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+The Project Gutenberg Ebook A Modern Chronicle, v5, by Winston Churchill
+WC#41 in our series by Winston Churchill (USA author, not Sir Winston Churchill)
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+Title: A Modern Chronicle, Volume 5.
+
+Author: Winston Churchill (USA author, not Sir Winston Churchill)
+
+Release Date: March, 2004  [EBook #5378]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 28, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN CHRONICLE, V5, BY CHURCHILL ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+A MODERN CHRONICLE
+
+By Winston Churchill
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+Volume 5.
+
+
+I.        ASCENDI
+II.       THE PATH OF PHILANTHROPY
+III.      VINELAND
+IV.       THE VIKING
+V.        THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ASCENDI
+
+Honora did not go back to Quicksands.  Neither, in this modern chronicle,
+shall we.
+
+The sphere we have left, which we know is sordid, sometimes shines in the
+retrospect.  And there came a time, after the excitement of furnishing
+the new house was over, when our heroine, as it were, swung for a time in
+space: not for a very long time; that month, perhaps, between autumn and
+winter.
+
+We need not be worried about her, though we may pause for a moment or
+two to sympathize with her in her loneliness--or rather in the moods it
+produced.  She even felt, in those days, slightly akin to the Lady of the
+Victoria (perfectly respectable), whom all of us fortunate enough
+occasionally to go to New York have seen driving on Fifth Avenue with an
+expression of wistful haughtiness, and who changes her costumes four
+times a day.
+
+Sympathy!  We have seen Honora surrounded by friends--what has become of
+them?  Her husband is president of a trust company, and she has one of
+the most desirable houses in New York.  What more could be wished for?
+To jump at conclusions in this way is by no means to understand a heroine
+with an Ideal.  She had these things, and--strange as it may seem--
+suffered.
+
+Her sunny drawing-room, with its gathered silk curtains, was especially
+beautiful; whatever the Leffingwells or Allisons may have lacked, it was
+not taste.  Honora sat in it and wondered: wondered, as she looked back
+over the road she had threaded somewhat blindly towards the Ideal,
+whether she might not somewhere have taken the wrong turn.  The farther
+she travelled, the more she seemed to penetrate into a land of
+unrealities.  The exquisite objects by which she was surrounded, and
+which she had collected with such care, had no substance: she would not
+have been greatly surprised, at any moment, to see them vanish like a
+scene in a theatre, leaning an empty, windy stage behind them.  They did
+not belong to her, nor she to them.
+
+Past generations of another blood, no doubt, had been justified in
+looking upon the hazy landscapes in the great tapestries as their own:
+and children's children had knelt, in times gone by, beside the carved
+stone mantel.  The big, gilded chairs with the silken seats might
+appropriately have graced the table of the Hotel de Rambouillet.  Would
+not the warriors and the wits, the patient ladies of high degree and of
+many children, and even the 'precieuses ridicules' themselves, turn over
+in their graves if they could so much as imagine the contents of the
+single street in modern New York where Honora lived?
+
+One morning, as she sat in that room, possessed by these whimsical though
+painful fancies, she picked up a newspaper and glanced through it,
+absently, until her eye fell by chance upon a name on the editorial page.
+Something like an electric shock ran through her, and the letters of the
+name seemed to quiver and become red.  Slowly they spelled--Peter Erwin.
+
+"The argument of Mr. Peter Erwin, of St. Louis, before the Supreme Court
+of the United States in the now celebrated Snowden case is universally
+acknowledged by lawyers to have been masterly, and reminiscent of the
+great names of the profession in the past.  Mr. Erwin is not dramatic.
+He appears to carry all before him by the sheer force of intellect, and
+by a kind of Lincolnian ability to expose a fallacy: He is still a young
+man, self-made, and studied law under Judge Brice of St. Louis, once
+President of the National Bar Association, whose partner he is"....
+
+Honora cut out the editorial and thrust it in her gown, and threw the
+newspaper is the fire.  She stood for a time after it had burned,
+watching the twisted remnants fade from flame colour to rose, and finally
+blacken.  Then she went slowly up the stairs and put on her hat and coat
+and veil.  Although a cloudless day, it was windy in the park, and cold,
+the ruffled waters an intense blue.  She walked fast.
+
+She lunched with Mrs. Holt, who had but just come to town; and the light,
+like a speeding guest, was departing from the city when she reached her
+own door.
+
+"There is a gentleman in the drawing-room, madam," said the butler.  "He
+said he was an old friend, and a stranger in New York, and asked if he
+might wait."
+
+She stood still with presentiment.
+
+"What is his name?" she asked.
+
+"Mr. Erwin," said the man.
+
+Still she hesitated.  In the strange state in which she found herself
+that day, the supernatural itself had seemed credible.  And yet--she was
+not prepared.
+
+"I beg pardon, madam," the butler was saying, "perhaps I shouldn't--?"
+
+"Yes, yes, you should," she interrupted him, and pushed past him up the
+stairs.  At the drawing-room door she paused--he was unaware of her
+presence.  And he had not changed!  She wondered why she had expected him
+to change.  Even the glow of his newly acquired fame was not discernible
+behind his well-remembered head.  He seemed no older--and no younger.
+And he was standing with his hands behind his back gazing in simple,
+silent appreciation at the big tapestry nearest the windows.
+
+"Peter," she said, in a low voice.
+
+He turned quickly, and then she saw the glow.  But it was the old glow,
+not the new--the light m which her early years had been spent.
+
+"What a coincidence!" she exclaimed, as he took her hand.
+
+"Coincidence?"
+
+"It was only this morning that I was reading in the newspaper all sorts
+of nice things about you.  It made me feel like going out and telling
+everybody you were an old friend of mine."  Still holding his fingers,
+she pushed him away from her at arm's length, and looked at him.  "What
+does it feel like to be famous, and have editorials about one's self in
+the New York newspapers?"
+
+He laughed, and released his hands somewhat abruptly.
+
+"It seems as strange to me, Honora, as it does to you."
+
+"How unkind of you, Peter!" she exclaimed.
+
+She felt his eyes upon her, and their searching, yet kindly and humorous
+rays seemed to illuminate chambers within her which she would have kept
+in darkness: which she herself did not wish to examine.
+
+I'm so glad to see you," she said a little breathlessly, flinging her
+muff and boa on a chair.  Sit there, where I can look at you, and tell
+me why you didn't let me know you were coming to New York."
+
+He glanced a little comically at the gilt and silk arm-chair which she
+designated, and then at her; and she smiled and coloured, divining the
+humour in his unspoken phrase.
+
+"For a great man," she declared, "you are absurd."
+
+He sat down.  In spite of his black clothes and the lounging attitude he
+habitually assumed, with his knees crossed--he did not appear incongruous
+in a seat that would have harmonized with the flowing robes of the
+renowned French Cardinal himself.  Honora wondered why.  He impressed her
+to-day as force--tremendous force in repose, and yet he was the same
+Peter.  Why was it?  Had the clipping that even then lay in her bosom
+effected this magic change?  He had intimated as much, but she denied it
+fiercely.
+
+She rang for tea.
+
+"You haven't told me why you came to New York," she said.
+
+"I was telegraphed for, from Washington, by a Mr. Wing," he explained.
+
+"A Mr. Wing," she repeated.  "You don't mean by any chance James Wing?"
+
+"The Mr. Wing," said Peter.
+
+"The reason I asked," explained Honora, flushing, was because Howard is--
+associated with him.  Mr. Wing is largely interested in the Orange Trust
+Company."
+
+"Yes, I know," said Peter.  His elbows were resting on the arms of his
+chair, and he looked at the tips of his fingers, which met.  Honora
+thought it strange that he did not congratulate her, but he appeared to
+be reflecting.
+
+"What did Mr. Wing want?" she inquired in her momentary confusion, and
+added hastily, "I beg your pardon, Peter.  I suppose I ought not to ask
+that."
+
+"He was kind enough to wish me to live in New York he answered, still
+staring at the tips of his fingers.
+
+"Oh, how nice!" she cried--and wondered at the same time whether, on
+second thoughts, she would think it so.  "I suppose be wants you to be
+the counsel for one of his trusts.  When--when do you come?"
+
+"I'm not coming."
+
+"Not coming!  Why?  Isn't it a great compliment?"
+
+He ignored the latter part of her remark; and it seemed to her, when she
+recalled the conversation afterwards, that she had heard a certain note
+of sadness under the lightness of his reply.
+
+"To attempt to explain to a New Yorker why any one might prefer to live
+in any other place would be a difficult task."
+
+"You are incomprehensible, Peter," she declared.  And yet she felt a
+relief that surprised her, and a desire to get away from the subject.
+"Dear old St. Louis!  Somehow, in spite of your greatness, it seems to
+fit you."
+
+"It's growing," said Peter--and they laughed together.
+
+"Why didn't you come to lunch?" she said.
+
+"Lunch!  I didn't know that any one ever went to lunch in New York--in
+this part of it, at least--with less than three weeks' notice.  And by
+the way, if I am interfering with any engagement--"
+
+"My book is not so full as all that.  Of course you'll come and stay with
+us, Peter."
+
+He shook his head regretfully.
+
+"My train leaves at six, from Forty-Second Street," he replied.
+
+"Oh, you are niggardly," she cried.  "To think how little I see of you,
+Peter.  And sometimes I long for you.  It's strange, but I still miss you
+terribly--after five years.  It seems longer than that," she added, as
+she poured the boiling water into the tea-pot.  But she did not look at
+him.
+
+He got up and walked as far as a water-colour on the wall.
+
+"You have some beautiful things here, Honora," he said.  "I am glad I
+have had a glimpse of you surrounded by them to carry back to your aunt
+and uncle."
+
+She glanced about the room as he spoke, and then at him.  He seemed the
+only reality in it, but she did not say so.
+
+"You'll see them soon," was what she said.  And considered the miracle of
+him staying there where Providence had placed him, and bringing the world
+to him.  Whereas she, who had gone forth to seek it--
+
+"The day after to-morrow will be Sunday," he reminded her.
+
+Nothing had changed there.  She closed her eyes and saw the little dining
+room in all the dignity of Sunday dinner, the big silver soup tureen
+catching the sun, the flowered china with the gilt edges, and even a
+glimpse of lace paper when the closet door opened; Aunt Mary and Uncle
+Tom, with Peter between them.  And these, strangely, were the only
+tangible things and immutable.
+
+"You'll give them--a good account of me?"  she said.  "I know that you do
+not care for New York," she added with a smile.  "But it is possible to
+be happy here."
+
+"I am glad you are happy, Honora, and that you have got what you wanted
+in life.  Although I may be unreasonable and provincial and--and
+Western," he confessed with a twinkle--for he had the characteristic
+national trait of shading off his most serious remarks--"I have never
+gone so far as to declare that happiness was a question of locality."
+
+She laughed.
+
+"Nor fame."  Her mind returned to the loadstar.
+
+"Oh, fame!" he exclaimed, with a touch of impatience, and he used the
+word that had possessed her all day.  "There is no reality in that.  Men
+are not loved for it."
+
+She set down her cup quickly.  He was looking at the water-colour.
+
+"Have you been to the Metropolitan Museum lately?" he asked.
+
+"The Metropolitan Museum?" she repeated in bewilderment.
+
+"That would be one of the temptations of New York for me," he said.
+"I was there for half an hour this afternoon before I presented myself
+at your door as a suspicious character.  There is a picture there, by
+Coffin, called 'The Rain,' I believe.  I am very fond of it.  And looking
+at it on such a winter's day as this brings back the summer.  The squall
+coming, and the sound of it in the trees, and the very smell of the wet
+meadow-grass in the wind.  Do you know it?"
+
+"No," replied Honora, and she was suddenly filled with shame at the
+thought that she had never been in the Museum.  "I didn't know you were
+so fond of pictures."
+
+"I am beginning to be a rival of Mr. Dwyer," he declared.  "I've bought
+four--although I haven't built my gallery.  When you come to St. Louis
+I'll show them to you--and let us hope it will be soon."
+
+For some time after she had heard the street door close behind him Honora
+remained where she was, staring into the fire, and then she crossed the
+room to a reading lamp, and turned it up.
+
+Some one spoke in the doorway.
+
+"Mr. Grainger, madam."
+
+Before she could rouse herself and recover from her astonishment, the
+gentleman himself appeared, blinking as though the vision of her were too
+bright to be steadily gazed at.  If the city had been searched, it is
+doubtful whether a more striking contrast to the man who had just left
+could have been found than Cecil Grainger in the braided, grey cutaway
+that clung to the semblance of a waist he still possessed.  In him Hyde
+Park and Fifth Avenue, so to speak, shook hands across the sea: put him
+in either, and he would have appeared indigenous.
+
+"Hope you'll forgive my comin' 'round on such slight acquaintance, Mrs.
+Spence," said he.  "Couldn't resist the opportunity to pay my respects.
+Shorter told me where you were."
+
+"That was very good of Mr. Shorter," said Honora, whose surprise had
+given place to a very natural resentment, since she had not the honour
+of knowing Mrs. Grainger.
+
+"Oh," said Mr. Grainger, "Shorter's a good sort.  Said he'd been here
+himself to see how you were fixed, and hadn't found you in.  Uncommonly
+well fixed, I should say," he added, glancing around the room with
+undisguised approval.  "Why the deuce did she furnish it, since she's
+gone to Paris to live with Rindge?"
