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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories, by
+Robert Herrick
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories
+
+Author: Robert Herrick
+
+Posting Date: October 20, 2012 [EBook #8113]
+Release Date: May, 2005
+First Posted: June 15, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS, OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Bidwell, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS
+
+AND OTHER STORIES
+
+by
+
+ROBERT HERRICK
+
+
+
+TO
+
+G. H. P.
+
+
+
+LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS:
+
+A MODERN ACCOUNT
+
+NO. I. INTRODUCTORY AND EXPLANATORY.
+
+(_Eastlake has renewed an episode of his past life. The formalities
+have been satisfied at a chance meeting, and he continues_.)
+
+... So your carnations lie over there, a bit beyond this page, in a
+confusion of manuscripts. Sweet source of this idle letter and gentle
+memento of the house on Grant Street and of you! I fancy I catch their
+odor before it escapes generously into the vague darkness beyond my
+window. They whisper: "Be tender, be frank; recall to her mind what is
+precious in the past. For departed delights are rosy with deceitful
+hopes, and a woman's heart becomes heavy with living. We are the woman
+you once knew, but we are much more. We have learned new secrets, new
+emotions, new ambitions, in love--we are fuller than before." So--for
+to-morrow they will be shrivelled and lifeless--I take up their message
+to-night.
+
+I see you now as this afternoon at the Goodriches', when you came in
+triumphantly to essay that hot room of empty, passive folk. Someone was
+singing somewhere, and we were staring at one another. There you stood
+at the door, placing us; the roses, scattered in plutocratic profusion,
+had drooped their heads to our hot faces. We turned from the music to
+_you_. You knew it, and you were glad of it. You knew that they were
+busy about you, that you and your amiable hostess made an effective
+group at the head of the room. You scented their possible disapproval
+with zest, for you had so often mocked their good-will with impunity
+that you were serenely confident of getting what you wanted. Did you
+want a lover? Not that I mean to offer myself in flesh and blood: God
+forbid that I should join the imploring procession, even at a
+respectful distance! My pen is at your service. I prefer to be your
+historian, your literary maid--half slave, half confidant; for then you
+will always welcome me. If I were a lover, I might some day be
+inopportune. That would not be pleasant.
+
+Yes, they were chattering about you, especially around the table where
+some solid ladies of Chicago served iced drinks. I was sipping it all
+in with the punch, and looking at the pinks above the dark hair, and
+wondering if you found having your own way as good fun as when you were
+eighteen. You have gained, my dear lady, while I have been knocking
+about the world. You are now more than "sweet": you are almost
+handsome. I suppose it is a question of lights and the time of day
+whether or not you are really brilliant. And you carry surety in your
+face. There is nothing in Chicago to startle you, perhaps not in the
+world.
+
+She at the punch remarked, casually, to her of the sherbet: "I wonder
+when Miss Armstrong will settle matters with Lane? It is the best she
+can do now, though he isn't as well worth while as the men she threw
+over." And her neighbor replied: "She might do worse than Lane. She
+could get more from him than the showy ones." So Lane is the name of
+the day. They have gauged you and put you down at Lane. I took an ice
+and waited--but you will have to supply the details.
+
+Meantime, you sailed on, with that same everlasting enthusiasm upon
+your face that I knew six years ago, until you spied me. How extremely
+natural you made your greeting! I confess I believed that I had lived
+for that smile six years, and suffered a bad noise for the sound of
+your voice. It seemed but a minute until we found ourselves almost
+alone with the solid women at the ices. One swift phrase from you, and
+we had slipped back through the meaningless years till we stood _there_
+in the parlor at Grant Street, mere boy and girl. The babbling room
+vanished for a few golden moments. Then you rustled off, and I believe
+I told Mrs. Goodrich that musicales were very nice, for they gave you a
+chance to talk. And I went to the dressing-room, wondering what rare
+chance had brought me again within the bondage of that voice.
+
+Then, then, dear pinks, you came sailing over the stairs, peeping out
+from that bunch of lace. I loitered and spoke. Were the eyes green, or
+blue, or gray; ambition, or love, or indifference to the world? I was
+at my old puzzle again, while you unfastened the pinks, and, before the
+butler, who acquiesced at your frivolity in impertinent silence, you
+held them out to me. Only you know the preciousness of unsought-for
+favors. "Write me," you said; and I write.
+
+What should man write about to you but of love and yourself? My pen, I
+see, has not lost its personal gait in running over the mill books.
+Perhaps it politely anticipates what is expected! So much the better,
+say, for you expect what all men give--love and devotion. You would not
+know a man who could not love you. Your little world is a circle of
+possibilities. Let me explain. Each lover is a possible conception of
+life placed at a slightly different angle from his predecessor or
+successor. Within this circle you have turned and turned, until your
+head is a bit weary. But I stand outside and observe the whirligig.
+Shall I be drawn in? No, for I should become only a conventional
+interest. "If the salt," etc. I remember you once taught in a mission
+school.
+
+The flowers will tell me no more! Next time give me a rose--a huge,
+hybrid, opulent rose, the product of a dozen forcing processes--and I
+will love you a new way. As the flowers say good-by, I will say
+goodnight. Shall I burn them? No, for they would smoulder. And if I
+left them here alone, to-morrow they would be wan. There! I have thrown
+them out wide into that gulf of a street twelve stories below. They
+will flutter down in the smoky darkness, and fall, like a message from
+the land of the lotus-eaters, upon a prosy wayfarer. And safe in my
+heart there lives that gracious picture of my lady as she stands above
+me and gives them to me. That is eternal: you and the pinks are but
+phantoms. Farewell!
+
+
+
+NO. II. ACQUIESCENT AND ENCOURAGING.
+
+(_Miss Armstrong replies on a dull blue, canvas-textured page, over
+which her stub-pen wanders in fashionable negligence. She arrives on
+the third page at the matter in hand_.)
+
+Ah, it was very sweet, your literary love-letter. Considerable style,
+as you would say, but too palpably artificial. If you want to deceive
+this woman, my dear sir trifler, you must disguise your mockery more
+artfully.
+
+Why didn't I find you at the Stanwoods'? I had Nettie send you a card.
+I had promised you to a dozen delightful women, "our choicest lot," who
+were all agog to see my supercilious and dainty sir.... Why will you
+always play with things? Perhaps you will say because I am not worth
+serious moments. You play with everything, I believe, and that is
+banal. Ever sincerely,
+
+EDITH ARMSTRONG.
+
+
+
+NO. III. EXPLANATORY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.
+
+(_Eastlake has the masculine fondness for seeing himself in the right_.)
+
+I turned the Stanwoods' card down, and for your sake, or rather for the
+sake of your memory. I preferred to sit here and dream about you in the
+midst of my chimney-pots and the dull March mists rather than to run
+the risk of another, and perhaps fatal, impression. And so far as you
+are concerned your reproach is just. Do I "play with everything"?
+Perhaps I am afraid that it might play with me. Imagine frolicking with
+tigers, who might take you seriously some day, as a tidbit for
+afternoon tea--if you should confess that you were serious! That's the
+way I think of the world, or, rather, your part of it. Surely, it is a
+magnificent game, whose rules we learn completely just as our blood
+runs too slowly for active exercise. I like to break off a piece of its
+cake (or its rank cheese at times) and lug it away with me to my den up
+here for further examination. I think about it, I dream over it; yes,
+in a reflective fashion, I _feel_. It is a charming, experimental way
+of living.
+
+Then, after the echo becomes faint and lifeless, or, if you prefer, the
+cheese too musty, I sally out once more to refresh my larder. You play
+also in your way, but not so intelligently (pardon me), for you deceive
+yourself from day to day that your particular object, your temporary
+mood, is the one eternal thing in life. After all, you have mastered
+but one trick--the trick of being loved. With that trick you expect to
+take the world; but, alas! you capture only an old man's purse or a
+young man's passion.
+
+Artificial, my letters--yes, if you wish. I should say, not
+crude--matured, considered. I discuss the love you long to experience.
+I dangle it before your eyes as a bit of the drapery that goes to the
+ball of life. But when dawn almost comes and the ball is over, you
+mustn't expect the paper roses to smell. This mystifies you a little,
+for you are a plain, downright siren. Your lovers' songs have been in
+simple measures. Well, the moral is this: take my love-letters as real
+(in their way) as the play, or rather, the opera; infinitely true for
+the moment, unreal for the hour, eternal as the dead passions of the
+ages. Further, it is better to feel the aromatic attributes of love
+than the dangerous or unlovely reality. You can flirt with number nine
+or marry number ten, but I shall be stored away in your drawer for a
+life.
+
+You have carried me far afield, away from men and things. So, for a
+moment, I have stopped to listen to the hum of this chaotic city as it
+rises from Dearborn and State in the full blast of a commercial noon.
+You wonder why an unprofitable person like myself lives here, and not
+in an up-town club with my fellows. Ah, my dear lady, I wish to see the
+game always going on in its liveliest fashion. So I have made a den for
+myself, not under the eaves of a hotel, but on the roof, among the
+ventilators. Here I can see the clouds of steam and the perpetual pall
+of smoke below me. I can revel in gorgeous sunsets when the fiery light
+threads the smoke and the mists and the sodden clouds eastward over the
+lake. And at night I take my steamer chair to the battlements and peer
+over into a sea of lights below. As I sit writing to you, outside go
+the click and rattle of the elevator gates and other distant noises of
+humanity. My echo comes directly enough, but it does not deafen me.
+Below there exists my barber, and farther down that black pit of an
+elevator lies lunch, or a cigar, or a possible cocktail, if the mental
+combination should prove unpleasant. Across the hall is Aladdin's lamp,
+otherwise my banker; and above all is Haroun al Raschid. Am I not wise?
+In the morning, if it is fair, I take a walk among the bulkheads on the
+roof, and watch the blue deception of the lake. Perhaps, if the wind
+comes booming in, I hear the awakening roar in the streets and think of
+work. Perhaps the clear emptiness of a Sunday hovers over the shore;
+then I wonder what you will say to this letter. Will you feel with me
+that you should live on a housetop and eat cheese? Do you long for a
+cool stream without flies, and a carpet of golden sand? Do you want a
+coal fire and a husband home at six-thirty, or a third-class ticket to
+the realms of nonsense? Are you thinking of Lane's income, or Smith's
+cleverness, or the ennui of too many dinners?
+
+I know: you are thinking of love while you read this, and are happy. If
+I might send you a new sensation in every line, I should be happy, too,
+for your prodigal nature demands novelty. I should then be master for a
+moment. And love is mastery and submission, the two poles of a strong
+magnet. Adieu.
+
+
+
+NO. IV. FURTHER AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.
+
+(_Eastlake continues apropos of a chance meeting_.)
+
+So you rather like the curious flavor of this new dish, but it puzzles
+you. You ask for facts? What a stamp Chicago has put on your soul! You
+will continue to regard as facts the feeble fancies that God has
+allowed to petrify. I warn you that facts kill, but you shall have
+them. I had meditated a delightful sheet of love that has been
+disdainfully shoved into the waste-basket. A grave moral there for you,
+my lady!
+
+Do you remember when I was very young and _gauche_? Doubtless, for
+women never forget first impressions of that sort. You dressed very
+badly, and were quite ceremonious. I was the bantling son of one of
+your father's provincial correspondents, to adopt the suave term of the
+foreigners. I had been sent to Chicago to fit for a technical school,
+where I was to learn to be very clever about mill machinery. Perhaps
+you remember my father--a sweet-natured, wiry, active man, incapable of
+conceiving an interest in life that was divorced from respectability. I
+think he had some imagination, for now and then he was troubled about
+my becoming a loafer. However, he certainly kept it in control: I was
+to become a great mill owner.
+
+It was all luck at first: you were luck, and the Tech. was luck. Then I
+found my voice and saw my problem: to cross my father's aspirations, to
+be other than the Wabash mill owner, would have been cruel. You see his
+desires were more passionate than mine. I worried through the
+mechanical, deadening routine of the Tech. somehow, and finally got
+courage enough to tell him that I could not accept Wabash quite yet. I
+had the audacity to propose two years abroad. We compromised on one,
+but I understood that I must not finally disappoint him. He cared so
+much that it would have been wicked. A few people in this world have
+positive and masterful convictions. An explosion or insanity comes if
+their wills smoulder in ineffectual silence. Most of us have no more
+than inclinations. It seems wise and best that those of mere
+inclinations should waive their prejudices in favor of those who feel
+intensely. So much for the great questions of individuality and
+personality that set the modern world a-shrieking. This is a
+commonplace solution of the great family problem Turgenieff propounded
+in "Fathers and Sons." Perchance you have heard of Turgenieff?
+
+So I prepared to follow my father's will, for I loved him exceedingly.
+His life had not been happy, and his nature, as I have said, was a more
+exacting one than mine. The price of submission, however, was not plain
+to me until I was launched that year in Paris in a strange,
+cosmopolitan world. I was supposed to attend courses at the Ecole
+Polytechnique, but I became mad with the longings that are wafted about
+Europe from capital to capital. I went to Italy--to Venice and Florence
+and Rome--to Athens and Constantinople and Vienna. In a word, I
+unfitted myself for Wabash as completely as I could, and troubled my
+spirit with vain attempts after art and feeling.
+
+You women do not know the intoxication of five-and-twenty--a few
+hundred francs in one's pockets, the centuries behind, creation ahead.
+You do not know what it is to hunger after the power of understanding
+and the power of expression; to see the world as divine one minute and
+a mechanic hell the next; to feel the convictions of the vagabond; to
+grudge each sunbeam that falls unseen by you on some mouldering gate in
+some neglected city, each face of the living wherein possible life
+looks out untried by you, each picture that means a new curiosity. No,
+for, after all, you are material souls; you need a Bradshaw and a
+Baedeker, even in the land of dreams. All men, I like to think, for one
+short breath in their lives, believe this narrow world to be shoreless.
+They feel that they should die in discontent if they could not
+experience, test, this wonderful conglomerate of existence. It is an
+old, old matter I am writing you about. We have classified it nicely,
+these days; we call it the "romantic spirit," and we say that it is
+made three parts of youth and two of discontent--a perpetual expression
+of the world's pessimism.
+
+I look back, and I think that I have done you wrong. Women like you
+have something nearly akin to this mood. Some time in your lives you
+would all be romantic lovers. The commonest of you anticipate a
+masculine soul that shall harmonize your discontent into happiness.
+Most of you are not very nice about it; you make your hero out of the
+most obvious man. Yet it is pathetic, that longing for something beyond
+yourselves. That passionate desire for a complete illusion in love is
+the one permanent note you women have attained in literature. In your
+heart of hearts you would all (until you become stiff in the arms of an
+unlovely life) follow a cabman, if he could make the world dance for
+you in this joyous fashion. Some are hard to satisfy--for example, you,
+my lady--and you go your restless, brilliant little way, flirting with
+this man, coquetting with that, examining a third, until your heart
+grows weary or until you are at peace. You may marry for money or for
+love, and in twenty years you will teach your daughters that love
+doesn't pay at less than ten thousand a year. But you don't expect them
+to believe you, and they don't.
+
+I am not sneering at you. I would not have it otherwise, for the world
+would be one half cheaper if women like you did not follow the
+perpetual instinct. True, civilization tends to curb this romantic
+desire, but when civilization runs against a passionate nature we have
+a tragedy. The world is sweeter, deeper, for that. Live and love, if
+you can, and give the lie to facts. Be restless, be insatiable, be
+wicked, but believe that your body and soul were meant for more than
+food and raiment; that somewhere, somehow, some day, you will meet the
+dream made real, and that _he_ will unlock the secrets of this life.
+
+It is late. I am tired. The noises of the city begin, far down in the
+darkness. This carries love.
+
+
+
+NO. V. AROUSED.
+
+(_Miss Armstrong protests and invites_.)
+
+It is real, real, _real_. If I can say so, after going on all these
+years with but one idea (according to my good friends) of settling
+myself comfortably in some large home, shouldn't you believe it? You
+have lived more interestingly than I, and you are not dependent, as
+most of us are. You really mock me through it all. You think I am
+worthy of only a kind of candy that you carry about for agreeable
+children, which you call love. To me, sir, it reads like an
+insult--your message of love tucked in concisely at the close.
+
+No, keep to facts, for they are your _metier_. You make them
+interesting. Tell me more about your idle, contemplative self. And let
+me see you to-morrow at the Thorntons'. Leave your sombre eyes at home,
+and don't expect infinities in tea-gabble. I saw you at the opera last
+night. For some moments, while Melba was singing, I wanted you and your
+confectioner's love. That Melba might always sing, and the tide always
+flood the marshes! On the whole, I like candy. Send me a page of it.
+
+E. A.
+
+
+
+NO. VI. AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.
+
+(_Eastlake, disregarding her comments, continues._)
+
+Dear lady, did you ever read some stately bit of prose, which caught in
+its glamour of splendid words the vital, throbbing world of affairs and
+passions, some crystallization of a rich experience, and then by chance
+turn to the "newsy" column of an American newspaper? (Forsooth, these
+must be literary letters!) Well, that tells the sensations of going
+from Europe to Wabash. I had caught the sound of the greater harmony,
+or struggle, and I must accept the squeak of the melodeon. I did not
+think highly of myself; had started too far back in the race, and I
+knew that laborious years of intense zeal would place me only third
+class, or even lower, in any pursuit of the arts. Perhaps if I had felt
+that I could have made a good third class, I should have fought it out
+in Europe. There are some things man cannot accomplish, however, our
+optimistic national creed to the contrary. And there would have been
+something low in disappointing my father for such ignoble results, such
+imperfect satisfaction.
+
+So to Wabash I went. I resolved to adapt myself to the billiards and
+whiskey of the Commercial Club, and to the desk in the inner office
+behind the glass partitions. And I like to think that I satisfied my
+father those two years in the mills. After a time I achieved a lazy
+content. At first I tried to deceive myself; to think that the newsy
+column of Wabash was as significant as the grand page of London or
+Paris. That simple yarn didn't satisfy me many months.
+
+Then my father died. I hung on at the mills for a time, until the
+strikes and the general depression gave me valid reasons for
+withdrawing. To skip details, I sold out my interests, and with my
+little capital came to Chicago. My income, still dependent in some part
+upon those Wabash mills, trembles back and forth in unstable
+equilibrium.
+
+Chicago was too much like Wabash just then. I went to Florence to join
+a man, half German Jew, half American, wholly cosmopolite, whom I had
+known in Paris. His life was very thin: it consisted wholly of
+interests--a tenuous sort of existence. I can thank him for two things:
+that I did not remain forever in Italy, trying to say something new,
+and that I began a definite task. I should send you my book (now that
+it is out and people are talking about it), but it would bore you, and
+you would feel that you must chatter about it. It is a good piece of
+journeyman work. I gathered enough notes for another volume, and then I
+grew restless. Business called me home for a few months, so I came back
+to Chicago. Of all places! you say. Yes, to Chicago, to see this brutal
+whirlpool as it spins and spins. It has fascinated me, I admit, and I
+stay on--to live up among the chimneys, hanging out over the cornice of
+a twelve-story building; to soak myself in the steam and smoke of the
+prairie and in the noises of a city's commerce.
