girls for dances, scribbling their names on his cuff
+with a disregard of its white polished linen almost
+painful.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll have to divide up some of ’em, you know,
+girls,� he said. “Jim and Elmer have to play, and
+that makes us two men shy. But I’ll do the best
+I can—wish I could take you all in my arms at once
+and dance with you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The girls, standing in an expectant, eager little
+group, clutched one another nervously, and pretended
+to sneer at Lawrence’s patronage.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was standing with Lavinia near the door.
+He was trying to affect an ease; he knew by the
+way the other girls glanced at him now and then
+that they were speculating on his possibilities as a
+partner; he tried just then to look as if he were
+going to dance as all the other men were, yet he
+felt the necessity of confessing to Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You know,� he said contritely, “that I don’t
+dance.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She looked up, a disappointment springing to her
+eyes too quickly for her to conceal it. She was
+flushed with pleasure and excitement, and tapping
+her foot in time with the chords Payson and Gallard
+were trying on their instruments. Marley
+saw her surprise.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I ought not to have come,� he said; “I’ve no
+business here.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The look of disappointment in Lavinia’s eyes
+had gone, and in its place was now an expression
+of sympathy.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It makes no difference,� she said. And then
+she added in a low voice: “I’ll not dance either;
+there are too many of us girls anyway.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, don’t let me keep you from it,� said Marley,
+and yet a joy was shining in his eyes. She
+turned away and blushed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll give you all my dances,� she said; “we
+can sit them out.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But it won’t be any fun for you,� protested
+Marley. And just then Lawrence came up.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Say, Glenn,� he said, “if you don’t want to
+dance I’ll take Lavinia for the first number.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The guitar and mandolin, after a long preliminary
+strumming to get themselves in tune,
+suddenly burst into <em>The Georgia Campmeeting</em>, and
+the couples were instantly springing across the
+floor.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Come on, Vine,� said Lawrence, his fingers
+twitching. And Lavinia, eager, trembling, alive,
+casting one last glance at Marley, said “Just this
+one!� and went whirling away with Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley moved aside, awkwardly, when the couples,
+sweeping in a long oval stream around the
+little room, whirled past him. Lavinia danced
+with a grace that almost hurt him; she was laughing
+as she looked up into Lawrence’s face, talking
+to him as they danced. Marley felt a gloom, almost
+a rage, settle on him. He looked up and down the
+room. At the farther end, through the door by
+which the musicians sat swinging their feet over
+their knees in time to the tune they played, he
+could see the man who kept the grounds at the lake,
+looking on at the dance; his wife was with him,
+and they smiled contentedly at the joy of the young
+people.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley could not bear their joy, any more than
+he could bear the joy of the dancers, and he looked
+away from them. Glancing along the wall he saw
+a girl, sitting alone. It was Grace Winters; she
+was older than the others, and she sat there sullenly,
+her dark brows contracted under her dark
+hair. Marley felt drawn toward her by a common
+trouble, and he thought, instantly, that he might
+appear less conspicuous if he went and sat beside
+her. As he approached, her sallow face brightened
+with a brilliant smile of welcome and she drew
+aside her skirts to make a place for him, though
+there was no one else on all that side of the room.
+Marley sat down.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s warm, isn’t it?� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� Miss Winters replied, “almost too warm
+to dance, don’t you think?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley tried to express his acquiescence in the
+polite smile he had seen the other men use before
+the dance began, but he did not feel that he carried
+it off very well.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I should think you’d be dancing, Mr. Marley,�
+Miss Winters said. “I hear you are a splendid
+dancer. Don’t you care to dance this evening?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I can’t dance,� said Marley, crudely.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He was looking at Lavinia, following her young
+figure as it glided past with Lawrence. Miss
+Winters turned away. Her face became gloomy
+again, and she said nothing more. Marley was
+absorbed in Lavinia, and they sat there together
+silent, conspicuous and alone, in a wide separation.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley thought the dance never would end. It
+seemed to him that the dancers must drop from
+fatigue; but at last the mandolin and guitar ceased
+suddenly, the girls cried out a disappointed unisonant
+“Oh!� and then they all laughed and
+clapped their hands. Lavinia and Lawrence were
+coming up, glowing with the joy of the dance.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, that was splendid, Jack!� Lavinia cried,
+putting back her hair with that wave of her hand.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lawrence’s face was redder than ever. He
+leaned over and in a whisper that was for Lavinia
+and Marley together he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Lavinia, you’re the queen dancer of the town.�
+And then he turned to Miss Winters.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Grace,� he said, distributing himself with the
+impartiality he felt his position as a social leader
+demanded, “you’ve promised me a dance for a long
+time. Now’s my chance.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why certainly, Jack,� Miss Winters said, with
+her brilliant smile, and then she took Lawrence’s
+arm and drew him away, as if otherwise he might
+escape.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Take me outdoors!� said Lavinia to Marley.
+“Those big lamps make it <em>so</em> hot in here.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was glad to leave, and they went out on
+to the little piazza of the pavilion. Lavinia stood
+on the very edge of the steps, and drank in the fresh
+air eagerly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh!� she said. “Oh! Isn’t it delicious!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The darkness lay thick between the trees. The
+air was rich with the scent of the mown fields that
+lay beyond the grove. The insects shrilled contentedly.
+Marley stood and looked at Lavinia, standing
+on the edge of the steps, her body bent a little
+forward, her face upturned. She put back her hair
+again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Let’s go on down!� she said, a little adventurous
+quality in her tone. She ran lightly down the
+steps, Marley after her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Won’t you take cold?� he asked, bending close
+to her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She looked up and laughed. They were walking
+on, unconsciously making their way toward the
+edge of the little lake. Marley felt the white form
+floating there beside him and a happiness, new,
+unknown before, came to him. They were on the
+edge of the little lake. Before them the water
+lay, dark now, and smooth. A small stage was
+moored to the shore and a boat was fastened to
+it. They could hear the light lapping of the water
+that barely stirred the boat. Presently Lavinia
+ran out on to the stage. She gave a little spring,
+and rocked it up and down; then smiled up at
+Marley like a child venturing in forbidden places.
+Marley stepped carefully on to the stage.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Isn’t it a perfect night?� Lavinia said, looking
+up at the dark purple sky, strewn with all the
+stars. Marley looked at her white throat.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The most beautiful night I ever knew!� he
+said. He spoke solemnly, devoutly, and Lavinia
+turned and gazed on him. Marley touched the boat
+with the toe of his shoe.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We might row,� he said almost timidly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Could we?� inquired Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“If we may take the boat.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, of course—anybody may. Can you row?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley laughed. He had rowed in the college
+crew on the old Olentangy at Delaware. His
+laugh was a complete answer to Lavinia. She approached
+the boat, and Marley bent over and drew
+it alongside the stage.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Get in,� he said. It was good to find something
+he could do. He helped her carefully into the
+boat, and held it firmly until she had arranged herself
+in the stern, her feet against the cleats, and
+her white skirts tucked about her. Then he took
+his seat, shipped the oars and shoved off. He swept
+the boat out into the deep water, and rowed away
+up the lake. He rowed precisely, feathering his
+oars, that she might see how much a master he was.
+They did not speak for a long time. First one, then
+the other, of the little islands swept darkly by;
+the water slapped the bow of the boat as Marley
+urged it forward. The lights of the pavilion on
+the shore twinkled an instant, then went out behind
+the trees. They could hear the distant mellow
+thrumming of the guitar and the tinkle of the
+mandolin.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Are you too cool?� he asked presently.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, no, not at all!� said Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Hadn’t you better take my coat?� Marley
+persisted. The idea of putting his coat about her
+thrilled him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You’ll need it,� she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, I’ll be warm rowing.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She shook her head, and smiled. They drifted
+on. Still came the distant strumming of the guitar
+and the tinkle of the mandolin. Marley thought of
+the young people dancing, and then, noting Lavinia’s
+silence, he asked, out of the doubt that was his
+one remaining annoyance:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Wouldn’t you rather be back there dancing?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, no!� she answered softly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m ashamed of myself.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why?� She started a little.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Because I can’t dance!� There was guilt in
+his tone.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You mustn’t feel that way about it,� Lavinia
+said. “It’s nothing.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Isn’t it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No. It’s easy to learn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I never could learn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia was still, and Marley thought she assented
+to this. But in another moment she spoke
+again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I—� she began, and then she hesitated.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley stopped rowing and rested on his oars.
+The water lapped the bows of the boat as it slackened
+its speed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I could teach you,� Lavinia went on.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Could you?� Marley leaned forward eagerly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’d like to.� She was trailing one white hand
+in the water.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Will you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� she said. “We can do it over at Mayme’s—any
+time. She’ll play for us.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley felt a great gratitude, and he wondered
+how he could pour it forth upon her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You are too good to me,� he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Then, suddenly, a change came over the dark
+surface of the waters. A mellow quality touched
+them; they seemed to tremble ecstatically, then they
+broke into sparkling ripples; the air quivered with
+a luminous beauty and a light flooded the little
+valley. Marley and Lavinia turned instinctively
+and looked up, and there, over the tops of the
+trees, black a moment before, now rounded domes
+of silver, rose the moon. They gazed at it a long
+time. Finally Marley turned and looked at
+Lavinia. Her white dress had become a drapery,
+her arms gleamed, her eyes were lustrous in the
+transfiguration of the moonlight. He could see
+that her lips were slightly parted, and her fingertips,
+dipped in the cool water over the gunwale of
+the boat, trailed behind them a long narrow thread
+of silver. They looked into each other’s eyes, and
+neither spoke. They drifted on. At last, Marley
+said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Lavinia!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She stirred.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you know—� he began, and then he stopped.
+“Don’t you know,� he went on, “can’t you see,
+that I love you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He rested his arms on the oars, and leaned over
+toward her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve loved you ever since that first night—do
+you remember? I know—I know I’m not good
+enough, but can’t you—can’t I—love you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He saw her eyelids fall, and as she turned and
+looked over the side of the boat, she put forth
+her hand, and he took it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They were awakened from the dream by a call,
+and after what seemed to Marley a long time, he
+finally remembered the voice as Lawrence’s.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We must go back,� he said reluctantly. “How
+long have we been gone?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t know,� said Lavinia. He heard her
+sigh.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley pulled the boat in the direction whence
+came the hallooing voice; he had quite lost all notion
+of their whereabouts. But presently they saw
+the lights of the pavilion, and then the dark figures
+of the men, and the white figures of the girls
+on shore.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>As they pulled up and Marley sprang out of the
+boat to the landing stage, Lawrence said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, where have you babes been?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley helped Lavinia out of the boat.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We’ve been rowing,� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We thought you’d been drowned,� said Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley and Lavinia drove home together in silence.
+In the light of the moon, the road was silver,
+and the fields with their shocks of wheat
+were gold.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER V<br /> <br />THE SERENADE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>“I don’t know what ails Lavinia,� said Mrs.
+Blair to her husband as he sat on the veranda
+after dinner the next day. The judge laid his
+paper in his lap, and looked up at his wife over
+his glasses.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Isn’t she well?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“M—yes,� replied Mrs. Blair, prolonging the
+word in her lack of conviction, “I guess so.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t you know?� the judge demanded in some
+impatience with her uncertainty.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She says she feels all right.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, then, what makes you think she isn’t?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, I don’t know,� replied Mrs. Blair, “she
+seems so quiet, that’s all.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Lavinia is not a girl given to excitement or
+demonstration,� said the judge, lapsing easily into
+the manner of speech he had cultivated on the
+bench.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, that’s so,� assented Mrs. Blair. “But
+she’s always cheerful and bright.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Is she gloomy?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, I wouldn’t exactly call it that, but she
+seems preoccupied—rather wistful I should say,
+yes—wistful.� She seemed pleased to have found
+the right word.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, she’s all right. That picnic last night may
+have fatigued her. I presume there was dancing.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t know that we should let her go out that
+way.� The judge took off his glasses and twirled
+them by their black cord while he gazed across the
+street, apparently at some dogs that were tumbling
+each other about in the Chenowiths’ yard. The
+judge had a subconscious anxiety that they would
+get into Mrs. Chenowith’s flower beds.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You and I used to go to them; they never
+hurt us,� argued Mrs. Blair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, I suppose not. But then—that was different.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair laughed lightly, and the laugh served
+to dissipate their cares. She went to the edge of
+the veranda and pulled a few leaves from
+the climbing rose-vine that grew there, and the
+judge put on his glasses and spread out his paper.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll take her out for a drive this afternoon,�
+said Mrs. Blair, turning to go indoors.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She’ll be all right,� said the judge, already
+deep in the political columns.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>That night at supper, the judge looked at Lavinia
+closely, and after a while he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You’re not eating, Lavinia. Don’t you feel
+well?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia turned to her father and smiled.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, I’m all right.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Her smile perplexed the judge.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You look pale,� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair glanced warningly at him the length
+of the table.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“My girl’s losing her color,� he forged ahead.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia dropped her eyelids, and a look of
+pain appeared in her face, causing it to grow paler.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Please don’t worry about me, papa,� she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair divined Lavinia’s dislike of this
+personal discussion. She tried to catch her
+husband’s eye again, but he was looking at Lavinia
+narrowly through his glasses.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Did you go riding this afternoon?� he asked
+as if he were examining a witness whom counsel
+had not drawn out properly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� Mrs. Blair hastened to say. “We drove
+out the Ludlow a long way.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She was riding last night, too,� said Connie.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Who with?� demanded Chad, turning to Connie
+with the challenge he always had ready for
+her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Who with?� retorted Connie. “Why, Glenn
+Marley, of course. Who else?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, what of it?� demanded Chad. “What’s
+it to you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, children, children!� protested Mrs. Blair,
+wearily. “Do give us a little peace!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, she began it,� said Chad.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Connie was eating savagely, but she whirled on
+Chad, speaking with difficulty because her mouth
+was filled with food:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You shut up, will you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Chad laughed with a contempt almost theatrical,
+waved his hand lightly and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Run away, little girl, run away.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair asked the judge why he did not correct
+his children, and though the sigh he gave expressed
+the hopelessness, as it seemed to him, of
+bringing the two younger members of his train
+into anything like decorous behavior, he laid his
+knife and fork in his plate.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“This must cease,� he said. “It is scandalous.
+One might conclude that you were the children of
+some family in Lighttown.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It is very trying,� said Mrs. Blair, acquiescing
+in her husband’s reproof. “They are just like fire
+and tow.� She said this quite impersonally and
+then turned to Connie: “If you can’t behave yourself,
+I’ll have to send you from the table.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That’s it!� wailed Connie. “That’s it! Blame
+everything on to me!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair looked severely at her, and Connie’s
+face reddened. She glanced angrily at her mother
+and began again:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge rapped the table smartly with his
+knuckles.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Now I want this stopped!� he said. “And
+right away. If it isn’t I’ll—� He was about to
+say if it wasn’t he would clear the room, as he was
+fond of saying whenever the idle spectators in his
+court showed signs of being human, but he did
+not finish his sentence. Chad was subdued and
+decorous, and Connie drooped her head, and began
+to gulp her food. Her eyes were filling with tears
+and the tears began to fall, slowly, one by one,
+splashing heavily into her plate.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia was trembling; she tried to control herself,
+tried to lift her glass, but when she did, her
+hand shook so that the water was likely to spill.
+This completed the undoing of her nerves, her
+eyes suddenly flooded with tears, and she snatched
+her handkerchief from her lap, rose precipitately,
+and hurried from the room, dropping her napkin
+as she went. They heard her going up the stairs,
+and presently the door of her room closed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Connie had followed Lavinia with her misty
+eyes as she left the table and now she too prepared
+to leave. She felt a sudden pity springing
+from her great love of her older sister, and her
+great pride in her, and she felt a contrition, though
+she tried to convict Chad, as the latest object of her
+fiery and erratic temper, by glowering at him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll go to her,� she said, “<em>I</em> can comfort her!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, stay where you are,� said her mother.
+“Just leave her alone.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The evening light of the summer day flooded
+into the dining-room; outside a robin was singing.
+In the room there was constraint and heavy silence,
+broken only by the slight clatter of the silver
+or the china. But after a while the judge spoke:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Did Lavinia go to the picnic with young Marley?�
+he asked. He regretted instantly that he
+had revived the topic that had given rise to the difficulty,
+but as it lay on the minds of all, it was impossible,
+just then, to escape its influence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I believe so,� said Mrs. Blair. “He really
+seems like a nice young man.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge scowled.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t know,� he said. “He’s in the office of
+Wade Powell—I suppose he is the one, isn’t he?�
+He thought it unbecoming that a judge should show
+an intimate knowledge of the relations of young
+men who were merely studying law.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir,� said Chad, maintaining his own dignity.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Everybody seems to speak well of him,� said
+Mrs. Blair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But I can’t quite reconcile that with his selecting
+Wade Powell as a preceptor. I would hardly
+consider his influence the best in the world, and I
+would imagine that Doctor Marley would hold to
+the same opinion.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Judge Blair spoke with a certain disappointment
+in Doctor Marley. He had gone to hear him
+preach once or twice, and found, as he said, an
+intellectual quality in his utterances that he missed
+in the sermons Mr. Hill had been preaching for
+twenty years in the Presbyterian church.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Perhaps he doesn’t know Wade Powell,� said
+Mrs. Blair. “Doctor Marley is comparatively a
+stranger here, you know.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, I presume that explains it. But—� he
+shook his head. He could not forgive any one who
+showed respect for Wade Powell. “Powell has little
+business except a certain criminal practice, and
+now and then a personal injury case.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Is there anything wrong in personal injury
+cases?� asked Mrs. Blair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge looked at his wife in surprise.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I suppose you know, don’t you,� he said,
+“that such cases are taken on contingent fees?�
+He spoke with the natural judicial contempt of the
+poor litigant.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Of course, dear,� she replied, “I shall not undertake
+to defend Mr. Powell. He’s a wild sort.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes; a drunkard, practically,� said Judge
+Blair, “and an infidel besides. The moral environment
+there is certainly not one for a young
+man—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Is he really an <em>infidel</em>?� asked Mrs. Blair,
+abruptly dropping her knife and fork.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� replied the judge with the judicial affectation
+of fairness, “he’s at least a free-thinker.
+Perhaps agnostic were the better word. That is
+one reason why I can not understand Doctor Marley’s
+permitting his son to be associated with him.
+It seems to me to argue a weakness, or a lack of
+observation in the doctor, as it does a certain depravity
+of taste in his son.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They discussed Marley until the meal was done,
+and Connie and Chad had gone out of doors.
+Judge Blair followed his wife into the sitting-room.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m worried, I’ll admit,� said the judge.
+“What could it have been that so distressed her?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh well, the children’s little quarrels were too
+much for her nerves.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I suppose so.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They were silent and thoughtful, sitting together,
+rocking gently in their chairs as the twilight stole
+into the room.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s too bad he’s going to study law,� the judge
+said after a while.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He shook his gray head dubiously.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But you always say that about any one who’s
+going to study law,� Mrs. Blair argued. “You
+even said it about George Halliday when his father
+took him into partnership.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, it’s bad business nowadays unless a
+young man wants to go to the city, and it’s hard
+to get a foothold there.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But you began as a lawyer,� she urged, as
+though he had finished as something else.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It was different in my day.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And you’ve always done well in the law,� Mrs.
+Blair went on, ignoring his distinction.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh yes,� the judge said in a tone that expressed
+a sense of individual exception. “But I went on
+the bench just in time to save my bacon. There’s
+no telling what might have become of us if I had remained
+in the practice.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They were silent long enough for him to feel
+the relief he had always found in his salaried position,
+and then he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You don’t suppose—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, certainly not!� his wife hastened to assure
+him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I think it would be well, perhaps, to
+watch her closely. I don’t just like the notion.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But his father is—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, but after all, we really know nothing
+about him.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That is true.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And then Lavinia’s so young.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’d go to her.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“After a while,� Mrs. Blair said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They heard steps on the veranda, and then the
+voices of Mr. and Mrs. Chenowith who had run
+across, as Mrs. Chenowith said, when Mrs. Blair
+met them in the darkness that filled the wide hall,
+to see how they all were. The Chenowiths begged
+Mrs. Blair not to light the gas; they preferred
+to sit out of doors. The Chenowiths remained all
+the evening. When they had gone, the judge drew
+the chairs indoors, while Mrs. Blair rolled up
+the wide strip of red carpet that covered the steps
+of the veranda. And when they had gone up to
+their room, Mrs. Blair stole across to Lavinia,
+softly closing the door behind her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She found the girl stretched on her bed, her face
+buried in the pillows, which were wet with her
+tears.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What is troubling my little girl?� she asked.
+She sat down on the side of the bed, and lightly
+stroked Lavinia’s soft hair. The girl stirred, and
+drew herself close to her mother. Mrs. Blair did
+not speak, but continued to stroke her hair, and
+waited. Presently Lavinia cried out:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, mama! mama!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And then she was in her mother’s arms, weeping
+on her mother’s breast.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve never kept anything from you before,
+mama,� Lavinia cried.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No,� Mrs. Blair whispered. “Can’t you tell
+mama now?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And then with her mother’s arms about her Lavinia
+told her all. When she had finished she
+lay tranquilly. Mrs. Blair was relieved and yet
+her troubles had but grown the more complicated.
+She saw all the intricate elements with which she
+would have to deal, and she quailed before them,
+realizing what tact would be required of her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The coming of love should be a time of joy,
+dear,� she said presently. Even in the darkness,
+she could see the white blur of Lavinia’s face
+change its expression. A smile had touched it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It should, shouldn’t it, mama?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, indeed.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But I never kept anything from you before.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair laughed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But you kept this only a day, dear. That
+doesn’t count.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It was a long day.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I know, sweetheart.� The mother kissed her,
+and they were silent a while.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I do love him so,� said Lavinia, presently.
+“And you’ll love him too, mama, I know you will.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m sure of that, dear.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But what of papa?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair felt the girl grow tense in her arms.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That will all come right in time,� said Mrs.
+Blair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Will you tell him?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Not just now, dear. We’ll have this for a little
+secret of our own. There’s plenty of time. You
+are young, you know, and so is Glenn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I love to hear you call him Glenn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair remained with Lavinia until she had
+tucked her into her bed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Just my little child,� the mother whispered
+over the girl. “Just my little child.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, always that,� said Lavinia. And her
+mother kissed her again and again, and left her in
+the dark.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When Mrs. Blair rejoined her husband, he laid
+down the book he always read before retiring, and
+looked up with the question in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She’s just a little nervous and tired,� Mrs.
+Blair said. “She’ll be all right in the morning.
+I think it best not to notice her.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you think we’d better have Doctor Pierce
+see her?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, not at all!� Mrs. Blair laughed, and the
+judge, reassured, went back to his book.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They were awakened from their first doze that
+night by voices singing.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s some of the darkies from Gooseville,� said
+Mrs. Blair. “They’re out serenading.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� said the judge. “It is sweet to fall
+asleep by.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>At the sound of the singing Lavinia had crept
+from her bed and crouched in her white night-dress
+before the open window; the shutters were closed.
+She heard the melody from far down the street.
+The singing ceased, then began again, drawing
+nearer and nearer. Presently she heard the fall of
+feet on the sidewalk before the house, and the low
+tones of voices in hurried consultation. And then
+a clear baritone voice rose, and she heard it begin
+the song:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Oh the sun shines bright in my old Kentucky home,</div>
+      <div class='line'>’Tis summer, the darkies are gay.�</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c003'>She knew the voice. Her heart swelled and the
+tears came again and there alone in the fragrant
+night she opened her arms and stretched them out
+into the darkness.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER VI<br /> <br />LOVE’S ARREARS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>The days following the picnic had been no
+easier for Marley than they had been for
+Lavinia. As he looked back on that night, a
+fear took hold of him; the whole experience, the
+most wonderful of his life, grew more and more unreal.
+Much as he longed to see Lavinia again, he
+was afraid to go to her home; he wondered whether
+he should write her a note; perhaps she would
+think him false, perhaps she would think he had
+already forgotten her; the idea tormented him; he
+did not know what to do. He had seen her but
+once, and then at a distance; the Blairs’ well-known
+surrey had stopped in the middle of the Square,
+and George Halliday stood leaning into the carriage
+chatting with Lavinia. Marley had but a
+glimpse of Lavinia’s face, pink in the shadow of
+the surrey-top. As they drove away she had
+turned with a smile and a nod at Halliday. The
+sight had affected Marley strangely.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He felt himself so weak and incapable in this
+affair that he longed to discuss it with some one,
+and on Sunday afternoon he found his mother at
+her window with the <em>Christian Advocate</em>, which
+replaced, in her case, the nap nearly every one
+else took at that hour.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How old was father when you were married,
+mother?� he began.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He spoke out of that curious ignorance of the
+lives of their parents so common to children; he
+had never been able to realize his parents as having
+separate and independent existences before his
+own. Mrs. Marley laid her paper by, and a smile
+came to her face.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He was twenty-two,� she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Just my age,� observed Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Marley looked up hastily.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You’re not thinking of getting married, are
+you, Glenn?� she asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No.� he said with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“My goodness! You’re just a boy!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But I’m as old as father was.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Y—es,� said Mrs. Marley, “but then—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But then, what?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That was different.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley smiled.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Had father entered the ministry yet?� he said
+presently.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, we were married in his first year. He
+had been teaching school, and the fall he was admitted
+to the conference he was sent out to the
+Gibsonburg circuit in Green County. We were
+married in the spring.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Her face flushed, and she turned the pages of her
+paper with a dreamy deliberation.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Ah, but your father was a handsome young
+man, Glenn!� she said presently.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He’s handsome yet,� Marley replied with the
+pride he always felt in his father. And then he
+asked:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Did he have any money?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� she said, and she laughed, “just a hundred
+dollars!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“A hundred dollars! Well, he had nerve, didn’t
+he? And so did you!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We had more than that,� said Mrs. Marley,
+solemnly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked at his mother suddenly. Her
+face seemed for an instant to be transfigured in
+the afternoon glow.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He might have told her then; he was on the
+point of it, but a footfall on the brick walk outside
+caused him to look up, and he saw Lawrence
+coming into the yard. Lawrence beckoned him and
+he went out.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Come on,� said Lawrence. “Let’s go out to
+Carters’.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked a question at him, and the smile
+which Lawrence never could repress long at a time
+was twitching at the corners of his large mouth.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She’ll be there.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How do you know?� asked Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lawrence smiled a little more significantly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When they got to the Carters’ they found Mayme
+and Lavinia together in the yard, strolling about
+in apparent aimlessness, yet with an expectancy
+in their manner that belied its quality of mere idleness.
+In the look Lavinia gave him all of Marley’s
+perplexities vanished. Lawrence stood by with a
+grin on his red face, and Mayme Carter’s eyes
+danced. She and Lawrence assumed almost immediately
+an elder, paternal manner, and looked on
+at the lovers’ meeting as from far heights that
+were to be reached only after all such youthful
+experiences had long since become possible in retrospect
+alone. Still smiling, they edged away, and
+left the lovers alone.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Is it really true?� Marley asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia colored a little as she smiled up at him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And you are happy?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“So happy!� she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And then all at once a cloud came over her eyes.
+She closed them an instant.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What is it?� he asked in alarm.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Nothing.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Tell me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s nothing.� She was smiling again, as if to
+show that her happiness was complete. “See?�
+Her eyes were blinking rapidly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m glad,� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>As they turned and walked across the yard Marley
+looked at her nervously.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you know,� he said, “that I couldn’t
+remember what color your eyes were?� He spoke
+with all the virtue there is in confession.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What color are they?� she asked, suddenly closing
+her eyes.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“They’re blue,� Marley replied, saying the word
+ecstatically, as if it had a new, wonderful meaning
+for him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Connie says they’re green.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Connie?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, don’t you know? She’s my younger sister.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh.� He did not know any of her family, and
+the baffling sense of unreality came over him again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You’ll know her,� said Lavinia, and added
+thoughtfully: “I hope she’ll like you. Then there’s
+Chad, my little brother.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was growing alarmed at the intricacies
+of an introduction into a large family, the characters
+of which were as yet like the characters in
+the first few chapters of a novel, but he thought it
+would not reflect on him to admit that he did not
+know Chad, seeing that he was merely a little
+brother.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He admires you immensely,� said Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Does he?� said Marley, eagerly, instantly loving
+Chad. “How does he know me?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He says you were a football player at college.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley laughed a modest deprecation of his own
+prowess.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But I knew your voice,� said Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Did you? When did you hear it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“As if you didn’t know!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Honestly,� he protested. “Tell me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, that night that you serenaded me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He was regretting that she had outdone him in
+observation, but she suddenly looked up and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, Glenn! What a beautiful voice you have!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It was the first time she had ever called him
+Glenn, and it produced in him a wonderful sensation.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They had come to a little bench, and, sitting
+there, they could only look at each other and smile.
+Marley noticed that a little line of freckles ran up
+over the bridge of Lavinia’s nose. They were very
+beautiful, he thought, and yet he had never heard
+of freckles as one of the elements of a woman’s
+beauty. Then he leaned back and looked about the
+yard.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He had always thought of it as it seemed that
+first night, enormous, enchanted, with wide terraces
+and fountains, and white statues gleaming
+through the green shrubbery. But now he saw no
+terraces, no statuary, no fountains, and no wide
+lawns; nothing but a cramped little yard crowded
+with bushes and trees, and surrounded by a weathered
+fence that had lost several pickets. He looked
+around behind the house where he had fancied long
+stables with big iron lamps over the doors, but
+now he saw nothing but an old woodshed and a
+barn on the rear end of the lot. The cracks in the
+barn were so wide that he could see the light of day
+between them as through a kinetoscope. He heard
+a horse stamping fretfully at the flies.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It was here,� he said, “that I first saw you.�
+He did not speak his whole thought.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� she answered. “I remember.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That was a wonderful night, the most wonderful
+of my life, except the one at the lake.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He drew close to her. “I loved you at first
+sight,� he whispered.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Did you?� She looked at him in reverence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,—from the very first moment. When you
+came into the room, I knew that—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That you were the woman I had always loved
+and waited for; that I had found my ideal. And
+yet they say we never discover our ideals in this
+life!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He laughed at this philosophical absurdity.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What did you think then?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She cast down her eyes, and probed the turf
+with the toe of her little shoe.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I loved you then too.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He gazed at her tenderly, rapturously.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Isn’t it wonderful?� he said presently, “this
+love of ours? It came to us all at once!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She looked at him suddenly. Her short upper
+lip was raised.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It <em>was</em> love at first sight, wasn’t it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes. We were intended for each other.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They sat there, and went over that first night of
+their meeting and that other night at Greenwood
+Lake, finding each moment some new and remarkable
+feature of their love, something that proved
+its divine and providential quality, something that
+convinced them that no one before had ever known
+such a remarkable experience. They marveled at
+the mystery of it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But at last they must return to practical questions,
+and they resumed the account of their family
+relations. Marley told Lavinia about his father
+and mother, about his sister who had died, and then
+about his grandparents, and his uncles and aunts.
+He told her even of Dolly, behind whom she had
+driven to Greenwood Lake, and of his father’s
+love for fast horses, a love which sometimes drew
+upon his father the criticism parishioners ever have
+ready for their pastor. And he told her about his
+home, and how frequently his mother had to entertain
+transient ministers, and how the church laid
+missionary work upon her, until he feared the
+heathen would unwittingly break her down.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He was not conscious of it, but he felt it necessary
+to bring up all at once the arrears of her
+knowledge of him and his family, of all his affairs.
+Meeting as they had so strangely, so romantically,
+and falling in love at first sight, according
+to the prearrangement of the ages, they could
+excuse this otherwise strange ignorance of each
+other’s lives. They bemoaned all the years they
+had been compelled to live without knowing each
+other, and their one quarrel with fate was that
+they had had to wait until so late in life before
+meeting; and yet they finally consoled themselves
+for this deprivation by discovering that they had
+really always known and loved each other. They
+were now able to compare strange experiences of
+soul and, in the new light they possessed, to
+identify them as communings of their spirits
+across time and space.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve always believed somehow in the Sweden-borgians,�
+Lavinia said, “but I never really understood
+before what they meant by affinities.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They looked at each other in a silence that
+became somber, and was broken at last by Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve told mama,� she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You have?� Marley gasped.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And she—?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She was sweet about it. She will love you,
+I know.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley felt a sudden love for Lavinia’s mother.
+And then his fear returned at Lavinia’s sinister,</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But what?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She says we must wait.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh!� Marley said with a relief. He felt their
+present happiness so great that he could afford
+to waive any claim on the future. And yet he
+was troubled; he felt that somehow a depression
+lay on Lavinia. He wondered what its cause could
+be. Presently it came to him suddenly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And your father?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He doesn’t know—yet.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Will he—?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He’s very—� she hesitated, not liking to seem
+disloyal to her father. Finally she said “peculiar,�
+and then further qualified it by adding
+“sometimes.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The sadness that lies so near to the joy in lovers’
+hearts came over them, and yet they found a kind
+of joy in that too.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll go to him, of course,� Marley said presently.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, you’re so brave!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But this tribute did not tend to reassure Marley.
+It rather suggested terrors he had not thought of.
+Yet in the necessity of maintaining the manly
+spirit he forced a laugh.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Of course,� he continued, “I’ll go to him. I
+meant to from the first.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But not just yet,� she pleaded.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� he yielded, not at all unwillingly, “it
+shall be as you say.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He could not dispel her sadness, nor could he
+conquer his own. A little tremor ran through her,
+and he felt it electrically along his arm.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What is it, sweetheart?� he pleaded. “Tell
+me, won’t you? We must have no secrets, you
+know.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, Glenn,� she broke out, “I’m afraid!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She spoke with intuitive apprehension.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Of what?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Our happiness!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He tried to laugh again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you think it will ever be?� she asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I know it,� he said earnestly. “I have nothing
+but faith—our love is strong enough for anything!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You comfort me,� she said simply.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia spent the night with Mayme Carter, and
+the house sounded until long after midnight with
+the low, monotonous drone of their confidential
+voices.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER VII<br /> <br />AN UNNECESSARY OPPOSITION</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Marley heard on Monday evening that Judge
+Blair had gone to Cincinnati, and the news filled
+him with a high if somewhat culpable joy. He
+found Lavinia and her mother on the veranda,
+and Lavinia said, with a grave simplicity:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Mama, this is Glenn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m very glad to have you come,� said Mrs.
+Blair, trying instantly to rob the situation of the
+embarrassment she felt it must have for the
+young man.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley could not say a word, but he put all his
+gratitude in the pressure he gave Mrs. Blair’s hand.
+The light that came from the hall was dim, and
+though Mrs. Blair could see that Marley was
+straight and carried himself well, his face was
+blurred by the shadows. She turned to Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Will you bring out another chair, dear, or
+would you prefer to go indoors?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Then, seeing an advantage in this latter alternative,
+she decided for them:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Perhaps we’d better go in, I fear it’s cool
+out here.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She held back the screen door and Lavinia
+whisked excitedly into the hall. Mrs. Blair led
+the way to the parlor and sent Lavinia for a match.
+Then, turning to Marley, waiting there in the darkness,
+she said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She has told me, Glenn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley felt something tender, maternal in her
+voice; the way she spoke his name affected him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But she is young, very young; she is just a
+girl. We wish, of course, for nothing but her happiness,
+and you must be patient, very patient. It
+must not be, if it is to be, for a long time. What
+does your own mother think of it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I haven’t told her.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You haven’t!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No. I felt I hardly had the right yet—not
+before I spoke to Judge Blair, you know. I think
+I shall speak to him just as soon as he gets home.�
+He spoke impulsively; until that moment he had
+been thrusting the thought from him, but Mrs.
+Blair’s manner led him into confidences. In the
+immediate fear that he had been precipitant, he
+looked to her for help; she seemed the sort of woman
+to wish to save others all the trouble she
+could, one whose life was full of sacrifices, none
+the less noble, perhaps, because she made so little
+of them herself. But a perplexity showed in her
+eyes and before she could reply, Lavinia was
+back. With an intimate, domestic impulse Lavinia
+pressed the match into Marley’s hand, and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You do it; I can’t reach.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley groped with his upheld hand, and when
+Lavinia guided him to the middle of the room, he
+lighted the gas. Mrs. Blair looked at him for a moment
+and Lavinia, standing by, as if awaiting her
+decision, glowed with happiness. Mrs. Blair’s
+smile completed the fond, maternal impression
+Marley had somehow felt when she was standing
+by him in the darkness. Her full matronly figure,
+even in the tendency to corpulence of her middle
+years, had preserved its graceful lines; and Marley
+regretted the disappearance of this wholesome,
+cheerful woman as she passed out of the room.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Judge Blair got home from Cincinnati on Sunday
+morning, worn by his work, and maddened by
+the din of the city to which he was so unaccustomed.
+Walking up the familiar streets, he had been
+glad of their shade and that pervading sense of a
+Sunday that still remains a Sabbath in Macochee.
+He had been a little piqued, at first, because his
+wife had not met him at the train, though she
+had not, to be sure, known that he was coming.
+She had gone to Sunday-school, and Connie gave
+him his breakfast—that is, she sat at the table
+with him, watching him eat and answering the
+questions he put to her about the happenings in
+Macochee while he had been away.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It was not strange that Connie should talk mostly,
+after she yielded to the gnawing temptation to
+tell him at all, of the nightly visits Marley had
+made to the house. She did this in a certain resentment
+she felt with Lavinia, a resentment that
+came from an annoying jealousy she was beginning
+to have of Marley, as if, in installing himself in
+her sister’s heart, he had evicted all other affections
+from it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge, with his constant affectation of what
+he considered the judicial attitude of mind, tried
+to weigh Connie’s somewhat prejudiced evidence
+impartially, but he was troubled and annoyed that
+the peace he had been looking forward to all the
+week should be jeopardized immediately on his
+coming home.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It was not until afternoon that he had an opportunity
+to question his wife, and he began with a
+severity in his attitude that had as its fundamental
+cause, as much as anything else, her failure to
+meet him at the train that morning, and her remaining
+to church after Sunday-school.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What do you know about this business between
+Lavinia and that young Marley?� he asked. “It
+seems to have developed rapidly during my absence.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, Connie has been talking to you, I suppose!�
+laughed Mrs. Blair. “You know that Connie is
+apt to be sensational.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Judge Blair eyed his wife narrowly. Connie
+was his favorite child, though he would not, of
+course, admit as much, and he was ever ready to
+spring to her defense.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She has very bright eyes,� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, now, dear,� said Mrs. Blair, “don’t overestimate
+this thing. Lavinia’s nothing but a child.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That’s just the point. Has the young man been
+here much?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, he was here quite often—several evenings,
+in fact.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Humph! He seems to have taken advantage of
+the sunshine of my absence to make his hay.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t do him an injustice. He didn’t meet
+Lavinia until just about the time you went away.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, we’ll see about it,� said the judge, darkly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Now see here, Will, don’t make the matter serious
+by an unnecessary opposition; don’t drive
+the children into a position where they will consider
+themselves persecuted lovers.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair had not until that instant thought of
+this argument, and she was so pleased with it, as
+justifying her own course with the children, as she
+had artfully called them, that she pressed it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, don’t do that. Just let them alone. They’re
+as likely as not to outgrow it; that is, if there is
+anything between them to outgrow. They’ll probably
+imagine themselves in love a dozen times before
+either of them is married.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t talk of marriage!� said the judge, with
+a little shudder.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair, who had so well dispelled her own
+fears, could laugh at her husband’s.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Just let them alone,� she said; “or leave it to
+me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� said the judge peevishly, “leave it to
+you. You’d probably aid and abet them.� And
+then, instantly regretting his ill humor, he added
+hastily: “You’re so kind-hearted.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair kissed his white hair gently and
+gave his cheek a little pat.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You’d better take a nap,� she said.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER VIII<br /> <br />A JUDICIAL DECISION</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>The judge refused to take a nap, though
+when he sat down on the veranda he did take
+one, lying back in his chair with one of the
+many sections of the Sunday paper spread over
+his face. It was from this somewhat undignified
+posture that he was aroused by a step; he started
+up hastily.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I beg your pardon,� said the young man, who
+stood on the steps twirling his straw hat round and
+round in his hands. The young man went on with
+an anxious smile:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“This is Judge Blair, I presume? My name is
+Marley—Glenn Marley.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>If Marley had known that there were men then
+in the Ohio penitentiary serving terms that were
+longer by years than they would have been had
+Judge Blair digested his breakfast, or been allowed
+to finish his afternoon nap, he would have chosen
+another hour to press his suit. But he had youth’s
+sublime confidence, and its abiding faith in the abstract
+quality of justice. He had dreaded this
+moment, but it had forced itself upon his keen
+conscience as a duty, and when he heard that morning
+that Judge Blair had returned he resolved to
+have it out at once.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“May I have a word with you?� he asked, advancing
+a little.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge nodded, but slightly, as if it were
+necessary for him, as a fattening man advanced in
+middle life, to conserve his energies. His nod
+seemed to include not only an assent, however reluctant,
+but a permission as well, to take the other
+chair that stood, all ready to rock comfortably, on
+the veranda. Marley took the chair but he did not
+rock, nor did he yield himself to it, but sat somewhat
+tensely on its very edge.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s warm this afternoon, isn’t it?� he said, trying
+to keep up his smile. He felt hopeless about it,
+but the thought, darting through his mind, that Lavinia
+was near, braced his purpose. The judge sat
+hunched in his chair, with his short white hair
+tumbled rather picturesquely, and his chin low in
+his collar. His lips were set firmly, his brows contracted.
+He breathed heavily, and on his strong
+aquiline nose, Marley could see tiny drops of
+perspiration.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I have come,� said Marley, “to speak to you,
+Judge Blair, on a matter of, that is, importance.
+That is, I have come to ask you if I might—ah—pay
+my addresses to your daughter.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley thought this form of putting it rather
+fine, and he was glad that that much of it, at least,
+was over. And yet, much as he liked this old-fashioned
+formula about paying his addresses, he
+instantly felt its inadequacy, and so nerved himself
+to do it all over.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I mean Lavinia,� he said hurriedly, as if to
+correct any error of identification he might have
+led the judge into. “I want to marry her.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge, still breathing heavily, looked at
+Marley out of his narrowed eyes.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You know,� Marley said, in an explanatory
+way, “I love her.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He waited then, but the judge was motionless,
+even to the hand that hung at his side over the arm
+of his chair, still holding his paper. Now and
+then, at what seemed to be long, unequal intervals,
+his eyelids fell slowly in heavy winks.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How long have you and Lavinia known each
+other?� he asked finally.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I met her several weeks ago, out at Captain
+Carter’s. But I did not see her again, that is to
+speak to her, until about a week ago. In one way
+I have known her, you might say, but a week; yet I
+feel that I have known her a long time, always, in
+fact. I—I—well, I loved her at first sight.� Marley
+dropped his face at this speech, for it seemed
+that he had made it too sentimental; he had a feeling
+that the judge so regarded it. He sat and
+picked at the braids of straw in his hat.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And have you spoken to her?� asked the judge.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh yes!� said Marley, looking up quickly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And she—?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She loves me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge closed his eyes as if in pain. Then
+he stirred, the paper dropped from his fingers, and
+he drew himself up in his chair, as if to deal with
+the matter.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How old are you, Mr. Marley?� he inquired.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I am twenty-two,� said Marley, confidently, as
+if this maturity must incline the judge in his favor.
+“I cast my first vote for McKinley.� He
+thought this, too, would help matters, and possibly
+it did.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You have completed your education?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I graduated this summer from the Ohio Wesleyan.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And what are you doing now, or proposing to
+do?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Just now, I am studying law,� he announced.
+“I’m going to make the law my profession.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked up with a high faith in this final
+appeal, but even that did not impress the judge as
+Marley felt a tribute thus delicately implied should
+affect him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You are reading with a preceptor, I take it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir, in Mr. Powell’s office.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Judge Blair looked at Marley as if he were deciding
+what to do with him. After he had looked
+a while he gazed off across the street, drumming
+with his finger-tips on the arm of his chair. Presently,
+without turning, and still gazing abstractedly
+into the distance—and in that instant Marley remembered
+that he had seen the judge stare at the
+ceiling of the court room in exactly the same way
+while sentencing a culprit—he began to speak.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Lavinia is yet very young, Mr. Marley,� he
+said, “with no knowledge of the world, and, perhaps,
+little of the state of her own mind. You too,
+are young, very young, and as yet without an occupation.
+You are, it is true, studying law, but it
+will be three years before you can be admitted, and
+many years after that before you can command a
+practice that would warrant you in marrying. In
+this day, the outlook for the young lawyer is not encouraging.
+I do not think I would wish a son of
+mine to choose that profession; the great changes
+that have transpired, and are transpiring in our industrial
+development, have greatly reduced the
+chances of the young lawyer’s success. The practice
+in the smaller county-seats, like our own, for
+instance, has almost entirely vanished. The settlement
+of titles to real estate, so lucrative a branch of
+the law in the early days of my own practice, has
+deprived the later practitioners of that source of
+revenue; the field of criminal law has become
+narrowed, unremunerative and almost disreputable.
+The corporation work can be handled by one or two
+firms in each town, and all that seems to be left is
+the prosecution of personal injury suits, and that
+is a work that hardly appeals to the man of dignity
+and self-respect. The large cities have a wider, I
+might say, the only field, but there the young lawyer
+must spend years of the hardest, most unremitting
+toil before he can come to anything like success.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge paused. He had not intended to
+speak at such length, but the habit of the courts was
+on him, and once started, he found his own didacticism
+so pleasing to himself, that it was with reluctance
+that he paused at all. He might not have
+stopped when he did, but gone on almost indefinitely,
+as he did when he delivered what were always
+spoken of as his beautiful charges to juries,
+had he not recalled, with something like a pang of
+resentment, that the happiness of his own, instead
+of another’s child, lay at the bottom of all this. He
+turned then to face Marley. The young man was
+sitting there, his eyes wide, and his face long. The
+color that flamed in it when he first appeared, was
+now quite gone. It was gray and cold instead.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You will see, Mr. Marley,� the judge resumed,
+“that you are hardly in a position to ask for my
+daughter’s hand. Of course,� the judge allowed a
+smile to soften somewhat the fixity of his lips, “I
+appreciate your manliness in coming to me, and I
+do not want to be understood as making any reflections
+upon, or in the least questioning, your character,
+your worth, or the honor of your intentions.
+But in view of your youth and of Lavinia’s, and in
+view of your own, as yet, unsettled position in life,
+you must see how impossible it is that anything like
+an engagement should subsist between you. I say
+this because I wish only for Lavinia’s happiness.
+I may say that I am not unmindful of your happiness,
+too, and I esteem it my duty to reach the conclusions
+I have just presented to you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And I—I can not even see her?� stammered
+Marley, in his despair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I have not said that,� the judge said. “I shall
+always be pleased to extend to you the hospitality
+of my house, of course; but I would not consider it
+necessary for you to see her regularly, or intimately,
+and I certainly would not want you to
+monopolize her society to the exclusion of other young
+men with whom she has been in the habit of associating.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley sat there, after this long harangue, with
+his head downcast. He sat and turned his hat round
+and round. At last he did look up with an appeal
+in his eyes, but when he saw that the judge was sitting
+there, as he had at first, sunk in his chair,
+breathing heavily and looking at him out of those
+sluggish eyes, he arose. He stood a moment, and
+looked off across the street somewhere, anywhere.
+Then he smote one hand lightly into the other,
+turned, and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well—good afternoon, Judge Blair.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Good afternoon, Mr. Marley,� the judge replied.
+He watched Marley go down the walk and
+out of the gate.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER IX<br /> <br />A FILIAL REBUKE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Father!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Judge Blair turned and saw Lavinia standing
+in the wide front door. Her face was red, her
+eyes were flashing, her arms hung straight and
+tense at her sides.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge stirred uneasily in his chair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh!� she cried, rigidly clenching her little fists.
+“What have you done! You have sent him away!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Come here, my daughter,� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia moved toward him, halting each moment,
+then taking a few nervous steps forward.
+At last she stood before him, challenging, defiant.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Sit down, Lavinia, and listen,� implored the
+judge.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You have sent him away!� she repeated. “You
+were harsh and cruel and unkind to him!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Lavinia!� cried the judge, flushing with the
+anger parents call by different names. There was
+now a peremptory quality in his tone. But the
+girl did not heed him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, how could you!� she went on, “how could
+you! Think how you must have wounded him!
+You not only reproached him with being poor, but
+you discouraged him as to his prospects! Do you
+think I cared for that? Do you think I couldn’t
+have waited? Do you think I can’t wait anyhow?
+What had you when you proposed to mama? You
+were poor—you had no prospects; you had no
+more right—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Lavinia! Lavinia!� the judge commanded,
+grasping the arms of his chair in an effort to rise.
+“You are beside yourself! You don’t know what
+you are saying!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And you pretended to be doing it all for my
+happiness, too! Oh! oh! oh!� Her anger vented
+itself impotently in these exclamations, and then
+her mother, white and alarmed, appeared in the
+doorway behind her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Lavinia,� she said quietly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The girl trembled violently, then whirled about,
+pressed her hands to her face, and ran in, brushing
+by her mother in the doorway. Mrs. Blair glanced
+after her irresolutely. Then she went to her husband.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Be calm, dear,� she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge sank back in his chair and looked at
+her in amazement.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What has happened?� She drew the empty
+chair up and sat down in it. She leaned forward
+and took one of his hands, and pressed it between
+both of her own. She waited for the judge to
+speak.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I hardly know,� he began. “I never heard Lavinia
+break out so.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You must remember how excited and overwrought
+she is,� Mrs. Blair exclaimed. “You must
+make allowances.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I didn’t know the girl had such spirit,� he continued.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair smiled rather wanly, and stroked her
+husband’s hand. It was very cold and moist, and
+it trembled.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I had no idea it was so serious,� he went on, as
+if summing up the catalogue of his surprises.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Tell me how it all came about,� said Mrs.
+Blair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Marley was here, first,� the judge began. He
+had to pause, for he seemed to find it difficult to
+catch his breath. “It was a great surprise to me;
+it was very painful.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge withdrew his hand and wiped his
+brow. Then he gazed again as he had done before,
+across the street. Mrs. Blair, though eying him
+closely and with concern, waited patiently.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I didn’t wish to wound him,� the judge resumed,
+speaking as much to himself as to her. “I
+hope I said nothing harsh; he really was quite
+manly about it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He paused again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I presume I may have seemed cold, unfeeling,
+unsympathetic,� he went on; and then as if he
+needed to reassure and justify himself, he added,
+“but of course it was impossible, utterly impossible.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>After another pause, he drew a deep breath, and
+as if he had already outlined his whole interview
+with Marley, continued:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And then Lavinia appeared; she must have
+heard it all, standing there in the hall.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge leaned heavily against the back of his
+big chair; his face was drawn, his wrinkles were
+deeper than they had been, and he wore an aspect
+of weariness and pain. His form, too, seemed to
+have shrunk, and he sat there in an almost helpless
+mass, limp and inert.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I am only afraid, dear,� Mrs. Blair said
+quietly, “that we have taken this thing too seriously.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Possibly,� he said. “But it is serious, very
+serious. I don’t know what is to be done.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We must have patience,� Mrs. Blair counseled.
+“It will require all our delicacy and tact, now.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Perhaps you had better go in to her,� the judge
+said presently. “Poor little girl; she is passing
+through the deep waters. And I tried to act only
+for her interest and happiness.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair arose.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She will see that, dear, in time.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I hope so,� said the judge. Mrs. Blair went up
+to Lavinia’s room, and listened for a moment at the
+closed door. She heard a voice, low and indistinct,
+but she knew it for the voice of Connie, and she
+could tell from its tone that the little girl was trying
+in her way to comfort and console her sister.
+So she stepped away, silently, almost stealthily,
+going on tiptoe.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge sat on the veranda all the afternoon.
+He scarcely moved, and never once did he pick up
+the Sunday paper. Now and then he bowed, in his
+dignified way, to some acquaintance passing in the
+street. The Chenowiths came out on to their front
+porch, evidently hot and stupefied from their Sunday
+afternoon naps and ready now for the cool refreshment
+of the evening breeze they could usually
+rely on in Macochee with the coming of the evening.
+The judge bowed to them, and he tried to
+put into his bow an indolent unconcern, lest the
+Chenowiths should penetrate his manner and discover
+the trouble that lay on his heart. The Chenowiths
+had gone to the end of their porch, and the
+judge could hear their laughter. He thought it
+strange and unnatural that any one should laugh.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He decided that he would review this whole affair
+of Lavinia’s love calmly and judicially. He
+went back to the beginning of Marley’s visit, trying
+to see wherein he himself had been in the wrong,
+then he went over the hot scene with Lavinia.
+He could not recover from his surprise at this;
+that Lavinia, who was usually so gentle, so mild,
+so unselfish, should have given way to such anger
+was incomprehensible. He had always said that
+she had her mother’s disposition. He could see
+her, all the time, distinctly, as she had stood there,
+in a rage he had never known her to indulge before,
+and yet, as he looked at the image of her that
+was in his mind, and recalled certain expressions,
+certain attitudes, certain tones of voice, it came
+over him all at once that she was exactly as her
+mother had been at her age, though he could not
+reconcile Lavinia’s mood with the resemblance.
+Then he went back to his own days of courtship,
+with their emotions, their uncertainties, their
+doubts and illusions. They seemed a long way off.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He was trying to think calmly and logically,
+but he found that he could not then control his
+mind, for suddenly he saw Lavinia as a little girl,
+with her mother kneeling before her, shaking out
+and straightening her starched frock. And with
+this thought came the revelation, sudden,
+irresistible, that Lavinia was no longer a child as, with
+the habit of the happy years, he had thought of
+her, up to that very afternoon, in fact, until an
+hour ago, and he bowed before the changes that
+hour had wrought. He accepted the conviction
+now that he himself had grown old. He forgot
+his purpose to probe to its first cause this unhappiness
+that had come to him; he saw that what he
+mourned was the loss of a child, the loss of his
+own youth.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He glanced across at the Chenowiths again,
+and they seemed remote from him, of another generation
+in fact, though but a few moments before
+he had looked on them as contemporaries. And
+then suddenly there came to him the fear that Mr.
+Chenowith might run over to chat with him, as was
+his habit, and the judge hastily rose, and almost
+surreptitiously went off the end of the porch and
+around into the side yard. Under the new impression
+of age that he had grown into, he walked
+slowly, with a senile stoop, and dragged his feet
+as he went. He wandered about in the yard for
+a long while, looking at the shrubs and bushes and
+trees he had planted himself so long ago, when he
+was young. It occurred to him that here in this
+garden he would potter around, and pass his declining
+years.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He remained in the yard until his wife came
+to call him in to the supper she had prepared, in
+the Sunday evening absence of the hired girl, and
+with an effort he brought himself back from the
+future to the present.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How is she?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, she’s all right,� said Mrs. Blair, in her
+usual cheery tone. “I didn’t go to her, I thought
+it best to leave her alone.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge looked at his wife, with her rosy
+face, and her full figure still youthful in the simple
+summer gown she wore. He looked at her curiously,
+wondering why it was she seemed so young;
+a width of years seemed all at once to separate
+them. Mrs. Blair noted this look of her husband’s.
+She noted it with pity for him; he looked older
+to her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I think it would be nice for you to take Lavinia
+with you when you go to Put-in-Bay to the
+Bar Association meeting,� she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It seemed strange and anomalous to Judge
+Blair that he should still be attending Bar Association
+meetings.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll see,� he said; and then he qualified, “if
+I go.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“If you go?� his wife exclaimed. “Why,
+you’re down for a paper!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“So I am,� said the judge.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They turned toward the house, and the judge
+took his wife’s arm, leaning rather heavily on it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Will!� she said, after they had gone a few
+steps in this fashion. “What is the matter with
+you! You walk like an old man!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She shook his arm off, and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Hurry up now. The coffee will be getting
+cold.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Indoors, they passed Connie going through the
+hall; she had just come down the stairs, and the
+sight of her girlish figure, and her short skirts
+just sweeping the tops of her shoes, gladdened the
+judge’s heart, and he smiled. He could rely on
+Connie, anyway, for sympathy. But the girl
+gave him a sharp reproachful stare from her dark
+eyes, and the judge felt utterly deserted.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia did not come down to her supper,
+though her mother, knowing she would want it
+later, kept the coffee warm on the back of the
+kitchen stove. Chad had gone away with one of
+the Weston boys. So the three, the judge, Mrs.
+Blair and Connie, ate their supper alone.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>After supper, Mrs. Blair and Connie went immediately
+to Lavinia and the judge had a sense
+of exclusion from the mysteries that were enacting
+up there, an exclusion that seemed to proceed from
+his own culpability. He went to his library and
+tried to read, but he could only sit with his head
+in his hand, and stare before him. But finally
+he was aroused from his reveries by a stir in the
+hall, and glancing up he saw Lavinia in the door.
+She came straight to him, and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Forgive me, papa, if I was rude and unkind.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He seized her in his arms, hugging her head
+against his shoulders, and he said again and again,
+while stroking her hair clumsily:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“My little girl! My little girl!�</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER X<br /> <br />PUT-IN-BAY</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>The little steamer for the islands rolled out
+of Sandusky Bay with Lavinia sitting by the
+forward rail. She had yielded to her father’s
+wishes with an easy complaisance that made
+him suspicious, and yet, as he stood solicitously
+by, he was persistent in his determination
+to realize for her all the delights he had so
+extravagantly predicted for the journey. He tried
+to rouse her interest by pointing out Johnson’s
+Island, but it did not possess for her, as the place
+where the Confederate prisoners were confined during
+the war, the interest an old soldier was able
+to discover in it, and though he tried his best, with
+an effort at entertainment that was well-nigh pathetic,
+she only smiled wanly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He left her, after a while, her chin in her hands,
+looking over into the light green waters, watching
+the curve of the waves the steamer tossed away
+from its sharp prow. The lake was in one of its
+most smiling and happy moods, though they were
+then at a point where storms easily lash its shallow
+depths into billows that might satisfy the rage of
+the North Atlantic. The lighthouse on the rocks
+at Marblehead had a fascination for Lavinia; it
+seemed waiting for her humor, and she watched it
+until the steamer had gone far on toward Kelly’s
+Island, and left the lighthouse behind, a white
+spot gleaming in the sun.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When they entered the little archipelago of
+the Wine Islands, with their waters a deeper
+green than those out in the lake and overcast in
+strange ways by mysterious shadows and cool weird
+reflections of the green of the islands all about,
+Judge Blair came back to her and asked if she had
+been seasick and how she had enjoyed the little
+journey. As she met him with her strange perplexing
+smile, he began to doubt her again; something
+assured him that she still clung to her purpose
+of love, and he found himself almost wishing
+that she had kept to her defiant temper of the
+Sunday afternoon that now seemed so far away.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When they had reached Put-in-Bay and bounded
+on the trolley across the island to the huge hotel,
+they had their dinner and Lavinia perplexed the
+judge further by retiring to her room. She said
+she would rest, though she had persisted all the
+morning that she was not tired.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>As soon as she had closed the door on her father,
+leaving him in doubt and confusion, she began a
+long letter to Marley. She described her trip in
+detail, jealous of every trifle of experience that
+had befallen her; she told him of the bridal
+couple she had seen board the train at Clyde, and
+of the showers of rice that had been thrown by
+the laughing bridal party, though she omitted the
+lone father of the bride standing apart on the
+platform craning his head anxiously for another
+sight of his daughter, and trying to smile. But
+she gave him a sense of the romance that had
+stirred in her at the sight of the lighthouse on
+its lonely point of rocks and the stone towers that
+made the wine-cellars on Kelly’s Island look like
+castles.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>After supper Lavinia left her father to the
+pleasure of renewing acquaintance with the lawyers
+who thronged the lobby, and stole down to the rocks
+that marked the shelving shore of the island. She
+saw stately schooners, with white sails spread, and
+she watched, until its black banner of smoke was
+but a light wraith, a big propeller towing its convoy
+of grain barges across the far horizon. This calm
+serene passing of the life of the lakes soothed her,
+filled her with a thousand fancies, and stirred her
+emotions with deep, hidden hints of the mystery
+of all life. As she sat there and gazed, now and
+then tears came to her eyes. The waters were
+spread smoothly before her under the last reflection
+of the sun, the twilight was coming across the
+lake; and as the light followed the sun and the
+darkness crept behind, she looked toward the south
+in the direction, as she felt, of Macochee, and
+thought of her home and of her mother, of Connie
+and of Chad, and then she thought of Glenn.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Far out in the lake a cluster of yellow lights
+moved swiftly along—one of the big passenger
+steamers that nightly ply between Detroit and
+Buffalo, and she read in that moving girdle of
+light new meanings; then suddenly a fear seized
+her, a fear that was part of the ache in her heart,
+and she ran into the hotel and up to her room.
+Then she took up her letter again and poured
+out all her new sensations, her longings, and her
+fears in a lengthy postscript. When she had
+finished, she began to address the envelope; and
+she wrote on it, with pride:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Mr. Glenn—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And then she paused. She did not know
+whether he spelt his name “Marly,� or “Marley,�
+or “Marlay.� She tried writing it each way,
+dozens of times, but the oftener she tested it the
+less able she was to decide. It was too ridiculous;
+she became exasperated with herself; then humiliated
+and ashamed. When she heard her
+father’s step in the hall, she hastily locked her
+letter in her little traveling bag. The judge
+greeted her warmly; he was flushed and happy,
+and in the highest spirits. During the afternoon
+he had been meeting lawyers from all over Ohio;
+the evening boats from Cleveland and Toledo had
+brought more of them to the island; they were all
+eminent, respectable, rich, the attorneys of big
+corporations. The judges of the Supreme Court and
+of the Circuit Courts were there, and the excitement
+had reached its height when the boat from
+Cleveland brought an associate justice of the United
+States Supreme Court to deliver the chief
+address of the meeting.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Judge Blair reveled in meeting all these distinguished
+men; he enjoyed the flattery in
+their way of addressing and introducing him.
+But his conscience smote him when he saw Lavinia.
+He drew up a chair and sat beside her, holding
+his cigar at arm’s length. It was an excellent
+cigar, better than he ordinarily smoked, and the
+thin thread of smoke that wavered up from it
+filled the room almost instantly with its delicate
+perfume.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Did my little girl think her father had deserted
+her?� he said, speaking of her in the third person,
+after the affectionate way of parents. “He must
+pay better attention to her. She must come down
+and meet the lawyers; they will be delighted; a
+justice of the Supreme Court has just come on from
+Washington! She will want to meet him!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge paused and twisted his head about for
+a puff at his cigar, and then waited for Lavinia
+to glow at the prospect. But when she looked at
+him, and tried to smile again, he saw the glint of
+tears in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why come, come, dear!� he said. “What’s
+the matter? Aren’t you having a good time?
+Never mind, when this meeting’s over we’ll go to
+Detroit, and maybe up the lakes for a little trip.
+That’ll bring the roses back!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He pinched her cheeks playfully, but she did
+not respond; she looked at him pleadingly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, Lavinia,� he cried, “you aren’t homesick?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She winked bravely to stem the flood of tears
+and then nodded.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well!� he said, nonplussed. “You know, dear,
+we can’t—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The tears were brimming in her blue eyes, and
+he left his sentence uncompleted to go on:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“So you’re homesick, eh? For mama, and
+Connie?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She nodded, and he studied her closely for a
+moment, and then he could not resist the question
+that all along had been torturing him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And for—?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She confirmed his fear, with quick decisive little
+nods. She got out her handkerchief and hastily
+brushed her tears away, and then with an effort to
+control herself, she looked at him and said, as if
+she were ready to have it all out then:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, father, I haven’t treated him right. I
+came away without telling him.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Judge Blair scowled and turned away, and bit
+the end of his cigar. Then he sat and studied it.
+Lavinia waited; she was ready for the final contest.
+Presently the judge arose.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, dear,� he said. “Well—we’ll see; of
+course, we can’t go back just yet—I have my address
+to read to-morrow, and besides, some of the
+boys are talking of me for president of the Bar
+Association. And I had thought, I had thought,
+that a little trip over to Detroit, and maybe up to
+Mackinac—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Father,� said Lavinia, looking at him now
+calmly, “I don’t want to go to Detroit or up to
+Mackinac. I’ll do, of course, as you say; I’ll wait
+until the Bar meeting is over, but I want to go
+home. You might as well know now, father—we
+might as well understand each other—it can be
+no other way.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Judge Blair looked at his daughter a moment,
+and she kept her eyes directly and firmly in his.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh well,� he said with a sigh, “of course, dear,
+if you say. I’d like to stay until after the election
+though. Will you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Of course,� she consented.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XI<br /> <br />MACOCHEE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Marley had not learned of Lavinia’s departure
+until Monday afternoon; he had the
+news from Lawrence, who had it from the hackman
+who had taken Judge Blair and Lavinia
+to the train; for whenever any of the quality go
+away from Macochee they always ride to the station
+in the hack, though at other times they walk
+without difficulty all over the town. When Marley
+reached the office, and found Wade Powell, as
+he usually found him, sitting with his feet on his
+table, smoking and reading a Cincinnati paper,
+the lawyer looked up casually, but when he saw
+Marley’s expression he suddenly exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Hello! What’s the matter?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Something’s troubling you,� said Powell.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley shook his head again, and Powell looked
+at him as at a witness he was cross-examining.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I know better,� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley affected to busy himself at his desk, but
+after a while, he turned about and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Something is troubling me, Mr. Powell; my—prospects.�
+He had been on the point of confessing
+his real trouble, but with the very words
+on his lips, he could not utter them, and so let
+the conversation take another turn.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, prospects!� said Powell. “I can tell you
+all about prospects; I’ve had more than any man
+in Gordon County. When I was your age, opinion
+was unanimous in this community that my prospects
+were the most numerous and the most brilliant
+of any one here!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell laughed, a little bitterly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“If I’d only been prudent enough to die then,
+Glenn,� he went on, “I’d have been mourned as a
+potential judge of the Supreme Court, senator
+and president.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’ll be three years before I can be admitted,
+won’t it?� asked Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� said Powell; “but that isn’t long; and
+it isn’t anything to be admitted.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, it takes time, anyway,� said Marley,
+“and then there’s the practice after that—how
+long will that take?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, let’s see,� said Powell, plucking reflectively
+at the flabby skin that hung between the
+points of his collar. “Let’s see.� His brows were
+twitching humorously. “It’s taken me about
+thirty years—I don’t know how much longer it’ll
+take.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell smoked on for a few moments, and then
+added soberly:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Of course, I had to fool around in politics for
+about twenty-five years, and save the people.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you think,� Marley said, after a moment’s
+silence that paid its own respect to Powell’s regrets,
+“that there’s an opening for me here in Macochee?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, Glenn, I’ll tell you. There’s no use to
+think of locating in Macochee or any other small
+town. The business is dead here. It’s too bad,
+but it’s so. When I began there was plenty of
+real estate law to do, and plenty of criminal law,
+but the land titles are all settled now—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That’s what Judge Blair said,� interrupted
+Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“So you’ve been to him, have you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley blushed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, not exactly,� he said. “I heard him
+say that.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� mused Powell. “Well, he feathered his
+nest pretty well while they were being settled.
+But as I was saying—the criminal business has
+died out, or rather, it has changed. The criminals
+haven’t any money any more, that is, the old kind
+of criminals; the corporations have it all now—if
+you want to make money, you’ll have to have
+them for clients. Of course, the money still goes
+to the criminal lawyer just as it used to.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I like Macochee,� said Marley, his spirits
+falling fast.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, it’s a nice old town to live in,� Powell
+assented. “But the devil of it is how’re you going
+to live? Of course, you can study here just as
+well as anywhere; better than anywhere, in fact;
+you have plenty of time, and plenty of quiet. But
+as for locating here—why, it’s utterly out of the
+question for a man who wants to make anything
+of himself and has to get a living while he’s doing
+it—and I don’t know any other kind that ever do
+make anything out of themselves.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I had hoped—� persisted Marley, longing for
+Powell to relent.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, I know,� the lawyer replied almost impatiently,
+“but it’s no use, there’s nothing in it.
+No one with ambition can stay here now. The
+town, like all these old county-seats, is good for
+nothing but impecunious old age and cemeteries.
+It was nothing but a country cross-roads before the
+railroad came, and since then it’s been nothing but
+a water-tank; if it keeps on it’ll be nothing but a
+whistling-post, and the trains won’t be bothered
+to stop at all. Its people are industrious in nothing
+but gossip, and genuine in nothing but hypocrisy;
+they are so mean that they hate themselves,
+and think all the time they’re hating each other.
+Just look at our leading citizen, Brother Dudley,
+over there in his bank; he owns the whole town,
+and he thinks he’s a bigger man than old Grant.
+Sundays he sits in his pew with a black coat on,
+squinting at the preacher out of his sore little eyes,
+and waiting for him to say something he can get
+the bishop to fire him for, and he calls that religion.
+Mondays he goes back to his business of skinning
+farmers and poor widows out of their miserable
+little pennies, and he calls that business; Does he
+ever look at a flower or a tree, or turn round in the
+street at the laugh of a child? He’s the kind of
+man that runs this town, and he makes the rest of
+the people like it. Well, he don’t run me! God!
+If I’d only had some sense twenty years ago I’d
+have pulled out and gone to the city and been somebody
+to-day.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It pained Marley to hear Powell berate Macochee;
+he had never heard him rage so violently at
+the town, though he was always sneering at it.
+To Marley the very name of Macochee meant romance;
+he liked the name the Indian village had
+left behind when it vanished; he liked the old
+high-gabled buildings about the Square; he longed
+to identify himself with Macochee, to think of it
+as his home.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But I’ll tell you one thing,� Powell went on,
+his tone suddenly changing to one of angry resolution
+as he flung his feet heavily to the bare floor
+and struck his desk a startling blow with his fist,
+“I’ll tell you one thing, I’m through working for
+nothing; they’ve got to pay me! I’m going to
+squeeze the last cent out of them after this, same
+as old Dudley does, same as old Bill Blair did before
+he went on the bench; that’s what I’m going
+to do. I’m getting old and I’ve got to quit running
+a legal eleemosynary institution.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell’s eyes flamed, but a shadow fell in the
+room, and Powell and Marley glanced at the door.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, what do you want?� said Powell.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>An old woman, bareheaded in the hurry of a
+crisis, was on the threshold.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, Mr. Powell,� she began in a wailing
+voice, “would you come quick!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What for?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Charlie’s in ag’in.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Got any money?� demanded Powell, in the
+angry resolution of a moment before. He clenched
+his fist again on the edge of his table. Marley
+glanced at him in surprise, and then at the old
+woman.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The woman hung her head and stammered:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, you know—I hain’t just now, but by the
+week’s end, when I get the money for my
+washin’—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, that’s all right,� said Powell, getting to
+his feet, “that’s all right. We won’t talk of that
+now. I beg your pardon. We’ll walk down to
+the calaboose and see the boy; we can talk it over
+with him and see what’s to be done.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He picked up his slouch hat and clapped it on
+his head.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What’s he been doing this time?� he said to
+the old woman as they went out the door.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley watched them as they passed the open
+window and disappeared. A smile touched his
+lips an instant, and then he became serious and
+depressed once more.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He had had no word from Lavinia, and her
+going away immediately after his scene with
+Judge Blair confused him. He tried to think it
+out, but he could reach no conclusion save that it
+was all at an end. Lavinia’s sudden, unexplained
+departure proved that. And yet he could not, he
+would not, think that she had changed; no, her
+father had borne her away—that was it—forcibly
+and cruelly borne her away. For a long while he
+sat there finding a certain satisfaction in the melancholy
+that came over him, and then suddenly he
+was aroused by the boom of the town clock. The
+heavy notes of the bell rolled across to him, and
+he counted them—five. It was time to go. And
+Powell had not returned. It was not surprising;
+Powell often went out that way and did not come
+back, and, often, somehow to Marley’s chagrin,
+men and women sat and waited long hours in the
+dumb patience of the poor and then went away
+with their woes still burdening them. They must
+have been used to woes, they carried them so silently.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was walking moodily down Main Street,
+feeling that he had no part in the bustling happiness
+of the people going home from their day’s
+work, when, lifting his head, he saw Mrs. Blair in
+her surrey. Instantly she jerked the horse in
+toward the curb and beckoned to him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, Glenn! I’m so glad I met you!� she
+said, her face rosy with its smile. “I have something
+for you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She raised her eyebrows in a significant way
+and began fumbling in her lap. Presently she
+leaned out of the surrey and pressed something
+into his hand.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Just between ourselves, you know!� she said,
+with the delicious mystery of a secret, and then
+gathering up her reins, she clucked at her lazy
+horse.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He looked after her a moment, then at the
+thick envelope he held in his hand. On it was
+written in the long Anglican characters of a young
+girl, these words:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“For Glenn.�</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XII<br /> <br />A CONDITIONAL SURRENDER</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Judge Blair and Lavinia returned home Saturday.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I guess it’s no use,� the judge said to Mrs.
+Blair when she had followed him up stairs, where
+he had gone to wash off the dust he had accumulated
+during the six hours the train had consumed
+in jerking itself from Sandusky to Macochee.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, I could see how relieved she was to get
+home,� replied Mrs. Blair, musing idly out of the
+window. She was not so sure that she was pleased
+with the result she had done her part to accomplish.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I guess you were right,� the judge said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I?� asked Mrs. Blair, suddenly turning round.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes—in saying that it would be best not to dignify
+it by too much notice. That might only add
+to its seriousness.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair looked out of the window again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Of course,� the judge went on presently, “I
+wouldn’t want it considered as an engagement.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Of course not,� Mrs. Blair acquiesced.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You’d better have a talk with her,� he said.
+She saw that he was seeking his usual retreat in
+such cases, and she was now determined not to take
+the responsibility. Spiritually they tossed this
+responsibility back and forth between them, like
+a shuttlecock.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But wouldn’t that make it look as if we were
+taking too much notice of it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� the judge said, “I don’t know. Do
+just as you think best.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Didn’t you talk to her about it when you were
+away?� Mrs. Blair asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“M-m yes,� the judge said slowly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And what did she say?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Nothing much, only—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Only what?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Only that she would not give him up.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair waited, and the judge dawdled at his
+toilet. Some compulsion she could not resist,
+though she tried, distrusting her own weakness,
+drove Mrs. Blair to speak first, and even then she
+sought to minimize the effect of her surrender.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Of course, Will,� she said, “I want to be
+guided by you in this matter. It’s really quite serious.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, well,� he said, “you’re capable of managing
+it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You said you knew his father, didn’t you?�
+she asked after a while.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Slightly; why?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I was just wishing that we knew more of the
+family. You know they have not lived in Macochee
+long.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That’s true,� the judge assented, realizing all
+that the objection meant.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And yet,� Mrs. Blair reassured him, though
+she was trying to reassure herself at the same time,
+“his father is a minister; that ought to count for
+something.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, it ought, and still you know they say that
+ministers’ sons are always—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But,� Mrs. Blair interrupted, as if he were
+wholly missing the point, “ministers’ families always
+have a standing, I think.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They were silent, then, until Mrs. Blair began:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I suppose I really ought to call on Mrs. Marley.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, it seems, you know—it seems to me that
+I ought.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But wouldn’t that—?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I considered that, and still, it might seem more
+so if I didn’t, don’t you see?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge tried to grasp the attenuated point,
+and expressed his failure in the sigh with which he
+stooped to fasten his shoes. Then he drew on his
+alpaca coat, and just as he was leaving the room,
+his wife stopped him with:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But, Will!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He halted with his hand on the door-knob. For
+an instant his wife looked at him in pleasure. He
+was rather handsome, with his white hair combed
+gravely, his ruddy face fresh from his shaving,
+and his stiff, white collar about his neck.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What did you say?� he asked, recalling her
+from her reverie of him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh!� she said; “only this—maybe he won’t
+feel like coming around here any more. You
+know you practically sent him away.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge gave a little laugh.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I guess that will work itself out. Anyway I’ll
+leave it to you—or to them.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Still smiling at his own humor, he turned the
+door-knob, and then hesitated. His smile had
+vanished.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She’s so young,� he said with a regret. “She’s
+so young. How old did you say you were when we
+were married?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Eighteen,� Mrs. Blair replied.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And Lavinia can’t be more than—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, she’s twenty,� said Mrs. Blair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“So she is,� said the judge. “So she is. But
+then you—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair had come close to him, and stood
+picking a bit of thread from his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It was different with us, wasn’t it, dear?�
+she said, looking up at him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He kissed her.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XIII<br /> <br />SUMMER</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>The dust lay thick in Ward Street, sifting
+its fine powder on the leaves of the cottonwoods
+that grew at the weedy gutter. The
+grass in the yard grew long, and the bushes languished
+in the heat. Judge Blair’s beans clambered
+up their poles and turned white; and Connie’s
+sweet peas grew lush and rank, running,
+as she complained, mostly to leaves. The house
+seemed to have withdrawn within itself; its green
+shutters were closed. In the evening dim figures
+could be seen on the veranda, and the drone of
+voices could be heard. At eleven o’clock, the deep
+siren of the Limited could be heard, as it rounded
+the curve a mile out of town. After that it was
+still, and night lay on Macochee, soft, vast, immeasurable.
+The clock in the Court House tower
+boomed out the heavy hours. Sometimes the harmonies
+of the singing negroes were borne over the
+town.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And to Marley and Lavinia those days, and
+those evenings of purple shadows and soft brilliant
+stars, were but the setting of a dream that unfolded
+new wonders constantly. They were but a part of
+all life, a part of the glowing summer itself, innocent
+of the thousand artificial demands man has
+made on himself. Lavinia went about with a new
+expression, exalted, expectant; a new dignity had
+come to her and a new beauty; all at once, suddenly,
+as it were, character had set its noble mark
+upon her, and about her slender figure there was
+the aureola of romance.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Have you noticed Lavinia?� Mrs. Blair asked
+her husband.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, why?� he said, in the alarm that was ever
+ready to spring within him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She has changed so; she has grown so beautiful!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>One morning the judge saw a spar of light flash
+from her finger, and he peered anxiously over his
+glasses.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What’s that, Lavinia?� he asked, and when she
+stood at his knee, almost like a little girl again
+in all but spirit, he took her finger.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“A ring,� she said simply.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What does it mean?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Glenn gave it to me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Glenn?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But I thought there was to be no engagement?�
+The judge looked up, as if there had been betrayal.
+But Lavinia only smiled. The judge
+looked at her a moment, then released her hand.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I wouldn’t wear it where any one could see it,�
+he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The summer stretched itself long into September;
+and then came the still days of fall, moving
+slowly by in majestic procession. With the first
+cool air, a new restless energy awoke in Marley.
+All the summer he had neglected his
+studies; but now a change was working in him as
+wonderful as that which autumn was working in
+the world. He looked back at that happy, self-sufficient
+summer, and, for an instant, he had a
+wild, impotent desire to detain it, to hold it, to
+keep things just as they were; but the summer was
+gone, the winter at hand, and he felt all at once
+the impact of practical life. He faced the future,
+and for an instant he recoiled.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia was standing looking up at him. She
+laid her hand on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What is it, Glenn?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I was just thinking,� he said, “that I have a
+great assurance in asking you to marry me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What do you mean?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, dear, just this: I can’t get a practice in
+Macochee; I might as well look it in the face now
+as any time. I have known it all along, but I’ve
+kept it from you, and I’ve tried to keep it from
+myself. There’s no place here for me; everybody
+says so, your father, Wade Powell, everybody.
+There’s no chance for a young man in the
+law in these small towns. I’ve tried to make myself
+think otherwise. I’ve tried to make myself believe
+that after I’d been admitted I could settle
+down here and get a practice and we could have a
+little home of our own—but—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Can’t we?� Lavinia whispered the words, as if
+she were afraid utterance would confirm the fear
+they imported.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well—that’s what they all say,� Marley insisted.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But papa’s always talking that way,� Lavinia
+protested. “I suppose all old men do. They forget
+that they were ever young, and I don’t see
+what right they have to destroy your faith, your
+confidence, or the confidence of any young man!�
+Lavinia blazed out these words indignantly. It
+was consoling to Marley to hear them, he liked her
+passionate partizanship in his cause. He longed
+for her to go on, and he waited, anxious to be reassured
+in spite of himself. He could see her
+face dimly in the starlight, and feel her figure rigid
+with protest beside him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s simply wicked in them,� she said presently.
+“I don’t care what they say. We can and we will!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I like to have you put it that way, dear,� said
+Marley. “I like to have you say ‘we’!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She drew more closely to him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And you think we can?� he said presently.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I know it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And have a little home, here, in one of these
+quiet streets, with the shade, and the happiness—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And it wouldn’t matter much if we were poor?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Just at first, you know. I’d work hard, and we
+could be so happy, so happy, just we two, together!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, yes,� she whispered.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I love Macochee so,� Marley said presently. “I
+just couldn’t leave it!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t! Don’t!� she protested. “Don’t even