+
+"I suppose you mean Mrs. Rindge," said Honora.  "She didn't furnish it."
+
+Mr. Grainger winked at her rapidly, like a man suddenly brought face to
+face with a mystery.
+
+"Oh!" he replied, as though he had solved it.  The solution came a few
+moments later.  "It's ripping!" he said.  "Farwell couldn't have done it
+any better."
+
+Honora laughed, and momentarily forgot her resentment.
+
+"Will you have tea?"  she asked.  "Oh, don't sit down there!"
+
+"Why not?" he asked, jumping.  It was the chair that had held Peter, and
+Mr. Grainger examined the seat as though he suspected a bent pin.
+
+"Because," said Honora, "because it isn't comfortable.  Pull up that
+other one."
+
+Again mystified, he did as he was told.  She remembered his reputation
+for going to sleep, and wondered whether she had been wise in her second
+choice.  But it soon became apparent that Mr. Grainger, as he gazed at
+her from among the cushions, had no intention of dozing, His eyelids
+reminded her of the shutters of a camera, and she had the feeling of
+sitting for thousands of instantaneous photographs for his benefit.  She
+was by turns annoyed, amused, and distrait: Peter was leaving his hotel;
+now he was taking the train.  Was he thinking of her?  He had said he was
+glad she was happy!  She caught herself up with a start after one of
+these silences to realize that Mr. Grainger was making unwonted and
+indeed pathetic exertions to entertain her, and it needed no feminine eye
+to perceive that he was thoroughly uncomfortable.  She had, unconsciously
+and in thinking of Peter, rather overdone the note of rebuke of his
+visit.  And Honora was, above all else, an artist.  His air was
+distinctly apologetic as be rose, perhaps a little mortified,
+like that of a man who has got into the wrong house.
+
+"I very much fear I've intruded, Mrs. Spence," he stammered, and he was
+winking now with bewildering rapidity.  "We--we had such a pleasant drive
+together that day to Westchester--I was tempted--"
+
+"We did have a good time," she agreed.  "And it has been a pleasure to
+see you again."
+
+Thus, in the kindness of her heart, she assisted him to cover his
+retreat, for it was a strange and somewhat awful experience to see Mr.
+Cecil Grainger discountenanced.  He glanced again, as he went out, at the
+chair in which he had been forbidden to sit.
+
+She went to the piano, played over a few bars of Thais, and dropped her
+hands listlessly.  Cross currents of the strange events of the day flowed
+through her mind: Peter's arrival and its odd heralding, and the
+discomfort of Mr. Grainger.
+
+Howard came in.  He did not see her under the shaded lamp, and she sat
+watching him with a curious feeling of detachment as he unfolded his
+newspaper and sank, with a sigh of content, into the cushioned chair
+which Mr. Grainger had vacated.  Was it fancy that her husband's physical
+attributes had changed since he had attained his new position of dignity?
+She could have sworn that he had visibly swollen on the evening when he
+had announced to her his promotion, and he seemed to have remained
+swollen.  Not bloated, of course: he was fatter, and--if possible pinker.
+But there was a growing suggestion in him of humming-and-hawing
+greatness.  If there--were leisure in this too-leisurely chronicle for
+what might be called aftermath, the dinner that Honora had given to some
+of her Quicksands friends might be described.  Suffice it to recall, with
+Honora, that Lily Dallam, with a sure instinct, had put the finger of her
+wit on this new attribute of Howard's.
+
+"You'll kill me, Howard!" she had cried.  "He even looks at the soup as
+though he were examining a security!"
+
+Needless to say, it did not cure him, although it sealed Lily Dallam's
+fate--and incidentally that of Quicksands.  Honora's thoughts as she sat
+now at the piano watching him, flew back unexpectedly to the summer at
+Silverdale when she had met him, and she tried to imagine, the genial and
+boyish representative of finance that he was then.  In the midst of this
+effort he looked up and discovered her.
+
+"What are you doing over there, Honora?" he asked.
+
+"Thinking," she answered.
+
+"That's a great way to treat a man when he comes home after a day's
+work."
+
+"I beg your pardon, Howard," she said with unusual meekness.  "Who do you
+think was here this afternoon?"
+
+"Erwin?  I've just come from Mr. Wing's house--he has gout to-day and
+didn't go down town.  He offered Erwin a hundred thousand a year to come
+to New York as corporation counsel.  And if you'll believe me--he refused
+it."
+
+"I'll believe you," she said.
+
+"Did he say anything about it to you?"
+
+"He simply mentioned that Mr. Wing asked him to come to New York.  He
+didn't say why."
+
+"Well," Howard remarked, "he's one too many for me.  He can't be making
+over thirty thousand where he is."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE PATH OF PHILANTHROPY
+
+Mrs. Cecil Grainger may safely have been called a Personality, and one
+of the proofs of this was that she haunted people who had never seen her.
+Honora might have looked at her, it is true, on the memorable night of
+the dinner with Mrs. Holt and Trixton Brent; but--for sufficiently
+obvious reasons--refrained.  It would be an exaggeration to say that Mrs.
+Grainger became an obsession with our heroine; yet it cannot be denied
+that, since Honora's arrival at Quicksands, this lady had, in increasing
+degrees, been the subject of her speculations.  The threads of Mrs.
+Grainger's influence were so ramified, indeed, as to be found in Mrs.
+Dallam, who declared she was the rudest woman in New York and yet had
+copied her brougham; in Mr. Cuthbert and Trixton Brent; in Mrs. Kame; in
+Mrs. Holt, who proclaimed her a tower of strength in charities; and
+lastly in Mr. Grainger himself, who, although he did not spend much time
+in his wife's company, had for her an admiration that amounted to awe.
+
+Elizabeth Grainger, who was at once modern and tenaciously conservative,
+might have been likened to some of the Roman matrons of the aristocracy
+in the last years of the Republic.  Her family, the Pendletons, had
+traditions: so, for that matter, had the Graingers.  But Senator
+Pendleton, antique homo virtute et fide, had been a Roman of the old
+school who would have preferred exile after the battle of Philippi; and
+who, could he have foreseen modern New York and modern finance, would
+have been more content to die when he did.  He had lived in Washington
+Square.  His daughter inherited his executive ability, many of his
+prejudices (as they would now be called), and his habit of regarding
+favourable impressions with profound suspicion.  She had never known the
+necessity of making friends: hers she had inherited, and for some reason
+specially decreed, they were better than those of less fortunate people.
+
+Mrs. Grainger was very tall.  And Sargent, in his portrait of her, had
+caught with admirable art the indefinable, yet partly supercilious and
+scornful smile with which she looked down upon the world about her.  She
+possessed the rare gift of combining conventionality with personal
+distinction in her dress.  Her hair was almost Titian red in colour, and
+her face (on the authority of Mr. Reginald Farwell) was at once modern
+and Italian Renaissance.  Not the languid, amorous Renaissance, but the
+lady of decision who chose, and did not wait to be chosen.  Her eyes had
+all the colours of the tapaz, and her regard was so baffling as to arouse
+intense antagonism in those who were not her friends.
+
+To Honora, groping about for a better and a higher life, the path of
+philanthropy had more than once suggested itself.  And on the day of
+Peter's visit to New York, when she had lunched with Mrs. Holt, she had
+signified her willingness (now that she had come to live in town) to join
+the Working Girls' Relief Society.  Mrs. Holt, needless to say, was
+overjoyed: they were to have a meeting at her house in the near future
+which Honora must not fail to attend.  It was not, however, without a
+feeling of trepidation natural to a stranger that she made her way to
+that meeting when the afternoon arrived.
+
+No sooner was she seated in Mrs. Holt's drawing-room--filled with camp-
+chairs for the occasion--than she found herself listening breathlessly
+to a recital of personal experiences by a young woman who worked in a
+bindery on the East side.  Honora's heart was soft: her sympathies,
+as we know, easily aroused.  And after the young woman had told with
+great simplicity and earnestness of the struggle to support herself and
+lead an honest and self-respecting existence, it seemed to Honora that
+at last she had opened the book of life at the proper page.
+
+Afterwards there were questions, and a report by Miss Harber, a middle-
+aged lady with glasses who was the secretary.  Honora looked around her.
+The membership of the Society, judging by those present, was surely of a
+sufficiently heterogeneous character to satisfy even the catholic tastes
+of her hostess.  There were elderly ladies, some benevolent and some
+formidable, some bedecked and others unadorned; there were earnest-
+looking younger women, to whom dress was evidently a secondary
+consideration; and there was a sprinkling of others, perfectly gowned,
+several of whom were gathered in an opposite corner.  Honora's eyes,
+as the reading of the report progressed, were drawn by a continual and
+resistless attraction to this group; or rather to the face of one of the
+women in it, which seemed to stare out at her like the eat in the tree of
+an old-fashioned picture puzzle, or the lineaments of George Washington
+among a mass of boulders on a cliff.  Once one has discovered it, one
+can see nothing else.  In vain Honora dropped her eyes; some strange
+fascination compelled her to raise them again until they met those of the
+other woman: Did their glances meet?  She could never quite be sure, so
+disconcerting were the lights in that regard--lights, seemingly, of
+laughter and mockery.
+
+Some instinct informed Honora that the woman was Mrs. Grainger, and
+immediately the scene in the Holland House dining-room came back to her.
+Never until now had she felt the full horror of its comedy.  And then,
+as though to fill the cup of humiliation, came the thought of Cecil
+Grainger's call.  She longed, in an agony with which sensitive natures
+will sympathize, for the reading to be over.
+
+The last paragraph of the report contained tributes to Mrs. Joshua Holt
+and Mrs. Cecil Grainger for the work each had done during the year, and
+amidst enthusiastic hand-clapping the formal part of the meeting came to
+an end.  The servants were entering with tea as Honora made her way
+towards the door, where she was stopped by Susan Holt.
+
+"My dear Honora," cried Mrs. Holt, who had hurried after her daughter,
+"you're not going?"
+
+Honora suddenly found herself without an excuse.
+
+"I really ought to, Mrs. Holt.  I've had such a good time-and I've been
+so interested.  I never realized that such things occurred.  And I've got
+one of the reports, which I intend to read over again."
+
+"But my dear," protested Mrs. Holt, "you must meet some of the members of
+the Society.  Bessie!"
+
+Mrs. Grainger, indeed--for Honora had been right in her surmise--was
+standing within ear-shot of this conversation.  And Honora, who knew she
+was there, could not help feeling that she took a rather redoubtable
+interest in it.  At Mrs. Holt's words she turned.
+
+"Bessie, I've found a new recruit--one that I can answer for,
+Mrs. Spence, whom I spoke to you about."
+
+Mrs. Grainger bestowed upon Honora her enigmatic smile.
+
+"Oh," she declared, "I've heard of Mrs. Spence from other sources, and
+I've seen her, too."
+
+Honora grew a fiery red.  There was obviously no answer to such a remark,
+which seemed the quintessence of rudeness.  But Mrs. Grainger continued
+to smile, and to stare at her with the air of trying to solve a riddle.
+
+"I'm coming to see you, if I may," she said.  "I've been intending to
+since I've been in town, but I'm always so busy that I don't get time to
+do the things I want to do."
+
+An announcement that fairly took away Honora's breath.  She managed to
+express her appreciation of Mrs. Grainger's intention, and presently
+found herself walking rapidly up-town through swirling snow, somewhat
+dazed by the events of the afternoon.  And these, by the way, were not
+yet finished.  As she reached her own door, a voice vaguely familiar
+called her name.
+
+"Honora!"
+
+She turned.  The slim, tall figure of a young woman descended from a
+carriage and crossed the pavement, and in the soft light of the vestibule
+she recognized Ethel Wing.
+
+"I'm so glad I caught you," said that young lady when they entered the
+drawing-room.  And she gazed at her school friend.  The colour glowed in
+Honora's cheeks, but health alone could not account for the sparkle in
+her eyes.  "Why, you look radiant.  You are more beautiful than you were
+at Sutcliffe.  Is it marriage?"
+
+Honora laughed happily, and they sat down side by side on the lounge
+behind the tea table.
+
+"I heard you'd married," said Ethel, "but I didn't know what had become
+of you until the other day.  Jim never tells me anything.  It appears
+that he's seen something of you.  But it wasn't from Jim that I heard
+about you first.  You'd never guess who told me you were here."
+
+"Who?" asked Honora, curiously.
+
+"Mr. Erwin."
+
+"Peter Erwin!"
+
+"I'm perfectly shameless," proclaimed Ethel Wing.  "I've lost my heart to
+him, and I don't care who knows it.  Why in the world didn't you marry
+him?"
+
+"But--where did you see him?" Honora demanded as soon as she could
+command herself sufficiently to speak.  Her voice must have sounded odd.
+Ethel did not appear to notice that.
+
+"He lunched with us one day when father had gout.  Didn't he tell you
+about it?  He said he was coming to see you that afternoon."
+
+"Yes--he came.  But he didn't mention being at lunch at your house."
+
+"I'm sure that was like him," declared her friend.  And for the first
+time in her life Honora experienced a twinge of that world-old ailment--
+jealousy.  How did Ethel know what was like him?  "I made father give him
+up for a little while after lunch, and he talked about you the whole
+time.  But he was most interesting at the table," continued Ethel,
+sublimely unconscious of the lack of compliment in the comparison; "as
+Jim would say, he fairly wiped up the ground with father, and it isn't
+an easy thing to do."
+
+"Wiped up the ground with Mr. Wing!" Honora repeated.