+
+Am I content? Yes, when I am writing to you; or when the pile of
+manuscripts at my side grows painfully page by page; or when, peering
+out of the fort-like embrasure, I can see the sun drenched in smoke and
+mist and the "sky-scrapers" gleam like the walls of a Colorado canon. I
+have enough to buy me existence, and at thirty I still find peepholes
+into hopes.
+
+Are these enough facts for you? Shall I send you an inventory of my
+room, of my days, of my mental furniture? Some long afternoon I will
+spirit you up here in that little steel cage, and you shall peer out of
+my window, tapping your restless feet, while you sniff at the squalor
+below. You will move softly about, questioning the watercolors, the
+bits of bric-a-brac, the dusty manuscripts, the dull red hangings, not
+quite understanding the fox in his hole. You will gratefully catch the
+sounds from the mound below our feet, and when you say good-by and drop
+swiftly down those long stories you will gasp a little sigh of relief.
+You will pull down your veil and drive off to an afternoon tea, feeling
+that things as they are are very nice, and that a little Chicago mud is
+worth all the clay of the studios. And I? I shall take the roses out of
+the vase and throw them away. I shall say, "Enough!" But somehow you
+will have left a suggestion of love about the place. I shall fancy that
+I still hear your voice, which will be so far away dealing out
+banalities. I shall treasure the words you let wander heedlessly out of
+the window. I shall open my book and write, "To-day she
+came--_beatissima hora_."
+
+
+
+NO. VII. OF THE NATURE OF A CONFESSION.
+
+(_Miss Armstrong is nearing the close of her fifth season. Prospect and
+retrospect are equally uninviting. She wills to escape_.)
+
+I shall probably be thinking about the rents in your block, and
+wondering if the family had best put up a sky-scraper, instead of doing
+all the pretty little things you mention in your letter. At
+five-and-twenty one becomes practical, if one is a woman whose father
+has left barely enough to go around among two women who like luxury,
+and two greedy boys at college with expensive "careers" ahead. This
+letter finds me in the trough of the wave. I wonder if it's what you
+call "the ennui of many dinners?" More likely it's because we can't
+keep our cottage at Sorrento. Well-a-day! it's gray this morning, and I
+will write off a fit of the blues.
+
+I think it's about time to marry number nine. It would relieve the
+family immensely. I suspect they think I have had my share of fun.
+Probably you will take this as an exquisite joke, but 'tis the truth,
+alas!
+
+Last night I was at the Hoffmeyers' at dinner. It was slow. All such
+dinners are slow. The good Fraus don't know how to mix the sheep and
+the goats. For a passing moment they talked about you and about your
+book in a puzzled way. They think you so clever and so odd. But I know
+how hollow he is, and how thin his fame! I got some points on the new L
+from the Hoffmeyers and young Mr. Knowlton. That was interesting and
+exciting. We dealt in millions as if they were checkers. These
+practical men have a better grip on life than the cynics and dreamers
+like you. You call them plebeian and _bourgeois_ and Philistine and
+limited--all the bad names in your select vocabulary. But they know how
+to feel in the good, old, common-sense way. You've lost that. I like
+plebeian earnestness and push. I like success at something, and hearty
+enjoyment, and good dinners, and big men who talk about a million as if
+it were a ten-spot in the game.
+
+You see I am looking for number nine and my four horses. Then I mean to
+invite you to my country house, to have a lot of "fat" girls to meet
+you who will talk slang at you, and one of them shall marry you--one
+whose father is a great newspaper man. And your new papa will start you
+in the business of making public opinion. You will play with that, too,
+but, then, you will be coining money.
+
+No, not here in Chicago, but if you had talked to me at Sorrento as you
+write me from your sanctum on the roof, I might have listened and
+dreamed. The sea makes me believe and hope. I love it so! That's why I
+made mamma take a house near the lake--to be near a little piece of
+infinity. Yes, if you had paddled me out of the harbor at Sorrento,
+some fine night when the swell was rippling in, like the groaning of a
+sleepy beast, and the hills were a-hush on the shore, then we might
+have gone on to that place you are so fond of, "the land east of the
+sun, and west of the moon."
+
+
+
+NO. VIII. BIOGRAPHIC AND JUDICIAL.
+
+(_Eastlake replies analytically_.)
+
+But don't marry him until we are clear on all matters. I haven't
+finished your case. And don't marry that foreign-looking cavalier you
+were riding with to-day in the park. You are too American ever to be at
+home over there. You would smash their fragile china, and you wouldn't
+understand. England might fit you, though, for England is something
+like that dark green, prairie park, with its regular, bushy trees
+against a Gainsborough sky. You live deeply in the fierce open air. The
+English like that. However, America must not lose you.
+
+You it was, I am sure, who moved your family in that conventional
+pilgrimage of ambitious Chicagoans--west, south, north. Neither your
+father nor your mother would have stirred from sober little Grant
+Street had you not felt the pressing necessity for a career. Rumor got
+hold of you first on the South Side, and had it that you were
+experimenting with some small contractor. The explosion which followed
+reached me even in Vienna. Did you feel that you could go farther, or
+did you courageously run the risk of wrecking him then instead of
+wrecking yourself and him later? Oh well, he's comfortably married now,
+and all the pain you gave him was probably educative. You may look at
+his flaunting granite house on that broad boulevard, and think well of
+your courage.
+
+Your father died. You moved northward to that modest house tucked in
+lovingly under the ample shelter of the millionnaires on the Lake Shore
+Drive. I fancy there has always been the gambler in your nerves; that
+you have sacrificed your principle to getting a rapid return on your
+money. And you have dominated your family: you sent your two brothers
+to Harvard, and filled them with ambitions akin to yours. Now you are
+impatient because the thin ice cracks a bit.
+
+But I have great faith: you will mend matters by some shrewd deal with
+the manipulators at Hoffmeyer's, or by marrying number nine. You will
+do it honestly--I mean the marrying; for you will convince him that you
+love, so far as love is in you, and you will convince yourself that
+marriage, the end of it all, is unselfish, though prosaic. You will
+accept resignation with an occasional sigh, feeling that you have gone
+far, perhaps as far as you can go. I trust that solution will not come
+quickly, however, because I cannot regard it as a brilliant ending to
+your evolution. For you have kept yourself sweet and clean from fads,
+and mean pushing, and the vulgar machinery of society. You never forced
+your way or intrigued. You have talked and smiled and bewitched
+yourself straight to the point where you now are. You were eager and
+curious about pleasures, and the world has dealt liberally with you.
+
+Were you perilously near the crisis when you wrote me? Did the
+reflective tone come because you were brought at last squarely to the
+mark, because you must decide what one of the possible conceptions of
+life you really want? Don't think, I pray you; go straight on to the
+inevitable solution, for when you become conscious you are lost.
+
+Do you wonder that I love you, my hybrid rose; that I follow the heavy
+petals as they push themselves out into their final bloom; that I
+gather the aroma to comfort my heart in these lifeless pages? I follow
+you about in your devious path from tea to dinner or dance, or I wait
+at the opera or theatre to watch for a new light in your face, to see
+your world written in a smile. You are dark, and winning, and strong.
+You are pagan in your love of sensuous, full things. You are grateful
+to the biting air as it touches your cheek and sends the blood leaping
+in glad life. You love water and fire and wind, elemental things, and
+you love them with fervor and passion. All this to the world! Much more
+intimate to me, who can read the letters you scrawl for the impudent,
+careless world. For deep down in the core of that rose there lies a
+soul that permeates it all--a longing, restless soul, one moment
+revealing a heaven that the next is shut out in dark despair.
+
+Yes, keep the cottage by the sea for one more dream. Perchance I shall
+find something stable, eternal, something better than discontent and
+striving; for the sea is great and makes peace.
+
+
+
+NO. IX. CRITICISM.
+
+(_Miss Armstrong vindicates herself by scorning._)
+
+You are a tissue of phrases. You feel only words. You love! What
+mockery to hear you handle the worn, old words! You have secluded
+yourself in careful isolation from the human world you seem to despise.
+You have no right to its passions and solaces. Incarnate selfishness,
+dear friend, I suspect you are. You would not permit the disturbance of
+a ripple in the contemplative lake of your life such as love and
+marriage might bring.
+
+Pray what right may you have to stew me in a saucepan up on your roof,
+and to send me flavors of myself done up nicely into little packages
+labelled deceitfully "love"? It is lucky that this time you have come
+across a woman who has played the game before, and can meet you point
+by point. But I am too weary to argue with a man who carries two-edged
+words, flattery on one side and sneers on the reverse. Mark this one
+thing, nevertheless: if I should decide to sell myself advantageously
+next season I should be infinitely better than you,--for I am only a
+woman.
+
+E. A.
+
+
+
+NO. X. THE LIMITATION OF LIFE.
+
+(_Eastlake summarizes, and intends to conclude._)
+
+My lady, my humor of to-day makes me take up the charges in your last
+letters; I will define, not defend, myself. You fall out with me
+because I am a dilettante (or many words to that one effect), and you
+abuse me because I deal in the form rather than the matter of love. Is
+that not just to you?
+
+In short, I am not as your other admirers, and the variation in the
+species has lost the charm of novelty.
+
+Believe me that I am honest to-day, at least; indeed, I think you will
+understand. Only the college boy who feeds on Oscar Wilde and
+sentimental pessimism has that disease of indifference with which you
+crudely charge me. It is a kind of chicken-pox, cousin-French to the
+evils of literary Paris. But I must not thank God too loudly, or you
+will think I am one with them at heart.
+
+No, I am in earnest, in terrible earnest, about all this--I mean life
+and what to do with it. That is a great day when a man comes into his
+own, no matter how paltry the pittance may be the gods have given
+him--when he comes to know just how far he can go, and where lies his
+path of least resistance. That I know. I am tremendously sure of myself
+now, and, like your good business men, I go about my affairs and
+dispose of my life with its few energies in a cautious, economical way.
+
+What is all this I make so much to-do about? Very little, I confess,
+but to me more serious than L's and sky-scrapers; yes, than love. Mine
+is an infinite labor: first to shape the true tool, and then to master
+the material! I grant you I may die any day like a rat on a housetop,
+with only a bundle of musty papers, the tags of broken conversations,
+and one or two dead, distorted nerves. That is our common risk. But I
+shall accomplish as much of the road as God permits the snail, and I
+shall have moulded something; life will have justified itself to me, or
+I to life. But that is not our problem to-day.
+
+Why do I isolate myself? Because a few pursuits in life are great
+taskmasters and jealous ones. A wise man who had felt that truth wrote
+about it once. I must husband my devotions: love, except the idea of
+love, is not for me; pleasure, except the idea of pleasure, is too keen
+for me; energy, except the ideas energy creates, is beyond me. I am
+limited, definite, alone, without you.
+
+I confess that two passions are greater than any man, the passion for
+God and the passion of a great love. They send a man hungry and naked
+into the street, and make his subterfuges with existence ridiculous.
+How rarely they come! How inadequate the man who is mistaken about
+them! We peer into the corners of life after them, but they elude us.
+There are days of splendid consciousness, and we think we have
+them--then----
+
+No, it is foolish, _bete_, dear lady, to be deceived by a sentiment;
+better the comfortable activities of the world. They will suit you
+best; leave the other for the dream hidden in a glass of champagne.
+
+But let me love you always. Let me fancy you, when I walk down these
+gleaming boulevards in the silent evenings, as you sit flashingly
+lovely by some soft lamplight, wrapped about in the cotton-wools of
+society. That will reconcile me to the roar of these noonday streets.
+The city exists for _you_.
+
+
+
+NO. XI. UNSATISFIED.
+
+(_Miss Armstrong wills to drift_.)
+
+... Come to Sorrento....
+
+
+
+NO. XII. THE ILLUSION.
+
+(_Eastlake resumes some weeks later. He has put into Bar Harbor on a
+yachting trip. He sits writing late at night by the light of the
+binnacle lamp_.)
+
+Sweet lady, a few hours ago we slipped in here past the dark shore of
+your village, in almost dead calm, just parting the heavy waters with
+our prow. It was the golden set of the summer afternoon: a thrush or
+two were already whistling clear vespers in he woods; all else was
+fruitfully calm.
+
+And then, in the stillness of the ebb, we floated together, you and I,
+round that little lighthouse into the sheltering gloom of the woods.
+Then we drifted beyond it all, in serene solution of this world's fret!
+To-morrows you may keep for another.
+
+This night was richly mine. You brought your simple self, undisturbed
+by the people who expect of you, without your little airs of
+experience. I brought incense, words, devotion, and love. And I
+treasure now a few pure tones, some simple motions of your arm with the
+dripping paddle, a few pure feelings written on your face. That is all,
+but it is much. We got beyond necessity and the impertinent commonplace
+of Chicago. We had ourselves, and that was enough.
+
+And to-night, as I lie here under the cool, complete heavens, with only
+a twinkling cottage light here and there in the bay to remind me of
+unrest, I see life afresh in the old, simple, eternal lines. These are
+_our_ days of full consciousness.
+
+Do you remember that clearing in the woods where the long weeds and
+grass were spotted with white stones--burial-place it was--their bright
+faces turned ever to the sunshine and the stars? They spoke of other
+lives than yours and mine. Forgotten little units in our disdainful
+world, we pass them scornfully by. Other lives, and perhaps better, do
+you think? For them the struggle never came which holds us in a fist of
+brass, and thrashes us up and down the pavement of life. Perhaps--can
+you not, at one great leap, fancy it?--two sincere souls could escape
+from this brass master, and live, unmindful of strife, for a little
+grave on a hillside in the end? They must be strong souls to renounce
+that cherished hope of triumph, to be content with the simple, antique
+things, just living and loving--the eternal and brave things; for,
+after all, what you and I burn for so restlessly is a makeshift
+ambition. We wish to go far, "to make the best of ourselves." Why not,
+once for all, rely upon God to make? Why not live and rejoice?
+
+And the little graves are not bad: to lie long years within sound of
+this great-hearted ocean, with the peaceful, upturned stones bearing
+this full legend, "This one loved and lived...." Forgive me for making
+you sad. Perhaps you merely laugh at the intoxication your clear air
+has brought about. Well, dearest lady, the ships are striking their
+eight bells for midnight, the gayest cottages are going out, light by
+light, and somewhere in the still harbor I can hear a fisherman
+laboriously sweeping his boat away to the ocean. Away!--that is the
+word for us: I, in this boat southward, and ever away, searching in
+grim fashion for an accounting with Fate; you, in your intrepid
+loveliness, to other lives. And if I return some weeks hence, when I
+have satisfied the importunate business claims, what then? Shall we
+slip the cables and drift quietly out "to the land east of the sun and
+west of the moon"?
+
+
+
+NO. XIII. SANITY.
+
+(_Eastlake refuses Miss Armstrong's last invitation, continues, and
+concludes_.)
+
+Last night was given to me for insight. You were brilliantly your best,
+and set in the meshes of gold and precious stones that the gods willed
+for you. There was not a false note, not an attribute wanting. Over
+your head were mellow, clear, electric lights that showed forth coldly
+your faultless suitability. From the exquisitely fit pearls about your
+neck to the scents of the wine and the flowers, all was as it should
+be. I watched your face warm with multifold impressions, your nostrils
+dilate with sensuousness, appreciation, your pagan head above the
+perfect bosom; about you the languid eyes of your well-fed neighbors.
+
+The dusky recesses of the rooms, heavy with opulent comfort, stretched
+away from our long feast. There you could rest, effectually sheltered
+from the harsh noises of the world. And I rejoiced. Each minute I saw
+more clearly things as they are. I saw you giving the nicest dinners in
+Chicago, and scurrying through Europe, buying a dozen pictures here and
+there, building a great house, or perhaps, tired of Chicago, trying
+your luck in New York; but always pressing on, seizing this
+exasperating life, and tenaciously sucking out the rich enjoyments
+thereof! For the gold has entered your heart.
+
+What splendid folly we played at Sorrento! If you had deceived yourself
+with a sentiment, how long would you have maintained the illusion? When
+would the morning have come for your restless eyes to stare out at the
+world in longing and the unuttered sorrow of regret? Ah, I touch you
+but with words! The cadence of a phrase warms your heart, and you fancy
+your emotion is supreme, inevitable. Nevertheless, you are a practical
+goddess: you can rise beyond the waves toward the glorious ether, but
+at night you sink back. 'Tis alluring, but--eternal?
+
+Few of us can risk being romantic. The penalty is too dreadful. To be
+successful, we must maintain the key of our loveliest enthusiasm
+without stimulants. You need the stimulants. You imagined that you were
+tired, that rest could come in a lover's arms. Better the furs that are
+soft about your neck, for they never grow cold. Perchance the lover
+will come, also, as a prince with his princedom. It will be comfortable
+to have your cake and the frosting, too. If not, take the frosting; go
+glittering on with your pulses full of the joys, until you are old and
+fagged and the stupid world refuses to revolve. Remember my sure word
+that you were meant for dinners, for power and pleasure and excitement.
+Trust no will-o'-the-wisp that would lead you into the stony paths of
+romance.
+
+Some days in the years to come I shall enter at your feasts and watch
+you in admiration and love. (For I shall always love you.) Then will
+stir in your heart a mislaid feeling of some joy untasted. But you will
+smile wisely, and marvel at my exact judgment. You will think of
+another world where words and emotions alone are alive, where it is
+always high tide, and you will be glad that you did not force the
+gates. For life is not always lyric. Farewell.
+
+
+
+NO. XIV. THAT OTHER WORLD.
+
+(_Miss Armstrong writes with a calm heart_.)
+
+I have but a minute before I must go down to meet _him_. Then it will
+be settled. I can hear his voice now and mother's. I must be quick.
+
+So you tested me and found me wanting in "inevitableness." I was too
+much clay, it seems, and "pagan." What a strange word that is! You mean
+I love to enjoy; and, perhaps you are right, that I need my little
+world. Who knows? One cannot read the whole story--even you, dear
+master--until we are dead. We can never tell whether I am only
+frivolous and sensuous, or merely a woman who takes the best substitute
+at hand for life. I do not protest, and I think I never shall. I, too,
+am very sure--_now_. You have pointed out the path and I shall follow
+it to the end.
+
+But one must have other moments, not of regret, but of wonder. Did you
+have too little faith? Am I so cheap and weak? Before you read this it
+will all be over.... Now and then it seems I want only a dress for my
+back, a bit of food, rest, and your smile. But you have judged
+otherwise, and perhaps you are right. At any rate, I will think so.
+Only I know that the hours will come when I shall wish that I might lie
+among those little white gravestones above the beach.
+
+CHICAGO, November, 1893.
+
+
+
+A QUESTION OF ART
+
+I
+
+John Clayton had pretty nearly run the gamut of the fine arts. As a boy
+at college he had taken a dilettante interest in music, and having
+shown some power of sketching the summer girl he had determined to
+become an artist. His numerous friends had hoped such great things for
+him that he had been encouraged to spend the rest of his little
+patrimony in educating himself abroad. It took him nearly two years to
+find out what being an artist meant, and the next three in thinking
+what he wanted to do. In Paris and Munich and Rome, the wealth of the
+possible had dazzled him and confused his aims; he was so skilful and
+adaptable that in turn he had wooed almost all the arts, and had
+accomplished enough trivial things to raise very pretty expectations of
+his future powers. He had enjoyed an uncertain glory among the crowd of
+American amateurs. When his purse had become empty he returned to
+America to realize on his prospects.