+speak of it!�</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XIV<br /> <br />ONE SUNDAY MORNING</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>It was Sunday morning and Marley sat in
+church looking at a shaft of soft light that fell
+through one of the tall windows. From gazing at
+the shaft of light, he began to study the symbols
+in the different windows, the cross and crown, the
+lamb, the triangle that represented the Trinity, all
+the Roman symbols that Protestantism still retains
+in its decorations. Then he counted the pipes in
+the organ, back and forth, never certain that he
+had counted them correctly. All about him the
+people were going through the service, but it had
+lost all meaning for Marley, because he had been
+accustomed to it from childhood.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Having been reassured by Lavinia, he felt that
+he should be happy, yet a strong sense of dissatisfaction,
+of uncertainty, flowed persistently under
+all his thoughts, belying his heart’s assurance of
+its happiness. When Doctor Marley, advancing
+to the pulpit, buttoned his coat down before him,
+pushed aside the vase of flowers the ladies’ committee
+always put in his way, and stood with his
+strong, expressive hand laid on the open Bible,
+Marley’s thoughts fixed themselves for a moment in
+the pride and love he had always had for his father.
+There swept before him hundreds of scenes like this
+when his father had stood up to preach, and then
+suddenly he realized that his father had grown old:
+he was white-haired and in his rugged, smooth-shaven
+face deep lines were drawn—the lines of a
+beautiful character.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He remembered something his father had said to
+the effect that the pulpit was the only place in
+which inexperienced youth was desired, showing
+the insincerity of what people call their religion,
+and then he remembered the ambitions he
+had dimly felt in his father in his earlier days; it
+had been predicted that his father would be a
+bishop. But he was not a bishop, and now in all
+probability never would be one; he was not politician
+enough for that. And Marley wondered
+whether or not his father could be said to have
+been successful; he had come to know and to do
+high things, he had lived a life full of noble sacrifice
+and the finest faith in humanity and in God;
+but was this success? He heard his father’s voice:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The text will be found in the third chapter
+of the Lamentations of Jeremiah.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But Marley never listened to sermons; now and
+then he caught a phrase, or a period, especially
+when his father raised his voice, but his thoughts
+were elsewhere, anywhere—not on the sermon.
+The men and women sitting in front of him kept
+shifting constantly, and he grew tired of slipping
+this way and that and craning his neck in order to
+see his father. And then the constant fluttering of
+fans hurt his eyes, and they wandered here and
+there, each person they lighted on suggesting some
+new train of thought.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Presently they fell on a girl in a white dress, and
+in some way she suggested Lavinia. And instantly
+he felt that he should be perfectly happy when
+thinking of Lavinia, but, as suddenly, came that
+subconscious uncertainty, that deep-flowing discontent.
+He went over his last conversation with
+Lavinia, in which he had found such assurance,
+but now away from her he realized that he had
+lulled himself into a sense of security that was all
+false; and the conviction that Macochee had no
+place for him, at least as a lawyer, came back.
+He tried to put it away from him, and think of
+something else.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>His eyes fell on old Selah Dudley, sitting like all
+pillars of the church, at the end of his pew. Dudley’s
+back was narrow, and rounded out between
+the shoulders so that Marley wondered how he
+could sit comfortably at all; his head was flat and
+sheer behind, and Marley could see with what care
+the old banker had plastered the scant hair across
+his bald poll—the only sign of vanity revealed in
+him, unless it were in the brown kid gloves
+he wore. Marley looked at Dudley with the feeling
+that he was looking at the most successful man
+in Macochee, and yet he had a troubled sense of
+the phariseeism that is the essential element of
+such success. He remembered what Wade Powell
+had said; immediately he saw Dudley in a new
+light; the old man sat stolid, patient and brutal,
+waiting for some heterodoxy, or something that
+could be construed as heterodoxy, theological or
+economic, like a savage with a spear waiting to
+pierce his prey, and glad when the moment came.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But Marley, seeing the young girl in the white
+dress, again thought of Lavinia, who would be sitting
+at that very moment with her father and
+mother and Connie and Chad over in the Presbyterian
+church. How long would it be before he could
+sit there beside her, as her husband? Then with
+a flash it came to him that they would, in all
+likelihood, be married in that very church. Instantly
+he saw the spectators gathered, he saw the
+pulpit and the chancel-rail hidden in flowers, he
+saw his father with his ritual in his hands, waiting;
+and then while the organ played the wedding
+march, Lavinia coming down the aisle, her eyes
+lowered under her veil. His heart beat faster, he
+felt a wave of emotion, joyous, exciting.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But there was much to do before that moment
+could come—the long days and nights of study; the
+examination looming like a mountain of difficulties,
+then months and years of waiting for a practice.
+He tried to imagine each detail of the coming of
+a practice, but he could not; he could not conceive
+how it was possible for a practice to come to any
+one, much less to him. There were many lawyers
+in Macochee now, and all of them were more or
+less idle. There was certainly no need of more.
+Judge Blair and Wade Powell and every one
+had told him that, and suddenly he felt an impatience
+with them all, as if they were responsible
+for the conditions they described; they all conspired
+against him, men and conditions, making
+up the elements of a harsh, intractable fate.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And Marley grew bitter against every one in
+Macochee; they all gossiped about him, they were
+all determined to drive him away; well, let them;
+he would go; but he would come back again some
+day as a great, successful lawyer, looking down on
+them and their little interests, and they would be
+filled with envy and respect. But what of Lavinia?</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>What right had he to ask her to marry him?
+What right had he to place her in the position he
+had? He realized it now, clearly, he told himself,
+for the first time. She had given up all for
+him. She would go out no more, she had foregone
+her parties, calls, picnics, dances, everything; in
+her devotion she had estranged her friends. He
+had given her parents concern, he had placed her
+in a false, impossible position. He must rescue
+her from it. But how? By breaking the engagement?
+He blushed for the thought. By going
+away quietly, silently, without a word? That
+would only increase the difficulty of her position.
+By keeping her waiting, year after year, until he
+could find a foothold in the world? Even that
+was unfair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>No, he could not give up Lavinia and he could
+not go away from Macochee, hence it followed that
+he must give up the law. He must get some work
+to do, and at once; something that would pay him
+enough to support a wife. He began to canvass
+the possibilities in Macochee. He thought of all
+the openings; surely there would be something;
+there were several thousand persons in Macochee,
+and they lived somehow. He did not wish to give
+up the law; not that he loved it so, but because he
+disliked to own himself beaten. But it was necessary;
+he could suffer this defeat; he could make
+this sacrifice. There was something almost noble
+in the attitude, and he derived a kind of morbid
+consolation from the thought.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>His father was closing the Bible—sure sign that
+the sermon was about to end. There was another
+prayer, then a hymn, and while the congregation
+remained standing for the benediction, he heard
+his father’s voice:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The peace of God which passeth all understanding—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The words had always comforted him in the sorrows
+he was constantly imagining, but now they
+brought no peace.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>In another moment the congregation was stirring
+joyously, in unconscious relief that the sitting
+was over. The hum of voices assumed a pleasant
+social air, as friend and acquaintance turned to
+greet one another. The people moved slowly down
+the aisle. He caught a glimpse of his father,
+smiling and happy—happy that his work was done—passing
+his handkerchief over his reddened brow
+and bending to take the hands of those who came
+to speak to him and to congratulate him. Just then
+Selah Dudley gave his father his hand; the sight
+pleased Marley; and suddenly an idea came to him.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XV<br /> <br />A SAINT’S ADVICE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>On Monday morning Marley found Dudley
+at his post in the First National Bank. He
+halted at the little low gate in the rail that
+ran round Dudley’s desk until Dudley looked
+up and saw him, and then Marley smiled.
+Dudley, conceiving it to be the propitiatory smile
+of the intending borrower, narrowed his eyes as
+he regarded him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well?� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley went in and sat down on the edge of the
+hard chair that was placed near Dudley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I wish to have a little talk with you, Mr. Dudley,�
+he said. He waited then for Dudley to reply,
+thinking perhaps he would be interested in the
+son of his pastor. Dudley had turned his chair a
+little, and seemed to have sunk a little lower in its
+brown leather cushions, worn to a hard shine during
+the long years he had sat there. The lower part
+of him was round and full and heavy, while his
+shoulders were narrow and sloping, and his chest
+sunken, as if, from sitting there so many years,
+his vitals had settled, giving him the figure of a
+half emptied bag of grain. His legs were thin, and
+his trousers crept constantly up the legs of the boots
+he wore; the boots were blackened as far as the
+ankles, above the ankles they were wrinkled and
+scuffed to a dirty brown.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley noted these details hurriedly, for it was
+the face of the man that held him. A scant beard,
+made up of a few harsh, wiry hairs, partly covered
+the banker’s cheeks and chin; his upper lip was
+clean-shaven, and his hair, scant but still black,
+was combed forward at the temples, and carefully
+carried over from one side of his head to the other,
+ineffectually trying to hide the encroaching baldness.
+His nose was large; his eyes narrow under
+his almost barren brows and red at the edges of
+the lids that lacked lashes.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What do you want?� said Dudley, never moving,
+as if to economize his energies, as he
+economized his words and every other thing of value in
+his narrow world.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley did not know just what reply to make:
+this was a critical moment to him, and he must
+make no mistake.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I came,� he began, “to—to ask you for a little
+advice.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Dudley, at this, settled a little more into his
+chair, possibly a little more comfortably; he seemed
+to relax somewhat, and his eyes were not quite
+so narrow as they had been. But he blinked
+a moment, and then cautiously asked:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What about?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, it’s just this,� Marley began, smiling
+persistently; “you see I’ve begun the study of law;
+I had intended to be a lawyer.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We’ve got plenty o’ lawyers,� said Dudley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That’s just the conclusion I have come to, and
+I was thinking somewhat of making a change.
+And so I thought I’d come and ask you, that is,
+your advice.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Dudley, still cautious, made no reply, and Marley
+almost despaired of getting on easy terms. He
+began to wish he had not come; he might have
+known this, he said to himself, and his smile and
+the confidence with which he had come began to
+leave him. But he must make another effort.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You see, Mr. Dudley,� he said, “I thought,
+as things are nowadays, I would have to wait years
+before I could really do anything in the law, and
+as I have my own way to make in the world, I
+thought, you know, I might get into something
+else.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What, for instance?� asked Dudley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I didn’t exactly know; I had hardly
+thought it out,—that’s why I came to you, knowing
+you to be a man of large affairs.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Dudley had an instant’s vision of his bank, of
+his stocks, and of the many farms all over Gordon
+County on which he held mortgages, but he checked
+his impulse; these very possessions must be guarded;
+people envied him them, and while this envy
+in one way was among the sources of his few joys,
+it nevertheless gave rise to covetousness which was
+prohibited by the tenth commandment.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“So you want my advice, eh?� he asked, looking
+hard at Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And that’s all?� he asked suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well—any suggestions,� Marley said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Dudley still hesitated. He continued to study
+Marley out of his little eyes. Presently he inquired,
+as if by way of getting a basis to start on:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You been to college, ain’t you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir,� Marley answered promptly; “I graduated
+in June.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How long was you there?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why,� Marley replied in some surprise, “the
+full four years.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Four years,� Dudley repeated. “How old?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Twenty-two.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, that’s that much time wasted. If a young
+man’s going to get along these times, and make
+anything of himself, he has to start early, learn
+business ways and habits. He’s got to begin at
+the bottom, and feel his way up.� The banker was
+speaking now with a reckless waste of words that
+was surprising. “The main thing at first is to
+work; it ain’t the money. Now, when I come to
+Macochee, forty-seven years ago, I hadn’t nothing.
+But I went to work, I was up early, and I
+went to bed early; I worked hard all day, I ’tended
+to business, and I saved my money. That’s it,
+young man, that’s the only way—up early, work
+hard, and save your money.� Dudley leaned back
+in his chair to let Marley contemplate him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But what did you work at? At first, I mean.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why,� said Dudley, as if in surprise, “at anything
+I could get. I wan’t proud; I wan’t ’fraid
+o’ work.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley leaned forward with his elbows on his
+knees and began twirling his hat in his hands.
+Then, thinking the attitude lacking in respect, he
+sat up again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Then, I was careful of my habits,� Dudley
+went on. “I never touched a bit o’ tobacco, nor
+tasted a drop o’ liquor in my life.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He paused, and then:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you use tobacco?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Sometimes,� Marley hesitated to confess.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Cigarettes?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Now and then.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Humph! Learned that at college, I suppose.�
+Marley made no reply.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, you’ve started wrong, young man. That
+wan’t the way I made myself. I never touched a
+drop of liquor nor tasted tobacco. I worked hard
+and God prospered me—yes, God prospered me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Dudley’s voice sank piously.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Now, I’ll tell you.� He seemed to be about to
+impart the secret of it all. “When I was your
+age, I embraced religion, and I promised God
+that if he’d prosper me I’d give a tenth of all I
+made to the church; a tenth, yes, sir, a full tenth.�
+The banker paused again as if making a calculation,
+and a trouble gathered for an instant at his
+hairless brows, but, as if by an effort, he smoothed
+them so that they became meek and submissive.
+And then he went on, as if he had found a species
+of relief:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But it was the best bargain I ever made. It
+paid; yes, it paid; I kep’ my word, and the Lord
+kep’ His; He prospered me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He had folded his hands, and sat blinking at
+Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“So my advice to you, young man, is to give up
+tobacco and all your other bad habits, to be up early
+in the morning, to work hard, and remember God
+in all your ways, and He shall direct thy paths.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Dudley stirred, and moved his swivel chair a
+little, as if it were time to resume work. But Marley
+sat there.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That’s my advice to you, young man,� Dudley
+repeated, “and it won’t cost you a cent.� He said
+this generously, at the same time implying a hint
+of dismissal. Still Marley did not move, and Dudley
+eyed him in some concern. Marley saw the
+look and forced a smile.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I thank you, Mr. Dudley,� he said, “for your
+advice. I am sure it is good. I was wondering,
+though,� he went on, with a reluctance that he knew
+impaired the effect of his words, “if you wouldn’t
+have something here in your bank for me—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>At this Dudley suddenly seemed to shrink in
+size. His eyes became small, mere inflamed slits
+beneath his hairless brows, and he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I thought you said you wanted advice?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I did,� Marley explained, “but I thought
+maybe—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He did not finish the sentence. He rose and
+stood, still twirling his hat in his hand. “And
+you have nothing, you know of nothing?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Dudley slowly shook his head from side to side,
+once or twice, having resumed his economical
+habits.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Good morning,� Marley said, and left.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>As he went out, the cashier and the assistant
+cashier looked at him through the green wire
+screen. Then they lifted their heads from their
+tasks cautiously and exchanged surreptitious
+glances.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XVI<br /> <br />LOVE AND A LIVING</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Marley was not surprised by the result of
+his visit to Selah Dudley. He made an effort
+to convince himself that there was truth in
+what Dudley had said to him, even if he could
+not remember exactly what it was that Dudley
+had said. He tried to put down the instinctive feeling
+of dislike he had for the old banker; he told
+himself that such a feeling was unworthy of him,
+if not unworthy of Dudley, and in thinking the
+matter over he tried to clear himself of all suspicion
+of envy or jealousy of Dudley’s success. The whole
+town considered Dudley its leading man, and
+Marley tried so to consider him; and he tried to
+consider him in this light because he was a good
+man and not because he was a rich man, just as
+the town pretended to do. He wanted to talk about
+Dudley with some one, but he did not want to talk
+about him with Lavinia, because he felt a shame in
+his failure with Dudley that he feared Lavinia
+might share. He did talk with his father about
+him, but his father did not seem to be interested;
+he smiled his tolerant smile, but made no comment.
+And when Marley pressed him for an opinion
+of Dudley his father said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“They make broad their phylacteries.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And that was all.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>However, Marley found Wade Powell willing
+to talk of Selah Dudley, as he was willing to talk of
+almost anything. Marley did not tell Powell that
+he had been to Dudley to ask for a position; he
+merely let it be understood that he had met the
+old man in the course of the day and talked with
+him casually.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“By the way,� he asked, as if the thought had
+just come to him, “how did Selah Dudley make his
+money?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He didn’t make it,� Powell answered.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He didn’t? Did he inherit it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Then how did he get it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He gathered it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Gathered it? I don’t know what you mean.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell laughed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You don’t? Well, there’s a difference.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He wasn’t in the army, was he?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“In the army! Great God!� Powell threw into
+his voice the contempt he could not find the word
+to express. “You think he’d risk his hide in
+the army? Well, I should say not! Though
+he would have been perfectly safe—� Powell said
+it as a parenthetical afterthought—“no bullet could
+ever have pierced his hide, and he had no blood to
+shed.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell bit the end from his cigar and spat out
+the damp little pieces of tobacco viciously.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, I’ll tell you, Glenn,� he said, “he stayed
+at home and got his start, as he calls it, by skinning
+the poor. Widows were his big game and he
+gathered a little pile that has been growing ever
+since. To-day he owns Gordon County.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He seems to be a prominent man in the church,�
+ventured Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He’ll be a prominent man in hell,� said Powell,
+angrily. And then he added thoughtfully: “My
+one regret in going there myself is that I’ll have to
+see him every day.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The most curious effect of Marley’s visit to Dudley,
+however, was one he did not observe himself.
+Having been defeated in his plan to secure a place
+in the bank, he felt at first, with a certain consolation,
+that he still had the law to fall back on, and
+he returned to his studies. But he made little headway;
+once having decided to give up the law, the
+decision remained, and his mind was constantly
+occupied with schemes for securing a foothold in
+some other occupation. He considered, one after
+another, every possibility in Macochee, and as fast
+as he thought of some opening, he went for it, but
+invariably to find it either no opening at all, or
+else, if it were an opening, one that closed at his
+approach. Gradually he gave up his studies altogether,
+and sat idle, his book before him; but one
+day Powell said to him:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Say, Glenn, you’re not getting along very fast,
+are you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley started, and flushed with a sense of guilt.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, no,� he admitted.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What’s the matter, in love?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley blushed, from another cause this time,
+though the guilt remained in his face. But Powell
+instantly was gentle.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I beg your pardon,� he said, “I was just joking,
+of course; I didn’t mean to be inquisitive. You
+mustn’t mind my boorishness.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked at him gratefully and Powell, to
+whom any show of affection was confusing, turned
+away self-consciously. But Marley whirled his
+chair around toward Powell.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I am in love,� he said. “I’ve wanted to tell
+you, but I—you know who she is.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Lavinia Blair?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes. And that’s what’s troubling me,� Marley
+went on. “I want to get married, and I can’t. I
+can’t,� he repeated, “the law’s too slow; I’ve realized
+it for a long while, but I tried to keep the
+fact away, I tried not to see it. But now I have
+to face it. Why,� he said, rising to his feet, “it’ll
+take a thousand years to get a practice in this town,
+and I’m not even admitted yet.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He walked to and fro, his brows pinched together,
+his lower lip thrust out, his teeth nipping
+his upper one. Powell glanced at him, but said
+nothing. He knew human nature, this lawyer, and
+the fact made every one in the county tremble at
+the thought of his cross-examinations; sometimes he
+carried too far his love of laying souls bare, and
+as often hurt as helped his cause. He never had
+been able to turn his knowledge to much practical
+account; in a city he would have had numerous
+retainers as a trial lawyer, though few as a counselor.
+In Macochee he was out of place, and he
+chafed under a semi-consciousness of the fact. He
+waited, knowing that Marley would burst forth
+again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll have to get a job,� Marley said at that
+moment, bitterly, “and go to work; that’s all.� And
+then he laughed harshly. “Humph, get a job—that’s
+the biggest job of all. What can I get here
+in Macochee, I’d like to know?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He halted and turned suddenly, fiercely, almost
+menacingly on Powell, as if he were the cause of
+his predicament.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve told you already it’s no place for you,� said
+Powell, quietly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But where’ll I go?� Marley held out his hands
+with a gesture that was pleading, pathetic. Thus
+he waited for Powell’s reply.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell smoked thoughtfully for a moment and
+then began:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“When I was going to the law school in Cincinnati,
+there was a young fellow in my class—a
+great friend of mine. He was poor, and I was poor—God!
+how poor we were!� Powell paused in this
+retrospect of poverty. “That was why we were
+such friends,—our poverty gave us a common interest.
+This fellow came from up in Hardin
+County; he was tall, lean and gawky, the worst
+jay you ever saw. When we had graduated, I
+supposed he would go home, maybe to Kenton—that
+was his county-seat. When we were bidding
+each other good-by—I’ll never forget the day, it
+was June, hot as hell; and we had left the old law
+school in Walnut Street and were standing there
+by the Tyler-Davidson fountain in Fifth Street.
+I said, ‘Well, we’ll see each other once in a while;
+we won’t be far apart.’ He looked at me and said,
+‘I don’t know about that.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Well,’
+he said, ‘I’m going to Chicago.’ I looked at him
+in surprise. He was out at the elbows then, and
+had hardly enough money to get home on. Then
+the ridiculousness of it struck me, and I laughed.
+‘Why, you’ll starve to death there!’ I said. He
+only smiled.� Powell paused, to whet Marley’s
+appetite, perhaps, for the foregone dénouement.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That jay,� Powell said, when he had allowed
+sufficient time to elapse, “that jay I laughed at is
+Judge Johnson, of the United States Circuit
+Court.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The story saddened Marley. With his faculty of
+conceiving a whole drama at once, he caught in an
+instant the trials Judge Johnson had gone through
+before he won to his station of ease and honor; he
+saw the privations, the sacrifices, the hardships,
+the endless strivings, plottings, schemings; it wearied
+and depressed him; his frightened mind hung
+back, clung to the real, the present, the known,
+found a relief in picturing the seeming security of
+a man like Wade Powell, in a town where he knew
+everybody and was known by everybody. He
+shrank from hearing more of the judge; he wished
+to stay with his thought in Macochee.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How <em>do</em> young men get a start in places like
+Macochee?� he asked, and then he added in
+despairing argument: “They <em>do</em> stay, they <em>do</em> get
+along somehow, they make livings, and raise families;
+the town grows and does business, the population
+increases, it doesn’t die off.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� said Wade Powell, approaching the
+problem with the generalities its mystery demanded,
+“some of them marry rich women, but
+that industry is about played out now; the fortunes
+are divided up; some of them, most of them,
+are content to eke out small livings, clerking in
+stores and that kind of thing; about the only ones
+that get ahead any are traders; they barter around,
+first in one business, then in another; they run a
+grocery, then sell it out and buy a livery-stable;
+then they dabble in real estate a while; finally they
+skin some one out of a farm and then they go on
+skinning, a little at a time; by the time they’re
+old, people forget their beginnings and they become
+respectable; then they join the church, like
+Selah Dudley.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell stopped a moment, then he began again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The lawyers get along God knows how; the
+doctors, well, they never starve, for people will
+get sick, or think they’re sick, which is better yet;
+then there are a few preachers who are supported in
+a poor way by their congregations. When a man
+fails, he goes into the insurance business.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell smoked contemplatively for a few moments.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Sometimes,� he resumed presently, “I feel as
+if I were tottering on the verge of the insurance
+business myself.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked at Powell, who had relapsed into
+silence, his head lowered, his eyes fixed in the distance,
+and there was something pathetic in the figure,
+or would have been, but for the humor that
+saved every situation for Powell. There was, however,
+something appealing, and something to inspire
+affection, too. Marley’s gaze recalled Powell, and
+he glanced up with a smile.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I reckon you’ve gathered from my remarks,�
+said Powell, “that I consider success chiefly from
+a monetary standpoint, but I don’t. The main
+business of life is living, and the trouble with the
+world is that it is too busy getting ready to live
+to find the time for life; it has tied itself up with
+a thousand chains of its own forging and it has had
+to postpone living from time to time until most
+people have put the beginning of life at the gateway
+of death; meanwhile they’re busy gathering
+things, like magpies, and those that gather the
+most are considered the best; they have come to
+think that people are divided into two classes, good
+and bad; the good are those who own, the bad those
+who don’t, and the good think their business is to
+put down the bad. Now, here in Gordon County,
+we have about everything a man needs; the spring
+comes and the summer, and the autumn and the
+winter; the rain falls and the winds blow and the
+sun shines, and I’ve noticed that Lighttown gets
+about as much rain as Main Street, and Gooseville
+about as much wind as Scioto Street; the sun seems
+to shine pretty much alike on the niggers loafing
+in Market Space and on old Selah Dudley and
+Judge Blair, bowing like Christians to each other
+in the Square. The trees are the same color wherever
+they grow, and I don’t see any reason why
+people shouldn’t be happy if they’d only let one
+another be happy. Now, I would have lived, but I
+didn’t have time. I thought when I began that
+I’d have to do as the rest were doing, get hold of
+things, and I saw that if I did, I’d have to get
+my share away from them; well, I made a failure
+of that, being too soft inside someway; that was
+all right too, but meanwhile I was wasting time,
+and putting off living—now it’s too late.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked at him in perplexity, not knowing
+how to take him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I know,� he said presently. “But what am I
+going to do? I can live all right, but I have to do
+better than that; I want to get married.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Married,� mused Powell, “married! Well, I
+got married.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was interested. He had never heard
+Powell speak of his wife, and he feared what he
+was about to say; for that instant Powell’s standing
+in his estimation trembled.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And that was the only sensible thing I ever
+did.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley felt a great relief.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But I don’t know that I did right by Mary; I
+didn’t do her any good, I reckon; still, she’s borne
+up somehow; I wish I had a sky full of sunlight to
+pour over her.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell walked to his window, and looked across
+into the Court-House yard where the leaves were
+falling slowly from the Maple-trees. Marley hoped
+that he would go on, and say more of his wife, but
+he was silent. Presently he turned about.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, Glenn,� he said; “I see you’re stuck on
+staying in Macochee, and I don’t blame you; and
+you want to get married, and that’s all right. Maybe
+I can help you do it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How?� said Marley, eagerly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve got a scheme.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What is it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. I’d
+better wait till I see whether it will or not before I
+tell you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He stood and smiled at Marley a moment, and
+then said: “You wait here.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And he turned and left the office. Marley
+watched Powell’s fine figure as he walked across
+the street toward the Court House, a great love of
+the man surging within him. He felt secure and
+safe; a new warmth spread through him. At the
+door of the Court House Marley saw him stop
+and shake hands with Garver, the sheriff. The two
+talked a moment, then turned and went down
+toward the big iron gate in Main Street, and
+disappeared. Marley waited until noon and then he
+went home to his dinner. He returned, but Powell
+did not come back to the office all the afternoon.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XVII<br /> <br />THE COUNTY FAIR</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Marley did not see Wade Powell again for
+four days; a Sunday intervened, and Powell
+did not come back to the office until Monday
+morning. He came in with a solemn air upon
+him, and a new dignity that made impressive
+the seriousness with which he set to work at
+the pile of papers on his desk, as if he were beginning
+a new week with new resolutions. He
+was freshly shaved, and his hair had been cut; it
+was shorter at the sides and, against his rough sunburnt
+neck, showed an edge of clean white skin.
+His newly cropped hair gave him a strange, brisk
+appearance; his black clothes were brushed, his
+linen fresh.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He spoke to Marley but a few times and then
+from the distant altitude of his new dignity. Once
+he sent Marley on an errand to Snider’s drug store
+to buy a large blank book; he said he was going to
+keep an office docket after that. He worked on his
+new docket half the morning, then he carried the
+docket and the bundle of papers over to Marley’s
+table, flung them down and asked Marley if he
+would not continue the work for him. He explained
+the system he had devised for keeping a
+record of his cases; it was intricate and complete,
+but in many of his cases the numbers and in some
+instances the names of opposing parties were missing;
+Powell told Marley to go over to the Court
+House and get the missing data from the clerk.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve got to go out for a while,� Powell explained.
+Then he hurried away; he seemed to be
+glad to escape from the office and the drudgery of
+the task he had set for himself.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell’s absence weighed on Marley; he was
+lonesome in the deserted office, and found himself
+wondering just where Powell was at each moment;
+he pictured him with his companions, Colonel
+Devlin, Marshall Scarff, Sheriff Garver, old
+man Brockton and Doc Hall; lately it had been
+rumored that George Halliday had been admitted
+to the merry group, and that they played poker
+nightly in a room in the Coleman Block. Then
+Marley would picture to himself Wade Powell’s
+wife; he had never seen her, but he had an idea
+of her appearance, formed from no description
+of her, but created out of his own fancy. He pictured
+her as a graceful little woman, with a certain
+droop to her figure; but try as he would,
+he could not see her face; it was a blur to him, yet
+it gave somehow a certain expression of sweetness
+and patience; sometimes, by an effort, he could see
+her brow, and the hair above it; the hair was dark,
+and parted in the middle with some gray in its
+rather heavy mass.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley could never discuss Wade Powell with
+any kind of satisfaction with Lavinia. When he
+spoke of him, she would smile and affect an interest,
+but he could detect the affectation, and he
+could detect, also, a certain distance in her attitude
+toward Wade Powell or the thought of him,
+which he ascribed to the influence of Judge Blair’s
+dislike. Marley saw that Lavinia never would accept
+Wade Powell, and he had ceased to mention
+him except in a casual manner. For some like
+reason he had ceased to mention Wade Powell at
+home; he found that he had many views which he
+could not share with those nearest him, and his
+inner life at that time was somewhat lonely and
+aloof.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He had not told Lavinia of Wade Powell’s offer
+of assistance, nor had he spoken of it at home.
+In those four days he had thought much of it and
+built countless hopes upon it; he had thought of
+all the possibilities, and taken a fine delight in examining
+each one, working it out to its logical end
+in its effect upon Lavinia and him and upon their
+fortunes. He was disappointed when Wade Powell
+failed to refer to the subject again; he would have
+liked to discuss the disappointment with Lavinia;
+usually, out of her youthful optimism and faith in
+the life of which she was so innocent, she could reassure
+him; but of late he had had so many disappointments
+and had drawn so heavily on Lavinia’s
+resources of comfort and hope that he had
+grown wary, almost superstitiously wary, of making
+any further drafts.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When Monday came and Powell did not renew
+the subject, nor even say what his scheme had been,
+Marley concluded that Powell had forgotten all
+about it, and so he relinquished the hope with a
+sigh, and tried to forget it himself. He took up
+his studies once more; but he made poor headway;
+he saw with chagrin that he had not read ten
+pages of law in as many days, and what he had
+read he could not remember. When he tried to
+review it, the words had no meaning for him, nor
+could he wrest any from them, even though he
+ground his elbows in the table with the book between
+them and dug his fists into his hair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>That was the week of the Gordon County fair.
+For a month every fence along the white pikes in
+the country had borne the bills, flaming from afar
+in red ink the date, “Oct. 15-31.� There were,
+too, lithographs everywhere—on boards at the
+monument, at the Court House, on the town hall,
+on the covered bridge over Mad River—lithographs
+picturing the exciting finish of a trotting
+race, and a sedate concourse of fat cattle. The
+fair opened Monday, but it was understood that
+that day would be devoted to preparing and arranging
+the exhibits; the fair would not begin in earnest
+until Tuesday; the big day would be Thursday.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was glad that fair week had come, for
+the chance of novelty which it offered, and, too, for
+the excuse it gave him; he would not study that
+week, but in the general festivity try to forget
+the problem that so oppressed him. He would have
+liked to go to the fair every day, but he could not,
+for the expense, insignificant as it seemed to be to
+every one else in the county, was not insignificant
+to him. He went, however, on Wednesday with
+his father, who, with the love of horses he had inherited
+from the saddle-bag days of Methodism,
+recklessly attended the races. Marley thought that
+this visit would be his last, but on Thursday morning
+he met Lawrence in the Square.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Just the man I’m looking for!� said Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He was brisk, alert, important, and had an official
+air which was explained when Marley observed,
+on the lapel of his coat, the badge of blue
+ribbon that proclaimed an officer of the fair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I have charge of the tickets this year,� he said.
+“Want to go? I’ll pass you in.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was glad enough to accept.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ll have to go around to the office and tell
+Powell,� he said. “I was away all day yesterday.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, nonsense,� replied Lawrence, “that won’t
+make any difference; he’s been full for two days.
+This is his big time.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley had a pang as he saw with what small
+seriousness Lawrence regarded his relation to the
+law; it reflected, doubtless, the common attitude
+of the community toward him and his efforts.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve got to hurry,� Lawrence went on; “I’ve
+got a rig waiting here; you can ride out with me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It was one of the incomparable afternoons that
+autumn brings to Ohio; the retreating sun was
+flashing in the high, blue sky; the air was fresh and
+Marley felt it full of energy and hope. Lawrence
+drove rapidly through the throng of hurrying vehicles
+that crowded the road to the fair-grounds,
+stirring up a cloud of dust that covered everything
+with its white powder.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lawrence left him at the gate, being too full of
+business to engage in the weary search for pleasure,
+and Marley set out alone across the scorched
+and trampled turf for the grand stand, black with
+people for the races. He could hear the nervous
+clamor of the bell in the judges’ stand, the notes
+of the hand-organ at the squeaking merry-go-round,
+the incessant thumping of the bass drum that made
+its barbaric music for the side-show, and the cries
+of venders, dominating all the voices of the thousands
+bent in their silly way on pleasure. Once,
+calling him back to the real, to the peace of the
+commonplace, he heard the distant tones of the
+town clock in the tower that stood, a mile away,
+above the autumnal trees.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He pressed into the space between the grand
+stand and the whitewashed fence that surrounded
+the track; through the palings he could see the
+stoop-shouldered drivers, bent over the heavily
+breathing trotters they jogged to and fro; above
+him, in the grand stand, he could distinguish cries
+and laughs, now and then complete excited sentences,
+sometimes voices he knew. All around
+him the farmers, clumsy in their ready-made
+clothes and bearing their buggy whips as some
+insignia of office, solemnly watched the races and
+talked of horses.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The sense of kinship with the crowd that had unerringly
+drawn Marley left him the moment he
+was in the crowd, and a loneliness replaced the
+sense of kinship. He looked about for some one
+he knew. He began, here and there, to recognize
+faces, just as he had recognized voices in the din
+above him; he began to analyze and to classify the
+crowd, and he laughed somewhat cynically when he
+saw numbers of politicians going about among the
+farmers, shaking their hands, greeting them effusively,
+calling them by their Christian names.
+Then suddenly he saw Wade Powell. The crowd
+at the point where Powell stood, nucleated with
+him as its center; by the way the men were laughing,
+and by the way Powell was trying not to
+laugh, Marley knew that he had been telling them
+one of his stories, and from the self-conscious,
+guilty expressions on certain of the faces, Marley
+knew that the story was probably one that should
+not have been told. Several countrymen hung on
+the edge of the group, not identifying themselves
+with it, yet anxious to have a look at Wade Powell,
+who enjoyed the fame of the county’s best criminal
+lawyer.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When Powell saw Marley he called to him, and
+when Marley drew near, he introduced him, somehow
+mysteriously, almost surreptitiously, to the
+man at his elbow. Powell’s face was very red, and
+his eyes were brilliant. The mystery he put into
+his introduction was but a part of his manner.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“This is Mr. Carman, of Pleasant Grove Township,
+Glenn,� he said, bending over, as if no one
+should hear the name; and then he added, in a
+husky whisper: “He’s our candidate for county
+clerk, you know.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley saw something strange, forbidding, in
+Carman’s face, but he could not tell what it was.
+It was a red, sunburnt face, closely shaven, with
+a short mustache burned by the sun; the smile it
+wore seemed to be fixed and impersonal. Plainly
+the man had spent his days out of doors, though, it
+seemed, not healthfully, for his skin was dry and
+hardened, and his neck thin and wrinkled; he
+seemed to have known the hard work and the poor
+nourishment of a farm. Marley wondered what
+was the matter with Carman’s face. But Powell
+was drawing them aside.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Come over here,� he was saying, “where we
+can be alone.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He led them to a corner of the little yard; no one
+was near; they were quite out of the crowd which
+was pressing to the whitewashed picket fence,
+attracted by the excitement of the race for which
+the horses were just then scoring.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Now, Jake,� Powell began, speaking to Carman,
+“this is the young man I was talking to you
+about.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Carman, still smiling his dry meaningless smile,
+turned his face half away.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I reckon,� Powell went on, “that I might be
+able to do you some good, if I took off my coat.�
+Powell spoke with a pride in his own influence;
+Marley had never known him to come so near
+to boasting before.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Carman was looking away; and Powell, his own
+eyes narrowed, was watching him closely. Once
+he winked at Marley, and Marley was mystified;
+he did not know what play was going on here; he
+looked from Carman to Powell, and back to Carman
+again. There was some strange fascination
+about Carman; Marley felt a slight relief when he
+discovered that there was something peculiar
+about Carman’s eyes.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I haven’t said anything to Marley about the
+matter, Jake,� Powell said. “Maybe I’d better
+tell him. Hell! He might not want it—I don’t
+know.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Carman turned suddenly; his face had been in
+the shadow; now it came into the sunlight, and
+Marley saw that while the pupil of Carman’s right
+eye contracted suddenly, the pupil of his left eye
+remained fixed; it was larger than the pupil of
+the right eye, which had shrunk to a pin-point in
+the sharp light of the sun. Marley looked closely,
+the left eye seemed to be swimming in liquid; it
+almost hurt Marley’s eyes to look at it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve been telling Carman, Glenn,� Powell was
+explaining, “that if he is elected—and gets into
+the Court House—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked at Powell expectantly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I want him,� Powell went on, “to make you
+his deputy.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley saw it all in a flash; this was what
+Powell had meant that day a fortnight ago; he
+felt his great affection for Powell glow and
+warm; Lavinia would appreciate Powell after
+this. It meant salary, position, a place in which
+he might complete his law studies at his leisure;
+it meant a living, a home, marriage, Lavinia!
+He looked all his gratitude at Powell, who smiled
+appreciatively.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Carman had turned his face away again, he
+was still smiling, and plucking now at his chin;
+Marley waited, and Powell finally grew impatient.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, Jake, what do you say?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Carman waited a moment longer, then slowly
+turned about. Marley watched him narrowly, he
+saw the pupil of his right eye contract, the pupil
+of the watery left eye remained fixed; then, for
+the first time, Carman looked steadily at Marley
+and for the first time he spoke.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� he said, and he stopped to spit out his
+tobacco, “you know I’m always ready to do a friend
+a good turn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell looked Carman over carefully a moment,
+and then he said,</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“All right, Jake.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Just then there was a rush of hoofs, a shock of
+excitement, and they heard a loud yell:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Go!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And they rushed to the fence of the whitewashed
+palings.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XVIII<br /> <br />THE ROAD TO MINGO</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Lavinia sat rocking quietly back and forth,
+and stitched away with her colored silks on
+her tambourine frames, while Marley told her
+of the fortune Wade Powell had brought them.
+He told the story briefly, and he tried to tell it
+simply; he did not comment on Powell’s kindness
+or generosity, but let his deeds speak for themselves
+in Powell’s behalf. When he had done, Marley
+waited for Lavinia’s comment, but she rocked on
+a moment and then held her tambourine frames at
+arm’s length to study the sweet pea she was making.
+When she had done so, she dropped her sewing
+suddenly into her lap, and looking up, said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He thinks everything of you, doesn’t he?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I believe he likes me,� Marley said, as modestly
+as he could put it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Who could help it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia looked at Marley, and he leaned over,
+and took her hands.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I am glad you can’t, sweetheart,� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you know,� she went on, “I think it is because
+you have been kind and good to him—just
+as you are kind and good to every one. His life
+is lonely; he is an outcast, almost; no one cares
+for him, and he appreciates your goodness.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Pity was the utmost feeling she could produce
+for Wade Powell out of her kindly heart. But
+Marley, though he could accept her homage to the
+full without embarrassment, could not acquiesce
+to this length, and he laughed at her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Nonsense, Lavinia,� he said. “You have the
+thing all topsy-turvy. It is Wade Powell who has
+been kind to me; it is he and not I who is good
+to every one. He has a heart brimful of the milk
+of human kindness. You have no idea, and no
+one has, of the good he does in a thousand little
+ways. He tries to hide it all; he acts as if he
+were ashamed of it, but there are hundreds of
+people in Macochee who worship him, and would
+be ready to die for him, if it would help him any.
+Don’t think he has no friends! He has them by
+the score—of course, they are all poor; I reckon
+that’s why they are generally unknown.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But isn’t he cruel?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley’s eyes widened in astonishment.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I mean,� Lavinia said correctively, “isn’t he
+kind of sarcastic?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� Marley admitted, “he is that at times.
+I think he tries to hide his better qualities; I
+think he tries to cloak his finer nature with a
+rough garb. Perhaps it is because he is really so
+sensitive. But he is, to my mind, a truly great
+man. He is a sort of tribune of the people.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But, Glenn, what about his drinking?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, that’s the trouble,� Marley said, shaking
+his head. “If he had let liquor alone he’d have
+been away up.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia was silent a moment, her brow was knit
+in little wrinkles.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Glenn,� she said presently, “I have been thinking.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That with your influence you might reform him—out
+of his liking for you, don’t you know?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She raised her blue eyes. He laughed outright,
+and then took her face between his two hands.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You dear little thing!� he said, with the patronage
+of a lover.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia regained her dignity.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But couldn’t you?� she demanded.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, dear heart,� Marley said, “he would
+think it presumption. I wouldn’t dare.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia shook her head in the hopelessness of
+the reformer, and took up her tambourine frames
+again with a sigh.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s a pity,� she said, relinquishing the subject
+with the hope, “it’s such a pity.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But you haven’t told me what you think
+of the scheme.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You know, dear, that whatever you think best
+I think best.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was disappointed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You don’t seem to be very enthusiastic over
+the prospect,� he complained. “I thought you’d
+be glad as I to know that I can at last make a
+place for myself in the world—and a home and a
+living for you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia looked up.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I never had any doubt of that, Glenn,� she
+said simply.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He saw the trust and confidence she had in him,
+a trust and a confidence he had never felt himself,
+and had never before been wholly aware of
+in her. He saw that she had never shared those
+fears which had so long oppressed him, and into
+his love there came a devout thankfulness. He
+felt strong, hopeful, confident, victorious. He had
+a sudden fancy that it would be like this when
+they were married; he would sit at his own hearth,
+with a fire crackling merrily, and the rain and
+wind beating outside—for the first time he could
+indulge such a fancy; it allowed him, now that his
+future was assured, to come up to it and to take
+hold of it; it became a reality.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge was not at home that night. Now
+and then Marley could hear Mrs. Blair speak a
+word to Connie and Chad, over their lessons in
+the sitting-room; school had commenced, and Connie
+having that year entered the High School had
+taken on a new dignity, in consequence of which
+she was treating Chad with a divine patience
+that brought its own peace into the Blair household.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They talked for a long time of their plans.
+Marley would take his new place in December
+when the new county clerk went into office, and
+he told Lavinia all the advantages of the position.
+It would extend his acquaintance, it would give
+him a familiarity with court proceedings that otherwise
+he could not have acquired in years. He
+meant to study hard, and be admitted to the bar.
+They could have a little cottage and live simply
+and economically; he would save part of his salary,
+and when he hung out his shingle he would have
+enough money laid by to support them, modestly,
+until he could establish himself in a practice.
+He laid it all before her plainly, convincingly.
+He was charmed with the practicability of the
+plan, with its conservatism, its common sense.
+They might as well be married.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Can’t we?� he asked. He trembled as he
+asked; his happiness had never come so close before.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia dropped her embroidery frames into her
+lap and looked up at him. The question in her
+eyes was almost born of fear.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Right away?� exclaimed Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, almost right away,� Marley answered.
+“Sometime this winter, anyway.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“This winter! So soon?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“So soon!� Marley repeated her words, almost
+in mockery.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But we mustn’t be married in the winter,�
+she said, “we’ve always planned to be married in
+June—our month, you know.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What’s the use of waiting?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But papa and mama—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>This quick rushing to the parental cover, this
+clinging to the habit of years struck a jealousy
+through Marley’s heart. His face fell and he
+looked hurt.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Can’t we, dear?� he pleaded.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia looked at him, and she said shyly:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“If you say so, Glenn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They were solemn in their joy and made their
+plans in detail. They would be married quietly,
+Lavinia said, and at home. Doctor Marley would
+perform the ceremony, and Marley was touched
+by this recognition of his father.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The fall worked a new energy in Marley, and,
+with the assurance that his labors were now soon
+to bear fruit, he found that he could study better
+than ever before. He worked faithfully over his
+books every morning, and he worked so hard that
+he felt himself entitled to a portion of each afternoon.
+He would leave the office at four o’clock.
+Lavinia would be waiting for him, and they would
+try to get out of sight before Connie returned from
+school. She might be expected any moment to
+come slowly down Ward Street entwined with
+one of her school-girl friends. They did not like,
+somehow, to meet Connie. The smile she gave
+them was apt to be disconcerting. They met
+smiles in the faces of others they encountered in
+their walks, but they were of a quality more kindly
+than Connie’s smile.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They had walked one afternoon to the edge of
+town where Ward Street climbed a hill and became
+the road to Mingo. At their feet lay the
+little fields, in the distance they could see a man
+plowing with two white horses; off to the right
+lay the water-works pond, gleaming in the afternoon
+sun.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What are you thinking of?� Marley said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I was thinking that it would be nice to live in
+the country.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I was thinking that very thing myself!� exclaimed
+Marley. Their eyes met, and they thrilled
+over this unity in their thoughts. It was marvelous
+to them, mysterious, prophetic.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Some day I could buy a farm,� Marley said;
+“out that way.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� Lavinia replied, “away off there, beyond
+those low trees. Do you see?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She pointed, but Marley did not look in the direction
+of the trees; he looked at her finger. It
+was so small, so round, so white. He bent forward,
+and kissed the finger.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, but you must look where I’m pointing,�
+said Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They drew closely together. Marley took Lavinia’s
+hand and they stood long in silence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We could have a country home there,� Marley
+said after a while, “with a hedge about it and
+stables and horses and dogs. It would be close to
+town; I could go in in the morning and out again
+in the afternoon.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And I could drive you in, and then come for
+you in the afternoon—when court adjourned.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, I would have a man to drive me,� said
+Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But couldn’t I ride in beside you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes; you could sit beside me, on the back
+seat; we’d have an open carriage.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“A victoria!� exclaimed Lavinia. “It would
+be the only one in Macochee!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Is that what they call them?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Victorias?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You know, with a low seat behind and a high
+seat for the driver. You have a green cushion
+for your feet. You would look so handsome in
+one, Glenn. You would sit very erect and proud,
+with your hands on a cane. You would have white
+hair then.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We would be old?� he asked in some dismay.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, no,� said Lavinia, trying to reconcile her
+dreams, “not old exactly. But I dote on white
+hair. It’s so distinguished for a lawyer with a
+country home. Of course we’ll have to get old
+sometime.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We’ll grow old together, dear.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� she whispered, “and think of the long
+years of happiness!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They stood and gazed, looking down the long
+vista of years that stretched before them as smooth
+and peaceful as the white road to Mingo.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>A subtile change was passing over the face of
+the road; shadows were stealing toward it, and
+it was growing gray. The trees that still were
+green were darkening to a deeper green, but the
+colors of those that had changed flamed all the
+brighter. The sun shone more golden on the shocks
+of corn, the sky was glowing pink in the west, the
+water-works pond was glistening as the sun’s shafts
+struck it more obliquely. A fine powder hung in
+the peaceful air.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How beautiful the fall is!� said Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, I love it,� said Marley. “But do you
+know, dear, that I never liked it before? It always
+seemed sad to me. But you have taught me to
+love many things. You don’t know all that you
+have done for me!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She stood in her blue dress, with her hands
+folded before her. Marley looked at her hands,
+and at her white throat, and at her hair, its brown
+turned to a golden hue by the clear light; then
+he looked into her eyes. A sudden emotion, almost
+religious in its ecstasy, came over him. He bent
+forward.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh!� he exclaimed. “Do you know how beautiful
+you are! I worship you!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t, Glenn,� she said, “don’t say that!� The
+reflection of a superstitious fear lay in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why?� he said defiantly. “It’s all true. You
+are my religion.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You frighten me,� she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley laughed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why!� he exclaimed, “there’s nothing to fear.
+Isn’t our future assured now?�</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XIX<br /> <br />WAKING</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Carman was inducted into office the first
+Monday in December, quietly, as the <em>Republican</em>
+said, as though it reflected credit on
+the new county clerk as a man who modestly
+avoided the demonstration that might have been
+expected under such circumstances. Marley, in
+the hope of seeing his own name, eagerly ran his
+eyes down the few lines that were devoted to the
+occurrence, but his name was not there, the <em>Republican’s</em>
+reporter, as he felt, being a man who lacked
+a sense of the relative importance of events.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley had taken no part in the campaign,
+though Wade Powell wished him to, and suggested
+every now and then that he speak at some of the
+meetings that were being held in the country schoolhouses.
+Powell said it would be good practice for
+him in a profession where so much talking has to
+be done, and he found other reasons why Marley
+should do this, as that it would extend his acquaintance,
+and give him a standing with the party; but,
+though Marley was always promising, he was
+always postponing; the thought of standing up and
+speaking to the vast audiences his imagination was
+able to crowd into a little school-room filled him
+with fear, and he never could bring himself to consent
+to any definite time. Besides this, he could
+not find an evening he was willing to spend away
+from Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When election was over, he expected that he
+would hear from Carman, but he had no word
+from him. Several times he was on the point of
+mentioning the subject to Wade Powell, but somehow,
+with a reticence for which he reproached
+himself, he could not bring himself to do it. He
+watched the papers closely, but he found it quite
+as hard to find in them any information about Carman
+as on any other subject, except, possibly, the
+banal personalities of the town as they related
+themselves to the coming and going of the trains.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But at last, on the day it had occurred to the
+reporter to chronicle the fact that Carman had been
+inducted into office, the little item struck Marley
+sadly; he felt a sense of detachment from Carman;
+he could not altogether realize that intimate relationship
+to Carman in his new official position that
+he felt belonged to one who was to be Carman’s
+deputy. In his imagination he saw Carman shambling
+about in the dingy room where the county
+clerk kept the records of the court, his knees unhinging
+loosely at each step, his shoulders bent, his
+hands in his trousers pockets, his right eye squinting
+here and there observantly, the left fixed, impervious
+to light and shadow, to all that was going
+on in the world. He wondered if Carman, as he
+looked about, had been thinking in any wise of
+him or had seen him as a part of the place where
+his life was to be lived for the next three years.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley read the paper at supper time; in the
+evening he went to see Lavinia. She too had read
+the paper.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I know,� she said simply, and he was grateful
+for her quick intuition. “Have you seen him?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Are you going to?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Would you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, certainly, at once.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley went to the Court House the first thing
+in the morning. He feared he might have arrived
+too early, but Carman had the virtue that goes
+farther perhaps than any other in the affections
+and approval of men, he rose early. He had been
+at his office since long before seven o’clock.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley found the new county clerk at his desk,
+obviously ready for business. The desk was clean,
+with a cleanness that was rather a barrenness than
+an order. The ink-wells, the pens, with their shining
+new steel points, the fresh blotters, all were
+laid on the clean pad with geometrical exactness.
+The pigeon holes were empty, but they were all
+lettered as if the mind of the new county clerk
+had grappled with the future, come off victorious,
+and provided for every possible emergency, though
+there were certain contingencies that had impressed
+him as “Miscellaneous.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Carman looked up with the obliging expression
+of the new public official, but Marley’s heart instantly
+sank with a foreboding that told him he
+might as well turn about then and go. It was
+plain that Carman saw nothing in the call beyond
+a mere incident of the day’s work.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley took a chair near Carman’s desk. He
+looked at Carman once, and then looked instantly
+away; the eye that lacked the power of accommodation
+was fixed on him, and it made him nervous.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you remember me, Mr. Carman?� asked
+Marley; and then fearing the reply he hastened to
+add: “I’m Glenn Marley; Mr. Powell introduced
+me to you out at the fair-grounds last fall.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, I remember,� said Carman.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I suppose you know what I came for?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Carman’s right eye widened somewhat in an expression
+of mild surprise.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You know,� urged Marley, “the clerkship.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What clerkship was that?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, don’t you know? The chief clerkship, I
+reckon.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Here?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, yes. Don’t you remember?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Carman’s right eye wore a puzzled look.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t you remember?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, you’ve got me,� said Carman, with a
+little laugh of apology.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, I understood,� Marley went on, “that
+in the event of your election I was to have a position
+here.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What as?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why—as chief deputy.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>That right eye of Carman’s was fixed on him
+questioningly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Chief deputy?� he said finally. “Here—in
+my office?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, yes,� said Marley. “Don’t you remember?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The question in the right eye had given way to a
+surprise that was growing in Carman’s mind, and
+spreading contagiously to a surprise, deeper and
+more acute, in Marley’s mind. The eye had
+something reproachful in its steady stare. Marley
+leaned over impulsively.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, surely you haven’t forgotten—that day
+out at the fair-grounds, when Mr. Powell introduced
+me to you? I understood, I always understood
+that I was to have the place. I never mentioned
+it to you afterward, I didn’t like to bother
+you, you know. I waited along, feeling that everything
+was all right. But when election was over—and
+afterward, when you took your office, and I
+didn’t hear anything—I thought I’d come around
+and see you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Despite the sinister left eye, Marley leaned
+close to Carman and waited. Carman was long in
+bringing himself to speak. Even then he did not
+seem to be sure of the situation he was dealing
+with.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You say you understood you was to have a job
+under me as chief clerk?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, yes,� replied Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Who’d you understand it from, me or Wade
+Powell?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well—� Marley hesitated, “I thought I understood
+it from you; I certainly understood it
+from Mr. Powell.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You say you got the idea from something I
+said out at the fair-grounds?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, sir, at the fair-grounds.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Carman turned away and knitted his brows.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“At the fair-grounds,� he said presently, as
+though talking more to himself than to Marley.
+“The fair-grounds, h-m. Yes, I do remember—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley’s heart stirred with a little hope.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I do remember seeing you there, and talking
+to you. But I don’t remember making you any
+promises. Did you ask me?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No; Mr. Powell did that.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And what did I say?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� Marley answered, “I can’t recall your
+exact words, but I got the impression, and so did
+Mr. Powell, I’m sure, that it was all right, I—I
+counted on it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, say, Glenn,� he said; “I’m awfully sorry,
+honest I am. I remember now, come to think of
+it, that Wade did say something like that, and
+maybe I said something to lead you to think I’d do
+it; I don’t say I didn’t—I don’t just remember.
+But I reckon you’ve banked more on what Wade
+told you than on what I did. Course, I reckon
+I didn’t turn you down—a feller never does that
+in a campaign, you know. But Wade takes a lot
+o’ things for granted in this life.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He smiled indulgently, as if Powell’s weaknesses
+were commonly known and understood.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I reckon you relied too much on what Wade
+told you,� Carman went on. His right eye was fixed
+on Marley, but Marley did not return the look.
+He had turned half-way round and thrown his
+arm over the back of his chair. He looked out
+the window, his eyes vacant and sad. He was
+thinking of Lavinia, of their hopes and plans, of
+the little home that had become almost a reality to
+them; the trees in the Court-House yard held
+their gaunt limbs helplessly up against the cold
+December day; the ugly clouds were hurrying
+desperately across the sky; he thought of the little
+law office across the street, with the dusty law books
+lying on the table, and the hopelessness of it
+all overwhelmed him. But there beside him Carman
+still was speaking:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s like Wade,� he was saying. “I’m sorry,
+derned if I hain’t.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley scarcely heard him. He was looking
+ahead. How many years—</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He hadn’t ought to of done it,� Carman was
+going on; “no, sir, he hadn’t ought.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>How many years, Marley was thinking, would
+they have to wait now? Would Lavinia be lost
+with all the rest? Ought he to ask her to wait any
+longer? But Carman kept on:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve got all my arrangements made now, you
+see.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He swept his arm about the office where the few
+clerks were bending over the big records in which
+they were copying the pleadings they could not
+understand. Marley did not see; he saw nothing
+but the ruin of all his hopes. It was still in there;
+the atmosphere held the musty odor of a public office;
+the clock ticked; once a stamping machine
+clicked sharply as a clerk marked a filing date on
+some document. And then a great disgust overwhelmed
+him, a disgust with himself for being so
+fatuous, so credulous. He had taken so much for
+granted, he had acted as a child, not as a man,
+and he felt a hatred for himself, he felt almost
+like striking himself.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I guess I’ve been a fool,� he said suddenly,
+rising from his chair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, you haven’t neither,� said Carman, “but
+Wade Powell has; he had no business—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley did not wait to hear Carman finish his
+sentence. Shame and mortification were the final
+aspects of his defeat; he put on his hat, drew it
+down over his eyes and stalked away. Carman
+looked at him as he disappeared through the lofty
+door. The pupil of his right eye widened as he
+looked, and when Glenn had passed from his
+sight he turned to his desk, and began to rearrange
+the tools to which he was so unaccustomed.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XX<br /> <br />HEART OF GRACE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Marley sighed in relief when he went up
+the steps of the Blair house that evening.
+Somehow he had got through the long, desolate
+day. He was sore from his great defeat, but the
+worst, at any rate, was over; the pang had been
+sharp, but now the pain had been dulled. He
+had spent the day in the office. Wade Powell had
+been in and out, but never once had he spoken of
+the clerkship, and Marley was too deep in humiliation
+to mention it. His one consolation was in
+the fact that he had never told any one of his prospect,
+not even his own mother; it had been a secret
+which he and Lavinia had shared luxuriously;
+though, as Marley now looked back on their joy,
+he realized that what had kept him from telling
+any one was a prudent skepticism, a lack of faith
+in the possibility of human happiness, an inherited
+dread of the calamity that stalks every joy.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia flung the hall door wide for him before
+he could ring the bell.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What is the matter?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How did you know anything was?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why,� she exclaimed, “I could tell the minute
+I heard your step. Tell me—what is it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley, ever sensitive to atmospheres, instantly
+felt the peace of the household. The glow from the
+living-room, a quiet voice speaking a commonplace
+word now and then, told him that Mrs. Blair was
+there with Connie and Chad, and he knew the children
+were at their lessons; he caught the faint
+odor of a cigar, and he knew that Judge Blair
+was in his library reading peacefully of the dead
+and silent past, whose men had left all their troubles
+in the leaves of printed books; all round him
+life was flowing on, unconsciously, and normally;
+the tumult and strife in his own soul were nothing
+to the world. All this flashed on him in an instant—and
+there was Lavinia, standing before him,
+her white brow knit in perplexity.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Tell me,� she was saying, “what it is.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I don’t get the job, that’s all.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He felt a momentary savage pleasure in the pain
+he inflicted, justifying it in the thought that he
+eased his own suffering by giving it to another.
+Then as quickly he repented, and felt ashamed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Is that all?� she said. She had come close to
+him, smiling in her sympathy, and then lifting a
+hand to his forehead.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t do that,� she said, as if she would erase
+the scowl.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When they were seated he gave her the details of
+his meeting with Carman, and with the recital of
+his disappointment its sharpness was repeated. He
+leaned over, his elbows on his knees, and clutched
+his hair in his fists. For an instant a kind of relief
+came to Lavinia, a relief that a crisis in her
+life had been postponed, a crisis from which, instinctively,
+she had shrunk. Her life could go
+on for a while as it had always gone on; change,
+which mortals dread, was delayed. Then in
+another moment her sympathy went out to him; she
+was on the floor at his knees, her arms about him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t, dear, don’t,� she pleaded. “Why, it is
+nothing. What does it matter? What does anything
+matter, so long as we have each other?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She stroked his hair, she called him by all her
+endearing names. She tried to take his hands from
+his face, that she might get him to look at her.
+But he resisted.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No,� he said. “I’m no good; I’m a failure;
+I’m worse than a failure. I’m a fool, a poor,
+weak, silly fool.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Hush, Glenn, hush!� she whispered, as if he
+were uttering blasphemies. “You must not, you
+must not!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She shook him in a kind of fear.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Look at me!� she said. “Look at me!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He remained obdurate, slowly shaking his head
+from side to side.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Look at me!� Lavinia repeated. “Don’t you
+see—don’t you see that—I love you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>A change came over him, subtile, but distinct.
+Slowly he raised his head, and then he put his
+arms about her and held her close, and gradually
+a comfort stole over him,—a comfort so delicious
+that he felt himself hardly worthy, because he now
+saw that all through the day he had had a
+subconsciousness that it would come to him at evening,
+and that he had somehow exaggerated his own grief
+in order to make this certain comfort the sweeter
+when it came.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It seemed to Marley, after he and Lavinia had
+sat there for a while, that he had come out of some
+nightmare; sanity returned, things assumed once
+more their proper proportions and relations to each
+other. He found himself smiling, if not laughing
+just yet, and with Lavinia’s hope and confidence
+the future opened to him once more. Now and
+then, of course, his disappointment would roll
+over him as a great wave, and once he said ruefully:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But think of the little home we were going to
+have!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But we’re going to have it,� Lavinia replied,
+smiling on him, “we’re going to have it, just the
+same!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But we’ll have to wait!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, we’re young,� said Lavinia, “and it
+won’t be so very long.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But I wanted it to be in the spring.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“May be it will be, who knows?� Lavinia could
+smile in this reassurance, now that she knew it
+could not be in the spring.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They discussed their future in all its phases,
+with the hope that Lavinia could so easily inspire
+in him; Marley was to keep on with his law
+studies; there was nothing else now to do—unless
+something should turn up—there was always that
+hope.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And it will, you’ll see,� said Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They discussed, too, Carman and Wade Powell.
+Marley thought that Lavinia might return to her
+old severity with Powell; when he expected her to
+do this, he was preparing to defend Powell; when
+she did not, but was generous with him, and urged
+Marley to reflect that he had done all he had done
+out of a spirit of kindness, Marley was disposed to
+be severe with Powell himself. Carman, they
+agreed, had acted handsomely; they could not find
+cause to blame him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No,� said Marley, “he treated me all right; I
+believe he was really sorry for me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>And then, at the thought of Carman’s having
+pity for him, his rebellion flamed up again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s humiliating, that’s what it is. Wade
+Powell had no business making a monkey of me in
+that way; though it doesn’t take much to make a
+monkey of me; I had the job almost completed
+myself, just waiting for some one to come along
+and put the finishing touches on. And Wade
+Powell did that!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley spoke in the sardonic humor the wounded
+and beaten spirit likes to employ in dealing with
+itself. But Lavinia hushed him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You just can not talk that way about yourself,
+Glenn,� she declared with her finest air of ownership.
+“I won’t let you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, it’s so humiliating,� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, no, it can’t be that,� Lavinia argued.
+“You can not feel humiliated. You have done
+nothing that need cause you any humiliation. We
+are the only ones who can humiliate ourselves;
+nothing but our own actions can humiliate us; no
+one else can.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia had a smiling little triumph in her own
+philosophy, but she quickly compromised it by an
+inconsistency.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Besides, no one else knows about it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No,� Marley agreed thoughtfully, and without
+noticing her inconsistency. “No one else knows
+anything about it. We have that to be thankful
+for, anyway.�</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXI<br /> <br />CHRISTMAS EVE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Lawrence was arranging for a grand ball in
+the Odd Fellows’ Hall, on Christmas Eve, and
+he had, as he came around to the office one
+day to assure Marley, counted him and Lavinia
+in. Marley, glad enough to close the law-book he
+was finding more and more irksome, listened to
+Lawrence’s enthusiasm for a while, but said at
+last:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m afraid I can’t go.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why not? Lavinia will want to go; she always
+does.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I know that,� Marley admitted, “but I can’t,
+that’s all.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lawrence looked at him intently for a moment.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Say, Glenn, what’s the matter with you?� he
+said. “Anything been going wrong lately? You
+look like you were in the dumps.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley shook his head with a negative gesture
+that admitted all Lawrence had said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You ain’t fretting over that job, are you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What job?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked up suddenly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, with Carman.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How’d you know?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, everybody knows about that,� Lawrence
+replied with a light air that added to Marley’s
+gloom; “but what of it? I wouldn’t let that cut
+me up; come out and show yourself a little more!
+You don’t want to keep Lavinia housed up there,
+away from all the fun that’s going on, do you?
+Mayme and I were talking about it the other
+night; you and Lavinia haven’t been to a thing for
+months; it isn’t right, I tell you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked sharply at Lawrence for a minute,
+and Lawrence marking the resentment in his
+eyes, hastened on:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t get mad, now; I don’t mean anything.
+I’m only saying it for your good. I think you
+need a little shaking up, that’s all.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Lavinia can do as she likes,� Marley said with
+dignity. “I shall not hinder her; I never have.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, don’t get sore now, old man; I didn’t
+mean to hurt your feelings. The holidays are here
+and you want to cut into the game; it’s a time to
+forget your troubles and have a little fun; you’ve
+only got one life to live; what’s the use of taking
+it so seriously?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley looked at Lawrence with a genuine envy
+for an instant, as at a man who never took anything
+in life very seriously; he looked at the new
+overcoat Lawrence held over his knee, showing its
+satin lining; and then, reflecting that Lawrence’s
+father had left with his estate a block of bank
+stock which had given Lawrence his position in
+the bank, Marley’s impatience with him returned
+and he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, it’s easy enough for you to talk; if you were
+in my place you might find it different.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“That’s all right,� Lawrence went on, a smile on
+his freckled face. “You just come to the party;
+it’ll cost you only five, and Lavinia would like it.
+I know that. So do you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley did know it; and he felt a new disgust
+with himself that remained with him long after
+Lawrence had put on his new overcoat and left. He
+reproached himself bitterly, and he told himself
+that the best thing he could do would be to go
+away somewhere, and not tell Lavinia, or anybody.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m only in her way, that’s all,� he thought
+as he opened his law-book, and bent it back viciously,
+so that it would stay open.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Ever since the fiasco of his plans as to a place
+with Carman, he had been seeking consolation in
+a new resolution to keep on patiently in the law;
+but it was a consolation that he had to keep active
+by a constant contemplation of himself as a young
+man who was making a brave and determined fight
+against heavy odds. It was difficult to sustain this
+heroic attitude in his own eyes and at the same time
+maintain that modesty which he knew would become
+him best in the eyes of others. The approach
+of the holiday season, the visible preparations on
+every hand and the gay spirits everywhere apparent
+had isolated him more than ever, and he had felt
+his alienation complete whenever he went to see
+Lavinia and found the whole Blair family in an
+excitement over their own festival. Marley would
+have liked to make Lavinia handsome gifts, but
+his debts were already large, relatively, and he
+rose to heights of self-denial that made him pathetic
+to himself, when he decided that he could
+give her nothing. Now that Lawrence was getting
+up a ball to which he knew Lavinia would like to
+go, as she had always gone to the balls that were
+not so frequent in Macochee as Lawrence wished
+they might be, he felt his humiliation deeper
+than ever. He put the matter honestly to Lavinia,
+however, and she said promptly:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, I wouldn’t think of going.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She looked up at him brightly, and then in an
+instant she looked down again. She relished the
+nobility of the attitude she had so promptly taken,
+but the woman in her prevailed over the saint, and
+told what a moment before she had determined not
+to tell:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve already declined one invitation.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She saw the look of pain come into Marley’s eyes,
+and instantly she regretted.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You have?� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, yes.� She looked at him with her head
+turned to one side; her face wore an expression
+he did not like to see.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It was on Marley’s lips to ask who had invited
+her, but his pride would not let him do that; somehow
+a sense of separation fell suddenly between
+them. He examined with deep interest the arm
+of his chair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� he began presently, “I wouldn’t have
+you stay away on my account, you know.� He
+looked up suddenly. “Please don’t stay away, Lavinia.
+I’d like to have you go.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>There was contrition in her voice as she almost
+flew to reply:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, you dear old thing, it was only George
+Halliday who asked me; and when I told him I
+wouldn’t go he was actually relieved; he said he
+didn’t want to go himself; he hates our little
+functions out here, you know, and has ever since
+he came back from Harvard. I suppose he was
+used to so much more in Cambridge!� Lavinia had
+a sneer in her tone, and it took on a shade of irritation
+as she added: “He asked me only because
+he was sorry for me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, sorry for you,� Marley repeated bitterly.
+“That’s another thing I’ve done for you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Please don’t, dear,� said Lavinia, “don’t let
+yourself get bitter. It’ll be all right. We’ll spend
+Christmas Eve here at home and have ever so much
+more fun by ourselves.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair told Marley that she wished Lavinia
+might go to the ball; her father wished it, too.
+Mrs. Blair told him that she could easily get
+George Halliday to take her,—their lifelong intimacy
+with the Hallidays permitted that. Marley
+assured her that he wished Lavinia to accept Halliday’s
+invitation, but that she would not do so.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’d take her myself,� he added, “only I can’t
+dance, and—I have no money. I’d like to have
+her go, if it would give her pleasure.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I know you would, you dear boy,� said Mrs.
+Blair, laying her hand on his shoulder in her affectionate
+way.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair urged Lavinia to go, and so did Marley,
+and when he saw that she was determined not
+to go, he urged her all the more strongly, because,
+now that he was sure of her position, he could so
+much more enjoy his own disinterestedness and
+magnanimity. They desisted when Lavinia complained
+that they were making her life miserable.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Though Marley could deny Lavinia the dance,
+he found, after all, that he could not deny himself
+the distinction of giving her a Christmas present.
+His heroic attitude gradually broke under the temptation
+of Hoffman’s jewelry store, glittering with
+its holiday display. Marley already owed Hoffman
+for Lavinia’s ring, but like most of the merchants
+in Macochee, Hoffman had to do business on an
+elastic credit, if he wished to do any business at all,
+and Marley, after many pains of selection, did not
+have much difficulty in inducing Hoffman to let
+him have the pearl opera-glasses he finally chose in
+the despair of thinking of anything better.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The opera-glasses might have atoned for the
+deprivation of the ball, had Marley been able to
+think of them with any comfort. The delight Lavinia
+expressed in a gift she could never use in
+Macochee, and the enthusiasm with which Connie
+admired them, made him nervous and guilty.
+Connie had temporarily foregone her claims to
+young-ladyhood, and was a child again for a little
+while. Her excitement and that of Chad should
+have made any Christmas Eve merry, but it was not
+a merry Christmas Eve for Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>As Lavinia and he sat in the parlor they caught
+now and then, or imagined they caught, the strains
+of the orchestra that was playing for the dancers in
+the Odd Fellows’ Hall, and they were both conscious
+that life would be tolerable for them only
+when the music should cease and the ball take its
+place among the things of the past, incapable of
+further trouble in the earth.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s very trying,� said Judge Blair to his wife
+that night. “I wish there was something we could
+do.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“So do I,� his wife acquiesced.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t like to see Lavinia cut off this way from
+every enjoyment. The strain must be very wearing.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I suppose it is very wearing with most lovers,�
+said Mrs. Blair. “I don’t see how they ever endure
+it; but they all do.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Have you talked with her about it?� The judge
+put his question with a guarded look, and was not
+surprised when his wife quickly replied:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Gracious, no. I’d never dare.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, I presume not. I don’t know who would,
+unless it might be Connie.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair was silent for a while in the trouble
+that was all the more serious because they dared not
+recognize its seriousness, and then she asked:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Couldn’t you help him to something?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t know what,� the judge replied.
+“There’s really no opening in a little town.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“If you were off the bench and back in the practice—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Great heavens!� he interrupted her. “Don’t
+mention such a thing!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I meant that you might take him in with you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’d be looking around for some one to take me
+in,� the judge said. “I’m glad I haven’t the problem
+to face.� He enjoyed for a moment the snug
+sense he had in his own position and then he
+sighed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He’s young, he has that, anyway. He’ll work it
+out somehow, I suppose, though I don’t know how.
+As for us, all we can do is to have patience, and
+wait.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, that’s all,� said Mrs. Blair. “I don’t believe
+in long engagements.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How long has it been?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Nearly a year now.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I thought it had been ten.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair laughed as she said: “Connie was
+wishing this morning that he’d marry her and get
+it over with.�</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXII<br /> <br />AN ADVERTISEMENT OF DESTINY</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>The first days of spring contrasted strongly
+with Marley’s mood. Because of some mysterious
+similarity in the two seasons he found
+the melancholy suggestion of fall in this spring,
+just as, with his high-flown hopes, he had
+found some of the joyous suggestion of spring in
+the autumn before. But as failure followed failure,
+he began to feel more and more an alien in Macochee;
+he had a sense of exile among his own kind,
+he was tortured by the thought that here, in a
+world where each man had some work to do and
+where, as it seemed, all men had suddenly grown
+happy in that work, there was no work for him to
+do.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He was young, healthy, and ambitious; he had
+given years to what he had been taught was a
+necessary preparation, and then suddenly, just as
+he felt himself ready for life, he found that
+there was no place in life for him. As he went
+about seeking employment there was borne in on
+him a sense of criticism and opposition, and he was
+depressed and humiliated. By the end of the winter
+he disliked showing himself anywhere; he no longer
+stopped in the McBriar House of an afternoon to
+watch Lawrence and Halliday at the billiards they
+played so well; he thought he detected a coolness in
+Lawrence’s treatment of him. He felt, or imagined,
+this coolness in everybody’s attitude now,
+and finally began to suspect it in the Blairs.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What’s the matter?� asked Powell, one morning.
+“You ain’t sick, are you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, something ails you. I can see that.� He
+waited for Marley to speak. “Is there anything I
+can do for you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No,� said Marley, “thank you. I’ve just been
+feeling a little bit blue, that’s all.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What about?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, I don’t know. I’m kind o’ discouraged. It
+seems to me that I’m wasting time; I’m not making
+any headway and then everybody in town is—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I wouldn’t mind that,� said Powell, divining
+the trouble at once. “They’ve had me on the gridiron
+for about forty years, and they never get tired
+of giving it a twist. It doesn’t bother me much
+any more, and I don’t see why you should let it
+bother you, especially as all they say about you is a
+damn lie.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The speech touched Marley, and he lost himself
+in an impulse of sympathy for Powell, but he
+could not put his sympathy before Powell in the
+way he would like and his mind soon returned to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve got to do something,� he said. “I wish I
+knew what.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� said Powell, “you know what I’ve always
+told you. I know what I’d do if I were your
+age. Of course—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell did not finish his sentence. He was looking
+out the window again, lost in introspection.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell’s reiteration of his old advice expressed
+the very thought that had been nebulous in Marley’s
+mind for days, and while he was conscious of
+it, he feared the consciousness, and struggled to
+prevent it from positing itself. But now that
+Powell had voiced it for him, he could escape it no
+longer, and it filled him with a fear. He went
+about all the day with this fear appalling him;
+more and more under its perverse influence he felt
+himself an alien, and the people he met in the street
+seemed unreal and strange, outlandish persons
+whom he had never known. They came upon him as
+ghosts, or if they did something to prove their reality,
+he seemed to be some ghost himself.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>In the afternoon he received a note from Lavinia;
+she said that she was going that evening with
+George Halliday to a concert in the Opera House.
+She did not want to go a bit, she said, but her
+mother, and especially her father, had urged her to
+go; arguing that she now went out so seldom that it
+must do her good, and besides, they had urged her
+so often that she felt it to be her duty in this instance;
+she had held out as long as she could, and
+then had yielded.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley tried to look upon the note reasonably;
+he could see the influence that had compelled Lavinia
+to go, and he knew he had no right to blame
+her, and yet, try as he would, he could not escape a
+feeling of bitterness. When he went home at evening
+his mother instantly noticed his depression,
+and implored him for the reason. He did not answer
+for a while, that is, it seemed a while to Mrs.
+Marley, but at last he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Mother, I’ve got to leave.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Leave?� she repeated, pronouncing the word in
+a hollow note of fear.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, leave.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But what for?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, you know I’m no good; I’m making no
+headway; there’s no place for me here in Macochee;
+I’ve got to get out into the world and <em>make</em> a place
+for myself, somewhere.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But where?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t know—anywhere.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley moved his hand in a wide gesture that
+included the whole world, and yet was without hope
+of conquest.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But you must have some plans—some idea—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ve thought of going to Cincinnati;
+maybe to Chicago.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But what will you do?� Mrs. Marley looked at
+him with pain and alarm.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do!� he said, his voice rising almost angrily.
+“Why, anything I can get to do. Anything, anything,
+sweeping streets, digging ditches, anything!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Marley looked at her son, sitting there before
+her with his head bowed in his hands. In her
+own face were reflected the pain and trouble that
+darkened his, and yet she felt herself helpless; she
+vaguely realized that he was engaged in a battle
+that he must after all fight alone; she could not
+help him, though she wished that she knew how to
+impart to him the faith she had that he would
+win the battle, somehow, in the end.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Poor boy!� she said at length, rising; “you are
+not yourself just now. Think it all over and talk
+to your father about it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It was the first evening in months that Marley
+had not spent with Lavinia, and his existence being
+now so bound up with hers, he found that he could
+not spend the evening as the other young men in
+town spent their evenings. However, he went
+down to the McBriar House and there a long bill
+hanging on the wall instantly struck his eye. The
+bill announced an excursion to Chicago. It took
+away his breath; he stood transfixed before it,
+fascinated and yet repelled; he read it through a
+dozen times. The cheerful way in which the railroad
+held out this trip intensified his own gloom; he
+wondered how he might escape, but there was no
+way; it was plainly the revelation of his destiny,
+prophetic, absolute, final, and he bowed before it as
+to a decree of fate; he knew now that he must go.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>As he went home, as he walked the dark streets
+in the air that was full of the balm of the coming
+spring, he felt as one to whom a great sorrow had
+come. He thought of leaving Macochee, of leaving
+his father and mother, and then, more than all, of
+leaving Lavinia, and his throat ached with the
+pain of parting that, even now, before any of his
+plans had been made, began to assail him. His
+plans were nothing now; they had become the
+merest details; the great decision had been reached,
+not by him, but for him; the destiny toward which
+all the lines of his existence for months had been
+converging, was on him, the moment had arrived,
+and he had a sense of being the mute and helpless
+victim of forces that were playing with him,
+hurrying him along to a future as dark as the moonless
+night above him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He told his father of the excursion, though he
+gave him no notion of it as an expression of his
+fate, and he was all the more distressed at the calm
+way in which his father acquiesced in what he put
+before him as a decision he would have liked to
+have appear as less final. His father in his mildness
+could not object to his trying, and he would
+provide the money for the experiment. It gave
+Marley a moment’s respite to have his father speak
+of it as an experiment, for that included the possibility
+of failure, and hence of his return home,
+but this meager consolation was immediately dissipated
+in the surer sense he felt that this was the
+end—the end of Macochee, the end of home, and
+the beginning of a new life.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXIII<br /> <br />THE BREAK</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Marley went to Lavinia the next morning,
+and told her as they sat there on the veranda in
+the spring sunlight. She looked at him with distress
+in her wide blue eyes.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“When?� she asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“To-night!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Tonight? Oh Glenn!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Her eyes had filled with tears, and she was winking
+hard to keep them back.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“To-night.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She repeated the word over and over again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And to think,� she managed to say at last, “to
+think that the last night I should have been away
+from you! How can I ever forgive myself!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Her lip trembled, and the tears rolled down her
+cheeks. She drew out her handkerchief and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Let’s go in.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>All that day Marley went about faltering over his
+preparations. Wade Powell was the only one of
+the few who were interested in him that was enthusiastic
+over his going, and he praised and congratulated
+him, and pierced his already sore heart by
+declaring that he had known all along it was what
+Marley would be compelled to do. He would give
+him a letter to his old friend, Judge Johnson, he
+said; the judge would be a great man for him to
+know, and Powell sat down at once, with more energy
+and enterprise than Marley had ever known
+him to show, and began to elaborate his letter of introduction.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley dreaded saying good-by; he wished to
+shirk it as to Powell as he intended to shirk it in
+the cases of his few friends; he was to return to the
+office a last time in the afternoon to get the letter;
+and then he would bid Powell good-by. He had
+the day before him, but that thought could give him
+no comfort. He would see Lavinia again in the
+afternoon; he would see her once more, for the last
+time, in the evening, and in the meantime he would
+see his father and his mother, and his home; he had
+still two meals to eat with them, but it was as if he
+had already gone; there was no reality in his presence
+there among them; the blow that fate had decreed
+had fallen, and all that was to be was then
+actually in being; all about him the men and
+women of Macochee were pursuing their ordinary
+occupations just as if he were not so soon to go
+away and be of this scene no more; a few hours, and
+another day, and they would be going on with their
+concerns just the same, and he would have disappeared
+out of their lives and out of their memories.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He looked at everything that had been associated
+with his life, and everything called up some
+memory,—the little office where he had tried to
+study law, the Court House, and the blind goddess
+of justice holding aloft her scales, the familiar
+Square, the cloaked cavalryman on the monument,
+every tree, every fence, every brick in the sidewalk
+somehow called out to him—and he was leaving
+them all. He looked up and down Main Street,
+wide and ugly, littered with refuse, ragged with its
+graceless signs; he thought of the people who had
+gossiped about him, the people whom he had hated,
+but now he could not find in his heart the satisfaction
+he had expected in leaving them. He felt tenderly,
+almost affectionately, toward them all. But
+it was worse at home. He wandered about the
+house, looking at every piece of furniture, at every
+trinket; he went into the woodshed, and the old ax,
+the old saw, everything he had known for years,
+wrung his heart; he went to the barn, he looked at
+the muddy buggy in which he had driven so often
+with his father; he reproached himself because he
+had not kept the buggy cleaner for him; he went
+into the stall and patted the flank of Dolly, finally
+he put his arms about her warm neck, laid his face
+against it, and the tears rolled down his cheeks.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>One of the preachers that were always dropping
+in on them was there to dinner, and in the blessing
+he invoked on the temporalities, as he called them,
+he prayed with professional unction for the son
+who was about to leave the old roof-tree, and this
+made the ordeal harder for them all. Doctor Marley
+spoke to the preacher of little things that he
+was to do within the next few days and Marley wondered
+how he could mention them, for they were to
+be done at a time when he would be there no more.
+Because he conceived of life, as all must conceive of
+it, solely in its relation to himself, he could not imagine
+life going on in Macochee without him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The afternoon wore on, he passed his hour with
+Lavinia; they were to meet then but once again; he
+returned home, his mother had packed his trunk;
+it was waiting. He was tender with his mother,
+and he wondered now, with a wild regret, why he
+had not always been tender with her; he was tender
+now with all things; a tenderness suffused his whole
+being; it seemed as if it might dissolve in tears.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Still he shrank back; there was one thing more
+to do; he was to go up-town and get his ticket, and
+the letter to Judge Johnson, and bid Wade Powell
+good-by. A wild hope leaped in his heart; perhaps—but
+no, it was irrevocable now. He went,
+and got his letter, but Powell refused to bid him
+good-by; he said he would be at the train to see him
+off. He bought his ticket and went home. Old
+man Downing had been there with his dray and
+hauled away his trunk; it was settled. He could
+only wait and watch the minutes tick by.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It seemed to Marley that all things that evening
+conspired to accentuate all that he was leaving
+behind, and to make the grief of parting more poignant.
+His mother, who was then in that domestic
+exigency described by the ladies of Macochee as being
+without a girl, had prepared an unusually
+elaborate supper, and while there was no formal
+observance of the fact, it was eaten, so far as any of
+them could eat that evening, under a sense of its
+significance as a parting ceremonial. They talked,
+or tried to talk, indifferently of commonplace
+things, and Doctor Marley even sought to add
+merriment to their feast by a jocularity that was
+unusual with him. Marley, who knew his father
+so well, could easily detect the heavy heart that lay
+under his father’s jokes, and he suffered a keener
+misery from the pathos of it. Then he would
+catch his mother looking at him, her eyes deep and
+sad, and it seemed to him that his heart must burst.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley’s train was to leave at eleven o’clock; he
+had arranged to go to Lavinia’s and remain with
+her until ten o’clock; then he was to stop in at his
+home for his last good-by. Those last two hours
+with Lavinia were an ordeal; into the first hour
+they tried to crowd a thousand things they felt they
+must say, and a thousand things they could only
+suggest; when the clock struck nine, they looked at
+each other in anguish; they did little after that
+but mentally count the minutes. The clock ticked
+loudly, aggressively, until in the soul of each, unconfessed,
+there was a desire to hasten the moments
+they felt they would like to stay; the agony
+was almost beyond endurance; it exhausted them,
+beat them down, and rendered them powerless to
+speak. Finally the clock struck the half-hour; they
+could only sit and look at each other now; at a
+quarter of ten they began their good-bys.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>At ten o’clock Mrs. Blair, Connie and Chad
+came into the room solemnly, and bade Marley
+farewell; the judge himself came in after them, his
+glasses in his hand and the magazine he had been
+reading, which, as Marley thought with that pang
+of things going on without him, he would in a few
+moments be reading again as calmly as ever.
+He took Marley’s hand, and wished him success;
+for the first time he spoke gently, almost affectionately
+to him, and although Marley tried to bear
+himself stoically, the judge’s farewell touched him
+more than all the others.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The shameless children would have liked to
+remain and see the tragedy to its close, but Mrs. Blair
+drew them from the room with her. The last moment
+had come, and Marley held Lavinia in his
+arms; at last he tore himself from her, and it was
+over. He looked back from out the darkness;
+Lavinia was still standing in the doorway; he saw
+her slender, girlish figure outlined against the hall
+light behind her; somehow he knew that she was
+bravely smiling through her tears. She stood
+there until his footfall sounded loud in the spring
+night, then the light went out, the door closed as he
+had heard it close so often, and she was gone.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He saw the light in his father’s study as he approached
+his home, and there came again that torturing
+sense: the sermon his father then was working
+on would be preached when he was far away;
+his mother, as he knew by the light in the sitting-room
+window, was waiting for him; she had waited
+there so many nights, and now she was waiting for
+the last time. She rose at his step, and took him to
+her arms the minute he entered the door.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Be brave, dear,� he said, stroking her gray
+hair; “be brave.� He was trying so hard to be
+brave himself, and she was crying. He had not
+often seen her cry. She could not speak for many
+minutes; she could only pat him on the shoulder
+where her head lay.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Remember, my precious boy,� she managed to
+say at last, “that there’s a strong Arm to lean