+
+"Oh, in a delightfully quiet, humorous way.  That's what made it so
+effective.  I couldn't understand all of it; but I grasped enough to
+enjoy it hugely.  Father's so used to bullying people that it's become
+second nature with him.  I've seen him lay down the law to some of the
+biggest lawyers in New York, and they took it like little lambs.  He
+caught a Tartar in Mr. Erwin.  I didn't dare to laugh, but I wanted to."
+
+"What was the discussion about?" asked Honora.
+
+"I'm not sure that I can give you a very clear idea of it," said Ethel.
+"Generally speaking, it was about modern trust methods, and what a self-
+respecting lawyer would do and what he wouldn't.  Father took the ground
+that the laws weren't logical, and that they were different and
+conflicting, anyway, in different States.  He said they impeded the
+natural development of business, and that it was justifiable for the
+great legal brains of the country to devise means by which these laws
+could be eluded.  He didn't quite say that, but he meant it, and he
+honestly believes it.  The manner in which Mr. Erwin refuted it was a
+revelation to me.  I've been thinking about it since.  You see, I'd never
+heard that side of the argument.  Mr. Erwin said, in the nicest way
+possible, but very firmly, that a lawyer who hired himself out to enable
+one man to take advantage of another prostituted his talents: that the
+brains of the legal profession were out of politics in these days, and
+that it was almost impossible for the men in the legislatures to frame
+laws that couldn't be evaded by clever and unscrupulous devices.  He
+cited ever so many cases .  .  .  "
+
+Ethel's voice became indistinct, as though some one had shut a door in
+front of it.  Honora was trembling on the brink of a discovery: holding
+herself back from it, as one who has climbed a fair mountain recoils from
+the lip of an unsuspected crater at sight of the lazy, sulphurous fumes.
+All the years of her marriage, ever since she had first heard his name,
+the stature of James Wing had been insensibly growing, and the vastness
+of his empire gradually disclosed.  She had lived in that empire: in it
+his word had stood for authority, his genius had been worshipped, his
+decrees had been absolute.
+
+She had met him once, in Howard's office, when he had greeted her
+gruffly, and the memory of his rugged features and small red eyes, like
+live coals, had remained.  And she saw now the drama that had taken place
+before Ethel's eyes.  The capitalist, overbearing, tyrannical, hearing
+a few, simple truths in his own house from Peter--her Peter.  And she
+recalled her husband's account of his talk with James Wing.  Peter had
+refused to sell himself.  Had Howard?  Many times during the days that
+followed she summoned her courage to ask her husband that question, and
+kept silence.  She did not wish to know.
+
+"I don't want to seem disloyal to papa," Ethel was saying.  "He is under
+great responsibilities to other people, to stockholders; and he must get
+things done.  But oh, Honora, I'm so tired of money, money, money and its
+standards, and the things people are willing to do for it.  I've seen too
+much."
+
+Honora looked at her friend, and believed her.  One glance at the girl's
+tired eyes--a weariness somehow enhanced--in effect by the gold sheen of
+her hair--confirmed the truth of her words.
+
+"You've changed, Ethel, since Sutcliffe," she said.
+
+"Yes, I've changed," said Ethel Wing, and the weariness was in her voice,
+too.  "I've had too much, Honora.  Life was all glitter, like a Christmas
+tree, when I left Sutcliffe.  I had no heart.  I'm not at all sure that I
+have one now.  I've known all kinds of people--except the right kind.
+And if I were to tell you some of the things that have happened to me in
+five years you wouldn't believe them.  Money has been at the bottom of it
+all,--it ruined my brother, and it has ruined me.  And then, the other
+day, I beheld a man whose standards simply take no account of money, a
+man who holds something else higher.  I--I had been groping lately, and
+then I seemed to see clear for the first time in my life.  But I'm afraid
+it comes too late."
+
+Honora took her friend's hand in her own and pressed it.
+
+"I don't know why I'm telling you all this," said Ethel: "It seems
+to-day as though I had always known you, and yet we weren't particularly
+intimate at school.  I suppose I'm inclined to be oversuspicious.  Heaven
+knows I've had enough to make me so.  But I always thought that you were
+a little--ambitious.  You'll forgive my frankness, Honora.  I don't think
+you're at all so, now."  She glanced at Honora suddenly.  "Perhaps you've
+changed, too," she said.
+
+Honora nodded.
+
+"I think I'm changing all the time," she replied.
+
+After a moment's silence, Ethel Wing pursued her own train of thought.
+
+"Curiously enough when he--when Mr. Erwin spoke of you I seemed to get a
+very different idea of you than the one I had always had.  I had to go
+out of town, but I made up my mind I'd come to see you as soon as I got
+back, and ask you to tell me something about him."
+
+"What shall I tell you?" asked Honora.  "He is what you think he is, and
+more."
+
+"Tell me something of his early life," said Ethel Wing.
+
+                    .....................
+
+There is a famous river in the western part of our country that
+disappears into a canon, the walls of which are some thousands of feet
+high, and the bottom so narrow that the confined waters roar through it
+at breakneck speed.  Sometimes they disappear entirely under the rock, to
+emerge again below more furiously than ever.  From the river-bed can be
+seen, far, far above, a blue ribbon of sky.  Once upon a time, not long
+ago, two heroes in the service of the government of the United States,
+whose names should be graven in the immortal rock and whose story read
+wherever the language is spoken, made the journey through this canon and
+came out alive.  That journey once started, there could be no turning
+back.  Down and down they were buffeted by the rushing waters, over the
+falls and through the tunnels, with time to think only of that which
+would save them from immediate death, until they emerged into the
+sunlight of the plain below.
+
+All of which by way of parallel.  For our own chronicle, hitherto
+leisurely enough, is coming to its canon--perhaps even now begins to feel
+the pressure of the shelving sides.  And if our heroine be somewhat
+rudely tossed from one boulder to another, if we fail wholly to
+understand her emotions and her acts, we must blame the canon.  She had,
+indeed, little time to think.
+
+One evening, three weeks or so after the conversation with Ethel Wing
+just related, Honora's husband entered her room as her maid was giving
+the finishing touches to her toilet.
+
+"You're not going to wear that dress!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Why not?" she asked, without turning from the mirror.
+
+He lighted a cigarette.
+
+"I thought you'd put on something handsome--to go to the Graingers'.  And
+where are your jewels?  You'll find the women there loaded with 'em."
+
+"One string of pearls is all I care to wear," said Honora--a reply with
+which he was fain to be content until they were in the carriage, when she
+added: "Howard, I must ask you as a favour not to talk that way before
+the servants."
+
+"What way?" he demanded.
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed, "if you don't know I suppose it is impossible to
+explain.  You wouldn't understand."
+
+"I understand one thing, Honora, that you're too confoundedly clever for
+me," he declared.
+
+Honora did not reply.  For at that moment they drew up at a carpet
+stretched across the pavement.
+
+Unlike the mansions of vast and imposing facades that were beginning
+everywhere to catch the eye on Fifth Avenue, and that followed mostly the
+continental styles of architecture, the house of the Cecil Graingers had
+a substantial, "middle of-the-eighties" appearance.  It stood on a
+corner, with a high iron fence protecting the area around it.  Within, it
+gave one an idea of space that the exterior strangely belied; and it was
+furnished, not in a French, but in what might be called a comfortably
+English, manner.  It was filled, Honora saw, with handsome and priceless
+things which did not immediately and aggressively strike the eye, but
+which somehow gave the impression of having always been there.  What
+struck her, as she sat in the little withdrawing room while the maid
+removed her overshoes, was the note of permanence.
+
+Some of those who were present at Mrs. Grainger's that evening remember
+her entrance into the drawing-room.  Her gown, the colour of a rose-
+tinted cloud, set off the exceeding whiteness of her neck and arms and
+vied with the crimson in her cheeks, and the single glistening string of
+pearls about the slender column of her neck served as a contrast to the
+shadowy masses of her hair.  Mr. Reginald Farwell, who was there,
+afterwards declared that she seemed to have stepped out of the gentle
+landscape of an old painting.  She stood, indeed, hesitating for a moment
+in the doorway, her eyes softly alight, in the very pose of expectancy
+that such a picture suggested.
+
+Honora herself was almost frightened by a sense of augury, of triumph, as
+she went forward to greet her hostess.  Conversation, for the moment, had
+stopped.  Cecil Grainger, with the air of one who had pulled aside the
+curtain and revealed this vision of beauty and innocence, crossed the
+room to welcome her.  And Mrs. Grainger herself was not a little
+surprised; she was not a dramatic person, and it was not often that her
+drawing-room was the scene of even a mild sensation.  No entrance could
+have been at once so startling and so unexceptionable as Honora's.
+
+"I was sorry not to find you when I called," she said.  "I was sorry,
+too," replied Mrs. Grainger, regarding her with an interest that was
+undisguised, and a little embarrassing.  "I'm scarcely ever at home,
+except when I'm with the children.  Do you know these people?"
+
+"I'm not sure," said Honora, "but--I must introduce my husband to you."
+
+"How d'ye do!" said Mr. Grainger, blinking at her when this ceremony was
+accomplished.  "I'm awfully glad to see you, Mrs. Spence, upon my word."
+
+Honora could not doubt it.  But he had little time to express his joy,
+because of the appearance of his wife at Honora's elbow with a tall man
+she had summoned from a corner.
+
+"Before we go to dinner I must introduce my cousin, Mr. Chiltern--he is
+to have the pleasure of taking you out," she said.
+
+His name was in the class of those vaguely familiar: vaguely familiar,
+too, was his face.  An extraordinary face, Honora thought, glancing at it
+as she took his arm, although she was struck by something less tangible
+than the unusual features.  He might have belonged to any nationality
+within the limits of the Caucasian race.  His short, kinky, black hair
+suggested great virility, an effect intensified by a strongly bridged
+nose, sinewy hands, and bushy eyebrows.  But the intangible distinction
+was in the eyes that looked out from under these brows the glimpse she
+had of them as he bowed to her gravely, might be likened to the hasty
+reading of a chance page in a forbidden book.  Her attention was
+arrested, her curiosity aroused.  She was on that evening, so to speak,
+exposed for and sensitive to impressions.  She was on the threshold of
+the Alhambra.
+
+"Hugh has such a faculty," complained Mr. Grainger, "of turning up at the
+wrong moment!"
+
+Dinner was announced.  She took Chiltern's arm, and they fell into file
+behind a lady in yellow, with a long train, who looked at her rather
+hard.  It was Mrs. Freddy Maitland.  Her glance shifted to Chiltern, and
+it seemed to Honora that she started a little.
+
+"Hello, Hugh," she said indifferently, looking back over her shoulder;
+"have you turned up again?"
+
+"Still sticking to the same side of your horse, I see."  he replied,
+ignoring the question.  "I told you you'd get lop-sided."
+
+The deformity, if there were any, did not seem to trouble her.
+
+"I'm going to Florida Wednesday.  We want another man.  Think it over."
+
+"Sorry, but I've got something else to do," he said.
+
+"The devil and idle hands," retorted Mrs. Maitland.
+
+Honora was sure as she could be that Chiltern was angry, although he gave
+no visible sign of this.  It was as though the current ran from his arm
+into hers.
+
+"Have you been away?" she asked.
+
+"It seems to me as though I had never been anywhere else," he answered,
+and he glanced curiously at the guests ranging about the great, flower-
+laden table.  They sat down.
+
+She was a little repelled, a little piqued; and a little relieved when
+the man on her other side spoke to her, and she recognized Mr. Reginald
+Farwell, the architect.  The table capriciously swung that way.  She did
+not feel prepared to talk to Mr. Chiltern.  And before entering upon her
+explorations she was in need of a guide.  She could have found none more
+charming, none more impersonal, none more subtly aware of her wants
+(which had once been his) than Mr. Farwell.  With his hair parted with
+geometrical precision from the back of his collar to his forehead, with
+his silky mustache and eyes of soft hazel lights, he was all things
+to all men and women--within reason.  He was an achievement that
+civilization had not hitherto produced, a combination of the Beaux Arts
+and the Jockey Club and American adaptability.  He was of those upon whom
+labour leaves no trace.
+
+There were preliminaries, mutually satisfactory.  To see Mrs. Spence was
+never to forget her, but more delicately intimated.  He remembered to
+have caught a glimpse of her at the Quicksands Club, and Mrs. Dallam nor
+her house were not mentioned by either.  Honora could not have been in
+New York Long.  No, it was her first winter, and she felt like a
+stranger.  Would Mr. Farwell tell her who some of these people were?
+Nothing charmed Mr. Farwell so much as simplicity--when it was combined
+with personal attractions.  He did not say so, but contrived to intimate
+the former.
+
+"It's always difficult when one first comes to New York," he declared,
+"but it soon straightens itself out, and one is surprised at how few
+people there are, after all.  We'll begin on Cecil's right.  That's Mrs.
+George Grenfell."
+
+"Oh, yes," said Honora, looking at a tall, thin woman of middle age who
+wore a tiara, and whose throat was covered with jewels.  Honora did not
+imply that Mrs. Grenfell's name, and most of those that followed, were
+extremely familiar to her.
+
+"In my opinion she's got the best garden in Newport, and she did most of
+it herself.  Next to her, with the bald head, is Freddy Maitland.  Next
+to him is Miss Godfrey.  She's a little eccentric, but she can afford to
+be--the Godfreys for generations have done so much for the city.  The man
+with the beard, next her, is John Laurens, the philanthropist.  That
+pretty woman, who's just as nice as she looks, is Mrs. Victor Strange.