+
+On his arrival he had elaborately equipped a studio in Boston, but as
+he found the atmosphere "too provincial" he removed to New York. There
+he was much courted at a certain class of afternoon teas. He was in
+full bloom of the "might do," but he had his suspicions that a fatally
+limited term of years would translate the tense into "might have done."
+He argued, however, that he had not yet found the right _milieu_; he
+was fond of that word--conveniently comprehensive of all things that
+might stimulate his will. He doubted if America ever could furnish him
+a suitable _milieu_ for the expression of his artistic instincts. But
+in the meantime necessity for effort was becoming more urgent; he could
+not live at afternoon teas.
+
+Clayton was related widely to interesting and even influential people.
+One woman, a distant cousin, had taken upon herself his affairs.
+
+"I will give you another chance," she said, in a business-like tone,
+after he had been languidly detailing his condition to her and
+indicating politely that he was coming to extremities. "Visit me this
+summer at Bar Harbor. You shall have the little lodge at the Point for
+a studio, and you can take your meals at the hotel near by. In that way
+you will be independent. Now, there are three ways, any one of which
+will lead you out of your difficulties, and if you don't find one that
+suits you before October, I shall leave you to your fate."
+
+The young man appeared interested.
+
+"You can model something--that's your line, isn't it?"
+
+Clayton nodded meekly. He had resolved to become a sculptor during his
+last six months in Italy.
+
+"And so put you on your feet, professionally." Clayton sighed. "Or you
+can find some rich patron or patroness who will send you over for a
+couple of years more until your _chef d' oeuvre_ makes its appearance."
+Her pupil turned red, and began to murmur, but she kept on unperturbed.
+"Or, best of all, you can marry a girl with some money and then do what
+you like." At this Clayton rose abruptly.
+
+"I haven't come to that," he growled.
+
+"Don't be silly," she pursued. "You are really charming; good
+character; exquisite manners; pleasant habits; success with women. You
+needn't feel flattered, for this is your stock in trade. You are
+decidedly interesting, and lots of those girls who are brought there
+every year to get them in would be glad to make such an exchange. You
+know everybody, and you could give any girl a good standing in Boston
+or New York. Besides, there is your genius, which may develop. That
+will be thrown in to boot; it may bear interest."
+
+Clayton, who had begun by feeling how disagreeable his situation was
+when it exposed him to this kind of hauling over, ended by bursting
+into a cordial laugh at the frank materialism with which his cousin
+presented his case. "Well," he exclaimed, "it's no go to talk to you
+about the claims and ideals of art, Cousin Della, but I will accept
+your offer, if only for the sake of modelling a bust of 'The Energetic
+Matron (American).'"
+
+"Of course, I don't make much of ideals in art and all that," replied
+his cousin, "but I will put this through for you, as Harry says. You
+must promise me only one thing: no flirting with Harriet and Mary.
+Henry has been foolish and lost money, as you know, and I cannot have
+another beggar on my hands!"
+
+
+
+II
+
+By the end of July Clayton had found out two things definitely; he was
+standing in his little workshop, pulling at his mustache and looking
+sometimes at a half-completed sketch, and sometimes at the blue stretch
+of water below the cliff. The conclusions were that he certainly should
+not become interested in Harriet and Mary, and, secondly, that Mount
+Desert made him paint rather than model.
+
+"It's no place," he muttered, "except for color and for a poet. A man
+would have to shut himself up in a cellar to escape those glorious
+hills and the bay, if he wanted to work at that putty." He cast a
+contemptuous glance at a rough bust of his Cousin Della, the only thing
+he had attempted. As a solution of his hopeless problem he picked up a
+pipe and was hunting for some tobacco, preparatory to a stroll up
+Newport, when someone sounded timidly at the show knocker of the front
+door.
+
+"Is that you, Miss Marston?" Clayton remarked, in a disappointed tone,
+as a middle-aged woman entered.
+
+"The servants were all away," she replied, "and Della thought you might
+like some lunch to recuperate you from your labors." This was said a
+little maliciously, as she looked about and found nothing noteworthy
+going on.
+
+"I was just thinking of knocking off for this morning and taking a
+walk. Won't you come? It's such glorious weather and no fog," he added,
+parenthetically, as if in justification of his idleness.
+
+"Why do you happen to ask me?" Miss Marston exclaimed, impetuously.
+"You have hitherto never paid any more attention to my existence than
+if I had been Jane, the woman who usually brings your lunch." She
+gasped at her own boldness. This was not coquettishness, and was
+evidently unusual.
+
+"Why! I really wish you would come," said the young man, helplessly.
+"Then I'll have a chance to know you better."
+
+"Well! I will." She seemed to have taken a desperate step. Miss Jane
+Marston, Della's sister-in-law, had always been the superfluous member
+of her family. Such unenviable tasks as amusing or teaching the younger
+children, sewing, or making up whist sets, had, as is usual with the
+odd members in a family, fallen to her share. All this Miss Marston
+hated in a slow, rebellious manner. From always having just too little
+money to live independently, she had been forced to accept invitations
+for long visits in uninteresting places. As a girl and a young woman,
+she had shown a delicate, retiring beauty that might have been made
+much of, and in spite of gray hair, thirty-five years, and a somewhat
+drawn look, arising from her discontent, one might discover sufficient
+traces of this fading beauty to idealize her. All this summer she had
+watched the wayward young artist with a keen interest in the fresh life
+he brought among her flat surroundings. His buoyancy cheered her
+habitual depression; his eagerness and love of life made her blood flow
+more quickly, out of sympathy; and his intellectual alertness
+bewildered and fascinated her. She was still shy at thirty-five, and
+really very timid and apologetic for her commonplaceness; but at times
+the rebellious bitterness at the bottom of her heart would leap forth
+in a brusque or bold speech. She was still capable of affording
+surprise.
+
+"Won't I spoil the inspiration?" she ventured, after a long silence.
+
+"Bother the inspiration!" groaned Clayton. "I wish I were a blacksmith,
+or a sailor, or something honest. I feel like a hypocrite. I have
+started out at a pace that I can't keep up!"
+
+Miss Marston felt complimented by this apparent confidence. If she had
+had experience in that kind of nature, she would have understood how
+indifferent Clayton was to her personally. He would have made the same
+confession to the birds, if they had happened to produce the same
+irritation in his mind.
+
+"They all say your work is so brilliant," she said, soothingly.
+
+"Thunder!" he commented. "I wish they would not say anything kind and
+pleasant and cheap. At college they praised my verses, and the theatres
+stole my music for the Pudding play, and the girls giggled over my
+sketches. And now, at twenty-six, I don't know whether I want to
+fiddle, or to write an epic, or to model, or to paint. I am a victim of
+every artistic impulse."
+
+"I know what you should do," she said, wisely, when they had reached a
+shady spot and were cooling themselves.
+
+"Smoke?" queried Clayton, quizzically.
+
+"You ought to marry!"
+
+"That's every woman's great solution, great panacea," he replied,
+contemptuously.
+
+"It would steady you and make you work."
+
+"No," he replied, thoughtfully, "not unless she were poor, and in that
+case it would be from the frying-pan into the fire!"
+
+"You should work," she went on, more courageously. "And a wife would
+give you inspiration and sympathy."
+
+"I have had too much of the last already," he sighed. "And it's better
+not to have it all of one sort. After awhile a woman doesn't produce
+pleasant or profitable reactions in my soul. Yes, I know," he added, as
+he noticed her look of wonderment, "I am selfish and supremely
+egotistical. Every artist is; his only lookout, however, should be that
+his surroundings don't become stale. Or, if you prefer to put it more
+humanely, an artist isn't fit to marry; it's criminal for him to marry
+and break a woman's heart."
+
+After this heroic confession he paused to smoke. "Besides, no woman
+whom I ever knew really understands art and the ends which the artist
+is after. She has the temperament, a superficial appreciation and
+interest, but she hasn't the stimulus of insight. She's got the nerves,
+but not the head."
+
+"But you just said that you had had too much sympathy and
+molly-coddling."
+
+"Did I? Well, I was wrong. I need a lot, and I don't care how idiotic.
+It makes me courageous to have even a child approve. I suppose that
+shows how closely we human animals are linked together. We have got to
+have the consent of the world, or at any rate a small part of it, to
+believe ourselves sane. So I need the chorus of patrons, admiring
+friends, kind women, etc., while I play the Protagonist, to tell me
+that I am all right, to go ahead. Do you suppose any one woman would be
+enough? What a great posture for an arm!" His sudden exclamation was
+called out by the attitude that Miss Marston had unconsciously assumed
+in the eagerness of her interest. She had thrown her hand over a ledge
+above them, and was leaning lightly upon it. The loose muslin sleeve
+had fallen back, revealing a pretty, delicately rounded arm, not to be
+suspected from her slight figure. Clayton quickly squirmed a little
+nearer, and touching the arm with an artist's instinct, brought out
+still more the fresh white flesh and the delicate veining.
+
+"Don't move. That would be superb in marble!" Miss Marston blushed
+painfully.
+
+"How strange you are," she murmured, as she rose. "You just said that
+you had given up modelling, or I would let you model my arm in order to
+give you something to do. You should try to stick to something."
+
+"Don't be trite," laughed Clayton, "and don't make me consistent. You
+will keep yourself breathless if you try that!"
+
+"I know what you need," she said, persistently unmindful of his
+admonition. "You need the spur. It doesn't make so much difference
+_what_ you do--you're clever enough."
+
+"'Truth from the mouths of babes----'"
+
+"I am not a babe." She replied to his mocking, literally. "Even if I am
+stupid and commonplace, I may have intuitions like other women."
+
+"Which lead you to think that it's all chance whether Raphael paints or
+plays on the piano. Well, I don't know that you are so absurd. That's
+my theory: an artist is a fund of concentrated, undistributed energy
+that has any number of possible outlets, but selects one. Most of us
+are artists, but we take so many outlets that the hogshead becomes
+empty by leaking. Which shall it be? Shall we toss up a penny?"
+
+"Painting," said Miss Marston, decisively. "You must stick to that."
+
+"How did you arrive at that conclusion--have you observed my work?"
+
+"No! I'll let you know some time, but now you must go to work. Come!"
+She rose, as if to go down to the lodge that instant. Clayton, without
+feeling the absurdity of the comedy, rose docilely and followed her
+down the path for some distance. He seemed completely dominated by the
+sudden enthusiasm and will that chance had flung him.
+
+"There's no such blessed hurry," he remarked at last, when the first
+excitement had evanesced. "The light will be too bad for work by the
+time we reach Bar Harbor. Let's rest here in this dark nook, and talk
+it all over."
+
+Clayton was always abnormally eager to talk over anything. Much of his
+artistic energy had trickled away in elusive snatches of talk. "Come,"
+he exclaimed, enthusiastically, "I have it. I will begin a great
+work--a modern Magdalen or something of that sort. We can use you in
+just that posture, kneeling before a rock with outstretched hands, and
+head turned away. We will make everything of the hands and arms!"
+
+Miss Marston blushed her slow, unaccustomed blush. At first sight it
+pleased her to think that she had become so much a part of this
+interesting young man's plans, but in a moment she laughed calmly at
+the frank desire he expressed to leave out her face, and the
+characteristic indifference he had shown in suggesting negligently such
+a subject.
+
+"All right. I am willing to be of any service. But you will have to
+make use of the early hours. I teach the children at nine."
+
+"Splendid!" he replied, as the vista of a new era of righteousness
+dawned upon him. "We shall have the fresh morning light, and the cool
+and the beauty of the day. And I shall have plenty of time to loaf,
+too."
+
+"No, you mustn't loaf. You will find me a hard task-mistress!"
+
+
+
+III
+
+True to her word, Miss Marston rapped at the door of the studio
+promptly at six the next morning. She smiled fearfully, and finding no
+response, tried stones at the windows above. She kept saying to
+herself, to keep up her courage: "He won't think about me, and I am too
+old to care, anyway." Soon a head appeared, and Clayton called out, in
+a sleepy voice:
+
+"I dreamt it was all a joke; but wait a bit, and we will talk it over."
+
+Miss Marston entered the untidy studio, where the _debris_ of a month's
+fruitless efforts strewed the floor. Bits of clay and carving-tools,
+canvases hurled face downward in disgust and covered with paint-rags,
+lay scattered about. She tip-toed around, carefully raising her skirt,
+and examined everything. Finally, discovering an alcohol-lamp and a
+coffee-pot, she prepared some coffee, and when Clayton appeared--a
+somewhat dishevelled god--he found her hunting for biscuit.
+
+"You can't make an artist of me at six in the morning," he growled.
+
+In sudden inspiration, Miss Marston threw open the upper half of the
+door and admitted a straight pathway of warm sun that led across the
+water just rippling at their feet. The hills behind the steep shore
+were dark with a mysterious green and fresh with a heavy dew, and from
+the nooks in the woods around them thrush was answering thrush. Miss
+Marston gave a sigh of content. The warm, strong sunlight strengthened
+her and filled her wan cheeks, as the sudden interest in the artist's
+life seemed to have awakened once more the vigor of her feelings. She
+clasped her thin hands and accepted both blessings. Clayton also
+revived. At first he leant listlessly against the door-post, but as
+minute by minute he drank in the air and the beauty and the hope, his
+weary frame dilated with incoming sensations. "God, what beauty!" he
+murmured, and he accepted unquestioningly the interference in his life
+brought by this woman just as he accepted the gift of sunshine and
+desire.
+
+"Come to work," said Miss Marston, at last.
+
+"That's no go," he replied, "that subject we selected."
+
+"I dare say you won't do much with it, but it will do as well as any
+other for experiment and practice."
+
+"I see that you want those arms preserved."
+
+The little woman shrank into her shell for a moment: her lazy artist
+could scatter insults as negligently as epigrams. Then she blazed out.
+
+"Mr. Clayton, I didn't come here to be insulted."
+
+Clayton, utterly surprised, opened his sleepy eyes in real alarm.
+
+"Bless you, my dear Miss Marston, I can't insult anybody. I never mean
+anything."
+
+"Perhaps that's the trouble," replied Miss Marston, somewhat mollified.
+But the sitting was hardly a success. Clayton wasted almost all his
+time in improvising an easel and in preparing his brushes. Miss Marston
+had to leave him just as he was ready to throw himself into his work.
+He was discontented, and, instead of improving the good light and the
+long day, he took a pipe and went away into the hills. The next morning
+he felt curiously ashamed when Miss Marston, after examining the rough
+sketch on the easel, said:
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+And this day he painted, but in a fit of gloomy disgust destroyed
+everything. So it went on for a few weeks. Miss Marston was more
+regular than an alarm-clock; sometimes she brought some work, but
+oftener she sat vacantly watching the young man at work. Her only
+standard of accomplishment was quantity. One day, when Clayton had
+industriously employed a rainy afternoon in putting in the drapery for
+the figure, she was so much pleased by the quantity of the work
+accomplished that she praised him gleefully. Clayton, who was, as
+usual, in an ugly mood, cast an utterly contemptuous look at her and
+then turned to his easel.
+
+"You mustn't look at me like that," the woman said, almost frightened.
+
+"Then don't jabber about my pictures."
+
+Her lips quivered, but she was silent. She began to realize her
+position of galley-slave, and welcomed with a dull joy the contempt and
+insults to come.
+
+One morning Clayton was not to be found. He did not appear during that
+week, and at last Miss Marston determined to find him. She made an
+excuse for a journey to Boston, and divining where Clayton could be
+found, she sent him word at a certain favorite club that she wanted to
+see him. He called at her modest hotel, dejected, listless, and
+somewhat shamefaced; he found Miss Marston calm and commonplace as
+usual. But it was the calm of a desperate resolve, won after painful
+hours, that he little recognized. Her instinct to attach herself to
+this strange, unaccountable creature, to make him effective to himself,
+had triumphed over her prejudices. She humbled herself joyfully,
+recognizing a mission.
+
+"Della said that I might presume on your escort home," she remarked
+dryly, trembling for fear that she had exposed herself to some
+contemptuous retort. One great attraction, however, in Clayton was that
+he never expected the conventional. It did not occur to him as
+particularly absurd that this woman, ten years his senior, should hunt
+him up in this fashion. He took such eccentricities as a matter of
+course, and whatever the circumstances or the conversation, found it
+all natural and reasonable. Women did not fear him, but talked
+indiscreetly to him about all things.
+
+"What's the use of keeping up this ridiculous farce about my work?" he
+said, sadly. Then he sought for a conventional phrase. "Your unexpected
+interest and enthusiasm in my poor attempts have been most kind, my
+dear Miss Marston. But you must allow me to go to the dogs in my own
+fashion; that's the inalienable right of every emancipated soul in
+these days." The politeness and mockery of this little epigram stung
+the woman.
+
+"Don't be brutal, as well as good for nothing," she said, bitterly.
+"You're as low as if you took to drink or any other vice, and you know
+it. I can't appreciate your fine ideas, perhaps, but I know you ought
+to do something more than talk. You're terribly ambitious, but you're
+too weak to do anything but talk. I don't care what you think about my
+interference. I can make you work, and I will make you do something.
+You know you need the whip, and if none of your pleasant friends will
+give it to you, I can. Come!" she added, pleadingly.
+
+"Jove!" exclaimed the young man, slowly, "I believe you're an awful
+trump. I will go back."
+
+On their return they scarcely spoke. Miss Marston divined that her
+companion felt ashamed and awkward, and that his momentary enthusiasm
+had evaporated under the influence of a long railroad ride. While they
+were waiting for the steamer at the Mount Desert ferry, she said, as
+negligently as she could, "I have telegraphed for a carriage, but you
+had better walk up by yourself."
+
+He nodded assent. "So you will supply the will for the machine, if I
+will grind out the ideas. But it will never succeed," he added,
+gloomily. "Of course I am greatly obliged and all that, and I will
+stick to it until October for the sake of your interest." In answer she
+smiled with an air of proprietorship.
+
+One effect of this spree upon Clayton was that he took to landscape
+during the hours that he had formerly loafed. He found some quiet bits
+of dell with water, and planted his easel regularly every day.
+Sometimes he sat dreaming or reading, but he felt an unaccustomed
+responsibility if, when his mentor appeared with the children late in
+the afternoon, he hadn't something to show for his day. She never
+attempted to criticise except as to the amount performed, and she soon
+learned enough not to measure this by the area of canvas. Although
+Clayton had abandoned the Magdalen in utter disgust, Miss Marston
+persisted in the early morning sittings. She made herself useful in
+preparing his coffee and in getting his canvas ready. They rarely
+talked. Sometimes Clayton, in a spirit of deviltry, would tease his
+mentor about their peculiar relationship, about herself, or, worse than
+all, would run himself and say very true things about his own
+imperfections. Then, on detecting the tears that would rise in the
+tired, faded eyes of the woman he tortured, he would throw himself into
+his work.
+
+So the summer wore away and the brilliant September came. The
+unsanctified crowds flitted to the mountains or the town, and the
+island and sea resumed the air of free-hearted peace which was theirs
+by right. Clayton worked still more out of doors on marines, attempting
+to grasp the perplexing brilliancy that flooded everything.