+upon.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He saw that she was turning now to the great
+faith that had sustained her in every trial of a life
+that had known so many trials; and the tears
+came to his own eyes. He would have left her for
+a moment but she followed him. He had an impulse
+he could not resist to torture himself by going
+over the house again; he went into the dining-room
+which in the darkness wore an air of waiting for
+the breakfast they would eat when he was gone; he
+went to the kitchen and took a drink of water,
+from the old habit he was now breaking; then
+he went up stairs and looked into his own room,
+at the neatly made bed where he was to sleep no
+more; at last he stood at the door of the study.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He could catch the odor of his father’s cigar, just
+as he had in standing there so many times before;
+he pushed the door open and felt the familiar hot,
+close, smoke-laden atmosphere which his father
+seemed to find so congenial to his studies. Doctor
+Marley took off his spectacles and pushed his manuscript
+aside, and Marley felt that he never would
+forget that picture of the gray head bent in its
+earnest labors over that worn and littered desk; it
+was photographed for all time on his memory. His
+words with his father had always been few; there
+were no more now.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, father,� he said, “I’ve come to say good-by.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>His father pushed back his chair and turned
+about. He half-rose, then sank back again and took
+his son’s hand.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Good-by, Glenn,� he said. “You’ll write?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Write often. We’ll want to hear.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, write often,� the doctor said. “And take
+care of yourself.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I will, father.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Wait a moment.� Doctor Marley was fumbling
+in his pocket. He drew forth a few dollars.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Here, Glenn,� he said. “I wish it could be
+more.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>There was nothing more to do, or say. They
+went down stairs; Marley’s bag was waiting for
+him in the hall. He kissed his mother again and
+then again; he shook his father’s hand, and then he
+went.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Write often,� his father called out to him, as
+he went down the walk. It was all the old man
+could say.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The door closed, as the door of the Blairs’ had
+closed. Inside Doctor Marley looked at his wife a
+moment.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� he said, “he’s gone.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Marley made no answer.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I suppose,� he said, “I ought to have gone to
+the train with him.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Then he toiled up the stairs to his study and the
+sermon he was to preach when Glenn was gone.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley walked rapidly down Market Street toward
+the depot; in the dark houses that suddenly
+had taken on a new significance to him, people were
+sleeping, people who would awake the next morning
+in Macochee. He could not escape the torture
+of this thought; his mind revolved constantly about
+the mystery of his being still in Macochee, still
+within calling distance, almost, of Lavinia, of his
+father and mother, of all he loved in life, when in
+reality they had in an instant become as inaccessible
+to him as though the long miles of his exile
+already separated them.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Twenty minutes later, Lavinia, in her room,
+Mrs. Marley, at her prayers, and Doctor Marley
+sitting in deep absorption at his desk, heard the sonorous
+whistle of a locomotive sound ominously
+over the dark and quiet town.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXIV<br /> <br />THE GATES OF THE CITY</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>It was a relief to Marley when morning came
+and released him from the reclining chair that
+had held his form so rigidly all the night. He
+had not taken a sleeper because he felt himself too
+poor, and he had somewhere got the false impression
+that comfort was to be had in the chair car.
+He had stretched himself in the cruel rack when
+the porter came through and turned the lights down
+to the dismal point of gloom, but he had not slept;
+all through the night the trainmen constantly
+passed through the car talking with each other in
+low tones; the train, too, made long, inexplicable
+stops; he could hear the escape of the weary engine,
+through his window he could see the lights of
+some strange town; and then the trainmen would
+run by outside, swinging their lanterns in the
+darkness, and calling to each other, and Marley would
+fear that something had happened, or else was
+about to happen, which was worse.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Finally the train would creak on again, as if it
+were necessary to proceed slowly and cautiously
+through vague dangers of the night. Through his
+window he could see the glint of rails, the two
+yards of gleaming steel that traveled always abreast
+of him. Toward morning Marley wearily fell
+asleep, and then the sorrow and heart-ache of his
+parting from Lavinia and his home distorted themselves
+in fearful dreams.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When he awoke at last, and looked out on the
+ugly prairie that had nothing to break its monotony
+but a few scraggly scrub-oak bushes, and some
+clumps of stunted trees, the dawn was descending
+from the gray sky. The car presented a squalid,
+hideous sight; all about him were stretched the
+bodies of sleeping passengers, flaccid, inert, having
+cast aside in utter weariness all sense of decency
+and shame; the men had pulled off their
+boots, and sprawled on the chairs, their stockinged
+feet prominently in view; women lay with open
+mouths, their faces begrimed, their hair in slovenly
+disarray.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The baby that had been crying in the early part
+of the night had finally gone to sleep while nursing,
+and its tired mother slept with it at her
+breast. The Jewish drummer across the aisle was
+sleeping in shirt-sleeves; his head had rolled
+from the little rest on the back of his chair and now
+lolled off his shoulder, his sallow face turned
+toward Marley was greasy with perspiration; his
+closed eyes filled out their blue hemispherical lids,
+and his cheeks puffed with his intermittent snoring.
+At times his snoring grew so loud and so
+troubled that it seemed as if he must choke; he
+would reach a torturing climax, then suddenly the
+thick red lips beneath his black mustache would
+open, his sallow cheeks would collapse, and relief
+would come.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley wished the passengers would wake up
+and end the indecencies they had tried to hide
+earlier in the night. Glancing up and down the
+long car he could recognize none of them as having
+been there when he had boarded the car at
+Macochee; those who had got on with him had gone
+short distances, and then got off, breaking the last
+tie that bound him to his home. He found it impossible
+now to conceive of the car as having been in
+Macochee so short a time before.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Presently he saw an old lady sitting up in the
+remote end of the car; she was winding her thin
+wisp of gray hair in a little knob at the back of her
+head. Then, feeling that he might bestir himself,
+Marley got up and went forward; he washed his
+face, and tried to escape the discomfort of clothes
+he had worn all the night by readjusting them.
+The train was evidently approaching the city; now
+and then he saw a building, lonely and out of place:
+on the hideous sand-dunes, as if it waited for the
+city, in the growth it boasted, to catch up with it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The train ran on; it had reached an ever-widening
+web of tracks; it passed long lines of freight-cars,
+stock-cars from the west, empty gondolas that
+had come with coal from the Hocking Valley; a
+switch tower swept by, its bell jangling peevishly in
+alarm; long processions of working-men trooped
+with their dinner-pails between the tracks. The
+train stopped, finally, still far from its destination.
+The air in the car was foul from the feculence of
+all those bodies that had lain in it through the
+night, and Marley went out on the platform. He
+could hear the engine wheezing—the only sound to
+break the silence of the dawn. The cool morning
+air was grateful to Marley, though it was not the
+air of the spring they were already having in
+Macochee. He risked getting down off the platform
+and looked ahead. Beyond the long train,
+coated with its black cinders, he saw Chicago, dim
+through the morning light, lying dark, mysterious
+and grim under its pall of smoke. He shuddered
+and went back into the car. After a while the
+train creaked and strained and pulled on again.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The passengers had begun to stir, and now were
+hastening to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of
+the world; the woman with the baby fastened her
+dress, the drummer put on his collar and coat, the
+men drew on their boots, but it was long before they
+felt themselves presentable again. The women
+could achieve but half a toilet, and though they
+were all concerned about their hair, they could not
+make themselves tidy.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The train was running swiftly, now that it was
+in the city, where it seemed it should have run more
+slowly; the newsboy came in with the morning papers,
+followed by the baggage agent with his jingling
+bunch of brass checks. The porter doffed his
+white jacket and donned his blue, and waited now
+for the end of his labors, so near at hand. He made
+no pretense of brushing his passengers, for those in
+his charge were plainly not of the kind with tips to
+bestow.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>As the train rushed over unknown streets, Marley
+caught visions of the crowds blockaded by the crossing
+gates, street-cars already filled with people,
+empty trucks going after the great loads under
+which they would groan all the day; and people,
+people, people, ready for the new day of toil that
+had come to the earth.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>At last the train drew up under the black shed of
+the Union Station, and Marley stood with the
+passengers that huddled at the door of the car. He
+went out and down; he joined the crowd that passed
+through the big iron gates into the station; and
+then he turned and glanced back for one last look at
+the train that had brought him; only a few hours
+before it had been in Macochee; a few hours more
+and it would be there again. In leaving the train
+he felt that he was breaking the last tie that bound
+him to Macochee, and he would have liked to linger
+and gaze on it. But a man in a blue uniform, with
+the official surliness, ordered him not to hold back
+the crowd. He climbed the steps, went out into
+Canal Street, ran the gantlet of the cabmen, and
+was caught up in the crowd and swept across the
+bridge into Madison Street.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He was in Chicago, and here among these thousands
+of people, each hurrying along through the
+sordid crowd to his own task, here in this hideous,
+cruel city, he must make a place for himself, and
+gain the foothold from which he could fight his battle
+for existence in the world.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXV<br /> <br />LETTERS HOME</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>“How does she seem since he went away?�
+asked Judge Blair of his wife two days after
+Marley had gone. He spoke in his usual habit
+of deference to his wife’s observation, though his
+own opportunities for observing Lavinia might
+have been considered as great as hers.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I haven’t noticed any difference in her,� said
+Mrs. Blair, and then she added a qualifying and
+significant “yet.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� observed the judge, “I presume it’s too
+early. Has she heard from him?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She had a letter this morning; that is, I suppose
+it was from him; she ran to meet the postman,
+and then went up stairs.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You didn’t mention it to her?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair looked at her husband in surprise, and
+he hastened to make amends by acquiescing in the
+propriety of her conduct, when he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, of course not.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He seemed to drop the subject then, but that it
+remained uppermost in his mind was shown later,
+when he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I think she will be weaned away from him after
+a while, don’t you? That is—if he stays long
+enough.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair was not so hopeful; perhaps, too, in
+her romantic ideal of devotion, she did not wish
+Lavinia to be weaned away. But she avoided a direct
+answer by the suggestion:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Perhaps he will be weaned away from her.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>This possibility had not occurred to the judge.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, the idea!� he said resentfully. “Do you
+think him capable of such baseness?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair laughed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Would you like to think of <em>your</em> daughter as
+fickle, and forgetting a young man who was eating
+his heart out for her far away in a big city?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>A condition of such mild romantic sorrow might
+have attracted Mrs. Blair in the abstract, but it
+could not of course appeal to her when it came thus
+personally. As for the judge, he dismissed the
+problem, as he had so many times before, with the
+remark:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, we can only wait and see.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The letter which Lavinia received from Marley
+had been written the day he reached Chicago. It
+was a long letter, conceived largely in a facetious
+spirit, and he had labored over it far into the
+night in the little room of the boarding-house he
+had found in Ohio Street.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I chose Ohio Street,� he wrote, “because its
+name reminded me of home. Ohio Street may once
+have been the street of the well-born, but it has degenerated
+and it is now the abode of a long row of
+boarding—places, one of which houses me. My room
+is a little corner eyrie in the second story, back,
+and from its one window I get an admirable view
+of the garbage dump, the atmosphere and certain
+intensely red bricks which go to make the wall of
+the house next door. And my landlady, ah, I
+should have to be a Balzac to describe my landlady!
+She wears large, vociferous ear-rings, and she says
+‘y-e-e-a-a-s’ for yes; just kind o’ rolls it off her
+tongue as if she didn’t care whether it ever got off
+or not. She is truly a beauteous lady, given much
+to a scarlet hue of her nasal appendage; also, her
+molar system is unduly prominent, too much to the
+fore, as it were. As for form or figure, I’m afraid
+I couldn’t say with truth that she goes in for the
+sinuous, far from it; she leans more to the elephantine
+style of feminine architecture. And she
+has a way of reaching out that is very attractive;
+probably because of the necessity of reaching for
+room rent. She bears the air of one bent on no
+earthly thing, of a continual soaring in quest of the
+unexpected; there is about her the charm of the intangible,
+the unknowable.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The boarding-house itself isn’t so bad; I get my
+room and two meals for three-fifty a week; my
+noon luncheons I have to take down-town. They
+have dinner here, you know, in the evening. I
+haven’t seen much of the people in the boarding-house;
+the men are mostly clerks, and the women
+have bleached hair. They all looked at me when I
+went into the dining-room this evening. There is
+one young man who sits at my table who is in truth
+a very unwise and immature youth. He is given
+greatly to the use of words of awful and bizarre
+make-up. For instance, he said something about
+the jokes they get off in the shows here about Irishmen,
+but instead of saying jokes, he said ‘traversities’!
+What do you think of that?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley had already described his journey to
+Chicago in terms similar to those in which he described
+his boarding-house; of Chicago itself he
+said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It seems that ages ago when the gods, or maybe
+the demons, were making over plans and specifications
+of the infernal region, Chicago was mentioned
+and considered by the committee. When it came to
+a vote for choice of sites the place that won had only
+three more votes than Chicago. They didn’t locate
+the brimstone plant here, and from what I can
+learn Chicago was a candidate for both the plant
+and the honor. It was a mistake on somebody’s
+part, as Chicago is certainly an ideal place for it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But the letter discussed mostly the things of
+Macochee, where Marley’s spirit still dwelt. The
+passages Lavinia most liked, of course, were those
+in which he declared his love for her; it was the
+first love-letter she had ever received, and this
+tender experience went far to compensate her for the
+loneliness she felt in his absence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It grew upon her after she had read her letter
+many times, that it would be a kindness to take it
+over and read to Mrs. Marley those parts, at
+least, that were not personal. It was a hard thing
+for Lavinia to do; she had a fear of Mrs. Marley;
+but she felt more and more the kindness of it, and
+so in the morning she set out. Lavinia was surprised
+and a little disappointed, when Mrs. Marley
+told her that she too had received in the same mail
+a letter from Glenn. It somehow took away from
+her own act, the more when Mrs. Marley calmly
+passed her letter over for Lavinia to read.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia, who had not been able to resist a pang
+that Marley had written his mother quite as
+promptly as he had written her, found some consolation
+in the fact that his letter to his mother was
+not nearly so long as his letter to her, and it contained,
+too, the same information; in some instances,
+identical phrases, as letters do that are written
+at the same time. She felt that she should be
+happy in them both, and she wished she could determine
+which of the letters had been written first.
+After she had read Mrs. Marley’s letter, she could
+not speak for a moment; the letter closed with a description
+of the sensations it gave Marley to open
+his trunk and come across the Bible his mother had
+packed in it. But she controlled herself, and when
+she had finished reading parts of her own letter to
+Mrs. Marley, she said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, he seems to be in good spirits, doesn’t he?
+He writes so amusingly of everything.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Marley looked up at Lavinia with a curious
+smile.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, don’t you see?� she said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What?� asked Lavinia, glancing in alarm at the
+two letters which she still held in her lap.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, the poor boy is dying of homesickness;
+that’s what makes him write in that mocking vein.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you think that is so?� Lavinia leaned forward.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, I know it,� replied Mrs. Marley, with a
+little laugh. “He’s just like his father.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>For a moment Lavinia felt a satisfaction in
+Marley’s loneliness, but she denied the satisfaction
+when she said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He’ll get over it, after a while.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Not for a long while, I’m afraid,� said Mrs.
+Marley. “Not until some one can be with him.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia blushed, and before she knew it Mrs.
+Marley had bent over and kissed her cheek.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He has a long hard battle before him, my dear,�
+she said, “in a great cruel city. We must help him
+all we can.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia hesitated a moment, then she put her
+arms about Mrs. Marley and drew her down for the
+kiss which sealed their friendship.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They sat and talked of Marley for a long time,
+and at last when Lavinia rose to go, she held out to
+Mrs. Marley the letter her son had written her.
+She looked at it a moment before handing it to Mrs.
+Marley.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Would you like to keep it?� Mrs. Marley asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“May I?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“If you wish. But you must come often; I shall
+be lonely now, you know, and you must bring his
+letters and read parts of them. He’ll be writing
+so many more to you than he will to me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day;
+it was not long before Clemmons, the postman,
+smiled significantly when, each morning at the
+sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the
+door. And Lavinia wrote to Marley as regularly
+herself, sitting at the little desk in her room every
+night long after the house was dark and still.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge could find no hope in the observations
+Mrs. Blair reported to him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She seems to have developed a new idea of
+constancy,� said Mrs. Blair. “She will not allow
+herself to do a thing, or go to a single place; she
+will hardly accept any pleasure because he isn’t
+here to share it. I believe she tries not to have a
+thought that is not of him. She is almost fanatical
+about it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh dear!� said the judge. “I thought the
+nightly calls were a severe strain, but they can not
+compare to the strain of nightly letters.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He writes excellent letters, however,� Mrs.
+Blair said. “I wish you could read the one he
+wrote his mother. A boy who writes like that to
+his mother—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How did you get to see a letter he wrote his
+mother?� interrupted the judge.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Lavinia showed it to me.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Has she been over there?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes. Why?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation
+were now hopeless, indeed.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXVI<br /> <br />THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>“I am very tired to-night,� Marley wrote to
+Lavinia a day or so later. “I have been making
+the rounds of the law offices; I have been
+to all the leading firms, but—here I am, still
+without a place. I thought I might get a place in
+one of them where I could finish my law studies,
+and make enough to live on, meanwhile; I had
+dreams of working into the firm in time, but they
+were only dreams, and all my hopes have gone
+glimmering. The men who are employed in the law
+offices are already admitted to the bar; most of
+them are young fellows, but some are old and gray-headed,
+and the sight of them gave me the blues.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I did not get to see many of the firm members
+themselves; their offices are formidable places.
+There is no office in Macochee like them; they have
+big outer rooms, full of stenographers and clerks
+and there is a boy at a desk who makes you tell your
+business before you can get in to see any of the
+lawyers themselves. They seem to be mighty big,
+important fellows. Most of them would not see me
+at all; several said they had no place for me and
+dismissed me with a kind of pitying smile; one
+man, when I asked him if he thought there was an
+opening, said he supposed there ought to be, as one
+lawyer in Chicago had died of starvation only the
+day before. But some were kinder; one, whom I
+shall never forget, took pains to sit down and talk
+with me a long time, but he was no more encouraging
+than the others. He said the profession
+was terribly overcrowded, ‘that is,’ he corrected
+himself with a tired smile, ‘if you can call it a profession
+any longer. It is more of a business nowadays
+and the only ones who get ahead are those who
+have big corporations for clients. How they all live
+is a mystery to me!’ He thought I had better not
+undertake it and advised me to go into some
+business. But then most of them did that.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But I must tell you of my visit to Judge Johnson.
+You will remember my telling you of him;
+he was Wade Powell’s chum in the law school in
+Cincinnati, and Mr. Powell had given me a letter
+to him. I had a hard time seeing him; the hardest
+of all. When I went into the big stone government
+building he was holding court, and a lawyer was
+making an argument before him. I waited till they
+were all done, and then when the crier had adjourned
+court—he said ‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez,’ instead
+of the ‘Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye’ we have in Ohio;
+it sounded so old and quaint, even if he did say
+‘Oh yes,’ for ‘Oyez!’ It comes from the old Norman-French,
+you know; ask your father about it,
+he’ll explain it—I tried to get in to him. I succeeded
+at last, but it was hard work. He didn’t
+seem glad to see me; he looked at me coldly, and
+made me feel as if I ought to hurry up and state my
+business promptly and get away. When I gave him
+Wade Powell’s letter he put on his gold glasses and
+read it; but—what do you think?—I don’t believe
+he remembered Wade Powell at all! At least he
+seemed not to. Of course he may have been putting
+it on. Wouldn’t it make Wade Powell mad to
+know that? I’d give a dollar—and I haven’t any to
+spare either—to see him when he hears that his old
+friend, Judge Johnson of the United States Circuit
+Court, couldn’t remember him! Well, the
+judge didn’t let me detain him long, he looked at
+his watch a moment, and then he advised me not
+to try it in Chicago; he said there were too many
+lawyers here anyhow, and that he thought a young
+man made a mistake in coming to a city at all.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘Why don’t you stay in a small town?’ he
+asked, looking at me sternly over his glasses. ‘Living
+is cheaper there, and life is much more simple
+than it is in the cities. I’ve often wished I had
+stayed in a little town.’</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I came away, as you can imagine, feeling pretty
+much cast down and humbled in spirit. There are
+four thousand lawyers in Chicago; just think of it,
+almost as many lawyers as there are people in
+Macochee! As I walked through the crowded
+streets with men and women rushing along, I
+wondered how they all lived. What do they do?
+Where are they all going, and how do they get a
+place to stand on? As I came across the bridge
+over to the North Side I felt that there was no
+place for me here in this great, dirty, ugly city,
+just as there is no place for me back in peaceful
+Macochee, where every minute of the day I long to
+be. Anyway, I am sure that there is no place for
+me here in the law, and I shall have to look for
+something else. I see so much wretchedness and
+poverty and squalor; it is in the street everywhere—pale,
+gaunt men, who look at you out of
+sick, appealing eyes.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“This morning I saw a sight down-town that
+filled me with horror; it was noon, and a great
+crowd of ragged men were waiting in front of the
+<em>Daily News</em> office in Fifth Avenue. They were all
+standing idly and yet expectantly about; I stood
+and watched them. Presently, as at some signal,
+they all rushed for the office door, and then all at
+once they seemed to be enveloped in a white, rustling
+cloud. Each one had a newspaper, and they all
+turned to one page and began to read rapidly; sometimes
+two or three men bent over the same paper; in
+another moment they had scattered, going in all directions.
+Then it flashed upon me: they had been
+waiting for the noon edition of the paper and the
+page they had all turned to was the page with the
+‘want ads’ on it; they were all looking for jobs! It
+made me inexpressibly sad. I do not wish to inflict
+my own sorrow upon you, dear heart, but it made
+me shudder; what if I—but no, the thought is too
+horrible to mention. And yet I, too, belong to this
+great army of the unemployed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“As I write the clock in the steeple of a church
+a block away chimes the hour of midnight; so you
+see that I’ve retained my nocturnal habits. When
+the poets of a coming generation sing of me (as
+they doubtless will, after my death) their songs
+will be called Nocturnes.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>That same day Doctor Marley received a letter
+from his son which Mrs. Marley, though her husband
+passed it over to her to read, did not show
+to Lavinia. It ran:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s rather expensive living here, I find; especially
+for one who belongs to the great army of the
+unemployed. My contract with my basiliscine
+landlady calls for two meals a day and a bed at
+night—also for three-fifty per week in payment of
+said two meals and bed. My lunches I get down-town;
+that is, I did get them down-town; for two
+days I have gone without lunches, and the aforesaid
+landlady looks reproachfully at me at night when
+she sees me laying in an extra supply of dinner. I
+don’t mind the lack of the lunches, even if she
+does, but I’ll have to pay her in a day or so now.
+I’m in poor spirits to-night, so can’t write well;
+cause of said low mental temperature, only eighty
+cents in the world between me, my landlady and
+ultimate starvation. It’s funny how much hungrier
+a fellow gets as the food supply gets low.
+A word to the wise, etc.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What do you think? I met Charlie Davis
+on the street this morning. He is living here now,
+working in some big department store. My, it was
+good to see some one from Macochee! How small
+the world is, after all!</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How are you all? How is Dolly? Does Smith
+Johnson still clap his hands at his dog every evening
+as he comes home, and does the dog run out
+to meet him as joyously as of yore? And does
+Hank Delphy still go down-town in his shirt-sleeves?
+And has Charlie Fouly had any fits in the
+Square lately? And, father, has mother got a girl
+yet? Give her an ocean of love and tell her not to
+work too hard, and to let the heathen shift for
+themselves a while. They haven’t any trusts to
+monopolize the jobs as yet, and they ought to be
+able to get along. Oh, how I’d like to see you
+all! Answer all my questions: I propounded numerous
+ones to you. I don’t remember now what
+all of them were, but I know they were all momentous
+and had much to do with my well-being, spiritual
+and physical, not to say financial. And see
+that the moss doesn’t get too thickly overlaid on
+my memory.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley’s new life in Chicago, as somewhat
+vaguely reflected in his letters, impressed those
+who had a sense of having been left behind in Macochee,
+as but a continuation of the life he had led
+there, that is, it was presented to them as one long,
+hopeless search for employment. He told of his
+daily tramps up and down the city, of his dutiful
+applications for work in every place where the boon
+of work might be bestowed, and of the unvarying
+refusals of those in whose hands had been intrusted,
+by some inscrutable decree of the providence of
+economics, the right to control the opportunity
+of labor. It was as if the primal curse of earning
+his bread were in a fair way to be taken from
+man, had not the primal necessity of eating his
+bread continued unabated.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The routine through which he went each day
+had begun to weary Marley, and it might have begun
+to weary his readers in Macochee, had they
+not all felt their own fortunes somehow bound up
+with his. He apologized in his nightly letters for
+the monotony of their recitals, but he hoped it
+might be condoned as the most realistic portrayal
+of his life that he could give. He tried at times
+to give his letters a lighter tone by describing, with
+a facility that grew with practice, the many incidents
+that attracted him in a city whose life was
+all so new and strange to him; he could not help
+a growing interest in it all, and while Lavinia was
+probably unconscious of the change, his letters
+were now less concerned with the things of the life
+he had left in Macochee, and more and more with
+the things of the life he had entered upon in Chicago;
+as on a palimpsest, the old impressions were
+erased to make way for new ones.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But try as he would to give to his letters a cheer
+that was far from expressing his own spirit, he
+could not save them from the despair that was
+laying hold of him, a despair which finally communicated
+itself in the declaration that it was now
+no longer with him a question of selecting employment.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I must take,� he wrote, “whatever I can get,
+and that will probably be some kind of manual, if
+not menial, work. Sometimes,� so he let himself go
+on, “I feel as if I would give up and go back to
+Macochee, defeated and done for. But I can not
+come to that yet, though I would like to; oh, how
+I would like to! But I don’t dare, my pride won’t
+let me act the part of a coward, though I know I
+am one at heart. One thing keeps me up and that
+is the thought of you; I see your face ever before
+me, and your sweet eyes ever smiling at me—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia’s eyes were not smiling as she read this;
+and she poured out her own grief and sympathy in
+a long letter that she promptly tore up, to pen in
+its stead a calmer, braver one, that should hearten
+him in the struggle which, as she proudly assured
+him, he was making for her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley’s description of his straits partly prepared
+Lavinia for the shock of the letter in which
+he said he had found a job at last, but she was
+hardly prepared to learn that it was anything so far
+from her conception of what was due him as a
+job trucking freight for a railroad. The mockery
+he put into the picture of himself in a blue jumper
+and overalls could not console her, and she kept
+the truth from every one, except her mother; she
+preferred rather that they number Marley still with
+the army of the unemployed than to count him
+among those who toiled so desperately with the
+muscles of their arms and backs. She tried to conceal
+in encouraging congratulations the chagrin of
+which she felt she should be ashamed, and she
+tried to show her appreciation of his droll sarcasms
+about the preparation his four years of college had
+given him for the task of trundling barrels of
+sugar and heaving pianos down from box-cars.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m sure it’s honest work,� she wrote, “but
+do be careful, dear, not to hurt yourself in lifting
+such heavy loads.� It was a comfort to remind
+him that he was not intended to do such work.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>There was a relief, however, that she did not dare
+admit, when he told her three days later that he
+had lost his job.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I realize for the first time my importance in
+the great scheme of things,� he wrote. “I was
+fired because I do not belong to the freight
+handlers’ union. It took them three days to find this
+out, and then they threatened to strike if the railroad
+company did not immediately discharge me.
+The railroad company, after due consideration,
+decided to let me out, and—I’m out. It makes me
+tremble to think of the consequences that would
+have followed had they decided otherwise. Think
+of it! The railroad tied up, business at a standstill
+and the commerce of the nation paralyzed,
+and all because of Glenn Marley, A. B. It is
+really encouraging to know that my presence on
+the earth is actually known to my fellow-mortals;
+it has at least been discovered that I am alive and
+in Chicago, even if my diploma is not recognized by
+Freight Handlers’ Union No. 63. And now,� he
+concluded, “as Kipling says, it’s ‘back to the army
+again, Sergeant, back to the army again’—the
+army of the unemployed.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia was shocked again a day or so later
+when on opening her letter she met the announcement
+that he had been offered a job with another
+railroad as a freight handler.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But you need not be alarmed,� she was reassured
+to read—though it was not until she thought
+it all over afterward that she began to wonder how
+he had divined her dislike of his being in such
+work—“I haughtily declined, and turned them
+down. You see this road is just now in the throes
+of a strike, and all their freight handlers are out.
+Consequently, they have had to employ scabs to do
+the work of the strikers. They take anybody—that’s
+why they were ready to take me. But as I
+said, I declined. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself
+to take a place away from a union man.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia mistook her satisfaction in Marley’s declination
+of the position for a satisfaction in the
+nobility of his sacrifice, and in her elation she related
+the circumstance at dinner. Now that Marley
+had declined such an employment she felt safe in
+doing this. But her father did not see it in her
+light, or at least in Marley’s light.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Humph!� he sneered; “so he sympathizes with
+unionism, does he? Well, those unions will own
+the whole earth if they keep on.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But he says he thought of the wives and children
+of the union men—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, but why doesn’t he think of the wives and
+children of the scabs, as he calls them? They have
+as much right to live and work as the union
+men.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia, as an opponent of union labor herself,
+could not answer this argument, though she
+felt it her duty to defend Marley. But before
+she could proceed in his defense, her father,
+strangely enraged at the mere mention of the policies
+of the unions, hurried on:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The union didn’t show any consideration for
+him when it took his other job away from him.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia shot a reproachful glance at her mother,
+who did not see it because she was shooting a
+glance more than reproachful at her husband, and
+it had the effect of silencing and humbling the
+judge, as all of Lavinia’s arguments, or all of
+the arguments known to the propaganda of union
+labor, could not have done.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXVII<br /> <br />A FOOTHOLD</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>The next letter the postman gave Lavinia began
+ecstatically:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve got a job at last! I’m now working for
+the C. C. and P. Railroad, in their local
+freight office, and I’m not trucking freight either,
+but I’m a clerk—a bill clerk, to be more exact.
+My duties consist in sitting at a desk and writing
+out freight bills, for which by some inscrutable
+design of Providence my study of common carriers
+and contracts in the law was doubtless intended to
+prepare me.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“To-day I wrote out a bill for freight to Cook and
+Jennings, Macochee, Ohio, and you can imagine
+my sensations. It made me homesick for a while;
+I wished that by some necromancy I might conceal
+myself in the bill and go to Macochee with it;
+I had a notion to write a little word of greeting on
+the bill, but I didn’t; it might have worried old
+man Cook’s brain and he couldn’t stand much of
+a strain of that kind. But I’m getting nearer Macochee
+every day now. I guess I’m to be a railroad
+man after all, and some day you’ll be proud to
+tell your friends that I started at the bottom. ‘Oh,
+yes,’ you’ll be boasting, ‘Mr. Marley began as a
+common freight trucker; and worked his way up to
+general manager.’ Then we’ll go back to Macochee
+in my private car. I can see it standing down by
+the depot, on the side track close to Market Street,
+baking in the hot sun, and the little boys from
+across the tracks will be crowding about it, gaping
+at the white-jacketed darky who’ll be getting the
+dinner ready. We’ll have Jack and Mayme down
+to dine with us, and your father and mother and
+Chad and Connie, and my folks, too, and maybe,
+if you’ll let me, Wade Powell. Then, of course,
+the Macochee people will think better of me; they
+won’t be saying that I’m no good, but instead they’ll
+stand around, in an easy, careless way, and say,
+‘Oh, yes, I knew Glenn when he was a boy. I
+always said he’d get up in the world.’</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But, ah me, just now I’m a bill clerk at fifty
+dollars a month, thank you, and glad of the chance
+to get it; so is my voluptuous landlady glad; she’ll
+get her board money a little more regularly now.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I suppose you’ll want to know something about
+my surroundings. They are not elegant; the office
+is a big barn of a place, crowded full of desks,
+where we sit and write from eight in the morning
+until any hour at night when it occurs to the boss
+to tell us we can go. Last night it was ten o’clock
+before the idea struck him. They kindly allow us
+an hour in which to run out to a restaurant for
+supper. The windows in the office were washed, so
+tradition runs, in 1493, the year after Columbus
+landed. Outside, the freight trains rush by constantly
+so as to keep the noise going. My boss,
+whose name is Clark, strikes me as being a sort
+of fool of an innocuous sort. He is a conscientious
+ass, but a poor, unfortunate, deluded simpleton.
+He’s one of those close-fisted reubs whose chief
+care is the pennies, and whose only interest in
+life is the C. C. and P. Railroad. He makes his
+business his own personal affair and the C. C.
+and P. his god. He lunches down-town and pays
+twenty cents for his lunch, never more, often fifteen.
+One of the first things he told me was, now
+that I had come under his protecting wing, to begin
+to save money. They have a young man in the
+office here, whose desk is next to mine, who was born
+somewhere in Canada, and is always ’a-servin’ of
+her Majesty the Queen,’ as Kipling says. He told
+me with much gusto how he had hung out of the
+office window last New Year’s a Canadian flag.
+He seemed proud of having done so, and also told
+me, boasted to me, in fact, that he was going to
+hang the same flag out of the same window on the
+Fourth of July. ‘Oh, yes, you are!’ thinks I. So
+I got the flag and ripped it into shreds and started
+it through the waste-basket on a hurried trip to
+oblivion. <em>À bas</em> the Canadian flag! He’ll probably
+get another one, but if I get hold of it, it’ll
+meet the same fate as the first one. Then I have
+something to think of that’ll keep my mind off my
+horrible fate in being here in Chicago, while I
+smile in ghoulish glee with a cynical leer overspreading
+my classic features, at the young man’s
+disapproval of my actions. The rest of the men in
+the office aren’t much to boast of. They’re a
+diluted mixture of Nijni Norgordian and Bill Hoffman
+the jeweler. I still hate this town; I wish it
+were buried under seven hundred and thirty feet
+of Lake Michigan.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley’s next letter to Lavinia opened thus:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-l'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Extract from the diary of J. H. Anderson,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Esq., Canadian, clerk in the freight office of the</div>
+      <div class='line'>C. C. and P. Ry., at Chicago, Ill., April 20.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“‘New man on desk next to mine; young, about</div>
+      <div class='line'>24. Rather decent fellow, but conceited. Do not</div>
+      <div class='line'>think he will last. Took me to lunch with him</div>
+      <div class='line'>this evening.’</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Now what do you think of that? The youth
+I described to you at such length keeps a diary,
+and the foregoing is culled therefrom. He left it
+by some mistake on top of his desk, and I picked it
+up innocently enough to-night, to see what it was,
+and that was the first thing my eye lit on. He
+is evidently an adept at coming to conclusions, apparently
+he can sum one up in two whisks of a porter’s
+broom. I was much surprised to find myself
+so well done. Done on every side in those few
+words. I’ve rather enjoyed it; strikes me as being
+uproariously funny. Maybe his dictum is correct.
+You’ll agree with me as to his richness. Tell
+every one about it and see what they will think.
+Tell your mother and my mother. Tell Jack and
+give him a chance to laugh. Tell Mayme Carter,
+too.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia ran at once to her mother.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Listen,� she said. And she read it.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Mrs. Blair laughed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How funny!� she said, “and how well he
+writes! I should think he’d go into literature.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia laid the letter down in her lap and
+looked at her mother as if she had been startled by a
+striking coincidence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, do you know, I’ve thought of that very
+thing myself.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But read on,� urged Mrs. Blair.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia picked up the letter again and began:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, de—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh,� she exclaimed, blushing hotly, “I can’t
+read you that. Let’s see—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She leafed over the letter, one, two, three, four
+sheets. Mrs. Blair was smiling.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Aren’t you leaving out the best parts?� she
+asked archly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, there’s nothing,� Lavinia said, not looking
+up. “But—oh, well, this is all. He says—</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘There is a good deal of unrest and uneasiness
+here just now, because the first of May is coming.
+The road is anticipating trouble with the freight
+handlers; they may go out on a strike that day.’</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, dear,� sighed Lavinia, “more strikes, and
+I suppose that means more trouble for Glenn.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, the strike of those men can’t affect him,�
+Mrs. Blair assured her. “He’s a clerk now.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, I know, but what if he gets the notion he
+ought to help them by quitting too?�</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXVIII<br /> <br />THE TALK OF THE TOWN</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Macochee’s common interest in Marley was
+sharpened by his leaving town, and out of the
+curiosity that raged, Lawrence and Mayme Carter
+one evening made a call on Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, Lavinia,� said Lawrence, almost as soon
+as they were seated in the parlor, “what’s the news
+about Glenn? How’s he getting along?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, pretty well,� she said, smiling.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Does he like Chicago?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, yes; that is, fairly well.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Run get his letters and let us read them.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, Jack! The idea!� Mayme rebuked him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But Lavinia instantly got up.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ll read you part of one or two,� she
+said. “He can tell you much better than I all
+about himself.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>She was gone from the room a moment and then
+returned with two thick envelopes.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“My, Lavinia, you don’t intend to read all that,
+do you?� Lawrence made a burlesque of looking
+at his watch.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, you needn’t be afraid,� said Lavinia, smiling.
+She opened a letter.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Here’s one that came several days ago. He
+mentions you both in this one.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You don’t mean to say he connects our names?�
+Lawrence affected consternation.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Can’t you be serious a moment?� Mayme said,
+“I want to hear what he says; do go on, Lavinia,
+and don’t mind Jack.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia read the extract from the diary and
+Marley’s comment.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Doesn’t he say anything about you?� said
+Lawrence. “Why don’t you read that? You skip
+the most interesting parts. You’d better let me
+read them. Here—� and he held out his hand
+for the letter.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But Lavinia laid one letter securely in her lap
+and opened the other.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Listen to this,� she began, and then she glanced
+over the first page and half-way down the second.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Here you’re skipping again,� cried Lawrence.
+“Why don’t you play fair?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘I have made a friend,’ he says,� she began,
+“‘and it all came about through the strike. You
+know the freight handlers went out on the first of
+May, and since then there has been more excitement
+than work in the office. The freight house is stacked
+high with freight, and only a few men are working
+there and they are afraid of their lives. All
+around the outside of the big, long shed are policemen
+and detectives, and the strikers’ pickets. All
+day they walk up and down, up and down, at a
+safe distance, just off the company’s ground, and
+they waylay everybody and try to get them not to
+go to work here. I happened to see the strike
+when it began. It was day before yesterday morning.
+I had gone out in the freight house on some
+little errand and just at ten o’clock I noticed a
+man walk down by the platform that runs along
+outside the shed. I saw him stop by one of the
+big doors and look in. Suddenly he gave a low
+whistle, then another. The men in the freight
+house stopped and looked up. Then the man outside
+raised his arm, and held up two fingers—’�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He wanted them to go swimming probably,� interrupted
+Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, Jack, do stop,� said Mayme, irritably.
+“Right at the most interesting part, too! Do go
+on, Lavinia.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia read on:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘Then the man outside raised his arm, and held
+up two fingers, and instantly every truck in the
+shed dropped to the floor, bang, the men all went
+and put on their coats, marched out of the freight
+house—and the strike was on. Well, after that
+came the policemen and the detectives and the
+pickets, to say nothing of the reporters. It is about
+these last that I mean to tell you, for among them
+I have found this new friend. The other day a
+young man came into the office to see Clark, our
+boss. I was attracted by him at once. He was
+tall, and his smooth-shaven face was refined and
+thoughtful; I call him good-looking; his eyes were
+dark and his nose straight and full of character;
+his lips were thin and level; his hair was not quite
+black and stopped just on the right side of being
+curly. He was dressed modestly, but stylishly; I
+remember he wore gloves—he always does—and I
+thought him somewhat dudish. But what was my
+pleasure to see on his waistcoat the little white cross
+of my fraternity! I rushed up to him instantly,
+and gave him the grip. He was a Sig., from an Indiana
+college, and he is a reporter on the <em>Courier</em>.
+His name is James Weston; no, he is no relation to
+Bob Weston of Macochee at all. I asked him that
+the first thing; but he is some relation to the
+Cliffords, distant, I suppose.’�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I wonder if that isn’t the young man who
+visited them summer before last?� asked Mayme.
+“I’ll bet it is!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, it can’t be,� said Lavinia, “I thought of
+that the very first thing, but you see he says,�
+and Lavinia read on:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘He says he hasn’t been there for years. We
+chatted together for a few minutes and were friends
+at once. To-morrow night, if I can get off in time,
+I’m to dine with him at a café down-town. My,
+but it was good to see some one wearing that little
+white cross! You see my college training has
+done me some good after all.’�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>In their conversation afterward, Lavinia and
+Mayme celebrated Marley’s abilities as a writer,
+but Lawrence begged Lavinia to read them more,
+particularly, as he assured her, those parts about
+herself, saying he could judge better of Marley’s
+abilities after he heard how he treated romantic
+subjects.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I want to know how he handles the love interest,�
+he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, you got that from George Halliday,� said
+Mayme. “It sounds just like him when he’s discussing
+some book none of us has read, doesn’t it,
+Lavinia?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia admitted that it did sound like Halliday,
+and Mayme returned to her attack on Lawrence
+by saying:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What do you know about writing, anyway?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They might have gone farther along this line
+had not Mrs. Blair entered with a plate of cake
+and some ice-cream that had been left over from
+their dessert at supper. These refreshments instantly
+seemed to affect Mayme with the idea that
+the call had assumed the formality of a social
+function, and as she nibbled at her cake, she asked
+with a polite interest:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Just what is Mr. Marley’s position with the
+railroad, Lavinia?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh,� Lavinia answered, “he has a place in the
+office of the freight department; he’s a clerk there.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m so glad to know,� said Mayme, as if in
+relief.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why?� Lavinia looked up in alarm.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, well, you know—how people talk.� Mayme
+raised her pale eyebrows significantly. Lavinia
+was disturbed, but Lawrence, detecting the danger,
+instantly turned it off in a joke.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“She heard he was a section hand,� he said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The idea!� laughed Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Isn’t this just the worst place for gossip you
+ever heard of?� said Mayme.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The worst ever,� said Lawrence. “If I were
+you I’d quit and start a reform movement.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When they had gone and were strolling toward
+the Carters’, Lawrence grumbled at Mayme:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“What did you want to give it all away to Lavinia
+for?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, Jack, I didn’t say anything, did I?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, no, nothing—only you tipped off the whole
+thing to her.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, what did I say that hinted at it, even?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘Oh, you know how people talk!’� Lawrence
+mimicked her tone as he repeated her words.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, you know they do, Jack, and you know
+all the mean things they’ve been saying about
+Glenn. And you remember Charlie Davis’ mother
+told mama that Charlie ran across him in the street:
+in Chicago and that—�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, Charlie Davis!� said Lawrence, as impatiently
+as he could say anything. “What’s he?
+Anyway, you didn’t have to tell Lavinia.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I’m glad we got the truth anyway.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, so am I.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“We must tell everybody.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Sure,� acquiesced Lawrence, “if we can get the
+gossips started the other way they’ll have him
+president of the road in a few days.�</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXIX<br /> <br />A MAN OF LETTERS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>The Macochee gossips, after they were assured
+he was engaged in clerical, and not manual
+work, might have promoted Marley much
+more rapidly than his railroad would have done,
+had it not been for the news that he had changed
+his employment. They had gone far enough to
+noise it about that Marley was chief clerk in the
+office, where he was only a bill clerk, when the <em>Republican</em>,
+with the impartial good nature with
+which it treated all of Macochee’s folk, so long as
+they kept out of politics, mentioned him for the
+first time since his departure, and then, to tell of
+the advancement he was rapidly making in the
+metropolis that loomed so large and important
+in their provincial eyes. Lavinia had the
+facts in a letter from Marley a day or so before the
+<em>Republican</em> had them, though she never could imagine,
+as she told everybody, where the <em>Republican</em>
+got its information.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I have a big piece of news to tell you,� he
+wrote. “Last night I dined with Weston. It was
+the first really enjoyable evening I have had since I
+struck the town. Luckily, the strikers had everything
+tied up so tight that we could do little work,
+and I had no trouble in getting off in time. I met
+him about six o’clock, and we went to the swellest
+restaurant in town. Weston is the finest fellow
+you ever saw; as it was pay night, he said he would
+blow me off to a good dinner. And he did, the
+best dinner I have ever eaten; there were half a
+dozen courses, and as we ate we talked, talked
+about everything, college days, the hard days that
+come after college, and you, and everything. Weston’s
+experience has been about the same as mine—one
+long, hopeless search for a job. He, however,
+did not wait so long as I did; he said that he realized
+there was no place for him in a small town,
+and so he set out for the city almost at once. His
+father wanted him to study medicine, but he said
+he hadn’t the money or the patience to wait, and he
+hated medicine anyway, and, as newspaper work
+offered the quickest channel to making a living he
+chose that. His secret ambition, he confessed, is
+literature, and I believe he is writing a book, but
+he would not, or did not, tell me as much. He says
+he thinks newspaper work a bad business for any
+one to get into, but then I have discovered that
+that is the way every man talks about his own
+calling.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“After we had finished our dinner, we sat there
+for a long, long time over our coffee and cigarettes,
+and we finally got to talking about the strike.
+Weston, you know, has been working on it, and
+I was glad to be able to tell him a good many things
+he said he could use. Finally, I don’t know just
+how it came about, but I told him how the strike
+started with us, about the man appearing in the
+street alongside the freight house, whistling, and
+then holding up two fingers—I think I described it
+to you in a letter the other night. Weston was
+greatly interested; I can see him still, sitting across
+the table from me, knocking the ashes from his
+cigarette into his empty coffee-cup and looking so
+intently at me out of his brown eyes that he almost
+embarrassed me. And what was my surprise when
+I finished to have him say:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘By Jove, Marley, I’ll have to use that. I’ve
+been wondering how to lead my story to-night.’</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Now you know the strike at our place occurred
+several days ago, but since then it has been spreading,
+and to-day the men on another road walked
+out. This morning when I picked up the <em>Courier</em>
+and turned to the strike news, here is what I read,
+under big head-lines:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘A short man with a brown derby hat cocked
+over his eye walked leisurely down Canal Street
+at ten o’clock yesterday morning. The short man
+walked a block and then turned and walked back.
+At the open door of the C. and A.’s big freight
+house he stopped. Suddenly he whistled, once,
+twice, thrice, in low notes. Then he raised his hand
+with a gesture that was graceful and yet commanding,
+and held up two fingers. Inside the freight
+house the men who were heaving away at the big
+bales and boxes, attracted by the whistle, paused
+in their labor and looked up; they saw the man
+raise his two fingers; and, with the discipline of
+well-trained troops, they dropped their trucks, put
+on their coats and marched out of the freight
+house. And the Alton had been added to the list
+of railroads whose men were on strike.’</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Of course, I was surprised and puzzled, and a
+little pleased too, that I had had a hand in the article.
+As I read it, though, I thought of a hundred
+details I might have told Weston, and I began to
+wish I had written the account myself. This afternoon
+he came around to the office again, and the
+first thing he said was:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘Did you see your story this morning?’</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I told him I had, of course. ‘But,’ I added,
+‘that was the way it happened on our road; not on
+the Alton.’</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But he only laughed, and said something about
+the tricks of the trade.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And now for the news I was going to tell you.
+I told Weston, as we talked the story over, of my
+little wish that I had written the article myself, and
+he looked at me intently for a moment. Then he
+said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘How’d you like to break into newspaper business?’</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“My heart leaped; it came to me suddenly that
+it wasn’t the law, nor railroad work, but journalism
+that I wanted to enter. I told him so frankly
+and he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“‘Well, it’s a dog’s life and I don’t know
+whether I’m doing you a good turn or not, but
+I’ll speak to the city editor tonight. He’s a little
+short of men just now.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“My heart is in my mouth. I can hardly wait
+till to-morrow, when I’m to see him again. Think
+of it, dear, and all it means! It means more money,
+association with men of my own kind, men like
+Weston, and a fine, interesting life; and it means
+you; oh, it means you!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was able in this letter to communicate
+to Lavinia some of his enthusiasm and some of
+his suspense, and she found it difficult to await the
+result of his next interview with Weston. She began
+to count the hours until Marley and Weston
+should meet again, and then in a flash it came over
+her that they had doubtless already met, that the
+decision was already known, the fate determined,
+and she was still in ignorance. She had a sense of
+mystery in it, and she grew impatient, wondering
+why he did not telegraph. The next day came, and
+a letter with it; but the letter did not decide anything.
+Marley wrote that Weston had spoken to
+the city editor, and that he had told him to bring
+Marley around that evening. And so, other hours
+of waiting, and then, at last, another letter. Marley
+announced the result with what self-repression
+he could command.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It’s settled,� he wrote. “I’m to go to work
+Monday—as a reporter on the staff of the <em>Courier</em>.
+The salary to begin with is to be fifteen dollars a
+week. I’m glad to quit railroad work; I’m not
+built to be a railroad man; I can’t adhere to rules
+as they want me to, and I can’t bow down as it
+seems I should. I didn’t tell you that my boss
+and I had not been getting along very well lately;
+I thought I wouldn’t worry you. I was glad to be
+able to tell him to-day that I’d quit Saturday. I
+did it in a proud and haughty manner; he seemed
+surprised and shocked—even pained. And when I
+broke the news gently to the young Canuck he expressed
+great sorrow and regret, but in his secret
+heart I knew he was glad, for now as a prophet he
+can vindicate himself, at least partly, in his
+diary.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia was glad that Marley had gone into
+newspaper work; much as she had tried she had not
+been able to conceive of him in exactly the ideal
+light as a clerk in a railroad office; that position,
+while it may have had its own promise, nevertheless
+did not envelope him in the atmosphere she considered
+native to him. In his new relation to literature,
+which, in her ignorance, she confounded
+with journalism, she felt a deep satisfaction, and a
+new pride, and she was glad when the <em>Republican</em>
+announced the fact of Marley’s new position; she
+felt that it was a fitting vindication of her lover
+in the eyes of the people of Macochee and a rebuke
+for the distrust they had shown in him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Thereafter her mail was increased, for in addition
+to his letter Marley sent her the <em>Courier</em> with
+his work marked; often he marked Weston’s as
+well, and early in June he wrote: “I want you to
+read Weston’s story in Sunday’s paper about the
+Derby; it’s a peach; it’s the best piece of frill
+writing that the town has seen in many a day.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The tone of Marley’s letters now became more
+cheerful; it was evident to Lavinia that he was
+finding an interest in life, and in his descriptions
+of his daily work and the places all over Chicago
+it took him to and the people of all sorts it brought
+him in contact with, she found a new interest for
+her own life. When he wrote that his salary had
+been increased because of his story about a Sunday
+evening service in a church of the colored people
+in Dearborn Street, it seemed to her that happiness
+at last had come to them, and if, with the passing
+of June, she felt a pang at Marley’s grieving in
+one of his letters that this was the month in which
+they had intended to be married, she was consoled
+by the rapid progress he was making in his work.
+His salary had been raised a second time; he was
+receiving now twenty-five dollars a week; it seemed
+large to her, and she could not understand why it
+did not seem large to Marley, even when he wrote
+that Weston was paid forty dollars a week.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Her chief joy, perhaps, lay in the fact that he
+seemed to be living more comfortably than he had
+before. Now that he had left his dismal boarding-house
+she found a relief from its subtly communicated
+influence of the stranded wrecks of life, as
+Marley surely found it in the apartments he was
+sharing with Weston. She parted as gladly from
+the knowledge of his landlady as Marley did himself,
+assuring her that the landlady had “not decreased
+any in value as a zoo exhibit since first I
+rhapsodized about her.� Lavinia felt that she could
+dispense with much of the worry her womanly
+concern for his comfort had given her, and she
+turned with a new joy to the books he was constantly
+recommending.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Did you ever read,� he wrote, “Turgenieff’s
+<em>Fathers and Sons</em>? I know that you didn’t and
+therefore I know what a treat you have coming.
+I’ll send you the book if you can’t get it in Macochee,
+and I presume you can’t. Snider’s sign
+‘Drugs and Books’ is a lure to deceive an unwary
+public that doesn’t care as much for books as it
+does for soda-water; and the stock there, as I recall
+it, consists largely of forty-cent editions of
+books on which the copyright has expired, and
+which, printed on cheap, pulp paper, are to be introduced
+for the first time to the natives of Macochee.
+I wish you could see Weston’s little book-case,
+with its rows of his favorites. Besides Turgenieff
+and Tolstoi—he says the Russians are the greatest
+novel writers the world has yet produced—he has
+all of George Eliot; I have just read over again
+<em>Middlemarch</em> and <em>Daniel Deronda</em>. He likes
+Jane Austen, too, and he says you would like her;
+I haven’t read any but <em>Emma</em> as yet. I’m going to
+read them all. And if you like, you can read the
+set of little volumes I am sending you to-day; we
+can read them thus together. And Henry James—do
+read him—<em>Daisy Miller</em> especially; you will
+like that. Besides these, Weston has most of Ibsen’s
+plays, and sometimes he reads parts of them
+aloud to me; he reads them well. Some day, he
+says, he’s going to write a play himself; he is fond
+of the theater, and we often go. One of the fine
+things about being on a newspaper is that we get
+theater tickets, though we can’t always get tickets
+to the theater we want. Now and then the dramatic
+editor—a fine old fellow with a magnificent shock
+of white hair, who may be seen about the office late
+at night looking very <em>distingué</em> in his evening
+clothes—gets Weston to write a criticism on some
+play; and often the literary editor lets him review
+books. Weston said to-day he’d get the literary
+editor to let me review some books, and when I
+told him I didn’t know how, he laughed in a
+strange way and said that wouldn’t make the
+slightest difference. There’s another book you <em>must</em>
+read, and that is <em>A Modern Instance</em>. The chief
+character is Bartley Hubbard, a newspaper man.
+Weston and I had a big argument about the character
+to-day. I said I thought it was a libel on the
+newspaper profession and Weston laughed and
+said it was only the truth, and that I’d agree with
+him after I’d been in the work longer. ‘Newspaper
+work isn’t a profession anyway,’ he said, ‘but a
+business.’ He speaks of journalism—though he
+won’t call it journalism, nor let me—just as lawyers
+speak of the law. He is urging me, by the
+way, to keep up my law studies, and I’m thinking
+of going to the law school here, if I find I can
+carry it on with my other work. Weston declares
+I can; he says a man has to carry water on both
+shoulders if he wants to amount to anything in
+the world—Wade Powell said something like that
+to me once. Weston says I’ll want to get out of
+newspaper work after a while. He disturbed me
+a little to-day, and he hurt me, too, by saying that
+a newspaper man has no business to be married;
+and he knows all about you, too. Of course, he
+didn’t mean to hurt me, it’s merely his way of
+looking at things.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Happy as she was, Lavinia still had to have her
+woman’s worries, and they began to express themselves
+in constant adjuration to Marley to guard his
+health; she feared the effect of night work, and she
+feared, too, that he could not carry on his law
+studies and do his duty as a reporter at the same
+time. She sympathized with the spirit of pride
+and determination which made him wish to finish
+his law studies and be admitted to the bar, but
+she found a greater satisfaction in thinking of
+him as a journalist than as a lawyer; the figure
+he thus presented to her mind was so much more
+romantic than the prosaic one of a lawyer to which
+she had been all her life accustomed; on a large
+metropolitan daily he was almost as romantic to her
+as an army officer or a naval officer would have
+been. And while she did not like the night work,
+and had her fears of it for Marley, she nevertheless
+felt strongly its picturesque quality.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The picture Marley drew in one of his letters
+of the strange shifting of the scene that is to be
+observed in the streets of a great city as darkness
+falls, when those that work in the prosaic day disappear
+and in their places appears the vast and
+mysterious army of the toilers by night, many of
+them in callings demanding the cover of the night,
+thrilled her strangely. But she did not know
+how from all the temptations of the irregular life
+he was leading he was saved, partly by the gentle
+friend he had found in James Weston, but more
+by the constant thought of the girl whom he had
+left behind at home.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXX<br /> <br />HOME AGAIN</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Marley, after a year or more in Chicago, found
+the excitement of his first return home growing
+upon him as he looked out the car window and
+long before the train entered the borders of Gordon
+County he eagerly began watching for familiar
+things.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>In the spirit of holiday which had come in this
+his first vacation, he had felt justified in taking a
+chair in the parlor car, though from the associations
+he had formed in his newspaper work it was
+more difficult now for him to resist than to yield
+to extravagances. He had recalled with a smile
+how in those first hard days in the freight office
+he had joked about going home in a private car,
+and he had had all day a childish pleasure in pretending
+that the empty Pullman was a private
+car; he could almost realize such a distinction
+when he showed the conductor the pass his newspaper
+had got for him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But even if he now felt glad that he was a newspaper
+man instead of a railroad man, he was quite
+willing to return to Macochee on any terms. He
+had tried to convince himself that he knew the very
+moment the train swept across the Indiana line into
+Ohio, and he felt a fine glow of state pride.
+He held his pride somewhat in check until he heard
+some one speak a name that he recognized as that
+of an Ohio town and then he boasted to the porter:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I’m back in my own state again.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The porter, though ready to admit that Ohio was
+a pretty good old state, was nevertheless not very
+responsive, and Marley saw that he would have to
+enjoy his sensations all alone.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He could view with satisfaction the figure of a
+tolerably well-dressed city man reflected in the long
+mirror that swayed with the rushing of the heavy
+coach. He knew that his return would create a
+sensation in Macochee, though he was resolved to
+be modest about it. Even if he was not returning
+to Macochee in the ceremony he had dreamed of,
+he was returning in a way that was distinguished
+enough for him and for Macochee.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He was eager to see the old town; he tried to
+imagine his return in its proper order and sequence,
+first, the little depot, blistering in the hot
+sun of the August afternoon, the rails gleaming
+in front of it, and the air above them trembling in
+the heat; he could see the baggage trucks tilted
+up on the platform; from the eating-house came the
+odor of boiled ham compromised by the smell of
+the grease frying on the scorching cinders that
+were heaped about the ties; beyond was the grain elevator
+that once appeared so monstrous in his
+eyes; across the tracks, the weed-grown field; and
+the only living things in sight the two men unloading
+agricultural machines from a box-car abandoned
+on a siding, the only sound, the ticking of a
+telegraph instrument; the target was set, but the
+station officials had not yet appeared.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Thence, in thought, he went up Miami Street;
+he saw the Court House and, lounging along the
+stone base of the fence, the loafers whom no one
+had ever seen move, but who yet must have made
+some sort of imperceptible astronomical progress,
+for they kept always just in the shadow of the
+building; then the old law office across the way;
+then Main Street, with its crazy signs, its awnings,
+and the horses hitched to the racks, then the Square
+with its old gabled buildings, the monument and
+the cavalryman, the long street leading to his own
+home, and at last, Ward Street, arched by its cottonwoods,—and
+he recalled his unfinished verses
+which had taken Ward Street for a subject:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“I know a place all pastoral,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Where streams in winter flow,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And where down from the cottonwoods</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>There falls a summer snow.�</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c003'>And then, at last, the old house of the Blairs’
+with its cool veranda, its dark bricks, its broad
+overhanging cornices, and Lavinia standing in the
+doorway!</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He had never forgotten the anguish of his parting
+that night in spring, and he had looked forward
+to this return as an experience that would
+expiate it, and restore the lost balance of his life.
+But now as he thought of his life in Chicago, of the
+new scenes and associations, it came to him that
+that night after all had been final; the youth who
+had then gone forth had indeed gone forth never
+to return; another being was coming back in his
+stead. He had been successful in a way which at
+first flattered his pride, but a new sense of proportion
+had been growing in him that had lately made
+him mistrust newspaper work; he had for it a dislike
+almost as definite as that which used to displease
+him in Weston. He was growing tired of his
+life as a reporter; it had so many irregularities,
+so many hardships; it detached him from wholesome,
+every-day existence. He longed for some calling
+more definite, more permanent, a work in
+which he might do things, instead of record them
+in an ephemeral way. He had for a while been envious
+of Weston’s progress in his literary efforts,
+and for a while he had emulated him, but he had
+not been long in recognizing that he lacked literary
+talent.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Out of this dissatisfaction with himself he had
+lately gone in earnestly to complete his law studies,
+which all along he had pursued in a desultory
+fashion. He found some consolation in the hope
+that he might be admitted to the bar in the fall,
+though how or when he was to get into a practice
+was still as much of a problem as it had been in the
+old days in Macochee. He clung steadfastly, however,
+to the feeling that his newspaper work was
+but a makeshift; Weston and he had constantly
+supported each other in this view—it was their
+one hope.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>With thoughts somewhat like these Marley had
+been whiling away the hours of his long day’s
+journey from Chicago to Macochee. He had read
+thoroughly, and with a professionally critical
+faculty, all the Chicago papers, and had long ago
+thrown them aside in a disorderly pile. Now he
+had the tired sense that his journey was nearing its
+end.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>At last he saw the old mill-pond, and his heart
+leaped in affection; then he got his umbrella and
+sticks, took off his traveling cap and put it in his
+bag. He stood up for the porter to brush him off,
+and when he had selected a half-dollar as a tip, he
+asked the porter to get his luggage together, and
+in a conscious affectation he could not forego, began
+to pull on his new gloves. They were nearing
+Macochee now; and suddenly the tears started to
+his eyes, as in a flash he saw his white-haired
+father standing on the platform, anxiously craning
+his neck for a first glimpse of the boy who was
+coming home.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley’s mother did not reproach him when he
+ate a hurried supper that evening and then set
+off immediately for Lavinia’s. He renewed
+some of the emotions of the earlier days of his
+courtship as the familiar houses along the way
+gradually presented themselves to his recognition;
+he was glad to note the changeless aspect of a town
+that never now could change, at least in the way of
+progress, and he discovered a novel satisfaction—one
+of the many experiences that were so rapidly
+crowding in with his impressions—in the feeling
+that here, at least, in Macochee, things would remain
+as they were, and defy that inexorable law of
+change which makes so many tragedies in life. Lavinia
+must have recognized his step, for there she
+was, standing in the doorway, a smile on her face,
+and her eyelashes somehow moist. Marley felt
+a strange discomposure; there was a little effort,
+the intimacy of their letters must now give way to
+the intimacy of personal contact. But in another
+second she was in his arms, and her face was hidden
+against his breast.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“At last,� she said, “you’re here!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He felt her tremble, and he held her more
+closely. When he released her she put her hands up
+to his shoulders and held him away from her,
+while she scanned him critically.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You’ve grown broader,� she said, “and heavier,
+and—oh, so much handsomer!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The Blairs filed in presently, and Marley had
+the curious sense of this very scene having been
+enacted in his presence before, but it lacked the
+usual baffling effect of this psychological experience,
+for he was able to recall, in an incandescent
+flash of memory, that it was almost a repetition of
+their good-bys that night when he had gone away;
+Mrs. Blair was as tender, and if Connie and Chad
+were a little shy of his new importance, Judge Blair
+was as dignified, and as anxious as ever to get back
+to his reading. Marley felt once more that permanence
+of things in Macochee; this household had
+remained the same, and it made him feel more than
+ever the change that had occurred in him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>In lovers’ intense subjectivity, he and Lavinia
+discussed this change seriously. They reviewed
+their old dreams, and now they could laugh at
+their defeated wish to live, even in an humble
+way, in Macochee.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It was funny, wasn’t it?� said Marley. “I
+was very young then,—nothing, in fact, but a kid.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Are you so very much older now?� asked
+Lavinia with a slight hint of teasing in her tender
+voice.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� Marley replied, with a seriousness that
+impressed him, at least, as the ripe wisdom of
+maturity, “I am not much older in years, but I am
+in experience, and in knowledge of life. You see,
+dear, you can measure time by the calendar, but
+you can’t measure life that way. And Weston says
+that there is no calling that will give a man experience
+so quickly as newspaper work. You know
+we see everything, and we get a smattering of all
+kinds of knowledge. Weston says that is all that
+reconciles him to the business; he says a man learns
+more there than he ever does in college. He considers
+the training invaluable; he says it will be of
+great help to him in literature, if he can ever get
+into literature—he isn’t sure yet that he can. He
+can tell better after his book is published. And he
+says a newspaper experience will help me in the
+law, too, that is,� Marley added, with a whimsical
+imitation of Weston’s despairing uncertainty, “if
+I can ever get into the law.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You think a great deal of Mr. Weston, don’t
+you?� said Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He’s the finest fellow in the world, and the
+best friend I ever had.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley had a curious intuition that Lavinia
+was a little jealous of Weston. He immediately
+sought to allay the feeling with this argument:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You see, when a man does all for a fellow that
+Jim has done for me, and when you have lived
+with him, and shared your haversack with him,
+and he with you, like two soldier comrades, you
+get right down to the bottom of him. And I want
+you to know him, dear, I know you’ll like him.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Lavinia was silent, and Marley had a fear that
+she might not accept Weston quite so readily.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He has done me a world of good,� he went on.
+“He has taught me much, he has corrected my reckoning
+in more ways than one. He has taught me
+much about books; and he has taught me to look
+sanely on a life that isn’t, he says, always truthfully
+reflected in books. And besides all, if it hadn’t
+been for him, if he had not kept me at it and
+urged me on, I think I should have been doomed
+for ever to remain a poor newspaper man.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t you like newspaper work?� she asked
+with a shade of disappointment in her tone.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I did, but I like it less every day. It’s a hard
+and unsatisfactory life, and it has no promise in it.
+A man very soon reaches its highest point, and
+then he must be content to stay there. It’s the
+easiest thing for a young fellow to get a start in,
+if he’s bright; I suppose I’m making more money
+than any of the young lawyers in Chicago; but because
+it is so easy is the very reason why it is
+hardly worth while. Things that are easily won
+are not worth striving for.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And you’re going to get out of it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, as soon as I can. As soon as I can, I’m
+going to get into the law. When Weston first began
+urging me to keep up my studies, and when
+finally he made me go to the night law school, I
+consented chiefly because I had always felt the
+chagrin of defeat in having been compelled to give
+it up; lately, I’ve begun to see things differently,
+and I’ve determined to carry out my first intention
+and get into the law somehow. Of course,
+it’s going to be hard. And one has to have a pull
+there as everywhere else in these days.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was silent for a moment and, Lavinia
+thought, a little depressed. She watched him sympathetically,
+and yet she was a little troubled by
+a sense of detachment. She felt that Weston was
+now more closely associated with Marley’s struggle
+than she, and she was disturbed, too, by the disappointment
+of finding that his struggles were not
+at all ended.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Weston says,� Marley went on presently, “that
+newspaper work is a good stepping-stone, and by it
+I may be able to arrange for some place in the
+law which will give me the start I want.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I thought you liked your work,� Lavinia said;
+“I thought you were happy in it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley detected her regret, and was on the point
+of speaking, when Lavinia went on:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t see why you can’t go into literature as
+well as Mr. Weston.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley laughed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“The reason is that I haven’t his talent,� he
+said</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t see why,� Lavinia argued with some
+resentment of his humility. “You haven’t enough
+confidence in your own powers; you let Mr. Weston
+dominate you too much.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Now, dearest,� he pleaded, “you mustn’t do
+Jim that injustice. He doesn’t dominate me; but
+he is so much wiser than I, he knows so much
+more. You will understand when you meet him.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well,� she tentatively admitted, “that is no
+reason why you shouldn’t in time be a literary man
+as well as he. Why can’t you?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Because I can’t write, that’s why.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, Glenn, how can you say that? Your letters
+disprove that. Every one who read them said
+that they were remarkable, and that you should go
+into literature. They said you had such good descriptive
+powers.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley was looking at her in amazement.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Why, Lavinia, you didn’t show them!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You simpleton!� she said, with a smile in her
+eyes, “of course not; but I have read parts of
+them to mama and to your mother now and then.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, well, that’s all right,� sighed Marley in
+relief, and then he resumed his defense of Weston
+and his analysis of himself.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Of course, I suppose I can write a fairly good
+newspaper story; at least they say so at the office.�
+He indulged a little look of pride, and then he
+went on: “But that isn’t literature.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I don’t see why it isn’t,� she said. “I should
+think it would be the most natural thing in the
+world to go from one into the other.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Not at all. Literature requires style, personality,
+distinction, and the artistic temperament.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’d say you were talking now like George
+Halliday if I didn’t know you were talking like
+Mr. Weston.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I wish you could hear Weston talk about literature,�
+he said. “He’d convince you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“He couldn’t convince me that he can write any
+better than you can.� Lavinia compressed her
+lips in a defiant loyalty.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley paused to kiss the lips for their loyalty,
+and he compromised the validity of his own argument
+by saying:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“As a matter of fact, the law, in America and
+in England, has given more men to literature
+than journalism ever has.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Then maybe you can enter literature through
+the law,� said Lavinia, seizing her advantage.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No,� said Marley, shaking his head. “I’m
+not cut out for it, as Weston is. Some day he
+will be a great man, and we shall be proud to
+have known him so intimately. And we will have
+him at our home; I have many a dream about
+that.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He looked fondly at her, and her eyes brightened.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And there is another reason why I want to get
+out of newspaper work,� he went on, speaking tenderly,
+“and that is because everybody says a newspaper
+man has no more right to be married than
+a soldier has.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But they all are,� said Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, they all are, or most of them.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And I suppose it is the married ones who say
+that.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I know one who is going to be married
+just as soon as he can.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Who is that,—Mr. Weston?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“No, but Mr. Weston knows him, and knows his
+intentions, and he has promised to be at the wedding
+and act as best man.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, it would be fine to have a literary man at
+the wedding, wouldn’t it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They talked then about the wedding, and they
+found all their old delicious joy in it. Marley
+said it must be soon now, though with a pang that
+laid a weight on his heart, he wondered, as he
+thought of all the extravagances he had allowed
+himself to drift into, where he was to get the
+money. He could reassure himself only by telling
+himself that he was going to live as an anchorite
+when he got back to Chicago; even if he had to
+give up the pleasant apartment with Weston and
+go back to the boarding-house in Ohio Street.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“How shall you like living in Chicago?� he
+asked. “Can you be happy in a little flat, without
+knowing anybody, and without being anybody?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I shall be happy anywhere with you, Glenn!�
+she said, looking confidently into his eyes.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXXI<br /> <br />ILLUSIONS AND DISILLUSIONS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>It was a pleasure to Marley to accept the homage
+the people paid him; they confounded his
+success in journalism with a success in literature,
+and under the impression that all writers are somehow
+witty, they laughed extravagantly at his lightest
+observation.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But much as Marley relished all this, much as
+he enjoyed being at home again, with Lavinia and
+with his father and mother, he was disturbed by
+a certain restlessness that came over him after
+he had been in Macochee a few days and the novelty
+and excitement of his return had worn off. The
+glamour the town had worn for him had left it;
+it seemed to have withered and shrunk away. He
+could no longer, by any effort of the imagination,
+realize it as the place he had carried affectionately
+in his heart during the long months of his absence;
+its interests were so few and so petty, and he found
+himself battling with a wish to get away. He was
+fearful of this feeling; he did not dare to own
+it to himself, much less to his father and mother
+or to Lavinia.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He was glad that Lavinia would not let him
+mention going back to Chicago, and as the days
+swept by with the swiftness of vacation time, he
+was troubled that he did not feel more acutely the
+sorrow he felt would best become the prospect of
+another separation. He was comforted, finally,
+when he was able to analyze his sensations sufficiently
+to discover that it was neither his sweetheart
+nor his parents that had changed, but his own
+attitude toward life in a small town; he was vastly
+relieved when he succeeded in separating his feelings
+and saw that it was Macochee alone that he
+had lost his affection for, though he could not
+analyze his sensations deeply enough to recognize
+himself as at that period of life when external
+conditions are accepted for more than their real
+value; he was still too young for that. And so he
+could spend his days happily with Lavinia and
+grudge the moments which Lawrence and Mayme
+Carter filched from them by their calls, and he was
+as resentful of Mayme’s invitation to the supper
+which she exalted into a dinner with a reception
+afterward, as was Lavinia herself.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When Marley went to pay his call on Wade
+Powell, he found many sensations as he glanced
+about the dingy little office where he had begun his
+studies. Wade Powell himself, smoking and reading
+his Cincinnati paper, was sitting at his old
+desk, with the same aspect of permanence he had
+always given the impression of. Marley rushed in
+on him with a face red and smiling and when
+Powell looked up, he threw down his paper, and
+leaped to his feet, saying:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ll be damned!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But when their first greetings were over, Powell’s
+manner changed; he began to show Marley a
+certain respect, and he paid him the delicate tribute
+of letting him do most of the talking, whereas
+he used to do most of the talking himself. He was
+not prepared to hear that Marley was still studying
+law; and it cost him an effort to readjust his conception
+of Marley as a successful journalist to the
+old one of a struggling student. He gave Marley
+some intelligence of this, and of his disappointment
+when he said with a meekness Marley did not like
+to see in him:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, of course, you know your own business
+best.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But when Marley had taken pains to explain his
+position and when he had described the Chicago
+law offices, Powell grew more reconciled.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’ve watched you,� he said, “I’ve watched you,
+and I’ve asked your father about you every time
+I’ve seen him; my one regret was that you were
+not working on a Cincinnati paper; then I could
+have read what you were writing. I did try to get
+a Chicago paper—but you know what this town is.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell was deeply interested in Marley’s description
+of his old friend, Judge Johnson, and
+as Marley gave him some notion of the judge’s
+importance and prosperity Powell could only exclaim
+from time to time:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ll be damned!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley did not tell Powell that Judge Johnson
+had appeared to have forgotten him; he felt that
+it would be more handsome to accept the moral
+responsibility of a prevarication than to hurt Powell’s
+feelings in the way he knew the truth would hurt
+them. Even as it was, Judge Johnson’s success,
+now so keenly realized by Powell when it had
+been brought home to him in this personal way,
+seemed to subdue him, and he was only lifted out
+of his gloom when Marley said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But I’ll tell you one thing, there isn’t a lawyer
+in Chicago who can try a case with you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell’s eye brightened and his face glowed a
+deeper red; then the look died away as he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I made a mistake. I ought to have gone
+there.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Is it too late?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell thought a moment, and Marley regretted
+having tempted him with an impossibility. He
+was relieved when Powell shook his head and said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, it’s too late now.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell, with something of the pathos of age
+and failure that was stealing gradually over him,
+begged Marley to come in and see him every day
+while he was at home.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“You see I’ve always kept your desk,� he said,
+in a tone that apologized for a weakness he
+perhaps thought unmanly, “just as it was when you
+went away.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley thought cynically that Powell had kept
+everything else just as it was when he went away,
+but he was instantly ashamed of the thought, and
+ashamed, too, of the fact that he and Lavinia both
+considered even this little morning call a waste of
+time, and a sacrifice almost too great to be borne.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell went with Marley out into the street,
+and it gave him evident pride to walk by his side
+down Main Street and around the Square.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I want them all to see you,� he said frankly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He made Marley go with him to the McBriar
+House and then to Con’s Corner, and, in every
+place where men stopped him and shook Marley’s
+hand and asked him how he was getting along,
+Powell took the responsibility of replying promptly:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Look at him; how does he seem to be getting
+along?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Powell found a delight that must have been
+keener than Marley’s in Marley’s fidelity to Chicago,
+expressed quite in the boastful frankness
+of the citizens of that city when abroad, though to
+Marley it seemed that he was putting it on them by
+doing so. He found them all, however, in a spirit
+of loyalty to Macochee that might easily have
+become combative.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, little old Macochee’s good enough for us,
+eh, Wade?� they would say.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley would not let them be ahead of him in
+praise of Macochee, and Powell himself softened
+enough to admit that old Ohio was a pretty good
+place to have come from.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When they suddenly encountered Carman in the
+street, Marley flushed with confusion, first for
+himself and then vicariously for Powell. But
+there was no escape from a situation that no doubt
+exaggerated itself to his sensitiveness, and he was
+soon allowing Carman to hold his hand in his
+right palm while with the other Carman solicitously
+held Marley’s left elbow, and transfixed him
+with that left eye which still refused to react to
+light and shade.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, how are you?� asked Carman. “How
+are you, anyway?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, I’m all right.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Guess you’re glad now I didn’t give you that
+job, eh?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley could not look at Powell, but he hastened
+to say:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, I’m glad, now.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Maybe it was for the best,� said Carman.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When they had left him Marley quickly and
+crudely tried to change the subject, but Powell
+insisted on saying:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I want you to know that I’ve always felt like
+a dog over that.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Oh, don’t mention it,� Marley begged. “I
+was honest when I told Carman I was glad it
+turned out as it did.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� said Powell, “I guess it was all for the
+best.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>To Marley’s relief they dropped the matter then,
+and went over to Con’s Corner. There Powell
+lighted a cigar, and Marley could not resist asking
+for a brand of cigarettes, the kind that Weston
+smoked, though he knew that Con would not have
+them. He felt mean about it afterward, but he
+could not forego some of the petty distinctions of
+living in a city and he indulged a little revenge
+toward the people who had deserted him in what
+had seemed to him his need, and now, in what
+seemed to them his prosperity, were so ready to
+rally to him. Marley went home at noon feeling
+that his triumph had been almost as great as if
+he had come home in a private car.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>His triumph soon was at an end; they came to
+the afternoon of the day when Marley was to return
+to Chicago. It was a golden day, with a sun
+shining out of a sky without clouds, and yet a
+delicious breeze blew out of the little hills. Marley
+and Lavinia walked out the white and dusty
+pike that made the road to Mingo. They walked
+slowly along the edge of the road, in silence,
+under the sadness of the parting that was before
+them. They longed ineffably that the moments
+might be stayed; somehow they felt they might be
+stayed by their silence.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>But when they had ascended the hill and stood
+beside the old oak-tree which grew by the road,
+they looked out across the valley of the Mad River,
+miles and miles away—across fields now golden
+with the wheat, or green with the rustling corn
+that glinted in the sun, off and away to the trees
+that became vague and dim in the hazy distance.
+Back whence they had come lay Macochee; they
+could see the tower of the Court House, the red
+spire of the Methodist church, the gleam of the sun
+on some great window in the roof of the car-shops;
+on the other side of town crawled a train, trailing
+its smoke behind it. Marley looked at Lavinia—she
+was leaning against the tree, and as he looked
+he saw that her blue eyes were filling slowly with
+tears.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Isn’t it beautiful!� he said, looking away from
+her to the simple scenery of Ohio.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Do you remember that day?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“When we picked out our farm—where was it?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Wasn’t it over there?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� he said. “We could come and live here
+when we are old.� He knew he was but seeking to
+console himself for what now could not be.
+“And there is the old town,� he said. “It looks
+beautiful from here, nestling among those trees,
+it seems peaceful, and calm, and simple. But it is
+different when you are in it; for there are gossip
+and envy and spite, and I can never quite forgive
+it because it had no place for me. Well,� he went
+on defiantly, in the relief he had been able to make
+for himself out of his immature reading of Macochee’s
+character; “I don’t need it any more; it is
+little and narrow and provincial, and the real life
+is to be lived out in the larger world. It’s a hard
+fight, but it’s worth it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t you regret leaving it?� asked Lavinia,
+in a voice that was tenderer than Marley had ever
+known it. Marley looked at Macochee and then he
+looked at her.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I regret leaving it, dear heart, because I must
+leave you behind in it.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Would you never care to come back if it were
+not for me?� she asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I might,� he admitted, “when we are old. We
+could come back here then and settle down on our
+farm over there.� He pointed.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I’m half-afraid of the city,� Lavinia said.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>He turned and took her in his arms.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Dearest,� he said, “you must not say that;
+for the next time I come it will be to take you
+away from Macochee.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Will it?� she whispered.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes; and it can’t be long now. How we have
+had to wait!�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� she repeated, “how we have had to wait!�</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CHAPTER XXXII<br /> <br />AT LAST</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Marley, in that compensatory pleasure we
+find in difficulties in the retrospect, was afterward
+fond of saying that if he had waited until
+he had the money and the position to warrant
+his marrying, he never would have married at
+all.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Just what moved him to take the decisive step
+he did he would have found it hard to tell. He
+had grown accustomed to the life he was living in
+Chicago, he had succumbed, as it were, to his environment;
+he no longer regretted Macochee and
+he found a satisfaction in declaring, whenever he
+had the chance, that the kindest thing the town had
+ever done for him was to refuse him a place within
+its borders. As he looked back at all the plans he
+had formed, he marveled at their number, but he
+marveled more that he should have had such regret
+in the failure of all of them; he was glad
+now that they had failed; had any one of them succeeded
+his life would have been diverted into other
+channels, and it gave him a kind of fear when he
+tried to imagine his life in those other channels;
+he could see himself in those relations only as some
+other identity, and it gave him a gruesome feeling
+to do this.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Not that he was satisfied with himself or his
+surroundings; he did not like newspaper work, and
+he did not like Chicago very well. He was determined
+to get out of newspaper work at any rate,
+and while he could not yet clearly see a way of getting
+into the law, he had a calm assurance that he
+would do it, in the end. Weston sustained him in
+this hope by saying:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“A man can’t control circumstances; they control
+him; but sometimes he can dodge them, and,
+after all, every sincere prayer is answered.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>During the winter that followed the summer
+when he had paid his visit to his home he worked
+hard at the law, spending in study the hours the
+other men on his newspaper spent in their
+dissipations, and in the spring he stole away almost
+secretly to Springfield, took the examination, and
+was admitted to the bar.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>After it was done, it seemed but a little thing;
+he wrote Lavinia and he wrote Wade Powell, knowing
+the interest Powell would have in the fact, that
+he felt no different now as a lawyer than he had
+when he was merely a layman. Weston had spent
+the winter over the book he was writing; in the
+spring he found a publisher, and <em>The Clutch of
+Circumstance</em> was given to the world. Marley
+thought it a wonderful book, and so did Lavinia,
+and while it made but little noise in the world,
+Weston said it had done better than he expected—so
+well, in fact, that he was going to give up newspaper
+work, and give his attention wholly to writing
+another book.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>It was a shock to Marley when Weston told him
+they would have to give up their apartment; it was
+a break in the life to which he had grown accustomed.
+But it seemed a time of change, and it
+was then he wrote Lavinia that he thought it useless
+for them to wait any longer; he thought they might
+as well be married then as at any time.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Unconsciously, perhaps, he wrote this letter as if
+he and not she had been waiting, and if he had
+known the state of the sensitive public opinion in
+Macochee, he might have felt himself justified in
+the attitude. Ever since his visit there the summer
+before his apparent prosperity had given the sentiment
+of the town an impetus in his favor; the
+people had turned their criticism toward Lavinia;
+for months it was a common expression that it was
+a shame she was keeping Marley waiting so long.
+They would nod in a sinister way, and insinuate
+the worldliest of motives; it was generally under
+stood that she was waiting for Marley to make a
+fortune, and this, they held, was demanding too
+much. She had withdrawn utterly from the society
+of Macochee; and she had not gone to one
+of the balls Lawrence had arranged that winter at
+the Odd Fellows’ Hall; her position, outwardly
+at least, was as isolated as that of the Misses Cramer,
+the fragile and transparent old maids who
+lived so many years in their house sheltered by the
+row of cedars behind the High School grounds.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When Judge Blair received the formal letter in
+which Marley told him he had asked Lavinia to
+name the day and requested his approval, the judge
+gave his consent with a promptness that surprised
+him almost as much as it did Mrs. Blair and Lavinia.
+He justified his inconsistency to his wife,
+in order perhaps, the more thoroughly to justify it
+to himself, by saying that he had long felt Lavinia’s
+position keenly.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“If the strain has been to her anything like
+what it has been to me,� he said to his wife, “they
+could not have endured it much longer.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“It will be lonely here without her,� said
+Mrs. Blair, pensively.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes,� the judge assented, and then after a moment’s
+thought he added:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But we can now begin to worry about Connie.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t you dare mention that, William!� said
+Mrs. Blair, almost viciously. “She mustn’t begin
+to think of such a thing.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“But she’s in long dresses now, and she seems
+to walk home more and more slowly every night
+with those boys from the High School.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I don’t propose to go through such an
+experience as we have had for these last three
+years, not right away, at any rate.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge tried to laugh, as he said:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ll turn Connie over to you; I’m going
+to have a little peace now.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The judge complained that he could find no
+peace, however, anywhere, so great was the preparation
+that raged thereafter in the house, driving
+him with his book and cigar from place to place.
+Mrs. Blair and Lavinia and Connie were in fine
+excitement over the gowns that were being fashioned,
+and Miss Ryan lived at the Blairs’ for
+weeks, while in every room there were billowy
+clouds of white garments, and threads and ravelings
+over all the floors.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Meanwhile it was understood that Marley, too,
+was making arrangements in Chicago. He had
+leased a small flat on the South Side, and had arranged
+with Weston to remove most of the furniture
+of their apartment into the new home where
+the lovers were to set up housekeeping. Mrs.
+Marley was to spare them some of the things from
+her home, and Mrs. Blair, from time to time, designated
+certain articles which she was willing to devote
+to the cause. Chad’s contribution was merely
+a suggestion; he said they could depend on the wedding
+presents to fill up the gaps.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>They were married in the middle of June. The
+ceremony was pronounced by Doctor Marley in
+the parlor of the Blair home; everybody bore up
+well until, under the stress of his emotion, the
+doctor’s voice broke, and then Mrs. Blair wept and
+the judge wiped his eyes and his reddened, anguished
+face. Mrs. Marley cried too, though every
+one tried to comfort her with the assurance that
+she was not losing a son, but gaining a daughter.
+Connie, in her first long gown, acted as maid
+for her sister, but it was evident that she was
+desperately impressed by the young author of <em>The
+Clutch of Circumstance</em>, who had come on from
+Chicago to act as groomsman.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>The company that had been invited was as
+much impressed by Weston as Connie was;
+they had never had an author in Macochee before,
+and though most of them had such confused notions
+of Weston’s performances in literature that
+they grew cold with fear when they talked with
+him, they nevertheless braved it out for the sake of
+an experience they could boast of afterward. Most
+of them took refuge in a discussion of Marley’s
+achievements with him, and they gave him the
+unflattering impression that Marley’s work was as
+important as his own.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Many of them had plots they wished him to use
+in his stories, others wished to know if he
+took his characters from real life; and Mrs. Carter
+was of such an acuteness that she identified
+Marley as his hero, though Weston had tried to
+keep his book from having any hero. George
+Halliday, however, was able to save the day; he
+could discriminate; he had read <em>The Clutch of
+Circumstance</em>, having borrowed Lavinia’s autograph
+copy, and he told Weston that while he did
+not go in for realism, because it was too photographic,
+too materialistic and lacked personality,
+he nevertheless had enjoyed a pleasant half-hour
+with the volume, and considered it not half-bad.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>This conversation was held in plain hearing of
+all in that difficult moment after the ceremony,
+when the relatives of the bride had solemnly kissed
+her, and her most intimate friends, like Mayme
+Carter, had wept on her neck. The people were
+standing helplessly about; Marley noticed Wade
+Powell, as dignified as a clergyman, in his black
+garments and white tie standing apart with his
+wife.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley had never seen Mrs. Powell before, but
+he recalled in a flash that she filled his conception
+of her; and this delicate, sensitive little face
+completed the picture he remembered long ago to
+have formed. When he saw Powell standing there,
+his hands behind him, unequal to the ordeal of
+being entertained in Judge Blair’s house, bowing
+stiffly and forcing a smile on the few occasions when
+he was spoken to or thought he was being spoken
+to, he had a wish to go to him, but he could not
+then leave his place by Lavinia’s side. He was glad
+a moment later when he saw his father and Wade
+Powell in conversation, and as he and Lavinia
+passed them on their way out to the dining-room
+he heard his father say:</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Powell, when I was
+young my creed was founded on the fact of sin in
+man; but now that I am old, I find it more and
+more founded on the fact of the good that is in all
+of them.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>When the supper was over, Lawrence gave the
+cheer that every one wished to see come to the
+wedding by clearing the parlor for a dance, and
+Marley was glad that his position now permitted
+him to refrain from dancing with a valid excuse.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>Marley thought that Lavinia never looked so
+pretty as she did when she stood at the head of
+the stairs after she had donned her blue traveling
+gown, drawing on her gloves and waiting for the
+carriage that was to drive them to the station.
+Her face was rosy in the light that filled the house,
+and she met his eyes with a fond, contented glance.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Are you happy?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Don’t you see?� she said, looking up at him.</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“And will you be happy in that big city, away
+from every one you know, as the wife of a newspaper
+man?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“I shall be happy anywhere with you.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Our dreams are coming true,� Marley said,
+“after a fashion. And yet not just as we dreamed
+them, after all.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“In all the essentials they are, aren’t they?�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, but you know our dream was that I was to
+practise law.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Well, we still have that dream.�</p>
+
+<p class='c003'>“Yes, we still have it; maybe it will come true.
+Weston says that our dreams are as much realities
+in our lives as anything else.�</p>
+
+<div class='c006'>THE END</div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45728 ***</div>
+</body>
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Average, by Brand Whitlock