+She was Agatha Pendleton--Mrs. Grainger's cousin.  And the gentleman with
+the pink face, whom she is entertaining--"
+
+"Is my husband," said Honora, smiling.  "I know something about him."
+
+Mr. Farwell laughed.  He admired her aplomb, and he did not himself
+change countenance.  Indeed, the incident seemed rather to heighten the
+confidence between them.  Honora was looking rather critically at Howard.
+It was a fact that his face did grow red at this stage of a dinner, and
+she wondered what Mrs. Strange found to talk to him about.
+
+"And the woman on the other side of him?" she asked.  "By the way, she
+has a red face, too."
+
+"So she has," he replied amusedly.  "That is Mrs. Littleton Pryor, the
+greatest living rebuke to the modern woman.  Most of those jewels are
+inherited, but she has accustomed herself by long practice to carry them,
+as well as other burdens.  She has eight children, and she's on every
+charity list.  Her ancestors were the very roots of Manhattan.  She looks
+like a Holbein--doesn't she?"
+
+"And the extraordinary looking man on my right?" Honora asked.  "I've got
+to talk to him presently."
+
+"Chiltern!" he said.  "Is it possible you haven't heard something about
+Hugh Chiltern?"
+
+"Is it such lamentable ignorance?" she asked.
+
+"That depends upon one's point of view," he replied.  "He's always been a
+sort of a--well, Viking," said Farwell.
+
+Honora was struck by the appropriateness of the word.
+
+"Viking--yes, he looks it exactly.  I couldn't think.  Tell me something
+about him."
+
+"Well," he laughed, lowering his voice a little, here goes for a little
+rough and ready editing.  One thing about Chiltern that's to be admired
+is that he's never cared a rap what people think.  Of course, in a way,
+he never had to.  His family own a section of the state, where they've
+had woollen mills for a hundred years, more or less.  I believe Hugh
+Chiltern has sold 'em, or they've gone into a trust, or something, but
+the estate is still there, at Grenoble--one of the most beautiful places
+I've ever seen.  The General--this man's father--was a violent,
+dictatorial man.  There is a story about his taking a battery at
+Gettysburg which is almost incredible.  But he went back to Grenoble
+after the war, and became the typical public-spirited citizen; built up
+the mills which his own pioneer grandfather had founded, and all that.
+He married an aunt of Mrs. Grainger's,--one of those delicate, gentle
+women who never dare to call their soul their own."
+
+"And then?" prompted Honora, with interest.
+
+"It's only fair to Hugh," Farwell continued, "to take his early years
+into account.  The General never understood him, and his mother died
+before he went off to school.  Men who were at Harvard with him say he
+has a brilliant mind, but he spent most of his time across the Charles
+River breaking things.  It was, probably, the energy the General got rid
+of at Gettysburg.  What Hugh really needed was a war, and he had too much
+money.  He has a curious literary streak, I'm told, and wrote a rather
+remarkable article--I've forgotten just where it appeared.  He raced a
+yacht for a while in a dare-devil, fiendish way, as one might expect; and
+used to go off on cruises and not be heard of for months.  At last he got
+engaged to Sally Harrington--Mrs. Freddy Maitland."
+
+Honora glanced across the table.
+
+"Exactly," said Mr. Farwell.  "That was seven or eight years ago.  Nobody
+ever knew the reason why she broke it--though it may have been pretty
+closely guessed.  He went away, and nobody's laid eyes on him until he
+turned up to-night."
+
+Honora's innocence was not too great to enable her to read between the
+lines of this biography which Reginald Farwell had related with such
+praiseworthy delicacy.  It was a biography, she well knew, that, like a
+score of others, had been guarded as jealously as possible within the
+circle on the borders of which she now found herself.  Mrs. Grainger with
+her charities, Mrs. Littleton Pryor with her good works, Miss Godfrey
+with her virtue--all swallowed it as gracefully as possible.  Noblesse
+oblige.  Honora had read French and English memoirs, and knew that
+history repeats itself.  And a biography that is printed in black letter
+and illuminated in gold is attractive in spite of its contents.  The
+contents, indeed, our heroine had not found uninteresting, and she turned
+now to the subject with a flutter of anticipation.
+
+He looked at her intently, almost boldly, she thought, and before she
+dropped her eyes she had made a discovery.  The thing stamped upon his
+face and burning in his eyes was not world-weariness, disappointment,
+despair.  She could not tell what it was, yet; that it was none of these,
+she knew.  It was not unrelated to experience, but transcended it.  There
+was an element of purpose in it, of determination, almost--she would have
+believed--of hope.  That Mrs. Maitland nor any other woman was a part of
+it she became equally sure.  Nothing could have been more commonplace
+than the conversation which began, and yet it held for her, between the
+lines as in the biography, the thrill of interest.  She was a woman, and
+embarked on a voyage of discovery.
+
+"Do you live in New York?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said Honora, "since this autumn."
+
+"I've been away a good many years," he said, in explanation of his
+question.  "I haven't quite got my bearings.  I can't tell you how
+queerly this sort of thing affects me."
+
+"You mean civilization?" she hazarded.
+
+"Yes.  And yet I've come back to it."
+
+Of course she did not ask him why.  Their talk was like the starting
+of a heavy train--a series of jerks; and yet both were aware of an
+irresistible forward traction.  She had not recovered from her surprise
+in finding herself already so far in his confidence.
+
+"And the time will come, I suppose, when you'll long to get away again."
+
+"No," he said, "I've come back to stay.  It's taken me a long while to
+learn it, but there's only one place for a man, and that's his own
+country."
+
+Her eyes lighted.
+
+"There's always so much for a man to do."
+
+"What would you do?" he asked curiously.
+
+She considered this.
+
+"If you had asked me that question two years ago--even a year ago--
+I should have given you a different answer.  It's taken me some time to
+learn it, too, you see, and I'm not a man.  I once thought I should have
+liked to have been a king amongst money changers, and own railroad and
+steamship lines, and dominate men by sheer power."
+
+He was clearly interested.
+
+"And now?" he prompted her.
+
+She laughed a little, to relieve the tension.
+
+"Well--I've found out that there are some men that kind of power can't
+control--the best kind.  And I've found out that that isn't the best kind
+of power.  It seems to be a brutal, barbarous cunning power now that I've
+seen it at close range.  There's another kind that springs from a man
+himself, that speaks through his works and acts, that influences first
+those around him, and then his community, convincing people of their own
+folly, and that finally spreads in ever widening circles to those whom he
+cannot see, and never will see."
+
+She paused, breathing deeply, a little frightened at her own eloquence.
+Something told her that she was not only addressing her own soul--she was
+speaking to his.
+
+"I'm afraid you'll think I'm preaching," she apologized.
+
+"No," he said impatiently, "no."
+
+"To answer your question, then, if I were a man of independent means, I
+think I should go into politics.  And I should put on my first campaign
+banner the words, 'No Compromise.'"
+
+It was a little strange that, until now--to-night-she had not definitely
+formulated these ambitions.  The idea of the banner with its inscription
+had come as an inspiration.  He did not answer, but sat regarding her,
+drumming on the cloth with his strong, brown fingers.
+
+"I have learned this much in New York," she said, carried on by her
+impetus, "that men and women are like plants.  To be useful, and to grow
+properly, they must be firmly rooted in their own soil.  This city seems
+to me like a luxurious, overgrown hothouse.  Of course," she added
+hastily, "there are many people who belong here, and whose best work is
+done here.  I was thinking about those whom it attracts.  And I have seen
+so many who are only watered and fed and warmed, and who become--
+distorted."
+
+"It's extraordinary," replied Chiltern, slowly, "that you should say this
+to me.  It is what I have come to believe, but I couldn't have said it
+half so well."
+
+Mrs. Grainger gave the signal to rise.  Honora took Chiltern's arm, and
+he led her back to the drawing-room.  She was standing alone by the fire
+when Mrs. Maitland approached her.
+
+"Haven't I seen you before?" she asked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+VINELAND
+
+It was a pleasant Newport to which Honora went early in June, a fair city
+shining in the midst of summer seas, a place to light the fires of
+imagination.  It wore at once an air of age, and of a new and sparkling
+unreality.  Honora found in the very atmosphere a certain magic which she
+did not try to define, but to the enjoyment of which she abandoned
+herself; and in those first days after her arrival she took a sheer
+delight in driving about the island.  Narrow Thames Street, crowded with
+gay carriages, with its aspect of the eighteenth and it shops of the
+twentieth century; the whiffs of the sea; Bellevue Avenue, with its
+glorious serried ranks of trees, its erring perfumes from bright gardens,
+its massed flowering shrubs beckoning the eye, its lawns of a truly
+enchanted green.  Through tree and hedge, as she drove, came ever
+changing glimpses of gleaming palace fronts; glimpses that made her turn
+and look again; that stimulated but did not satisfy, and left a pleasant
+longing for something on the seeming verge of fulfilment.
+
+The very stillness and solitude that seemed to envelop these palaces
+suggested the enchanter's wand.  To-morrow, perhaps, the perfect lawns
+where the robins hopped amidst the shrubbery would become again the rock-
+bound, windswept New England pasture above the sea, and screaming gulls
+circle where now the swallows hovered about the steep blue roof of a
+French chateau.  Hundreds of years hence, would these great pleasure
+houses still be standing behind their screens and walls and hedges?  or
+would, indeed, the shattered, vine-covered marble of a balustrade alone
+mark the crumbling terraces whence once the fabled owners scanned the
+sparkling waters of the ocean?  Who could say?
+
+The onward rush of our story between its canon walls compels us
+reluctantly to skip the narrative of the winter conquests of the lady who
+is our heroine.  Popularity had not spoiled her, and the best proof of
+this lay in the comments of a world that is nothing if not critical.  No
+beauty could have received with more modesty the triumph which had
+greeted her at Mrs. Grenfell's tableaux, in April, when she had appeared
+as Circe, in an architectural frame especially designed by Mr. Farwell
+himself.  There had been a moment of hushed astonishment, followed by an
+acclaim that sent the curtain up twice again.
+
+We must try to imagine, too, the logical continuation of that triumph in
+the Baiae of our modern republic and empire, Newport.  Open, Sesame!
+seems, as ever, to be the countersign of her life.  Even the palace gates
+swung wide to her: most of them with the more readiness because she had
+already passed through other gates--Mrs. Grainger's, for instance.
+Baiae, apparently, is a topsy-turvy world in which, if one alights upside
+down, it is difficult to become righted.  To alight upside down, is to
+alight in a palace.  The Graingers did not live in one, but in a garden
+that existed before the palaces were, and one that the palace owners
+could not copy: a garden that three generations of Graingers, somewhat
+assisted by a remarkable climate, had made with loving care.  The box was
+priceless, the spreading trees in the miniature park no less so, and
+time, the unbribeable, alone could now have produced the wide, carefully
+cherished Victorian mansion.  Likewise not purchasable by California gold
+was a grandfather whose name had been written large in the pages of
+American history.  His library was now lined with English sporting
+prints; but these, too, were old and mellow and rare.
+
+To reach Honora's cottage, you turned away from the pomp and glitter and
+noise of Bellevue Avenue into the inviting tunnel of a leafy lane that
+presently stopped of itself.  As though to provide against the
+contingency of a stray excursionist, a purple-plumed guard of old lilac
+trees massed themselves before the house, and seemed to look down with
+contempt on the new brick wall across the lane.  'Odi profanum vulgus'.
+It was on account of the new brick wall, in fact, that Honora, through
+the intervention of Mrs. Grainger and Mrs. Shorter, had been able to
+obtain this most desirable of retreats, which belonged to a great-aunt of
+Miss Godfrey, Mrs. Forsythe.
+
+Mr. Chamberlin, none other than he of whom we caught a glimpse some years
+ago in a castle near Silverdale, owned the wall and the grounds and the
+palace it enclosed.  This gentleman was of those who arrive in Newport
+upside down; and was even now, with the somewhat doubtful assistance of
+his wife, making lavish and pathetic attempts to right himself.  Newport
+had never forgiven him for the razing of a mansion and the felling of
+trees which had been landmarks, and for the driving out of Mrs. Forsythe.
+The mere sight of the modern wall had been too much for this lady--the
+lilacs and the leaves in the lane mercifully hid the palace--and after
+five and thirty peaceful summers she had moved out, and let the cottage.
+It was furnished with delightful old-fashioned things that seemed to
+express, at every turn, the aristocratic and uncompromising personality
+of the owner who had lived so long in their midst.
+
+Mr. Chamberlin, who has nothing whatever to do with this chronicle except
+to have been the indirect means of Honora's installation, used to come
+through the wall once a week or so to sit for half an hour on her porch
+as long as he ever sat anywhere.  He had reddish side-whiskers, and he
+reminded her of a buzzing toy locomotive wound up tight and suddenly
+taken from the floor.  She caught glimpses of him sometimes in the
+mornings buzzing around his gardeners, his painters, his carpenters, and
+his grooms.  He would buzz the rest of his life, but nothing short of a
+revolution could take his possessions away.
+
+The Graingers and the Grenfells and the Stranges might move mountains,
+but not Mr. Chamberlin's house.  Whatever heart-burnings he may have had
+because certain people refused to come to his balls, he was in Newport to
+remain.  He would sit under the battlements until the crack of doom; or
+rather--and more appropriate in Mr. Chamberlin's case--walk around them
+and around, blowing trumpets until they capitulated.