+
+"It's no use," he said, sadly, as he packed up his kit one evening in
+the last of September. "I really don't know the first thing about
+color. I couldn't exhibit a single thing I have done this entire
+summer."
+
+"What's the real matter?" asked Miss Marston, with a desperate calm.
+
+"Why, I have fooled about so much that I have lost a lot I learnt over
+there in Paris."
+
+"Why don't you get--get a teacher?"
+
+Clayton laughed ironically. "I am pretty old to start in, especially as
+I have just fifty dollars to my name, and a whole winter before me."
+
+They returned silently. The next morning Miss Marston appeared at the
+usual hour and made the coffee. After Clayton had finished his meagre
+meal, she sat down shyly and looked at him.
+
+"You've never interested yourself much in my plans, but I am going to
+tell you some of them. I'm sick of living about like a neglected cat,
+and I am going to New York to--to keep boarders." Her face grew very
+red. "They will make a fuss, but I am ready to break with them all."
+
+"So you, too, find dependence a burden?" commented Clayton,
+indifferently.
+
+"You haven't taken much pains to know me," she replied. "And if I were
+a man," she went on, with great scorn, "I would die before I would be
+dependent!"
+
+"Talking about insults--but an artist isn't a man," remarked Clayton,
+philosophically smoking his pipe.
+
+"I hate you when you're like that," Miss Marston remarked, with intense
+bitterness.
+
+"Then you must hate me pretty often! But continue with your plans.
+Don't let our little differences in temperament disturb us."
+
+"Well," she continued, "I have written to some friends who spend the
+winters in New York, and out of them I think I shall find enough
+boarders--enough to keep me from starving. And the house has a large
+upper story with a north light." She stopped and peeped at him
+furtively.
+
+"Oh," said Clayton, coolly, "and you're thinking that I would make a
+good tenant."
+
+"Exactly," assented Miss Marston, uncomfortably.
+
+"And who will put up the tin: for you don't suppose that I am low
+enough to live off you?"
+
+"No," replied the woman, quietly. "I shouldn't allow that, though I was
+not quite sure you would be unwilling. But you can borrow two or three
+hundred dollars from your brother, and by the time that's gone you
+ought to be earning something. You could join a class; the house isn't
+far from those studios."
+
+Clayton impulsively seized her arms and looked into her face. She was
+startled and almost frightened.
+
+"I believe," he began, but the words faded away.
+
+"No, don't say it. You believe that I am in love with you, and do this
+to keep you near me. Don't be quite such a brute, for you _are_ a
+brute, a grasping, egotistical, intolerant brute." She smiled slightly.
+"But don't think that I am such a fool as not to know how impossible
+_that_ is."
+
+Clayton still held her in astonishment. "I think I was going to say
+that I was in love with you."
+
+"Oh, no," she laughed, sadly. "I am coffee and milk and bread and
+butter, the 'stuff that dreams are made on.' You want some noble young
+woman--a goddess, to make you over, to make you human. I only save you
+from the poor-house."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+There followed a bitter two years for this strange couple. Clayton
+borrowed a thousand dollars--a more convenient number to remember, he
+said, than three hundred dollars--and induced a prominent artist "who
+happens to know something," to take him into his crowded classes for a
+year. He began with true grit to learn again what he had forgotten and
+some things that he had never known. At the end of the year he felt
+that he could go alone, and the artist agreed, adding, nonchalantly:
+"You may get there; God knows; but you need loads of work."
+
+Domestically, the life was monotonous. Clayton had abandoned his old
+habits, finding it difficult to harmonize his present existence with
+his clubs and his fashionable friends. Besides, he hoarded every cent
+and, with Miss Marston's aid, wrung the utmost of existence out of the
+few dollars he had left. Miss Marston's modest house was patronized by
+elderly single ladies. It was situated on one of those uninteresting
+East Side streets where you can walk a mile without remembering an
+individual stone. The table, in food and conversation, was monotonous.
+In fact, Clayton could not dream of a more inferior _milieu_ for the
+birth of the great artist.
+
+Miss Marston had fitted herself to suit his needs, and in submitting to
+this difficult position felt that she was repaying a loan of a new
+life. He was so curious, so free, so unusual, so fond of ideas, so
+entertaining, even in his grim moods, that he made her stupid life
+over. She could enjoy vicariously by feeling his intense interest in
+all living things. In return, she learnt the exact time to bring him an
+attractive lunch, and just where to place it so that it would catch his
+eye without calling out a scowl of impatience. She made herself at home
+in his premises, so that all friction was removed from the young
+artist's life. He made no acknowledgment of her devotion, but he worked
+grimly, doggedly, with a steadiness that he had never before known.
+Once, early in the first winter, having to return to Boston on some
+slight business, he permitted himself to be entrapped by old friends
+and lazed away a fortnight. On his return Miss Marston noticed with a
+pang that this outing had done him good; that he seemed to have more
+spirit, more vivaciousness, more ideas, and more zest for his work. So,
+in a methodical fashion, she thought out harmless dissipations for him.
+She induced him to take her to the opera, even allowing him to think
+that it was done from pure charity to her. Sunday walks in the
+picturesque nooks of New York--they both shunned the Fifth Avenue
+promenade for different reasons--church music, interesting novels, all
+the "fuel," as Clayton remarked, that she could find she piled into his
+furnace. She made herself acquainted with the peculiar literature that
+seemed to stimulate his imagination, and sometimes she read him asleep
+in the evenings to save his overworked eyes. Her devotion he took
+serenely, as a rule. During the second winter, however, after a slight
+illness brought on by over-application, he seemed to have a thought
+upon his mind that troubled him. One day he impatiently threw down his
+palette and put his hands upon her shoulders.
+
+"Little woman, why do you persist in using up your life on me?"
+
+"I am gambling," she replied, evasively.
+
+"What do you expect to get if you win?"
+
+"A few contemptuous thanks; perhaps free tickets when you exhibit, or a
+line in your biography. But seriously, Jack, don't you know women well
+enough to understand how they enjoy drudging for someone who is
+powerful?"
+
+"But even if I have any ability, which you can't tell, how do you enjoy
+it? You can't appreciate a picture."
+
+She smiled. "Don't bother yourself about me. I get my fun, as you say,
+because you make me feel things I shouldn't otherwise. I suppose that's
+the only pay you artists ever give those who slave for you?"
+
+Such talks were rare. They experienced that physical and mental unity
+in duality which comes to people who live and think and work together
+for a common aim. They had not separated a day since that first visit
+to Boston. The summer had been spent at a cheap boarding-house on Cape
+Ann, in order that Clayton might sketch in company with the artist who
+had been teaching him. Neither thought of conventionality; it was too
+late for that.
+
+As the second year came to an end, the pressure of poverty began to be
+felt. Clayton refused to make any efforts to sell his pictures. He eked
+out his capital and went on. The end of his thousand came; he took to
+feeding himself in his rooms. He sold his clothes, his watch, his
+books, and at last the truck he had accumulated abroad. "More fuel for
+the fire," he said bitterly.
+
+"I will lend you something," remarked Miss Marston.
+
+"No, thanks," he said, shortly, and then added, with characteristic
+brutality, "my body is worth a hundred. Stevens will give that for it,
+which would cover the room-rent. And my brother will have to whistle
+for his cash or take it out in paint and canvas."
+
+She said nothing, for she had a scheme in reserve. She was content
+meantime to see him pinched; it brought out the firmer qualities in the
+man. Her own resources, moreover, were small, for the character of her
+boarders had fallen. Unpleasant rumors had deprived her of the
+unexceptionable set of middle-aged ladies with whom she had started,
+but she had pursued her course unaltered. The reproach of her
+relatives, who considered her disgraced, had been a sweet solace to her
+pride.
+
+The rough struggle had told on them both. He had forgotten his delicate
+habits, his nicety of dress. A cheap suit once in six months was all
+that he could afford. His mind had become stolidly fixed, so that he
+did not notice the gradual change. It was a grim fight! The elements
+were relentless; day by day the pounding was harder, and the end of his
+resistance seemed nearer. Although he was deeply discontented with his
+work, he did not dare to think of ultimate failure, for it unnerved him
+for several days. Miss Marston's quiet assumption, however, that it was
+only a question of months, irritated him.
+
+"God must have put the idea into your head that I am a genius," he
+would mutter fiercely at her. "I never did, nor work of mine. You don't
+know good from bad, anyway, and we may both be crazy." He buried his
+face in his hands, overcome by the awfulness of failure. She put her
+arms about his head.
+
+"Well, we can stand it a little longer, and then----"
+
+"And then?" he asked, grimly.
+
+"Then," she looked at him significantly. They both understood. "Lieber
+Gott," he murmured, "thou hast a soul." And he kissed her gently, as in
+momentary love. She did not resist, but both were indifferent to
+passion, so much their end absorbed them.
+
+At last she insisted upon trying to sell some marines at the art
+stores. She brought him back twenty-five dollars, and he did not
+suspect that she was the patron. He looked at the money wistfully.
+
+"I thought we should have a spree on the first money I earned. But it's
+all fuel now."
+
+Her eyes filled with tears at this sign of humanity. "Next time,
+perhaps."
+
+"So you think that's the beginning of a fortune. I have failed--failed
+if you get ten thousand dollars for every canvas in this shop. You will
+never know why. Perhaps I don't myself." And then he went to work. Some
+weeks later he came to her again. This time she tried to enlist the
+sympathy of the one successful artist Clayton knew, and through his
+influence she succeeded in selling a number of pictures and placed
+others upon sale. She was so happy, so sure that the prophetic instinct
+in her soul was justified, that she told Clayton of her previous fraud.
+He listened carefully; his face twitched, as if his mind were adjusting
+itself to new ideas. First he took twenty-five dollars from the money
+she had just brought him and handed it to her. Then putting his arms
+about her, he looked inquisitively down into her face, only a bit more
+tenderly than he squinted at his canvases.
+
+"Jane!" She allowed him to kiss her once or twice, and then she pushed
+him away, making a pathetic bow.
+
+"Thanks for your sense of gratitude. You're becoming more civilized.
+Only I wish it had been something more than money you had been thankful
+for. Is money the only sacrifice you understand?"
+
+"You can take your dues in taunts if you like. I never pretended to be
+anything but a huge, and possibly productive polypus. I am honest
+enough, anyway, not to fool with lovers' wash. You ought to know how I
+feel toward you--you're the best woman I ever knew."
+
+"Kindest to you, you mean? No, Jack," she continued, tenderly; "you can
+have me, body and soul. I am yours fast enough now, what there is left
+of me. I have given you my reputation, and that sort of thing long
+ago--no, you needn't protest. I know you despise people who talk like
+that, and I don't reproach you. But don't deceive yourself. You feel a
+little moved just now. If I had any charms, like a pretty model, you
+might acquire some kind of attachment for me, but love--you never
+dreamed of it. And," she continued, after a moment, "I begin to think,
+after watching you these two years, never will. So I am safe in saying
+that I am yours to do with what you will. I am fuel. Only, oh, Jack, if
+you break my heart, your last fuel will be gone. You can't do without
+me!"
+
+It seemed very absurd to talk about breaking hearts--a tired, silent
+man; a woman unlovely from sordid surroundings, from age, and from
+care. Clayton pulled back the heavy curtain to admit the morning light,
+for they had talked for hours before coming to the money question. The
+terrible, passionate glare of a summer sun in the city burst in from
+the neighboring housetops.
+
+"Why don't you curse _Him_?" muttered Clayton.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because He gave you a heart to love, and made you lonely, and then
+wasted your love!"
+
+"Jack, the worst hasn't come. It's not all wasted."
+
+
+
+V
+
+Clayton gradually became conscious of a new feeling about his work. He
+was master of his tools, for one thing, and he derived exquisite
+pleasure from the exercise of execution. The surety of his touch, the
+knowledge of the exact effect he was after, made his working hours an
+absorbing pleasure rather than an exasperating penance. And through his
+secluded life, with its singleness of purpose, its absence of the
+social ambitions of his youth, and the complexity of life in the world,
+the restlessness and agitation of his earlier devotion to his art
+disappeared. He was content to forget the expression of himself--that
+youthful longing--in contemplating and enjoying the created matter. In
+other words, the art of creation was attended with less friction. He
+worked unconsciously, and he did not, hen-like, call the attention of
+the entire barnyard to each new-laid egg. He felt also that human,
+comfortable weariness after labor when self sinks out of sight in the
+universal wants of mankind--food and sleep. Perhaps the fact that he
+could now earn enough to relieve him from actual want, that to some
+extent he had wrestled with the world and wrung from it the conditions
+of subsistence, relieved the strain under which he had been laboring.
+He sold his pictures rarely, however, and only when absolutely
+compelled to get money. Miss Marston could not comprehend his feeling
+about the inadequacy of his work, and he gave up attempting to make her
+understand where he failed.
+
+The bond between them had become closer. This one woman filled many
+human relationships for him--mother, sister, friend, lover, and wife in
+one. The boarding-house had come to be an affair of transients and
+young clerks, so that all her time that could be spared from the
+drudgery of housekeeping was spent in the studio. Slowly he became
+amenable to her ever-present devotion, and even, in his way, thoughtful
+for her. And she was almost happy.
+
+The end came in this way. One day Clayton was discovered on the street
+by an intimate college friend. They had run upon each other abruptly,
+and Clayton, finding that escape was decently impossible, submitted
+without much urging to be taken to one of his old clubs for a quiet
+luncheon. As a result he did not return that night, but sent a note to
+Miss Marston saying that he had gone to Lenox with a college chum. That
+note chilled her heart. She felt that this was the beginning of the
+end, and the following week she spent in loneliness in the little
+studio, sleeping upon the neglected lounge. And yet she divined that
+the movement and stimulus of this vacation was what Clayton needed
+most. She feared he was becoming stale, and she knew that in a week, or
+a fortnight, or perhaps a month, he would return and plunge again into
+his work.
+
+He came back. He hardly spoke to her; he seemed absorbed in the
+conception of a new work. And when she brought him his usual luncheon
+she found the door locked, the first time in many months. She sat down
+on the stairs and waited--how long she did not know--waited, staring
+down the dreary hall and at the faded carpet and at herself, faded to
+suit the surroundings. At length she knocked, and Clayton came, only to
+take her lunch and say absently that he was much absorbed by a new
+picture and should not be disturbed. Would she bring his meals? He
+seemed to refuse tacitly an entrance to the studio. So a week passed,
+and then one day Clayton disappeared again, saying that he was going
+into the country for another rest. He went out as he had come in,
+absorbed in some dream or plan of great work. Pride kept her from
+entering his rooms during that week.
+
+One day, however, he came back as before and plunged again into his
+work. This time she found the door ajar and entered noiselessly, as she
+had learned to move. He was hard at work; she admired his swift
+movements that seemed premeditated, the ease with which the picture
+before him was rowing. Surely he had a man's power, now, to execute
+what his spirit conceived! And the mechanical effort gave him evidently
+great pleasure. His complete absorption indicated the most intense
+though unconscious pleasure.
+
+The picture stunned her. She knew that she was totally ignorant of art,
+but she knew that the picture before her was the greatest thing Clayton
+had accomplished. It seemed to breathe power. And she saw without
+surprise that the subject was a young woman. Clayton's form hid the
+face, but she could see the outline of a woman beside a dory, on a
+beach, in the early morning. So it had come.
+
+When she was very close to Clayton, he felt her presence, and they both
+stood still, looking at the picture. It was almost finished--all was
+planned. Miss Marston saw only the woman. She was youthful, just
+between girlhood and womanhood--unconscious, strong, and active as the
+first; with the troubled mystery of the second. The artist had divined
+an exquisite moment in life, and into the immature figure, the face of
+perfect repose, the supple limbs, he had thrown the tender mystery that
+met the morning light. It was the new birth--that ancient, solemn,
+joyous beginning of things in woman and in day.
+
+Clayton approached his picture as if lovingly to hide it. "Isn't it
+immense?" he murmured. "It's come at last. I don't daub any more, but I
+can see, I can paint! God, it's worth the hell I have been through--"
+
+He paused, for he felt that his companion had left him.
+
+"Jane," he said, curiously examining her face. "Jane, what's the
+matter?"
+
+"Don't you know?" she replied, looking steadily at him. He looked first
+at her and then at the picture, and then back again. Suddenly the facts
+in the case seemed to get hold of him. "Jane," he cried, impetuously,
+"it's all yours--you gave me the power, and made me human, too--or a
+little more so than I was. But I am killing you by living in this
+fashion. Why don't you end it?"
+
+She smiled feebly at his earnestness. "There is only one end," she
+whispered, and pointed to his picture. Clayton comprehended, and
+seizing a paint-rag would have ruined it, but the woman caught his hand.
+
+"Don't let us be melodramatic. Would you ruin what we have been living
+for all these years? Don't be silly--you would always regret it."
+
+"It's your life against a little fame."
+
+"No, against your life." They stood, nervelessly eying the picture.
+
+"Oh, Jack, Jack," she cried, at last, "why did God make men like you?
+You take it all, everything that life gives, sunshine and love and hope
+and opportunity. Your roots seem to suck out what you want from the
+whole earth, and you leave the soil exhausted. My time has gone; I know
+it, I know it, and I knew it would go. Now some other life will be
+sacrificed. For you'll break her heart whether she's alive now or
+you're dreaming of someone to come. You'll treat her as you have
+everything. It isn't any fault--you don't understand." The words ended
+with a moan. Clayton sat doggedly looking at his picture. But his heart
+refused to be sad.
+
+LITTLE CRANBERRY, ME.,
+
+August, 1893.
+
+
+
+MARE MARTO
+
+I
+
+The narrow slant of water that could be seen between the posts of the
+felza was rippling with little steely waves. The line of the heavy beak
+cut the opening between the tapering point of the Lido and the misty
+outline of Tre Porti. Inside the white lighthouse tower a burnished
+man-of-war lay at anchor, a sluggish mass like a marble wharf placed
+squarely in the water. From the lee came a slight swell of a
+harbor-boat puffing its devious course to the Lido landing. The
+sea-breeze had touched the locust groves of San Niccolo da Lido, and
+caught up the fragrance of the June blossoms, filling the air with the
+soft scent of a feminine city.
+
+When the scrap of the island Sant' Elena came enough into the angle to
+detach itself from the green mass of the Giardino Pubblico, the prow
+swung softly about, flapping the little waves, and pointed in shore
+where a bridge crossed an inlet into the locust trees.
+
+"You can see the Italian Alps," Miss Barton remarked, pulling aside the
+felza curtains and pointing lazily to the snow masses on the blue north
+horizon. "That purplish other sea is the Trevisan plain, and back of it
+is Castelfranco--Giorgione's Castelfranco--and higher up where the blue
+begins to break into the first steps of the Alps is perched
+Asolo--Browning's Asolo. Oh! It is so sweet! a little hill town! And
+beyond are Bassano and Belluno, and somewhere in the mist before you
+get to those snow-heads is Pieve da Cadore." Her voice dropped
+caressingly over the last vowels. The mere, procession of names was a
+lyric sent across sea to the main.