-

-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/license

-

-

-Title: The Happy Average

-

-Author: Brand Whitlock

-

-Illustrator: Howard Chandler Christy

-

-Release Date: May 23, 2014 [EBook #45728]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY AVERAGE ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by Peter Bayes, Roger Frank and the online

-Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at

-http://www.pgdpcanada.net

-

-

-

-

-

-[Illustration]

-

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

-

-                           The Happy Average

-

-                           By BRAND WHITLOCK

-

-                               AUTHOR OF

-                   "Her Infinite Variety," "The 13th

-                            District, etc."

-

-                             ILLUSTRATED BY

-                        HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY

-

-                           A. L. BURT COMPANY

-                         Publishers    New York

-

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

-

-                            COPYRIGHT, 1904

-                       THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

-

-                                OCTOBER

-

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

-

-                           The Happy Average

-

-                               CHAPTER I

-

-                          A YOUNG MAN'S FANCY

-

-"Come on, old man."

-

-Lawrence led the way with a jaunty step that was intended to show his

-easy footing with the Carters. But Marley lagged behind. Even if calling

-on girls had not been such a serious business with him, he could not

-forget that he was just graduated from college and that a certain

-dignity befitted him. He wished Lawrence would not speak so loud; the

-girls might hear, and think he was afraid; he wished to keep the truth

-from them as long as possible. He had already caught a glimpse of the

-girls, or thought he had, but before he could make sure, the vague white

-figures on the veranda stirred; he heard a scurrying, and the loose bang

-of a screen door. Then it was still. Lawrence laughed--somehow, as

-Marley felt, derisively.

-

-The way from the sidewalk up to the Carters' veranda was not long, of

-course, though it seemed long to Marley, and Marley's deliberation made

-it seem long to Lawrence. They paused at the steps of the veranda, and

-Lawrence made a low bow.

-

-"Good evening, Mrs. Carter," he said. "Ah, Captain, you here too?"

-

-Marley had not noticed the captain, or Mrs. Carter; they sat there so

-quietly, enjoying the cool of the evening, or such cool as a July

-evening can find in central Ohio.

-

-"My friend, Mr. Marley, Mrs. Carter--Glenn Marley--you've heard of him,

-Captain."

-

-Marley bowed and said something. The presentation there in the darkness

-made it rather difficult for him, and neither the captain nor his wife

-moved. Lawrence sat down on the steps and fanned himself with his hat.

-

-"Been a hot day, Captain," he said. "Think there's any sign of rain?" He

-sniffed the air. The captain did not need to sniff the air to be able to

-reply, in a voice that rumbled up from his bending figure, that he had

-no hope of any.

-

-"Mayme's home, ain't she?" asked Lawrence, turning to Mrs. Carter.

-

-"I'll go see," said Mrs. Carter, and she rose quickly, as if glad to get

-away, and the screen door slammed again.

-

-"Billy was in the bank to-day," Lawrence went on, speaking to Captain

-Carter. "He said your wheat was ready to cut. Did you get Foose all

-right?"

-

-"Yes," said the captain, "he'll give me next week."

-

-"Do you have to board the threshers?"

-

-"No, not this year; they bring along their own cook, and a tent and

-everything."

-

-"Je-rusalem!" exclaimed Lawrence. "Things _are_ changing in these days,

-ain't they? Harvesting ain't as hard on the women-folks as it used to

-be."

-

-"No," said the captain, "but I pay for it, so much extra a bushel."

-

-His head shook regretfully, but he would have lost his regrets in

-telling of the time when he had swung a cradle all day in the harvest

-field, had not Mrs. Carter's voice just then been heard calling up the

-stairs:

-

-"Mayme!"

-

-"Whoo!" answered a high, feminine voice.

-

-"Come down. There's some one here to see you."

-

-Mrs. Carter turned into the parlor, and the tall windows that opened to

-the floor of the veranda burst into light.

-

-"She'll be right down, John," said Mrs. Carter, appearing in the door.

-"You give me your hats and go right in."

-

-"All right," said Lawrence, and he got to his feet. "Come on, Glenn."

-

-Mrs. Carter took the hats of the young men and hung them on the rack,

-where they might easily have hung them themselves. Then she went back to

-the veranda, letting the screen door bang behind her, and Lawrence and

-Marley entered the parlor. Marley took his seat on one of the haircloth

-chairs that seemed to have ranged themselves permanently along the

-walls, and Lawrence went to the square piano that stood across one

-corner of the room, and sat down tentatively on the stool, swinging from

-side to side.

-

-Marley glanced at the pictures on the walls. One of them was a steel

-engraving of Lincoln and his cabinet; another, in a black oval frame,

-portrayed Captain Carter in uniform, his hair dusting the strapped

-shoulders of a coat made after the pattern that seems to have been worn

-so uncomfortably by the heroes of the Civil War. There was, however, a

-later picture of the captain, a crayon enlargement of a photograph, that

-had taken him in civilian garb. This picture, in its huge gilt frame,

-was the most aggressive thing in the room, except, possibly, the walnut

-what-not. Marley had a great fear of the what-not; it seemed to him that

-if he stirred he must topple it over, and dash its load of trinkets to

-the floor. Presently he heard the swish of skirts. Then a tall girl came

-in, and Lawrence sprang to his feet.

-

-"Hello, Mayme. What'd you run for?" he said.

-

-He had crossed the room and seized the girl's hand. She flashed a rebuke

-at him, though it was evident that the rebuke was more out of deference

-to the strange presence of Marley than for any real resentment she felt.

-

-"This is my friend, Mr. Marley, Miss Carter," Lawrence said. "You've

-heard me speak of him."

-

-Marley edged away from the what-not, rose and took the hand the girl

-gave him. Then Miss Carter crossed to the black haircloth sofa and

-seated herself, smoothing out her skirts.

-

-"Didn't know what to do, so we thought we'd come out and see you," said

-Lawrence.

-

-"Oh, indeed!" said Miss Carter. "Well, it's too bad about you. We'll do

-when you can't find anybody else to put up with you, eh?"

-

-"Oh, yes, you'll do in a pinch," chaffed Lawrence.

-

-"Well, can't you find a comfortable seat?" the girl asked, still

-addressing Lawrence, who had gone back to the piano stool.

-

-"I'm going to play in a minute," said Lawrence, "and sing."

-

-"Well, excuse _me_!" implored Miss Carter. "Do let me get you a seat."

-

-Lawrence promptly went over to the sofa and leaned back in one corner of

-it, affecting a discomfort.

-

-"Can't I get you a pillow, Mr. Lawrence?" Miss Carter asked presently.

-"Or perhaps a cot; I believe there's one somewhere in the attic."

-

-"Oh, I reckon I can stand it," said Lawrence.

-

-Marley had regained his seat on the edge of the slippery chair.

-

-"Where's Vinie?" asked Lawrence.

-

-"She's coming," answered Miss Carter.

-

-"Taking out her curl papers, eh?" said Lawrence. "She needn't mind us."

-

-Miss Carter pretended a disgust, but as she was framing a retort,

-somehow, the eyes of all of them turned toward the hall door. A girl in

-a gown of white stood there clasping and unclasping her hands curiously,

-and looking from one to another of those in the room.

-

-"Come in, Lavinia," said Miss Carter. Something had softened her voice.

-The girl stepped into the room almost timidly.

-

-"Miss Blair," said Miss Carter, "let me introduce Mr. Marley."

-

-The sudden consciousness that he had been sitting--and staring--smote

-Marley, and he sprang to his feet. Embarrassment overpowered him and he

-bowed awkwardly. Lawrence had been silent, and his silence had been a

-long one for him. Seeming to recognize this he hastened to say:

-

-"Well, how's the world using you, Vinie?"

-

-The girl smiled and answered:

-

-"Oh, pretty well, thank you, Jack."

-

-It grated on Marley to hear her called Vinie. Lavinia Blair! Lavinia

-Blair! That was her name. He had heard it before, of course, yet it had

-never sounded as it did now when he repeated it to himself. The girl had

-seated herself in a rocking-chair across the room, almost out of range,

-as it were. He was rather glad of this, if anything. It seemed to

-relieve him of the duty of talking to her. He supposed, of course, they

-would pair off somehow. The young people always did in Macochee. He

-supposed he had been brought there to pair off with Lavinia Blair. He

-liked the thought, yet the position had its responsibilities. Somehow he

-never could forget that he could not dance. He hoped they would not

-propose dancing. He always had a fear of that in making calls, and all

-the calls he made seemed to come to it soon or late; some one always

-proposed it.

-

-Marley was aware that Lawrence and Mayme Carter had resumed the exchange

-of their rude repartee, though he did not know what they had said. They

-kept laughing, too. Lavinia Blair seemed to join in the laughter if not

-in the badinage. Marley wished he might join in it. Jack Lawrence was

-evidently funnier than ever that night; Mayme Carter was convulsed. Now

-and then Lawrence said something to her in a tone too low for the others

-to hear, and these remarks pushed her to the verge of hysterics. Marley

-had a notion they were laughing at him.

-

-Meanwhile Lavinia Blair sat with her hands in her lap, smiling as though

-she were amused. Marley wondered if he amused her. He felt that he ought

-to say something, but he did not know what to say. He thought of several

-things, but, as he turned them over in his mind, he was convinced that

-they were not appropriate. So he sat and looked at Lavinia Blair, looked

-at her eyes, her mouth, her hair. He thought he had never seen such a

-complexion.

-

-Mayme Carter had snatched her handkerchief back from Lawrence, and

-retreated to her end of the sofa. There she sat up stiffly, folded her

-hands, and, though her mirth still shook her spasmodically, she said:

-

-"Now, Jack, behave yourself."

-

-Lawrence burlesqued a surprise, and said:

-

-"I'll leave it to Vine if I've done anything."

-

-Marley wondered how much further abbreviation Lavinia Blair's name would

-stand, but he was suddenly aware that he was being addressed. Miss

-Carter, with an air of dismissing Lawrence, said:

-

-"You have not been in Macochee long, have you, Mr. Marley?"

-

-Marley admitted that he had not, but said that he liked the town. When

-Lawrence explained that Marley was going to settle down there and become

-one of them, Miss Carter said she was awfully glad, but warned him

-against associating too much with Lawrence. This embarrassed Marley, if

-it did not Lawrence, and he immediately gave the scene to Lawrence, who

-guessed he would sing his song. To do so he went to the piano, and began

-to pick over the frayed sheets of music that lay on its green cover. To

-forestall him, however, Miss Carter rushed across the room and slid on

-to the piano stool herself, saying breathlessly:

-

-"Anything to stop that!"

-

-She struck a few vagrant chords, and Marley, glad of a subject on which

-he could express himself, pleaded with her to play. At last she did so.

-When she had finished, Lawrence clapped his hands loudly, and stopped

-only when a voice startled them. It was Mrs. Carter calling through the

-window:

-

-"Play your new piece, Mayme!"

-

-Miss Carter demurred, but after they had argued the question through the

-window, the daughter gave in, and played it. The music soothed Lawrence

-to silence, and when Miss Carter completed her little repertoire, his

-mockery could recover itself no further than to say:

-

-"Won't you favor us, Miss Blair?"

-

-When Lavinia Blair declined, he struck an imploring attitude and said:

-

-"Oh, please do! We're dying to hear you. You didn't leave your music at

-home, did you?"

-

-Marley heard the chairs scraping on the veranda, and the screen door

-slammed once more. Then he heard Captain Carter go up the stairs, while

-Mrs. Carter halted in the doorway of the parlor long enough to say:

-

-"You lock the front door when you come up, Mayme."

-

-Mayme without turning replied "All right," and when her mother had

-disappeared she said:

-

-"It's awful hot in here, let's go outside."

-

-Marley found himself strolling in the yard with Lavinia Blair. The moon

-had not risen, but the girl's throat and arms gleamed in the starlight;

-her white dress seemed to be a cloud of gauze; she floated, rather than

-walked, there by his side. They paused by the gate. About them were the

-voices of the summer night, the crickets, the katydids, far away the

-frogs, chirping musically. They stood a while in the silence, and then

-they turned, and were talking again.

-

-Marley did most of the talking, and all he said was about himself,

-though he did not realize that this was so. He had already told her of

-his life in the towns where his father had preached before he came to

-Macochee, and of his four years in college at Delaware. He tried to give

-her some notion of the sense of alienation he had felt as the son of an

-itinerant Methodist minister; for him no place had ever taken on the

-warm color and expression of home. He explained that as yet he knew

-little of Macochee, having been away at college when his father moved

-there the preceding fall. It was so easy to talk to her, and as he told

-her of his ambitions, the things he was going to do became so many, and

-so easy. He was going to become a lawyer; he thought he should go to

-Cincinnati.

-

-"And leave Macochee?" said Lavinia Blair.

-

-Marley caught his breath.

-

-"Would you care?" he whispered.

-

-She did not answer. He heard the crickets, the katydids, the frogs

-again; there came the perfume of the lilacs, late flowering that year;

-the heavy odor of a shrub almost overpowered him.

-

-"My father is a lawyer," Lavinia said.

-

-They had turned off the path, and were wandering over the lawn. The dew

-sparkled on it; and Marley became solicitous.

-

-"Won't you get your feet wet?" he asked.

-

-The girl laughed at the idea, but she caught up her skirts, and they

-wandered on in the shade of the tall elms. Marley did not know where

-they were. The yard seemed an endless garden, immense, unknown,

-enchanted; the dark trees all around him stood like the forest of some

-park, and the lawn stretched away to fall over endless terraces; he

-imagined statues and fountains gleaming in the heavy shadows of the

-trees. The house seemed lost in the distance, though he felt its

-presence there behind him.

-

-Once he saw the twinkle of a passing light in an upper story. He could

-no longer hear the voices of Mayme and Lawrence, but he caught the

-tinkling notes of a banjo, away off somewhere. Its music was very sweet.

-They strolled on, their feet swishing in the damp grass, then suddenly

-there was a rush, a loud barking, and a dog sprang at them out of the

-darkness. Lavinia gave a little cry. Marley was startled; he felt that

-he must run, yet he thought of the girl beside him. He must not let her

-see his fear. He stepped in front of her. He could feel her draw more

-closely to him, and he thrilled as the sense of his protectorship came

-to him. He must think of some heroic scheme of vanquishing the dog, but

-it stopped in its mad rush, and Lavinia, standing aside, said:

-

-"Why, it's only Sport!"

-

-They laughed, and their laugh was the happier because of the relief from

-their fear.

-

-"We must have wandered around behind the house," said Lavinia. "There's

-the shed."

-

-They turned, and went back. The enchantment of the yard had departed.

-Marley seemed to see things clearly once more, though his heart still

-beat as he felt the delicious sense of protectorship that had come over

-him as Lavinia shrank to his side at the moment the dog rushed at them.

-Nor could he ever forget her face as she smiled up at him in the little

-opening they came into on the side lawn. The young moon was just sailing

-over the trees. As they approached the veranda, Lawrence's voice called

-out of the darkness:

-

-"Well, where have you young folks been stealing away to?"

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER II

-

-                              WADE POWELL

-

-

-Marley halted at the threshold and glanced up at the sign that swung

-over the doorway. The gilt lettering of the sign had long ago been

-tarnished, and where its black sanded paint had peeled in many weathers

-the original tin was as rusty as the iron arm from which it creaked. Yet

-Macochee had long since lost its need of the shingle to tell it where

-Wade Powell's law office was. It had been for many years in one of the

-little rooms of the low brick building in Miami Street, just across from

-the Court House; it was almost as much of an institution as the Court

-House itself, with which its triumphs and its trials were identified.

-Marley gathered enough courage from his inspection of the sign to enter,

-but once inside, he hesitated. Then a heavy voice spoke.

-

-"Well, come in," it said peremptorily.

-

-Wade Powell, sitting with his feet on his table, held his newspaper

-aside and looked at Marley over his spectacles. Marley had had an ideal

-of Wade Powell, and now he had to pause long enough to relinquish the

-ideal and adjust himself to the reality. The hair was as disordered as

-his young fancy would have had it, but it was thinner than he had known

-it in his dreams, and its black was streaked with gray. The face was

-smooth-shaven, which accorded with his notion, though it had not been

-shaven as recently as he felt it should have been. But he could not

-reconcile himself to the spectacles that rested on Powell's nose, and

-pressed their bows into the flesh of his temples--the eagle eyes of the

-Wade Powell of his imagination had never known glasses.

-

-When Wade Powell slowly pulled his spectacles from his nose and tossed

-them on to the table before him, he bent his eyes on Marley, and their

-gaze, under their heavy brows, somewhat restored him, but it could not

-atone for the disappointment. Perhaps the disappointment that Marley

-felt in this moment came from some dim, unrealized sense that Wade

-Powell was growing old. The spectacles, the gray in his hair, the

-wrinkles in his face, the looseness of the skin at his jaws and at his

-throat--where a fold of it hung between the points of his collar--all

-told that Wade Powell had passed the invisible line which marks life's

-summit, and that his face was turned now toward the evening. There was

-the touch of sadness in the indistinct conception of him as a man who

-had not altogether realized the ambitions of his youth or the

-predictions of his friends, and the sadness came from the intuition that

-the failure or the half-failure was not of the heroic kind.

-

-The office in which he sat, and on which, in the long years, he had

-impressed his character, was untidy; the floor was dirty, the books on

-the shelves were dusty and leaning all awry; the set of the Ohio reports

-had not been kept up to date; one might have told by a study of them at

-just what period enterprise and energy had faltered, while the gaps here

-and there showed how an uncalculating generosity had helped a natural

-indolence by lending indiscriminately to other lawyers, who, with the

-lack of respect for the moral of the laws they pretended to revere, had

-borrowed with no thought of returning.

-

-Two or three pictures hung crookedly on the walls; the table at which

-Powell sat was old and scarred; its ink-stand had long ago gone dry and

-been abandoned; a cheap bottle, with its cork rolling tipsily by its

-side, had taken the ink-stand's place. The papers scattered over the

-table had an air of hopelessness, as though they had grown tired, like

-the clients they represented, in waiting for Powell's attention. The

-half-open door at the back led into a room that had been, and possibly

-might yet be, used as a private office or consulting room, should any

-one care to brave its darkness and its dust; but as for Wade Powell, it

-was plain that he preferred to sit democratically in the outer office,

-where all might see him, and, what was of more importance to him, where

-he might see all.

-

-The one new thing in the room was a typewriter, standing on its little

-sewing-machine table, in the corner of the room. There was no

-stenographer nor any chair for one; Marley imagined Powell, whenever he

-had occasion to write, sitting down to the machine himself, and picking

-out his pleadings painfully, laboriously and slowly, letter by letter,

-using only his index fingers. And this somehow humbled his ideal the

-more. Marley almost wished he hadn't come.

-

-"What's on your mind, young man?" said Wade Powell, leaning back in his

-chair and dropping his long arm at his side until his newspaper swept

-the floor. Marley had seated himself in a wooden chair that was

-evidently intended for clients, and he began nervously.

-

-"Well, I--"

-

-Here he stopped, overcome again by an embarrassment. A smile spread over

-Wade Powell's face, a gentle smile with a winning quality in it, and his

-face to Marley became young again.

-

-"Tell your troubles," he said. "I've confessed all the young men in

-Macochee for twenty-five years. Yes--thirty-five--" He grew suddenly

-sober as he numbered the years and then exclaimed as if to himself:

-

-"My God! Has it been that long?"

-

-He took out his watch and looked at it as if it must somehow correct his

-reckoning. For a moment, then, he thought; his gaze was far away. But

-Marley brought him back when he said:

-

-"I only want--I only want to study law."

-

-"Oh!" said Powell, and he seemed somehow relieved. "Is that all?"

-

-To Marley this seemed quite enough, and the disappointment he felt,

-which was a part of the effect Wade Powell's office had had on him,

-showed suddenly in his face. Powell glanced quickly at him, and hastened

-to reassure him.

-

-"We can fix that easily enough," he said. "Have you ever read any law?"

-

-"No," said Marley.

-

-"Been to college?"

-

-Marley told him that he had just that summer been graduated and when he

-mentioned the name of the college Powell said:

-

-"The Methodists, eh?"

-

-He could hardly conceal a certain contempt in the tone with which he

-said this, and then, as if instantly regretting the unkindness, he

-observed:

-

-"It's a good school, I'm told."

-

-He could not, however, evince an entire approval, and so seeming to

-desert the subject he hastened on:

-

-"What's your name?"

-

-"Glenn Marley."

-

-"Oh!" Wade Powell dropped his feet to the floor and sat upright. "Are

-you Preacher Marley's son?"

-

-Marley did not like to hear his father called "Preacher," and when he

-said that he was the son of Doctor Marley, Powell remarked:

-

-"I've heard him preach, and he's a damn good preacher too, I want to

-tell you."

-

-Marley warmed under this profane indorsement. He had always, from a boy,

-felt somehow that he must defend his father's position as a preacher

-from the world, as with the little world of his boyhood and youth he had

-always had to defend his own position as the son of a preacher.

-

-"Yes, sir, he's a good preacher, and a good man," Powell went on. He had

-taken a cigar from his pocket and was nipping the end from it with his

-teeth. He lighted it, and leaned back comfortably again to smoke, and

-then in tardy hospitality he drew another cigar from his waistcoat

-pocket and held it toward Marley.

-

-"Smoke?" he said, and then he added apologetically, "I didn't think; I

-never do."

-

-Marley declined the cigar, but Powell pressed it on him, saying:

-

-"Well, your father does, I'll bet. Give it to him with Wade Powell's

-compliments. He won't hesitate to smoke with a publican and sinner."

-

-Marley smiled and put the cigar away in his pocket.

-

-"I don't know, though," Powell went on slowly, speaking as much to

-himself as to Marley, while he watched the thick white clouds he rolled

-from his lips, "that he'd want you to be in my office. I know some of

-the _brethren_ wouldn't approve. They'd think I'd contaminate you."

-

-Marley would have hastened to reassure Powell had he known how to do so

-without seeming to recognize the possibility of contamination; but while

-he hesitated Powell avoided the necessity for him by asking:

-

-"Did your father send you to me?"

-

-He looked at Marley eagerly, and with an expression of unfounded hope,

-as he awaited the answer.

-

-"No," replied Marley, "he doesn't know. I haven't talked with him at

-all. I have to do something and I've always thought I'd go into the law.

-I presume it would be better to go to a law school, but father couldn't

-afford that after putting me through college. I thought I could read law

-in some office, and maybe get admitted that way."

-

-"Sure," said Powell, "it's easy enough. You'll have to learn the law

-after you get to practising anyway--and there isn't much to learn at

-that. It's mostly a fake."

-

-Marley looked at him in some alarm, at this new smiting of an idol.