+
+Honora magically found herself within them, and without a siege.  Behold
+her at last in the setting for which we always felt she was destined.
+Why is it, in this world, that realization is so difficult a thing?  Now
+that she is there, how shall we proceed to give the joys of her Elysium
+their full value?  Not, certainly, by repeating the word pleasure over
+and over again: not by describing the palaces at which she lunched and
+danced and dined, or the bright waters in which she bathed, or the yachts
+in which she sailed.  During the week, indeed, she moved untrammelled in
+a world with which she found herself in perfect harmony: it was new, it
+was dazzling, it was unexplored.  During the week it possessed still
+another and more valuable attribute--it was real.  And she, Honora
+Leffingwell Spence, was part and parcel of its permanence.  The life
+relationships of the people by whom she was surrounded became her own.
+She had little time for thought--during the week.
+
+We are dealing, now, in emotions as delicate as cloud shadows, and these
+drew on as Saturday approached.  On Saturdays and Sundays the quality and
+texture of life seemed to undergo a change.  Who does not recall the
+Monday mornings of the school days of youth, and the indefinite feeling
+betwixt sleep and waking that to-day would not be as yesterday or the day
+before?  On Saturday mornings, when she went downstairs, she was wont to
+find the porch littered with newspapers and her husband lounging in a
+wicker chair behind the disapproving lilacs.  Although they had long
+ceased to bloom, their colour was purple--his was pink.
+
+Honora did not at first analyze or define these emotions, and was
+conscious only of a stirring within her, and a change.  Reality became
+unreality.  The house in which she lived, and for which she felt a
+passion of ownership, was for two days a rented house.  Other women in
+Newport had week-end guests in the guise of husbands, and some of them
+went so far as to bewail the fact.  Some had got rid of them.  Honora
+kissed hers dutifully, and picked up the newspapers, drove him to the
+beach, and took him out to dinner, where he talked oracularly of finance.
+On Sunday night he departed, without visible regrets, for New York.
+
+One Monday morning a storm was raging over Newport.  Seized by a sudden
+whim, she rang her bell, breakfasted at an unusual hour, and nine o'clock
+found her, with her skirts flying, on the road above the cliffs that
+leads to the Fort.  The wind had increased to a gale, and as she stood on
+the rocks the harbour below her was full of tossing white yachts
+straining at their anchors.  Serene in the midst of all this hubbub
+lay a great grey battleship.
+
+Presently, however, her thoughts were distracted by the sight of
+something moving rapidly across her line of vision.  A sloop yacht, with
+a ridiculously shortened sail, was coming in from the Narrows, scudding
+before the wind like a frightened bird.  She watched its approach in a
+sort of fascination, for of late she had been upon the water enough to
+realize that the feat of which she was witness was not without its
+difficulties.  As the sloop drew nearer she made out a bare-headed figure
+bent tensely at the wheel, and four others clinging to the yellow deck.
+In a flash the boat had rounded to, the mainsail fell, and a veil of
+spray hid the actors of her drama.  When it cleared the yacht was tugging
+like a wild thing at its anchor.
+
+That night was Mrs. Grenfell's ball, and many times in later years has
+the scene come back to Honora.  It was not a large ball, by no means on
+the scale of Mr. Chamberlin's, for instance.  The great room reminded one
+of the gallery of a royal French chateau, with its dished ceiling, in the
+oval of which the colours of a pastoral fresco glowed in the ruby lights
+of the heavy chandeliers; its grey panelling, hidden here and there by
+tapestries, and its series of deep, arched windows that gave glimpses of
+a lantern-hung terrace.  Out there, beyond a marble balustrade, the
+lights of fishing schooners tossed on a blue-black ocean.  The same ocean
+on which she had looked that morning, and which she heard now, in the
+intervals of talk and laughter, crashing against the cliffs,--although
+the wind had gone down.  Like a woman stirred to the depths of her being,
+its bosom was heaving still at the memory of the passion of the morning.
+
+This night after the storm was capriciously mild, the velvet gown of
+heaven sewn with stars.  The music had ceased, and supper was being
+served at little tables on the terrace.  The conversation was desultory.
+
+"Who is that with Reggie Farwell?" Ethel Wing asked.
+
+"It's the Farrenden girl," replied Mr. Cuthbert, whose business it was to
+know everybody.  "Chicago wheat.  She looks like Ceres, doesn't she?
+Quite becoming to Reggie's dark beauty.  She was sixteen, they tell me,
+when the old gentleman emerged from the pit, and they packed her off to a
+convent by the next steamer.  Reggie may have the blissful experience of
+living in one of his own houses if he marries her."
+
+The fourth at the table was Ned Carrington, who had been first secretary
+at an Embassy, and he had many stories to tell of ambassadors who spoke
+commercial American and asked royalties after their wives.  Some one had
+said about him that he was the only edition of the Almanach de Gotha that
+included the United States.  He somewhat resembled a golden seal emerging
+from a cold bath, and from time to time screwed an eyeglass into his eye
+and made a careful survey of Mrs. Grenfell's guests.
+
+"By George! "he exclaimed.  "Isn't that Hugh Chiltern?"
+
+Honora started, and followed the direction of Mr. Carrington's glance.
+At sight of him, a vivid memory of the man's personality possessed her.
+
+"Yes," Cuthbert was saying, "that's Chiltern sure enough.  He came in on
+Dicky Farnham's yacht this morning from New York."
+
+"This morning!" said Ethel Wing.  "Surely not!  No yacht could have come
+in this morning."
+
+"Nobody but Chiltern would have brought one in, you mean," he corrected
+her.  "He sailed her.  They say Dicky was half dead with fright, and
+wanted to put in anywhere.  Chiltern sent him below and kept right on.
+He has a devil in him, I believe.  By the way, that's Dicky Farnham's
+ex-wife he's talking to--Adele.  She keeps her good looks, doesn't she?
+What's happened to Rindge?"
+
+"Left him on the other side, I hear," said Carrington.  "Perhaps she'll
+take Chiltern next.  She looked as though she were ready to.  And they
+say it's easier every time."
+
+"C'est le second mari qui coute," paraphrased Cuthbert, tossing his cigar
+over the balustrade.  The strains of a waltz floated out of the windows,
+the groups at the tables broke up, and the cotillon began.
+
+As Honora danced, Chiltern remained in the back of her mind, or rather an
+indefinite impression was there which in flashes she connected with him.
+She wondered, at times, what had become of him, and once or twice she
+caught herself scanning the bewildering, shifting sheen of gowns and
+jewels for his face.  At last she saw him by the windows, holding a
+favour in his hand, coming in her direction.  She looked away, towards
+the red uniforms of the Hungarian band on the raised platform at the end
+of the room.  He was standing beside her.
+
+"Do you remember me, Mrs. Spence?"  he asked.
+
+She glanced up at him and smiled.  He was not a person one would be
+likely to forget, but she did not say so.
+
+"I met you at Mrs. Granger's," was what she said.
+
+He handed her the favour.  She placed it amongst the collection at the
+back of her chair and rose, and they danced.  Was it dancing?  The music
+throbbed; nay, the musicians seemed suddenly to have been carried out of
+themselves, and played as they had not played before.  Her veins were
+filled with pulsing fire as she was swung, guided, carried out of herself
+by the extraordinary virility of the man who held her.  She had tasted
+mastery.
+
+"Thank you," she faltered, as they came around the second time to her
+seat.
+
+He released her.
+
+"I stayed to dance with you," he said.  "I had to await my opportunity."
+
+"It was kind of you to remember me," she replied, as she went off with
+Mr. Carrington.
+
+A moment later she saw him bidding good night to his hostess.  His face,
+she thought, had not lost that strange look of determination that she
+recalled.  And yet--how account for his recklessness?
+
+"Rum chap, Chiltern," remarked Carrington.  "He might be almost anything,
+if he only knew it."
+
+In the morning, when she awoke, her eye fell on the cotillon favours
+scattered over the lounge.  One amongst them stood out--a silver-mounted
+pin-cushion.  Honora arose, picked it up contemplatively, stared at it
+awhile, and smiled.  Then she turned to her window, breathing in the
+perfumes, gazing out through the horse-chestnut leaves at the green,
+shadow-dappled lawn below.
+
+On her breakfast tray, amidst some invitations, was a letter from her.
+uncle.  This she opened first.
+
+     "Dear Honora," he wrote, "amongst your father's papers, which have
+     been in my possession since his death, was a certificate for three
+     hundred shares in a land company.  He bought them for very little,
+     and I had always thought them worthless.  It turns out that these
+     holdings are in a part of the state of Texas that is now being
+     developed; on the advice of Mr. Isham and others I have accepted an
+     offer of thirty dollars a share, and I enclose a draft on New York
+     for nine thousand dollars.  I need not dwell upon the pleasure it is
+     for me to send you this legacy from your father.  And I shall only
+     add the counsel of an old uncle, to invest this money by your
+     husband's advice in some safe securities."  .  .  .
+
+Honora put down the letter, and sat staring at the cheque in her hand.
+Nine thousand dollars--and her own!  Her first impulse was to send it
+back to her uncle.  But that would be, she knew, to hurt his feelings--
+he had taken such a pride in handing her this inheritance.  She read the
+letter again, and resolved that she would not ask Howard to invest the
+money.  This, at least, should be her very own, and she made up her mind
+to take it to a bank in Thames Street that morning.
+
+While she was still under the influence of the excitement aroused by
+the unexpected legacy, Mrs. Shorter came in, a lady with whom Honora's
+intimacy had been of steady growth.  The tie between them might perhaps
+have been described as intellectual, for Elsie Shorter professed only to
+like people who were "worth while."  She lent Honora French plays,
+discussed them with her, and likewise a wider range of literature,
+including certain brightly bound books on evolution and sociology.
+
+In the eighteenth century, Mrs. Shorter would have had a title and a
+salon in the Faubourg: in the twentieth, she was the wife of a most
+fashionable and successful real estate agent in New York, and was aware
+of no incongruity.  Bourgeoise was the last thing that could be said of
+her; she was as ready as a George Sand to discuss the whole range of
+human emotions; which she did many times a week with certain gentlemen of
+intellectual bent who had the habit of calling on her.  She had never, to
+the knowledge of her acquaintances, been shocked.  But while she believed
+that a great love carried, mysteriously concealed in its flame, its own
+pardon, she had through some fifteen years of married life remained
+faithful to Jerry Shorter: who was not, to say the least, a Lochinvar or
+a Roland.  Although she had had nervous prostration and was thirty-four,
+she was undeniably pretty.  She was of the suggestive, and not the
+strong-minded type, and the secret of her strength with the other sex was
+that she was in the habit of submitting her opinions for their approval.
+
+"My dear," she said to Honora, "you may thank heaven that you are still
+young enough to look beautiful in negligee.  How far have you got?  Have
+you guessed of which woman Vivarce was the lover?  And isn't it the most
+exciting play you've ever read?  Ned Carrington saw it in Paris, and
+declares it frightened him into being good for a whole week!"
+
+"Oh, Elsie," exclaimed Honora, apologetically, "I haven't read a word of
+it."
+
+Mrs. Shorter glanced at the pile of favours.
+
+"How was the dance?" she asked.  "I was too tired to go.  Hugh Chiltern
+offered to take me."
+
+"I saw Mr. Chiltern there.  I met him last winter at the Graingers'."
+
+"He's staying with us," said Mrs. Shorter; "you know he's a sort of
+cousin of Jerry's, and devoted to him.  He turned up yesterday morning on
+Dicky Farnham's yacht, in the midst of all that storm.  It appears that
+Dicky met him in New York, and Hugh said he was coming up here, and Dicky
+offered to sail him up.  When the storm broke they were just outside, and
+all on board lost their heads, and Hugh took charge and sailed in.  Dicky
+told me that himself."
+
+"Then it wasn't--recklessness," said Honora, involuntarily.  But Mrs.
+Shorter did not appear to be surprised by the remark.
+
+"That's what everybody thinks, of course," she answered. "They say that
+he had a chance to run in somewhere, and browbeat Dicky into keeping on
+for Newport at the risk of their lives.  They do Hugh an injustice.  He
+might have done that some years ago, but he's changed."
+
+Curiosity got the better of Honora.
+
+"Changed?" she repeated.
+
+"Of course you didn't know him in the old days, Honora," said Mrs.
+Shorter.  "You wouldn't recognize him now.  I've seen a good deal of men,
+but he is the most interesting and astounding transformation I've ever
+known."
+
+"How?" asked Honora.  She was sitting before the glass, with her hand
+raised to her hair.
+
+Mrs. Shorter appeared puzzled.
+
+"That's what interests me," she said.  "My dear, don't you think life
+tremendously interesting?  I do.  I wish I could write a novel.  Between
+ourselves, I've tried.  I had Mr. Dewing send it to a publisher, who said
+it was clever, but had no plot.  If I only could get a plot!"
+
+Honora laughed.
+
+"How would I The Transformation of Mr. Chiltern' do, Elsie?"
+
+"If I only knew what's happened to him, and how he's going to end!"
+sighed Mrs. Shorter.
+
+You were saying," said Honora, for her friend seemed to have relapsed
+into a contemplation of this problem, "you were saying that he had
+changed."