+
+"They came over them, then, the curious ones," the younger man of the
+two who lounged on cushions underneath the felza remarked, as if to
+prolong the theme. "To the gates of Paradise," he continued, while his
+companion motioned to the gondolier. "And they broke them open, but
+they could never take the swag after all."
+
+He laughed at her puzzled look. He seemed to mock her, and his face
+became young in spite of the bald-looking temples and forehead, and the
+copperish skin that indicated years of artificial heat.
+
+"They got some things," the older man put in, "and they have been
+living off 'em ever since."
+
+"But they never got _it_," persisted his companion, argumentatively.
+"Perhaps they were afraid."
+
+The gondola was gliding under the stone bridge, skilfully following the
+line of the key-stones in the arch. It passed out into a black pool at
+the feet of the Church of San Niccolo. The marble bishop propped up
+over the pediment of the door lay silently above the pool. The grove of
+blossoming locusts dropped white-laden branches over a decaying barca
+chained to the shore.
+
+"What is _'it'_?" the girl asked, slowly turning her face from the
+northern mountains. She seemed to carry a suggestion of abundance, of
+opulence; of beauty made of emphasis. "You," the young man laughed
+back, enigmatically.
+
+"They came again and again, and they longed for you, and would have
+carried you away by force. But their greedy arms snatched only a few
+jewels, a dress or two, and _you_ they left."
+
+The girl caught at a cluster of locust blossoms that floated near.
+
+"It is an allegory."
+
+"I'll leave Niel to untie his riddles." Their companion lit his pipe
+and strode ashore. "I am off for an hour with the Adriatic. Don't
+bother about me if you get tired of waiting."
+
+He disappeared in the direction of the Lido bathing stablimento. The
+two gathered up cushions and rugs, and wandered into the grove. The
+shade was dark and cool. Beyond were the empty acres of a great fort
+grown up in a tangle of long grass like an abandoned pasture. Across
+the pool they could see the mitred bishop sleeping aloft in the sun,
+and near him the lesser folk in their graves beside the convent wall.
+
+"No, I am not all that," Miss Barton said, thoughtfully, her face
+bending, as if some rich, half-open rose were pondering.
+
+"_He_ says that I am a fragment, a bit of detritus that has been washed
+around the world--"
+
+"And finally lodged and crystallized in Italy."
+
+This mystified her again, as if she were compelled to use a medium of
+expression that was unfamiliar.
+
+"Papa was consul-general, you know, first at Madrid, then in the East,
+and lastly merely a consul at Milan." She fell back in relief upon a
+statement of fact.
+
+"Yes, I know."
+
+"And mamma--she was from the South but he married her in Paris. They
+called me the polyglot bebe at the convent." She confided this as
+lazily interesting, like the clouds, or the locusts, or the faint
+chatter of the Adriatic waves around the breakwater of the Lido.
+
+"Nevertheless you are Venice, you are Italy, you are Pagan"--the young
+man iterated almost solemnly, as if a Puritan ancestry demanded this
+reproach. Then he rolled his body half over and straightened himself to
+look at her rigidly. "How did you come about? How could Council Bluffs
+make it?" His voice showed amusement at its own intensity. She shook
+her head.
+
+"I don't know," she said, softly.
+
+"It doesn't seem real. They tell me so, just as they say that the
+marble over there comes from that blue mountain. But why bother about
+it? I am here----"
+
+They drifted on in personal chat until the sunlight came in parallel
+lines between the leaves.
+
+"Where is Caspar?" he said at last, reluctantly. "It's too late to get
+back to the Britannia for dinner." He jumped up as if conscious of a
+fault.
+
+"Oh, we'll dine here. Caspar has found some one at the stablimento and
+has gone off. Ask Bastian--there must be some place where we can get
+enough to eat."
+
+Lawrence hesitated as if not quite sure of the outcome of such
+unpremeditation. But Miss Barton questioned the gondolier. "The Buon
+Pesche--that will be lovely; Bastian will paddle over and order the
+supper. We can walk around."
+
+So Lawrence, as if yielding against his judgment, knelt down and picked
+up her wrap. "Bastian will take care of the rest," she said, gleefully,
+walking on ahead through the long grass of the abandoned fort. "Be a
+bit of detritus, too, and enjoy the few half-hours," she added,
+coaxingly, over her shoulder.
+
+When they were seated at the table under the laurel-trees before the
+Buon Pesche, Lawrence threw himself into the situation, with all the
+robustness of a moral resolve to do the delightful and sinful thing.
+Just why it should be sinful to dine there out-doors in an evening
+light of luminous gold, with the scent of locusts eddying about, and
+the mirage-like show of Venice sleeping softly over beyond--was not
+quite clear. Perhaps because his companion seemed so careless and
+unfamiliar with the monitions of strenuous living; perhaps because her
+face was brilliant and naive--some spontaneous thing of nature,
+unmarked by any lines of consciousness.
+
+Under a neighboring tree a couple were already eating, or quarrelling
+in staccato phrases. Lawrence thought that the man was an artist.
+
+Miss Barton smiled at his seriousness, crossing her hands placidly on
+the table and leaning forward. To her companion she gleamed, as if a
+wood-thing, a hamadryad, had slipped out from the laurel-tree and come
+to dine with him in the dusk.
+
+The woman of the inn brought a flask of thin yellow wine and placed it
+between them. Lawrence mutely decanted it into the glasses.
+
+"Well?" she said, questioningly.
+
+Her companion turned his head away to the solemn, imperial mountains,
+that were preparing with purple and gold for a night's oblivion.
+
+"You are thinking of Nassau Street, New York, of the rooms divided by
+glass partitions, and typewriters and the bundles of documents--bah!
+Chained!" She sipped scornfully a drop or two from the glass.
+
+The man flushed.
+
+"No, not that exactly. I am thinking of the police courts, of the
+squalor, of taking a deposition in a cell with the filthy breathing all
+about. The daily jostle." He threw his head back.
+
+"Don't try it again," she whispered.
+
+"I am only over for six weeks, you know, health--"
+
+"Yes? and there is a girl in Lowell,"--she read his mind impudently.
+
+"Was," he emended, with an uneasy blush.
+
+"Poor, starved one! Here is our fish and spaghetti. To-night is a night
+of feast."
+
+The dusk grew grayer, more powderish; the mountains faded away, and the
+long Lido banks disappeared into lines pointed by the lights of
+Torcello and Murano. Sant' Elena became sea, and the evening wind from
+the Adriatic started in toward the city. A few sailors who had come for
+a glass were sitting under the arbor of the Buon Pesche smoking, with
+an occasional stinging word dropped nonchalantly into the dusk. Their
+hostess was working in the garden patch behind the house. At last the
+artist moved off with his companion through the grove of laurel between
+the great well-heads. Bastian loitered suggestively near.
+
+So they gathered their thoughts and followed the gondolier to the bank.
+Miss Barton lingered by one of the well-heads to peer at the pitchy
+bottom.
+
+"Here they came for fresh water, the last gift of Venice before they
+took sail. And sometimes a man never went farther--it was a safe kind
+of a grave." She laughed unconcernedly.
+
+"Perhaps you came out of the locusts and took a hand in pitching the
+bodies in."
+
+The woman shivered.
+
+"No! no! I only brought them here."
+
+Bastian turned the prow into the current, heading to weather Sant'
+Elena. Lawrence took an oar silently. He liked the rush on the forward
+stroke, the lingering recovery. The evening puffs were cool. They slid
+on past a ghostly full-rigged ship from the north, abandoned at the
+point of Sant' Elena, until the black mass of trees in the Giardino
+Pubblico loomed up. A little off the other quarter the lights from the
+island of San Lazzaro gleamed and faded. It was so very silent on the
+waste of waters!
+
+"Come."
+
+Lawrence looked back at his companion; she was holding her hat idly,
+huddled limply on the cushions.
+
+"Come," she said again, adding mockingly----
+
+"If you are so ferocious, we shall get there too soon."
+
+Lawrence gave up his oar and lay down at her feet. Bastian's sweep
+dipped daintily in and out; the good current was doing his work. They
+drifted silently on near Venice. The halo of light above the squares
+grew brighter. San Giorgio Maggiore appeared suddenly off the quarter.
+
+Miss Barton signed to the gondolier to wait. They were outside the city
+wash; the notes of the band in San Marco came at intervals; the water
+slipped noiselessly around the channels, and fire-fly lights from the
+gondolas twinkled on the Grand Canal. San Giorgio was asleep.
+
+Miss Barton's head was leaning forward, her eyes brooding over the
+black outlines, her ears sensuously absorbing the gurgle of the
+currents. A big market boat from Palestrina winged past them, sliding
+over the oily water. Several silent figures were standing in the stern.
+
+Lawrence looked up; her eyes seemed lit with little candles placed
+behind. Her face gleamed, and one arm slipped from her wrap to the
+cushion by his side.
+
+"Bella Venezia," he murmured.
+
+She smiled, enveloping him, mastering him, taking him as a child with
+her ample powers.
+
+"You will never go back to 'that'!"
+
+Her arm by his side filled out the thought.
+
+"Never," he heard himself say as on a stage, and the dusky lights from
+that radiant face seemed very near.
+
+"Because----"
+
+"Because I am----"
+
+"Sh," she laid her fingers lightly on his forehead. "There is no thine
+and mine."
+
+Bastian dipped his sweep once more. San Giorgio's austere facade went
+out into the black night. One cold ripple of Adriatic wind stirred the
+felza curtains.
+
+
+
+II
+
+The garden on the Giudecca was a long narrow strip on the seaward side,
+blossoming profusely with flowers. A low vine-covered villino slanted
+along the canal; beyond, there was a cow-house where a boy was feeding
+some glossy cows. The garden was full of the morning sun.
+
+Lawrence could see her from the open door, a white figure, loitering in
+a bed of purple tulips. Her dark hair was loosely knotted up; stray
+wisps fell about her ears.
+
+Lawrence closed the door that opened from the canal and walked softly
+through the plats of lilies and tulips. Miss Barton glanced up.
+
+"Ecco! il cavaliere!"
+
+"Didn't you expect me!" he asked, clumsily, revealing one potent reason
+for his appearance.
+
+She smiled for an answer.
+
+"Last night," he began again, explanatorily. Her eyes followed his lips
+and interrupted him.
+
+"What do you think of our place?" She had turned away as if to direct
+his speech into indifferent channels.
+
+He looked about bewildered.
+
+"I can't think anything; I _feel_ it; it's one mass of sense."
+
+"Exactly. We found it, papa and I, one day two years ago when we were
+paddling around the Giudecca. One is so much at home here. At night you
+can see the lights along the Lido, and all the campaniles over there in
+Venice. Then the Redentore sweeps up so grandly--"
+
+Lawrence slapped a bending tulip.
+
+"Yes, the world lies far away."
+
+"And you are afraid to lose sight of it," she turned on him swiftly.
+And she added, before he could find defence, "You have come to redeem
+your words, to tell me that you love me desperately; that you want to
+make an engagement; and some day marry me and go over there to live?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Caspar would do that."
+
+"And Severance has something to offer," Lawrence remarked, bluntly.
+
+"Half a million."
+
+She began to walk slowly across the little grass-plot over to the Lido
+side. Here the oily swell was gurgling in the stone embankment.
+
+She was like a plant flowering in the garden--a plant, part lily, part
+hyacinth.
+
+"And you do not want me," she began, softly, less to him than to
+herself. "I don't fit in. You cannot take me up and put me aside, at
+your will. You would be _mine_."
+
+"Good!"
+
+"It should have been different. We should never have met. They should
+have made you a saint, or a priest, or a pastor for the bleeding world.
+You are a trifle late; half a century ago, you could have given your
+soul to God, quite easily, and not bothered about one woman."
+
+"Yes, I agree, but that was settled by the way the world has ground,"
+the young man sighed. "Why should it bother you, my fooling with the
+forlorn and wretched--the others? Any more than I mind your dealings
+with men?"
+
+They turned about and crossed the dozen paces to the Redentore wall
+where lay a blade of dark shade.
+
+"You could flirt with the multitude? Yes, I should object," she looked
+at him slowly, "I couldn't understand it."
+
+He threw his head back as if to look beyond Venice.
+
+"The maimed in body and spirit," he muttered.
+
+"They call you; I call you; you----"
+
+"I was starved," he pleaded, "I love flesh and glory, too."
+
+She laughed unconcernedly.
+
+"Oh, no. I think not. You are trying to very hard. You think you are
+enjoying your wine and your figs and the sun; but you say a prayer."
+
+Her words taunted him. The vines on the villino swayed in the sun.
+
+"Come, we will go out to the water, and I will master your doubt."
+
+They stood silent, looking at each other, half curiously. At length she
+uttered what was common to their minds.
+
+"Marry the world; it woos you. Love me and leave me; love another and
+leave her. The world, that is your mistress."
+
+"And the world incarnate, that is you. The world, breathing, living,
+loving, the world a passion of delight."
+
+Their hands touched for a moment. Then she said, hastily:
+
+"Too late! There is Caspar. I forgot we were to go to Burano. Will you
+join us?"
+
+A figure in white ducks was coming toward them. His cordial smile
+seemed to include a comment--a mental note of some hint he must give.
+"In stalks the world of time and place," the young man muttered. "No, I
+will not go with you."
+
+He helped her into the waiting gondola. She settled back upon the
+cushions, stretched one languid arm in farewell. He could feel the
+smile with which she swept Caspar Severance, the women at work in the
+rio over their kettles, the sun-bright stretch of waters--all
+impartially.
+
+He lay down in the shade of the Redentore wall. Eight weeks ago there
+had been a dizzy hour, a fainting scene in a crowded court-room, a
+consultation with a doctor, the conventional prescription, a fortnight
+of movement--then _this_. He had cursed that combination of nerve and
+tissue; equally he cursed this. One word to his gondolier and in two
+hours he could be on the train for Milan, Paris, London--then
+indefinite years of turning about in the crowd, of jostling and being
+jostled. But he lay still while the sun crept over him.
+
+She was so unreal, once apart from her presence, like an evanescent
+mirage on the horizon of the mind. He told himself that he had seen
+her, heard her voice; that her eyes had been close to his, that she had
+touched him; that there had been moments when she stood with the
+flowers of the garden.
+
+He shook the drowsy sun from his limbs and went away, closing the door
+softly on the empty garden. Venice, too, was a shadow made between
+water and sun. The boat slipped in across the Zattere, in and out of
+cool water alleys, under church windows and palings of furtive gardens,
+until he came to the plashings of the waves on the marble steps along
+the Grand Canal. Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between
+cool palace facades, the length of its expressive curve. From silence
+and emptiness into silence the gondola pushed. Someone to incarnate
+this empty, vacuous world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and
+eyes, and hair, and a voice that mocked the little goings up and down
+of men.
+
+
+
+III
+
+In the afternoon Lawrence and Severance were dawdling over coffee in
+the Piazza. A strident band sent up voluminous notes that boomed back
+and forth between the palace and the stone arches of the procurate.
+
+"And Burano?" Lawrence suggested, idly. The older man nodded.
+
+"We lunched there--convent--Miss Barton bought lace."
+
+He broke the pause by adding, negligently:
+
+"I think I shall marry her."
+
+Lawrence smoked; he could see the blue water about San Giorgio.
+
+"Marry her," he repeated, vaguely. "You are engaged?"
+
+Severance nodded.
+
+The young man reached out a bony hand. One had but to wait to still the
+problems of life. They strolled across the piazza.
+
+"When do you leave?" Severance inquired.
+
+"To-night," almost slipped from the young man's lips. He was murmuring
+to himself. "I have played with Venice and lost. I must return to my
+busy village."
+
+"I can't tell," he said.
+
+Severance daintily stepped into a gondola. "La Giudecca."
+
+Lawrence turned into the swarming alleys leading to the Rialto.
+
+Streams of Venetians were eddying about the cul-de-sacs and enclosed
+squares, hurrying over the bridges of the canals, turning in and out of
+the calles, or coming to rest at the church doors. Lawrence drifted
+tranquilly on. He had slipped a cable; he was free and ready for the
+open sea. Following at random any turning that offered, he came out
+suddenly upon Verocchio's black horseman against the black sky. The San
+Zanipolo square was deserted; the cavernous San Zanipolo tenanted by
+tombs. Stone figures, seated, a-horse, lying carved in death, started
+out from the silent walls.
+
+"Condottieri," the man muttered, "great robbers who saw and took!
+Briseghella, Mocenigo, Leonardo Loredan, Vittore Capello." He rolled
+the powerful names under his breath. "They are right--Take, enjoy; then
+die." And he saw a hill sleeping sweetly in the mountains, where the
+sun rested on its going down, and a villino with two old trees where
+the court seemed ever silent. In the stealthy, passing hours she came
+and sat in the sun, and _was_. And the two remembered, looking on the
+valley road, that somewhere lay in the past a procession of storms and
+mornings and nights which was called the world, and a procession of
+people which was called life. But she looked at him and smiled.
+
+Outside in the square the transparent dusk of Venice settled down. In
+the broad canal of the Misericordia a faint plash and drip from a
+passing gondola; then, in a moment, as the boat rounded into the rio, a
+resounding "Stai"; again silence and the robber in bronze.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+He waited for a sign from the Giudecca. He told himself that Theodosia
+Barton was not done with him yet, nor he with her.
+
+The tourist-stream, turning northward from Rome and Florence, met in
+Venice a new stream of Germans. The paved passage beside the hotel
+garden was alive with a cosmopolitan picnic party. Lawrence lingered
+and watched; perhaps when the current set strongly to the north again,
+it would carry him along with it.
+
+He had not seen Caspar Severance. Each day of delay made it more
+awkward to meet him, made the confession of disappointment more
+obvious, he reflected. Each day it was easier to put out to the lagoons
+for a still dream, and return when the Adriatic breeze was winding into
+the heated calles. Over there, in the heavy-scented garden on the
+Giudecca, lined against a purplish sea, she was resting; she had given
+free warning for him to go, but she was there----.
+
+"She holds me here in the Mare Morto, where the sea-weeds wind about
+and bind."
+
+And he believed that he should meet her somewhere in the dead lagoon,
+out yonder around the city, in the enveloping gloom of the waters which
+held the pearl of Venice.
+
+So each afternoon his gondola crept out from the Fondamenta del Zattere
+into the ruffling waters of the Giudecca canal, and edged around the
+deserted Campo di Marte. There the gondolier labored in the viscous
+sea-grass.
+
+One day, from far behind, came the plash of an oar in the channel. As
+the narrow hull swept past, he saw a hand gather in the felza curtains,
+and a woman kneel to his side.
+
+"So Bastian takes you always to the dead sea," she tossed aboard.
+
+"Bastian might convoy other forestieri," Lawrence defended.
+
+"Really? here to the laguna morta?" and as his gondola slid into the
+channel, she added:
+
+"I knew you were in Venice; you could not go without--another time."
+
+"What would that bring?" he questioned her with his eyes.
+
+"How should I know?" she answered, evasively. "Come with me out to the
+San Giorgio in Alga. It is the loneliest place in Venice!"
+
+Lawrence sat at her feet. The gondola moved on between the sea-weed
+banks. Away off by Chioggia, filmy gray clouds grew over the horizon.
+
+"Rain."