-

-"I began to read law," Powell went on, "under old Judge Colwin--that is,

-what I read. I used to sit at the window with a book in my lap and watch

-the girls go by. Still," he added with a tone of doing himself some

-final justice, "it was a liberal education to sit under the old judge's

-drippings. I learned more that way than I ever did at the law school."

-

-He smoked on a moment, ruminating on his lost youth; then, bringing

-himself around to business again, he said:

-

-"How'd you happen to come to me?"

-

-"Well," said Marley, haltingly, "I'd heard a good deal of you--and I

-thought I'd like you, and then I've heard father speak of you."

-

-"You have?" said Powell, looking up quickly.

-

-"Yes."

-

-"What'd he say?"

-

-"Well, he said you were a great orator and he said you were always with

-the under dog. He said he liked that."

-

-Powell turned his eyes away and his face reddened.

-

-"Well, let's see. If you think your father would approve of your sitting

-at the feet of such a Gamaliel as I, we can--" He was squinting

-painfully at his book-shelves. "Is that Blackstone over there on the top

-shelf?"

-

-Marley got up and glanced along the backs of the dingy books, their

-calfskin bindings deeply browned by the years, their red and black

-labels peeling off.

-

-"Here's Blackstone," he said, taking down a book, "but it's the second

-volume."

-

-"Second volume, eh? Don't see the first around anywhere, do you?"

-

-Marley looked, without finding it.

-

-"Then see if Walker's there."

-

-Marley looked again.

-

-"Walker's _American Law_," Powell explained.

-

-"I don't see it," Marley said.

-

-"No, I reckon not," assented Powell, "some one's borrowed it. I seem to

-run a sort of circulating library of legal works in this town, without

-fines--though we have statutes against petit larceny. Well, hand me

-Swan's _Treatise_. That's it, on the end of the second shelf."

-

-Marley took down the book, and gave it to Powell. While Marley dusted

-his begrimed fingers with his handkerchief, Powell blew the dust off the

-top of the book; he slapped it on the arm of his chair, the dust flying

-from it at every stroke. He picked up his spectacles, put them on and

-turned over the first few leaves of the book.

-

-"You might begin on that," he said presently, "until we can borrow a

-Blackstone or a Walker for you. This book is the best law-book ever

-written anyway; the law's all there. If you knew all that contains, you

-could go in any court and get along without giving yourself away; which

-is the whole duty of a lawyer."

-

-He closed the book and gave it to Marley, who was somewhat at a loss;

-this was the final disappointment. He had thought that his introduction

-into the mysteries of the noble profession should be attended by some

-sort of ceremony. He looked at the book in his hand quite helplessly and

-then looked up at Powell.

-

-"Is that--all?" he said.

-

-"Why, yes," Powell answered. "Isn't that enough?"

-

-"I thought--that is, that I might have some duties. How am I to begin?"

-

-"Why, just open the book to the first page and read that, then turn over

-to the second page and read that, and so on--till you get to the end."

-

-"What will my hours be?"

-

-"Your hours?" said Powell, as if he did not understand. "Oh, just suit

-yourself."

-

-Marley was looking at the book again.

-

-"Don't you make any entry--any memorandum?" he asked, still unable to

-separate himself from the idea that something formal, something legal,

-should mark the beginning of such an important epoch.

-

-"Oh, you keep track of the date," said Powell, "and at the end of three

-years I'll give you a certificate. You may find that you can do most of

-your reading at home, but come around."

-

-Marley looked about the office, trying to imagine himself in this new

-situation.

-

-"I'd like, you know," he said, "to do something, if I could, to repay

-you for your trouble."

-

-"That's all right, my boy," said Powell. Then he added as if the thought

-had just come to him:

-

-"Say, can you run a typewriter?"

-

-"I can learn."

-

-"Well, that's more than I can do," said Powell, glancing at his new

-machine. "I've tried, but it would take a stationary engineer to operate

-that thing. You might help out with my letters and my pleadings now and

-then. And I'd like to have you around. You'd make good company."

-

-"Well," said Marley, "I'll be here in the morning." He still clung to

-the idea that he was to be a part of the office, to be an identity in

-the local machinery of the law. As he rose to go, a young man appeared

-in the doorway. He was tall, and the English cap and the rough Scotch

-suit he wore, with the trousers rolled up over his heavy tan shoes,

-enabled Marley to identify him instantly as young Halliday. He was

-certain of this when Powell, looking up, said indifferently:

-

-"Hello, George. Raining in London?"

-

-"Oh, I say, Powell," replied Halliday, ignoring a taunt that had grown

-familiar to him, "that Zeller case--we would like to have that go over

-to the fall term, if you don't mind."

-

-"Why don't you settle it?" asked Powell.

-

-Halliday was leaning against the door-post, and had drawn a short brier

-pipe from his pocket. Before he answered, he paused long enough to fill

-it with tobacco. Then he said:

-

-"You'll have to see the governor about that--it's a case he's been

-looking after."

-

-"Oh, well," said Powell, with his easy acquiescence, "all right."

-

-Halliday had pressed the tobacco into the bowl of the pipe and struck a

-match.

-

-"Then, I'll tell old Bill," he said, pausing in his sentence to light

-his pipe, "to mark it off the assignment."

-

-Marley watched Halliday saunter away, with a feeling that mixed

-admiration with amazement. He could not help admiring his clothes, and

-he felt drawn toward him as a college man from a school so much greater

-than his own, though he felt some resentment because Halliday had never

-once given a sign that he was aware of Marley's presence. His amazement

-came from the utter disrespect with which Halliday referred to Judge

-Blair. Old Bill! Marley had caught his breath. He would have liked to

-discuss Halliday with Powell, but the lawyer seemed to be as indifferent

-to Halliday's existence as Halliday had been to Marley's, and when

-Marley saw that Powell was not likely to refer to him, he started toward

-the door. As he went Powell resumptively called after him:

-

-"I'll get a Blackstone for you in a day or two. Be down in the morning."

-

-Marley went away bearing Swan's _Treatise_ under his arm. He looked up

-at the Court House across the way; the trees were stirring in the light

-winds of summer, and their leaves writhed joyously in the sun. The

-windows of the Court House were open, and he could hear the voice of

-some lawyer arguing a cause to the jury. Marley thought of Judge Blair

-sitting there, the jury in its box, the sleepy bailiff drowsing in his

-place, the accustomed attorneys and the angry litigants, and his heart

-began to beat a little more rapidly, for the thought of Judge Blair

-brought the thought of Lavinia Blair. And in the days to come, when he

-should be arguing a cause to a jury, as that lawyer, whose voice came

-pealing and echoing in sudden and surprising shouts through the open

-windows, was arguing a cause now, would Lavinia Blair be interested?

-

-He had imagined that a day so full of importance for him would be marked

-by greater ceremonials, and yet while he was disappointed, he was

-reassured. He had solved a problem, he had done with inaction, he had

-made a beginning, he was entered at last upon a career. As all the

-events of the recent years rushed on him, the years of college life, the

-decisions and indecisions of his classmates, their vague troubles about

-a career, he felt a pride that he had so soon solved that problem. He

-felt a certain superiority too, that made him carry his head high, as he

-turned into Main Street and marched across the Square. It required only

-decision and life was conquered. He saw the years stretching out

-prosperously before him, expanding as his ambitions expanded. He was

-glad that he had tackled life so promptly, that he had come so quickly

-to an issue with it; it was not so bad, viewed thus close, as it had

-been from a distance. He laughed at the folly of all the talk he had

-heard about the difficulty of young men getting a start in these days;

-he must write to his fraternity fellows at once, and tell them what he

-had done and how he was succeeding. They would surely see that at the

-bar he would do, not only himself, but them, the greatest credit, and

-they would be proud.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER III

-

-                             GREENWOOD LAKE

-

-

-The girls, flitting about with nervous laughter and now and then little

-screams, had spread long cloths over the table of plain boards that had

-served so many picnic parties at Greenwood Lake; the table-cloths and

-the dresses of the girls gleamed white in the amber light that streamed

-across the little sheet of water, though the slender trees, freshened by

-the morning shower that threatened to spoil the outing, were beginning

-to darken under the shadows that diffused themselves subtly through the

-grove, as if there were exudations of the heavy foliage.

-

-Lawrence, in his white ducks, stood by the table, assuming to direct the

-laying of the supper. His immense cravat of blue was the only bit of

-color about him, unless it were his red hair, which he had had clipped

-that very morning, and his shorn appearance intensified his comic air.

-Marley, sitting apart on the stump of a small oak, could hear the

-burlesque orders Lawrence shouted at the girls. The girls were convulsed

-by his orders; at times they had to put their dishes down lest in their

-laughter they spill the food or break the china; just then Marley saw

-Mayme Carter double over suddenly, her mass of yellow hair lurching

-forward to her brow, while the woods rang with her laughter. The other

-men were off looking after the horses.

-

-Lavinia moved quickly here and there, smiling joyously, her face

-flushed; though she laughed as the others did at Lawrence's drollery,

-she did not laugh as loudly, and she did not scream. Just now she rose

-from bending over the table, and brushed her brown hair from her brow

-with the back of her hand, while she stood and surveyed the table as if

-to see what it lacked. When she raised her hand the sleeve of her muslin

-gown fell away from her wrist and showed her slender forearm, white in

-the calm light of evening. Marley could not take his eyes from her. She

-ran into the pavilion, her little low shoes flashed below her

-petticoats, and he grew sad; when she reappeared, all her movements

-seemed to be new, to have fresh beauties. Then he suspected that the

-girls were laughing at him and he felt miserable.

-

-He thought of himself sitting alone and apart, an awkward, ungainly

-figure. He longed to go away, yet he feared that, if he did, he would

-not have the courage to come back. He shifted his position, only to make

-matters worse. Then suddenly his feeling took the form of a rage with

-Lawrence; he longed to seize Lawrence and kick him, to pitch him into

-the lake, to humiliate him before the girls. He thought he saw all at

-once that Lawrence had been making fun of him, surreptitiously; that was

-what had made the girls laugh so.

-

-There was some little consolation in the thought that Lavinia did not

-laugh as much as the others; perhaps, if she did not care to defend him,

-she at least pitied him. And then he began to pity himself. The whole

-evening stretched before him; pretty soon he would have to move up to

-the table, and sit down on the narrow little benches that were fastened

-between the trees; then after supper they would begin their dancing and

-when that came he did not see what he could do.

-

-The only pleasure he had had that afternoon had been on the way out; he

-had been alone with Lavinia, and the four miles of pleasant road that

-lay between the town and Greenwood Lake were too short for all the

-happiness Marley found in them. He could feel Lavinia again by his side,

-her hands folded on the thin old linen lap-robe. He could not recall a

-word they had said, but it seemed to him that the conversation had

-flowed on intimately and tranquilly; she had been so close and

-sympathetic; and he would always remember how her eyes had been raised

-to his. The fields with the wheat in shock had swept by in the beauty of

-harvest time; the road, its dust laid by the morning shower, had rolled

-under the wheels of the buggy softly, smoothly and noiselessly; the air

-had been odorous with the scent of green things freshened by the rain,

-and had vibrated with the sounds of summer.

-

-Then suddenly his reverie was broken. The men were gathering about the

-table with the girls; all of them looked at him expectantly.

-

-"Here, you!" called Lawrence. "Do you think we're going to do all the

-work? Come, get in the game, and don't look so solemn--this ain't a

-funeral."

-

-They all laughed, and Marley felt his face flame, but he rose and went

-over to the table, halting in indecision.

-

-"Run get some water," ordered Lawrence, imperatively waving his hand.

-"Mayme," he shouted, "hand him the pitcher! Step lively, now. The

-men-folks are hungry after their day's work. Has any one got a pitcher

-concealed about his person? What did you do with the pitcher, Glenn?

-Take it to water your horse?"

-

-They were laughing uproariously, and Marley was plainly discomfited. But

-Lavinia stepped to his side, a large white pitcher in her hand. "I'll

-show you," she said.

-

-They started away together, and Marley felt a protection in her

-presence. A little way farther he suddenly thought of the pitcher, which

-Lavinia still was bearing, and he took it from her. As he seized the

-handle their fingers became for an instant entangled.

-

-"Did I hurt you?" he asked.

-

-"Oh, no!" she assured him, and as they walked on, out of the sight of

-the laughing group behind them, an ease came over him.

-

-"Do you know where the well is?" he asked.

-

-"Oh, yes," she answered. "It's down here. I could have come just as well

-as not."

-

-"I'm glad to come," he said; and then he added, "with _you_."

-

-They had reached the wooden pump behind the pavilion. The little sheet

-of water curved away like a crescent, following the course of the stream

-of which it was but a widening. Its little islands were mirrored in its

-surface. The sun was just going down, the sky beyond the lake was rosy,

-and the same rosy hue now suffused everything; the waters themselves

-were reddened.

-

-It was very still, and the peace of the evening lay on them both.

-Lavinia stood motionless, and looked out across the water to the little

-Ohio hills that rolled away toward the west. She stood and gazed a long

-time, her hands at her sides, yet with their fingers open and extended,

-as if the beauty of the scene had suddenly transfixed her. Marley did

-not see the lake or the sun, the islands or the hills; he saw only the

-girl before him, the outline of her cheek, the down on it showing fine

-in the pure light, the hair that nestled at her neck, the curve from her

-shoulder to her arms and down to her intent fingers. At last she sighed,

-and looked up at him.

-

-"Isn't it all beautiful?" she said solemnly.

-

-"Beautiful?" he repeated, as if in question, not knowing what she said.

-

-Just then they heard Lawrence hallooing, and Marley began to pump

-vigorously. He rinsed out the pitcher, then filled it, and they went

-back, walking closely side by side, and they did not speak all the way.

-

-Mayme Carter, who, as it seemed, had a local reputation as a compounder

-of lemonade, had the lemons and the sugar all ready when Marley and

-Lavinia rejoined the group, and Lawrence, as he seized the pitcher,

-said:

-

-"I see that, between you, you've spilled nearly all of the water, but I

-guess Mayme and I'll have to make it do."

-

-The others laughed at this, as they did at all of Lawrence's speeches,

-and then they turned and laughed at Marley and Lavinia, though the men,

-who as yet did not feel themselves on terms with Marley, had a subtile

-manner of not including him in their ridicule, however little they

-spared Lavinia.

-

-The supper was eaten with the hunger their spirits and the fresh air had

-given them and Marley, placed, as of course, by Lavinia's side, felt

-sheltered by her, as he felt sheltered by all the talk that raged about

-him. He wished that he could join in the talk, but he could not discover

-what it was all about. Once, in a desperate determination to assert

-himself, he did mention a book he had been reading, but his remark

-seemed to have a chilling effect from which they did not recover until

-Lawrence, out of his own inexhaustible fund of nonsense, restored them

-to their inanities. He tried to hide his embarrassment by eating the

-cold chicken, the ham and sardines, the potato chips and pickles, the

-hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches that went up and down the board in

-endless procession, and he was thankful, when he thought of it, that

-Lawrence seemed to forget him, though Lawrence had forgotten no one else

-there. He seemed to note accurately each mouthful every one took.

-

-"Hand up another dozen eggs for Miss Winters, Joe," he called to one of

-the men, and then they all laughed at Miss Winters.

-

-When the cake came, Lawrence identified each kind with some remark about

-the mother of the girl who had brought it, and tasted all, because, as

-he said, he could not afford to show partiality. The fun lagged somewhat

-as the meal neared its end, but Lawrence revived it instantly and

-sensationally by rising suddenly, bending far over toward Lavinia in a

-tragic attitude and saying:

-

-"Why, Vine, child, you haven't eaten a mouthful! I do believe you're in

-love!"

-

-The company burst into laughter, but they suddenly stopped when they saw

-Marley. His face showed his anger with them, and he made a little

-movement, but Lavinia smiled up at Lawrence, and said:

-

-"Well, Jack, it's evident that _you're_ not."

-

-And then they all laughed at Lawrence, and the girls clapped their

-hands, while Marley, angry now with himself, tried to laugh with them.

-

-When they stopped laughing Lawrence produced his cigarettes, and tossing

-one to Marley in a way that delicately conveyed a sense of intimacy and

-affection, he said:

-

-"When you girls get your dishes done up we'll be back and see if we

-can't think up something to entertain you," and then he called Marley

-and with him and the other men strolled down to the lake.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER IV

-

-                               MOONLIGHT

-

-

-The dance was proposed almost immediately. Marley had hoped up to the

-very last minute that something, possibly a miracle, would prevent it,

-but scarcely had the men finished their first cigarettes before Howard

-was saying:

-

-"Well, let's be getting back to the girls. They'll want to dance."

-

-Howard spoke as if the dancing would be a sacrifice on the part of the

-men to the pleasure of the girls, but they all turned at once, some of

-them flinging their cigarettes into the water, as if to complete the

-sacrifice, and started back. When they reached the pavilion, Payson and

-Gallard took instruments out of green bags, Payson a guitar and Gallard

-a mandolin, and Lawrence, bustling about over the floor, shoving the few

-chairs against the unplastered wooden walls, was shouting:

-

-"Tune 'em up, boys, tune 'em up!"

-

-The first tentative notes of the strings twanged in the hollow room, and

-Lawrence was asking the girls for dances, scribbling their names on his

-cuff with a disregard of its white polished linen almost painful.

-

-"I'll have to divide up some of 'em, you know, girls," he said. "Jim and

-Elmer have to play, and that makes us two men shy. But I'll do the best

-I can--wish I could take you all in my arms at once and dance with you."

-

-The girls, standing in an expectant, eager little group, clutched one

-another nervously, and pretended to sneer at Lawrence's patronage.

-

-Marley was standing with Lavinia near the door. He was trying to affect

-an ease; he knew by the way the other girls glanced at him now and then

-that they were speculating on his possibilities as a partner; he tried

-just then to look as if he were going to dance as all the other men

-were, yet he felt the necessity of confessing to Lavinia.

-

-"You know," he said contritely, "that I don't dance."

-

-She looked up, a disappointment springing to her eyes too quickly for

-her to conceal it. She was flushed with pleasure and excitement, and

-tapping her foot in time with the chords Payson and Gallard were trying

-on their instruments. Marley saw her surprise.

-

-"I ought not to have come," he said; "I've no business here."

-

-The look of disappointment in Lavinia's eyes had gone, and in its place

-was now an expression of sympathy.

-

-"It makes no difference," she said. And then she added in a low voice:

-"I'll not dance either; there are too many of us girls anyway."

-

-"Oh, don't let me keep you from it," said Marley, and yet a joy was

-shining in his eyes. She turned away and blushed.

-

-"I'll give you all my dances," she said; "we can sit them out."

-

-"But it won't be any fun for you," protested Marley. And just then

-Lawrence came up.

-

-"Say, Glenn," he said, "if you don't want to dance I'll take Lavinia for

-the first number."

-

-The guitar and mandolin, after a long preliminary strumming to get

-themselves in tune, suddenly burst into _The Georgia Campmeeting_, and

-the couples were instantly springing across the floor.

-

-"Come on, Vine," said Lawrence, his fingers twitching. And Lavinia,

-eager, trembling, alive, casting one last glance at Marley, said "Just

-this one!" and went whirling away with Lawrence.

-

-Marley moved aside, awkwardly, when the couples, sweeping in a long oval

-stream around the little room, whirled past him. Lavinia danced with a

-grace that almost hurt him; she was laughing as she looked up into

-Lawrence's face, talking to him as they danced. Marley felt a gloom,

-almost a rage, settle on him. He looked up and down the room. At the

-farther end, through the door by which the musicians sat swinging their

-feet over their knees in time to the tune they played, he could see the

-man who kept the grounds at the lake, looking on at the dance; his wife

-was with him, and they smiled contentedly at the joy of the young

-people.

-

-Marley could not bear their joy, any more than he could bear the joy of

-the dancers, and he looked away from them. Glancing along the wall he

-saw a girl, sitting alone. It was Grace Winters; she was older than the

-others, and she sat there sullenly, her dark brows contracted under her

-dark hair. Marley felt drawn toward her by a common trouble, and he

-thought, instantly, that he might appear less conspicuous if he went and

-sat beside her. As he approached, her sallow face brightened with a

-brilliant smile of welcome and she drew aside her skirts to make a place

-for him, though there was no one else on all that side of the room.

-Marley sat down.

-

-"It's warm, isn't it?" he said.

-

-"Yes," Miss Winters replied, "almost too warm to dance, don't you

-think?"

-

-Marley tried to express his acquiescence in the polite smile he had seen

-the other men use before the dance began, but he did not feel that he

-carried it off very well.

-

-"I should think you'd be dancing, Mr. Marley," Miss Winters said. "I

-hear you are a splendid dancer. Don't you care to dance this evening?"

-

-"I can't dance," said Marley, crudely.

-

-He was looking at Lavinia, following her young figure as it glided past

-with Lawrence. Miss Winters turned away. Her face became gloomy again,

-and she said nothing more. Marley was absorbed in Lavinia, and they sat

-there together silent, conspicuous and alone, in a wide separation.

-

-Marley thought the dance never would end. It seemed to him that the

-dancers must drop from fatigue; but at last the mandolin and guitar

-ceased suddenly, the girls cried out a disappointed unisonant "Oh!" and

-then they all laughed and clapped their hands. Lavinia and Lawrence were

-coming up, glowing with the joy of the dance.

-

-"Oh, that was splendid, Jack!" Lavinia cried, putting back her hair with

-that wave of her hand.

-

-Lawrence's face was redder than ever. He leaned over and in a whisper

-that was for Lavinia and Marley together he said:

-

-"Lavinia, you're the queen dancer of the town." And then he turned to

-Miss Winters.

-

-"Grace," he said, distributing himself with the impartiality he felt his

-position as a social leader demanded, "you've promised me a dance for a

-long time. Now's my chance."

-

-"Why certainly, Jack," Miss Winters said, with her brilliant smile, and

-then she took Lawrence's arm and drew him away, as if otherwise he might

-escape.

-

-"Take me outdoors!" said Lavinia to Marley. "Those big lamps make it

-_so_ hot in here."

-

-Marley was glad to leave, and they went out on to the little piazza of

-the pavilion. Lavinia stood on the very edge of the steps, and drank in

-the fresh air eagerly.

-

-"Oh!" she said. "Oh! Isn't it delicious!"

-

-The darkness lay thick between the trees. The air was rich with the

-scent of the mown fields that lay beyond the grove. The insects shrilled

-contentedly. Marley stood and looked at Lavinia, standing on the edge of

-the steps, her body bent a little forward, her face upturned. She put

-back her hair again.

-

-"Let's go on down!" she said, a little adventurous quality in her tone.

-She ran lightly down the steps, Marley after her.

-

-"Won't you take cold?" he asked, bending close to her.

-

-She looked up and laughed. They were walking on, unconsciously making

-their way toward the edge of the little lake. Marley felt the white form

-floating there beside him and a happiness, new, unknown before, came to

-him. They were on the edge of the little lake. Before them the water

-lay, dark now, and smooth. A small stage was moored to the shore and a

-boat was fastened to it. They could hear the light lapping of the water

-that barely stirred the boat. Presently Lavinia ran out on to the stage.

-She gave a little spring, and rocked it up and down; then smiled up at

-Marley like a child venturing in forbidden places. Marley stepped

-carefully on to the stage.

-

-"Isn't it a perfect night?" Lavinia said, looking up at the dark purple

-sky, strewn with all the stars. Marley looked at her white throat.

-

-"The most beautiful night I ever knew!" he said. He spoke solemnly,

-devoutly, and Lavinia turned and gazed on him. Marley touched the boat

-with the toe of his shoe.

-

-"We might row," he said almost timidly.

-

-"Could we?" inquired Lavinia.

-

-"If we may take the boat."

-

-"Oh, of course--anybody may. Can you row?"

-

-Marley laughed. He had rowed in the college crew on the old Olentangy at

-Delaware. His laugh was a complete answer to Lavinia. She approached the

-boat, and Marley bent over and drew it alongside the stage.

-

-"Get in," he said. It was good to find something he could do. He helped

-her carefully into the boat, and held it firmly until she had arranged

-herself in the stern, her feet against the cleats, and her white skirts

-tucked about her. Then he took his seat, shipped the oars and shoved

-off. He swept the boat out into the deep water, and rowed away up the

-lake. He rowed precisely, feathering his oars, that she might see how

-much a master he was. They did not speak for a long time. First one,

-then the other, of the little islands swept darkly by; the water slapped

-the bow of the boat as Marley urged it forward. The lights of the

-pavilion on the shore twinkled an instant, then went out behind the

-trees. They could hear the distant mellow thrumming of the guitar and

-the tinkle of the mandolin.

-

-"Are you too cool?" he asked presently.

-

-"Oh, no, not at all!" said Lavinia.

-

-"Hadn't you better take my coat?" Marley persisted. The idea of putting

-his coat about her thrilled him.

-

-"You'll need it," she said.

-

-"No, I'll be warm rowing."

-

-She shook her head, and smiled. They drifted on. Still came the distant

-strumming of the guitar and the tinkle of the mandolin. Marley thought

-of the young people dancing, and then, noting Lavinia's silence, he

-asked, out of the doubt that was his one remaining annoyance:

-

-"Wouldn't you rather be back there dancing?"

-

-"No, no!" she answered softly.

-

-"I'm ashamed of myself."

-

-"Why?" She started a little.

-

-"Because I can't dance!" There was guilt in his tone.

-

-"You mustn't feel that way about it," Lavinia said. "It's nothing."

-

-"Isn't it?"

-

-"No. It's easy to learn."

-

-"I never could learn."

-

-Lavinia was still, and Marley thought she assented to this. But in

-another moment she spoke again.

-

-"I--" she began, and then she hesitated.

-

-Marley stopped rowing and rested on his oars. The water lapped the bows

-of the boat as it slackened its speed.

-

-"I could teach you," Lavinia went on.

-

-"Could you?" Marley leaned forward eagerly.

-

-"I'd like to." She was trailing one white hand in the water.

-

-"Will you?"

-

-"Yes," she said. "We can do it over at Mayme's--any time. She'll play

-for us."

-

-Marley felt a great gratitude, and he wondered how he could pour it

-forth upon her.

-

-"You are too good to me," he exclaimed.

-

-Then, suddenly, a change came over the dark surface of the waters. A

-mellow quality touched them; they seemed to tremble ecstatically, then

-they broke into sparkling ripples; the air quivered with a luminous

-beauty and a light flooded the little valley. Marley and Lavinia turned

-instinctively and looked up, and there, over the tops of the trees,

-black a moment before, now rounded domes of silver, rose the moon. They

-gazed at it a long time. Finally Marley turned and looked at Lavinia.

-Her white dress had become a drapery, her arms gleamed, her eyes were

-lustrous in the transfiguration of the moonlight. He could see that her

-lips were slightly parted, and her fingertips, dipped in the cool water

-over the gunwale of the boat, trailed behind them a long narrow thread

-of silver. They looked into each other's eyes, and neither spoke. They

-drifted on. At last, Marley said:

-

-"Lavinia!"

-

-She stirred.

-

-"Do you know--" he began, and then he stopped. "Don't you know," he went

-on, "can't you see, that I love you?"

-

-He rested his arms on the oars, and leaned over toward her.

-

-"I've loved you ever since that first night--do you remember? I know--I

-know I'm not good enough, but can't you--can't I--love you?"

-

-He saw her eyelids fall, and as she turned and looked over the side of

-the boat, she put forth her hand, and he took it.

-

-They were awakened from the dream by a call, and after what seemed to

-Marley a long time, he finally remembered the voice as Lawrence's.

-

-"We must go back," he said reluctantly. "How long have we been gone?"

-

-"I don't know," said Lavinia. He heard her sigh.

-

-Marley pulled the boat in the direction whence came the hallooing voice;

-he had quite lost all notion of their whereabouts. But presently they

-saw the lights of the pavilion, and then the dark figures of the men,

-and the white figures of the girls on shore.

-

-As they pulled up and Marley sprang out of the boat to the landing

-stage, Lawrence said:

-

-"Well, where have you babes been?"

-

-Marley helped Lavinia out of the boat.

-

-"We've been rowing," he said.

-

-"We thought you'd been drowned," said Lawrence.

-

-Marley and Lavinia drove home together in silence. In the light of the

-moon, the road was silver, and the fields with their shocks of wheat

-were gold.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER V

-

-                              THE SERENADE

-

-

-"I don't know what ails Lavinia," said Mrs. Blair to her husband as he

-sat on the veranda after dinner the next day. The judge laid his paper

-in his lap, and looked up at his wife over his glasses.

-

-"Isn't she well?" he asked.

-

-"M--yes," replied Mrs. Blair, prolonging the word in her lack of

-conviction, "I guess so."

-

-"Don't you know?" the judge demanded in some impatience with her

-uncertainty.

-

-"She says she feels all right."

-

-"Well, then, what makes you think she isn't?"

-

-"Oh, I don't know," replied Mrs. Blair, "she seems so quiet, that's

-all."

-

-"Lavinia is not a girl given to excitement or demonstration," said the

-judge, lapsing easily into the manner of speech he had cultivated on the

-bench.

-

-"No, that's so," assented Mrs. Blair. "But she's always cheerful and

-bright."

-

-"Is she gloomy?"

-

-"No, I wouldn't exactly call it that, but she seems preoccupied--rather

-wistful I should say, yes--wistful." She seemed pleased to have found

-the right word.

-

-"Oh, she's all right. That picnic last night may have fatigued her. I

-presume there was dancing."

-

-"Yes."

-

-"I don't know that we should let her go out that way." The judge took

-off his glasses and twirled them by their black cord while he gazed

-across the street, apparently at some dogs that were tumbling each other

-about in the Chenowiths' yard. The judge had a subconscious anxiety that

-they would get into Mrs. Chenowith's flower beds.

-

-"You and I used to go to them; they never hurt us," argued Mrs. Blair.

-

-"No, I suppose not. But then--that was different."

-

-Mrs. Blair laughed lightly, and the laugh served to dissipate their

-cares. She went to the edge of the veranda and pulled a few leaves from

-the climbing rose-vine that grew there, and the judge put on his glasses

-and spread out his paper.

-

-"I'll take her out for a drive this afternoon," said Mrs. Blair, turning

-to go indoors.

-

-"She'll be all right," said the judge, already deep in the political

-columns.

-

-That night at supper, the judge looked at Lavinia closely, and after a

-while he said:

-

-"You're not eating, Lavinia. Don't you feel well?"

-

-Lavinia turned to her father and smiled.

-

-"Oh, I'm all right."

-

-Her smile perplexed the judge.

-

-"You look pale," he said.

-

-Mrs. Blair glanced warningly at him the length of the table.

-

-"My girl's losing her color," he forged ahead.

-

-Lavinia dropped her eyelids, and a look of pain appeared in her face,

-causing it to grow paler.

-

-"Please don't worry about me, papa," she said.

-

-Mrs. Blair divined Lavinia's dislike of this personal discussion. She

-tried to catch her husband's eye again, but he was looking at Lavinia

-narrowly through his glasses.

-

-"Did you go riding this afternoon?" he asked as if he were examining a

-witness whom counsel had not drawn out properly.

-

-"Yes," Mrs. Blair hastened to say. "We drove out the Ludlow a long way."

-

-"She was riding last night, too," said Connie.

-

-"Who with?" demanded Chad, turning to Connie with the challenge he

-always had ready for her.

-

-"Who with?" retorted Connie. "Why, Glenn Marley, of course. Who else?"

-

-"Well, what of it?" demanded Chad. "What's it to you?"

-

-"Oh, children, children!" protested Mrs. Blair, wearily. "Do give us a

-little peace!"

-

-"Well, she began it," said Chad.

-

-Connie was eating savagely, but she whirled on Chad, speaking with

-difficulty because her mouth was filled with food:

-

-"You shut up, will you?"

-

-Chad laughed with a contempt almost theatrical, waved his hand lightly

-and said:

-

-"Run away, little girl, run away."

-

-Mrs. Blair asked the judge why he did not correct his children, and

-though the sigh he gave expressed the hopelessness, as it seemed to him,

-of bringing the two younger members of his train into anything like

-decorous behavior, he laid his knife and fork in his plate.

-

-"This must cease," he said. "It is scandalous. One might conclude that

-you were the children of some family in Lighttown."

-

-"It is very trying," said Mrs. Blair, acquiescing in her husband's

-reproof. "They are just like fire and tow." She said this quite

-impersonally and then turned to Connie: "If you can't behave yourself,

-I'll have to send you from the table."

-

-"That's it!" wailed Connie. "That's it! Blame everything on to me!"

-

-Mrs. Blair looked severely at her, and Connie's face reddened. She

-glanced angrily at her mother and began again:

-

-"Well, I--"

-

-The judge rapped the table smartly with his knuckles.

-

-"Now I want this stopped!" he said. "And right away. If it isn't I'll--"

-He was about to say if it wasn't he would clear the room, as he was fond

-of saying whenever the idle spectators in his court showed signs of

-being human, but he did not finish his sentence. Chad was subdued and

-decorous, and Connie drooped her head, and began to gulp her food. Her

-eyes were filling with tears and the tears began to fall, slowly, one by

-one, splashing heavily into her plate.

-

-Lavinia was trembling; she tried to control herself, tried to lift her

-glass, but when she did, her hand shook so that the water was likely to

-spill. This completed the undoing of her nerves, her eyes suddenly

-flooded with tears, and she snatched her handkerchief from her lap, rose

-precipitately, and hurried from the room, dropping her napkin as she

-went. They heard her going up the stairs, and presently the door of her

-room closed.

-

-Connie had followed Lavinia with her misty eyes as she left the table

-and now she too prepared to leave. She felt a sudden pity springing from

-her great love of her older sister, and her great pride in her, and she

-felt a contrition, though she tried to convict Chad, as the latest

-object of her fiery and erratic temper, by glowering at him.

-

-"I'll go to her," she said, "_I_ can comfort her!"

-

-"No, stay where you are," said her mother. "Just leave her alone."

-

-The evening light of the summer day flooded into the dining-room;

-outside a robin was singing. In the room there was constraint and heavy

-silence, broken only by the slight clatter of the silver or the china.

-But after a while the judge spoke:

-

-"Did Lavinia go to the picnic with young Marley?" he asked. He regretted

-instantly that he had revived the topic that had given rise to the

-difficulty, but as it lay on the minds of all, it was impossible, just

-then, to escape its influence.

-

-"I believe so," said Mrs. Blair. "He really seems like a nice young

-man."

-

-The judge scowled.

-

-"I don't know," he said. "He's in the office of Wade Powell--I suppose

-he is the one, isn't he?" He thought it unbecoming that a judge should

-show an intimate knowledge of the relations of young men who were merely

-studying law.

-

-"Yes, sir," said Chad, maintaining his own dignity.

-

-"Everybody seems to speak well of him," said Mrs. Blair.

-

-"But I can't quite reconcile that with his selecting Wade Powell as a

-preceptor. I would hardly consider his influence the best in the world,

-and I would imagine that Doctor Marley would hold to the same opinion."

-

-Judge Blair spoke with a certain disappointment in Doctor Marley. He had

-gone to hear him preach once or twice, and found, as he said, an

-intellectual quality in his utterances that he missed in the sermons Mr.

-Hill had been preaching for twenty years in the Presbyterian church.

-

-"Perhaps he doesn't know Wade Powell," said Mrs. Blair. "Doctor Marley

-is comparatively a stranger here, you know."

-

-"Yes, I presume that explains it. But--" he shook his head. He could not

-forgive any one who showed respect for Wade Powell. "Powell has little

-business except a certain criminal practice, and now and then a personal

-injury case."

-

-"Is there anything wrong in personal injury cases?" asked Mrs. Blair.

-

-The judge looked at his wife in surprise.

-

-"Well, I suppose you know, don't you," he said, "that such cases are

-taken on contingent fees?" He spoke with the natural judicial contempt

-of the poor litigant.

-

-"Of course, dear," she replied, "I shall not undertake to defend Mr.

-Powell. He's a wild sort."

-

-"Yes; a drunkard, practically," said Judge Blair, "and an infidel

-besides. The moral environment there is certainly not one for a young

-man--"

-

-"Is he really an _infidel_?" asked Mrs. Blair, abruptly dropping her

-knife and fork.

-

-"Well," replied the judge with the judicial affectation of fairness,

-"he's at least a free-thinker. Perhaps agnostic were the better word.

-That is one reason why I can not understand Doctor Marley's permitting

-his son to be associated with him. It seems to me to argue a weakness,

-or a lack of observation in the doctor, as it does a certain depravity

-of taste in his son."

-

-They discussed Marley until the meal was done, and Connie and Chad had

-gone out of doors. Judge Blair followed his wife into the sitting-room.

-

-"I'm worried, I'll admit," said the judge. "What could it have been that

-so distressed her?"

-

-"Oh well, the children's little quarrels were too much for her nerves."

-

-"I suppose so."

-

-They were silent and thoughtful, sitting together, rocking gently in

-their chairs as the twilight stole into the room.

-

-"It's too bad he's going to study law," the judge said after a while.

-

-He shook his gray head dubiously.

-

-"But you always say that about any one who's going to study law," Mrs.

-Blair argued. "You even said it about George Halliday when his father

-took him into partnership."

-

-"Well, it's bad business nowadays unless a young man wants to go to the

-city, and it's hard to get a foothold there."

-

-"But you began as a lawyer," she urged, as though he had finished as

-something else.

-

-"It was different in my day."

-

-"And you've always done well in the law," Mrs. Blair went on, ignoring

-his distinction.

-

-"Oh yes," the judge said in a tone that expressed a sense of individual

-exception. "But I went on the bench just in time to save my bacon.

-There's no telling what might have become of us if I had remained in the

-practice."

-

-They were silent long enough for him to feel the relief he had always

-found in his salaried position, and then he said:

-

-"You don't suppose--"

-

-"Oh, certainly not!" his wife hastened to assure him.

-

-"Well, I think it would be well, perhaps, to watch her closely. I don't

-just like the notion."

-

-"But his father is--"

-

-"Yes, but after all, we really know nothing about him."

-

-"That is true."

-

-"And then Lavinia's so young."

-

-"Yes."

-

-"I'd go to her."

-

-"After a while," Mrs. Blair said.

-

-They heard steps on the veranda, and then the voices of Mr. and Mrs.

-Chenowith who had run across, as Mrs. Chenowith said, when Mrs. Blair

-met them in the darkness that filled the wide hall, to see how they all

-were. The Chenowiths begged Mrs. Blair not to light the gas; they

-preferred to sit out of doors. The Chenowiths remained all the evening.

-When they had gone, the judge drew the chairs indoors, while Mrs. Blair

-rolled up the wide strip of red carpet that covered the steps of the

-veranda. And when they had gone up to their room, Mrs. Blair stole

-across to Lavinia, softly closing the door behind her.

-

-She found the girl stretched on her bed, her face buried in the pillows,

-which were wet with her tears.

-

-"What is troubling my little girl?" she asked. She sat down on the side

-of the bed, and lightly stroked Lavinia's soft hair. The girl stirred,

-and drew herself close to her mother. Mrs. Blair did not speak, but

-continued to stroke her hair, and waited. Presently Lavinia cried out:

-

-"Oh, mama! mama!"

-

-And then she was in her mother's arms, weeping on her mother's breast.

-

-"I've never kept anything from you before, mama," Lavinia cried.

-

-"No," Mrs. Blair whispered. "Can't you tell mama now?"

-

-And then with her mother's arms about her Lavinia told her all. When she

-had finished she lay tranquilly. Mrs. Blair was relieved and yet her

-troubles had but grown the more complicated. She saw all the intricate

-elements with which she would have to deal, and she quailed before them,

-realizing what tact would be required of her.

-

-"The coming of love should be a time of joy, dear," she said presently.

-Even in the darkness, she could see the white blur of Lavinia's face

-change its expression. A smile had touched it.

-

-"It should, shouldn't it, mama?"

-

-"Yes, indeed."

-

-"But I never kept anything from you before."

-

-Mrs. Blair laughed.

-

-"But you kept this only a day, dear. That doesn't count."

-

-"It was a long day."

-

-"I know, sweetheart." The mother kissed her, and they were silent a

-while.

-

-"I do love him so," said Lavinia, presently. "And you'll love him too,

-mama, I know you will."

-

-"I'm sure of that, dear."

-

-"But what of papa?"

-

-Mrs. Blair felt the girl grow tense in her arms.

-

-"That will all come right in time," said Mrs. Blair.

-

-"Will you tell him?"

-

-"Not just now, dear. We'll have this for a little secret of our own.

-There's plenty of time. You are young, you know, and so is Glenn."

-

-"I love to hear you call him Glenn."

-

-Mrs. Blair remained with Lavinia until she had tucked her into her bed.

-

-"Just my little child," the mother whispered over the girl. "Just my

-little child."

-

-"Yes, always that," said Lavinia. And her mother kissed her again and

-again, and left her in the dark.

-

-When Mrs. Blair rejoined her husband, he laid down the book he always

-read before retiring, and looked up with the question in his eyes.

-

-"She's just a little nervous and tired," Mrs. Blair said. "She'll be all

-right in the morning. I think it best not to notice her."

-

-"Do you think we'd better have Doctor Pierce see her?"

-

-"Oh, not at all!" Mrs. Blair laughed, and the judge, reassured, went

-back to his book.

-

-They were awakened from their first doze that night by voices singing.

-

-"It's some of the darkies from Gooseville," said Mrs. Blair. "They're

-out serenading."

-

-"Yes," said the judge. "It is sweet to fall asleep by."

-

-At the sound of the singing Lavinia had crept from her bed and crouched

-in her white night-dress before the open window; the shutters were

-closed. She heard the melody from far down the street. The singing

-ceased, then began again, drawing nearer and nearer. Presently she heard

-the fall of feet on the sidewalk before the house, and the low tones of

-voices in hurried consultation. And then a clear baritone voice rose,

-and she heard it begin the song:

-

-           "Oh the sun shines bright in my old Kentucky home,

-           'Tis summer, the darkies are gay."

-

-She knew the voice. Her heart swelled and the tears came again and there

-alone in the fragrant night she opened her arms and stretched them out

-into the darkness.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER VI

-

-                             LOVE'S ARREARS

-

-

-The days following the picnic had been no easier for Marley than they

-had been for Lavinia. As he looked back on that night, a fear took hold

-of him; the whole experience, the most wonderful of his life, grew more

-and more unreal. Much as he longed to see Lavinia again, he was afraid

-to go to her home; he wondered whether he should write her a note;

-perhaps she would think him false, perhaps she would think he had

-already forgotten her; the idea tormented him; he did not know what to

-do. He had seen her but once, and then at a distance; the Blairs'

-well-known surrey had stopped in the middle of the Square, and George

-Halliday stood leaning into the carriage chatting with Lavinia. Marley

-had but a glimpse of Lavinia's face, pink in the shadow of the

-surrey-top. As they drove away she had turned with a smile and a nod at

-Halliday. The sight had affected Marley strangely.

-

-He felt himself so weak and incapable in this affair that he longed to

-discuss it with some one, and on Sunday afternoon he found his mother at

-her window with the _Christian Advocate_, which replaced, in her case,

-the nap nearly every one else took at that hour.

-

-"How old was father when you were married, mother?" he began.

-

-He spoke out of that curious ignorance of the lives of their parents so

-common to children; he had never been able to realize his parents as

-having separate and independent existences before his own. Mrs. Marley

-laid her paper by, and a smile came to her face.

-

-"He was twenty-two," she said.

-

-"Just my age," observed Marley.

-

-Mrs. Marley looked up hastily.

-

-"You're not thinking of getting married, are you, Glenn?" she asked.

-

-"No." he said with a laugh.

-

-"My goodness! You're just a boy!"

-

-"But I'm as old as father was."

-

-"Y--es," said Mrs. Marley, "but then--"

-

-"But then, what?"

-

-"That was different."

-

-Marley smiled.

-

-"Had father entered the ministry yet?" he said presently.

-

-"Yes, we were married in his first year. He had been teaching school,

-and the fall he was admitted to the conference he was sent out to the

-Gibsonburg circuit in Green County. We were married in the spring."

-

-Her face flushed, and she turned the pages of her paper with a dreamy

-deliberation.

-

-"Ah, but your father was a handsome young man, Glenn!" she said

-presently.

-

-"He's handsome yet," Marley replied with the pride he always felt in his

-father. And then he asked:

-

-"Did he have any money?"

-

-"Yes," she said, and she laughed, "just a hundred dollars!"

-

-"A hundred dollars! Well, he had nerve, didn't he? And so did you!"

-

-"We had more than that," said Mrs. Marley, solemnly.

-

-Marley looked at his mother suddenly. Her face seemed for an instant to

-be transfigured in the afternoon glow.

-

-He might have told her then; he was on the point of it, but a footfall

-on the brick walk outside caused him to look up, and he saw Lawrence

-coming into the yard. Lawrence beckoned him and he went out.

-

-"Come on," said Lawrence. "Let's go out to Carters'."

-

-Marley looked a question at him, and the smile which Lawrence never

-could repress long at a time was twitching at the corners of his large

-mouth.

-

-"She'll be there."

-

-"How do you know?" asked Marley.

-

-Lawrence smiled a little more significantly.

-

-When they got to the Carters' they found Mayme and Lavinia together in

-the yard, strolling about in apparent aimlessness, yet with an

-expectancy in their manner that belied its quality of mere idleness. In

-the look Lavinia gave him all of Marley's perplexities vanished.

-Lawrence stood by with a grin on his red face, and Mayme Carter's eyes

-danced. She and Lawrence assumed almost immediately an elder, paternal

-manner, and looked on at the lovers' meeting as from far heights that

-were to be reached only after all such youthful experiences had long

-since become possible in retrospect alone. Still smiling, they edged

-away, and left the lovers alone.

-

-"Is it really true?" Marley asked.

-

-Lavinia colored a little as she smiled up at him.

-

-"And you are happy?" he asked.

-

-"So happy!" she said.

-

-And then all at once a cloud came over her eyes. She closed them an

-instant.

-

-"What is it?" he asked in alarm.

-

-"Nothing."

-

-"Tell me."

-

-"It's nothing." She was smiling again, as if to show that her happiness

-was complete. "See?" Her eyes were blinking rapidly.

-

-"I'm glad," he said.

-

-As they turned and walked across the yard Marley looked at her

-nervously.

-

-"Do you know," he said, "that I couldn't remember what color your eyes

-were?" He spoke with all the virtue there is in confession.

-

-"What color are they?" she asked, suddenly closing her eyes.

-

-"They're blue," Marley replied, saying the word ecstatically, as if it

-had a new, wonderful meaning for him.

-

-"Connie says they're green."

-

-"Connie?"

-

-"Yes, don't you know? She's my younger sister."

-

-"Oh." He did not know any of her family, and the baffling sense of

-unreality came over him again.

-

-"You'll know her," said Lavinia, and added thoughtfully: "I hope she'll

-like you. Then there's Chad, my little brother."

-

-Marley was growing alarmed at the intricacies of an introduction into a

-large family, the characters of which were as yet like the characters in

-the first few chapters of a novel, but he thought it would not reflect

-on him to admit that he did not know Chad, seeing that he was merely a

-little brother.

-

-"He admires you immensely," said Lavinia.

-

-"Does he?" said Marley, eagerly, instantly loving Chad. "How does he

-know me?"

-

-"He says you were a football player at college."

-

-Marley laughed a modest deprecation of his own prowess.

-

-"But I knew your voice," said Lavinia.

-

-"Did you? When did you hear it?"

-

-"As if you didn't know!"

-

-"Honestly," he protested. "Tell me."

-

-"Why, that night that you serenaded me."

-

-He was regretting that she had outdone him in observation, but she

-suddenly looked up and said:

-

-"Oh, Glenn! What a beautiful voice you have!"

-

-It was the first time she had ever called him Glenn, and it produced in

-him a wonderful sensation.

-

-They had come to a little bench, and, sitting there, they could only

-look at each other and smile. Marley noticed that a little line of

-freckles ran up over the bridge of Lavinia's nose. They were very

-beautiful, he thought, and yet he had never heard of freckles as one of

-the elements of a woman's beauty. Then he leaned back and looked about

-the yard.

-

-He had always thought of it as it seemed that first night, enormous,

-enchanted, with wide terraces and fountains, and white statues gleaming

-through the green shrubbery. But now he saw no terraces, no statuary, no

-fountains, and no wide lawns; nothing but a cramped little yard crowded

-with bushes and trees, and surrounded by a weathered fence that had lost

-several pickets. He looked around behind the house where he had fancied

-long stables with big iron lamps over the doors, but now he saw nothing

-but an old woodshed and a barn on the rear end of the lot. The cracks in

-the barn were so wide that he could see the light of day between them as

-through a kinetoscope. He heard a horse stamping fretfully at the flies.

-

-"It was here," he said, "that I first saw you." He did not speak his

-whole thought.

-

-"Yes," she answered. "I remember."

-

-"That was a wonderful night, the most wonderful of my life, except the

-one at the lake."

-

-He drew close to her. "I loved you at first sight," he whispered.

-

-"Did you?" She looked at him in reverence.

-

-"Yes,--from the very first moment. When you came into the room, I knew

-that--"

-

-"What?"

-

-"That you were the woman I had always loved and waited for; that I had

-found my ideal. And yet they say we never discover our ideals in this

-life!"

-

-He laughed at this philosophical absurdity.

-

-"What did you think then?" he asked.

-

-She cast down her eyes, and probed the turf with the toe of her little

-shoe.

-

-"I loved you then too."

-

-He gazed at her tenderly, rapturously.

-

-"Isn't it wonderful?" he said presently, "this love of ours? It came to

-us all at once!"

-

-She looked at him suddenly. Her short upper lip was raised.

-

-"It _was_ love at first sight, wasn't it?"

-

-"Yes. We were intended for each other."

-

-They sat there, and went over that first night of their meeting and that

-other night at Greenwood Lake, finding each moment some new and

-remarkable feature of their love, something that proved its divine and

-providential quality, something that convinced them that no one before

-had ever known such a remarkable experience. They marveled at the

-mystery of it.

-

-But at last they must return to practical questions, and they resumed

-the account of their family relations. Marley told Lavinia about his

-father and mother, about his sister who had died, and then about his

-grandparents, and his uncles and aunts. He told her even of Dolly,

-behind whom she had driven to Greenwood Lake, and of his father's love

-for fast horses, a love which sometimes drew upon his father the

-criticism parishioners ever have ready for their pastor. And he told her

-about his home, and how frequently his mother had to entertain transient

-ministers, and how the church laid missionary work upon her, until he

-feared the heathen would unwittingly break her down.

-

-He was not conscious of it, but he felt it necessary to bring up all at

-once the arrears of her knowledge of him and his family, of all his

-affairs. Meeting as they had so strangely, so romantically, and falling

-in love at first sight, according to the prearrangement of the ages,

-they could excuse this otherwise strange ignorance of each other's

-lives. They bemoaned all the years they had been compelled to live

-without knowing each other, and their one quarrel with fate was that

-they had had to wait until so late in life before meeting; and yet they

-finally consoled themselves for this deprivation by discovering that

-they had really always known and loved each other. They were now able to

-compare strange experiences of soul and, in the new light they

-possessed, to identify them as communings of their spirits across time

-and space.

-

-"I've always believed somehow in the Sweden-borgians," Lavinia said,

-"but I never really understood before what they meant by affinities."

-

-They looked at each other in a silence that became somber, and was

-broken at last by Lavinia.

-

-"I've told mama," she said.

-

-"You have?" Marley gasped.

-

-"Yes."

-

-"And she--?"

-

-"She was sweet about it. She will love you, I know."

-

-Marley felt a sudden love for Lavinia's mother. And then his fear

-returned at Lavinia's sinister,

-

-"But--"

-

-"But what?"

-

-"She says we must wait."

-

-"Oh!" Marley said with a relief. He felt their present happiness so

-great that he could afford to waive any claim on the future. And yet he

-was troubled; he felt that somehow a depression lay on Lavinia. He

-wondered what its cause could be. Presently it came to him suddenly.

-

-"And your father?" he asked.

-

-"He doesn't know--yet."

-

-"Will he--?"

-

-"He's very--" she hesitated, not liking to seem disloyal to her father.

-Finally she said "peculiar," and then further qualified it by adding

-"sometimes."

-

-The sadness that lies so near to the joy in lovers' hearts came over

-them, and yet they found a kind of joy in that too.

-

-"I'll go to him, of course," Marley said presently.

-

-"Oh, you're so brave!"

-

-But this tribute did not tend to reassure Marley. It rather suggested

-terrors he had not thought of. Yet in the necessity of maintaining the

-manly spirit he forced a laugh.

-

-"Of course," he continued, "I'll go to him. I meant to from the first."

-

-"But not just yet," she pleaded.

-

-"Well," he yielded, not at all unwillingly, "it shall be as you say."

-

-He could not dispel her sadness, nor could he conquer his own. A little

-tremor ran through her, and he felt it electrically along his arm.

-

-"What is it, sweetheart?" he pleaded. "Tell me, won't you? We must have

-no secrets, you know."

-

-"Oh, Glenn," she broke out, "I'm afraid!"

-

-She spoke with intuitive apprehension.

-

-"Of what?"

-

-"Our happiness!"

-

-He tried to laugh again.

-

-"Do you think it will ever be?" she asked.

-

-"I know it," he said earnestly. "I have nothing but faith--our love is

-strong enough for anything!"

-

-"You comfort me," she said simply.

-

-Lavinia spent the night with Mayme Carter, and the house sounded until

-long after midnight with the low, monotonous drone of their confidential

-voices.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER VII

-

-                       AN UNNECESSARY OPPOSITION

-

-

-Marley heard on Monday evening that Judge Blair had gone to Cincinnati,

-and the news filled him with a high if somewhat culpable joy. He found

-Lavinia and her mother on the veranda, and Lavinia said, with a grave

-simplicity:

-

-"Mama, this is Glenn."

-

-"I'm very glad to have you come," said Mrs. Blair, trying instantly to

-rob the situation of the embarrassment she felt it must have for the

-young man.

-

-Marley could not say a word, but he put all his gratitude in the

-pressure he gave Mrs. Blair's hand. The light that came from the hall

-was dim, and though Mrs. Blair could see that Marley was straight and

-carried himself well, his face was blurred by the shadows. She turned to

-Lavinia.

-

-"Will you bring out another chair, dear, or would you prefer to go

-indoors?"

-

-Then, seeing an advantage in this latter alternative, she decided for

-them:

-

-"Perhaps we'd better go in, I fear it's cool out here."

-

-She held back the screen door and Lavinia whisked excitedly into the

-hall. Mrs. Blair led the way to the parlor and sent Lavinia for a match.

-Then, turning to Marley, waiting there in the darkness, she said:

-

-"She has told me, Glenn."

-

-Marley felt something tender, maternal in her voice; the way she spoke

-his name affected him.

-

-"But she is young, very young; she is just a girl. We wish, of course,

-for nothing but her happiness, and you must be patient, very patient. It

-must not be, if it is to be, for a long time. What does your own mother

-think of it?"

-

-"I haven't told her."

-

-"You haven't!"

-

-"No. I felt I hardly had the right yet--not before I spoke to Judge

-Blair, you know. I think I shall speak to him just as soon as he gets

-home." He spoke impulsively; until that moment he had been thrusting the

-thought from him, but Mrs. Blair's manner led him into confidences. In

-the immediate fear that he had been precipitant, he looked to her for

-help; she seemed the sort of woman to wish to save others all the

-trouble she could, one whose life was full of sacrifices, none the less

-noble, perhaps, because she made so little of them herself. But a

-perplexity showed in her eyes and before she could reply, Lavinia was

-back. With an intimate, domestic impulse Lavinia pressed the match into

-Marley's hand, and said:

-

-"You do it; I can't reach."

-

-Marley groped with his upheld hand, and when Lavinia guided him to the

-middle of the room, he lighted the gas. Mrs. Blair looked at him for a

-moment and Lavinia, standing by, as if awaiting her decision, glowed

-with happiness. Mrs. Blair's smile completed the fond, maternal

-impression Marley had somehow felt when she was standing by him in the

-darkness. Her full matronly figure, even in the tendency to corpulence

-of her middle years, had preserved its graceful lines; and Marley

-regretted the disappearance of this wholesome, cheerful woman as she

-passed out of the room.

-

-Judge Blair got home from Cincinnati on Sunday morning, worn by his

-work, and maddened by the din of the city to which he was so

-unaccustomed. Walking up the familiar streets, he had been glad of their

-shade and that pervading sense of a Sunday that still remains a Sabbath

-in Macochee. He had been a little piqued, at first, because his wife had

-not met him at the train, though she had not, to be sure, known that he

-was coming. She had gone to Sunday-school, and Connie gave him his

-breakfast--that is, she sat at the table with him, watching him eat and

-answering the questions he put to her about the happenings in Macochee

-while he had been away.

-

-It was not strange that Connie should talk mostly, after she yielded to

-the gnawing temptation to tell him at all, of the nightly visits Marley

-had made to the house. She did this in a certain resentment she felt

-with Lavinia, a resentment that came from an annoying jealousy she was

-beginning to have of Marley, as if, in installing himself in her

-sister's heart, he had evicted all other affections from it.

-

-The judge, with his constant affectation of what he considered the

-judicial attitude of mind, tried to weigh Connie's somewhat prejudiced

-evidence impartially, but he was troubled and annoyed that the peace he

-had been looking forward to all the week should be jeopardized

-immediately on his coming home.

-

-It was not until afternoon that he had an opportunity to question his

-wife, and he began with a severity in his attitude that had as its

-fundamental cause, as much as anything else, her failure to meet him at

-the train that morning, and her remaining to church after Sunday-school.

-

-"What do you know about this business between Lavinia and that young

-Marley?" he asked. "It seems to have developed rapidly during my

-absence."

-

-"Oh, Connie has been talking to you, I suppose!" laughed Mrs. Blair.

-"You know that Connie is apt to be sensational."

-

-Judge Blair eyed his wife narrowly. Connie was his favorite child,

-though he would not, of course, admit as much, and he was ever ready to

-spring to her defense.

-

-"She has very bright eyes," he said.

-

-"Oh, now, dear," said Mrs. Blair, "don't overestimate this thing.

-Lavinia's nothing but a child."

-

-"That's just the point. Has the young man been here much?"

-

-"Yes, he was here quite often--several evenings, in fact."

-

-"Humph! He seems to have taken advantage of the sunshine of my absence

-to make his hay."

-

-"Don't do him an injustice. He didn't meet Lavinia until just about the

-time you went away."

-

-"Well, we'll see about it," said the judge, darkly.

-

-"Now see here, Will, don't make the matter serious by an unnecessary

-opposition; don't drive the children into a position where they will

-consider themselves persecuted lovers."

-

-Mrs. Blair had not until that instant thought of this argument, and she

-was so pleased with it, as justifying her own course with the children,

-as she had artfully called them, that she pressed it.

-

-"No, don't do that. Just let them alone. They're as likely as not to

-outgrow it; that is, if there is anything between them to outgrow.

-They'll probably imagine themselves in love a dozen times before either

-of them is married."

-

-"Don't talk of marriage!" said the judge, with a little shudder.

-

-Mrs. Blair, who had so well dispelled her own fears, could laugh at her

-husband's.

-

-"Just let them alone," she said; "or leave it to me."

-

-"Yes," said the judge peevishly, "leave it to you. You'd probably aid

-and abet them." And then, instantly regretting his ill humor, he added

-hastily: "You're so kind-hearted."

-

-Mrs. Blair kissed his white hair gently and gave his cheek a little pat.

-

-"You'd better take a nap," she said.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER VIII

-

-                          A JUDICIAL DECISION

-

-

-The judge refused to take a nap, though when he sat down on the veranda

-he did take one, lying back in his chair with one of the many sections

-of the Sunday paper spread over his face. It was from this somewhat

-undignified posture that he was aroused by a step; he started up

-hastily.

-

-"I beg your pardon," said the young man, who stood on the steps twirling

-his straw hat round and round in his hands. The young man went on with

-an anxious smile:

-

-"This is Judge Blair, I presume? My name is Marley--Glenn Marley."

-

-If Marley had known that there were men then in the Ohio penitentiary

-serving terms that were longer by years than they would have been had

-Judge Blair digested his breakfast, or been allowed to finish his

-afternoon nap, he would have chosen another hour to press his suit. But

-he had youth's sublime confidence, and its abiding faith in the abstract

-quality of justice. He had dreaded this moment, but it had forced itself

-upon his keen conscience as a duty, and when he heard that morning that

-Judge Blair had returned he resolved to have it out at once.

-

-"May I have a word with you?" he asked, advancing a little.

-

-The judge nodded, but slightly, as if it were necessary for him, as a

-fattening man advanced in middle life, to conserve his energies. His nod

-seemed to include not only an assent, however reluctant, but a

-permission as well, to take the other chair that stood, all ready to

-rock comfortably, on the veranda. Marley took the chair but he did not

-rock, nor did he yield himself to it, but sat somewhat tensely on its

-very edge.

-

-"It's warm this afternoon, isn't it?" he said, trying to keep up his

-smile. He felt hopeless about it, but the thought, darting through his

-mind, that Lavinia was near, braced his purpose. The judge sat hunched

-in his chair, with his short white hair tumbled rather picturesquely,

-and his chin low in his collar. His lips were set firmly, his brows

-contracted. He breathed heavily, and on his strong aquiline nose, Marley

-could see tiny drops of perspiration.

-

-"I have come," said Marley, "to speak to you, Judge Blair, on a matter

-of, that is, importance. That is, I have come to ask you if I

-might--ah--pay my addresses to your daughter."

-

-Marley thought this form of putting it rather fine, and he was glad that

-that much of it, at least, was over. And yet, much as he liked this

-old-fashioned formula about paying his addresses, he instantly felt its

-inadequacy, and so nerved himself to do it all over.

-

-"I mean Lavinia," he said hurriedly, as if to correct any error of

-identification he might have led the judge into. "I want to marry her."

-

-The judge, still breathing heavily, looked at Marley out of his narrowed

-eyes.

-

-"You know," Marley said, in an explanatory way, "I love her."

-

-He waited then, but the judge was motionless, even to the hand that hung

-at his side over the arm of his chair, still holding his paper. Now and

-then, at what seemed to be long, unequal intervals, his eyelids fell

-slowly in heavy winks.

-

-"How long have you and Lavinia known each other?" he asked finally.

-

-"I met her several weeks ago, out at Captain Carter's. But I did not see

-her again, that is to speak to her, until about a week ago. In one way I

-have known her, you might say, but a week; yet I feel that I have known

-her a long time, always, in fact. I--I--well, I loved her at first

-sight." Marley dropped his face at this speech, for it seemed that he

-had made it too sentimental; he had a feeling that the judge so regarded

-it. He sat and picked at the braids of straw in his hat.

-

-"And have you spoken to her?" asked the judge.

-

-"Oh yes!" said Marley, looking up quickly.

-

-"And she--?"

-

-"She loves me."

-

-The judge closed his eyes as if in pain. Then he stirred, the paper

-dropped from his fingers, and he drew himself up in his chair, as if to

-deal with the matter.

-

-"How old are you, Mr. Marley?" he inquired.

-

-"I am twenty-two," said Marley, confidently, as if this maturity must

-incline the judge in his favor. "I cast my first vote for McKinley." He

-thought this, too, would help matters, and possibly it did.

-

-"You have completed your education?"

-

-"I graduated this summer from the Ohio Wesleyan."

-

-"And what are you doing now, or proposing to do?"

-

-"Just now, I am studying law," he announced. "I'm going to make the law

-my profession."

-

-Marley looked up with a high faith in this final appeal, but even that

-did not impress the judge as Marley felt a tribute thus delicately

-implied should affect him.

-

-"You are reading with a preceptor, I take it?"

-

-"Yes, sir, in Mr. Powell's office."

-

-Judge Blair looked at Marley as if he were deciding what to do with him.

-After he had looked a while he gazed off across the street, drumming

-with his finger-tips on the arm of his chair. Presently, without

-turning, and still gazing abstractedly into the distance--and in that

-instant Marley remembered that he had seen the judge stare at the

-ceiling of the court room in exactly the same way while sentencing a

-culprit--he began to speak.

-

-"Lavinia is yet very young, Mr. Marley," he said, "with no knowledge of

-the world, and, perhaps, little of the state of her own mind. You too,

-are young, very young, and as yet without an occupation. You are, it is

-true, studying law, but it will be three years before you can be

-admitted, and many years after that before you can command a practice

-that would warrant you in marrying. In this day, the outlook for the

-young lawyer is not encouraging. I do not think I would wish a son of

-mine to choose that profession; the great changes that have transpired,

-and are transpiring in our industrial development, have greatly reduced

-the chances of the young lawyer's success. The practice in the smaller

-county-seats, like our own, for instance, has almost entirely vanished.

-The settlement of titles to real estate, so lucrative a branch of the

-law in the early days of my own practice, has deprived the later

-practitioners of that source of revenue; the field of criminal law has

-become narrowed, unremunerative and almost disreputable. The corporation

-work can be handled by one or two firms in each town, and all that seems

-to be left is the prosecution of personal injury suits, and that is a

-work that hardly appeals to the man of dignity and self-respect. The

-large cities have a wider, I might say, the only field, but there the

-young lawyer must spend years of the hardest, most unremitting toil

-before he can come to anything like success."

-

-The judge paused. He had not intended to speak at such length, but the

-habit of the courts was on him, and once started, he found his own

-didacticism so pleasing to himself, that it was with reluctance that he

-paused at all. He might not have stopped when he did, but gone on almost

-indefinitely, as he did when he delivered what were always spoken of as

-his beautiful charges to juries, had he not recalled, with something

-like a pang of resentment, that the happiness of his own, instead of

-another's child, lay at the bottom of all this. He turned then to face

-Marley. The young man was sitting there, his eyes wide, and his face

-long. The color that flamed in it when he first appeared, was now quite

-gone. It was gray and cold instead.

-

-"You will see, Mr. Marley," the judge resumed, "that you are hardly in a

-position to ask for my daughter's hand. Of course," the judge allowed a

-smile to soften somewhat the fixity of his lips, "I appreciate your

-manliness in coming to me, and I do not want to be understood as making

-any reflections upon, or in the least questioning, your character, your

-worth, or the honor of your intentions. But in view of your youth and of

-Lavinia's, and in view of your own, as yet, unsettled position in life,

-you must see how impossible it is that anything like an engagement

-should subsist between you. I say this because I wish only for Lavinia's

-happiness. I may say that I am not unmindful of your happiness, too, and

-I esteem it my duty to reach the conclusions I have just presented to

-you."

-

-"And I--I can not even see her?" stammered Marley, in his despair.

-

-"I have not said that," the judge said. "I shall always be pleased to

-extend to you the hospitality of my house, of course; but I would not

-consider it necessary for you to see her regularly, or intimately, and I

-certainly would not want you to monopolize her society to the exclusion

-of other young men with whom she has been in the habit of associating."

-

-Marley sat there, after this long harangue, with his head downcast. He

-sat and turned his hat round and round. At last he did look up with an

-appeal in his eyes, but when he saw that the judge was sitting there, as

-he had at first, sunk in his chair, breathing heavily and looking at him

-out of those sluggish eyes, he arose. He stood a moment, and looked off

-across the street somewhere, anywhere. Then he smote one hand lightly

-into the other, turned, and said:

-

-"Well--good afternoon, Judge Blair."

-

-"Good afternoon, Mr. Marley," the judge replied. He watched Marley go

-down the walk and out of the gate.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER IX

-

-                            A FILIAL REBUKE

-

-

-"Father!"

-

-Judge Blair turned and saw Lavinia standing in the wide front door. Her

-face was red, her eyes were flashing, her arms hung straight and tense

-at her sides.

-

-The judge stirred uneasily in his chair.

-

-"Oh!" she cried, rigidly clenching her little fists. "What have you

-done! You have sent him away!"

-

-"Come here, my daughter," he said.

-

-Lavinia moved toward him, halting each moment, then taking a few nervous

-steps forward. At last she stood before him, challenging, defiant.

-

-"Sit down, Lavinia, and listen," implored the judge.

-

-"You have sent him away!" she repeated. "You were harsh and cruel and

-unkind to him!"

-

-"Lavinia!" cried the judge, flushing with the anger parents call by

-different names. There was now a peremptory quality in his tone. But the

-girl did not heed him.

-

-"Oh, how could you!" she went on, "how could you! Think how you must

-have wounded him! You not only reproached him with being poor, but you

-discouraged him as to his prospects! Do you think I cared for that? Do

-you think I couldn't have waited? Do you think I can't wait anyhow? What

-had you when you proposed to mama? You were poor--you had no prospects;

-you had no more right--"

-

-"Lavinia! Lavinia!" the judge commanded, grasping the arms of his chair

-in an effort to rise. "You are beside yourself! You don't know what you

-are saying!"

-

-"And you pretended to be doing it all for my happiness, too! Oh! oh!

-oh!" Her anger vented itself impotently in these exclamations, and then

-her mother, white and alarmed, appeared in the doorway behind her.

-

-"Lavinia," she said quietly.

-

-The girl trembled violently, then whirled about, pressed her hands to

-her face, and ran in, brushing by her mother in the doorway. Mrs. Blair

-glanced after her irresolutely. Then she went to her husband.

-

-"Be calm, dear," she said.

-

-The judge sank back in his chair and looked at her in amazement.

-

-"What has happened?" She drew the empty chair up and sat down in it. She

-leaned forward and took one of his hands, and pressed it between both of

-her own. She waited for the judge to speak.

-

-"I hardly know," he began. "I never heard Lavinia break out so."

-

-"You must remember how excited and overwrought she is," Mrs. Blair

-exclaimed. "You must make allowances."

-

-"I didn't know the girl had such spirit," he continued.