+
+"He goes away for seven years, and he suddenly turns up filled with
+ambition and a purpose in life, something he had never dreamed of.  He's
+been at Grenoble, where the Chiltern estate is, making improvements and
+preparing to settle down there.  And he's actually getting ready to write
+a life of his father, the General--that's the most surprising thing!
+They never met but to strike fire while the General was alive.  It
+appears that Jerry and Cecil Grainger and one or two other people have
+some of the old gentleman's letters, and that's the reason why Hugh's
+come to Newport.  And the strangest thing about it, my dear," added Mrs.
+Shorter, inconsequently, "is that I don't think it's a love affair."
+
+Honora laughed again.  It was the first time she had ever heard Mrs.
+Shorter attribute unusual human phenomena to any other source.
+"He wrote Jerry that he was coming back to live on the estate,--from
+England.  And he wasn't there a week.  I can't think where he's seen any
+women--that is," Mrs. Shorter corrected herself hastily, "of his own
+class.  He's been in the jungle--India, Africa, Cores.  That was after
+Sally Harrington broke the engagement.  And I'm positive he's not still
+in love with Sally.  She lunched with me yesterday, and I watched him.
+Oh, I should have known it.  But Sally hasn't got over it.  It wasn't a
+grand passion with Hugh.  I don't believe he's ever had such a thing.
+Not that he isn't capable of it--on the contrary, he's one of the few men
+I can think of who is."
+
+At this point in the conversation Honora thought that her curiosity had
+gone far enough.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE VIKING
+
+She was returning on foot from the bank in Thames Street, where she had
+deposited her legacy, when she met him who had been the subject of her
+conversation with Mrs. Shorter.  And the encounter seemed--and was--the
+most natural thing in the world.  She did not stop to ask herself why it
+was so fitting that the Viking should be a part of Vineland: why his
+coming should have given it the one and final needful touch.  For that
+designation of Reginald Farwell's had come back to her.  Despite the fact
+that Hugh Chiltern had with such apparent resolution set his face towards
+literature and the tillage of the land, it was as the Viking still that
+her imagination pictured him.  By these tokens we may perceive that this
+faculty of our heroine's has been at work, and her canvas already
+sketched in.
+
+Whether by design or accident he was at the leafy entrance of her lane
+she was not to know.  She spied him standing there; and in her leisurely
+approach a strange conceit of reincarnation possessed her, and she smiled
+at the contrast thus summoned up.  Despite the jingling harnesses of
+Bellevue Avenue and the background of Mr. Chamberlin's palace wall;
+despite the straw hat and white trousers and blue double-breasted serge
+coat in which he was conventionally arrayed, he was the sea fighter
+still--of all the ages.  M. Vipsanius Agrippa, who had won an empire for
+Augustus, had just such a head.
+
+Their greeting, too, was conventional enough, and he turned and walked
+with her up the lane, and halted before the lilacs.  You have Mrs.
+Forsythe's house," he said.  "How well I remember it!  My mother used
+to bring me here years ago."
+
+"Won't you come in?" asked Honora, gently.
+
+He seemed to have forgotten her as they mounted in silence to the porch,
+and she watched him with curious feelings as he gazed about him, and
+peered through the windows into the drawing-room.
+
+"It's just as it was," he said.  "Even the furniture.  I'm glad you
+haven't moved it.  They used to sit over there in the corner, and have
+tea on the ebony table.  And it was always dark-just as it is now.  I can
+see them.  They wore dresses with wide skirts and flounces, and queer low
+collars and bonnets.  And they talked in subdued voices--unlike so many
+women in these days."
+
+She was a little surprised, and moved, by the genuine feeling with which
+he spoke.
+
+"I was most fortunate to get the house," she answered.  "And I have grown
+to love it.  Sometimes it seems as though I had always lived here."
+
+"Then you don't envy that," he said, flinging his hand towards an opening
+in the shrubbery which revealed a glimpse of one of the pilasters of the
+palace across the way.  The instinct of tradition which had been the
+cause of Mrs. Forsythe's departure was in him, too.  He, likewise, seemed
+to belong to the little house as he took one of the wicker chairs.
+
+"Not," said Honora, "when I can have this."
+
+She was dressed in white, her background of lilac leaves.  Seated on the
+railing, with the tip of one toe resting on the porch, she smiled down at
+him from under the shadows of her wide hat.
+
+"I didn't think you would," he declared.  "This place seems to suit you,
+as I imagined you.  I have thought of you often since we first met last
+winter."
+
+"Yes," she replied hastily, "I am very happy here.  Mrs. Shorter tells me
+you are staying with then."
+
+"When I saw you again last night," he continued, ignoring her attempt to
+divert the stream from his channel, I had a vivid impression as of having
+just left you.  Have you ever felt that way about people?"
+
+"Yes," she admitted, and poked the toe of her boot with her parasol.
+
+"And then I find you in this house, which has so many associations for
+me.  Harmoniously here," he added, "if you know what I mean.  Not a
+newcomer, but some one who must always have been logically expected."
+
+She glanced at him quickly, with parted lips.  It was she who had done
+most of the talking at Mrs. Grainger's dinner; and the imaginative
+quality of mind he was now revealing was unlooked for.  She was surprised
+not to find it out of character.  It is a little difficult to know what
+she expected of him, since she did not know herself the methods, perhaps;
+of the Viking in Longfellow's poem.  She was aware, at least, that she
+had attracted him, and she was beginning to realize it was not a thing
+that could be done lightly.  This gave her a little flutter of fear.
+
+"Are you going to be long in Newport?" she asked.
+
+"I am leaving on Friday," he replied.  "It seems strange to be here again
+after so many years.  I find I've got out of touch with it.  And I
+haven't a boat, although Farnham's been kind enough to offer me his."
+
+"I can't imagine you, somehow, without a boat," she said, and added
+hastily: "Mrs. Shorter was speaking of you this morning, and said that
+you were always on the water when you were here.  Newport must have been
+quite different then."
+
+He accepted the topic, and during the remainder of his visit she
+succeeded in keeping the conversation in the middle ground, although she
+had a sense of the ultimate futility of the effort; a sense of pressure
+being exerted, no matter what she said.  She presently discovered,
+however, that the taste for literature attributed to him which had seemed
+so incongruous--existed.  He spoke with a new fire when she led him that
+way, albeit she suspected that some of the fuel was derived from the
+revelation that she shared his liking for books.  As the extent of his
+reading became gradually disclosed, however, her feeling of inadequacy
+grew, and she resolved in the future to make better use of her odd
+moments.  On her table, in two green volumes, was the life of a
+Massachusetts statesman that Mrs. Shorter had lent her.  She picked it up
+after Chiltern had gone.  He had praised it.
+
+He left behind him a blurred portrait on her mind, as that of two men
+superimposed.  And only that morning he had had such a distinct
+impression of one.  It was from a consideration of this strange
+phenomenon, with her book lying open in her lap, that her maid
+aroused her to go to Mrs. Pryor's.  This was Tuesday.
+
+Some of the modern inventions we deem most marvellous have been fitted
+for ages to man and woman.  Woman, particularly, possesses for instance
+a kind of submarine bell; and, if she listens, she can at times hear it
+tinkling faintly.  And the following morning, Wednesday, Honora heard
+hers when she received an invitation to lunch at Mrs. Shorter's.  After a
+struggle, she refused, but Mrs. Shorter called her up over the telephone,
+and she yielded.
+
+"I've got Alfred Dewing for myself," said Elsie Shorter, as she greeted
+Honora in the hall.  "He writes those very clever things--you've read
+them.  And Hugh for you," she added significantly.
+
+The Shorter cottage, though commodious, was simplicity itself.  From the
+vine-covered pergola where they lunched they beheld the distant sea like
+a lavender haze across the flats.  And Honora wondered whether there were
+not an element of truth in what Mr. Dewing said of their hostess--that
+she thought nothing immoral except novels with happy endings.  Chiltern
+did not talk much: he looked at Honora.
+
+"Hugh has got so serious," said Elsie Shorter, "that sometimes I'm
+actually afraid of him.  You ought to have done something to be as
+serious as that, Hugh."
+
+"Done something!"
+
+"Written the 'Origin of Species,' or founded a new political party, or
+executed a coup d'etat.  Half the time I'm under the delusion that I'm
+entertaining a celebrity under my roof, and I wake up and it's only
+Hugh."
+
+"It's because he looks as though he might do any of those things,"
+suggested Mr. Deming.  "Perhaps he may."
+
+"Oh," said Elsie Shorter, "the men who do them are usually little wobbly
+specimens."
+
+Honora was silent, watching Chiltern.  At times the completeness of her
+understanding of him gave her an uncanny sensation; and again she failed
+to comprehend him at all.  She felt his anger go to a white heat, but the
+others seemed blissfully unaware of the fact.  The arrival of coffee made
+a diversion.
+
+"You and Hugh may have the pergola, Honora.  I'll take Mr. Deming into
+the garden."
+
+"I really ought to go in a few minutes, Elsie," said Honora.
+
+"What nonsense!" exclaimed Mrs. Shorter.  "If it's bridge at the
+Playfairs', I'll telephone and get you out of it."
+
+"No--"
+
+"Then I don't see where you can be going," declared Mrs. Shorter, and
+departed with her cavalier.
+
+"Why are you so anxious to get away?" asked Chiltern, abruptly.
+
+Honora coloured.
+
+"Oh--did I seem so?  Elsie has such a mania for pairing people off-
+sometimes it's quite embarrassing."
+
+"She was a little rash in assuming that you'd rather talk to me," he
+said, smiling.
+
+"You were not consulted, either."
+
+"I was consulted before lunch," he replied.
+
+"You mean--?"
+
+"I mean that I wanted you," he said.  She had known it, of course.  The
+submarine bell had told her.  And he could have found no woman in Newport
+who would have brought more enthusiasm to his aid than Elsie Shorter.
+
+"And you usually--get what you want," she retorted with a spark of
+rebellion.
+
+"Yes," he admitted.  "Only hitherto I haven't wanted very desirable
+things."
+
+She laughed, but her curiosity got the better of her.
+
+"Hitherto," she said, "you have just taken what you desired."
+
+From the smouldering fires in his eyes darted an arrowpoint of flame.
+
+"What kind of a man are you?" she asked, throwing the impersonal to the
+winds.  "Somebody called you a Viking once."
+
+"Who?" he demanded.
+
+"It doesn't matter.  I'm beginning to think the name singularly
+appropriate.  It wouldn't be the first time one landed in Newport,
+according to legend," she added.
+
+"I haven't read the poem since childhood," said Chiltern, looking at her
+fixedly, "but he became--domesticated, if I remember rightly."
+
+"Yes," she admitted, "the impossible happened to him, as it usually does
+in books.  And then, circumstances helped.  There were no other women."
+
+"When the lady died," said Chiltern, "he fell upon his spear."
+
+"The final argument for my theory," declared Honora.
+
+"On the contrary," he maintained, smiling, "it proves there is always
+one woman for every man--if he cars find her.  If this man had lived in
+modern times, he would probably have changed from a Captain Kidd into a
+useful citizen of the kind you once said you admired."
+
+"Is a woman necessary," she asked, "for the transformation?"
+
+He looked at her so intently that she blushed to the hair clustering at
+her temples.  She had not meant that her badinage should go so deep.
+
+"It was not a woman," he said slowly, "that brought me back to America."
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed, suffused, "I hope you won't think that curiosity"
+--and got no farther.
+
+He was silent a moment, and when she ventured to glance up at him one of
+those enigmatical changes had taken place.  He was looking at her
+gravely, though intently, and the Viking had disappeared.
+
+"I wanted you to know," he answered.  "You must have heard more or less
+about me.  People talk.  Naturally these things haven't been repeated to
+me, but I dare say many of them are true.  I haven't been a saint, and I
+don't pretend to be now.  I've never taken the trouble to deceive any
+one.  And I've never cared, I'm sorry to say, what was said.  But I'd
+like you to believe that when I agreed with with the sentiments you
+expressed the first time I saw you, I was sincere.  And I am still
+sincere."
+
+"Indeed, I do believe it!" cried Honora.
+
+His face lighted.
+
+"You seemed different from the other women I had known--of my generation,
+at least," he went on steadily.  "None of them could have spoken as you
+did.  I had just landed that morning, and I should have gone direct to
+Grenoble, but there was some necessary business to be attended to in New
+York.  I didn't want to go to Bessie's dinner, but she insisted.  She was
+short of a man.  I went.  I sat next to you, and you interpreted my mind.
+It seemed too extraordinary not to have had a significance."
+
+Honora did not reply.  She felt instinctively that he was a man who was
+not wont ordinarily to talk about his affairs.  Beneath his speech was
+an undercurrent--or undertow, perhaps--carrying her swiftly, easily,
+helpless into the deep waters of intimacy.  For the moment she let
+herself go without a struggle.  Her silence was of a breathless quality
+which he must have felt.