+
+She shook her head. "For the others, landward. Those opalescent clouds
+streaking the sky are merely the undertone of Venice; they are always
+_here_."
+
+"The note of sadness," he suggested.
+
+"You thought to have ended with _me_."
+
+She rested her head on her hands and looked at him. He preferred to
+have her mention Caspar Severance.
+
+"Whenever I was beyond your eyes, you were not quite sure. You went
+back to your hotel and wondered. The wine was over strong for your
+temperate nerves, and there was so much to do elsewhere!" she mocked
+him.
+
+"After all, I was a fragment. And you judged in your wise new-world
+fashion that fragments were--useless."
+
+Just ahead was a tiny patch of earth, rimmed close to the edge by
+ruined walls. The current running landward drew them about the corner,
+under the madonna's hand, and the gondola came to rest beside the
+lichens and lizards of a crumbling wharf.
+
+"No," she continued, "I shall not let you go so easily." One hand fell
+beside his arm, figuratively indicating her thought.
+
+"And I shall carry you off," he responded, slowly. "It lies between
+you--and all, everything."
+
+The gondolier had gone ashore. Silence had swallowed him up.
+
+"All, myself and the others; effort, variety--for the man who loves
+_you_, there is but one act in life."
+
+"Splendid!" Her lips parted as if savoring his words.
+
+His voice went on, low, strained to plunge his words into her heart.
+
+"You are the woman, the curious thing that God made to stir life. You
+would draw all activities to you, and through you nothing may pass.
+Like the dead sea of grass you encompass the end of desire. You have
+been with me from my manhood, the fata morgana that laughed at my love
+of other creatures. I must meet you, I knew, face to face!"
+
+His lips closed.
+
+"Go on!"
+
+"I have met you," he added, sullenly, "and should I turn away, I should
+not forget you. You will go with me, and I shall hunger for you and
+hate you, and you will make it over, my life, to fill the hollow of
+your hand."
+
+"To fill the hollow of my hand," she repeated softly, as if not
+understanding.
+
+"You will mould it and pat it and caress it, until it fits. You will
+never reason about it, nor doubt, nor talk; the tide flows underneath
+into the laguna morta, and never wholly flows out. God has painted in
+man's mind the possible; and he has painted the delusions, the
+impossible--and that is woman?"
+
+"Impossible," she murmured. "Oh, no, not that!"
+
+Her eyes compelled him; her hand dropped to his hand. Venice sank into
+a gray blot in the lagoon. The water was waveless like a deep night.
+
+"Possible for a moment," he added, dreamily, "possible as the unsung
+lyric. Possible as the light of worlds behind the sun and moon.
+Possible as the mysteries of God that the angels whisper----"
+
+"The only possible," again her eyes flamed; the dark hair gleamed black
+above the white face.
+
+"And that is enough for us forever!"
+
+
+
+V
+
+The heavy door of the Casa Lesca swung in, admitting Lawrence to a damp
+stone-flagged room. At the farther end it opened on a little cortile,
+where gnarled rose-bushes were in bloom. A broken Venus, presiding over
+a dusty fountain, made the centre of the cortile, and there a strapping
+girl from the campagna was busy trimming the stalks of a bunch of
+roses. The signorina had not arrived; Lawrence lounged against the
+gunwale of a gondola, which lay on one side of the court.
+
+A pretentious iron gate led from the cortile to the farm, where the
+running vines stretched from olive-stump to trellis, weaving a mat of
+undulating green. It was so quiet, here in the rear of the palace, that
+one could almost hear the hum of the air swimming over the broad vine
+leaves.
+
+Lawrence, at first alert, then drowsy, reclined in the shade, and
+watched the girl. From time to time she threw him a soft word of
+Venetian. Then, gathering her roses, she shook them in his face and
+tripped up the stairs to the palace above.
+
+He had made the appointment without intention, but he came to fulfil it
+in a tumult of energy.
+
+_She_ must choose and _he_ arrange--for that future which troubled his
+mind. But the heated emptiness of the June afternoon soothed his will.
+He saw that whatever she bade, that he would do. Still here, while he
+was alone, before her presence came to rule, he plotted little things.
+When he was left with himself he wondered about it; no, he did not want
+her, did not want it! His life was over there, beyond her, and she must
+bend to that conception. People, women, anyone, this piece of beauty
+and sense, were merely episodic. The sum was made from all, and greater
+than all.
+
+The door groaned, and he turned to meet her, shivering in the damp
+passage. She gathered a wrap about her shoulders.
+
+"Caspar would not go," she explained, appealingly.
+
+"Which one is to go?" the young man began. She sank down on a bench and
+turned her head wearily to the vineyard. Over the swaying tendrils of
+the vine, a dark line, a blue slab of salt water, made the horizon.
+
+"Should I know?" her face said, mutely.
+
+"He thinks you should," she spoke, calmly. "He has been talking two
+hours about you, your future, your brilliant performances----"
+
+"That detained you!"
+
+"He is plotting to make you a great man. You belong to the world, he
+said, and, the world would have you. They need you to plan and exhort,
+I believe."
+
+"So you come to tell me--"
+
+"Let us go out to the garden." She laid her hand reprovingly on his
+arm. "We can see the pictures later."
+
+She took his arm and directed him down the arched walk between the
+vines, toward the purple sea.
+
+"I did not realize that--that you were a little Ulysses. He warned me!"
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"That you would love and worship at any wayside shrine; that the spirit
+of devotion was not in you."
+
+"And you believed?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"It seemed so. I have thought so. Once a few feet away and you are
+wondering!"
+
+The young man was guiltily silent.
+
+"And I am merely a wayside chapel, good for an idle prayer."
+
+"Make it perpetual."
+
+Her arm was heavy.
+
+"Caspar wants you--away. He will try to arrange it. Perhaps you will
+yield, and I shall lose."
+
+"You mean he will make them recall me."
+
+She said nothing.
+
+"You can end it now." He stopped and raised her arm. They stood for a
+moment, revolving the matter; a gardener came down the path. "You will
+get the message tonight," she said, gloomily. "Go! The message will say
+'come,' and you will obey."
+
+Lawrence turned.
+
+"Shall we see the pictures?"
+
+The peasant girl admitted them to the hall, and opened, here and there,
+a long shutter. The vast hall, in the form of a Latin cross, revealed a
+dusky line of frescoes.
+
+"Veronese," she murmured. Lawrence turned to the open window that
+looked across the water to the piazza. Beneath, beside the quay, a
+green-painted Greek ship was unloading grain. Some panting, half-naked
+men were shovelling the oats.
+
+"We might go," he said; "Caspar is probably waiting for his report. You
+can tell him that he has won."
+
+Suddenly he felt her very near him.
+
+"No, not that way!"
+
+"You are good to--love," she added deliberatively, placing her hands
+lightly on his heart.
+
+"You do not care enough; ah! that is sad, sad. Caspar, or denial, or
+God--nothing would stand if you cared, more than you care for the
+little people and things. See, I can take you now. I can say you are
+mine. I can make you love--as another may again. But love me, now, as
+if no other minute could ever follow."
+
+She sighed the words.
+
+"Here I am, to be loved. Let us settle nothing. Let us have this minute
+for a few kisses."
+
+The hall filled with dusk. The girl came back again. Suddenly a bell
+began ringing.
+
+"Caspar," she said. "Stay here; I will go."
+
+"We will go together."
+
+"No," she waved him back. "You will get the message. Caspar is right.
+You are not for any woman for always."
+
+"Go," he flung out, angrily.
+
+The great doors of the hall had rattled to, leaving him alone half
+will-less. He started and then returned to the balcony over the
+fondamenta. In the half-light he could see her stepping into a waiting
+gondola, and certain words came floating up clearly as if said to
+him----
+
+"To-morrow evening, the Contessa Montelli, at nine." But she seemed to
+be speaking to her companion. The gondola shot out into the broad canal.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The long June day, Lawrence sat with the yellow cablegram before his
+eyes. The message had come, indeed, and the way had been cleared.
+Eleven--the train for Paris! passed; then, two, and now it was dusk
+again.
+
+Had she meant those words for him? So carelessly flung back. That he
+would prove.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The signorina awaits you." The man pointed to the garden, and turned
+back with his smoking lamp up the broad staircase that clung to one
+side of the court. Across the strip of garden lay a bar of moonlight on
+the grass.
+
+She was standing over the open well-head at the farther end where the
+grass grew in rank tufts. The gloomy wall of the palace cast a shadow
+that reached to the well. Just as he entered, a church-clock across the
+rio struck the hour on a cracked bell.
+
+"My friend has gone in--she is afraid of the night air," Miss Barton
+explained. "Perhaps she is afraid of ghosts," she added, as the young
+man stood silent by her side. "An old doge killed his wife and her
+children here, some centuries ago. They say the woman walks. Are you
+afraid?"
+
+"Of only one ghost----"
+
+"Not yet a ghost!" Indeed, her warm, breathing self threw a spirit of
+life into the moonlight and gainsaid his idle words.
+
+"I have come for you," he said, a little peremptorily. "To do it I have
+lost my engagement with life."
+
+"So the message came. You refused, and now you look for a reward. A man
+must be paid!"
+
+"I tried to keep the other engagement and could not!"
+
+"I shall make you forget it, as if it were some silly boyish dream."
+She began to walk over the moonlit grass. "I was waiting for
+that--sacrifice. For if you desire _me_, you must leave the other
+engagements, always."
+
+"I know it."
+
+"I lie in the laguna morta, and the dead are under me, and the living
+are caught in my sea-weed." She laughed.
+
+"Now, we have several long hours of moonlight. Shall we stay here?"
+
+The young man shivered.
+
+"No, the Lady Dogessa might disturb us. Let us go out toward Murano."
+
+"Are you really--alive and mine, not Severance's?" he threw out,
+recklessly.
+
+She stopped and smiled.
+
+"First you tell me that I disturb your plans; then you want to know if
+I am preoccupied. You would like to have me as an 'extra' in the
+subscription."
+
+As they came out on the flags by the gondola, another boat was pushing
+a black prow into the rio from the Misericordia canal. It came up to
+the water-steps where the two stood. Caspar Severance stepped out.
+
+"Caspar!" Miss Barton laughed.
+
+"They told me you were here for dinner," he explained. He was in
+evening clothes, a Roman cloak hanging from his shoulders. He looked,
+standing on the steps below the other two, like an impertinent
+intrusion.
+
+"Lawrence! I thought you were on your way home."
+
+Lawrence shook his head. All three were silent, wondering who would
+dare to open the final theme.
+
+"The Signora Contessa had a headache," Miss Barton began, nonchalantly.
+
+Severance glanced skeptically at the young American by her side.
+
+"So you fetched il dottore americano? Well, Giovanni is waiting to
+carry us home."
+
+Miss Barton stepped forward slowly, as if to enter the last gondola
+whose prow was nuzzling by the steps.
+
+Lawrence took her hand and motioned to his gondola.
+
+"Miss Barton----"
+
+Severance smiled, placidly.
+
+"You will miss the midnight train."
+
+The young man halted a moment, and Miss Barton's arm slipped into his
+fingers.
+
+"Perhaps," he muttered.
+
+"The night will be cool for you," Severance turned to the woman. She
+wavered a moment.
+
+"You will miss more than the midnight train," Severance added to the
+young fellow, in a low voice.
+
+Lawrence knelt beside his gondola. He glanced up into the face of the
+woman above him. "Will you come?" he murmured. She gathered up her
+dress and stepped firmly into the boat. Severance, left alone on the
+fondamenta, watched the two. Then he turned back to his gondola. The
+two boats floated out silently into the Misericordia Canal.
+
+"To the Cimeterio," Miss Barton said. "To the Canale Grande," Severance
+motioned.
+
+The two men raised their hats.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a few moments the man and the woman sat without words, until the
+gondola cleared the Fondamenta Nuova, and they were well out in the sea
+of moonlight. Ahead of them lay the stucco walls of the Cimeterio,
+glowing softly in the white light. Some dark spots were moving out from
+the city mass to their right, heading for the silent island.
+
+"There goes the conclusion," Lawrence nodded to the funeral boats.
+
+"But between us and them lies a space of years--life."
+
+"Who decided?"
+
+"You looked. It was decided."
+
+The city detached itself insensibly from them, lying black behind. A
+light wind came down from Treviso, touching the white waves.
+
+"You are thinking that back there, up the Grand Canal, lie fame and
+accomplishment. You are thinking that now you have your fata
+morgana--nothing else. You are already preparing a grave for her in
+your mind!"
+
+Lawrence took her head in his hands. "Never," he shot out the word.
+"Never--you are mine; I have come all these ocean miles to find you. I
+have come for an accounting with the vision that troubles man." Her
+face drew nearer.
+
+"I am Venice, you said. I am set in the mare morto. I am built on the
+sea-weed. But from me you shall not go. You came over the mountains for
+this."
+
+The man sighed. Some ultimate conception of life seemed to outline
+itself on the whitish walls of the Cimeterio--a question of sex. The
+man would go questioning visions. The woman was held by one.
+
+"Caspar Severance will find his way, and will play your game for you,"
+she went on coaxingly. "But this," her eyes were near him, "_this_ is a
+moment of life. You have chosen. There is no mine and thine."
+
+One by one the campaniles of Venice loomed, dark pillars in the white
+sky. And all around toward Mestre and Treviso and Torcello; to San
+Pietro di Castello and the grim walls of the arsenal, the mare morto
+heaved gently and sighed.
+
+CHICAGO, January, 1897.
+
+
+
+THE PRICE OF ROMANCE
+
+They were paying the price of their romance, and the question was
+whether they would pay it cheerfully. They had been married a couple of
+years, and the first flush of excitement over their passion and the
+stumbling-blocks it had met was fading away. When he, an untried young
+lawyer and delicate dilettante, had married her she was a Miss Benton,
+of St. Louis, "niece of Oliphant, that queer old fellow who made his
+money in the Tobacco Trust," and hence with no end of prospects.
+Edwards had been a pleasant enough fellow, and Oliphant had not
+objected to his loafing away a vacation about the old house at Quogue.
+Marriage with his niece, the one remaining member of his family who
+walked the path that pleased him, was another thing. She had plenty of
+warning. Had he not sent his only son adrift as a beggar because he had
+married a little country cousin? He could make nothing out of Edwards
+except that he was not keen after business--loafed much, smoked much,
+and fooled with music, possibly wrote songs at times.
+
+Yet Miss Benton had not expected that cruel indifference when she
+announced her engagement to the keen old man. For she was fond of him
+and grateful.
+
+"When do you think of marrying?" had been his single comment. She
+guessed the unexpressed complement to that thought, "You can stay here
+until that time. Then good-by."
+
+She found in herself an admirable spirit, and her love added devotion
+and faith in the future, her lover's future. So she tided over the
+months of her engagement, when her uncle's displeasure settled down
+like a fog over the pleasant house. Edwards would run down frequently,
+but Oliphant managed to keep out of his way. It was none of his affair,
+and he let them see plainly this aspect of it. Her spirit rose. She
+could do as other women did, get on without candy and roses, and it
+hurt her to feel that she had expected money from her uncle. She could
+show him that they were above that.
+
+So they were married and went to live in a little flat in Harlem, very
+modest, to fit their income. Oliphant had bade her good-by with the
+courtesy due to a tiresome Sunday visitor. "Oh, you're off, are you?"
+his indifferent tones had said. "Well, good-by; I hope you will have a
+good time." And that was all. Even the colored cook had said more; the
+servants in general looked deplorable. Wealth goes so well with a
+pretty, bright young woman!
+
+Thus it all rested in the way they would accept the bed they had made.
+Success would be ample justification. Their friends watched to see how
+well they would solve the problem they had so jauntily set themselves.
+
+Edwards was by no means a _faineant_--his record at the Columbia Law
+School promised better than that, and he had found a place in a large
+office that might answer for the stepping-stone. As yet he had not
+individualized himself; he was simply charming, especially in correct
+summer costume, luxuriating in indolent conversation. He had the
+well-bred, fine-featured air of so many of the graduates from our
+Eastern colleges. The suspicion of effeminacy which he suggested might
+be unjust, but he certainly had not experienced what Oliphant would
+call "life." He had enough interest in music to dissipate in it.
+Marriage was an excellent settler, though, on a possible income of
+twelve hundred!
+
+The two years had not the expected aspiring march, however; ten-dollar
+cases, even, had not been plenty in Edwards's path, and he suspected
+that he was not highly valued in his office. He had been compelled to
+tutor a boy the second year, and the hot summers made him listless. In
+short, he felt that he had missed his particular round in the ladder.
+He should have studied music, or tried for the newspapers as a musical
+critic. Sunday afternoons he would loll over the piano, picturing the
+other life--that life which is always so alluring! His wife followed
+him heroically into all his moods with that pitiful absorption such
+women give to the men they love. She believed in him tremendously, if
+not as a lawyer, as a man and an artist. Somehow she hadn't been an
+inspiration, and for that she humbly blamed herself. How was it
+accomplished, this inspiration? A loving wife inspired the ordinary
+man. Why not an artist?
+
+They got into the habit of planning their life all differently--so that
+it might not be limited and futile. _If_ they had a few thousand
+dollars! That was a bad sign, and she knew it, and struggled against
+it. _If_ she could only do something to keep the pot boiling while he
+worked at his music for fame and success! But she could reduce
+expenses; so the one servant went, and the house-bills grew tinier and
+tinier. However, they didn't "make connections," and--something was
+wrong--she wondered what.
+
+As the second summer came in they used to stroll out of their stuffy
+street of an evening, up St. Nicholas Avenue, to the Park, or to the
+Riverside Drive. There they would sit speechless, she in a faded blue
+serge skirt with a crisp, washed-out shirtwaist, and an old sailor
+hat--dark and pretty, in spite of her troubled face; he in a ready-made
+black serge suit, yet very much the gentleman--pale and listless. Their
+eyes would seek out any steamer in the river below, or anything else
+that reminded them of other conditions. He would hum a bit from an
+opera. They needed no words; their faces were evident, though mute,
+indications of the tragedy. Then they would return at bed-time into the
+sultry streets, where from the open windows of the flats came the
+hammered music of the city. Such discordant efforts for harmony! Her
+heart would fill over him, yearning like a mother to cherish him in all
+the pleasant ways of life, but impotent, impotent!
+
+She never suggested greater effort. Conditions were hard, she said over
+and over; if there were only a little money to give him a start in
+another direction. She admired his pride in never referring to old
+Oliphant. Her uncle was often in her mind, but she felt that even if
+she could bring herself to petition him, her husband would indignantly
+refuse to consider the matter.
+
+Still, she thought about it, and especially this summer, for she knew
+he was then at Quogue. Moreover, she expected her first child. That
+worried her daily; she saw how hopeless another complication would make
+their fate. She cried over it at night when the room was too hot to
+sleep. And then she reproached herself; God would punish her for not
+wanting her baby.
+
+One day she had gone down town to get some materials for the
+preparations she must make. She liked to shop, for sometimes she met
+old friends; this time in a large shop she happened upon a woman she
+had known at Quogue, the efficient wife of a successful minister in
+Brooklyn. This Mrs. Leicester invited her to lunch at the cafe at the
+top of the building, and she had yielded, after a little urging, with
+real relief. They sat down at a table near the window--it was so high
+up there was not much noise--and the streets suddenly seemed
+interesting to Mrs. Edwards. The quiet table, the pleasant lunch, and
+the energetic Mrs. Leicester were all refreshing.