-

-Mrs. Blair smiled rather wanly, and stroked her husband's hand. It was

-very cold and moist, and it trembled.

-

-"I had no idea it was so serious," he went on, as if summing up the

-catalogue of his surprises.

-

-"Tell me how it all came about," said Mrs. Blair.

-

-"Marley was here, first," the judge began. He had to pause, for he

-seemed to find it difficult to catch his breath. "It was a great

-surprise to me; it was very painful."

-

-The judge withdrew his hand and wiped his brow. Then he gazed again as

-he had done before, across the street. Mrs. Blair, though eying him

-closely and with concern, waited patiently.

-

-"I didn't wish to wound him," the judge resumed, speaking as much to

-himself as to her. "I hope I said nothing harsh; he really was quite

-manly about it."

-

-He paused again.

-

-"I presume I may have seemed cold, unfeeling, unsympathetic," he went

-on; and then as if he needed to reassure and justify himself, he added,

-"but of course it was impossible, utterly impossible."

-

-After another pause, he drew a deep breath, and as if he had already

-outlined his whole interview with Marley, continued:

-

-"And then Lavinia appeared; she must have heard it all, standing there

-in the hall."

-

-The judge leaned heavily against the back of his big chair; his face was

-drawn, his wrinkles were deeper than they had been, and he wore an

-aspect of weariness and pain. His form, too, seemed to have shrunk, and

-he sat there in an almost helpless mass, limp and inert.

-

-"I am only afraid, dear," Mrs. Blair said quietly, "that we have taken

-this thing too seriously."

-

-"Possibly," he said. "But it is serious, very serious. I don't know what

-is to be done."

-

-"We must have patience," Mrs. Blair counseled. "It will require all our

-delicacy and tact, now."

-

-"Perhaps you had better go in to her," the judge said presently. "Poor

-little girl; she is passing through the deep waters. And I tried to act

-only for her interest and happiness."

-

-Mrs. Blair arose.

-

-"She will see that, dear, in time."

-

-"I hope so," said the judge. Mrs. Blair went up to Lavinia's room, and

-listened for a moment at the closed door. She heard a voice, low and

-indistinct, but she knew it for the voice of Connie, and she could tell

-from its tone that the little girl was trying in her way to comfort and

-console her sister. So she stepped away, silently, almost stealthily,

-going on tiptoe.

-

-The judge sat on the veranda all the afternoon. He scarcely moved, and

-never once did he pick up the Sunday paper. Now and then he bowed, in

-his dignified way, to some acquaintance passing in the street. The

-Chenowiths came out on to their front porch, evidently hot and stupefied

-from their Sunday afternoon naps and ready now for the cool refreshment

-of the evening breeze they could usually rely on in Macochee with the

-coming of the evening. The judge bowed to them, and he tried to put into

-his bow an indolent unconcern, lest the Chenowiths should penetrate his

-manner and discover the trouble that lay on his heart. The Chenowiths

-had gone to the end of their porch, and the judge could hear their

-laughter. He thought it strange and unnatural that any one should laugh.

-

-He decided that he would review this whole affair of Lavinia's love

-calmly and judicially. He went back to the beginning of Marley's visit,

-trying to see wherein he himself had been in the wrong, then he went

-over the hot scene with Lavinia. He could not recover from his surprise

-at this; that Lavinia, who was usually so gentle, so mild, so unselfish,

-should have given way to such anger was incomprehensible. He had always

-said that she had her mother's disposition. He could see her, all the

-time, distinctly, as she had stood there, in a rage he had never known

-her to indulge before, and yet, as he looked at the image of her that

-was in his mind, and recalled certain expressions, certain attitudes,

-certain tones of voice, it came over him all at once that she was

-exactly as her mother had been at her age, though he could not reconcile

-Lavinia's mood with the resemblance. Then he went back to his own days

-of courtship, with their emotions, their uncertainties, their doubts and

-illusions. They seemed a long way off.

-

-He was trying to think calmly and logically, but he found that he could

-not then control his mind, for suddenly he saw Lavinia as a little girl,

-with her mother kneeling before her, shaking out and straightening her

-starched frock. And with this thought came the revelation, sudden,

-irresistible, that Lavinia was no longer a child as, with the habit of

-the happy years, he had thought of her, up to that very afternoon, in

-fact, until an hour ago, and he bowed before the changes that hour had

-wrought. He accepted the conviction now that he himself had grown old.

-He forgot his purpose to probe to its first cause this unhappiness that

-had come to him; he saw that what he mourned was the loss of a child,

-the loss of his own youth.

-

-He glanced across at the Chenowiths again, and they seemed remote from

-him, of another generation in fact, though but a few moments before he

-had looked on them as contemporaries. And then suddenly there came to

-him the fear that Mr. Chenowith might run over to chat with him, as was

-his habit, and the judge hastily rose, and almost surreptitiously went

-off the end of the porch and around into the side yard. Under the new

-impression of age that he had grown into, he walked slowly, with a

-senile stoop, and dragged his feet as he went. He wandered about in the

-yard for a long while, looking at the shrubs and bushes and trees he had

-planted himself so long ago, when he was young. It occurred to him that

-here in this garden he would potter around, and pass his declining

-years.

-

-He remained in the yard until his wife came to call him in to the supper

-she had prepared, in the Sunday evening absence of the hired girl, and

-with an effort he brought himself back from the future to the present.

-

-"How is she?"

-

-"Oh, she's all right," said Mrs. Blair, in her usual cheery tone. "I

-didn't go to her, I thought it best to leave her alone."

-

-The judge looked at his wife, with her rosy face, and her full figure

-still youthful in the simple summer gown she wore. He looked at her

-curiously, wondering why it was she seemed so young; a width of years

-seemed all at once to separate them. Mrs. Blair noted this look of her

-husband's. She noted it with pity for him; he looked older to her.

-

-"I think it would be nice for you to take Lavinia with you when you go

-to Put-in-Bay to the Bar Association meeting," she said.

-

-It seemed strange and anomalous to Judge Blair that he should still be

-attending Bar Association meetings.

-

-"I'll see," he said; and then he qualified, "if I go."

-

-"If you go?" his wife exclaimed. "Why, you're down for a paper!"

-

-"So I am," said the judge.

-

-They turned toward the house, and the judge took his wife's arm, leaning

-rather heavily on it.

-

-"Will!" she said, after they had gone a few steps in this fashion. "What

-is the matter with you! You walk like an old man!"

-

-She shook his arm off, and said:

-

-"Hurry up now. The coffee will be getting cold."

-

-Indoors, they passed Connie going through the hall; she had just come

-down the stairs, and the sight of her girlish figure, and her short

-skirts just sweeping the tops of her shoes, gladdened the judge's heart,

-and he smiled. He could rely on Connie, anyway, for sympathy. But the

-girl gave him a sharp reproachful stare from her dark eyes, and the

-judge felt utterly deserted.

-

-Lavinia did not come down to her supper, though her mother, knowing she

-would want it later, kept the coffee warm on the back of the kitchen

-stove. Chad had gone away with one of the Weston boys. So the three, the

-judge, Mrs. Blair and Connie, ate their supper alone.

-

-After supper, Mrs. Blair and Connie went immediately to Lavinia and the

-judge had a sense of exclusion from the mysteries that were enacting up

-there, an exclusion that seemed to proceed from his own culpability. He

-went to his library and tried to read, but he could only sit with his

-head in his hand, and stare before him. But finally he was aroused from

-his reveries by a stir in the hall, and glancing up he saw Lavinia in

-the door. She came straight to him, and said:

-

-"Forgive me, papa, if I was rude and unkind."

-

-He seized her in his arms, hugging her head against his shoulders, and

-he said again and again, while stroking her hair clumsily:

-

-"My little girl! My little girl!"

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER X

-

-                               PUT-IN-BAY

-

-

-The little steamer for the islands rolled out of Sandusky Bay with

-Lavinia sitting by the forward rail. She had yielded to her father's

-wishes with an easy complaisance that made him suspicious, and yet, as

-he stood solicitously by, he was persistent in his determination to

-realize for her all the delights he had so extravagantly predicted for

-the journey. He tried to rouse her interest by pointing out Johnson's

-Island, but it did not possess for her, as the place where the

-Confederate prisoners were confined during the war, the interest an old

-soldier was able to discover in it, and though he tried his best, with

-an effort at entertainment that was well-nigh pathetic, she only smiled

-wanly.

-

-He left her, after a while, her chin in her hands, looking over into the

-light green waters, watching the curve of the waves the steamer tossed

-away from its sharp prow. The lake was in one of its most smiling and

-happy moods, though they were then at a point where storms easily lash

-its shallow depths into billows that might satisfy the rage of the North

-Atlantic. The lighthouse on the rocks at Marblehead had a fascination

-for Lavinia; it seemed waiting for her humor, and she watched it until

-the steamer had gone far on toward Kelly's Island, and left the

-lighthouse behind, a white spot gleaming in the sun.

-

-When they entered the little archipelago of the Wine Islands, with their

-waters a deeper green than those out in the lake and overcast in strange

-ways by mysterious shadows and cool weird reflections of the green of

-the islands all about, Judge Blair came back to her and asked if she had

-been seasick and how she had enjoyed the little journey. As she met him

-with her strange perplexing smile, he began to doubt her again;

-something assured him that she still clung to her purpose of love, and

-he found himself almost wishing that she had kept to her defiant temper

-of the Sunday afternoon that now seemed so far away.

-

-When they had reached Put-in-Bay and bounded on the trolley across the

-island to the huge hotel, they had their dinner and Lavinia perplexed

-the judge further by retiring to her room. She said she would rest,

-though she had persisted all the morning that she was not tired.

-

-As soon as she had closed the door on her father, leaving him in doubt

-and confusion, she began a long letter to Marley. She described her trip

-in detail, jealous of every trifle of experience that had befallen her;

-she told him of the bridal couple she had seen board the train at Clyde,

-and of the showers of rice that had been thrown by the laughing bridal

-party, though she omitted the lone father of the bride standing apart on

-the platform craning his head anxiously for another sight of his

-daughter, and trying to smile. But she gave him a sense of the romance

-that had stirred in her at the sight of the lighthouse on its lonely

-point of rocks and the stone towers that made the wine-cellars on

-Kelly's Island look like castles.

-

-After supper Lavinia left her father to the pleasure of renewing

-acquaintance with the lawyers who thronged the lobby, and stole down to

-the rocks that marked the shelving shore of the island. She saw stately

-schooners, with white sails spread, and she watched, until its black

-banner of smoke was but a light wraith, a big propeller towing its

-convoy of grain barges across the far horizon. This calm serene passing

-of the life of the lakes soothed her, filled her with a thousand

-fancies, and stirred her emotions with deep, hidden hints of the mystery

-of all life. As she sat there and gazed, now and then tears came to her

-eyes. The waters were spread smoothly before her under the last

-reflection of the sun, the twilight was coming across the lake; and as

-the light followed the sun and the darkness crept behind, she looked

-toward the south in the direction, as she felt, of Macochee, and thought

-of her home and of her mother, of Connie and of Chad, and then she

-thought of Glenn.

-

-Far out in the lake a cluster of yellow lights moved swiftly along--one

-of the big passenger steamers that nightly ply between Detroit and

-Buffalo, and she read in that moving girdle of light new meanings; then

-suddenly a fear seized her, a fear that was part of the ache in her

-heart, and she ran into the hotel and up to her room. Then she took up

-her letter again and poured out all her new sensations, her longings,

-and her fears in a lengthy postscript. When she had finished, she began

-to address the envelope; and she wrote on it, with pride:

-

-"Mr. Glenn--"

-

-And then she paused. She did not know whether he spelt his name "Marly,"

-or "Marley," or "Marlay." She tried writing it each way, dozens of

-times, but the oftener she tested it the less able she was to decide. It

-was too ridiculous; she became exasperated with herself; then humiliated

-and ashamed. When she heard her father's step in the hall, she hastily

-locked her letter in her little traveling bag. The judge greeted her

-warmly; he was flushed and happy, and in the highest spirits. During the

-afternoon he had been meeting lawyers from all over Ohio; the evening

-boats from Cleveland and Toledo had brought more of them to the island;

-they were all eminent, respectable, rich, the attorneys of big

-corporations. The judges of the Supreme Court and of the Circuit Courts

-were there, and the excitement had reached its height when the boat from

-Cleveland brought an associate justice of the United States Supreme

-Court to deliver the chief address of the meeting.

-

-Judge Blair reveled in meeting all these distinguished men; he enjoyed

-the flattery in their way of addressing and introducing him. But his

-conscience smote him when he saw Lavinia. He drew up a chair and sat

-beside her, holding his cigar at arm's length. It was an excellent

-cigar, better than he ordinarily smoked, and the thin thread of smoke

-that wavered up from it filled the room almost instantly with its

-delicate perfume.

-

-"Did my little girl think her father had deserted her?" he said,

-speaking of her in the third person, after the affectionate way of

-parents. "He must pay better attention to her. She must come down and

-meet the lawyers; they will be delighted; a justice of the Supreme Court

-has just come on from Washington! She will want to meet him!"

-

-The judge paused and twisted his head about for a puff at his cigar, and

-then waited for Lavinia to glow at the prospect. But when she looked at

-him, and tried to smile again, he saw the glint of tears in her eyes.

-

-"Why come, come, dear!" he said. "What's the matter? Aren't you having a

-good time? Never mind, when this meeting's over we'll go to Detroit, and

-maybe up the lakes for a little trip. That'll bring the roses back!"

-

-He pinched her cheeks playfully, but she did not respond; she looked at

-him pleadingly.

-

-"Why, Lavinia," he cried, "you aren't homesick?"

-

-She winked bravely to stem the flood of tears and then nodded.

-

-"Well!" he said, nonplussed. "You know, dear, we can't--"

-

-The tears were brimming in her blue eyes, and he left his sentence

-uncompleted to go on:

-

-"So you're homesick, eh? For mama, and Connie?"

-

-She nodded, and he studied her closely for a moment, and then he could

-not resist the question that all along had been torturing him.

-

-"And for--?"

-

-She confirmed his fear, with quick decisive little nods. She got out her

-handkerchief and hastily brushed her tears away, and then with an effort

-to control herself, she looked at him and said, as if she were ready to

-have it all out then:

-

-"Yes, father, I haven't treated him right. I came away without telling

-him."

-

-Judge Blair scowled and turned away, and bit the end of his cigar. Then

-he sat and studied it. Lavinia waited; she was ready for the final

-contest. Presently the judge arose.

-

-"Well, dear," he said. "Well--we'll see; of course, we can't go back

-just yet--I have my address to read to-morrow, and besides, some of the

-boys are talking of me for president of the Bar Association. And I had

-thought, I had thought, that a little trip over to Detroit, and maybe up

-to Mackinac--"

-

-"Father," said Lavinia, looking at him now calmly, "I don't want to go

-to Detroit or up to Mackinac. I'll do, of course, as you say; I'll wait

-until the Bar meeting is over, but I want to go home. You might as well

-know now, father--we might as well understand each other--it can be no

-other way."

-

-Judge Blair looked at his daughter a moment, and she kept her eyes

-directly and firmly in his.

-

-"Oh well," he said with a sigh, "of course, dear, if you say. I'd like

-to stay until after the election though. Will you?"

-

-"Of course," she consented.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER XI

-

-                                MACOCHEE

-

-

-Marley had not learned of Lavinia's departure until Monday afternoon; he

-had the news from Lawrence, who had it from the hackman who had taken

-Judge Blair and Lavinia to the train; for whenever any of the quality go

-away from Macochee they always ride to the station in the hack, though

-at other times they walk without difficulty all over the town. When

-Marley reached the office, and found Wade Powell, as he usually found

-him, sitting with his feet on his table, smoking and reading a

-Cincinnati paper, the lawyer looked up casually, but when he saw

-Marley's expression he suddenly exclaimed:

-

-"Hello! What's the matter?"

-

-Marley shook his head.

-

-"Something's troubling you," said Powell.

-

-Marley shook his head again, and Powell looked at him as at a witness he

-was cross-examining.

-

-"I know better," he said.

-

-Marley affected to busy himself at his desk, but after a while, he

-turned about and said:

-

-"Something is troubling me, Mr. Powell; my--prospects." He had been on

-the point of confessing his real trouble, but with the very words on his

-lips, he could not utter them, and so let the conversation take another

-turn.

-

-"Oh, prospects!" said Powell. "I can tell you all about prospects; I've

-had more than any man in Gordon County. When I was your age, opinion was

-unanimous in this community that my prospects were the most numerous and

-the most brilliant of any one here!"

-

-Powell laughed, a little bitterly.

-

-"If I'd only been prudent enough to die then, Glenn," he went on, "I'd

-have been mourned as a potential judge of the Supreme Court, senator and

-president."

-

-"It'll be three years before I can be admitted, won't it?" asked Marley.

-

-"Yes," said Powell; "but that isn't long; and it isn't anything to be

-admitted."

-

-"Well, it takes time, anyway," said Marley, "and then there's the

-practice after that--how long will that take?"

-

-"Well, let's see," said Powell, plucking reflectively at the flabby skin

-that hung between the points of his collar. "Let's see." His brows were

-twitching humorously. "It's taken me about thirty years--I don't know

-how much longer it'll take."

-

-Powell smoked on for a few moments, and then added soberly:

-

-"Of course, I had to fool around in politics for about twenty-five

-years, and save the people."

-

-"Do you think," Marley said, after a moment's silence that paid its own

-respect to Powell's regrets, "that there's an opening for me here in

-Macochee?"

-

-"No, Glenn, I'll tell you. There's no use to think of locating in

-Macochee or any other small town. The business is dead here. It's too

-bad, but it's so. When I began there was plenty of real estate law to

-do, and plenty of criminal law, but the land titles are all settled

-now--"

-

-"That's what Judge Blair said," interrupted Marley.

-

-"So you've been to him, have you?"

-

-Marley blushed.

-

-"Well, not exactly," he said. "I heard him say that."

-

-"Yes," mused Powell. "Well, he feathered his nest pretty well while they

-were being settled. But as I was saying--the criminal business has died

-out, or rather, it has changed. The criminals haven't any money any

-more, that is, the old kind of criminals; the corporations have it all

-now--if you want to make money, you'll have to have them for clients. Of

-course, the money still goes to the criminal lawyer just as it used to."

-

-"I like Macochee," said Marley, his spirits falling fast.

-

-"Well, it's a nice old town to live in," Powell assented. "But the devil

-of it is how're you going to live? Of course, you can study here just as

-well as anywhere; better than anywhere, in fact; you have plenty of

-time, and plenty of quiet. But as for locating here--why, it's utterly

-out of the question for a man who wants to make anything of himself and

-has to get a living while he's doing it--and I don't know any other kind

-that ever do make anything out of themselves."

-

-"I had hoped--" persisted Marley, longing for Powell to relent.

-

-"Oh, I know," the lawyer replied almost impatiently, "but it's no use,

-there's nothing in it. No one with ambition can stay here now. The town,

-like all these old county-seats, is good for nothing but impecunious old

-age and cemeteries. It was nothing but a country cross-roads before the

-railroad came, and since then it's been nothing but a water-tank; if it

-keeps on it'll be nothing but a whistling-post, and the trains won't be

-bothered to stop at all. Its people are industrious in nothing but

-gossip, and genuine in nothing but hypocrisy; they are so mean that they

-hate themselves, and think all the time they're hating each other. Just

-look at our leading citizen, Brother Dudley, over there in his bank; he

-owns the whole town, and he thinks he's a bigger man than old Grant.

-Sundays he sits in his pew with a black coat on, squinting at the

-preacher out of his sore little eyes, and waiting for him to say

-something he can get the bishop to fire him for, and he calls that

-religion. Mondays he goes back to his business of skinning farmers and

-poor widows out of their miserable little pennies, and he calls that

-business; Does he ever look at a flower or a tree, or turn round in the

-street at the laugh of a child? He's the kind of man that runs this

-town, and he makes the rest of the people like it. Well, he don't run

-me! God! If I'd only had some sense twenty years ago I'd have pulled out

-and gone to the city and been somebody to-day."

-

-It pained Marley to hear Powell berate Macochee; he had never heard him

-rage so violently at the town, though he was always sneering at it. To

-Marley the very name of Macochee meant romance; he liked the name the

-Indian village had left behind when it vanished; he liked the old

-high-gabled buildings about the Square; he longed to identify himself

-with Macochee, to think of it as his home.

-

-"But I'll tell you one thing," Powell went on, his tone suddenly

-changing to one of angry resolution as he flung his feet heavily to the

-bare floor and struck his desk a startling blow with his fist, "I'll

-tell you one thing, I'm through working for nothing; they've got to pay

-me! I'm going to squeeze the last cent out of them after this, same as

-old Dudley does, same as old Bill Blair did before he went on the bench;

-that's what I'm going to do. I'm getting old and I've got to quit

-running a legal eleemosynary institution."

-

-Powell's eyes flamed, but a shadow fell in the room, and Powell and

-Marley glanced at the door.

-

-"Well, what do you want?" said Powell.

-

-An old woman, bareheaded in the hurry of a crisis, was on the threshold.

-

-"Oh, Mr. Powell," she began in a wailing voice, "would you come quick!"

-

-"What for?"

-

-"Charlie's in ag'in."

-

-"Got any money?" demanded Powell, in the angry resolution of a moment

-before. He clenched his fist again on the edge of his table. Marley

-glanced at him in surprise, and then at the old woman.

-

-The woman hung her head and stammered:

-

-"Well, you know--I hain't just now, but by the week's end, when I get

-the money for my washin'--"

-

-"Oh, that's all right," said Powell, getting to his feet, "that's all

-right. We won't talk of that now. I beg your pardon. We'll walk down to

-the calaboose and see the boy; we can talk it over with him and see

-what's to be done."

-

-He picked up his slouch hat and clapped it on his head.

-

-"What's he been doing this time?" he said to the old woman as they went

-out the door.

-

-Marley watched them as they passed the open window and disappeared. A

-smile touched his lips an instant, and then he became serious and

-depressed once more.

-

-He had had no word from Lavinia, and her going away immediately after

-his scene with Judge Blair confused him. He tried to think it out, but

-he could reach no conclusion save that it was all at an end. Lavinia's

-sudden, unexplained departure proved that. And yet he could not, he

-would not, think that she had changed; no, her father had borne her

-away--that was it--forcibly and cruelly borne her away. For a long while

-he sat there finding a certain satisfaction in the melancholy that came

-over him, and then suddenly he was aroused by the boom of the town

-clock. The heavy notes of the bell rolled across to him, and he counted

-them--five. It was time to go. And Powell had not returned. It was not

-surprising; Powell often went out that way and did not come back, and,

-often, somehow to Marley's chagrin, men and women sat and waited long

-hours in the dumb patience of the poor and then went away with their

-woes still burdening them. They must have been used to woes, they

-carried them so silently.

-

-Marley was walking moodily down Main Street, feeling that he had no part

-in the bustling happiness of the people going home from their day's

-work, when, lifting his head, he saw Mrs. Blair in her surrey. Instantly

-she jerked the horse in toward the curb and beckoned to him.

-

-"Why, Glenn! I'm so glad I met you!" she said, her face rosy with its

-smile. "I have something for you."

-

-She raised her eyebrows in a significant way and began fumbling in her

-lap. Presently she leaned out of the surrey and pressed something into

-his hand.

-

-"Just between ourselves, you know!" she said, with the delicious mystery

-of a secret, and then gathering up her reins, she clucked at her lazy

-horse.

-

-He looked after her a moment, then at the thick envelope he held in his

-hand. On it was written in the long Anglican characters of a young girl,

-these words:

-

-"For Glenn."

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XII

-

-                        A CONDITIONAL SURRENDER

-

-

-Judge Blair and Lavinia returned home Saturday.

-

-"I guess it's no use," the judge said to Mrs. Blair when she had

-followed him up stairs, where he had gone to wash off the dust he had

-accumulated during the six hours the train had consumed in jerking

-itself from Sandusky to Macochee.

-

-"No, I could see how relieved she was to get home," replied Mrs. Blair,

-musing idly out of the window. She was not so sure that she was pleased

-with the result she had done her part to accomplish.

-

-"I guess you were right," the judge said.

-

-"I?" asked Mrs. Blair, suddenly turning round.

-

-"Yes--in saying that it would be best not to dignify it by too much

-notice. That might only add to its seriousness."

-

-Mrs. Blair looked out of the window again.

-

-"Of course," the judge went on presently, "I wouldn't want it considered

-as an engagement."

-

-"Of course not," Mrs. Blair acquiesced.

-

-"You'd better have a talk with her," he said. She saw that he was

-seeking his usual retreat in such cases, and she was now determined not

-to take the responsibility. Spiritually they tossed this responsibility

-back and forth between them, like a shuttlecock.

-

-"But wouldn't that make it look as if we were taking too much notice of

-it?"

-

-"Well," the judge said, "I don't know. Do just as you think best."

-

-"Didn't you talk to her about it when you were away?" Mrs. Blair asked.

-

-"M-m yes," the judge said slowly.

-

-"And what did she say?"

-

-"Nothing much, only--"

-

-"Only what?"

-

-"Only that she would not give him up."

-

-"Oh!"

-

-Mrs. Blair waited, and the judge dawdled at his toilet. Some compulsion

-she could not resist, though she tried, distrusting her own weakness,

-drove Mrs. Blair to speak first, and even then she sought to minimize

-the effect of her surrender.

-

-"Of course, Will," she said, "I want to be guided by you in this matter.

-It's really quite serious."

-

-"Oh, well," he said, "you're capable of managing it."

-

-"You said you knew his father, didn't you?" she asked after a while.

-

-"Slightly; why?"

-

-"I was just wishing that we knew more of the family. You know they have

-not lived in Macochee long."

-

-"That's true," the judge assented, realizing all that the objection

-meant.

-

-"And yet," Mrs. Blair reassured him, though she was trying to reassure

-herself at the same time, "his father is a minister; that ought to count

-for something."

-

-"Yes, it ought, and still you know they say that ministers' sons are

-always--"

-

-"But," Mrs. Blair interrupted, as if he were wholly missing the point,

-"ministers' families always have a standing, I think."

-

-They were silent, then, until Mrs. Blair began:

-

-"I suppose I really ought to call on Mrs. Marley."

-

-"Why?"

-

-"Well, it seems, you know--it seems to me that I ought."

-

-"But wouldn't that--?"

-

-"I considered that, and still, it might seem more so if I didn't, don't

-you see?"

-

-The judge tried to grasp the attenuated point, and expressed his failure

-in the sigh with which he stooped to fasten his shoes. Then he drew on

-his alpaca coat, and just as he was leaving the room, his wife stopped

-him with:

-

-"But, Will!"

-

-He halted with his hand on the door-knob. For an instant his wife looked

-at him in pleasure. He was rather handsome, with his white hair combed

-gravely, his ruddy face fresh from his shaving, and his stiff, white

-collar about his neck.

-

-"What did you say?" he asked, recalling her from her reverie of him.

-

-"Oh!" she said; "only this--maybe he won't feel like coming around here

-any more. You know you practically sent him away."

-

-The judge gave a little laugh.

-

-"I guess that will work itself out. Anyway I'll leave it to you--or to

-them."

-

-Still smiling at his own humor, he turned the door-knob, and then

-hesitated. His smile had vanished.

-

-"She's so young," he said with a regret. "She's so young. How old did

-you say you were when we were married?"

-

-"Eighteen," Mrs. Blair replied.

-

-"And Lavinia can't be more than--"

-

-"Why, she's twenty," said Mrs. Blair.

-

-"So she is," said the judge. "So she is. But then you--"

-

-Mrs. Blair had come close to him, and stood picking a bit of thread from

-his shoulder.

-

-"It was different with us, wasn't it, dear?" she said, looking up at

-him.

-

-He kissed her.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XIII

-

-                                 SUMMER

-

-

-The dust lay thick in Ward Street, sifting its fine powder on the leaves

-of the cottonwoods that grew at the weedy gutter. The grass in the yard

-grew long, and the bushes languished in the heat. Judge Blair's beans

-clambered up their poles and turned white; and Connie's sweet peas grew

-lush and rank, running, as she complained, mostly to leaves. The house

-seemed to have withdrawn within itself; its green shutters were closed.

-In the evening dim figures could be seen on the veranda, and the drone

-of voices could be heard. At eleven o'clock, the deep siren of the

-Limited could be heard, as it rounded the curve a mile out of town.

-After that it was still, and night lay on Macochee, soft, vast,

-immeasurable. The clock in the Court House tower boomed out the heavy

-hours. Sometimes the harmonies of the singing negroes were borne over

-the town.

-

-And to Marley and Lavinia those days, and those evenings of purple

-shadows and soft brilliant stars, were but the setting of a dream that

-unfolded new wonders constantly. They were but a part of all life, a

-part of the glowing summer itself, innocent of the thousand artificial

-demands man has made on himself. Lavinia went about with a new

-expression, exalted, expectant; a new dignity had come to her and a new

-beauty; all at once, suddenly, as it were, character had set its noble

-mark upon her, and about her slender figure there was the aureola of

-romance.

-

-"Have you noticed Lavinia?" Mrs. Blair asked her husband.

-

-"No, why?" he said, in the alarm that was ever ready to spring within

-him.

-

-"She has changed so; she has grown so beautiful!"

-

-One morning the judge saw a spar of light flash from her finger, and he

-peered anxiously over his glasses.

-

-"What's that, Lavinia?" he asked, and when she stood at his knee, almost

-like a little girl again in all but spirit, he took her finger.

-

-"A ring," she said simply.

-

-"What does it mean?"

-

-"Glenn gave it to me."

-

-"Glenn?"

-

-"Yes."

-

-"But I thought there was to be no engagement?" The judge looked up, as

-if there had been betrayal. But Lavinia only smiled. The judge looked at

-her a moment, then released her hand.

-

-"I wouldn't wear it where any one could see it," he said.

-

-The summer stretched itself long into September; and then came the still

-days of fall, moving slowly by in majestic procession. With the first

-cool air, a new restless energy awoke in Marley. All the summer he had

-neglected his studies; but now a change was working in him as wonderful

-as that which autumn was working in the world. He looked back at that

-happy, self-sufficient summer, and, for an instant, he had a wild,

-impotent desire to detain it, to hold it, to keep things just as they

-were; but the summer was gone, the winter at hand, and he felt all at

-once the impact of practical life. He faced the future, and for an

-instant he recoiled.

-

-Lavinia was standing looking up at him. She laid her hand on his

-shoulder.

-

-"What is it, Glenn?"

-

-"I was just thinking," he said, "that I have a great assurance in asking

-you to marry me."

-

-"What do you mean?"

-

-"Why, dear, just this: I can't get a practice in Macochee; I might as

-well look it in the face now as any time. I have known it all along, but

-I've kept it from you, and I've tried to keep it from myself. There's no

-place here for me; everybody says so, your father, Wade Powell,

-everybody. There's no chance for a young man in the law in these small

-towns. I've tried to make myself think otherwise. I've tried to make

-myself believe that after I'd been admitted I could settle down here and

-get a practice and we could have a little home of our own--but--"

-

-"Can't we?" Lavinia whispered the words, as if she were afraid utterance

-would confirm the fear they imported.

-

-"Well--that's what they all say," Marley insisted.

-

-"But papa's always talking that way," Lavinia protested. "I suppose all

-old men do. They forget that they were ever young, and I don't see what

-right they have to destroy your faith, your confidence, or the

-confidence of any young man!" Lavinia blazed out these words

-indignantly. It was consoling to Marley to hear them, he liked her

-passionate partizanship in his cause. He longed for her to go on, and he

-waited, anxious to be reassured in spite of himself. He could see her

-face dimly in the starlight, and feel her figure rigid with protest

-beside him.

-

-"It's simply wicked in them," she said presently. "I don't care what

-they say. We can and we will!"

-

-"I like to have you put it that way, dear," said Marley. "I like to have

-you say 'we'!"

-

-She drew more closely to him.

-

-"And you think we can?" he said presently.

-

-"I know it."

-

-"And have a little home, here, in one of these quiet streets, with the

-shade, and the happiness--"

-

-"Yes!"

-

-"And it wouldn't matter much if we were poor?"

-

-"No!"

-

-"Just at first, you know. I'd work hard, and we could be so happy, so

-happy, just we two, together!"

-

-"Yes, yes," she whispered.

-

-"I love Macochee so," Marley said presently. "I just couldn't leave it!"

-

-"Don't! Don't!" she protested. "Don't even speak of it!"

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XIV

-

-                           ONE SUNDAY MORNING

-

-

-It was Sunday morning and Marley sat in church looking at a shaft of

-soft light that fell through one of the tall windows. From gazing at the

-shaft of light, he began to study the symbols in the different windows,

-the cross and crown, the lamb, the triangle that represented the

-Trinity, all the Roman symbols that Protestantism still retains in its

-decorations. Then he counted the pipes in the organ, back and forth,

-never certain that he had counted them correctly. All about him the

-people were going through the service, but it had lost all meaning for

-Marley, because he had been accustomed to it from childhood.

-

-Having been reassured by Lavinia, he felt that he should be happy, yet a

-strong sense of dissatisfaction, of uncertainty, flowed persistently

-under all his thoughts, belying his heart's assurance of its happiness.

-When Doctor Marley, advancing to the pulpit, buttoned his coat down

-before him, pushed aside the vase of flowers the ladies' committee

-always put in his way, and stood with his strong, expressive hand laid

-on the open Bible, Marley's thoughts fixed themselves for a moment in

-the pride and love he had always had for his father. There swept before

-him hundreds of scenes like this when his father had stood up to preach,

-and then suddenly he realized that his father had grown old: he was

-white-haired and in his rugged, smooth-shaven face deep lines were

-drawn--the lines of a beautiful character.

-

-He remembered something his father had said to the effect that the

-pulpit was the only place in which inexperienced youth was desired,

-showing the insincerity of what people call their religion, and then he

-remembered the ambitions he had dimly felt in his father in his earlier

-days; it had been predicted that his father would be a bishop. But he

-was not a bishop, and now in all probability never would be one; he was

-not politician enough for that. And Marley wondered whether or not his

-father could be said to have been successful; he had come to know and to

-do high things, he had lived a life full of noble sacrifice and the

-finest faith in humanity and in God; but was this success? He heard his

-father's voice:

-

-"The text will be found in the third chapter of the Lamentations of

-Jeremiah."

-

-But Marley never listened to sermons; now and then he caught a phrase,

-or a period, especially when his father raised his voice, but his

-thoughts were elsewhere, anywhere--not on the sermon. The men and women

-sitting in front of him kept shifting constantly, and he grew tired of

-slipping this way and that and craning his neck in order to see his

-father. And then the constant fluttering of fans hurt his eyes, and they

-wandered here and there, each person they lighted on suggesting some new

-train of thought.

-

-Presently they fell on a girl in a white dress, and in some way she

-suggested Lavinia. And instantly he felt that he should be perfectly

-happy when thinking of Lavinia, but, as suddenly, came that subconscious

-uncertainty, that deep-flowing discontent. He went over his last

-conversation with Lavinia, in which he had found such assurance, but now

-away from her he realized that he had lulled himself into a sense of

-security that was all false; and the conviction that Macochee had no

-place for him, at least as a lawyer, came back. He tried to put it away

-from him, and think of something else.

-

-His eyes fell on old Selah Dudley, sitting like all pillars of the

-church, at the end of his pew. Dudley's back was narrow, and rounded out

-between the shoulders so that Marley wondered how he could sit

-comfortably at all; his head was flat and sheer behind, and Marley could

-see with what care the old banker had plastered the scant hair across

-his bald poll--the only sign of vanity revealed in him, unless it were

-in the brown kid gloves he wore. Marley looked at Dudley with the

-feeling that he was looking at the most successful man in Macochee, and

-yet he had a troubled sense of the phariseeism that is the essential

-element of such success. He remembered what Wade Powell had said;

-immediately he saw Dudley in a new light; the old man sat stolid,

-patient and brutal, waiting for some heterodoxy, or something that could

-be construed as heterodoxy, theological or economic, like a savage with

-a spear waiting to pierce his prey, and glad when the moment came.

-

-But Marley, seeing the young girl in the white dress, again thought of

-Lavinia, who would be sitting at that very moment with her father and

-mother and Connie and Chad over in the Presbyterian church. How long

-would it be before he could sit there beside her, as her husband? Then

-with a flash it came to him that they would, in all likelihood, be

-married in that very church. Instantly he saw the spectators gathered,

-he saw the pulpit and the chancel-rail hidden in flowers, he saw his

-father with his ritual in his hands, waiting; and then while the organ

-played the wedding march, Lavinia coming down the aisle, her eyes

-lowered under her veil. His heart beat faster, he felt a wave of

-emotion, joyous, exciting.

-

-But there was much to do before that moment could come--the long days

-and nights of study; the examination looming like a mountain of

-difficulties, then months and years of waiting for a practice. He tried

-to imagine each detail of the coming of a practice, but he could not; he

-could not conceive how it was possible for a practice to come to any

-one, much less to him. There were many lawyers in Macochee now, and all

-of them were more or less idle. There was certainly no need of more.

-Judge Blair and Wade Powell and every one had told him that, and

-suddenly he felt an impatience with them all, as if they were

-responsible for the conditions they described; they all conspired

-against him, men and conditions, making up the elements of a harsh,

-intractable fate.

-

-And Marley grew bitter against every one in Macochee; they all gossiped

-about him, they were all determined to drive him away; well, let them;

-he would go; but he would come back again some day as a great,

-successful lawyer, looking down on them and their little interests, and

-they would be filled with envy and respect. But what of Lavinia?

-

-What right had he to ask her to marry him? What right had he to place

-her in the position he had? He realized it now, clearly, he told

-himself, for the first time. She had given up all for him. She would go

-out no more, she had foregone her parties, calls, picnics, dances,

-everything; in her devotion she had estranged her friends. He had given

-her parents concern, he had placed her in a false, impossible position.

-He must rescue her from it. But how? By breaking the engagement? He

-blushed for the thought. By going away quietly, silently, without a

-word? That would only increase the difficulty of her position. By

-keeping her waiting, year after year, until he could find a foothold in

-the world? Even that was unfair.

-

-No, he could not give up Lavinia and he could not go away from Macochee,

-hence it followed that he must give up the law. He must get some work to

-do, and at once; something that would pay him enough to support a wife.

-He began to canvass the possibilities in Macochee. He thought of all the

-openings; surely there would be something; there were several thousand

-persons in Macochee, and they lived somehow. He did not wish to give up

-the law; not that he loved it so, but because he disliked to own himself

-beaten. But it was necessary; he could suffer this defeat; he could make

-this sacrifice. There was something almost noble in the attitude, and he

-derived a kind of morbid consolation from the thought.

-

-His father was closing the Bible--sure sign that the sermon was about to

-end. There was another prayer, then a hymn, and while the congregation

-remained standing for the benediction, he heard his father's voice:

-

-"The peace of God which passeth all understanding--"

-

-The words had always comforted him in the sorrows he was constantly

-imagining, but now they brought no peace.

-

-In another moment the congregation was stirring joyously, in unconscious

-relief that the sitting was over. The hum of voices assumed a pleasant

-social air, as friend and acquaintance turned to greet one another. The

-people moved slowly down the aisle. He caught a glimpse of his father,

-smiling and happy--happy that his work was done--passing his

-handkerchief over his reddened brow and bending to take the hands of

-those who came to speak to him and to congratulate him. Just then Selah

-Dudley gave his father his hand; the sight pleased Marley; and suddenly

-an idea came to him.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER XV

-

-                            A SAINT'S ADVICE

-

-

-On Monday morning Marley found Dudley at his post in the First National

-Bank. He halted at the little low gate in the rail that ran round

-Dudley's desk until Dudley looked up and saw him, and then Marley

-smiled. Dudley, conceiving it to be the propitiatory smile of the

-intending borrower, narrowed his eyes as he regarded him.

-

-"Well?" he said.

-

-Marley went in and sat down on the edge of the hard chair that was

-placed near Dudley.

-

-"I wish to have a little talk with you, Mr. Dudley," he said. He waited

-then for Dudley to reply, thinking perhaps he would be interested in the

-son of his pastor. Dudley had turned his chair a little, and seemed to

-have sunk a little lower in its brown leather cushions, worn to a hard

-shine during the long years he had sat there. The lower part of him was

-round and full and heavy, while his shoulders were narrow and sloping,

-and his chest sunken, as if, from sitting there so many years, his

-vitals had settled, giving him the figure of a half emptied bag of

-grain. His legs were thin, and his trousers crept constantly up the legs

-of the boots he wore; the boots were blackened as far as the ankles,

-above the ankles they were wrinkled and scuffed to a dirty brown.

-

-Marley noted these details hurriedly, for it was the face of the man

-that held him. A scant beard, made up of a few harsh, wiry hairs, partly

-covered the banker's cheeks and chin; his upper lip was clean-shaven,

-and his hair, scant but still black, was combed forward at the temples,

-and carefully carried over from one side of his head to the other,

-ineffectually trying to hide the encroaching baldness. His nose was

-large; his eyes narrow under his almost barren brows and red at the

-edges of the lids that lacked lashes.

-

-"What do you want?" said Dudley, never moving, as if to economize his

-energies, as he economized his words and every other thing of value in

-his narrow world.

-

-Marley did not know just what reply to make: this was a critical moment

-to him, and he must make no mistake.

-

-"I came," he began, "to--to ask you for a little advice."

-

-Dudley, at this, settled a little more into his chair, possibly a little

-more comfortably; he seemed to relax somewhat, and his eyes were not

-quite so narrow as they had been. But he blinked a moment, and then

-cautiously asked:

-

-"What about?"

-

-"Well, it's just this," Marley began, smiling persistently; "you see

-I've begun the study of law; I had intended to be a lawyer."

-

-"We've got plenty o' lawyers," said Dudley.

-

-"That's just the conclusion I have come to, and I was thinking somewhat

-of making a change. And so I thought I'd come and ask you, that is, your

-advice."

-

-Dudley, still cautious, made no reply, and Marley almost despaired of

-getting on easy terms. He began to wish he had not come; he might have

-known this, he said to himself, and his smile and the confidence with

-which he had come began to leave him. But he must make another effort.

-

-"You see, Mr. Dudley," he said, "I thought, as things are nowadays, I

-would have to wait years before I could really do anything in the law,

-and as I have my own way to make in the world, I thought, you know, I

-might get into something else."

-

-"What, for instance?" asked Dudley.

-

-"Well, I didn't exactly know; I had hardly thought it out,--that's why I

-came to you, knowing you to be a man of large affairs."

-

-Dudley had an instant's vision of his bank, of his stocks, and of the

-many farms all over Gordon County on which he held mortgages, but he

-checked his impulse; these very possessions must be guarded; people

-envied him them, and while this envy in one way was among the sources of

-his few joys, it nevertheless gave rise to covetousness which was

-prohibited by the tenth commandment.

-

-"So you want my advice, eh?" he asked, looking hard at Marley.

-

-"Yes, sir."

-

-"And that's all?" he asked suspiciously.

-

-"Well--any suggestions," Marley said.

-

-Dudley still hesitated. He continued to study Marley out of his little

-eyes. Presently he inquired, as if by way of getting a basis to start

-on:

-

-"You been to college, ain't you?"

-

-"Yes, sir," Marley answered promptly; "I graduated in June."

-

-"How long was you there?"

-

-"Why," Marley replied in some surprise, "the full four years."

-

-"Four years," Dudley repeated. "How old?"

-

-"Twenty-two."

-

-"Well, that's that much time wasted. If a young man's going to get along

-these times, and make anything of himself, he has to start early, learn

-business ways and habits. He's got to begin at the bottom, and feel his

-way up." The banker was speaking now with a reckless waste of words that

-was surprising. "The main thing at first is to work; it ain't the money.

-Now, when I come to Macochee, forty-seven years ago, I hadn't nothing.

-But I went to work, I was up early, and I went to bed early; I worked

-hard all day, I 'tended to business, and I saved my money. That's it,

-young man, that's the only way--up early, work hard, and save your

-money." Dudley leaned back in his chair to let Marley contemplate him.

-

-"But what did you work at? At first, I mean."

-

-"Why," said Dudley, as if in surprise, "at anything I could get. I wan't

-proud; I wan't 'fraid o' work."

-

-Marley leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and began twirling

-his hat in his hands. Then, thinking the attitude lacking in respect, he

-sat up again.

-

-"Then, I was careful of my habits," Dudley went on. "I never touched a

-bit o' tobacco, nor tasted a drop o' liquor in my life."

-

-He paused, and then:

-

-"Do you use tobacco?" he asked.

-

-"Sometimes," Marley hesitated to confess.

-

-"Cigarettes?"

-

-"Now and then."

-

-"Humph! Learned that at college, I suppose." Marley made no reply.

-

-"Well, you've started wrong, young man. That wan't the way I made

-myself. I never touched a drop of liquor nor tasted tobacco. I worked

-hard and God prospered me--yes, God prospered me."

-

-Dudley's voice sank piously.

-

-"Now, I'll tell you." He seemed to be about to impart the secret of it

-all. "When I was your age, I embraced religion, and I promised God that

-if he'd prosper me I'd give a tenth of all I made to the church; a

-tenth, yes, sir, a full tenth." The banker paused again as if making a

-calculation, and a trouble gathered for an instant at his hairless

-brows, but, as if by an effort, he smoothed them so that they became

-meek and submissive. And then he went on, as if he had found a species

-of relief:

-

-"But it was the best bargain I ever made. It paid; yes, it paid; I kep'

-my word, and the Lord kep' His; He prospered me."

-

-He had folded his hands, and sat blinking at Marley.

-

-"So my advice to you, young man, is to give up tobacco and all your

-other bad habits, to be up early in the morning, to work hard, and

-remember God in all your ways, and He shall direct thy paths."

-

-Dudley stirred, and moved his swivel chair a little, as if it were time

-to resume work. But Marley sat there.

-

-"That's my advice to you, young man," Dudley repeated, "and it won't

-cost you a cent." He said this generously, at the same time implying a

-hint of dismissal. Still Marley did not move, and Dudley eyed him in

-some concern. Marley saw the look and forced a smile.

-

-"I thank you, Mr. Dudley," he said, "for your advice. I am sure it is

-good. I was wondering, though," he went on, with a reluctance that he

-knew impaired the effect of his words, "if you wouldn't have something

-here in your bank for me--"

-

-At this Dudley suddenly seemed to shrink in size. His eyes became small,

-mere inflamed slits beneath his hairless brows, and he said:

-

-"I thought you said you wanted advice?"

-

-"Well, I did," Marley explained, "but I thought maybe--"

-

-He did not finish the sentence. He rose and stood, still twirling his

-hat in his hand. "And you have nothing, you know of nothing?"

-

-Dudley slowly shook his head from side to side, once or twice, having

-resumed his economical habits.

-

-"Good morning," Marley said, and left.

-

-As he went out, the cashier and the assistant cashier looked at him

-through the green wire screen. Then they lifted their heads from their

-tasks cautiously and exchanged surreptitious glances.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XVI

-

-                           LOVE AND A LIVING

-

-

-Marley was not surprised by the result of his visit to Selah Dudley. He

-made an effort to convince himself that there was truth in what Dudley

-had said to him, even if he could not remember exactly what it was that

-Dudley had said. He tried to put down the instinctive feeling of dislike

-he had for the old banker; he told himself that such a feeling was

-unworthy of him, if not unworthy of Dudley, and in thinking the matter

-over he tried to clear himself of all suspicion of envy or jealousy of

-Dudley's success. The whole town considered Dudley its leading man, and

-Marley tried so to consider him; and he tried to consider him in this

-light because he was a good man and not because he was a rich man, just

-as the town pretended to do. He wanted to talk about Dudley with some

-one, but he did not want to talk about him with Lavinia, because he felt

-a shame in his failure with Dudley that he feared Lavinia might share.

-He did talk with his father about him, but his father did not seem to be

-interested; he smiled his tolerant smile, but made no comment. And when

-Marley pressed him for an opinion of Dudley his father said:

-

-"They make broad their phylacteries."

-

-And that was all.

-

-However, Marley found Wade Powell willing to talk of Selah Dudley, as he

-was willing to talk of almost anything. Marley did not tell Powell that

-he had been to Dudley to ask for a position; he merely let it be

-understood that he had met the old man in the course of the day and

-talked with him casually.

-

-"By the way," he asked, as if the thought had just come to him, "how did

-Selah Dudley make his money?"

-

-"He didn't make it," Powell answered.

-

-"He didn't? Did he inherit it?"

-

-"No."

-

-"Then how did he get it?"

-

-"He gathered it."

-

-"Gathered it? I don't know what you mean."

-

-Powell laughed.

-

-"You don't? Well, there's a difference."

-

-"He wasn't in the army, was he?"

-

-"In the army! Great God!" Powell threw into his voice the contempt he

-could not find the word to express. "You think he'd risk his hide in the

-army? Well, I should say not! Though he would have been perfectly

-safe--" Powell said it as a parenthetical afterthought--"no bullet could

-ever have pierced his hide, and he had no blood to shed."

-

-Powell bit the end from his cigar and spat out the damp little pieces of

-tobacco viciously.

-

-"No, I'll tell you, Glenn," he said, "he stayed at home and got his

-start, as he calls it, by skinning the poor. Widows were his big game

-and he gathered a little pile that has been growing ever since. To-day

-he owns Gordon County."

-

-"He seems to be a prominent man in the church," ventured Marley.

-

-"He'll be a prominent man in hell," said Powell, angrily. And then he

-added thoughtfully: "My one regret in going there myself is that I'll

-have to see him every day."

-

-The most curious effect of Marley's visit to Dudley, however, was one he

-did not observe himself. Having been defeated in his plan to secure a

-place in the bank, he felt at first, with a certain consolation, that he

-still had the law to fall back on, and he returned to his studies. But

-he made little headway; once having decided to give up the law, the

-decision remained, and his mind was constantly occupied with schemes for

-securing a foothold in some other occupation. He considered, one after

-another, every possibility in Macochee, and as fast as he thought of

-some opening, he went for it, but invariably to find it either no

-opening at all, or else, if it were an opening, one that closed at his

-approach. Gradually he gave up his studies altogether, and sat idle, his

-book before him; but one day Powell said to him:

-

-"Say, Glenn, you're not getting along very fast, are you?"

-

-Marley started, and flushed with a sense of guilt.

-

-"Well, no," he admitted.

-

-"What's the matter, in love?"

-

-Marley blushed, from another cause this time, though the guilt remained

-in his face. But Powell instantly was gentle.

-

-"I beg your pardon," he said, "I was just joking, of course; I didn't

-mean to be inquisitive. You mustn't mind my boorishness."

-

-Marley looked at him gratefully and Powell, to whom any show of

-affection was confusing, turned away self-consciously. But Marley

-whirled his chair around toward Powell.

-

-"I am in love," he said. "I've wanted to tell you, but I--you know who

-she is."

-

-"Lavinia Blair?"

-

-"Yes. And that's what's troubling me," Marley went on. "I want to get

-married, and I can't. I can't," he repeated, "the law's too slow; I've

-realized it for a long while, but I tried to keep the fact away, I tried

-not to see it. But now I have to face it. Why," he said, rising to his

-feet, "it'll take a thousand years to get a practice in this town, and

-I'm not even admitted yet."

-

-He walked to and fro, his brows pinched together, his lower lip thrust

-out, his teeth nipping his upper one. Powell glanced at him, but said

-nothing. He knew human nature, this lawyer, and the fact made every one

-in the county tremble at the thought of his cross-examinations;

-sometimes he carried too far his love of laying souls bare, and as often

-hurt as helped his cause. He never had been able to turn his knowledge

-to much practical account; in a city he would have had numerous

-retainers as a trial lawyer, though few as a counselor. In Macochee he

-was out of place, and he chafed under a semi-consciousness of the fact.

-He waited, knowing that Marley would burst forth again.

-

-"I'll have to get a job," Marley said at that moment, bitterly, "and go

-to work; that's all." And then he laughed harshly. "Humph, get a

-job--that's the biggest job of all. What can I get here in Macochee, I'd

-like to know?"

-

-He halted and turned suddenly, fiercely, almost menacingly on Powell, as

-if he were the cause of his predicament.

-

-"I've told you already it's no place for you," said Powell, quietly.

-

-"But where'll I go?" Marley held out his hands with a gesture that was

-pleading, pathetic. Thus he waited for Powell's reply.

-

-Powell smoked thoughtfully for a moment and then began:

-

-"When I was going to the law school in Cincinnati, there was a young

-fellow in my class--a great friend of mine. He was poor, and I was

-poor--God! how poor we were!" Powell paused in this retrospect of

-poverty. "That was why we were such friends,--our poverty gave us a

-common interest. This fellow came from up in Hardin County; he was tall,

-lean and gawky, the worst jay you ever saw. When we had graduated, I

-supposed he would go home, maybe to Kenton--that was his county-seat.

-When we were bidding each other good-by--I'll never forget the day, it

-was June, hot as hell; and we had left the old law school in Walnut

-Street and were standing there by the Tyler-Davidson fountain in Fifth

-Street. I said, 'Well, we'll see each other once in a while; we won't be

-far apart.' He looked at me and said, 'I don't know about that.' 'Why?'

-I asked. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm going to Chicago.' I looked at him in

-surprise. He was out at the elbows then, and had hardly enough money to

-get home on. Then the ridiculousness of it struck me, and I laughed.

-'Why, you'll starve to death there!' I said. He only smiled." Powell

-paused, to whet Marley's appetite, perhaps, for the foregone dénouement.

-

-"That jay," Powell said, when he had allowed sufficient time to elapse,

-"that jay I laughed at is Judge Johnson, of the United States Circuit

-Court."

-

-The story saddened Marley. With his faculty of conceiving a whole drama

-at once, he caught in an instant the trials Judge Johnson had gone

-through before he won to his station of ease and honor; he saw the

-privations, the sacrifices, the hardships, the endless strivings,

-plottings, schemings; it wearied and depressed him; his frightened mind

-hung back, clung to the real, the present, the known, found a relief in

-picturing the seeming security of a man like Wade Powell, in a town

-where he knew everybody and was known by everybody. He shrank from

-hearing more of the judge; he wished to stay with his thought in

-Macochee.

-

-"How _do_ young men get a start in places like Macochee?" he asked, and

-then he added in despairing argument: "They _do_ stay, they _do_ get

-along somehow, they make livings, and raise families; the town grows and

-does business, the population increases, it doesn't die off."

-

-"Well," said Wade Powell, approaching the problem with the generalities

-its mystery demanded, "some of them marry rich women, but that industry

-is about played out now; the fortunes are divided up; some of them, most

-of them, are content to eke out small livings, clerking in stores and

-that kind of thing; about the only ones that get ahead any are traders;

-they barter around, first in one business, then in another; they run a

-grocery, then sell it out and buy a livery-stable; then they dabble in

-real estate a while; finally they skin some one out of a farm and then

-they go on skinning, a little at a time; by the time they're old, people

-forget their beginnings and they become respectable; then they join the

-church, like Selah Dudley."

-

-Powell stopped a moment, then he began again.

-

-"The lawyers get along God knows how; the doctors, well, they never

-starve, for people will get sick, or think they're sick, which is better

-yet; then there are a few preachers who are supported in a poor way by

-their congregations. When a man fails, he goes into the insurance

-business."

-

-Powell smoked contemplatively for a few moments.

-

-"Sometimes," he resumed presently, "I feel as if I were tottering on the

-verge of the insurance business myself."

-

-Marley looked at Powell, who had relapsed into silence, his head

-lowered, his eyes fixed in the distance, and there was something

-pathetic in the figure, or would have been, but for the humor that saved

-every situation for Powell. There was, however, something appealing, and

-something to inspire affection, too. Marley's gaze recalled Powell, and

-he glanced up with a smile.

-

-"I reckon you've gathered from my remarks," said Powell, "that I

-consider success chiefly from a monetary standpoint, but I don't. The

-main business of life is living, and the trouble with the world is that

-it is too busy getting ready to live to find the time for life; it has

-tied itself up with a thousand chains of its own forging and it has had

-to postpone living from time to time until most people have put the

-beginning of life at the gateway of death; meanwhile they're busy

-gathering things, like magpies, and those that gather the most are

-considered the best; they have come to think that people are divided

-into two classes, good and bad; the good are those who own, the bad

-those who don't, and the good think their business is to put down the

-bad. Now, here in Gordon County, we have about everything a man needs;

-the spring comes and the summer, and the autumn and the winter; the rain

-falls and the winds blow and the sun shines, and I've noticed that

-Lighttown gets about as much rain as Main Street, and Gooseville about

-as much wind as Scioto Street; the sun seems to shine pretty much alike

-on the niggers loafing in Market Space and on old Selah Dudley and Judge

-Blair, bowing like Christians to each other in the Square. The trees are

-the same color wherever they grow, and I don't see any reason why people

-shouldn't be happy if they'd only let one another be happy. Now, I would

-have lived, but I didn't have time. I thought when I began that I'd have

-to do as the rest were doing, get hold of things, and I saw that if I

-did, I'd have to get my share away from them; well, I made a failure of

-that, being too soft inside someway; that was all right too, but

-meanwhile I was wasting time, and putting off living--now it's too

-late."

-

-Marley looked at him in perplexity, not knowing how to take him.

-

-"I know," he said presently. "But what am I going to do? I can live all

-right, but I have to do better than that; I want to get married."

-

-"Married," mused Powell, "married! Well, I got married."

-

-Marley was interested. He had never heard Powell speak of his wife, and

-he feared what he was about to say; for that instant Powell's standing

-in his estimation trembled.

-

-"And that was the only sensible thing I ever did."

-

-Marley felt a great relief.

-

-"But I don't know that I did right by Mary; I didn't do her any good, I

-reckon; still, she's borne up somehow; I wish I had a sky full of

-sunlight to pour over her."

-

-Powell walked to his window, and looked across into the Court-House yard

-where the leaves were falling slowly from the Maple-trees. Marley hoped

-that he would go on, and say more of his wife, but he was silent.

-Presently he turned about.

-

-"Well, Glenn," he said; "I see you're stuck on staying in Macochee, and

-I don't blame you; and you want to get married, and that's all right.

-Maybe I can help you do it."

-

-"How?" said Marley, eagerly.

-

-"I've got a scheme."

-

-"What is it?"

-

-"Well, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. I'd better wait till I see

-whether it will or not before I tell you."

-

-He stood and smiled at Marley a moment, and then said: "You wait here."

-

-And he turned and left the office. Marley watched Powell's fine figure

-as he walked across the street toward the Court House, a great love of

-the man surging within him. He felt secure and safe; a new warmth spread

-through him. At the door of the Court House Marley saw him stop and

-shake hands with Garver, the sheriff. The two talked a moment, then

-turned and went down toward the big iron gate in Main Street, and

-disappeared. Marley waited until noon and then he went home to his

-dinner. He returned, but Powell did not come back to the office all the

-afternoon.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XVII

-

-                            THE COUNTY FAIR

-

-

-Marley did not see Wade Powell again for four days; a Sunday intervened,

-and Powell did not come back to the office until Monday morning. He came

-in with a solemn air upon him, and a new dignity that made impressive

-the seriousness with which he set to work at the pile of papers on his

-desk, as if he were beginning a new week with new resolutions. He was

-freshly shaved, and his hair had been cut; it was shorter at the sides

-and, against his rough sunburnt neck, showed an edge of clean white

-skin. His newly cropped hair gave him a strange, brisk appearance; his

-black clothes were brushed, his linen fresh.

-

-He spoke to Marley but a few times and then from the distant altitude of

-his new dignity. Once he sent Marley on an errand to Snider's drug store

-to buy a large blank book; he said he was going to keep an office docket

-after that. He worked on his new docket half the morning, then he

-carried the docket and the bundle of papers over to Marley's table,

-flung them down and asked Marley if he would not continue the work for

-him. He explained the system he had devised for keeping a record of his

-cases; it was intricate and complete, but in many of his cases the

-numbers and in some instances the names of opposing parties were

-missing; Powell told Marley to go over to the Court House and get the

-missing data from the clerk.

-

-"I've got to go out for a while," Powell explained. Then he hurried

-away; he seemed to be glad to escape from the office and the drudgery of

-the task he had set for himself.

-

-Powell's absence weighed on Marley; he was lonesome in the deserted

-office, and found himself wondering just where Powell was at each

-moment; he pictured him with his companions, Colonel Devlin, Marshall

-Scarff, Sheriff Garver, old man Brockton and Doc Hall; lately it had

-been rumored that George Halliday had been admitted to the merry group,

-and that they played poker nightly in a room in the Coleman Block. Then

-Marley would picture to himself Wade Powell's wife; he had never seen

-her, but he had an idea of her appearance, formed from no description of

-her, but created out of his own fancy. He pictured her as a graceful

-little woman, with a certain droop to her figure; but try as he would,

-he could not see her face; it was a blur to him, yet it gave somehow a

-certain expression of sweetness and patience; sometimes, by an effort,

-he could see her brow, and the hair above it; the hair was dark, and

-parted in the middle with some gray in its rather heavy mass.

-

-Marley could never discuss Wade Powell with any kind of satisfaction

-with Lavinia. When he spoke of him, she would smile and affect an

-interest, but he could detect the affectation, and he could detect,

-also, a certain distance in her attitude toward Wade Powell or the

-thought of him, which he ascribed to the influence of Judge Blair's

-dislike. Marley saw that Lavinia never would accept Wade Powell, and he

-had ceased to mention him except in a casual manner. For some like

-reason he had ceased to mention Wade Powell at home; he found that he

-had many views which he could not share with those nearest him, and his

-inner life at that time was somewhat lonely and aloof.

-

-He had not told Lavinia of Wade Powell's offer of assistance, nor had he

-spoken of it at home. In those four days he had thought much of it and

-built countless hopes upon it; he had thought of all the possibilities,

-and taken a fine delight in examining each one, working it out to its

-logical end in its effect upon Lavinia and him and upon their fortunes.

-He was disappointed when Wade Powell failed to refer to the subject

-again; he would have liked to discuss the disappointment with Lavinia;

-usually, out of her youthful optimism and faith in the life of which she

-was so innocent, she could reassure him; but of late he had had so many

-disappointments and had drawn so heavily on Lavinia's resources of

-comfort and hope that he had grown wary, almost superstitiously wary, of

-making any further drafts.

-

-When Monday came and Powell did not renew the subject, nor even say what

-his scheme had been, Marley concluded that Powell had forgotten all

-about it, and so he relinquished the hope with a sigh, and tried to

-forget it himself. He took up his studies once more; but he made poor

-headway; he saw with chagrin that he had not read ten pages of law in as

-many days, and what he had read he could not remember. When he tried to

-review it, the words had no meaning for him, nor could he wrest any from

-them, even though he ground his elbows in the table with the book

-between them and dug his fists into his hair.

-

-That was the week of the Gordon County fair. For a month every fence

-along the white pikes in the country had borne the bills, flaming from

-afar in red ink the date, "Oct. 15-31." There were, too, lithographs

-everywhere--on boards at the monument, at the Court House, on the town

-hall, on the covered bridge over Mad River--lithographs picturing the

-exciting finish of a trotting race, and a sedate concourse of fat

-cattle. The fair opened Monday, but it was understood that that day

-would be devoted to preparing and arranging the exhibits; the fair would

-not begin in earnest until Tuesday; the big day would be Thursday.

-

-Marley was glad that fair week had come, for the chance of novelty which

-it offered, and, too, for the excuse it gave him; he would not study

-that week, but in the general festivity try to forget the problem that

-so oppressed him. He would have liked to go to the fair every day, but

-he could not, for the expense, insignificant as it seemed to be to every

-one else in the county, was not insignificant to him. He went, however,

-on Wednesday with his father, who, with the love of horses he had

-inherited from the saddle-bag days of Methodism, recklessly attended the

-races. Marley thought that this visit would be his last, but on Thursday

-morning he met Lawrence in the Square.

-

-"Just the man I'm looking for!" said Lawrence.

-

-He was brisk, alert, important, and had an official air which was

-explained when Marley observed, on the lapel of his coat, the badge of

-blue ribbon that proclaimed an officer of the fair.

-

-"I have charge of the tickets this year," he said. "Want to go? I'll

-pass you in."

-

-Marley was glad enough to accept.

-

-"I'll have to go around to the office and tell Powell," he said. "I was

-away all day yesterday."

-

-"Oh, nonsense," replied Lawrence, "that won't make any difference; he's

-been full for two days. This is his big time."

-

-Marley had a pang as he saw with what small seriousness Lawrence

-regarded his relation to the law; it reflected, doubtless, the common

-attitude of the community toward him and his efforts.

-

-"I've got to hurry," Lawrence went on; "I've got a rig waiting here; you

-can ride out with me."

-

-It was one of the incomparable afternoons that autumn brings to Ohio;

-the retreating sun was flashing in the high, blue sky; the air was fresh

-and Marley felt it full of energy and hope. Lawrence drove rapidly

-through the throng of hurrying vehicles that crowded the road to the

-fair-grounds, stirring up a cloud of dust that covered everything with

-its white powder.

-

-Lawrence left him at the gate, being too full of business to engage in

-the weary search for pleasure, and Marley set out alone across the

-scorched and trampled turf for the grand stand, black with people for

-the races. He could hear the nervous clamor of the bell in the judges'

-stand, the notes of the hand-organ at the squeaking merry-go-round, the

-incessant thumping of the bass drum that made its barbaric music for the

-side-show, and the cries of venders, dominating all the voices of the

-thousands bent in their silly way on pleasure. Once, calling him back to

-the real, to the peace of the commonplace, he heard the distant tones of

-the town clock in the tower that stood, a mile away, above the autumnal

-trees.

-

-He pressed into the space between the grand stand and the whitewashed

-fence that surrounded the track; through the palings he could see the

-stoop-shouldered drivers, bent over the heavily breathing trotters they

-jogged to and fro; above him, in the grand stand, he could distinguish

-cries and laughs, now and then complete excited sentences, sometimes

-voices he knew. All around him the farmers, clumsy in their ready-made

-clothes and bearing their buggy whips as some insignia of office,

-solemnly watched the races and talked of horses.

-

-The sense of kinship with the crowd that had unerringly drawn Marley

-left him the moment he was in the crowd, and a loneliness replaced the

-sense of kinship. He looked about for some one he knew. He began, here

-and there, to recognize faces, just as he had recognized voices in the

-din above him; he began to analyze and to classify the crowd, and he

-laughed somewhat cynically when he saw numbers of politicians going

-about among the farmers, shaking their hands, greeting them effusively,

-calling them by their Christian names. Then suddenly he saw Wade Powell.

-The crowd at the point where Powell stood, nucleated with him as its

-center; by the way the men were laughing, and by the way Powell was

-trying not to laugh, Marley knew that he had been telling them one of

-his stories, and from the self-conscious, guilty expressions on certain

-of the faces, Marley knew that the story was probably one that should

-not have been told. Several countrymen hung on the edge of the group,

-not identifying themselves with it, yet anxious to have a look at Wade

-Powell, who enjoyed the fame of the county's best criminal lawyer.

-

-When Powell saw Marley he called to him, and when Marley drew near, he

-introduced him, somehow mysteriously, almost surreptitiously, to the man

-at his elbow. Powell's face was very red, and his eyes were brilliant.

-The mystery he put into his introduction was but a part of his manner.

-

-"This is Mr. Carman, of Pleasant Grove Township, Glenn," he said,

-bending over, as if no one should hear the name; and then he added, in a

-husky whisper: "He's our candidate for county clerk, you know."

-

-Marley saw something strange, forbidding, in Carman's face, but he could

-not tell what it was. It was a red, sunburnt face, closely shaven, with

-a short mustache burned by the sun; the smile it wore seemed to be fixed

-and impersonal. Plainly the man had spent his days out of doors, though,

-it seemed, not healthfully, for his skin was dry and hardened, and his

-neck thin and wrinkled; he seemed to have known the hard work and the

-poor nourishment of a farm. Marley wondered what was the matter with

-Carman's face. But Powell was drawing them aside.

-

-"Come over here," he was saying, "where we can be alone."

-

-He led them to a corner of the little yard; no one was near; they were

-quite out of the crowd which was pressing to the whitewashed picket

-fence, attracted by the excitement of the race for which the horses were

-just then scoring.

-

-"Now, Jake," Powell began, speaking to Carman, "this is the young man I

-was talking to you about."

-

-Carman, still smiling his dry meaningless smile, turned his face half

-away.

-

-"I reckon," Powell went on, "that I might be able to do you some good,

-if I took off my coat." Powell spoke with a pride in his own influence;

-Marley had never known him to come so near to boasting before.

-

-Carman was looking away; and Powell, his own eyes narrowed, was watching

-him closely. Once he winked at Marley, and Marley was mystified; he did

-not know what play was going on here; he looked from Carman to Powell,

-and back to Carman again. There was some strange fascination about

-Carman; Marley felt a slight relief when he discovered that there was

-something peculiar about Carman's eyes.

-

-"I haven't said anything to Marley about the matter, Jake," Powell said.

-"Maybe I'd better tell him. Hell! He might not want it--I don't know."

-

-Carman turned suddenly; his face had been in the shadow; now it came

-into the sunlight, and Marley saw that while the pupil of Carman's right

-eye contracted suddenly, the pupil of his left eye remained fixed; it

-was larger than the pupil of the right eye, which had shrunk to a

-pin-point in the sharp light of the sun. Marley looked closely, the left

-eye seemed to be swimming in liquid; it almost hurt Marley's eyes to

-look at it.

-

-"I've been telling Carman, Glenn," Powell was explaining, "that if he is

-elected--and gets into the Court House--"

-

-Marley looked at Powell expectantly.

-

-"I want him," Powell went on, "to make you his deputy."