+
+"And I am going to tell you why I came home," he said.  "I have spoken of
+it to nobody, but I wish you to know that it had nothing to do with any
+ordinary complication these people may invent.  Nor was there anything
+supernatural about it: what happened to me, I suppose, is as old a story
+as civilization itself.  I'd been knocking about the world for a good
+many years, and I'd had time to think.  One day I found myself in the
+interior of China with a few coolies and a man who I suspect was a
+ticket-of-leave Englishman.  I can see the place now the yellow fog, the
+sand piled up against the wall like yellow snow.  Desolation was a mild
+name for it.  I think I began with a consideration of the Englishman who
+was asleep in the shadow of a tower.  There was something inconceivably
+hopeless in his face in that ochre light.  Then the place where I was
+born and brought up came to me with a startling completeness, and I began
+to go over my own life, step by step.  To make a long story short, I
+perceived that what my father had tried to teach me, in his own way, had
+some reason in it.  He was a good deal of a man.  I made up my mind I'd
+come home and start in where I belonged.  But I didn't do so right away
+--I finished the trip first, and lent the Englishman a thousand pounds to
+buy into a firm in Shanghai.  I suppose," he added, "that is what is
+called suggestion.  In my case it was merely the cumulative result of
+many reflections in waste places."
+
+"And since then?"
+
+"Since then I have been at Grenoble, making repairs and trying to learn
+something about agriculture.  I've never been as happy in my life."
+
+"And you're going back on Friday," she said.
+
+He glanced at her quickly.  He had detected the note in her speech:
+though lightly uttered, it was unmistakably a command.  She tried to
+soften its effect in her next sentence.
+
+"I can't express how much I appreciate your telling me this," she said.
+"I'll confess to you I wished to think that something of that kind had
+happened.  I wished to believe that--that you had made this determination
+alone.  When I met you that night there was something about you I
+couldn't account for.  I haven't been able to account for it until now."
+
+She paused, confused, fearful that she had gone too far.  A moment later
+she was sure of it.  A look came into his eyes that frightened her.
+
+"You've thought of me?"  he said.
+
+"You must know," she replied, "that you have an unusual personality--a
+striking one.  I can go so far as to say that I remembered you when you
+reappeared at Mrs. Grenfell's--" she hesitated.
+
+He rose, and walked to the far end of the tiled pavement of the pergola,
+and stood for a moment looking out over the sea.  Then he turned to her.
+
+"I either like a person or I don't," he said.  "And I tell you frankly I
+have never met a woman whom I cared for as I do you.  I hope you're not
+going to insist upon a probationary period of months before you decide
+whether you can reciprocate."
+
+Here indeed was a speech in his other character, and she seemed to see,
+in a flash, his whole life in it.  There was a touch of boyishness that
+appealed, a touch of insistent masterfulness that alarmed.  She recalled
+that Mrs. Shorter had said of him that he had never had to besiege a
+fortress--the white flag had always appeared too quickly.  Of course
+there was the mystery of Mrs. Maitland--still to be cleared up.  It was
+plain, at least, that resistance merely made him unmanageable.  She
+smiled.
+
+"It seems to me," she said, "that in two days we have become
+astonishingly intimate."
+
+"Why shouldn't we?"  he demanded.
+
+But she was not to be led into casuistry.
+
+"I've been reading the biography you recommended," she said.
+
+He continued to look at her a moment, and laughed as he sat down beside
+her.  Later he walked home with her.  A dinner and bridge followed, and
+it was after midnight when she returned.  As her maid unfastened her gown
+she perceived that her pincushion had been replaced by the one she had
+received at the ball.
+
+"Did you put that there, Mathilde?" she asked.
+
+Mathilde had.  She had seen it on madame's bureau, and thought madame
+wished it there.  She would replace the old one at once.
+
+"No," said Honora, "you may leave it, now."
+
+"Bien, madame," said the maid, and glanced at her mistress, who appeared
+to have fallen into a revery.
+
+It had seemed strange to her to hear people talking about him at the
+dinner that night, and once or twice her soul had sprung to arms to
+champion him, only to remember that her knowledge was special.  She
+alone of all of them understood, and she found herself exulting in the
+superiority.  The amazed comment when the heir to the Chiltern fortune
+had returned to the soil of his ancestors had been revived on his arrival
+in Newport.  Ned Carrington, amid much laughter, had quoted the lines
+about Prince Hal:
+
+                   "To mock the expectations of the world,
+                    To frustrate prophecies."
+
+Honora disliked Mr. Carrington,
+
+Perhaps the events of Thursday, would better be left in the confusion in
+which they remained in Honora's mind.  She was awakened by penetrating,
+persistent, and mournful notes which for some time she could not
+identify, although they sounded oddly familiar; and it was not until she
+felt the dampness of the coverlet and looked at the white square of her
+open windows that she realized there was a fog.  And it had not lifted
+when Chiltern came in the afternoon.  They discussed literature--but the
+book had fallen to the floor.  'Absit omen'!  If printing had then been
+invented, undoubtedly there would have been a book instead of an apple in
+the third chapter of Genesis.  He confided to her his plan of collecting
+his father's letters and of writing the General's life.  Honora, too,
+would enjoy writing a book.  Perhaps the thought of the pleasure of
+collaboration occurred to them both at once; it was Chiltern who wished
+that he might have her help in the difficult places; she had, he felt,
+the literary instinct.  It was not the Viking who was talking now.  And
+then, at last, he had risen reluctantly to leave.  The afternoon had
+flown.  She held out her hand with a frank smile.
+
+"Good-by," she said.  "Good-by, and good luck."
+
+"But I may not go," he replied.
+
+She stood dismayed.
+
+"I thought you told me you were going on Friday--to-morrow."
+
+"I merely set that as a probable date.  I have changed my mind.  There
+is no immediate necessity.  Do you wish me to go?"  he demanded.
+
+She had turned away, and was straightening the books on the table.
+
+"Why should I?"  she said.
+
+"You wouldn't object to my remaining a few days more?" He had reached the
+doorway.
+
+"What have I to do with your staying?" she asked.
+
+"Everything," he answered--and was gone.
+
+She stood still.  The feeling that possessed her now was rebellion, and
+akin to hate.
+
+Her conduct, therefore, becomes all the more incomprehensible when we
+find her accepting, the next afternoon, his invitation to sail on Mr.
+Farnham's yacht, the 'Folly'.  It is true that the gods will not
+exonerate Mrs. Shorter.  That lady, who had been bribed with Alfred
+Dewing, used her persuasive powers; she might be likened to a skilful
+artisan who blew wonderful rainbow fabrics out of glass without breaking
+it; she blew the tender passion into a thousand shapes, and admired every
+one.  Her criminal culpability consisted in forgetting the fact that it
+could not be trusted with children.
+
+Nature seems to delight in contrasts.  As though to atone for the fog
+she sent a dazzling day out of the northwest, and the summer world was
+stained in new colours.  The yachts were whiter, the water bluer, the
+grass greener; the stern grey rocks themselves flushed with purple.  The
+wharves were gay, and dark clustering foliage hid an enchanted city as
+the Folly glided between dancing buoys.  Honora, with a frightened glance
+upward at the great sail, caught her breath.  And she felt rather than
+saw the man beside her guiding her seaward.
+
+A discreet expanse of striped yellow deck separated them from the wicker
+chairs where Mrs. Shorter and Mr. Dewing were already established.  She
+glanced at the profile of the Viking, and allowed her mind to dwell for
+an instant upon the sensations of that other woman who had been snatched
+up and carried across the ocean.  Which was the quality in him that
+attracted her? his lawlessness, or his intellect and ambition?  Never,
+she knew, had he appealed to her more than at this moment, when he stood,
+a stern figure at the wheel, and vouchsafed her nothing but commonplaces.
+This, surely, was his element.
+
+Presently, however, the yacht slid out from the infolding land into an
+open sea that stretched before them to a silver-lined horizon.  And he
+turned to her with a disconcerting directness, as though taking for
+granted a subtle understanding between them.
+
+"How well you sail," she said, hurriedly.
+
+"I ought to be able to do that, at least," he declared.
+
+"I saw you when you came in the other day, although I didn't know who it
+was until afterwards.  I was standing on the rocks near the Fort, and my
+heart was in my mouth."
+
+He answered that the Dolly was a good sea boat.
+
+"So you decided to forgive me," he said.
+
+"For what?"
+
+"For staying in Newport."
+
+Before accepting the invitation she had formulated a policy, cheerfully
+confident in her ability to carry it out.  For his decision not to
+leave Newport had had an opposite effect upon her than that she had
+anticipated; it had oddly relieved the pressure.  It had given her a
+chance to rally her forces; to smile, indeed, at an onslaught that had so
+disturbed her; to examine the matter in a more rational light.  It had
+been a cause for self-congratulation that she had scarcely thought of him
+the night before.  And to-day, in her blue veil and blue serge gown, she
+had boarded the 'Folly' with her wits about her.  She forgot that it was
+he who, so to speak, had the choice of ground and weapons.
+
+"I have forgiven you.  Why shouldn't I, when you have so royally atoned."
+
+But he obstinately refused to fence.  There was nothing apologetic in
+this man, no indirectness in his method of attack.  Parry adroitly as she
+might, he beat down her guard.  As the afternoon wore on there were
+silences, when Honora, by staring over the waters, tried to collect her
+thoughts.  But the sea was his ally, and she turned her face appealingly
+toward the receding land.  Fascination and fear struggled within her as
+she had listened to his onslaughts, and she was conscious of being moved
+by what he was, not by what he said.  Vainly she glanced at the two
+representatives of an ironically satisfied convention, only to realize
+that they were absorbed in a milder but no less entrancing aspect of the
+same topic, and would not thank her for an interruption.
+
+"Do you wish me to go away?" he asked at last abruptly, almost rudely.
+
+"Surely," she said, "your work, your future isn't in Newport."
+
+"You haven't answered my question."
+
+"It's because I have no right to answer it," she replied.  "Although
+we have known each other so short a time, I am your friend.  You must
+realize that.  I am not conventional.  I have lived long enough to
+understand that the people one likes best are not necessarily those one
+has known longest.  You interest me--I admit it frankly--I speak to you
+sincerely.  I am even concerned that you shall find happiness, and I feel
+that you have the power to make something of yourself.  What more can I
+say?  It seems to me a little strange," she added, "that under the
+circumstances I should say so much.  I can give no higher proof of my
+friendship."
+
+He did not reply, but gave a sharp order to the crew.  The sheet was
+shortened, and the Folly obediently headed westward against the swell,
+flinging rainbows from her bows as she ran.  Mrs. Shorter and Dewing
+returned at this moment from the cabin, where they had been on a tour of
+inspection.
+
+"Where are you taking us, Hugh?"  said Mrs. Shorter.  "Nowhere in
+particular," he replied.
+
+"Please don't forget that I am having people to dinner to-night.  That's
+all I ask.  What have you done to him, Honora, to put him in such a
+humour?"
+
+Honora laughed.
+
+"I hadn't noticed anything peculiar about him," she answered.
+
+"This boat reminds me of Adele," said Mrs. Shorter.  "She loved it.
+I can see how she could get a divorce from Dicky--but the 'Folly'!  She
+told me yesterday that the sight of it made her homesick, and Eustace
+Rindge won't leave Paris."
+
+It suddenly occurred to Honora, as she glanced around the yacht, that
+Mrs. Rindge rather haunted her.
+
+"So that is your answer," said Chiltern, when they were alone again.
+
+"What other can I give you?"
+
+"Is it because you are married?" he demanded.
+
+She grew crimson.
+
+"Isn't that an unnecessary question?"
+
+"No," he declared.  "It concerns me vitally to understand you.  You were
+good enough to wish that I should find happiness.  I have found the
+possibility of it--in you."
+
+"Oh," she cried, "don't say such things!"
+
+"Have you found happiness?" he asked.
+
+She turned her face from him towards their shining wake.  But he had seen
+that her eyes were filled with sudden tears.
+
+"Forgive me," he pleaded; "I did not mean to be brutal.  I said that
+because I felt as I have never in my life felt before.  As I did not know
+I could feel.  I can't account for it, but I ask you to believe me."
+
+"I can account for it," she answered presently, with a strange
+gentleness.  "It is because you met me at a critical time.  Such-
+coincidences often occur in life.  I happened to be a woman; and, I
+confess it, a woman who was interested.  I could not have been interested
+if you had been less real, less sincere.  But I saw that you were going
+through a crisis; that you might, with your powers, build up your life
+into a splendid and useful thing.  And, womanlike, my instinct was to
+help you.  I should not have allowed you to go on, but--but it all
+happened so quickly that I was bewildered.  I--I do not understand
+it myself."
+
+He listened hungrily, and yet at times with evident impatience.
+
+"No," he said, "I cannot believe that it was an accident.  It was you--"
+
+She stopped him with an imploring gesture.
+
+"Please," she said, "please let us go in."
+
+Without an instant's hesitation he brought the sloop about and headed her
+for the light-ship on Brenton's reef, and they sailed in silence.  Awhile
+she watched the sapphire waters break to dazzling whiteness under the
+westerning sun.  Then, in an ecstasy she did not seek to question, she
+closed her eyes to feel more keenly the swift motion of their flight.
+Why not?  The sea, the winds of heaven, had aided others since the dawn
+of history.  Legend was eternally true.  On these very shores happiness
+had awaited those who had dared to face primeval things.
+
+She looked again, this time towards an unpeopled shore.  No sentinel
+guarded the uncharted reefs, and the very skies were smiling, after the
+storm, at the scudding fates.
+
+It was not until they were landlocked once more, and the Folly was
+reluctantly beating back through the Narrows, that he spoke again.
+
+"So you wish me to go away?"
+
+"I cannot see any use in your staying," she replied, "after what you have
+said.  I--cannot see," she added in a low voice, "that for you to remain
+would be to promote the happiness of--either of us.  You should have gone
+to-day."
+
+"You care!" he exclaimed.