+
+"And how is your husband?" Mrs. Leicester inquired, keenly. As a
+minister's wife she was compelled to interest herself in sentimental
+complications that inwardly bored her. It was a part of her
+professional duties. She had taken in this situation at once--she had
+seen that kind of thing before; it made her impatient. But she liked
+the pretty little woman before her, and was sorry she hadn't managed
+better.
+
+"Pretty well," Mrs. Edwards replied, consciously. "The heat drags one
+down so!"
+
+Mrs. Leicester sent another quick glance across the table. "You haven't
+been to Quogue much of late, have you? You know how poorly your uncle
+is."
+
+"No! _You_ must know that Uncle James doesn't see us."
+
+"Well," Mrs. Leicester went on, hastily, "he's been quite ill and
+feeble, and they say he's growing queer. He never goes away now, and
+sees nobody. Most of the servants have gone. I don't believe he will
+last long."
+
+Then her worldliness struggled with her conventional position, and she
+relapsed into innuendo. "He ought to have someone look after him, to
+see him die decently, for he can't live beyond the autumn, and the only
+person who can get in is that fat, greasy Dr. Shapless, who is after
+his money for the Methodist missions. He goes down every week. I wonder
+where Mr. Oliphant's son can be?"
+
+Mrs. Edwards took in every word avidly while she ate. But she let the
+conversation drift off to Quogue, their acquaintances, and the
+difficulty of shopping in the summer. "Well, I must be going to get the
+train," exclaimed Mrs. Leicester at last. With a sigh the young wife
+rose, looked regretfully down at the remains of their liberal luncheon,
+and then walked silently to the elevator. They didn't mention Oliphant
+again, but there was something understood between them. Mrs. Leicester
+hailed a cab; just as she gathered her parcels to make a dive, she
+seemed illuminated with an idea. "Why don't you come down some
+Sunday--visit us? Mr. Leicester would be delighted."
+
+Mrs. Edwards was taken unawares, but her instincts came to her rescue.
+
+"Why, we don't go anywhere; it's awfully kind, and I should be
+delighted; I am afraid Mr. Edwards can't."
+
+"Well," sighed Mrs. Leicester, smiling back, unappeased, "come if you
+can; come alone." The cab drove off, and the young wife felt her cheeks
+burn.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Edwardses had never talked over Oliphant or his money explicitly.
+They shrank from it; it would be a confession of defeat. There was
+something abhorrently vulgar in thus lowering the pitch of their life.
+They had come pretty near it often this last summer. But each feared
+what the other might think. Edwards especially was nervous about the
+impression it might make on his wife, if he should discuss the matter.
+Mrs. Leicester's talk, however, had opened possibilities for the
+imagination. So little of Uncle James's money, she mused, would make
+them ideally happy--would put her husband on the road to fame. She had
+almost made up her mind on a course of action, and she debated the
+propriety of undertaking the affair without her husband's knowledge.
+She knew that his pride would revolt from her plan. She could pocket
+her own pride, but she was tender of his conscience, of his comfort, of
+his sensibilities. It would be best to act at once by herself--perhaps
+she would fail, anyway--and to shield him from the disagreeable and
+useless knowledge and complicity. She couldn't resist throwing out some
+feelers, however, at supper that night. He had come in tired and soiled
+after a day's tramp collecting bills that wouldn't collect this
+droughty season. She had fussed over him and coaxed a smile out, and
+now they were at their simple tea.
+
+She recounted the day's events as indifferently as possible, but her
+face trembled as she described the luncheon, the talk, the news of her
+uncle, and at last Mrs. Leicester's invitation. Edwards had started at
+the first mention of Quogue.
+
+"It's been in his mind," she thought, half-relieved, and his nervous
+movements of assumed indifference made it easier for her to go on.
+
+"It was kind of her, wasn't it?" she ended.
+
+"Yes," Edwards replied, impressively. "Of course you declined."
+
+"Oh, yes; but she seemed to expect us all the same." Edwards frowned,
+but he kept an expectant silence. So she remarked, tentatively:
+
+"It would be so pleasant to see dear old Quogue again." Her hypocrisy
+made her flush. Edwards rose abruptly from the table and wandered about
+the room. At length he said, in measured tones, his face averted from
+her:
+
+"_Of course_, under the circumstances, we cannot visit Quogue while
+your uncle lives--unless he should send for us." Thus he had put
+himself plainly on record. His wife suddenly saw the folly and meanness
+of her little plans.
+
+It was hardly a disappointment; her mind felt suddenly relieved from an
+unpleasant responsibility. She went to her husband, who was nervously
+playing at the piano, and kissed him, almost reverently. It had been a
+temptation from which he had saved her. They talked that evening a good
+deal, planning what they would do if they could get over to Europe for
+a year, calculating how cheaply they could go. It was an old subject.
+Sometimes it kept off the blues; sometimes it indicated how blue they
+were. Mrs. Edwards forgot the disturbance of the day until she was
+lying wide awake in her hot bed. Then the old longings came in once
+more; she saw the commonplace present growing each month more dreary;
+her husband drudging away, with his hopes sinking. Suddenly he spoke:
+
+"What made Mrs. Leicester ask us, do you suppose?" So he was thinking
+of it again.
+
+"I don't know!" she replied, vaguely. Soon his voice came again:
+
+"You understand, Nell, that I distinctly disapprove of our making any
+effort _that way_." She didn't think that her husband was a hypocrite.
+She did not generalize when she felt deeply. But she knew that her
+husband didn't want the responsibility of making any effort. Somehow
+she felt that he would be glad if she should make the effort and take
+the responsibility on her own shoulders.
+
+Why had he lugged it into plain light again if he hadn't expected her
+to do something? How could she accomplish it without making it
+unpleasant for him? Before daylight she had it planned, and she turned
+once and kissed her husband, protectingly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That August morning, as she walked up the dusty road, fringed with
+blossoming golden-rod, toward the little cottage of the Leicesters, she
+was content, in spite of her tumultuous mind. It was all so heavenly
+quiet! the thin, drooping elms, with their pendent vines, like the
+waterfalls of a maiden lady; the dusty snarls of blackberry bushes; the
+midsummer contented repose of the air, and that distantly murmuring
+sea--it was all as she remembered it in her childhood. A gap of
+disturbed years closed up, and peace once more! The old man slowly
+dying up beyond in that deserted, gambrel-roofed house would Forget and
+forgive.
+
+Mrs. Leicester received her effusively, anxious now not to meddle
+dangerously in what promised to be a ticklish business. Mrs. Edwards
+must stay as long as she would. The Sundays were especially lonely, for
+Mr. Leicester did not think she should bear the heat of the city so
+soon, and left her alone when he returned to Brooklyn for his Sunday
+sermon. Of course, stay as long as Mr. Edwards could spare her--a
+month; if possible.
+
+At the mention of Mr. Edwards the young wife had a twinge of remorse
+for the manner in which she had evaded him--her first deceit for his
+sake. She had talked vaguely about visiting a friend at Moriches, and
+her husband had fallen in with the idea. New York was like a finely
+divided furnace, radiating heat from every tube-like street. So she was
+to go for a week or ten days. Perhaps the matter would arrange itself
+before that time was up; if not, she would write him what she had done.
+But ten days seemed so long that she put uncomfortable thoughts out of
+her head.
+
+Mrs. Leicester showed her to her room, a pretty little box, into which
+the woodbine peeped and nodded, and where from one window she could get
+a glimpse of the green marshes, with the sea beyond. After chatting
+awhile, her hostess went out, protesting that her guest must be too
+tired to come down. Mrs. Edwards gladly accepted the excuse, ate the
+luncheon the maid brought, in two bites, and then prepared to sally
+forth.
+
+She knew the path between the lush meadow-grass so well! Soon she was
+at the entrance to the "Oliphant place." It was more run down than two
+years ago; the lower rooms were shut up tight in massive green blinds
+that reached to the warped boards of the veranda. It looked old,
+neglected, sad, and weary; and she felt almost justified in her
+mission. She could bring comfort and light to the dying man.
+
+In a few minutes she was smothering the hysterical enthusiasm of her
+old friend, Dinah. It was as she had expected: Oliphant had grown more
+suspicious and difficult for the last two years, and had refused to see
+a doctor, or, in fact, anyone but the Rev. Dr. Shapless and a country
+lawyer whom he used when absolutely necessary. He hadn't left his room
+for a month; Dinah had carried him the little he had seen fit to eat.
+She was evidently relieved to see her old mistress once more at hand.
+She asked no questions, and Mrs. Edwards knew that she would obey her
+absolutely.
+
+They were sitting in Oliphant's office, a small closet off the more
+pretentious library, and Mrs. Edwards could see the disorder into which
+the old man's papers had fallen. The confusion preceding death had
+already set in.
+
+After laying aside her hat, she went up, unannounced, to her uncle's
+room, determined not to give him an opportunity to dismiss her out of
+hand. He was lying with his eyes closed, so she busied herself in
+putting the room to rights, in order to quiet her nerves. The air was
+heavily languorous, and soon in the quiet country afternoon her
+self-consciousness fell asleep, and she went dreaming over the
+irresponsible past, the quiet summers, and the strange, stern old man.
+Suddenly she knew that he was awake and watching her closely. She
+started, but, as he said nothing, she went on with her dusting, her
+hand shaking.
+
+He made no comment while she brought him his supper and arranged the
+bed. Evidently he would accept her services. Her spirit leapt up with
+the joy of success. That was the first step. She deemed it best to send
+for her meagre satchel, and to take possession of her old room. In that
+way she could be more completely mistress of the situation and of him.
+She had had no very definite ideas of action before that afternoon; her
+one desire had been to be on the field of battle, to see what could be
+done, perhaps to use a few tears to soften the implacable heart. But
+now her field opened out. She must keep the old man to herself, within
+her own care--not that she knew specifically what good that would do,
+but it was the tangible nine points of the law.
+
+The next morning Oliphant showed more life, and while she was helping
+him into his dressing-gown, he vouchsafed a few grunts, followed by a
+piercing inquiry:
+
+"Is _he_ dead yet?"
+
+The young wife flushed with indignant protest.
+
+"Broke, perhaps?"
+
+"Well, we haven't starved yet." But she was cowed by his cynical
+examination. He relapsed into silence; his old, bristly face assumed a
+sardonic peace whenever his eyes fell upon her. She speculated about
+that wicked beatitude; it made her uncomfortable. He was still,
+however--never a word from morning till night.
+
+The routine of little duties about the sickroom she performed
+punctiliously. In that way she thought to put her conscience to rights,
+to regard herself in the kind role of ministering angel. That illusion
+was hard to attain in the presence of the sardonic comment the old man
+seemed to add. After all, it was a vulgar grab after the candied fruits
+of this life.
+
+She had felt it necessary to explain her continued absence to her
+husband. Mrs. Leicester, who did not appear to regard her actions as
+unexpected, had undertaken that delicate business. Evidently, she had
+handled it tactfully, for Mrs. Edwards soon received a hurried note. He
+felt that she was performing her most obvious duty; he could not but be
+pleased that the breach caused by him had been thus tardily healed. As
+long as her uncle continued in his present extremity, she must remain.
+He would run down to the Leicesters over Sundays, etc. Mrs. Edwards was
+relieved; it was nice of him--more than that, delicate--not to be
+stuffy over her action.
+
+The uppermost question these days of monotonous speculation was how
+long would this ebb-tide of a tenacious life flow. She took a guilty
+interest in her uncle's condition, and yet she more than half wished
+him to live. Sometimes he would rally. Something unfulfilled troubled
+his mind, and once he even crawled downstairs. She found him shakily
+puttering over the papers in his huge davenport. He asked her to make a
+fire in the grate, and then, gathering up an armful of papers, he knelt
+down on the brick hearth, but suddenly drew back. His deep eyes gleamed
+hatefully at her. Holding out several stiff papers, he motioned to her
+to burn them. Usually she would have obeyed docilely enough, but this
+deviltry of merriment she resented. While she delayed, standing erect
+before the smouldering sticks, she noticed that a look of terror crept
+across the sick face. A spasm shook him, and he fainted. After that his
+weakness kept him in bed. She wondered what he had been so anxious to
+burn.
+
+From this time her thoughts grew more specific. Just how should she
+attain her ends? Had he made a will? Could he not now do something for
+them, or would it be safer to bide their time? Indeed, for a few
+moments she resolved to decide all by one straightforward prayer. She
+began, and the old man seemed so contentedly prepared for the scene
+that she remained dumb.
+
+In this extremity of doubt she longed to get aid from her husband. Yet
+under the circumstances she dared to admit so little. One Saturday
+afternoon he called at the house; she was compelled to share some of
+her perplexities.
+
+"He seems so very feeble," she remarked. They were sitting on the
+veranda some distance from Oliphant's room, yet their conversation was
+furtive. "Perhaps he should see a doctor or a minister."
+
+"No, I don't think so," Edwards replied, assuringly. "You see, he
+doesn't believe in either, and such things should be left to the person
+himself, as long as he's in his right mind."
+
+"And a lawyer?" Mrs. Edwards continued, probingly.
+
+"Has he asked for one?"
+
+"No, but he seems to find it hard to talk."
+
+"I guess it's best not to meddle. Who's that?"
+
+A little, fat man in baggy black trousers and a seersucker coat was
+panting up the gentle hill to the gate. He had a puggy nose and a
+heavy, thinly bearded face incased about the eyes in broad steel
+spectacles.
+
+"That must be Dr. Shapless," she said, in a flutter.
+
+"What of it?" Edwards replied.
+
+"He mustn't come in," she cried, with sudden energy. "You must see him,
+and send him away! He wants to see Uncle Oliphant. Tell him he's too
+sick--to come another day." Edwards went down the path to meet him.
+Through the window she could hear a low conversation, and then crunched
+gravel. Meantime Oliphant seemed restlessly alert, expectant of
+something, and with suspicious eyes intent on her.
+
+Her heart thumped with relief when the gate clicked. Edwards had been
+effective that time. Oliphant was trying to say something, but the hot
+August day had been too much for him--it all ended in a mumble. Then
+she pulled in the blinds, settled the pillows nervously, and left the
+room in sheer fright.
+
+The fight had begun--and grimly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I wonder what the old cove wanted?" Edwards said the next day; "he was
+dead set on seeing your uncle; said he had an engagement with him, and
+looked me up and down. I stood him off, but he'll be down again."
+
+"Don't you know about that new fund the Methodists are raising? Uncle
+Oliphant has always helped the Methodists, and I suppose Dr. Shapless
+wanted to see him about some contributions." Edwards asked no more
+questions, and, in fact, got back to town on a pretext of business that
+afternoon. He was clearly of no use in Quogue. His wife sent for a
+physician that week. It was tardy justice to propriety, but it was safe
+then, for Oliphant had given up all attempts to talk.
+
+The doctor came, looked at the old man, and uttered a few remarks. He
+would come again. Mrs. Edwards did not need to be told that the end was
+near. The question was, how soon?
+
+That week had another scare. Somehow old Slocum, the local lawyer
+Oliphant used, had been summoned, and one morning she ran across him in
+the hall. She knew the man well of old. He was surprised and pleased to
+see her, and it was not difficult to get him out of the house without
+arousing his suspicions. But he would talk so boisterously; she felt
+her uncle's eyes aflame in anger.
+
+"Be sure and send for me when he rallies, quick," Slocum whispered
+loudly in the hall. "Perhaps we can do a little something for some
+folks." And with a wink he went out.
+
+Had she done the clever thing, after all, in shooing old Slocum out?
+Her mind went over the possibilities in tense anxiety. If there were no
+will, James, Jr., would get the whole, she thought. If there was a will
+already in the house, in that old davenport, what then? Would Shapless
+get the money? She grew keen in speculation. To leave her in the lurch,
+to give it all to that greasy Shapless, would be the most natural trick
+in the world for an incisive old fellow like Oliphant.
+
+It was too much! She cried a little, and she began to hate the helpless
+man upstairs. It occurred to her to poke about in the papers in the
+adjoining room. She must do it at once, for she expected Edwards every
+moment.
+
+First she ran upstairs to see if her uncle was all right. As soon as
+she entered, he glared at her bitterly and would have spoken. She noted
+the effort and failure, elated. He could not betray her now, unless he
+rallied wonderfully. So leaving the door ajar, she walked firmly
+downstairs. Now she could satisfy her desire.
+
+If the money were _all_ left to Shapless? She might secure the will,
+and bargain with the old parasite for a few thousands of dollars. Her
+mind was full of wild schemes. If she only knew a little more about
+affairs! She had heard of wills, and read many novels that turned upon
+wills lost or stolen. They had always seemed to her improbable, mere
+novels. Necessity was stranger than fiction.
+
+It did not take long to find the very articles she was after; evidently
+Oliphant had been overhauling them on that last excursion from his
+room. The package lay where he had dropped it when he fainted. There
+were two documents. She unfolded them on the top of the mussy desk.
+They were hard reading in all their legal dress, and her head was
+filled with fears lest her husband should walk in. She could make out,
+however, that Oliphant was much richer than she had ever vaguely
+supposed, and that since her departure he had relented toward his son.
+For by the first will in date she was the principal heir, a lot of
+queer charities coming in besides. In the second, James, Jr., received
+something. Her name did not appear. Several clauses had been added from
+time to time, each one giving more money and lands to the Methodists.
+Probably Shapless was after another codicil when he called.
+
+It had taken her into the twilight to gain even a meagre idea of all
+this. She was preparing to fold the documents up in their common
+wrapper, when she felt the door open behind her. All she could see in
+the terror of the moment was the gaunt white arm of her uncle, and the
+two angry eyes in the shaking head. She shrieked, from pure
+nervousness, and at her cry the old man fell in a heap.
+
+The accident steeled her nerves. Dinah came in in a panic, and as they
+were lifting the bony frame from the floor Edwards arrived. With his
+assistance they got the sick man to bed.
+
+That was clearly the last gasp. Yet Mrs. Edwards shook in dread every
+time she entered the room. The look seemed conscious still, intensified
+malignity and despair creeping in. She was afraid and guilty and
+unstrung. Perhaps, with some sudden revival of his forces, he would
+kill her. He was lying there, too still for defeat. His life had been
+an expression of hates; the last one might be dreadful.
+
+Yet she stood to her post in the sick-room, afraid, as she knew, to
+trust herself with her husband. Her mind was soiled with seething
+thoughts, and, in contrast, his seemed so fresh and pure! If she could
+keep him unsuspicious of her, all would be well in the end. But the
+task she had set herself for him was hard, so hard!
+
+That night when all was still she crept downstairs and groped about in
+the davenport for the papers. They had been lying there unopened where
+they had fallen earlier in the evening. She struck a match, caught up
+the fresher document, and hugged it to her as she toiled upstairs. When
+she had tucked it away in her satchel the end seemed near. They must
+wait now.