-

-Marley saw it all in a flash; this was what Powell had meant that day a

-fortnight ago; he felt his great affection for Powell glow and warm;

-Lavinia would appreciate Powell after this. It meant salary, position, a

-place in which he might complete his law studies at his leisure; it

-meant a living, a home, marriage, Lavinia! He looked all his gratitude

-at Powell, who smiled appreciatively.

-

-Carman had turned his face away again, he was still smiling, and

-plucking now at his chin; Marley waited, and Powell finally grew

-impatient.

-

-"Well, Jake, what do you say?"

-

-Carman waited a moment longer, then slowly turned about. Marley watched

-him narrowly, he saw the pupil of his right eye contract, the pupil of

-the watery left eye remained fixed; then, for the first time, Carman

-looked steadily at Marley and for the first time he spoke.

-

-"Well," he said, and he stopped to spit out his tobacco, "you know I'm

-always ready to do a friend a good turn."

-

-Powell looked Carman over carefully a moment, and then he said,

-

-"All right, Jake."

-

-Just then there was a rush of hoofs, a shock of excitement, and they

-heard a loud yell:

-

-"Go!"

-

-And they rushed to the fence of the whitewashed palings.

-

-

-

-

-                             CHAPTER XVIII

-

-                           THE ROAD TO MINGO

-

-

-Lavinia sat rocking quietly back and forth, and stitched away with her

-colored silks on her tambourine frames, while Marley told her of the

-fortune Wade Powell had brought them. He told the story briefly, and he

-tried to tell it simply; he did not comment on Powell's kindness or

-generosity, but let his deeds speak for themselves in Powell's behalf.

-When he had done, Marley waited for Lavinia's comment, but she rocked on

-a moment and then held her tambourine frames at arm's length to study

-the sweet pea she was making. When she had done so, she dropped her

-sewing suddenly into her lap, and looking up, said:

-

-"He thinks everything of you, doesn't he?"

-

-"I believe he likes me," Marley said, as modestly as he could put it.

-

-"Who could help it?"

-

-Lavinia looked at Marley, and he leaned over, and took her hands.

-

-"I am glad you can't, sweetheart," he said.

-

-"Do you know," she went on, "I think it is because you have been kind

-and good to him--just as you are kind and good to every one. His life is

-lonely; he is an outcast, almost; no one cares for him, and he

-appreciates your goodness."

-

-Pity was the utmost feeling she could produce for Wade Powell out of her

-kindly heart. But Marley, though he could accept her homage to the full

-without embarrassment, could not acquiesce to this length, and he

-laughed at her.

-

-"Nonsense, Lavinia," he said. "You have the thing all topsy-turvy. It is

-Wade Powell who has been kind to me; it is he and not I who is good to

-every one. He has a heart brimful of the milk of human kindness. You

-have no idea, and no one has, of the good he does in a thousand little

-ways. He tries to hide it all; he acts as if he were ashamed of it, but

-there are hundreds of people in Macochee who worship him, and would be

-ready to die for him, if it would help him any. Don't think he has no

-friends! He has them by the score--of course, they are all poor; I

-reckon that's why they are generally unknown."

-

-"But isn't he cruel?"

-

-Marley's eyes widened in astonishment.

-

-"I mean," Lavinia said correctively, "isn't he kind of sarcastic?"

-

-"Well," Marley admitted, "he is that at times. I think he tries to hide

-his better qualities; I think he tries to cloak his finer nature with a

-rough garb. Perhaps it is because he is really so sensitive. But he is,

-to my mind, a truly great man. He is a sort of tribune of the people."

-

-"But, Glenn, what about his drinking?"

-

-"Well, that's the trouble," Marley said, shaking his head. "If he had

-let liquor alone he'd have been away up."

-

-Lavinia was silent a moment, her brow was knit in little wrinkles.

-

-"Glenn," she said presently, "I have been thinking."

-

-"Well?"

-

-"That with your influence you might reform him--out of his liking for

-you, don't you know?"

-

-She raised her blue eyes. He laughed outright, and then took her face

-between his two hands.

-

-"You dear little thing!" he said, with the patronage of a lover.

-

-Lavinia regained her dignity.

-

-"But couldn't you?" she demanded.

-

-"Why, dear heart," Marley said, "he would think it presumption. I

-wouldn't dare."

-

-Lavinia shook her head in the hopelessness of the reformer, and took up

-her tambourine frames again with a sigh.

-

-"It's a pity," she said, relinquishing the subject with the hope, "it's

-such a pity."

-

-"But you haven't told me what you think of the scheme."

-

-"You know, dear, that whatever you think best I think best."

-

-Marley was disappointed.

-

-"You don't seem to be very enthusiastic over the prospect," he

-complained. "I thought you'd be glad as I to know that I can at last

-make a place for myself in the world--and a home and a living for you."

-

-Lavinia looked up.

-

-"I never had any doubt of that, Glenn," she said simply.

-

-He saw the trust and confidence she had in him, a trust and a confidence

-he had never felt himself, and had never before been wholly aware of in

-her. He saw that she had never shared those fears which had so long

-oppressed him, and into his love there came a devout thankfulness. He

-felt strong, hopeful, confident, victorious. He had a sudden fancy that

-it would be like this when they were married; he would sit at his own

-hearth, with a fire crackling merrily, and the rain and wind beating

-outside--for the first time he could indulge such a fancy; it allowed

-him, now that his future was assured, to come up to it and to take hold

-of it; it became a reality.

-

-The judge was not at home that night. Now and then Marley could hear

-Mrs. Blair speak a word to Connie and Chad, over their lessons in the

-sitting-room; school had commenced, and Connie having that year entered

-the High School had taken on a new dignity, in consequence of which she

-was treating Chad with a divine patience that brought its own peace into

-the Blair household.

-

-They talked for a long time of their plans. Marley would take his new

-place in December when the new county clerk went into office, and he

-told Lavinia all the advantages of the position. It would extend his

-acquaintance, it would give him a familiarity with court proceedings

-that otherwise he could not have acquired in years. He meant to study

-hard, and be admitted to the bar. They could have a little cottage and

-live simply and economically; he would save part of his salary, and when

-he hung out his shingle he would have enough money laid by to support

-them, modestly, until he could establish himself in a practice. He laid

-it all before her plainly, convincingly. He was charmed with the

-practicability of the plan, with its conservatism, its common sense.

-They might as well be married.

-

-"Can't we?" he asked. He trembled as he asked; his happiness had never

-come so close before.

-

-Lavinia dropped her embroidery frames into her lap and looked up at him.

-The question in her eyes was almost born of fear.

-

-"Right away?" exclaimed Lavinia.

-

-"Well, almost right away," Marley answered. "Sometime this winter,

-anyway."

-

-"This winter! So soon?"

-

-"So soon!" Marley repeated her words, almost in mockery.

-

-"But we mustn't be married in the winter," she said, "we've always

-planned to be married in June--our month, you know."

-

-"What's the use of waiting?"

-

-"But papa and mama--"

-

-This quick rushing to the parental cover, this clinging to the habit of

-years struck a jealousy through Marley's heart. His face fell and he

-looked hurt.

-

-"Can't we, dear?" he pleaded.

-

-Lavinia looked at him, and she said shyly:

-

-"If you say so, Glenn."

-

-They were solemn in their joy and made their plans in detail. They would

-be married quietly, Lavinia said, and at home. Doctor Marley would

-perform the ceremony, and Marley was touched by this recognition of his

-father.

-

-The fall worked a new energy in Marley, and, with the assurance that his

-labors were now soon to bear fruit, he found that he could study better

-than ever before. He worked faithfully over his books every morning, and

-he worked so hard that he felt himself entitled to a portion of each

-afternoon. He would leave the office at four o'clock. Lavinia would be

-waiting for him, and they would try to get out of sight before Connie

-returned from school. She might be expected any moment to come slowly

-down Ward Street entwined with one of her school-girl friends. They did

-not like, somehow, to meet Connie. The smile she gave them was apt to be

-disconcerting. They met smiles in the faces of others they encountered

-in their walks, but they were of a quality more kindly than Connie's

-smile.

-

-They had walked one afternoon to the edge of town where Ward Street

-climbed a hill and became the road to Mingo. At their feet lay the

-little fields, in the distance they could see a man plowing with two

-white horses; off to the right lay the water-works pond, gleaming in the

-afternoon sun.

-

-"What are you thinking of?" Marley said.

-

-"I was thinking that it would be nice to live in the country."

-

-"I was thinking that very thing myself!" exclaimed Marley. Their eyes

-met, and they thrilled over this unity in their thoughts. It was

-marvelous to them, mysterious, prophetic.

-

-"Some day I could buy a farm," Marley said; "out that way."

-

-"Yes," Lavinia replied, "away off there, beyond those low trees. Do you

-see?"

-

-She pointed, but Marley did not look in the direction of the trees; he

-looked at her finger. It was so small, so round, so white. He bent

-forward, and kissed the finger.

-

-"Oh, but you must look where I'm pointing," said Lavinia.

-

-They drew closely together. Marley took Lavinia's hand and they stood

-long in silence.

-

-"We could have a country home there," Marley said after a while, "with a

-hedge about it and stables and horses and dogs. It would be close to

-town; I could go in in the morning and out again in the afternoon."

-

-"And I could drive you in, and then come for you in the afternoon--when

-court adjourned."

-

-"Oh, I would have a man to drive me," said Marley.

-

-"But couldn't I ride in beside you?"

-

-"Yes; you could sit beside me, on the back seat; we'd have an open

-carriage."

-

-"A victoria!" exclaimed Lavinia. "It would be the only one in Macochee!"

-

-"Is that what they call them?"

-

-"Victorias?"

-

-"Yes."

-

-"You know, with a low seat behind and a high seat for the driver. You

-have a green cushion for your feet. You would look so handsome in one,

-Glenn. You would sit very erect and proud, with your hands on a cane.

-You would have white hair then."

-

-"We would be old?" he asked in some dismay.

-

-"No, no," said Lavinia, trying to reconcile her dreams, "not old

-exactly. But I dote on white hair. It's so distinguished for a lawyer

-with a country home. Of course we'll have to get old sometime."

-

-"We'll grow old together, dear."

-

-"Yes," she whispered, "and think of the long years of happiness!"

-

-They stood and gazed, looking down the long vista of years that

-stretched before them as smooth and peaceful as the white road to Mingo.

-

-A subtile change was passing over the face of the road; shadows were

-stealing toward it, and it was growing gray. The trees that still were

-green were darkening to a deeper green, but the colors of those that had

-changed flamed all the brighter. The sun shone more golden on the shocks

-of corn, the sky was glowing pink in the west, the water-works pond was

-glistening as the sun's shafts struck it more obliquely. A fine powder

-hung in the peaceful air.

-

-"How beautiful the fall is!" said Lavinia.

-

-"Yes, I love it," said Marley. "But do you know, dear, that I never

-liked it before? It always seemed sad to me. But you have taught me to

-love many things. You don't know all that you have done for me!"

-

-She stood in her blue dress, with her hands folded before her. Marley

-looked at her hands, and at her white throat, and at her hair, its brown

-turned to a golden hue by the clear light; then he looked into her eyes.

-A sudden emotion, almost religious in its ecstasy, came over him. He

-bent forward.

-

-"Oh!" he exclaimed. "Do you know how beautiful you are! I worship you!"

-

-"Don't, Glenn," she said, "don't say that!" The reflection of a

-superstitious fear lay in her eyes.

-

-"Why?" he said defiantly. "It's all true. You are my religion."

-

-"You frighten me," she said.

-

-Marley laughed.

-

-"Why!" he exclaimed, "there's nothing to fear. Isn't our future assured

-now?"

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XIX

-

-                                 WAKING

-

-

-Carman was inducted into office the first Monday in December, quietly,

-as the _Republican_ said, as though it reflected credit on the new

-county clerk as a man who modestly avoided the demonstration that might

-have been expected under such circumstances. Marley, in the hope of

-seeing his own name, eagerly ran his eyes down the few lines that were

-devoted to the occurrence, but his name was not there, the

-_Republican's_ reporter, as he felt, being a man who lacked a sense of

-the relative importance of events.

-

-Marley had taken no part in the campaign, though Wade Powell wished him

-to, and suggested every now and then that he speak at some of the

-meetings that were being held in the country schoolhouses. Powell said

-it would be good practice for him in a profession where so much talking

-has to be done, and he found other reasons why Marley should do this, as

-that it would extend his acquaintance, and give him a standing with the

-party; but, though Marley was always promising, he was always

-postponing; the thought of standing up and speaking to the vast

-audiences his imagination was able to crowd into a little school-room

-filled him with fear, and he never could bring himself to consent to any

-definite time. Besides this, he could not find an evening he was willing

-to spend away from Lavinia.

-

-When election was over, he expected that he would hear from Carman, but

-he had no word from him. Several times he was on the point of mentioning

-the subject to Wade Powell, but somehow, with a reticence for which he

-reproached himself, he could not bring himself to do it. He watched the

-papers closely, but he found it quite as hard to find in them any

-information about Carman as on any other subject, except, possibly, the

-banal personalities of the town as they related themselves to the coming

-and going of the trains.

-

-But at last, on the day it had occurred to the reporter to chronicle the

-fact that Carman had been inducted into office, the little item struck

-Marley sadly; he felt a sense of detachment from Carman; he could not

-altogether realize that intimate relationship to Carman in his new

-official position that he felt belonged to one who was to be Carman's

-deputy. In his imagination he saw Carman shambling about in the dingy

-room where the county clerk kept the records of the court, his knees

-unhinging loosely at each step, his shoulders bent, his hands in his

-trousers pockets, his right eye squinting here and there observantly,

-the left fixed, impervious to light and shadow, to all that was going on

-in the world. He wondered if Carman, as he looked about, had been

-thinking in any wise of him or had seen him as a part of the place where

-his life was to be lived for the next three years.

-

-Marley read the paper at supper time; in the evening he went to see

-Lavinia. She too had read the paper.

-

-"I know," she said simply, and he was grateful for her quick intuition.

-"Have you seen him?"

-

-"No."

-

-"Are you going to?"

-

-"Would you?"

-

-"Why, certainly, at once."

-

-Marley went to the Court House the first thing in the morning. He feared

-he might have arrived too early, but Carman had the virtue that goes

-farther perhaps than any other in the affections and approval of men, he

-rose early. He had been at his office since long before seven o'clock.

-

-Marley found the new county clerk at his desk, obviously ready for

-business. The desk was clean, with a cleanness that was rather a

-barrenness than an order. The ink-wells, the pens, with their shining

-new steel points, the fresh blotters, all were laid on the clean pad

-with geometrical exactness. The pigeon holes were empty, but they were

-all lettered as if the mind of the new county clerk had grappled with

-the future, come off victorious, and provided for every possible

-emergency, though there were certain contingencies that had impressed

-him as "Miscellaneous."

-

-Carman looked up with the obliging expression of the new public

-official, but Marley's heart instantly sank with a foreboding that told

-him he might as well turn about then and go. It was plain that Carman

-saw nothing in the call beyond a mere incident of the day's work.

-

-Marley took a chair near Carman's desk. He looked at Carman once, and

-then looked instantly away; the eye that lacked the power of

-accommodation was fixed on him, and it made him nervous.

-

-"Do you remember me, Mr. Carman?" asked Marley; and then fearing the

-reply he hastened to add: "I'm Glenn Marley; Mr. Powell introduced me to

-you out at the fair-grounds last fall."

-

-"Yes, I remember," said Carman.

-

-"I suppose you know what I came for?"

-

-Carman's right eye widened somewhat in an expression of mild surprise.

-

-"You know," urged Marley, "the clerkship."

-

-"What clerkship was that?"

-

-"Why, don't you know? The chief clerkship, I reckon."

-

-"Here?"

-

-"Why, yes. Don't you remember?"

-

-Carman's right eye wore a puzzled look.

-

-"Don't you remember?"

-

-"Well, you've got me," said Carman, with a little laugh of apology.

-

-"Why, I understood," Marley went on, "that in the event of your election

-I was to have a position here."

-

-"What as?"

-

-"Why--as chief deputy."

-

-That right eye of Carman's was fixed on him questioningly.

-

-"Chief deputy?" he said finally. "Here--in my office?"

-

-"Why, yes," said Marley. "Don't you remember?"

-

-The question in the right eye had given way to a surprise that was

-growing in Carman's mind, and spreading contagiously to a surprise,

-deeper and more acute, in Marley's mind. The eye had something

-reproachful in its steady stare. Marley leaned over impulsively.

-

-"Why, surely you haven't forgotten--that day out at the fair-grounds,

-when Mr. Powell introduced me to you? I understood, I always understood

-that I was to have the place. I never mentioned it to you afterward, I

-didn't like to bother you, you know. I waited along, feeling that

-everything was all right. But when election was over--and afterward,

-when you took your office, and I didn't hear anything--I thought I'd

-come around and see you."

-

-Despite the sinister left eye, Marley leaned close to Carman and waited.

-Carman was long in bringing himself to speak. Even then he did not seem

-to be sure of the situation he was dealing with.

-

-"You say you understood you was to have a job under me as chief clerk?"

-

-"Why, yes," replied Marley.

-

-"Who'd you understand it from, me or Wade Powell?"

-

-"Well--" Marley hesitated, "I thought I understood it from you; I

-certainly understood it from Mr. Powell."

-

-"You say you got the idea from something I said out at the

-fair-grounds?"

-

-"Yes, sir, at the fair-grounds."

-

-Carman turned away and knitted his brows.

-

-"At the fair-grounds," he said presently, as though talking more to

-himself than to Marley. "The fair-grounds, h-m. Yes, I do remember--"

-

-Marley's heart stirred with a little hope.

-

-"I do remember seeing you there, and talking to you. But I don't

-remember making you any promises. Did you ask me?"

-

-"No; Mr. Powell did that."

-

-"And what did I say?"

-

-"Well," Marley answered, "I can't recall your exact words, but I got the

-impression, and so did Mr. Powell, I'm sure, that it was all right, I--I

-counted on it."

-

-"Well, say, Glenn," he said; "I'm awfully sorry, honest I am. I remember

-now, come to think of it, that Wade did say something like that, and

-maybe I said something to lead you to think I'd do it; I don't say I

-didn't--I don't just remember. But I reckon you've banked more on what

-Wade told you than on what I did. Course, I reckon I didn't turn you

-down--a feller never does that in a campaign, you know. But Wade takes a

-lot o' things for granted in this life."

-

-He smiled indulgently, as if Powell's weaknesses were commonly known and

-understood.

-

-"I reckon you relied too much on what Wade told you," Carman went on.

-His right eye was fixed on Marley, but Marley did not return the look.

-He had turned half-way round and thrown his arm over the back of his

-chair. He looked out the window, his eyes vacant and sad. He was

-thinking of Lavinia, of their hopes and plans, of the little home that

-had become almost a reality to them; the trees in the Court-House yard

-held their gaunt limbs helplessly up against the cold December day; the

-ugly clouds were hurrying desperately across the sky; he thought of the

-little law office across the street, with the dusty law books lying on

-the table, and the hopelessness of it all overwhelmed him. But there

-beside him Carman still was speaking:

-

-"It's like Wade," he was saying. "I'm sorry, derned if I hain't."

-

-Marley scarcely heard him. He was looking ahead. How many years--

-

-"He hadn't ought to of done it," Carman was going on; "no, sir, he

-hadn't ought."

-

-How many years, Marley was thinking, would they have to wait now? Would

-Lavinia be lost with all the rest? Ought he to ask her to wait any

-longer? But Carman kept on:

-

-"I've got all my arrangements made now, you see."

-

-He swept his arm about the office where the few clerks were bending over

-the big records in which they were copying the pleadings they could not

-understand. Marley did not see; he saw nothing but the ruin of all his

-hopes. It was still in there; the atmosphere held the musty odor of a

-public office; the clock ticked; once a stamping machine clicked sharply

-as a clerk marked a filing date on some document. And then a great

-disgust overwhelmed him, a disgust with himself for being so fatuous, so

-credulous. He had taken so much for granted, he had acted as a child,

-not as a man, and he felt a hatred for himself, he felt almost like

-striking himself.

-

-"I guess I've been a fool," he said suddenly, rising from his chair.

-

-"No, you haven't neither," said Carman, "but Wade Powell has; he had no

-business--"

-

-Marley did not wait to hear Carman finish his sentence. Shame and

-mortification were the final aspects of his defeat; he put on his hat,

-drew it down over his eyes and stalked away. Carman looked at him as he

-disappeared through the lofty door. The pupil of his right eye widened

-as he looked, and when Glenn had passed from his sight he turned to his

-desk, and began to rearrange the tools to which he was so unaccustomed.

-

-

-

-

-                               CHAPTER XX

-

-                             HEART OF GRACE

-

-

-Marley sighed in relief when he went up the steps of the Blair house

-that evening. Somehow he had got through the long, desolate day. He was

-sore from his great defeat, but the worst, at any rate, was over; the

-pang had been sharp, but now the pain had been dulled. He had spent the

-day in the office. Wade Powell had been in and out, but never once had

-he spoken of the clerkship, and Marley was too deep in humiliation to

-mention it. His one consolation was in the fact that he had never told

-any one of his prospect, not even his own mother; it had been a secret

-which he and Lavinia had shared luxuriously; though, as Marley now

-looked back on their joy, he realized that what had kept him from

-telling any one was a prudent skepticism, a lack of faith in the

-possibility of human happiness, an inherited dread of the calamity that

-stalks every joy.

-

-Lavinia flung the hall door wide for him before he could ring the bell.

-

-"What is the matter?"

-

-"How did you know anything was?" he asked.

-

-"Why," she exclaimed, "I could tell the minute I heard your step. Tell

-me--what is it?"

-

-Marley, ever sensitive to atmospheres, instantly felt the peace of the

-household. The glow from the living-room, a quiet voice speaking a

-commonplace word now and then, told him that Mrs. Blair was there with

-Connie and Chad, and he knew the children were at their lessons; he

-caught the faint odor of a cigar, and he knew that Judge Blair was in

-his library reading peacefully of the dead and silent past, whose men

-had left all their troubles in the leaves of printed books; all round

-him life was flowing on, unconsciously, and normally; the tumult and

-strife in his own soul were nothing to the world. All this flashed on

-him in an instant--and there was Lavinia, standing before him, her white

-brow knit in perplexity.

-

-"Tell me," she was saying, "what it is."

-

-"Well, I don't get the job, that's all."

-

-He felt a momentary savage pleasure in the pain he inflicted, justifying

-it in the thought that he eased his own suffering by giving it to

-another. Then as quickly he repented, and felt ashamed.

-

-"Is that all?" she said. She had come close to him, smiling in her

-sympathy, and then lifting a hand to his forehead.

-

-"Don't do that," she said, as if she would erase the scowl.

-

-When they were seated he gave her the details of his meeting with

-Carman, and with the recital of his disappointment its sharpness was

-repeated. He leaned over, his elbows on his knees, and clutched his hair

-in his fists. For an instant a kind of relief came to Lavinia, a relief

-that a crisis in her life had been postponed, a crisis from which,

-instinctively, she had shrunk. Her life could go on for a while as it

-had always gone on; change, which mortals dread, was delayed. Then in

-another moment her sympathy went out to him; she was on the floor at his

-knees, her arms about him.

-

-"Don't, dear, don't," she pleaded. "Why, it is nothing. What does it

-matter? What does anything matter, so long as we have each other?"

-

-She stroked his hair, she called him by all her endearing names. She

-tried to take his hands from his face, that she might get him to look at

-her. But he resisted.

-

-"No," he said. "I'm no good; I'm a failure; I'm worse than a failure.

-I'm a fool, a poor, weak, silly fool."

-

-"Hush, Glenn, hush!" she whispered, as if he were uttering blasphemies.

-"You must not, you must not!"

-

-She shook him in a kind of fear.

-

-"Look at me!" she said. "Look at me!"

-

-He remained obdurate, slowly shaking his head from side to side.

-

-"Look at me!" Lavinia repeated. "Don't you see--don't you see that--I

-love you?"

-

-A change came over him, subtile, but distinct. Slowly he raised his

-head, and then he put his arms about her and held her close, and

-gradually a comfort stole over him,--a comfort so delicious that he felt

-himself hardly worthy, because he now saw that all through the day he

-had had a subconsciousness that it would come to him at evening, and

-that he had somehow exaggerated his own grief in order to make this

-certain comfort the sweeter when it came.

-

-It seemed to Marley, after he and Lavinia had sat there for a while,

-that he had come out of some nightmare; sanity returned, things assumed

-once more their proper proportions and relations to each other. He found

-himself smiling, if not laughing just yet, and with Lavinia's hope and

-confidence the future opened to him once more. Now and then, of course,

-his disappointment would roll over him as a great wave, and once he said

-ruefully:

-

-"But think of the little home we were going to have!"

-

-"But we're going to have it," Lavinia replied, smiling on him, "we're

-going to have it, just the same!"

-

-"But we'll have to wait!"

-

-"Well, we're young," said Lavinia, "and it won't be so very long."

-

-"But I wanted it to be in the spring."

-

-"May be it will be, who knows?" Lavinia could smile in this reassurance,

-now that she knew it could not be in the spring.

-

-They discussed their future in all its phases, with the hope that

-Lavinia could so easily inspire in him; Marley was to keep on with his

-law studies; there was nothing else now to do--unless something should

-turn up--there was always that hope.

-

-"And it will, you'll see," said Lavinia.

-

-They discussed, too, Carman and Wade Powell. Marley thought that Lavinia

-might return to her old severity with Powell; when he expected her to do

-this, he was preparing to defend Powell; when she did not, but was

-generous with him, and urged Marley to reflect that he had done all he

-had done out of a spirit of kindness, Marley was disposed to be severe

-with Powell himself. Carman, they agreed, had acted handsomely; they

-could not find cause to blame him.

-

-"No," said Marley, "he treated me all right; I believe he was really

-sorry for me."

-

-And then, at the thought of Carman's having pity for him, his rebellion

-flamed up again.

-

-"It's humiliating, that's what it is. Wade Powell had no business making

-a monkey of me in that way; though it doesn't take much to make a monkey

-of me; I had the job almost completed myself, just waiting for some one

-to come along and put the finishing touches on. And Wade Powell did

-that!"

-

-Marley spoke in the sardonic humor the wounded and beaten spirit likes

-to employ in dealing with itself. But Lavinia hushed him.

-

-"You just can not talk that way about yourself, Glenn," she declared

-with her finest air of ownership. "I won't let you."

-

-"Well, it's so humiliating," he said.

-

-"Why, no, it can't be that," Lavinia argued. "You can not feel

-humiliated. You have done nothing that need cause you any humiliation.

-We are the only ones who can humiliate ourselves; nothing but our own

-actions can humiliate us; no one else can."

-

-Lavinia had a smiling little triumph in her own philosophy, but she

-quickly compromised it by an inconsistency.

-

-"Besides, no one else knows about it."

-

-"No," Marley agreed thoughtfully, and without noticing her

-inconsistency. "No one else knows anything about it. We have that to be

-thankful for, anyway."

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXI

-

-                             CHRISTMAS EVE

-

-

-Lawrence was arranging for a grand ball in the Odd Fellows' Hall, on

-Christmas Eve, and he had, as he came around to the office one day to

-assure Marley, counted him and Lavinia in. Marley, glad enough to close

-the law-book he was finding more and more irksome, listened to

-Lawrence's enthusiasm for a while, but said at last:

-

-"I'm afraid I can't go."

-

-"Why not? Lavinia will want to go; she always does."

-

-"I know that," Marley admitted, "but I can't, that's all."

-

-Lawrence looked at him intently for a moment.

-

-"Say, Glenn, what's the matter with you?" he said. "Anything been going

-wrong lately? You look like you were in the dumps."

-

-Marley shook his head with a negative gesture that admitted all Lawrence

-had said.

-

-"You ain't fretting over that job, are you?"

-

-"What job?"

-

-Marley looked up suddenly.

-

-"Why, with Carman."

-

-"How'd you know?"

-

-"Oh, everybody knows about that," Lawrence replied with a light air that

-added to Marley's gloom; "but what of it? I wouldn't let that cut me up;

-come out and show yourself a little more! You don't want to keep Lavinia

-housed up there, away from all the fun that's going on, do you? Mayme

-and I were talking about it the other night; you and Lavinia haven't

-been to a thing for months; it isn't right, I tell you."

-

-Marley looked sharply at Lawrence for a minute, and Lawrence marking the

-resentment in his eyes, hastened on:

-

-"Don't get mad, now; I don't mean anything. I'm only saying it for your

-good. I think you need a little shaking up, that's all."

-

-"Lavinia can do as she likes," Marley said with dignity. "I shall not

-hinder her; I never have."

-

-"Well, don't get sore now, old man; I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.

-The holidays are here and you want to cut into the game; it's a time to

-forget your troubles and have a little fun; you've only got one life to

-live; what's the use of taking it so seriously?"

-

-Marley looked at Lawrence with a genuine envy for an instant, as at a

-man who never took anything in life very seriously; he looked at the new

-overcoat Lawrence held over his knee, showing its satin lining; and

-then, reflecting that Lawrence's father had left with his estate a block

-of bank stock which had given Lawrence his position in the bank,

-Marley's impatience with him returned and he said:

-

-"Oh, it's easy enough for you to talk; if you were in my place you might

-find it different."

-

-"That's all right," Lawrence went on, a smile on his freckled face. "You

-just come to the party; it'll cost you only five, and Lavinia would like

-it. I know that. So do you."

-

-Marley did know it; and he felt a new disgust with himself that remained

-with him long after Lawrence had put on his new overcoat and left. He

-reproached himself bitterly, and he told himself that the best thing he

-could do would be to go away somewhere, and not tell Lavinia, or

-anybody.

-

-"I'm only in her way, that's all," he thought as he opened his law-book,

-and bent it back viciously, so that it would stay open.

-

-Ever since the fiasco of his plans as to a place with Carman, he had

-been seeking consolation in a new resolution to keep on patiently in the

-law; but it was a consolation that he had to keep active by a constant

-contemplation of himself as a young man who was making a brave and

-determined fight against heavy odds. It was difficult to sustain this

-heroic attitude in his own eyes and at the same time maintain that

-modesty which he knew would become him best in the eyes of others. The

-approach of the holiday season, the visible preparations on every hand

-and the gay spirits everywhere apparent had isolated him more than ever,

-and he had felt his alienation complete whenever he went to see Lavinia

-and found the whole Blair family in an excitement over their own

-festival. Marley would have liked to make Lavinia handsome gifts, but

-his debts were already large, relatively, and he rose to heights of

-self-denial that made him pathetic to himself, when he decided that he

-could give her nothing. Now that Lawrence was getting up a ball to which

-he knew Lavinia would like to go, as she had always gone to the balls

-that were not so frequent in Macochee as Lawrence wished they might be,

-he felt his humiliation deeper than ever. He put the matter honestly to

-Lavinia, however, and she said promptly:

-

-"Why, I wouldn't think of going."

-

-She looked up at him brightly, and then in an instant she looked down

-again. She relished the nobility of the attitude she had so promptly

-taken, but the woman in her prevailed over the saint, and told what a

-moment before she had determined not to tell:

-

-"I've already declined one invitation."

-

-She saw the look of pain come into Marley's eyes, and instantly she

-regretted.

-

-"You have?" he said.

-

-"Why, yes." She looked at him with her head turned to one side; her face

-wore an expression he did not like to see.

-

-It was on Marley's lips to ask who had invited her, but his pride would

-not let him do that; somehow a sense of separation fell suddenly between

-them. He examined with deep interest the arm of his chair.

-

-"Well," he began presently, "I wouldn't have you stay away on my

-account, you know." He looked up suddenly. "Please don't stay away,

-Lavinia. I'd like to have you go."

-

-There was contrition in her voice as she almost flew to reply:

-

-"Why, you dear old thing, it was only George Halliday who asked me; and

-when I told him I wouldn't go he was actually relieved; he said he

-didn't want to go himself; he hates our little functions out here, you

-know, and has ever since he came back from Harvard. I suppose he was

-used to so much more in Cambridge!" Lavinia had a sneer in her tone, and

-it took on a shade of irritation as she added: "He asked me only because

-he was sorry for me."

-

-"Yes, sorry for you," Marley repeated bitterly. "That's another thing

-I've done for you."

-

-"Please don't, dear," said Lavinia, "don't let yourself get bitter.

-It'll be all right. We'll spend Christmas Eve here at home and have ever

-so much more fun by ourselves."

-

-Mrs. Blair told Marley that she wished Lavinia might go to the ball; her

-father wished it, too. Mrs. Blair told him that she could easily get

-George Halliday to take her,--their lifelong intimacy with the Hallidays

-permitted that. Marley assured her that he wished Lavinia to accept

-Halliday's invitation, but that she would not do so.

-

-"I'd take her myself," he added, "only I can't dance, and--I have no

-money. I'd like to have her go, if it would give her pleasure."

-

-"I know you would, you dear boy," said Mrs. Blair, laying her hand on

-his shoulder in her affectionate way.

-

-Mrs. Blair urged Lavinia to go, and so did Marley, and when he saw that

-she was determined not to go, he urged her all the more strongly,

-because, now that he was sure of her position, he could so much more

-enjoy his own disinterestedness and magnanimity. They desisted when

-Lavinia complained that they were making her life miserable.

-

-Though Marley could deny Lavinia the dance, he found, after all, that he

-could not deny himself the distinction of giving her a Christmas

-present. His heroic attitude gradually broke under the temptation of

-Hoffman's jewelry store, glittering with its holiday display. Marley

-already owed Hoffman for Lavinia's ring, but like most of the merchants

-in Macochee, Hoffman had to do business on an elastic credit, if he

-wished to do any business at all, and Marley, after many pains of

-selection, did not have much difficulty in inducing Hoffman to let him

-have the pearl opera-glasses he finally chose in the despair of thinking

-of anything better.

-

-The opera-glasses might have atoned for the deprivation of the ball, had

-Marley been able to think of them with any comfort. The delight Lavinia

-expressed in a gift she could never use in Macochee, and the enthusiasm

-with which Connie admired them, made him nervous and guilty. Connie had

-temporarily foregone her claims to young-ladyhood, and was a child again

-for a little while. Her excitement and that of Chad should have made any

-Christmas Eve merry, but it was not a merry Christmas Eve for Marley.

-

-As Lavinia and he sat in the parlor they caught now and then, or

-imagined they caught, the strains of the orchestra that was playing for

-the dancers in the Odd Fellows' Hall, and they were both conscious that

-life would be tolerable for them only when the music should cease and

-the ball take its place among the things of the past, incapable of

-further trouble in the earth.

-

-"It's very trying," said Judge Blair to his wife that night. "I wish

-there was something we could do."

-

-"So do I," his wife acquiesced.

-

-"I don't like to see Lavinia cut off this way from every enjoyment. The

-strain must be very wearing."

-

-"I suppose it is very wearing with most lovers," said Mrs. Blair. "I

-don't see how they ever endure it; but they all do."

-

-"Have you talked with her about it?" The judge put his question with a

-guarded look, and was not surprised when his wife quickly replied:

-

-"Gracious, no. I'd never dare."

-

-"No, I presume not. I don't know who would, unless it might be Connie."

-

-Mrs. Blair was silent for a while in the trouble that was all the more

-serious because they dared not recognize its seriousness, and then she

-asked:

-

-"Couldn't you help him to something?"

-

-"I don't know what," the judge replied. "There's really no opening in a

-little town."

-

-"If you were off the bench and back in the practice--"

-

-"Great heavens!" he interrupted her. "Don't mention such a thing!"

-

-"I meant that you might take him in with you."

-

-"I'd be looking around for some one to take me in," the judge said. "I'm

-glad I haven't the problem to face." He enjoyed for a moment the snug

-sense he had in his own position and then he sighed.

-

-"He's young, he has that, anyway. He'll work it out somehow, I suppose,

-though I don't know how. As for us, all we can do is to have patience,

-and wait."

-

-"Yes, that's all," said Mrs. Blair. "I don't believe in long

-engagements."

-

-"How long has it been?" he asked.

-

-"Nearly a year now."

-

-"I thought it had been ten."

-

-Mrs. Blair laughed as she said: "Connie was wishing this morning that

-he'd marry her and get it over with."

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXII

-

-                      AN ADVERTISEMENT OF DESTINY

-

-

-The first days of spring contrasted strongly with Marley's mood. Because

-of some mysterious similarity in the two seasons he found the melancholy

-suggestion of fall in this spring, just as, with his high-flown hopes,

-he had found some of the joyous suggestion of spring in the autumn

-before. But as failure followed failure, he began to feel more and more

-an alien in Macochee; he had a sense of exile among his own kind, he was

-tortured by the thought that here, in a world where each man had some

-work to do and where, as it seemed, all men had suddenly grown happy in

-that work, there was no work for him to do.

-

-He was young, healthy, and ambitious; he had given years to what he had

-been taught was a necessary preparation, and then suddenly, just as he

-felt himself ready for life, he found that there was no place in life

-for him. As he went about seeking employment there was borne in on him a

-sense of criticism and opposition, and he was depressed and humiliated.

-By the end of the winter he disliked showing himself anywhere; he no

-longer stopped in the McBriar House of an afternoon to watch Lawrence

-and Halliday at the billiards they played so well; he thought he

-detected a coolness in Lawrence's treatment of him. He felt, or

-imagined, this coolness in everybody's attitude now, and finally began

-to suspect it in the Blairs.

-

-"What's the matter?" asked Powell, one morning. "You ain't sick, are

-you?"

-

-Marley shook his head.

-

-"Well, something ails you. I can see that." He waited for Marley to

-speak. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

-

-"No," said Marley, "thank you. I've just been feeling a little bit blue,

-that's all."

-

-"What about?"

-

-"Oh, I don't know. I'm kind o' discouraged. It seems to me that I'm

-wasting time; I'm not making any headway and then everybody in town

-is--"

-

-"I wouldn't mind that," said Powell, divining the trouble at once.

-"They've had me on the gridiron for about forty years, and they never

-get tired of giving it a twist. It doesn't bother me much any more, and

-I don't see why you should let it bother you, especially as all they say

-about you is a damn lie."

-

-The speech touched Marley, and he lost himself in an impulse of sympathy

-for Powell, but he could not put his sympathy before Powell in the way

-he would like and his mind soon returned to himself.

-

-"I've got to do something," he said. "I wish I knew what."

-

-"Well," said Powell, "you know what I've always told you. I know what

-I'd do if I were your age. Of course--"

-

-Powell did not finish his sentence. He was looking out the window again,

-lost in introspection.

-

-Powell's reiteration of his old advice expressed the very thought that

-had been nebulous in Marley's mind for days, and while he was conscious

-of it, he feared the consciousness, and struggled to prevent it from

-positing itself. But now that Powell had voiced it for him, he could

-escape it no longer, and it filled him with a fear. He went about all

-the day with this fear appalling him; more and more under its perverse

-influence he felt himself an alien, and the people he met in the street

-seemed unreal and strange, outlandish persons whom he had never known.

-They came upon him as ghosts, or if they did something to prove their

-reality, he seemed to be some ghost himself.

-

-In the afternoon he received a note from Lavinia; she said that she was

-going that evening with George Halliday to a concert in the Opera House.

-She did not want to go a bit, she said, but her mother, and especially

-her father, had urged her to go; arguing that she now went out so seldom

-that it must do her good, and besides, they had urged her so often that

-she felt it to be her duty in this instance; she had held out as long as

-she could, and then had yielded.

-

-Marley tried to look upon the note reasonably; he could see the

-influence that had compelled Lavinia to go, and he knew he had no right

-to blame her, and yet, try as he would, he could not escape a feeling of

-bitterness. When he went home at evening his mother instantly noticed

-his depression, and implored him for the reason. He did not answer for a

-while, that is, it seemed a while to Mrs. Marley, but at last he said:

-

-"Mother, I've got to leave."

-

-"Leave?" she repeated, pronouncing the word in a hollow note of fear.

-

-"Yes, leave."

-

-"But what for?"

-

-"Well, you know I'm no good; I'm making no headway; there's no place for

-me here in Macochee; I've got to get out into the world and _make_ a

-place for myself, somewhere."

-

-"But where?"

-

-"I don't know--anywhere."

-

-Marley moved his hand in a wide gesture that included the whole world,

-and yet was without hope of conquest.

-

-"But you must have some plans--some idea--"

-

-"Well, I've thought of going to Cincinnati; maybe to Chicago."

-

-"But what will you do?" Mrs. Marley looked at him with pain and alarm.

-

-"Do!" he said, his voice rising almost angrily. "Why, anything I can get

-to do. Anything, anything, sweeping streets, digging ditches, anything!"

-

-Mrs. Marley looked at her son, sitting there before her with his head

-bowed in his hands. In her own face were reflected the pain and trouble

-that darkened his, and yet she felt herself helpless; she vaguely

-realized that he was engaged in a battle that he must after all fight

-alone; she could not help him, though she wished that she knew how to

-impart to him the faith she had that he would win the battle, somehow,

-in the end.

-

-"Poor boy!" she said at length, rising; "you are not yourself just now.

-Think it all over and talk to your father about it."

-

-It was the first evening in months that Marley had not spent with

-Lavinia, and his existence being now so bound up with hers, he found

-that he could not spend the evening as the other young men in town spent

-their evenings. However, he went down to the McBriar House and there a

-long bill hanging on the wall instantly struck his eye. The bill

-announced an excursion to Chicago. It took away his breath; he stood

-transfixed before it, fascinated and yet repelled; he read it through a

-dozen times. The cheerful way in which the railroad held out this trip

-intensified his own gloom; he wondered how he might escape, but there

-was no way; it was plainly the revelation of his destiny, prophetic,

-absolute, final, and he bowed before it as to a decree of fate; he knew

-now that he must go.

-

-As he went home, as he walked the dark streets in the air that was full

-of the balm of the coming spring, he felt as one to whom a great sorrow

-had come. He thought of leaving Macochee, of leaving his father and

-mother, and then, more than all, of leaving Lavinia, and his throat

-ached with the pain of parting that, even now, before any of his plans

-had been made, began to assail him. His plans were nothing now; they had

-become the merest details; the great decision had been reached, not by

-him, but for him; the destiny toward which all the lines of his

-existence for months had been converging, was on him, the moment had

-arrived, and he had a sense of being the mute and helpless victim of

-forces that were playing with him, hurrying him along to a future as

-dark as the moonless night above him.

-

-He told his father of the excursion, though he gave him no notion of it

-as an expression of his fate, and he was all the more distressed at the

-calm way in which his father acquiesced in what he put before him as a

-decision he would have liked to have appear as less final. His father in

-his mildness could not object to his trying, and he would provide the

-money for the experiment. It gave Marley a moment's respite to have his

-father speak of it as an experiment, for that included the possibility

-of failure, and hence of his return home, but this meager consolation

-was immediately dissipated in the surer sense he felt that this was the

-end--the end of Macochee, the end of home, and the beginning of a new

-life.

-

-

-

-

-                             CHAPTER XXIII

-

-                               THE BREAK

-

-

-Marley went to Lavinia the next morning, and told her as they sat there

-on the veranda in the spring sunlight. She looked at him with distress

-in her wide blue eyes.

-

-"When?" she asked.

-

-"To-night!"

-

-"Tonight? Oh Glenn!"

-

-Her eyes had filled with tears, and she was winking hard to keep them

-back.

-

-"To-night."

-

-She repeated the word over and over again.

-

-"And to think," she managed to say at last, "to think that the last

-night I should have been away from you! How can I ever forgive myself!"

-

-Her lip trembled, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. She drew out her

-handkerchief and said:

-

-"Let's go in."

-

-All that day Marley went about faltering over his preparations. Wade

-Powell was the only one of the few who were interested in him that was

-enthusiastic over his going, and he praised and congratulated him, and

-pierced his already sore heart by declaring that he had known all along

-it was what Marley would be compelled to do. He would give him a letter

-to his old friend, Judge Johnson, he said; the judge would be a great

-man for him to know, and Powell sat down at once, with more energy and

-enterprise than Marley had ever known him to show, and began to

-elaborate his letter of introduction.

-

-Marley dreaded saying good-by; he wished to shirk it as to Powell as he

-intended to shirk it in the cases of his few friends; he was to return

-to the office a last time in the afternoon to get the letter; and then

-he would bid Powell good-by. He had the day before him, but that thought

-could give him no comfort. He would see Lavinia again in the afternoon;

-he would see her once more, for the last time, in the evening, and in

-the meantime he would see his father and his mother, and his home; he

-had still two meals to eat with them, but it was as if he had already

-gone; there was no reality in his presence there among them; the blow

-that fate had decreed had fallen, and all that was to be was then

-actually in being; all about him the men and women of Macochee were

-pursuing their ordinary occupations just as if he were not so soon to go

-away and be of this scene no more; a few hours, and another day, and

-they would be going on with their concerns just the same, and he would

-have disappeared out of their lives and out of their memories.

-

-He looked at everything that had been associated with his life, and

-everything called up some memory,--the little office where he had tried

-to study law, the Court House, and the blind goddess of justice holding

-aloft her scales, the familiar Square, the cloaked cavalryman on the

-monument, every tree, every fence, every brick in the sidewalk somehow

-called out to him--and he was leaving them all. He looked up and down

-Main Street, wide and ugly, littered with refuse, ragged with its

-graceless signs; he thought of the people who had gossiped about him,

-the people whom he had hated, but now he could not find in his heart the

-satisfaction he had expected in leaving them. He felt tenderly, almost

-affectionately, toward them all. But it was worse at home. He wandered

-about the house, looking at every piece of furniture, at every trinket;

-he went into the woodshed, and the old ax, the old saw, everything he

-had known for years, wrung his heart; he went to the barn, he looked at

-the muddy buggy in which he had driven so often with his father; he

-reproached himself because he had not kept the buggy cleaner for him; he

-went into the stall and patted the flank of Dolly, finally he put his

-arms about her warm neck, laid his face against it, and the tears rolled

-down his cheeks.

-

-One of the preachers that were always dropping in on them was there to

-dinner, and in the blessing he invoked on the temporalities, as he

-called them, he prayed with professional unction for the son who was

-about to leave the old roof-tree, and this made the ordeal harder for

-them all. Doctor Marley spoke to the preacher of little things that he

-was to do within the next few days and Marley wondered how he could

-mention them, for they were to be done at a time when he would be there

-no more. Because he conceived of life, as all must conceive of it,

-solely in its relation to himself, he could not imagine life going on in

-Macochee without him.

-

-The afternoon wore on, he passed his hour with Lavinia; they were to

-meet then but once again; he returned home, his mother had packed his

-trunk; it was waiting. He was tender with his mother, and he wondered

-now, with a wild regret, why he had not always been tender with her; he

-was tender now with all things; a tenderness suffused his whole being;

-it seemed as if it might dissolve in tears.

-

-Still he shrank back; there was one thing more to do; he was to go

-up-town and get his ticket, and the letter to Judge Johnson, and bid

-Wade Powell good-by. A wild hope leaped in his heart; perhaps--but no,

-it was irrevocable now. He went, and got his letter, but Powell refused

-to bid him good-by; he said he would be at the train to see him off. He

-bought his ticket and went home. Old man Downing had been there with his

-dray and hauled away his trunk; it was settled. He could only wait and

-watch the minutes tick by.

-

-It seemed to Marley that all things that evening conspired to accentuate

-all that he was leaving behind, and to make the grief of parting more

-poignant. His mother, who was then in that domestic exigency described

-by the ladies of Macochee as being without a girl, had prepared an

-unusually elaborate supper, and while there was no formal observance of

-the fact, it was eaten, so far as any of them could eat that evening,

-under a sense of its significance as a parting ceremonial. They talked,

-or tried to talk, indifferently of commonplace things, and Doctor Marley

-even sought to add merriment to their feast by a jocularity that was

-unusual with him. Marley, who knew his father so well, could easily

-detect the heavy heart that lay under his father's jokes, and he

-suffered a keener misery from the pathos of it. Then he would catch his

-mother looking at him, her eyes deep and sad, and it seemed to him that

-his heart must burst.

-

-Marley's train was to leave at eleven o'clock; he had arranged to go to

-Lavinia's and remain with her until ten o'clock; then he was to stop in

-at his home for his last good-by. Those last two hours with Lavinia were

-an ordeal; into the first hour they tried to crowd a thousand things

-they felt they must say, and a thousand things they could only suggest;

-when the clock struck nine, they looked at each other in anguish; they

-did little after that but mentally count the minutes. The clock ticked

-loudly, aggressively, until in the soul of each, unconfessed, there was

-a desire to hasten the moments they felt they would like to stay; the

-agony was almost beyond endurance; it exhausted them, beat them down,

-and rendered them powerless to speak. Finally the clock struck the

-half-hour; they could only sit and look at each other now; at a quarter

-of ten they began their good-bys.

-

-At ten o'clock Mrs. Blair, Connie and Chad came into the room solemnly,

-and bade Marley farewell; the judge himself came in after them, his

-glasses in his hand and the magazine he had been reading, which, as

-Marley thought with that pang of things going on without him, he would

-in a few moments be reading again as calmly as ever. He took Marley's

-hand, and wished him success; for the first time he spoke gently, almost

-affectionately to him, and although Marley tried to bear himself

-stoically, the judge's farewell touched him more than all the others.

-

-The shameless children would have liked to remain and see the tragedy to

-its close, but Mrs. Blair drew them from the room with her. The last

-moment had come, and Marley held Lavinia in his arms; at last he tore

-himself from her, and it was over. He looked back from out the darkness;

-Lavinia was still standing in the doorway; he saw her slender, girlish

-figure outlined against the hall light behind her; somehow he knew that

-she was bravely smiling through her tears. She stood there until his

-footfall sounded loud in the spring night, then the light went out, the

-door closed as he had heard it close so often, and she was gone.

-

-He saw the light in his father's study as he approached his home, and

-there came again that torturing sense: the sermon his father then was

-working on would be preached when he was far away; his mother, as he

-knew by the light in the sitting-room window, was waiting for him; she

-had waited there so many nights, and now she was waiting for the last

-time. She rose at his step, and took him to her arms the minute he

-entered the door.

-

-"Be brave, dear," he said, stroking her gray hair; "be brave." He was

-trying so hard to be brave himself, and she was crying. He had not often

-seen her cry. She could not speak for many minutes; she could only pat

-him on the shoulder where her head lay.

-

-"Remember, my precious boy," she managed to say at last, "that there's a

-strong Arm to lean upon."

-

-He saw that she was turning now to the great faith that had sustained

-her in every trial of a life that had known so many trials; and the

-tears came to his own eyes. He would have left her for a moment but she

-followed him. He had an impulse he could not resist to torture himself

-by going over the house again; he went into the dining-room which in the

-darkness wore an air of waiting for the breakfast they would eat when he

-was gone; he went to the kitchen and took a drink of water, from the old

-habit he was now breaking; then he went up stairs and looked into his

-own room, at the neatly made bed where he was to sleep no more; at last

-he stood at the door of the study.

-

-He could catch the odor of his father's cigar, just as he had in

-standing there so many times before; he pushed the door open and felt

-the familiar hot, close, smoke-laden atmosphere which his father seemed

-to find so congenial to his studies. Doctor Marley took off his

-spectacles and pushed his manuscript aside, and Marley felt that he

-never would forget that picture of the gray head bent in its earnest

-labors over that worn and littered desk; it was photographed for all

-time on his memory. His words with his father had always been few; there

-were no more now.

-

-"Well, father," he said, "I've come to say good-by."

-

-His father pushed back his chair and turned about. He half-rose, then

-sank back again and took his son's hand.

-

-"Good-by, Glenn," he said. "You'll write?"

-

-"Yes."

-

-"Write often. We'll want to hear."

-

-"Yes, write often," the doctor said. "And take care of yourself."

-

-"I will, father."

-

-"Wait a moment." Doctor Marley was fumbling in his pocket. He drew forth

-a few dollars.

-

-"Here, Glenn," he said. "I wish it could be more."

-

-There was nothing more to do, or say. They went down stairs; Marley's

-bag was waiting for him in the hall. He kissed his mother again and then

-again; he shook his father's hand, and then he went.

-

-"Write often," his father called out to him, as he went down the walk.

-It was all the old man could say.

-

-The door closed, as the door of the Blairs' had closed. Inside Doctor

-Marley looked at his wife a moment.

-

-"Well," he said, "he's gone."

-

-Mrs. Marley made no answer.

-

-"I suppose," he said, "I ought to have gone to the train with him."

-

-Then he toiled up the stairs to his study and the sermon he was to

-preach when Glenn was gone.

-

-Marley walked rapidly down Market Street toward the depot; in the dark

-houses that suddenly had taken on a new significance to him, people were

-sleeping, people who would awake the next morning in Macochee. He could

-not escape the torture of this thought; his mind revolved constantly

-about the mystery of his being still in Macochee, still within calling

-distance, almost, of Lavinia, of his father and mother, of all he loved

-in life, when in reality they had in an instant become as inaccessible

-to him as though the long miles of his exile already separated them.

-

-Twenty minutes later, Lavinia, in her room, Mrs. Marley, at her prayers,

-and Doctor Marley sitting in deep absorption at his desk, heard the

-sonorous whistle of a locomotive sound ominously over the dark and quiet

-town.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXIV

-

-                         THE GATES OF THE CITY

-

-

-It was a relief to Marley when morning came and released him from the

-reclining chair that had held his form so rigidly all the night. He had

-not taken a sleeper because he felt himself too poor, and he had

-somewhere got the false impression that comfort was to be had in the

-chair car. He had stretched himself in the cruel rack when the porter

-came through and turned the lights down to the dismal point of gloom,

-but he had not slept; all through the night the trainmen constantly

-passed through the car talking with each other in low tones; the train,

-too, made long, inexplicable stops; he could hear the escape of the

-weary engine, through his window he could see the lights of some strange

-town; and then the trainmen would run by outside, swinging their

-lanterns in the darkness, and calling to each other, and Marley would

-fear that something had happened, or else was about to happen, which was

-worse.

-

-Finally the train would creak on again, as if it were necessary to

-proceed slowly and cautiously through vague dangers of the night.

-Through his window he could see the glint of rails, the two yards of

-gleaming steel that traveled always abreast of him. Toward morning

-Marley wearily fell asleep, and then the sorrow and heart-ache of his

-parting from Lavinia and his home distorted themselves in fearful

-dreams.

-

-When he awoke at last, and looked out on the ugly prairie that had

-nothing to break its monotony but a few scraggly scrub-oak bushes, and

-some clumps of stunted trees, the dawn was descending from the gray sky.

-The car presented a squalid, hideous sight; all about him were stretched

-the bodies of sleeping passengers, flaccid, inert, having cast aside in

-utter weariness all sense of decency and shame; the men had pulled off

-their boots, and sprawled on the chairs, their stockinged feet

-prominently in view; women lay with open mouths, their faces begrimed,

-their hair in slovenly disarray.

-

-The baby that had been crying in the early part of the night had finally

-gone to sleep while nursing, and its tired mother slept with it at her

-breast. The Jewish drummer across the aisle was sleeping in

-shirt-sleeves; his head had rolled from the little rest on the back of

-his chair and now lolled off his shoulder, his sallow face turned toward

-Marley was greasy with perspiration; his closed eyes filled out their

-blue hemispherical lids, and his cheeks puffed with his intermittent

-snoring. At times his snoring grew so loud and so troubled that it

-seemed as if he must choke; he would reach a torturing climax, then

-suddenly the thick red lips beneath his black mustache would open, his

-sallow cheeks would collapse, and relief would come.

-

-Marley wished the passengers would wake up and end the indecencies they

-had tried to hide earlier in the night. Glancing up and down the long

-car he could recognize none of them as having been there when he had

-boarded the car at Macochee; those who had got on with him had gone

-short distances, and then got off, breaking the last tie that bound him

-to his home. He found it impossible now to conceive of the car as having

-been in Macochee so short a time before.

-

-Presently he saw an old lady sitting up in the remote end of the car;

-she was winding her thin wisp of gray hair in a little knob at the back

-of her head. Then, feeling that he might bestir himself, Marley got up

-and went forward; he washed his face, and tried to escape the discomfort

-of clothes he had worn all the night by readjusting them. The train was

-evidently approaching the city; now and then he saw a building, lonely

-and out of place: on the hideous sand-dunes, as if it waited for the

-city, in the growth it boasted, to catch up with it.

-

-The train ran on; it had reached an ever-widening web of tracks; it

-passed long lines of freight-cars, stock-cars from the west, empty

-gondolas that had come with coal from the Hocking Valley; a switch tower

-swept by, its bell jangling peevishly in alarm; long processions of

-working-men trooped with their dinner-pails between the tracks. The

-train stopped, finally, still far from its destination. The air in the

-car was foul from the feculence of all those bodies that had lain in it

-through the night, and Marley went out on the platform. He could hear

-the engine wheezing--the only sound to break the silence of the dawn.

-The cool morning air was grateful to Marley, though it was not the air

-of the spring they were already having in Macochee. He risked getting

-down off the platform and looked ahead. Beyond the long train, coated

-with its black cinders, he saw Chicago, dim through the morning light,

-lying dark, mysterious and grim under its pall of smoke. He shuddered

-and went back into the car. After a while the train creaked and strained

-and pulled on again.

-

-The passengers had begun to stir, and now were hastening to rehabilitate

-themselves in the eyes of the world; the woman with the baby fastened

-her dress, the drummer put on his collar and coat, the men drew on their

-boots, but it was long before they felt themselves presentable again.

-The women could achieve but half a toilet, and though they were all

-concerned about their hair, they could not make themselves tidy.

-

-The train was running swiftly, now that it was in the city, where it

-seemed it should have run more slowly; the newsboy came in with the

-morning papers, followed by the baggage agent with his jingling bunch of

-brass checks. The porter doffed his white jacket and donned his blue,

-and waited now for the end of his labors, so near at hand. He made no

-pretense of brushing his passengers, for those in his charge were

-plainly not of the kind with tips to bestow.

-

-As the train rushed over unknown streets, Marley caught visions of the

-crowds blockaded by the crossing gates, street-cars already filled with

-people, empty trucks going after the great loads under which they would

-groan all the day; and people, people, people, ready for the new day of

-toil that had come to the earth.

-

-At last the train drew up under the black shed of the Union Station, and

-Marley stood with the passengers that huddled at the door of the car. He

-went out and down; he joined the crowd that passed through the big iron

-gates into the station; and then he turned and glanced back for one last

-look at the train that had brought him; only a few hours before it had

-been in Macochee; a few hours more and it would be there again. In

-leaving the train he felt that he was breaking the last tie that bound

-him to Macochee, and he would have liked to linger and gaze on it. But a

-man in a blue uniform, with the official surliness, ordered him not to

-hold back the crowd. He climbed the steps, went out into Canal Street,

-ran the gantlet of the cabmen, and was caught up in the crowd and swept

-across the bridge into Madison Street.

-

-He was in Chicago, and here among these thousands of people, each

-hurrying along through the sordid crowd to his own task, here in this

-hideous, cruel city, he must make a place for himself, and gain the

-foothold from which he could fight his battle for existence in the

-world.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXV

-

-                              LETTERS HOME

-

-

-"How does she seem since he went away?" asked Judge Blair of his wife

-two days after Marley had gone. He spoke in his usual habit of deference

-to his wife's observation, though his own opportunities for observing

-Lavinia might have been considered as great as hers.

-

-"I haven't noticed any difference in her," said Mrs. Blair, and then she

-added a qualifying and significant "yet."

-

-"Well," observed the judge, "I presume it's too early. Has she heard

-from him?"

-

-"She had a letter this morning; that is, I suppose it was from him; she

-ran to meet the postman, and then went up stairs."

-

-"You didn't mention it to her?"

-

-Mrs. Blair looked at her husband in surprise, and he hastened to make

-amends by acquiescing in the propriety of her conduct, when he said:

-

-"Oh, of course not."

-

-He seemed to drop the subject then, but that it remained uppermost in

-his mind was shown later, when he said:

-

-"I think she will be weaned away from him after a while, don't you? That

-is--if he stays long enough."

-

-Mrs. Blair was not so hopeful; perhaps, too, in her romantic ideal of

-devotion, she did not wish Lavinia to be weaned away. But she avoided a

-direct answer by the suggestion:

-

-"Perhaps he will be weaned away from her."

-

-This possibility had not occurred to the judge.

-

-"Why, the idea!" he said resentfully. "Do you think him capable of such

-baseness?"

-

-Mrs. Blair laughed.

-

-"Would you like to think of _your_ daughter as fickle, and forgetting a

-young man who was eating his heart out for her far away in a big city?"

-

-A condition of such mild romantic sorrow might have attracted Mrs. Blair

-in the abstract, but it could not of course appeal to her when it came

-thus personally. As for the judge, he dismissed the problem, as he had

-so many times before, with the remark:

-

-"Well, we can only wait and see."

-

-The letter which Lavinia received from Marley had been written the day

-he reached Chicago. It was a long letter, conceived largely in a

-facetious spirit, and he had labored over it far into the night in the

-little room of the boarding-house he had found in Ohio Street.

-

-"I chose Ohio Street," he wrote, "because its name reminded me of home.

-Ohio Street may once have been the street of the well-born, but it has

-degenerated and it is now the abode of a long row of boarding--places,

-one of which houses me. My room is a little corner eyrie in the second

-story, back, and from its one window I get an admirable view of the

-garbage dump, the atmosphere and certain intensely red bricks which go

-to make the wall of the house next door. And my landlady, ah, I should

-have to be a Balzac to describe my landlady! She wears large, vociferous

-ear-rings, and she says 'y-e-e-a-a-s' for yes; just kind o' rolls it off

-her tongue as if she didn't care whether it ever got off or not. She is

-truly a beauteous lady, given much to a scarlet hue of her nasal

-appendage; also, her molar system is unduly prominent, too much to the

-fore, as it were. As for form or figure, I'm afraid I couldn't say with

-truth that she goes in for the sinuous, far from it; she leans more to

-the elephantine style of feminine architecture. And she has a way of

-reaching out that is very attractive; probably because of the necessity

-of reaching for room rent. She bears the air of one bent on no earthly

-thing, of a continual soaring in quest of the unexpected; there is about

-her the charm of the intangible, the unknowable.

-

-"The boarding-house itself isn't so bad; I get my room and two meals for

-three-fifty a week; my noon luncheons I have to take down-town. They

-have dinner here, you know, in the evening. I haven't seen much of the

-people in the boarding-house; the men are mostly clerks, and the women

-have bleached hair. They all looked at me when I went into the

-dining-room this evening. There is one young man who sits at my table

-who is in truth a very unwise and immature youth. He is given greatly to

-the use of words of awful and bizarre make-up. For instance, he said

-something about the jokes they get off in the shows here about Irishmen,

-but instead of saying jokes, he said 'traversities'! What do you think

-of that?"

-

-Marley had already described his journey to Chicago in terms similar to

-those in which he described his boarding-house; of Chicago itself he

-said:

-

-"It seems that ages ago when the gods, or maybe the demons, were making

-over plans and specifications of the infernal region, Chicago was

-mentioned and considered by the committee. When it came to a vote for

-choice of sites the place that won had only three more votes than

-Chicago. They didn't locate the brimstone plant here, and from what I

-can learn Chicago was a candidate for both the plant and the honor. It

-was a mistake on somebody's part, as Chicago is certainly an ideal place

-for it."

-

-But the letter discussed mostly the things of Macochee, where Marley's

-spirit still dwelt. The passages Lavinia most liked, of course, were

-those in which he declared his love for her; it was the first

-love-letter she had ever received, and this tender experience went far

-to compensate her for the loneliness she felt in his absence.

-

-It grew upon her after she had read her letter many times, that it would

-be a kindness to take it over and read to Mrs. Marley those parts, at

-least, that were not personal. It was a hard thing for Lavinia to do;

-she had a fear of Mrs. Marley; but she felt more and more the kindness

-of it, and so in the morning she set out. Lavinia was surprised and a

-little disappointed, when Mrs. Marley told her that she too had received

-in the same mail a letter from Glenn. It somehow took away from her own

-act, the more when Mrs. Marley calmly passed her letter over for Lavinia

-to read.

-

-Lavinia, who had not been able to resist a pang that Marley had written

-his mother quite as promptly as he had written her, found some

-consolation in the fact that his letter to his mother was not nearly so

-long as his letter to her, and it contained, too, the same information;

-in some instances, identical phrases, as letters do that are written at

-the same time. She felt that she should be happy in them both, and she

-wished she could determine which of the letters had been written first.

-After she had read Mrs. Marley's letter, she could not speak for a

-moment; the letter closed with a description of the sensations it gave

-Marley to open his trunk and come across the Bible his mother had packed

-in it. But she controlled herself, and when she had finished reading

-parts of her own letter to Mrs. Marley, she said:

-

-"Well, he seems to be in good spirits, doesn't he? He writes so

-amusingly of everything."

-

-Mrs. Marley looked up at Lavinia with a curious smile.

-

-"Why, don't you see?" she said.

-

-"What?" asked Lavinia, glancing in alarm at the two letters which she

-still held in her lap.

-

-"Why, the poor boy is dying of homesickness; that's what makes him write

-in that mocking vein."

-

-"Do you think that is so?" Lavinia leaned forward.

-

-"Why, I know it," replied Mrs. Marley, with a little laugh. "He's just

-like his father."

-

-For a moment Lavinia felt a satisfaction in Marley's loneliness, but she

-denied the satisfaction when she said:

-

-"He'll get over it, after a while."

-

-"Not for a long while, I'm afraid," said Mrs. Marley. "Not until some

-one can be with him."

-

-Lavinia blushed, and before she knew it Mrs. Marley had bent over and

-kissed her cheek.

-

-"He has a long hard battle before him, my dear," she said, "in a great

-cruel city. We must help him all we can."

-

-Lavinia hesitated a moment, then she put her arms about Mrs. Marley and

-drew her down for the kiss which sealed their friendship.

-

-They sat and talked of Marley for a long time, and at last when Lavinia

-rose to go, she held out to Mrs. Marley the letter her son had written

-her. She looked at it a moment before handing it to Mrs. Marley.

-

-"Would you like to keep it?" Mrs. Marley asked.

-

-"May I?"

-

-"If you wish. But you must come often; I shall be lonely now, you know,

-and you must bring his letters and read parts of them. He'll be writing

-so many more to you than he will to me."

-

-Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day; it was not long before

-Clemmons, the postman, smiled significantly when, each morning at the

-sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the door. And Lavinia wrote

-to Marley as regularly herself, sitting at the little desk in her room

-every night long after the house was dark and still.

-

-The judge could find no hope in the observations Mrs. Blair reported to

-him.

-

-"She seems to have developed a new idea of constancy," said Mrs. Blair.

-"She will not allow herself to do a thing, or go to a single place; she

-will hardly accept any pleasure because he isn't here to share it. I

-believe she tries not to have a thought that is not of him. She is

-almost fanatical about it."

-

-"Oh dear!" said the judge. "I thought the nightly calls were a severe

-strain, but they can not compare to the strain of nightly letters."

-

-"He writes excellent letters, however," Mrs. Blair said. "I wish you

-could read the one he wrote his mother. A boy who writes like that to

-his mother--"

-

-"How did you get to see a letter he wrote his mother?" interrupted the

-judge.

-

-"Lavinia showed it to me."

-

-"Has she been over there?"

-

-"Yes. Why?"

-

-The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation were now hopeless,

-indeed.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXVI

-

-                       THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED

-

-

-"I am very tired to-night," Marley wrote to Lavinia a day or so later.

-"I have been making the rounds of the law offices; I have been to all

-the leading firms, but--here I am, still without a place. I thought I

-might get a place in one of them where I could finish my law studies,

-and make enough to live on, meanwhile; I had dreams of working into the

-firm in time, but they were only dreams, and all my hopes have gone

-glimmering. The men who are employed in the law offices are already

-admitted to the bar; most of them are young fellows, but some are old

-and gray-headed, and the sight of them gave me the blues.

-

-"I did not get to see many of the firm members themselves; their offices

-are formidable places. There is no office in Macochee like them; they

-have big outer rooms, full of stenographers and clerks and there is a

-boy at a desk who makes you tell your business before you can get in to

-see any of the lawyers themselves. They seem to be mighty big, important

-fellows. Most of them would not see me at all; several said they had no

-place for me and dismissed me with a kind of pitying smile; one man,

-when I asked him if he thought there was an opening, said he supposed

-there ought to be, as one lawyer in Chicago had died of starvation only

-the day before. But some were kinder; one, whom I shall never forget,

-took pains to sit down and talk with me a long time, but he was no more

-encouraging than the others. He said the profession was terribly

-overcrowded, 'that is,' he corrected himself with a tired smile, 'if you

-can call it a profession any longer. It is more of a business nowadays

-and the only ones who get ahead are those who have big corporations for

-clients. How they all live is a mystery to me!' He thought I had better

-not undertake it and advised me to go into some business. But then most

-of them did that.

-

-"But I must tell you of my visit to Judge Johnson. You will remember my

-telling you of him; he was Wade Powell's chum in the law school in

-Cincinnati, and Mr. Powell had given me a letter to him. I had a hard

-time seeing him; the hardest of all. When I went into the big stone

-government building he was holding court, and a lawyer was making an

-argument before him. I waited till they were all done, and then when the

-crier had adjourned court--he said 'Oyez, Oyez, Oyez,' instead of the

-'Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye' we have in Ohio; it sounded so old and

-quaint, even if he did say 'Oh yes,' for 'Oyez!' It comes from the old

-Norman-French, you know; ask your father about it, he'll explain it--I

-tried to get in to him. I succeeded at last, but it was hard work. He

-didn't seem glad to see me; he looked at me coldly, and made me feel as

-if I ought to hurry up and state my business promptly and get away. When

-I gave him Wade Powell's letter he put on his gold glasses and read it;

-but--what do you think?--I don't believe he remembered Wade Powell at

-all! At least he seemed not to. Of course he may have been putting it

-on. Wouldn't it make Wade Powell mad to know that? I'd give a

-dollar--and I haven't any to spare either--to see him when he hears that

-his old friend, Judge Johnson of the United States Circuit Court,

-couldn't remember him! Well, the judge didn't let me detain him long, he

-looked at his watch a moment, and then he advised me not to try it in

-Chicago; he said there were too many lawyers here anyhow, and that he

-thought a young man made a mistake in coming to a city at all.