+
+"It is because I do not wish to care that I tell you to go--"
+
+"And you refuse happiness?"
+
+"It could be happiness for neither of us," said Honora.  "The situation
+would be impossible.  You are not a man who would be satisfied with
+moderation.  You would insist upon having all.  And you do not know what
+you are asking."
+
+"I know that I want you," he said, "and that my life is won or lost with
+or without you."
+
+You have no right to say such a thing."
+
+"We have each of us but one life to live."
+
+"And one life to ruin," she answered.  "See, you are running on the
+rocks!"
+
+He swung the boat around.
+
+"Others have rebuilt upon ruins," he declared.
+
+She smiled at him.
+
+"But you are taking my ruins for granted," she said.  "You would make
+them first."
+
+He relapsed into silence again.  The Folly needed watching.  Once he
+turned and spoke her name, and she did not rebuke him.
+
+"Women have a clearer vision of the future than men," she began
+presently, "and I know you better than you know yourself.  What--what
+you desire would not mend your life, but break it utterly.  I am speaking
+plainly.  As I have told you, you interest me; so far that is the extent
+of my feelings.  I do not know whether they would go any farther, but on
+your account as well as my own I will not take the risk.  We have come to
+an impasse.  I am sorry.  I wish we might have been friends, but what you
+have said makes it impossible.  There is only one thing to do, and that
+is for you to go away."
+
+He eased off his sheet, rounded the fort, and set a course for the
+moorings.  The sun hung red above the silhouetted roofs of Conanicut, and
+a quaint tower in the shape of a minaret stood forth to cap the illusions
+of a day.
+
+The wind was falling, the harbour quieting for the night, and across the
+waters, to the tones of a trumpet, the red bars of the battleship's flag
+fluttered to the deck.  The Folly, making a wide circle, shot into the
+breeze, and ended by gliding gently up to the buoy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
+
+It was Saturday morning, but Honora had forgotten the fact.  Not until
+she was on the bottom step did the odour of cigarettes reach her and turn
+her faint; and she clutched suddenly at the banisters.  Thus she stood
+for a while, motionless, and then went quietly into the drawing-room.
+The French windows looking out on the porch were, as usual, open.
+
+It was an odd sensation thus to be regarding one's husband objectively.
+For the first time he appeared to her definitely as a stranger; as much a
+stranger as the man who came once a week to wind Mrs. Forsythe's clocks.
+Nay, more.  There was a sense of intrusion in this visit, of invasion of
+a life with which he had nothing to do.  She examined him ruthlessly,
+very much as one might examine a burglar taken unawares.  There was the
+inevitable shirt with the wide pink stripes, of the abolishment or even
+of the effective toning down of which she had long since despaired.  On
+the contrary, like his complexion, they evinced a continual tendency
+towards a more aggressive colour.  There was also the jewelled ring, now
+conspicuously held aloft on a fat little finger.  The stripes appeared
+that morning as the banner of a hated suzerain, the ring as the emblem of
+his overlordship.  He did not belong in that house; everything in it
+cried out for his removal; and yet it was, in the eyes of the law at
+least, his.  By grace of that fact she was here, enjoying it.  At that
+instant, as though in evidence of this, he laid down a burning cigarette
+on a mahogany stand he had had brought out to him.  Honora seized an ash
+tray, hurried to the porch, and picked up the cigarette in the tips of
+her fingers.
+
+"Howard, I wish you would be more careful of Mrs. Forsythe's furniture,"
+she exclaimed.
+
+"Hello, Honora," he said, without looking up.  "I see by the Newport
+paper that old Maitland is back from Europe.  Things are skyrocketing in
+Wall Street."  He glanced at the ash tray, which she had pushed towards
+him.  "What's the difference about the table?  If the old lady makes a
+row, I'll pay for it."
+
+"Some things are priceless," she replied; "you do not seem to realize
+that."
+
+"Not this rubbish," said Howard.  "Judging by the fuss she made over the
+inventory, you'd think it might be worth something."
+
+"She has trusted us with it," said Honora.  Her voice shook.
+
+He stared at her.
+
+"I never saw you look like that," he declared.
+
+"It's because you never look at me closely," she answered.
+
+He laughed, and resumed his reading.  She stood awhile by the railing.
+Across the way, beyond the wall, she heard Mr. Chamberlin's shrill voice
+berating a gardener.
+
+"Howard," she asked presently, "why do you come to Newport at all?"
+
+"Why do I come to Newport?" he repeated.  "I don't understand you."
+
+"Why do you come up here every week?"
+
+"Well," he said, "it isn't a bad trip on the boat, and I get a change
+from New York; and see men I shouldn't probably see otherwise."  He
+paused and looked at her again, doubtfully.  "Why do you ask such a
+question?"
+
+"I wished to be sure," said Honora.
+
+"Sure of what?"
+
+"That the-arrangement suited you perfectly.  You do not feel--the lack of
+anything, do you?"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"You wouldn't care to stay in Newport all the time?"
+
+"Not if I know myself," he replied.  "I leave that part of it to you."
+
+"What part of it?" she demanded.
+
+"You ought to know.  You do it pretty well," he laughed.  "By the way,
+Honora, I've got to have a conference with Mr. Wing to-day, and I may
+not be home to lunch."
+
+"We're dining there to-night," she told him, in a listless voice.
+
+Upon Ethel Wing had descended the dominating characteristics of the elder
+James, who, whatever the power he might wield in Wall Street, was little
+more than a visitor in Newport.  It was Ethel's house, from the hour she
+had swept the Reel and Carter plans (which her father had brought home)
+from the table and sent for Mr. Farwell.  The forehanded Reginald arrived
+with a sketch, and the result, as every one knows, is one of the chief
+monuments to his reputation.  So exquisitely proportioned is its simple,
+two-storied marble front as seen through the trees left standing on the
+old estate, that tourists, having beheld the Chamberlin and other
+mansions, are apt to think this niggardly for a palace.  Two infolding
+wings, stretching towards the water, enclose a court, and through the
+slender white pillars of the peristyle one beholds in fancy the summer
+seas of Greece.
+
+Looking out on the court, and sustaining this classic illusion, is a
+marble-paved dining room, with hangings of Pompeiian red, and frescoes of
+nymphs and satyrs and piping shepherds, framed between fluted pilasters,
+dimly discernible in the soft lights.
+
+In the midst of these surroundings, at the head of his table, sat the
+great financier whose story but faintly concerns this chronicle; the man
+who, every day that he had spent down town in New York in the past thirty
+years, had eaten the same meal in the same little restaurant under the
+street.  This he told Honora, on his left, as though it were not history.
+He preferred apple pie to the greatest of artistic triumphs of his
+daughter's chef, and had it; a glorified apple pie, with frills and
+furbelows, and whipped cream which he angrily swept to one side with
+contempt.
+
+"That isn't apple pie," he said.  "I'd like to take that Frenchman to the
+little New England hilltown where I went to school and show him what
+apple pie is."
+
+Such were the autobiographical snatches--by no means so crude as they
+sound that reached her intelligence from time to time.  Mr. Wing was too
+subtle to be crude; and he had married a Playfair, a family noted for
+good living.  Honora did not know that he was fond of talking of that
+apple pie and the New England school at public banquets; nor did Mr. Wing
+suspect that the young woman whom he was apparently addressing, and who
+seemed to be hanging on his words, was not present.
+
+It was not until she had put her napkin on the table that she awoke
+with a start and gazed into his face and saw written there still another
+history than the one he had been telling her.  The face was hidden,
+indeed, by the red beard.  What she read was in the little eyes that
+swept her with a look of possession: possession in a large sense, let it
+be emphasized, that an exact justice be done Mr. James Wing,--she was one
+of the many chattels over which his ownership extended; bought and paid
+for with her husband.  A hot resentment ran through her at the thought.
+
+Mr. Cuthbert, who was many kinds of a barometer, sought her out later in
+the courtyard.
+
+"Your husband's feeling tiptop, isn't he?" said he.
+
+"He's been locked up with old Wing all day.  Something's in the wind, and
+I'd give a good deal to know what it is."
+
+"I'm afraid I can't inform you," replied Honora.
+
+Mr. Cuthbert apologized.
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean to ask you far a tip," he declared, quite confused.
+"I didn't suppose you knew.  The old man is getting ready to make another
+killing, that's all.  You don't mind my telling you you look stunning
+tonight, do you?"
+
+Honora smiled.
+
+"No, I don't mind," she said.
+
+Mr. Cuthbert appeared to be ransacking the corners of his brain for
+words.
+
+"I was watching you to-night at the table while Mr. Wing was talking to
+you.  I don't believe you heard a thing he said."
+
+"Such astuteness," she answered, smiling at him, "astounds me."
+
+He laughed nervously.
+
+"You're different than you've ever been since I've known you," he went
+on, undismayed.  "I hope you won't think I'm making love to you.  Not
+that I shouldn't like to, but I've got sense enough to see it's no use."
+
+Her reply was unexpected.
+
+"What makes you think that?" she asked curiously.
+
+"Oh, I'm not a fool," said Mr. Cuthbert.  "But if I were a poet, or that
+fellow Dewing, I might be able to tell you what your eyes were like to-
+night."
+
+"I'm glad you're not," said Honora.
+
+As they were going in, she turned for a lingering look at the sea.  A
+strong young moon rode serenely in the sky and struck a path of light
+across the restless waters.  Along this shimmering way the eyes of her
+companion followed hers.
+
+"I can tell you what that colour is, at least.  Do you remember the blue,
+transparent substance that used to be on favours at children's parties?"
+he asked.  "There were caps inside of them, and crackers."
+
+"I believe you are a poet, after all," she said.
+
+A shadow fell across the flags.  Honora did not move.
+
+"Hello, Chiltern," said Cuthbert.  "I thought you were playing bridge..."
+
+"You haven't looked at me once to-night," he said, when Cuthbert had gone
+in.
+
+She was silent.
+
+"Are you angry?"
+
+"Yes, a little," she answered.  "Do you blame me?"
+
+The vibration of his voice in the moonlit court awoke an answering chord
+in her; and a note of supplication from him touched her strangely.  Logic
+in his presence was a little difficult--there can be no doubt of that.
+
+"I must go in," she said unsteadily, "my carriage is waiting."
+
+But he stood in front of her.
+
+"I should have thought you would have gone," she said.
+
+"I wanted to see you again."
+
+"And now?"
+
+"I can't leave while you feel this way," he pleaded.  "I can't abandon
+what I have of you--what you will let me take.  If I told you I would be
+reasonable--"
+
+"I don't believe in miracles," she said, recovering a little; "at least
+in modern ones.  The question is, could you become reasonable?"
+
+"As a last resort," he replied, with a flash of humour and a touch of
+hope.  "If you would--commute my sentence."
+
+She passed him, and picking up her skirts, paused in the window.
+
+"I will give you one more chance," she said.
+
+This was the conversation that, by repeating itself, filled the interval
+of her drive home.  So oblivious was she to Howard's presence, that he
+called her twice from her corner of the carriage after the vehicle had
+stopped; and he halted her by seizing her arm as she was about to go up
+the stairs.  She followed him mechanically into the drawing-room.
+
+He closed the door behind them, and the other door into the darkened
+dining room.  He even took a precautionary glance out of the window of
+the porch.  And these movements, which ordinarily might have aroused her
+curiosity, if not her alarm, she watched with a profound indifference.
+He took a stand before the Japanese screen in front of the fireplace,
+thrust his hands in his pockets, cleared his throat, and surveyed her
+from her white shoulders to the gold-embroidered tips of her slippers.
+
+"I'm leaving for the West in the morning, Honora.  If you've made any
+arrangements for me on Sunday, you'll have to cancel them.  I may be gone
+two weeks, I may be gone a month.  I don't know."
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"I'm going to tell you something those fellows in the smoking room to-
+night did their best to screw out of me.  If you say anything about it,
+all's up between me and Wing.  The fact that he picked me out to engineer
+the thing, and that he's going to let me in if I push it through, is a
+pretty good sign that he thinks something of my business ability, eh?"
+
+"You'd better not tell me, Howard," she said.
+
+You're too clever to let it out," he assured her; and added with a
+chuckle: "If it goes through, order what you like.  Rent a house on
+Bellevue Avenue--any thing in reason."
+
+"What is it?" she asked, with a sudden premonition that the thing had a
+vital significance for her.
+
+"It's the greatest scheme extant," he answered with elation.  "I won't go
+into details--you wouldn't understand'em.  Mr. Wing and some others have
+tried the thing before, nearer home, and it worked like a charm.  Street
+railways.  We buy up the little lines for nothing, and get an interest in
+the big ones, and sell the little lines for fifty times what they cost
+us, and guarantee big dividends for the big lines."
+
+"It sounds to me," said Honora, slowly, "as though some one would get
+cheated."
+
+"Some one get cheated!" he exclaimed, laughing.  "Every one gets cheated,
+as you call it, if they haven't enough sense to know what their
+property's worth, and how to use it to the best advantage.  It's a case,"
+he announced, "of the survival of the fittest.  Which reminds me that if
+I'm going to be fit to-morrow I'd better go to bed.  Mr. Wing's to take
+me to New York on his yacht, and you've got to have your wits about you
+when you talk to the old man."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Regarding favourable impressions with profound suspicion
+She had never known the necessity of making friends
+Time, the unbribeable
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN CHRONICLE, V5, BY CHURCHILL ***
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