-

-"'Why don't you stay in a small town?' he asked, looking at me sternly

-over his glasses. 'Living is cheaper there, and life is much more simple

-than it is in the cities. I've often wished I had stayed in a little

-town.'

-

-"I came away, as you can imagine, feeling pretty much cast down and

-humbled in spirit. There are four thousand lawyers in Chicago; just

-think of it, almost as many lawyers as there are people in Macochee! As

-I walked through the crowded streets with men and women rushing along, I

-wondered how they all lived. What do they do? Where are they all going,

-and how do they get a place to stand on? As I came across the bridge

-over to the North Side I felt that there was no place for me here in

-this great, dirty, ugly city, just as there is no place for me back in

-peaceful Macochee, where every minute of the day I long to be. Anyway, I

-am sure that there is no place for me here in the law, and I shall have

-to look for something else. I see so much wretchedness and poverty and

-squalor; it is in the street everywhere--pale, gaunt men, who look at

-you out of sick, appealing eyes.

-

-"This morning I saw a sight down-town that filled me with horror; it was

-noon, and a great crowd of ragged men were waiting in front of the

-_Daily News_ office in Fifth Avenue. They were all standing idly and yet

-expectantly about; I stood and watched them. Presently, as at some

-signal, they all rushed for the office door, and then all at once they

-seemed to be enveloped in a white, rustling cloud. Each one had a

-newspaper, and they all turned to one page and began to read rapidly;

-sometimes two or three men bent over the same paper; in another moment

-they had scattered, going in all directions. Then it flashed upon me:

-they had been waiting for the noon edition of the paper and the page

-they had all turned to was the page with the 'want ads' on it; they were

-all looking for jobs! It made me inexpressibly sad. I do not wish to

-inflict my own sorrow upon you, dear heart, but it made me shudder; what

-if I--but no, the thought is too horrible to mention. And yet I, too,

-belong to this great army of the unemployed.

-

-"As I write the clock in the steeple of a church a block away chimes the

-hour of midnight; so you see that I've retained my nocturnal habits.

-When the poets of a coming generation sing of me (as they doubtless

-will, after my death) their songs will be called Nocturnes."

-

-That same day Doctor Marley received a letter from his son which Mrs.

-Marley, though her husband passed it over to her to read, did not show

-to Lavinia. It ran:

-

-"It's rather expensive living here, I find; especially for one who

-belongs to the great army of the unemployed. My contract with my

-basiliscine landlady calls for two meals a day and a bed at night--also

-for three-fifty per week in payment of said two meals and bed. My

-lunches I get down-town; that is, I did get them down-town; for two days

-I have gone without lunches, and the aforesaid landlady looks

-reproachfully at me at night when she sees me laying in an extra supply

-of dinner. I don't mind the lack of the lunches, even if she does, but

-I'll have to pay her in a day or so now. I'm in poor spirits to-night,

-so can't write well; cause of said low mental temperature, only eighty

-cents in the world between me, my landlady and ultimate starvation. It's

-funny how much hungrier a fellow gets as the food supply gets low. A

-word to the wise, etc.

-

-"What do you think? I met Charlie Davis on the street this morning. He

-is living here now, working in some big department store. My, it was

-good to see some one from Macochee! How small the world is, after all!

-

-"How are you all? How is Dolly? Does Smith Johnson still clap his hands

-at his dog every evening as he comes home, and does the dog run out to

-meet him as joyously as of yore? And does Hank Delphy still go down-town

-in his shirt-sleeves? And has Charlie Fouly had any fits in the Square

-lately? And, father, has mother got a girl yet? Give her an ocean of

-love and tell her not to work too hard, and to let the heathen shift for

-themselves a while. They haven't any trusts to monopolize the jobs as

-yet, and they ought to be able to get along. Oh, how I'd like to see you

-all! Answer all my questions: I propounded numerous ones to you. I don't

-remember now what all of them were, but I know they were all momentous

-and had much to do with my well-being, spiritual and physical, not to

-say financial. And see that the moss doesn't get too thickly overlaid on

-my memory."

-

-Marley's new life in Chicago, as somewhat vaguely reflected in his

-letters, impressed those who had a sense of having been left behind in

-Macochee, as but a continuation of the life he had led there, that is,

-it was presented to them as one long, hopeless search for employment. He

-told of his daily tramps up and down the city, of his dutiful

-applications for work in every place where the boon of work might be

-bestowed, and of the unvarying refusals of those in whose hands had been

-intrusted, by some inscrutable decree of the providence of economics,

-the right to control the opportunity of labor. It was as if the primal

-curse of earning his bread were in a fair way to be taken from man, had

-not the primal necessity of eating his bread continued unabated.

-

-The routine through which he went each day had begun to weary Marley,

-and it might have begun to weary his readers in Macochee, had they not

-all felt their own fortunes somehow bound up with his. He apologized in

-his nightly letters for the monotony of their recitals, but he hoped it

-might be condoned as the most realistic portrayal of his life that he

-could give. He tried at times to give his letters a lighter tone by

-describing, with a facility that grew with practice, the many incidents

-that attracted him in a city whose life was all so new and strange to

-him; he could not help a growing interest in it all, and while Lavinia

-was probably unconscious of the change, his letters were now less

-concerned with the things of the life he had left in Macochee, and more

-and more with the things of the life he had entered upon in Chicago; as

-on a palimpsest, the old impressions were erased to make way for new

-ones.

-

-But try as he would to give to his letters a cheer that was far from

-expressing his own spirit, he could not save them from the despair that

-was laying hold of him, a despair which finally communicated itself in

-the declaration that it was now no longer with him a question of

-selecting employment.

-

-"I must take," he wrote, "whatever I can get, and that will probably be

-some kind of manual, if not menial, work. Sometimes," so he let himself

-go on, "I feel as if I would give up and go back to Macochee, defeated

-and done for. But I can not come to that yet, though I would like to;

-oh, how I would like to! But I don't dare, my pride won't let me act the

-part of a coward, though I know I am one at heart. One thing keeps me up

-and that is the thought of you; I see your face ever before me, and your

-sweet eyes ever smiling at me--"

-

-Lavinia's eyes were not smiling as she read this; and she poured out her

-own grief and sympathy in a long letter that she promptly tore up, to

-pen in its stead a calmer, braver one, that should hearten him in the

-struggle which, as she proudly assured him, he was making for her.

-

-Marley's description of his straits partly prepared Lavinia for the

-shock of the letter in which he said he had found a job at last, but she

-was hardly prepared to learn that it was anything so far from her

-conception of what was due him as a job trucking freight for a railroad.

-The mockery he put into the picture of himself in a blue jumper and

-overalls could not console her, and she kept the truth from every one,

-except her mother; she preferred rather that they number Marley still

-with the army of the unemployed than to count him among those who toiled

-so desperately with the muscles of their arms and backs. She tried to

-conceal in encouraging congratulations the chagrin of which she felt she

-should be ashamed, and she tried to show her appreciation of his droll

-sarcasms about the preparation his four years of college had given him

-for the task of trundling barrels of sugar and heaving pianos down from

-box-cars.

-

-"I'm sure it's honest work," she wrote, "but do be careful, dear, not to

-hurt yourself in lifting such heavy loads." It was a comfort to remind

-him that he was not intended to do such work.

-

-There was a relief, however, that she did not dare admit, when he told

-her three days later that he had lost his job.

-

-"I realize for the first time my importance in the great scheme of

-things," he wrote. "I was fired because I do not belong to the freight

-handlers' union. It took them three days to find this out, and then they

-threatened to strike if the railroad company did not immediately

-discharge me. The railroad company, after due consideration, decided to

-let me out, and--I'm out. It makes me tremble to think of the

-consequences that would have followed had they decided otherwise. Think

-of it! The railroad tied up, business at a standstill and the commerce

-of the nation paralyzed, and all because of Glenn Marley, A. B. It is

-really encouraging to know that my presence on the earth is actually

-known to my fellow-mortals; it has at least been discovered that I am

-alive and in Chicago, even if my diploma is not recognized by Freight

-Handlers' Union No. 63. And now," he concluded, "as Kipling says, it's

-'back to the army again, Sergeant, back to the army again'--the army of

-the unemployed."

-

-Lavinia was shocked again a day or so later when on opening her letter

-she met the announcement that he had been offered a job with another

-railroad as a freight handler.

-

-"But you need not be alarmed," she was reassured to read--though it was

-not until she thought it all over afterward that she began to wonder how

-he had divined her dislike of his being in such work--"I haughtily

-declined, and turned them down. You see this road is just now in the

-throes of a strike, and all their freight handlers are out.

-Consequently, they have had to employ scabs to do the work of the

-strikers. They take anybody--that's why they were ready to take me. But

-as I said, I declined. Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to take a place

-away from a union man."

-

-Lavinia mistook her satisfaction in Marley's declination of the position

-for a satisfaction in the nobility of his sacrifice, and in her elation

-she related the circumstance at dinner. Now that Marley had declined

-such an employment she felt safe in doing this. But her father did not

-see it in her light, or at least in Marley's light.

-

-"Humph!" he sneered; "so he sympathizes with unionism, does he? Well,

-those unions will own the whole earth if they keep on."

-

-"But he says he thought of the wives and children of the union men--"

-

-"Well, but why doesn't he think of the wives and children of the scabs,

-as he calls them? They have as much right to live and work as the union

-men."

-

-Lavinia, as an opponent of union labor herself, could not answer this

-argument, though she felt it her duty to defend Marley. But before she

-could proceed in his defense, her father, strangely enraged at the mere

-mention of the policies of the unions, hurried on:

-

-"The union didn't show any consideration for him when it took his other

-job away from him."

-

-Lavinia shot a reproachful glance at her mother, who did not see it

-because she was shooting a glance more than reproachful at her husband,

-and it had the effect of silencing and humbling the judge, as all of

-Lavinia's arguments, or all of the arguments known to the propaganda of

-union labor, could not have done.

-

-

-

-

-                             CHAPTER XXVII

-

-                               A FOOTHOLD

-

-

-The next letter the postman gave Lavinia began ecstatically:

-

-"I've got a job at last! I'm now working for the C. C. and P. Railroad,

-in their local freight office, and I'm not trucking freight either, but

-I'm a clerk--a bill clerk, to be more exact. My duties consist in

-sitting at a desk and writing out freight bills, for which by some

-inscrutable design of Providence my study of common carriers and

-contracts in the law was doubtless intended to prepare me.

-

-"To-day I wrote out a bill for freight to Cook and Jennings, Macochee,

-Ohio, and you can imagine my sensations. It made me homesick for a

-while; I wished that by some necromancy I might conceal myself in the

-bill and go to Macochee with it; I had a notion to write a little word

-of greeting on the bill, but I didn't; it might have worried old man

-Cook's brain and he couldn't stand much of a strain of that kind. But

-I'm getting nearer Macochee every day now. I guess I'm to be a railroad

-man after all, and some day you'll be proud to tell your friends that I

-started at the bottom. 'Oh, yes,' you'll be boasting, 'Mr. Marley began

-as a common freight trucker; and worked his way up to general manager.'

-Then we'll go back to Macochee in my private car. I can see it standing

-down by the depot, on the side track close to Market Street, baking in

-the hot sun, and the little boys from across the tracks will be crowding

-about it, gaping at the white-jacketed darky who'll be getting the

-dinner ready. We'll have Jack and Mayme down to dine with us, and your

-father and mother and Chad and Connie, and my folks, too, and maybe, if

-you'll let me, Wade Powell. Then, of course, the Macochee people will

-think better of me; they won't be saying that I'm no good, but instead

-they'll stand around, in an easy, careless way, and say, 'Oh, yes, I

-knew Glenn when he was a boy. I always said he'd get up in the world.'

-

-"But, ah me, just now I'm a bill clerk at fifty dollars a month, thank

-you, and glad of the chance to get it; so is my voluptuous landlady

-glad; she'll get her board money a little more regularly now.

-

-"I suppose you'll want to know something about my surroundings. They are

-not elegant; the office is a big barn of a place, crowded full of desks,

-where we sit and write from eight in the morning until any hour at night

-when it occurs to the boss to tell us we can go. Last night it was ten

-o'clock before the idea struck him. They kindly allow us an hour in

-which to run out to a restaurant for supper. The windows in the office

-were washed, so tradition runs, in 1493, the year after Columbus landed.

-Outside, the freight trains rush by constantly so as to keep the noise

-going. My boss, whose name is Clark, strikes me as being a sort of fool

-of an innocuous sort. He is a conscientious ass, but a poor,

-unfortunate, deluded simpleton. He's one of those close-fisted reubs

-whose chief care is the pennies, and whose only interest in life is the

-C. C. and P. Railroad. He makes his business his own personal affair and

-the C. C. and P. his god. He lunches down-town and pays twenty cents for

-his lunch, never more, often fifteen. One of the first things he told me

-was, now that I had come under his protecting wing, to begin to save

-money. They have a young man in the office here, whose desk is next to

-mine, who was born somewhere in Canada, and is always 'a-servin' of her

-Majesty the Queen,' as Kipling says. He told me with much gusto how he

-had hung out of the office window last New Year's a Canadian flag. He

-seemed proud of having done so, and also told me, boasted to me, in

-fact, that he was going to hang the same flag out of the same window on

-the Fourth of July. 'Oh, yes, you are!' thinks I. So I got the flag and

-ripped it into shreds and started it through the waste-basket on a

-hurried trip to oblivion. _À bas_ the Canadian flag! He'll probably get

-another one, but if I get hold of it, it'll meet the same fate as the

-first one. Then I have something to think of that'll keep my mind off my

-horrible fate in being here in Chicago, while I smile in ghoulish glee

-with a cynical leer overspreading my classic features, at the young

-man's disapproval of my actions. The rest of the men in the office

-aren't much to boast of. They're a diluted mixture of Nijni Norgordian

-and Bill Hoffman the jeweler. I still hate this town; I wish it were

-buried under seven hundred and thirty feet of Lake Michigan."

-

-Marley's next letter to Lavinia opened thus:

-

-"Extract from the diary of J. H. Anderson,

-Esq., Canadian, clerk in the freight office of the

-C. C. and P. Ry., at Chicago, Ill., April 20.

-

-            "'New man on desk next to mine; young, about

-            24. Rather decent fellow, but conceited. Do not

-            think he will last. Took me to lunch with him

-            this evening.'

-

-"Now what do you think of that? The youth I described to you at such

-length keeps a diary, and the foregoing is culled therefrom. He left it

-by some mistake on top of his desk, and I picked it up innocently enough

-to-night, to see what it was, and that was the first thing my eye lit

-on. He is evidently an adept at coming to conclusions, apparently he can

-sum one up in two whisks of a porter's broom. I was much surprised to

-find myself so well done. Done on every side in those few words. I've

-rather enjoyed it; strikes me as being uproariously funny. Maybe his

-dictum is correct. You'll agree with me as to his richness. Tell every

-one about it and see what they will think. Tell your mother and my

-mother. Tell Jack and give him a chance to laugh. Tell Mayme Carter,

-too."

-

-Lavinia ran at once to her mother.

-

-"Listen," she said. And she read it.

-

-Mrs. Blair laughed.

-

-"How funny!" she said, "and how well he writes! I should think he'd go

-into literature."

-

-Lavinia laid the letter down in her lap and looked at her mother as if

-she had been startled by a striking coincidence.

-

-"Why, do you know, I've thought of that very thing myself."

-

-"But read on," urged Mrs. Blair.

-

-Lavinia picked up the letter again and began:

-

-"Well, de--"

-

-"Oh," she exclaimed, blushing hotly, "I can't read you that. Let's

-see--"

-

-She leafed over the letter, one, two, three, four sheets. Mrs. Blair was

-smiling.

-

-"Aren't you leaving out the best parts?" she asked archly.

-

-"Oh, there's nothing," Lavinia said, not looking up. "But--oh, well,

-this is all. He says--

-

-"'There is a good deal of unrest and uneasiness here just now, because

-the first of May is coming. The road is anticipating trouble with the

-freight handlers; they may go out on a strike that day.'

-

-"Oh, dear," sighed Lavinia, "more strikes, and I suppose that means more

-trouble for Glenn."

-

-"Why, the strike of those men can't affect him," Mrs. Blair assured her.

-"He's a clerk now."

-

-"Yes, I know, but what if he gets the notion he ought to help them by

-quitting too?"

-

-

-

-

-                             CHAPTER XXVIII

-

-                          THE TALK OF THE TOWN

-

-

-Macochee's common interest in Marley was sharpened by his leaving town,

-and out of the curiosity that raged, Lawrence and Mayme Carter one

-evening made a call on Lavinia.

-

-"Well, Lavinia," said Lawrence, almost as soon as they were seated in

-the parlor, "what's the news about Glenn? How's he getting along?"

-

-"Oh, pretty well," she said, smiling.

-

-"Does he like Chicago?"

-

-"Oh, yes; that is, fairly well."

-

-"Run get his letters and let us read them."

-

-"Why, Jack! The idea!" Mayme rebuked him.

-

-But Lavinia instantly got up.

-

-"Well, I'll read you part of one or two," she said. "He can tell you

-much better than I all about himself."

-

-She was gone from the room a moment and then returned with two thick

-envelopes.

-

-"My, Lavinia, you don't intend to read all that, do you?" Lawrence made

-a burlesque of looking at his watch.

-

-"Oh, you needn't be afraid," said Lavinia, smiling. She opened a letter.

-

-"Here's one that came several days ago. He mentions you both in this

-one."

-

-"You don't mean to say he connects our names?" Lawrence affected

-consternation.

-

-"Can't you be serious a moment?" Mayme said, "I want to hear what he

-says; do go on, Lavinia, and don't mind Jack."

-

-Lavinia read the extract from the diary and Marley's comment.

-

-"Doesn't he say anything about you?" said Lawrence. "Why don't you read

-that? You skip the most interesting parts. You'd better let me read

-them. Here--" and he held out his hand for the letter.

-

-But Lavinia laid one letter securely in her lap and opened the other.

-

-"Listen to this," she began, and then she glanced over the first page

-and half-way down the second.

-

-"Here you're skipping again," cried Lawrence. "Why don't you play fair?"

-

-"'I have made a friend,' he says," she began, "'and it all came about

-through the strike. You know the freight handlers went out on the first

-of May, and since then there has been more excitement than work in the

-office. The freight house is stacked high with freight, and only a few

-men are working there and they are afraid of their lives. All around the

-outside of the big, long shed are policemen and detectives, and the

-strikers' pickets. All day they walk up and down, up and down, at a safe

-distance, just off the company's ground, and they waylay everybody and

-try to get them not to go to work here. I happened to see the strike

-when it began. It was day before yesterday morning. I had gone out in

-the freight house on some little errand and just at ten o'clock I

-noticed a man walk down by the platform that runs along outside the

-shed. I saw him stop by one of the big doors and look in. Suddenly he

-gave a low whistle, then another. The men in the freight house stopped

-and looked up. Then the man outside raised his arm, and held up two

-fingers--'"

-

-"He wanted them to go swimming probably," interrupted Lawrence.

-

-"Oh, Jack, do stop," said Mayme, irritably. "Right at the most

-interesting part, too! Do go on, Lavinia."

-

-Lavinia read on:

-

-"'Then the man outside raised his arm, and held up two fingers, and

-instantly every truck in the shed dropped to the floor, bang, the men

-all went and put on their coats, marched out of the freight house--and

-the strike was on. Well, after that came the policemen and the

-detectives and the pickets, to say nothing of the reporters. It is about

-these last that I mean to tell you, for among them I have found this new

-friend. The other day a young man came into the office to see Clark, our

-boss. I was attracted by him at once. He was tall, and his smooth-shaven

-face was refined and thoughtful; I call him good-looking; his eyes were

-dark and his nose straight and full of character; his lips were thin and

-level; his hair was not quite black and stopped just on the right side

-of being curly. He was dressed modestly, but stylishly; I remember he

-wore gloves--he always does--and I thought him somewhat dudish. But what

-was my pleasure to see on his waistcoat the little white cross of my

-fraternity! I rushed up to him instantly, and gave him the grip. He was

-a Sig., from an Indiana college, and he is a reporter on the _Courier_.

-His name is James Weston; no, he is no relation to Bob Weston of

-Macochee at all. I asked him that the first thing; but he is some

-relation to the Cliffords, distant, I suppose.'"

-

-"I wonder if that isn't the young man who visited them summer before

-last?" asked Mayme. "I'll bet it is!"

-

-"No, it can't be," said Lavinia, "I thought of that the very first

-thing, but you see he says," and Lavinia read on:

-

-"'He says he hasn't been there for years. We chatted together for a few

-minutes and were friends at once. To-morrow night, if I can get off in

-time, I'm to dine with him at a café down-town. My, but it was good to

-see some one wearing that little white cross! You see my college

-training has done me some good after all.'"

-

-In their conversation afterward, Lavinia and Mayme celebrated Marley's

-abilities as a writer, but Lawrence begged Lavinia to read them more,

-particularly, as he assured her, those parts about herself, saying he

-could judge better of Marley's abilities after he heard how he treated

-romantic subjects.

-

-"I want to know how he handles the love interest," he said.

-

-"Oh, you got that from George Halliday," said Mayme. "It sounds just

-like him when he's discussing some book none of us has read, doesn't it,

-Lavinia?"

-

-Lavinia admitted that it did sound like Halliday, and Mayme returned to

-her attack on Lawrence by saying:

-

-"What do you know about writing, anyway?"

-

-They might have gone farther along this line had not Mrs. Blair entered

-with a plate of cake and some ice-cream that had been left over from

-their dessert at supper. These refreshments instantly seemed to affect

-Mayme with the idea that the call had assumed the formality of a social

-function, and as she nibbled at her cake, she asked with a polite

-interest:

-

-"Just what is Mr. Marley's position with the railroad, Lavinia?"

-

-"Oh," Lavinia answered, "he has a place in the office of the freight

-department; he's a clerk there."

-

-"I'm so glad to know," said Mayme, as if in relief.

-

-"Why?" Lavinia looked up in alarm.

-

-"Oh, well, you know--how people talk." Mayme raised her pale eyebrows

-significantly. Lavinia was disturbed, but Lawrence, detecting the

-danger, instantly turned it off in a joke.

-

-"She heard he was a section hand," he said.

-

-"The idea!" laughed Lavinia.

-

-"Isn't this just the worst place for gossip you ever heard of?" said

-Mayme.

-

-"The worst ever," said Lawrence. "If I were you I'd quit and start a

-reform movement."

-

-When they had gone and were strolling toward the Carters', Lawrence

-grumbled at Mayme:

-

-"What did you want to give it all away to Lavinia for?"

-

-"Why, Jack, I didn't say anything, did I?"

-

-"Oh, no, nothing--only you tipped off the whole thing to her."

-

-"Why, what did I say that hinted at it, even?"

-

-"'Oh, you know how people talk!'" Lawrence mimicked her tone as he

-repeated her words.

-

-"Well, you know they do, Jack, and you know all the mean things they've

-been saying about Glenn. And you remember Charlie Davis' mother told

-mama that Charlie ran across him in the street: in Chicago and that--"

-

-"Oh, Charlie Davis!" said Lawrence, as impatiently as he could say

-anything. "What's he? Anyway, you didn't have to tell Lavinia."

-

-"Well, I'm glad we got the truth anyway."

-

-"Yes, so am I."

-

-"We must tell everybody."

-

-"Sure," acquiesced Lawrence, "if we can get the gossips started the

-other way they'll have him president of the road in a few days."

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXIX

-

-                            A MAN OF LETTERS

-

-

-The Macochee gossips, after they were assured he was engaged in

-clerical, and not manual work, might have promoted Marley much more

-rapidly than his railroad would have done, had it not been for the news

-that he had changed his employment. They had gone far enough to noise it

-about that Marley was chief clerk in the office, where he was only a

-bill clerk, when the _Republican_, with the impartial good nature with

-which it treated all of Macochee's folk, so long as they kept out of

-politics, mentioned him for the first time since his departure, and

-then, to tell of the advancement he was rapidly making in the metropolis

-that loomed so large and important in their provincial eyes. Lavinia had

-the facts in a letter from Marley a day or so before the _Republican_

-had them, though she never could imagine, as she told everybody, where

-the _Republican_ got its information.

-

-"I have a big piece of news to tell you," he wrote. "Last night I dined

-with Weston. It was the first really enjoyable evening I have had since

-I struck the town. Luckily, the strikers had everything tied up so tight

-that we could do little work, and I had no trouble in getting off in

-time. I met him about six o'clock, and we went to the swellest

-restaurant in town. Weston is the finest fellow you ever saw; as it was

-pay night, he said he would blow me off to a good dinner. And he did,

-the best dinner I have ever eaten; there were half a dozen courses, and

-as we ate we talked, talked about everything, college days, the hard

-days that come after college, and you, and everything. Weston's

-experience has been about the same as mine--one long, hopeless search

-for a job. He, however, did not wait so long as I did; he said that he

-realized there was no place for him in a small town, and so he set out

-for the city almost at once. His father wanted him to study medicine,

-but he said he hadn't the money or the patience to wait, and he hated

-medicine anyway, and, as newspaper work offered the quickest channel to

-making a living he chose that. His secret ambition, he confessed, is

-literature, and I believe he is writing a book, but he would not, or did

-not, tell me as much. He says he thinks newspaper work a bad business

-for any one to get into, but then I have discovered that that is the way

-every man talks about his own calling.

-

-"After we had finished our dinner, we sat there for a long, long time

-over our coffee and cigarettes, and we finally got to talking about the

-strike. Weston, you know, has been working on it, and I was glad to be

-able to tell him a good many things he said he could use. Finally, I

-don't know just how it came about, but I told him how the strike started

-with us, about the man appearing in the street alongside the freight

-house, whistling, and then holding up two fingers--I think I described

-it to you in a letter the other night. Weston was greatly interested; I

-can see him still, sitting across the table from me, knocking the ashes

-from his cigarette into his empty coffee-cup and looking so intently at

-me out of his brown eyes that he almost embarrassed me. And what was my

-surprise when I finished to have him say:

-

-"'By Jove, Marley, I'll have to use that. I've been wondering how to

-lead my story to-night.'

-

-"Now you know the strike at our place occurred several days ago, but

-since then it has been spreading, and to-day the men on another road

-walked out. This morning when I picked up the _Courier_ and turned to

-the strike news, here is what I read, under big head-lines:

-

-"'A short man with a brown derby hat cocked over his eye walked

-leisurely down Canal Street at ten o'clock yesterday morning. The short

-man walked a block and then turned and walked back. At the open door of

-the C. and A.'s big freight house he stopped. Suddenly he whistled,

-once, twice, thrice, in low notes. Then he raised his hand with a

-gesture that was graceful and yet commanding, and held up two fingers.

-Inside the freight house the men who were heaving away at the big bales

-and boxes, attracted by the whistle, paused in their labor and looked

-up; they saw the man raise his two fingers; and, with the discipline of

-well-trained troops, they dropped their trucks, put on their coats and

-marched out of the freight house. And the Alton had been added to the

-list of railroads whose men were on strike.'

-

-"Of course, I was surprised and puzzled, and a little pleased too, that

-I had had a hand in the article. As I read it, though, I thought of a

-hundred details I might have told Weston, and I began to wish I had

-written the account myself. This afternoon he came around to the office

-again, and the first thing he said was:

-

-"'Did you see your story this morning?'

-

-"I told him I had, of course. 'But,' I added, 'that was the way it

-happened on our road; not on the Alton.'

-

-"But he only laughed, and said something about the tricks of the trade.

-

-"And now for the news I was going to tell you. I told Weston, as we

-talked the story over, of my little wish that I had written the article

-myself, and he looked at me intently for a moment. Then he said:

-

-"'How'd you like to break into newspaper business?'

-

-"My heart leaped; it came to me suddenly that it wasn't the law, nor

-railroad work, but journalism that I wanted to enter. I told him so

-frankly and he said:

-

-"'Well, it's a dog's life and I don't know whether I'm doing you a good

-turn or not, but I'll speak to the city editor tonight. He's a little

-short of men just now.

-

-"My heart is in my mouth. I can hardly wait till to-morrow, when I'm to

-see him again. Think of it, dear, and all it means! It means more money,

-association with men of my own kind, men like Weston, and a fine,

-interesting life; and it means you; oh, it means you!"

-

-Marley was able in this letter to communicate to Lavinia some of his

-enthusiasm and some of his suspense, and she found it difficult to await

-the result of his next interview with Weston. She began to count the

-hours until Marley and Weston should meet again, and then in a flash it

-came over her that they had doubtless already met, that the decision was

-already known, the fate determined, and she was still in ignorance. She

-had a sense of mystery in it, and she grew impatient, wondering why he

-did not telegraph. The next day came, and a letter with it; but the

-letter did not decide anything. Marley wrote that Weston had spoken to

-the city editor, and that he had told him to bring Marley around that

-evening. And so, other hours of waiting, and then, at last, another

-letter. Marley announced the result with what self-repression he could

-command.

-

-"It's settled," he wrote. "I'm to go to work Monday--as a reporter on

-the staff of the _Courier_. The salary to begin with is to be fifteen

-dollars a week. I'm glad to quit railroad work; I'm not built to be a

-railroad man; I can't adhere to rules as they want me to, and I can't

-bow down as it seems I should. I didn't tell you that my boss and I had

-not been getting along very well lately; I thought I wouldn't worry you.

-I was glad to be able to tell him to-day that I'd quit Saturday. I did

-it in a proud and haughty manner; he seemed surprised and shocked--even

-pained. And when I broke the news gently to the young Canuck he

-expressed great sorrow and regret, but in his secret heart I knew he was

-glad, for now as a prophet he can vindicate himself, at least partly, in

-his diary."

-

-Lavinia was glad that Marley had gone into newspaper work; much as she

-had tried she had not been able to conceive of him in exactly the ideal

-light as a clerk in a railroad office; that position, while it may have

-had its own promise, nevertheless did not envelope him in the atmosphere

-she considered native to him. In his new relation to literature, which,

-in her ignorance, she confounded with journalism, she felt a deep

-satisfaction, and a new pride, and she was glad when the _Republican_

-announced the fact of Marley's new position; she felt that it was a

-fitting vindication of her lover in the eyes of the people of Macochee

-and a rebuke for the distrust they had shown in him.

-

-Thereafter her mail was increased, for in addition to his letter Marley

-sent her the _Courier_ with his work marked; often he marked Weston's as

-well, and early in June he wrote: "I want you to read Weston's story in

-Sunday's paper about the Derby; it's a peach; it's the best piece of

-frill writing that the town has seen in many a day."

-

-The tone of Marley's letters now became more cheerful; it was evident to

-Lavinia that he was finding an interest in life, and in his descriptions

-of his daily work and the places all over Chicago it took him to and the

-people of all sorts it brought him in contact with, she found a new

-interest for her own life. When he wrote that his salary had been

-increased because of his story about a Sunday evening service in a

-church of the colored people in Dearborn Street, it seemed to her that

-happiness at last had come to them, and if, with the passing of June,

-she felt a pang at Marley's grieving in one of his letters that this was

-the month in which they had intended to be married, she was consoled by

-the rapid progress he was making in his work. His salary had been raised

-a second time; he was receiving now twenty-five dollars a week; it

-seemed large to her, and she could not understand why it did not seem

-large to Marley, even when he wrote that Weston was paid forty dollars a

-week.

-

-Her chief joy, perhaps, lay in the fact that he seemed to be living more

-comfortably than he had before. Now that he had left his dismal

-boarding-house she found a relief from its subtly communicated influence

-of the stranded wrecks of life, as Marley surely found it in the

-apartments he was sharing with Weston. She parted as gladly from the

-knowledge of his landlady as Marley did himself, assuring her that the

-landlady had "not decreased any in value as a zoo exhibit since first I

-rhapsodized about her." Lavinia felt that she could dispense with much

-of the worry her womanly concern for his comfort had given her, and she

-turned with a new joy to the books he was constantly recommending.

-

-"Did you ever read," he wrote, "Turgenieff's _Fathers and Sons_? I know

-that you didn't and therefore I know what a treat you have coming. I'll

-send you the book if you can't get it in Macochee, and I presume you

-can't. Snider's sign 'Drugs and Books' is a lure to deceive an unwary

-public that doesn't care as much for books as it does for soda-water;

-and the stock there, as I recall it, consists largely of forty-cent

-editions of books on which the copyright has expired, and which, printed

-on cheap, pulp paper, are to be introduced for the first time to the

-natives of Macochee. I wish you could see Weston's little book-case,

-with its rows of his favorites. Besides Turgenieff and Tolstoi--he says

-the Russians are the greatest novel writers the world has yet

-produced--he has all of George Eliot; I have just read over again

-_Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_. He likes Jane Austen, too, and he

-says you would like her; I haven't read any but _Emma_ as yet. I'm going

-to read them all. And if you like, you can read the set of little

-volumes I am sending you to-day; we can read them thus together. And

-Henry James--do read him--_Daisy Miller_ especially; you will like that.

-Besides these, Weston has most of Ibsen's plays, and sometimes he reads

-parts of them aloud to me; he reads them well. Some day, he says, he's

-going to write a play himself; he is fond of the theater, and we often

-go. One of the fine things about being on a newspaper is that we get

-theater tickets, though we can't always get tickets to the theater we

-want. Now and then the dramatic editor--a fine old fellow with a

-magnificent shock of white hair, who may be seen about the office late

-at night looking very _distingué_ in his evening clothes--gets Weston to

-write a criticism on some play; and often the literary editor lets him

-review books. Weston said to-day he'd get the literary editor to let me

-review some books, and when I told him I didn't know how, he laughed in

-a strange way and said that wouldn't make the slightest difference.

-There's another book you _must_ read, and that is _A Modern Instance_.

-The chief character is Bartley Hubbard, a newspaper man. Weston and I

-had a big argument about the character to-day. I said I thought it was a

-libel on the newspaper profession and Weston laughed and said it was

-only the truth, and that I'd agree with him after I'd been in the work

-longer. 'Newspaper work isn't a profession anyway,' he said, 'but a

-business.' He speaks of journalism--though he won't call it journalism,

-nor let me--just as lawyers speak of the law. He is urging me, by the

-way, to keep up my law studies, and I'm thinking of going to the law

-school here, if I find I can carry it on with my other work. Weston

-declares I can; he says a man has to carry water on both shoulders if he

-wants to amount to anything in the world--Wade Powell said something

-like that to me once. Weston says I'll want to get out of newspaper work

-after a while. He disturbed me a little to-day, and he hurt me, too, by

-saying that a newspaper man has no business to be married; and he knows

-all about you, too. Of course, he didn't mean to hurt me, it's merely

-his way of looking at things."

-

-Happy as she was, Lavinia still had to have her woman's worries, and

-they began to express themselves in constant adjuration to Marley to

-guard his health; she feared the effect of night work, and she feared,

-too, that he could not carry on his law studies and do his duty as a

-reporter at the same time. She sympathized with the spirit of pride and

-determination which made him wish to finish his law studies and be

-admitted to the bar, but she found a greater satisfaction in thinking of

-him as a journalist than as a lawyer; the figure he thus presented to

-her mind was so much more romantic than the prosaic one of a lawyer to

-which she had been all her life accustomed; on a large metropolitan

-daily he was almost as romantic to her as an army officer or a naval

-officer would have been. And while she did not like the night work, and

-had her fears of it for Marley, she nevertheless felt strongly its

-picturesque quality.

-

-The picture Marley drew in one of his letters of the strange shifting of

-the scene that is to be observed in the streets of a great city as

-darkness falls, when those that work in the prosaic day disappear and in

-their places appears the vast and mysterious army of the toilers by

-night, many of them in callings demanding the cover of the night,

-thrilled her strangely. But she did not know how from all the

-temptations of the irregular life he was leading he was saved, partly by

-the gentle friend he had found in James Weston, but more by the constant

-thought of the girl whom he had left behind at home.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXX

-

-                               HOME AGAIN

-

-

-Marley, after a year or more in Chicago, found the excitement of his

-first return home growing upon him as he looked out the car window and

-long before the train entered the borders of Gordon County he eagerly

-began watching for familiar things.

-

-In the spirit of holiday which had come in this his first vacation, he

-had felt justified in taking a chair in the parlor car, though from the

-associations he had formed in his newspaper work it was more difficult

-now for him to resist than to yield to extravagances. He had recalled

-with a smile how in those first hard days in the freight office he had

-joked about going home in a private car, and he had had all day a

-childish pleasure in pretending that the empty Pullman was a private

-car; he could almost realize such a distinction when he showed the

-conductor the pass his newspaper had got for him.

-

-But even if he now felt glad that he was a newspaper man instead of a

-railroad man, he was quite willing to return to Macochee on any terms.

-He had tried to convince himself that he knew the very moment the train

-swept across the Indiana line into Ohio, and he felt a fine glow of

-state pride. He held his pride somewhat in check until he heard some one

-speak a name that he recognized as that of an Ohio town and then he

-boasted to the porter:

-

-"Well, I'm back in my own state again."

-

-The porter, though ready to admit that Ohio was a pretty good old state,

-was nevertheless not very responsive, and Marley saw that he would have

-to enjoy his sensations all alone.

-

-He could view with satisfaction the figure of a tolerably well-dressed

-city man reflected in the long mirror that swayed with the rushing of

-the heavy coach. He knew that his return would create a sensation in

-Macochee, though he was resolved to be modest about it. Even if he was

-not returning to Macochee in the ceremony he had dreamed of, he was

-returning in a way that was distinguished enough for him and for

-Macochee.

-

-He was eager to see the old town; he tried to imagine his return in its

-proper order and sequence, first, the little depot, blistering in the

-hot sun of the August afternoon, the rails gleaming in front of it, and

-the air above them trembling in the heat; he could see the baggage

-trucks tilted up on the platform; from the eating-house came the odor of

-boiled ham compromised by the smell of the grease frying on the

-scorching cinders that were heaped about the ties; beyond was the grain

-elevator that once appeared so monstrous in his eyes; across the tracks,

-the weed-grown field; and the only living things in sight the two men

-unloading agricultural machines from a box-car abandoned on a siding,

-the only sound, the ticking of a telegraph instrument; the target was

-set, but the station officials had not yet appeared.

-

-Thence, in thought, he went up Miami Street; he saw the Court House and,

-lounging along the stone base of the fence, the loafers whom no one had

-ever seen move, but who yet must have made some sort of imperceptible

-astronomical progress, for they kept always just in the shadow of the

-building; then the old law office across the way; then Main Street, with

-its crazy signs, its awnings, and the horses hitched to the racks, then

-the Square with its old gabled buildings, the monument and the

-cavalryman, the long street leading to his own home, and at last, Ward

-Street, arched by its cottonwoods,--and he recalled his unfinished

-verses which had taken Ward Street for a subject:

-

-                  "I know a place all pastoral,

-                    Where streams in winter flow,

-                  And where down from the cottonwoods

-                    There falls a summer snow."

-

-And then, at last, the old house of the Blairs' with its cool veranda,

-its dark bricks, its broad overhanging cornices, and Lavinia standing in

-the doorway!

-

-He had never forgotten the anguish of his parting that night in spring,

-and he had looked forward to this return as an experience that would

-expiate it, and restore the lost balance of his life. But now as he

-thought of his life in Chicago, of the new scenes and associations, it

-came to him that that night after all had been final; the youth who had

-then gone forth had indeed gone forth never to return; another being was

-coming back in his stead. He had been successful in a way which at first

-flattered his pride, but a new sense of proportion had been growing in

-him that had lately made him mistrust newspaper work; he had for it a

-dislike almost as definite as that which used to displease him in

-Weston. He was growing tired of his life as a reporter; it had so many

-irregularities, so many hardships; it detached him from wholesome,

-every-day existence. He longed for some calling more definite, more

-permanent, a work in which he might do things, instead of record them in

-an ephemeral way. He had for a while been envious of Weston's progress

-in his literary efforts, and for a while he had emulated him, but he had

-not been long in recognizing that he lacked literary talent.

-

-Out of this dissatisfaction with himself he had lately gone in earnestly

-to complete his law studies, which all along he had pursued in a

-desultory fashion. He found some consolation in the hope that he might

-be admitted to the bar in the fall, though how or when he was to get

-into a practice was still as much of a problem as it had been in the old

-days in Macochee. He clung steadfastly, however, to the feeling that his

-newspaper work was but a makeshift; Weston and he had constantly

-supported each other in this view--it was their one hope.

-

-With thoughts somewhat like these Marley had been whiling away the hours

-of his long day's journey from Chicago to Macochee. He had read

-thoroughly, and with a professionally critical faculty, all the Chicago

-papers, and had long ago thrown them aside in a disorderly pile. Now he

-had the tired sense that his journey was nearing its end.

-

-At last he saw the old mill-pond, and his heart leaped in affection;

-then he got his umbrella and sticks, took off his traveling cap and put

-it in his bag. He stood up for the porter to brush him off, and when he

-had selected a half-dollar as a tip, he asked the porter to get his

-luggage together, and in a conscious affectation he could not forego,

-began to pull on his new gloves. They were nearing Macochee now; and

-suddenly the tears started to his eyes, as in a flash he saw his

-white-haired father standing on the platform, anxiously craning his neck

-for a first glimpse of the boy who was coming home.

-

-Marley's mother did not reproach him when he ate a hurried supper that

-evening and then set off immediately for Lavinia's. He renewed some of

-the emotions of the earlier days of his courtship as the familiar houses

-along the way gradually presented themselves to his recognition; he was

-glad to note the changeless aspect of a town that never now could

-change, at least in the way of progress, and he discovered a novel

-satisfaction--one of the many experiences that were so rapidly crowding

-in with his impressions--in the feeling that here, at least, in

-Macochee, things would remain as they were, and defy that inexorable law

-of change which makes so many tragedies in life. Lavinia must have

-recognized his step, for there she was, standing in the doorway, a smile

-on her face, and her eyelashes somehow moist. Marley felt a strange

-discomposure; there was a little effort, the intimacy of their letters

-must now give way to the intimacy of personal contact. But in another

-second she was in his arms, and her face was hidden against his breast.

-

-"At last," she said, "you're here!"

-

-He felt her tremble, and he held her more closely. When he released her

-she put her hands up to his shoulders and held him away from her, while

-she scanned him critically.

-

-"You've grown broader," she said, "and heavier, and--oh, so much

-handsomer!"

-

-The Blairs filed in presently, and Marley had the curious sense of this

-very scene having been enacted in his presence before, but it lacked the

-usual baffling effect of this psychological experience, for he was able

-to recall, in an incandescent flash of memory, that it was almost a

-repetition of their good-bys that night when he had gone away; Mrs.

-Blair was as tender, and if Connie and Chad were a little shy of his new

-importance, Judge Blair was as dignified, and as anxious as ever to get

-back to his reading. Marley felt once more that permanence of things in

-Macochee; this household had remained the same, and it made him feel

-more than ever the change that had occurred in him.

-

-In lovers' intense subjectivity, he and Lavinia discussed this change

-seriously. They reviewed their old dreams, and now they could laugh at

-their defeated wish to live, even in an humble way, in Macochee.

-

-"It was funny, wasn't it?" said Marley. "I was very young

-then,--nothing, in fact, but a kid."

-

-"Are you so very much older now?" asked Lavinia with a slight hint of

-teasing in her tender voice.

-

-"Well," Marley replied, with a seriousness that impressed him, at least,

-as the ripe wisdom of maturity, "I am not much older in years, but I am

-in experience, and in knowledge of life. You see, dear, you can measure

-time by the calendar, but you can't measure life that way. And Weston

-says that there is no calling that will give a man experience so quickly

-as newspaper work. You know we see everything, and we get a smattering

-of all kinds of knowledge. Weston says that is all that reconciles him

-to the business; he says a man learns more there than he ever does in

-college. He considers the training invaluable; he says it will be of

-great help to him in literature, if he can ever get into literature--he

-isn't sure yet that he can. He can tell better after his book is

-published. And he says a newspaper experience will help me in the law,

-too, that is," Marley added, with a whimsical imitation of Weston's

-despairing uncertainty, "if I can ever get into the law."

-

-"You think a great deal of Mr. Weston, don't you?" said Lavinia.

-

-"He's the finest fellow in the world, and the best friend I ever had."

-

-Marley had a curious intuition that Lavinia was a little jealous of

-Weston. He immediately sought to allay the feeling with this argument:

-

-"You see, when a man does all for a fellow that Jim has done for me, and

-when you have lived with him, and shared your haversack with him, and he

-with you, like two soldier comrades, you get right down to the bottom of

-him. And I want you to know him, dear, I know you'll like him."

-

-Lavinia was silent, and Marley had a fear that she might not accept

-Weston quite so readily.

-

-"He has done me a world of good," he went on. "He has taught me much, he

-has corrected my reckoning in more ways than one. He has taught me much

-about books; and he has taught me to look sanely on a life that isn't,

-he says, always truthfully reflected in books. And besides all, if it

-hadn't been for him, if he had not kept me at it and urged me on, I

-think I should have been doomed for ever to remain a poor newspaper

-man."

-

-"Don't you like newspaper work?" she asked with a shade of

-disappointment in her tone.

-

-"I did, but I like it less every day. It's a hard and unsatisfactory

-life, and it has no promise in it. A man very soon reaches its highest

-point, and then he must be content to stay there. It's the easiest thing

-for a young fellow to get a start in, if he's bright; I suppose I'm

-making more money than any of the young lawyers in Chicago; but because

-it is so easy is the very reason why it is hardly worth while. Things

-that are easily won are not worth striving for."

-

-"And you're going to get out of it?"

-

-"Yes, as soon as I can. As soon as I can, I'm going to get into the law.

-When Weston first began urging me to keep up my studies, and when

-finally he made me go to the night law school, I consented chiefly

-because I had always felt the chagrin of defeat in having been compelled

-to give it up; lately, I've begun to see things differently, and I've

-determined to carry out my first intention and get into the law somehow.

-Of course, it's going to be hard. And one has to have a pull there as

-everywhere else in these days."

-

-Marley was silent for a moment and, Lavinia thought, a little depressed.

-She watched him sympathetically, and yet she was a little troubled by a

-sense of detachment. She felt that Weston was now more closely

-associated with Marley's struggle than she, and she was disturbed, too,

-by the disappointment of finding that his struggles were not at all

-ended.

-

-"Weston says," Marley went on presently, "that newspaper work is a good

-stepping-stone, and by it I may be able to arrange for some place in the

-law which will give me the start I want."

-

-"I thought you liked your work," Lavinia said; "I thought you were happy

-in it."

-

-Marley detected her regret, and was on the point of speaking, when

-Lavinia went on:

-

-"I don't see why you can't go into literature as well as Mr. Weston."

-

-Marley laughed.

-

-"The reason is that I haven't his talent," he said

-

-"I don't see why," Lavinia argued with some resentment of his humility.

-"You haven't enough confidence in your own powers; you let Mr. Weston

-dominate you too much."

-

-"Now, dearest," he pleaded, "you mustn't do Jim that injustice. He

-doesn't dominate me; but he is so much wiser than I, he knows so much

-more. You will understand when you meet him."

-

-"Well," she tentatively admitted, "that is no reason why you shouldn't

-in time be a literary man as well as he. Why can't you?"

-

-"Because I can't write, that's why."

-

-"Why, Glenn, how can you say that? Your letters disprove that. Every one

-who read them said that they were remarkable, and that you should go

-into literature. They said you had such good descriptive powers."

-

-Marley was looking at her in amazement.

-

-"Why, Lavinia, you didn't show them!"

-

-"You simpleton!" she said, with a smile in her eyes, "of course not; but

-I have read parts of them to mama and to your mother now and then."

-

-"Oh, well, that's all right," sighed Marley in relief, and then he

-resumed his defense of Weston and his analysis of himself.

-

-"Of course, I suppose I can write a fairly good newspaper story; at

-least they say so at the office." He indulged a little look of pride,

-and then he went on: "But that isn't literature."

-

-"I don't see why it isn't," she said. "I should think it would be the

-most natural thing in the world to go from one into the other."

-

-"Not at all. Literature requires style, personality, distinction, and

-the artistic temperament."

-

-"I'd say you were talking now like George Halliday if I didn't know you

-were talking like Mr. Weston."

-

-"I wish you could hear Weston talk about literature," he said. "He'd

-convince you."

-

-"He couldn't convince me that he can write any better than you can."

-Lavinia compressed her lips in a defiant loyalty.

-

-Marley paused to kiss the lips for their loyalty, and he compromised the

-validity of his own argument by saying:

-

-"As a matter of fact, the law, in America and in England, has given more

-men to literature than journalism ever has."

-

-"Then maybe you can enter literature through the law," said Lavinia,

-seizing her advantage.

-

-"No," said Marley, shaking his head. "I'm not cut out for it, as Weston

-is. Some day he will be a great man, and we shall be proud to have known

-him so intimately. And we will have him at our home; I have many a dream

-about that."

-

-He looked fondly at her, and her eyes brightened.

-

-"And there is another reason why I want to get out of newspaper work,"

-he went on, speaking tenderly, "and that is because everybody says a

-newspaper man has no more right to be married than a soldier has."

-

-"But they all are," said Lavinia.

-

-"Yes, they all are, or most of them."

-

-"And I suppose it is the married ones who say that."

-

-"Well, I know one who is going to be married just as soon as he can."

-

-"Who is that,--Mr. Weston?"

-

-"No, but Mr. Weston knows him, and knows his intentions, and he has

-promised to be at the wedding and act as best man."

-

-"Oh, it would be fine to have a literary man at the wedding, wouldn't

-it."

-

-They talked then about the wedding, and they found all their old

-delicious joy in it. Marley said it must be soon now, though with a pang

-that laid a weight on his heart, he wondered, as he thought of all the

-extravagances he had allowed himself to drift into, where he was to get

-the money. He could reassure himself only by telling himself that he was

-going to live as an anchorite when he got back to Chicago; even if he

-had to give up the pleasant apartment with Weston and go back to the

-boarding-house in Ohio Street.

-

-"How shall you like living in Chicago?" he asked. "Can you be happy in a

-little flat, without knowing anybody, and without being anybody?"

-

-"I shall be happy anywhere with you, Glenn!" she said, looking

-confidently into his eyes.

-

-

-

-

-                              CHAPTER XXXI

-

-                       ILLUSIONS AND DISILLUSIONS

-

-

-It was a pleasure to Marley to accept the homage the people paid him;

-they confounded his success in journalism with a success in literature,

-and under the impression that all writers are somehow witty, they

-laughed extravagantly at his lightest observation.

-

-But much as Marley relished all this, much as he enjoyed being at home

-again, with Lavinia and with his father and mother, he was disturbed by

-a certain restlessness that came over him after he had been in Macochee

-a few days and the novelty and excitement of his return had worn off.

-The glamour the town had worn for him had left it; it seemed to have

-withered and shrunk away. He could no longer, by any effort of the

-imagination, realize it as the place he had carried affectionately in

-his heart during the long months of his absence; its interests were so

-few and so petty, and he found himself battling with a wish to get away.

-He was fearful of this feeling; he did not dare to own it to himself,

-much less to his father and mother or to Lavinia.

-

-He was glad that Lavinia would not let him mention going back to

-Chicago, and as the days swept by with the swiftness of vacation time,

-he was troubled that he did not feel more acutely the sorrow he felt

-would best become the prospect of another separation. He was comforted,

-finally, when he was able to analyze his sensations sufficiently to

-discover that it was neither his sweetheart nor his parents that had

-changed, but his own attitude toward life in a small town; he was vastly

-relieved when he succeeded in separating his feelings and saw that it

-was Macochee alone that he had lost his affection for, though he could

-not analyze his sensations deeply enough to recognize himself as at that

-period of life when external conditions are accepted for more than their

-real value; he was still too young for that. And so he could spend his

-days happily with Lavinia and grudge the moments which Lawrence and

-Mayme Carter filched from them by their calls, and he was as resentful

-of Mayme's invitation to the supper which she exalted into a dinner with

-a reception afterward, as was Lavinia herself.

-

-When Marley went to pay his call on Wade Powell, he found many

-sensations as he glanced about the dingy little office where he had

-begun his studies. Wade Powell himself, smoking and reading his

-Cincinnati paper, was sitting at his old desk, with the same aspect of

-permanence he had always given the impression of. Marley rushed in on

-him with a face red and smiling and when Powell looked up, he threw down

-his paper, and leaped to his feet, saying:

-

-"Well, I'll be damned!"

-

-But when their first greetings were over, Powell's manner changed; he

-began to show Marley a certain respect, and he paid him the delicate

-tribute of letting him do most of the talking, whereas he used to do

-most of the talking himself. He was not prepared to hear that Marley was

-still studying law; and it cost him an effort to readjust his conception

-of Marley as a successful journalist to the old one of a struggling

-student. He gave Marley some intelligence of this, and of his

-disappointment when he said with a meekness Marley did not like to see

-in him:

-

-"Well, of course, you know your own business best."

-

-But when Marley had taken pains to explain his position and when he had

-described the Chicago law offices, Powell grew more reconciled.

-

-"I've watched you," he said, "I've watched you, and I've asked your

-father about you every time I've seen him; my one regret was that you

-were not working on a Cincinnati paper; then I could have read what you

-were writing. I did try to get a Chicago paper--but you know what this

-town is."

-

-Powell was deeply interested in Marley's description of his old friend,

-Judge Johnson, and as Marley gave him some notion of the judge's

-importance and prosperity Powell could only exclaim from time to time:

-

-"Well, I'll be damned!"

-

-Marley did not tell Powell that Judge Johnson had appeared to have

-forgotten him; he felt that it would be more handsome to accept the

-moral responsibility of a prevarication than to hurt Powell's feelings

-in the way he knew the truth would hurt them. Even as it was, Judge

-Johnson's success, now so keenly realized by Powell when it had been

-brought home to him in this personal way, seemed to subdue him, and he

-was only lifted out of his gloom when Marley said:

-

-"But I'll tell you one thing, there isn't a lawyer in Chicago who can

-try a case with you."

-

-Powell's eye brightened and his face glowed a deeper red; then the look

-died away as he said:

-

-"Well, I made a mistake. I ought to have gone there."

-

-"Is it too late?"

-

-Powell thought a moment, and Marley regretted having tempted him with an

-impossibility. He was relieved when Powell shook his head and said:

-

-"Yes, it's too late now."

-

-Powell, with something of the pathos of age and failure that was

-stealing gradually over him, begged Marley to come in and see him every

-day while he was at home.

-

-"You see I've always kept your desk," he said, in a tone that apologized

-for a weakness he perhaps thought unmanly, "just as it was when you went

-away."

-

-Marley thought cynically that Powell had kept everything else just as it

-was when he went away, but he was instantly ashamed of the thought, and

-ashamed, too, of the fact that he and Lavinia both considered even this

-little morning call a waste of time, and a sacrifice almost too great to

-be borne.

-

-Powell went with Marley out into the street, and it gave him evident

-pride to walk by his side down Main Street and around the Square.

-

-"I want them all to see you," he said frankly.

-

-He made Marley go with him to the McBriar House and then to Con's

-Corner, and, in every place where men stopped him and shook Marley's

-hand and asked him how he was getting along, Powell took the

-responsibility of replying promptly:

-

-"Look at him; how does he seem to be getting along?"

-

-Powell found a delight that must have been keener than Marley's in

-Marley's fidelity to Chicago, expressed quite in the boastful frankness

-of the citizens of that city when abroad, though to Marley it seemed

-that he was putting it on them by doing so. He found them all, however,

-in a spirit of loyalty to Macochee that might easily have become

-combative.

-

-"Well, little old Macochee's good enough for us, eh, Wade?" they would

-say.

-

-Marley would not let them be ahead of him in praise of Macochee, and

-Powell himself softened enough to admit that old Ohio was a pretty good

-place to have come from.

-

-When they suddenly encountered Carman in the street, Marley flushed with

-confusion, first for himself and then vicariously for Powell. But there

-was no escape from a situation that no doubt exaggerated itself to his

-sensitiveness, and he was soon allowing Carman to hold his hand in his

-right palm while with the other Carman solicitously held Marley's left

-elbow, and transfixed him with that left eye which still refused to

-react to light and shade.

-

-"Well, how are you?" asked Carman. "How are you, anyway?"

-

-"Oh, I'm all right."

-

-"Guess you're glad now I didn't give you that job, eh?"

-

-Marley could not look at Powell, but he hastened to say:

-

-"Yes, I'm glad, now."

-

-"Maybe it was for the best," said Carman.

-

-When they had left him Marley quickly and crudely tried to change the

-subject, but Powell insisted on saying:

-

-"I want you to know that I've always felt like a dog over that."

-

-"Oh, don't mention it," Marley begged. "I was honest when I told Carman

-I was glad it turned out as it did."

-

-"Yes," said Powell, "I guess it was all for the best."

-

-To Marley's relief they dropped the matter then, and went over to Con's

-Corner. There Powell lighted a cigar, and Marley could not resist asking

-for a brand of cigarettes, the kind that Weston smoked, though he knew

-that Con would not have them. He felt mean about it afterward, but he

-could not forego some of the petty distinctions of living in a city and

-he indulged a little revenge toward the people who had deserted him in

-what had seemed to him his need, and now, in what seemed to them his

-prosperity, were so ready to rally to him. Marley went home at noon

-feeling that his triumph had been almost as great as if he had come home

-in a private car.

-

-His triumph soon was at an end; they came to the afternoon of the day

-when Marley was to return to Chicago. It was a golden day, with a sun

-shining out of a sky without clouds, and yet a delicious breeze blew out

-of the little hills. Marley and Lavinia walked out the white and dusty

-pike that made the road to Mingo. They walked slowly along the edge of

-the road, in silence, under the sadness of the parting that was before

-them. They longed ineffably that the moments might be stayed; somehow

-they felt they might be stayed by their silence.

-

-But when they had ascended the hill and stood beside the old oak-tree

-which grew by the road, they looked out across the valley of the Mad

-River, miles and miles away--across fields now golden with the wheat, or

-green with the rustling corn that glinted in the sun, off and away to

-the trees that became vague and dim in the hazy distance. Back whence

-they had come lay Macochee; they could see the tower of the Court House,

-the red spire of the Methodist church, the gleam of the sun on some

-great window in the roof of the car-shops; on the other side of town

-crawled a train, trailing its smoke behind it. Marley looked at

-Lavinia--she was leaning against the tree, and as he looked he saw that

-her blue eyes were filling slowly with tears.

-

-"Isn't it beautiful!" he said, looking away from her to the simple

-scenery of Ohio.

-

-"Do you remember that day?"

-

-"When we picked out our farm--where was it?"

-

-"Wasn't it over there?"

-

-"Yes," he said. "We could come and live here when we are old." He knew

-he was but seeking to console himself for what now could not be. "And

-there is the old town," he said. "It looks beautiful from here, nestling

-among those trees, it seems peaceful, and calm, and simple. But it is

-different when you are in it; for there are gossip and envy and spite,

-and I can never quite forgive it because it had no place for me. Well,"

-he went on defiantly, in the relief he had been able to make for himself

-out of his immature reading of Macochee's character; "I don't need it

-any more; it is little and narrow and provincial, and the real life is

-to be lived out in the larger world. It's a hard fight, but it's worth

-it."

-

-"Don't you regret leaving it?" asked Lavinia, in a voice that was

-tenderer than Marley had ever known it. Marley looked at Macochee and

-then he looked at her.

-

-"I regret leaving it, dear heart, because I must leave you behind in

-it."

-

-"Would you never care to come back if it were not for me?" she asked.

-

-"I might," he admitted, "when we are old. We could come back here then

-and settle down on our farm over there." He pointed.

-

-"I'm half-afraid of the city," Lavinia said.

-

-He turned and took her in his arms.

-

-"Dearest," he said, "you must not say that; for the next time I come it

-will be to take you away from Macochee."

-

-"Will it?" she whispered.

-

-"Yes; and it can't be long now. How we have had to wait!"

-

-"Yes," she repeated, "how we have had to wait!"

-

-

-

-

-                             CHAPTER XXXII

-

-                                AT LAST

-

-

-Marley, in that compensatory pleasure we find in difficulties in the

-retrospect, was afterward fond of saying that if he had waited until he

-had the money and the position to warrant his marrying, he never would

-have married at all.

-

-Just what moved him to take the decisive step he did he would have found

-it hard to tell. He had grown accustomed to the life he was living in

-Chicago, he had succumbed, as it were, to his environment; he no longer

-regretted Macochee and he found a satisfaction in declaring, whenever he

-had the chance, that the kindest thing the town had ever done for him

-was to refuse him a place within its borders. As he looked back at all

-the plans he had formed, he marveled at their number, but he marveled

-more that he should have had such regret in the failure of all of them;

-he was glad now that they had failed; had any one of them succeeded his

-life would have been diverted into other channels, and it gave him a

-kind of fear when he tried to imagine his life in those other channels;

-he could see himself in those relations only as some other identity, and

-it gave him a gruesome feeling to do this.

-

-Not that he was satisfied with himself or his surroundings; he did not

-like newspaper work, and he did not like Chicago very well. He was

-determined to get out of newspaper work at any rate, and while he could

-not yet clearly see a way of getting into the law, he had a calm

-assurance that he would do it, in the end. Weston sustained him in this

-hope by saying:

-

-"A man can't control circumstances; they control him; but sometimes he

-can dodge them, and, after all, every sincere prayer is answered."

-

-During the winter that followed the summer when he had paid his visit to

-his home he worked hard at the law, spending in study the hours the

-other men on his newspaper spent in their dissipations, and in the

-spring he stole away almost secretly to Springfield, took the

-examination, and was admitted to the bar.

-

-After it was done, it seemed but a little thing; he wrote Lavinia and he

-wrote Wade Powell, knowing the interest Powell would have in the fact,

-that he felt no different now as a lawyer than he had when he was merely

-a layman. Weston had spent the winter over the book he was writing; in

-the spring he found a publisher, and _The Clutch of Circumstance_ was

-given to the world. Marley thought it a wonderful book, and so did

-Lavinia, and while it made but little noise in the world, Weston said it

-had done better than he expected--so well, in fact, that he was going to

-give up newspaper work, and give his attention wholly to writing another

-book.

-

-It was a shock to Marley when Weston told him they would have to give up

-their apartment; it was a break in the life to which he had grown

-accustomed. But it seemed a time of change, and it was then he wrote

-Lavinia that he thought it useless for them to wait any longer; he

-thought they might as well be married then as at any time.

-

-Unconsciously, perhaps, he wrote this letter as if he and not she had

-been waiting, and if he had known the state of the sensitive public

-opinion in Macochee, he might have felt himself justified in the

-attitude. Ever since his visit there the summer before his apparent

-prosperity had given the sentiment of the town an impetus in his favor;

-the people had turned their criticism toward Lavinia; for months it was

-a common expression that it was a shame she was keeping Marley waiting

-so long. They would nod in a sinister way, and insinuate the worldliest

-of motives; it was generally under stood that she was waiting for Marley

-to make a fortune, and this, they held, was demanding too much. She had

-withdrawn utterly from the society of Macochee; and she had not gone to

-one of the balls Lawrence had arranged that winter at the Odd Fellows'

-Hall; her position, outwardly at least, was as isolated as that of the

-Misses Cramer, the fragile and transparent old maids who lived so many

-years in their house sheltered by the row of cedars behind the High

-School grounds.

-

-When Judge Blair received the formal letter in which Marley told him he

-had asked Lavinia to name the day and requested his approval, the judge

-gave his consent with a promptness that surprised him almost as much as

-it did Mrs. Blair and Lavinia. He justified his inconsistency to his

-wife, in order perhaps, the more thoroughly to justify it to himself, by

-saying that he had long felt Lavinia's position keenly.

-

-"If the strain has been to her anything like what it has been to me," he

-said to his wife, "they could not have endured it much longer."

-

-"It will be lonely here without her," said Mrs. Blair, pensively.

-

-"Yes," the judge assented, and then after a moment's thought he added:

-

-"But we can now begin to worry about Connie."

-

-"Don't you dare mention that, William!" said Mrs. Blair, almost

-viciously. "She mustn't begin to think of such a thing."

-

-"But she's in long dresses now, and she seems to walk home more and more

-slowly every night with those boys from the High School."

-

-"Well, I don't propose to go through such an experience as we have had

-for these last three years, not right away, at any rate."

-

-The judge tried to laugh, as he said:

-

-"Well, I'll turn Connie over to you; I'm going to have a little peace

-now."

-

-The judge complained that he could find no peace, however, anywhere, so

-great was the preparation that raged thereafter in the house, driving

-him with his book and cigar from place to place. Mrs. Blair and Lavinia

-and Connie were in fine excitement over the gowns that were being

-fashioned, and Miss Ryan lived at the Blairs' for weeks, while in every

-room there were billowy clouds of white garments, and threads and

-ravelings over all the floors.

-

-Meanwhile it was understood that Marley, too, was making arrangements in

-Chicago. He had leased a small flat on the South Side, and had arranged

-with Weston to remove most of the furniture of their apartment into the

-new home where the lovers were to set up housekeeping. Mrs. Marley was

-to spare them some of the things from her home, and Mrs. Blair, from

-time to time, designated certain articles which she was willing to

-devote to the cause. Chad's contribution was merely a suggestion; he

-said they could depend on the wedding presents to fill up the gaps.

-

-They were married in the middle of June. The ceremony was pronounced by

-Doctor Marley in the parlor of the Blair home; everybody bore up well

-until, under the stress of his emotion, the doctor's voice broke, and

-then Mrs. Blair wept and the judge wiped his eyes and his reddened,

-anguished face. Mrs. Marley cried too, though every one tried to comfort

-her with the assurance that she was not losing a son, but gaining a

-daughter. Connie, in her first long gown, acted as maid for her sister,

-but it was evident that she was desperately impressed by the young

-author of _The Clutch of Circumstance_, who had come on from Chicago to

-act as groomsman.

-

-The company that had been invited was as much impressed by Weston as

-Connie was; they had never had an author in Macochee before, and though

-most of them had such confused notions of Weston's performances in

-literature that they grew cold with fear when they talked with him, they

-nevertheless braved it out for the sake of an experience they could

-boast of afterward. Most of them took refuge in a discussion of Marley's

-achievements with him, and they gave him the unflattering impression

-that Marley's work was as important as his own.

-

-Many of them had plots they wished him to use in his stories, others

-wished to know if he took his characters from real life; and Mrs. Carter

-was of such an acuteness that she identified Marley as his hero, though

-Weston had tried to keep his book from having any hero. George Halliday,

-however, was able to save the day; he could discriminate; he had read

-_The Clutch of Circumstance_, having borrowed Lavinia's autograph copy,

-and he told Weston that while he did not go in for realism, because it

-was too photographic, too materialistic and lacked personality, he

-nevertheless had enjoyed a pleasant half-hour with the volume, and

-considered it not half-bad.

-

-This conversation was held in plain hearing of all in that difficult

-moment after the ceremony, when the relatives of the bride had solemnly

-kissed her, and her most intimate friends, like Mayme Carter, had wept

-on her neck. The people were standing helplessly about; Marley noticed

-Wade Powell, as dignified as a clergyman, in his black garments and

-white tie standing apart with his wife.

-

-Marley had never seen Mrs. Powell before, but he recalled in a flash

-that she filled his conception of her; and this delicate, sensitive

-little face completed the picture he remembered long ago to have formed.

-When he saw Powell standing there, his hands behind him, unequal to the

-ordeal of being entertained in Judge Blair's house, bowing stiffly and

-forcing a smile on the few occasions when he was spoken to or thought he

-was being spoken to, he had a wish to go to him, but he could not then

-leave his place by Lavinia's side. He was glad a moment later when he

-saw his father and Wade Powell in conversation, and as he and Lavinia

-passed them on their way out to the dining-room he heard his father say:

-

-"Well, I'll tell you, Mr. Powell, when I was young my creed was founded

-on the fact of sin in man; but now that I am old, I find it more and

-more founded on the fact of the good that is in all of them."

-

-When the supper was over, Lawrence gave the cheer that every one wished

-to see come to the wedding by clearing the parlor for a dance, and

-Marley was glad that his position now permitted him to refrain from

-dancing with a valid excuse.

-

-Marley thought that Lavinia never looked so pretty as she did when she

-stood at the head of the stairs after she had donned her blue traveling

-gown, drawing on her gloves and waiting for the carriage that was to

-drive them to the station. Her face was rosy in the light that filled

-the house, and she met his eyes with a fond, contented glance.

-

-"Are you happy?" he asked.

-

-"Don't you see?" she said, looking up at him.

-

-"And will you be happy in that big city, away from every one you know,

-as the wife of a newspaper man?"

-

-"I shall be happy anywhere with you."

-

-"Our dreams are coming true," Marley said, "after a fashion. And yet not

-just as we dreamed them, after all."

-

-"In all the essentials they are, aren't they?"

-

-"Yes, but you know our dream was that I was to practise law."

-

-"Well, we still have that dream."

-

-"Yes, we still have it; maybe it will come true. Weston says that our

-dreams are as much realities in our lives as anything else."

-

-                                THE END

-

-

-

-

-

-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Average, by Brand Whitlock

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