+
+She put her husband out of her mind. Outside, the warm summer days died
+away over the sea, one by one, and the grass beyond the gates grew
+heavier with dust. Life was tense in its monotony.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That had happened on a Saturday; Monday Dr. Shapless came again, his
+shoes dusty from his long walk from the station. He looked oiled as
+ever, but more determined. Mrs. Edwards daringly permitted him to see
+the dying man--he had been lying in a stupor--for she was afraid that
+the reverend doctor's loud tones in the hall might exasperate Oliphant
+to some wild act. Dr. Shapless shut her from the room when he went in,
+but he did not stay long. A restless despair had settled down on her
+uncle's face, there to remain for the last few hours.
+
+Her heart sank; she longed to cry out to the poor old man on the bed
+that _she_ did not want his money. She remained with him all night, yet
+she did not dare to approach his bed. She would disturb him.
+
+He died the next afternoon, and at the last he looked out on the world
+and at her with his final note of intelligence. It was pathetic, a
+suggestion of past tenderness defeated, and of defeat in hate, too. She
+shuddered as she closed his sad eyes; it was awful to meddle with a
+man's last purposes.
+
+The funeral was almost surreptitious; old Dinah, the Leicesters, and
+the Edwardses occupied the one carriage that followed him to the
+graveyard across the village. They met a hay-cart or two on their way,
+but no curious neighbors. Old Oliphant's death aroused no interest in
+this village, ridden with summer strangers.
+
+The day was impersonally suave and tender, with its gentle haze and
+autumn premonitions. Mr. Leicester said a few equivocal words, while
+Mrs. Edwards gazed helplessly into the grave. The others fell back
+behind the minister. Between her and her uncle down there something
+remained unexplained, and her heart ached.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They spent that night at the Leicesters', for Mrs. Edwards wearily
+refused to return to the Oliphant place. Edwards carried the keys over
+to Slocum, and told him to take the necessary steps toward settling the
+old man's affairs. The next day they returned to the little flat in
+Harlem. The Leicesters found their presence awkward, now that there was
+nothing to do, and Mrs. Edwards was craving to be alone with her
+husband, to shut out the past month from their lives as soon as
+possible.
+
+These September days, while they both waited in secret anxiety, she
+clung to him as she had never before. He was pure, the ideal she had
+voluntarily given up, given up for his sake in order that he might have
+complete perfection. His delicate sensitiveness kept him from referring
+to that painful month, or to possible expectations. She worshipped him
+the more, and was thankful for his complete ignorance. Their common
+life could go on untainted and noble.
+
+Yet Edwards betrayed his nervous anxiety. His eagerness for the mail
+every morning, his early return from business, indicated his troubled
+mind.
+
+The news came at breakfast-time. Mrs. Edwards handed Slocum's letter
+across the table and waited, her face wanly eager. The letter was long;
+it took some half-dozen large letter-sheets for the country lawyer to
+tell his news, but in the end it came. He had found the will and was
+happy to say that Mrs. Edwards was a large, a very large, beneficiary.
+Edwards read these closing sentences aloud. He threw down the letter
+and tried to take her in his arms. But she tearfully pushed him away,
+and then, repenting, clasped his knees.
+
+"Oh, Will! it's so much, so very much," she almost sobbed.
+
+Edwards looked as if that were not an irremediable fault in their good
+luck. He said nothing. Already he was planning their future movements.
+Under the circumstances neither cared to discuss their happiness, and
+so they got little fun from the first bloom.
+
+In spite of Mrs. Edwards's delicate health and her expected confinement
+they decided to go abroad. She was feverishly anxious for him to begin
+his real work at once, to prove himself; and it might be easier to
+forget her one vicious month when the Atlantic had been crossed. They
+put their affairs to rights hurriedly, and early in November sailed for
+France.
+
+The Leicesters were at the dock to bid them God-speed and to chirrup
+over their good fortune.
+
+"It's all like a good, old-fashioned story," beamed Mrs. Leicester,
+content with romance for once, now that it had arranged itself so
+decorously.
+
+"Very satisfactory; quite right," the clergyman added. "We'll see you
+soon in Paris. We're thinking of a gay vacation, and will let you know."
+
+Edwards looked fatuous; his wife had an orderly smile. She was glad
+when Sandy Hook sank into the mist. She had only herself to avoid now.
+
+They took some pleasant apartments just off the Rue de Rivoli, and then
+their life subsided into the complacent commonplace of possession. She
+was outwardly content to enjoy with her husband, to go to the
+galleries, the opera, to try the restaurants, and to drive.
+
+Yet her life went into one idea, a very fixed idea, such as often takes
+hold of women in her condition. She was eager to see him at work. If he
+accomplished something--even content!--she would feel justified and
+perhaps happy. As to the child, the idea grew strange to her. Why
+should she have a third in the problem? For she saw that the child must
+take its part in her act, must grow up and share their life and inherit
+the Oliphant money. In brief, she feared the yet unborn stranger, to
+whom she would be responsible in this queer way. And the child could
+not repair the wrong as could her husband. Certainly the child was an
+alien.
+
+She tried to be tender of her husband in his boyish glee and loafing.
+She could understand that he needed to accustom himself to his new
+freedom, to have his vacation first. She held herself in, tensely,
+refraining from criticism lest she might mar his joy. But she counted
+the days, and when her child had come, she said to herself, _then_ he
+must work.
+
+This morbid life was very different from what she had fancied the rich
+future would be, as she looked into the grave, the end of her struggle,
+that September afternoon. But she had grown to demand so much more from
+_him_; she had grown so grave! His bright, boyish face, the gentle
+curls, had been dear enough, and now she looked for the lines a man's
+face should have. Why was he so terribly at ease? The world was bitter
+and hard in its conditions, and a man should not play.
+
+Late in December the Leicesters called; they were like gleeful
+sparrows, twittering about. Mrs. Edwards shuddered to see them again,
+and when they were gone she gave up and became ill.
+
+Her tense mind relieved itself in hysterics, which frightened her to
+further repression. Then one night she heard herself moaning: "Why did
+I have to take all? It was so little, so very little, I wanted, and I
+had to take all. Oh, Will, Will, you should have done for yourself! Why
+did you need this? Why couldn't you do as other men do? It's no harder
+for you than for them." Then she recollected herself. Edwards was
+holding her hand and soothing her.
+
+Some weeks later, when she was very ill, she remembered those words,
+and wondered if he had suspected anything. Her child came and died, and
+she forgot this matter, with others. She lay nerveless for a long time,
+without thought; Edwards and the doctor feared melancholia. So she was
+taken to Italy for the cold months. Edwards cared for her tenderly, but
+his caressing presence was irritating, instead of soothing, to her. She
+was hungry for a justification that she could not bring about.
+
+At last it wore on into late spring. She began to force herself back
+into the old activities, in order to leave no excuse for further
+dawdling. Her attitude became terribly judicial and suspicious.
+
+An absorbing idleness had settled down over Edwards, partly excused to
+himself by his wife's long illness. When he noticed that his desultory
+days made her restless, he took to loafing about galleries or making
+little excursions, generally in company with some forlorn artist he had
+picked up. He had nothing, after all, so very definite that demanded
+his time; he had not yet made up his mind for any attempts. And
+something in the domestic atmosphere unsettled him. His wife held
+herself aloof, with alien sympathies, he felt.
+
+So they drifted on to discontent and unhappiness until she could bear
+it no longer without expression.
+
+"Aren't we to return to Paris soon?" she remarked one morning as they
+idled over a late breakfast. "I am strong now, and I should like to
+settle down."
+
+Edwards took the cue, idly welcoming any change.
+
+"Why, yes, in the fall. It's too near the summer now, and there's no
+hurry."
+
+"Yes, there _is_ hurry," his wife replied, hastily. "We have lost
+almost eight months."
+
+"Out of a lifetime," Edwards put in, indulgently.
+
+She paused, bewildered by the insinuation of his remark. But her mood
+was too incendiary to avoid taking offence. "Do you mean that that
+would be a _life_, loafing around all day, enjoying this, that, and the
+other fine pleasure? That wasn't what we planned."
+
+"No, but I don't see why people who are not driven should drive
+themselves. I want to get the taste of Harlem out of my mouth." He was
+a bit sullen. A year ago her strict inquiry into his life would have
+been absurd. Perhaps the money, her money, gave her the right.
+
+"If people don't drive themselves," she went on, passionately, "they
+ought to be driven. It's cowardly to take advantage of having money to
+do nothing. You wanted the--the opportunity to do something. Now you
+have it."
+
+Edwards twisted his wicker chair into uncomfortable places. "Well, are
+you sorry you happen to have given me the chance?" He looked at her
+coldly, so that a suspicious thought shot into her mind.
+
+"Yes," she faltered, "if it means throwing it away, I _am_ sorry."
+
+She dared no more. Her mind was so close on the great sore in her
+gentle soul. He lit a cigarette, and sauntered down the hotel garden.
+But the look he had given her--a queer glance of disagreeable
+intelligence--illumined her dormant thoughts.
+
+What if he had known all along? She remembered his meaning words that
+hot night when they talked over Oliphant's illness for the first time.
+And why had he been so yielding, so utterly passive, during the sordid
+drama over the dying man? What kept him from alluding to the matter in
+any way? Yes, he must have encouraged her to go on. _She_ had been his
+tool, and he the passive spectator. The blind certainty of a woman made
+the thing assured, settled. She picked up the faint yellow rose he had
+laid by her plate, and tore it slowly into fine bits. On the whole, he
+was worse than she.
+
+But before he returned she stubbornly refused to believe herself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the autumn they were again in Paris, in soberer quarters, which were
+conducive to effort. Edwards was working fitfully with several
+teachers, goaded on, as he must confess to himself, by a pitiless wife.
+Not much was discussed between them, but he knew that the price of the
+_statu quo_ was continued labor.
+
+She was watching him; he felt it and resented it, but he would not
+understand. All the idealism, the worship of the first sweet months in
+marriage, had gone. Of course that incense had been foolish, but it was
+sweet. Instead, he felt these suspicious, intolerant eyes following his
+soul in and out on its feeble errands. He comforted himself with the
+trite consolation that he was suffering from the natural readjustment
+in a woman's mind. It was too drastic for that, however.
+
+He was in the habit of leaving her in the evenings of the opera. The
+light was too much for her eyes, and she was often tired. One wet April
+night, when he returned late, he found her up, sitting by the window
+that overlooked the steaming boulevard. Somehow his soul was
+rebellious, and when she asked him about the opera he did not take the
+pains to lie.
+
+"Oh, I haven't been there," he muttered, "I am beastly tired of it all.
+Let's get out of it; to St. Petersburg or Norway--for the summer," he
+added, guiltily.
+
+Now that the understanding impended she trembled, for hitherto she had
+never actually known. In suspicion there was hope. So she almost
+entreated.
+
+"We go to Vienna next winter anyway, and I thought we had decided on
+Switzerland for the summer."
+
+"You decided! But what's the use of keeping up the mill night and day?
+There's plenty of opportunity over there for an educated gentleman with
+money, if what you are after is a 'sphere' for me."
+
+"You want to--to go back now?"
+
+"No, I want to be let alone."
+
+"Don't you care to pay for all you have had? Haven't you any sense of
+justice to Uncle Oliphant, to your opportunities?"
+
+"Oliphant!" Edwards laughed, disagreeably. "Wouldn't he be pleased to
+have an operetta, a Gilbert and Sullivan affair, dedicated to him! No.
+I have tried to humor your idea of making myself famous. But what's the
+use of being wretched?" The topic seemed fruitless. Mrs. Edwards looked
+over to the slight, careless figure. He was sitting dejectedly on a
+large fauteuil, smoking. He seemed fagged and spiritless. She almost
+pitied him and gave in, but suddenly she rose and crossed the room.
+
+"We've made ourselves pretty unhappy," she said, apologetically,
+resting her hand on the lapel of his coat. "I guess it's mostly my
+fault, Will. I have wanted so much that you should do something fine
+with Uncle Oliphant's money, with _yourself_. But we can make it up in
+other ways."
+
+"What are you so full of that idea for?" Edwards asked, curiously. "Why
+can't you be happy, even as happy as you were in Harlem?" His voice was
+hypocritical.
+
+"Don't you know?" she flashed back. "You _do_ know, I believe. Tell me,
+did you look over those papers on the davenport that night Uncle James
+fainted?"
+
+The unexpected rush of her mind bewildered him. A calm lie would have
+set matters to rights, but he was not master of it.
+
+"So you were willing--you knew?"
+
+"It wasn't my affair," he muttered, weakly, but she had left him.
+
+He wandered about alone for a few days until the suspense became
+intolerable. When he turned up one afternoon in their apartments he
+found preparations on foot for their departure.
+
+"We're going away?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, to New York."
+
+"Not so fast," he interrupted, bitterly. "We might as well face the
+matter openly. What's the use of going back there?"
+
+"We can't live here, and besides I shall be wanted there."
+
+"You can't do anything now. Talk sensibly about it. I will not go back."
+
+She looked at him coldly, critically. "I cabled Slocum yesterday, and
+we must live somehow."
+
+"You--" but she laid her hand on his arm. "It makes no difference now,
+you know, and it can't be changed. I've done everything."
+
+CHICAGO, August, 1895.
+
+
+
+A REJECTED TITIAN
+
+
+"John," my wife remarked in horrified tones, "he's coming to Rome!"
+
+"Who is coming to Rome--the Emperor?"
+
+"Uncle Ezra--see," she handed me the telegram. "Shall arrive in Rome
+Wednesday morning; have Watkins at the Grand Hotel."
+
+I handed the despatch to Watkins.
+
+"Poor uncle!" my wife remarked.
+
+"He will get it in the neck," I added, profanely.
+
+"They ought to put nice old gentlemen like your uncle in bond when they
+reach Italy," Watkins mused, as if bored in advance. "The _antichitas_
+get after them, like--like confidence-men in an American city, and the
+same old story is the result; they find, in some mysterious fashion, a
+wonderful Titian, a forgotten Giorgione, cheap at _cinque mille lire_.
+Then it's all up with them. His pictures are probably decalcomanias,
+you know, just colored prints pasted over board. Why, we _know_ every
+picture in Venice; it's simply _impossible_--"
+
+Watkins was a connoisseur; he had bought his knowledge in the dearest
+school of experience.
+
+"What are you going to do, Mr. Watkins?" my wife put in. "Tell him the
+truth?"
+
+"There's nothing else to do. I used up all my ambiguous terms over that
+daub he bought in the Piazza di Spagna--'reminiscential' of half a
+dozen worthless things, 'suggestive,' etc. I can't work them over
+again." Watkins was lugubrious.
+
+"Tell him the truth as straight as you can; it's the best medicine." I
+was Uncle Ezra's heir; naturally, I felt for the inheritance.
+
+"Well," my wife was invariably cheerful, "perhaps he has found
+something valuable; at least, one of them may be; isn't it possible?"
+
+Watkins looked at my wife indulgently.
+
+"He's been writing me about them for a month, suggesting that, as I was
+about to go on to Venice, he would like to have me see them; such
+treasures as I should find them. I have been waiting until he should
+get out. It isn't a nice job, and your uncle--"
+
+"There are three of them, Aunt Mary writes: Cousin Maud has bought one,
+with the advice of Uncle Ezra and Professor Augustus Painter, and
+Painter himself is the last one to succumb."
+
+"They have all gone mad," Watkins murmured.
+
+"Where did Maudie get the cash?" I asked.
+
+"She had a special gift on coming of age, and she has been looking
+about for an opportunity for throwing it away"--my wife had never
+sympathized with my cousin, Maud Vantweekle. "She had better save it
+for her trousseau, if she goes on much more with that young professor.
+Aunt Mary should look after her."
+
+Watkins rose to go.
+
+"Hold on a minute," I said. "Just listen to this delicious epistle from
+Uncle Ezra."
+
+"'... We have hoped that you would arrive in Venice before we break up
+our charming home here. Mary has written you that Professor Painter has
+joined us at the Palazzo Palladio, complementing our needs and
+completing our circle. He has an excellent influence for seriousness
+upon Maud; his fine, manly qualities have come out. Venice, after two
+years of Berlin, has opened his soul in a really remarkable manner. All
+the beauty lying loose around here has been a revelation to him--'"
+
+"Maud's beauty," my wife interpreted.
+
+"'And our treasures you will enjoy so much--such dashes of color, such
+great slaps of light! I was the first to buy--they call it a Savoldo,
+but I think no third-rate man could be capable of so much--such
+reaching out after infinity. However, that makes little difference. I
+would not part with it, now that I have lived these weeks with so fine
+a thing. Maud won a prize in her Bonifazio, which she bought under my
+advice. Then Augustus secured the third one, a Bissola, and it has had
+the greatest influence upon him already; it has given him his education
+in art. He sits with it by the hour while he is at work, and its charm
+has gradually produced a revolution in his character. We had always
+found him too Germanic, and he had immured himself in that barbarous
+country for so long over his Semitic books that his nature was stunted
+on one side. His picture has opened a new world for him. Your Aunt Mary
+and I already see the difference in his character; he is gentler, less
+narrowly interested in the world. This precious bit of fine art has
+been worth its price many times, but I don't think Augustus would part
+with it for any consideration now that he has lived with it and learned
+to know its power.'"
+
+"I can't see why he is coming to Rome," Watkins commented at the end.
+"If they are confident that they know all about their pictures, and
+don't care anyway who did them, and are having all this spiritual
+love-feast, what in the world do they want any expert criticism of
+their text for? Now for such people to buy pictures, when they haven't
+a mint of money! Why don't they buy something within their means really
+fine--a coin, a Van Dyck print? I could get your uncle a Whistler
+etching for twenty-five pounds; a really fine thing, you know--"
+
+This was Watkins's hobby.
+
+"Oh, well, it won't be bad in the end of the hall at New York; it's as
+dark as pitch there; and then Uncle Ezra can leave it to the
+Metropolitan as a Giorgione. It will give the critics something to do.
+And I suppose that in coming on here he has in mind to get an
+indorsement for his picture that will give it a commercial value. He's
+canny, is my Uncle Ezra, and he likes to gamble too, like the rest of
+us. If he should draw a prize, it wouldn't be a bad thing to brag of."
+
+Watkins called again the next morning.
+
+"Have you seen Uncle Ezra?" my wife asked, anxiously.
+
+"No. Three telegrams. Train was delayed--I suppose by the importance of
+the works of art it's bringing on."
+
+"When do you expect him?"
+
+"About noon."
+
+"Mr. Watkins," my wife flamed out, "I believe you are just shirking it,
+to meet that poor old man with his pictures. You ought to have been at
+the station, or at least at the hotel. Why, it's twelve now!"
+
+Watkins hung his head.
+
+"I believe you are a coward," my wife went on. "Just think of his
+arriving there, all excitement over his pictures, and finding you gone!"
+
+"Well, well," I said, soothingly, "it's no use to trot off now,
+Watkins; stay to breakfast. He will be in shortly. When he finds you
+are out at the hotel he will come straight on here, I am willing to
+bet."
+
+Watkins looked relieved at my suggestion.
+
+"I believe you meant to run away all along," my wife continued,
+severely, "and to come here for refuge."
+
+Watkins sulked.
+
+We waited in suspense, straining our ears to hear the sound of a cab
+stopping in the street. At last one did pull up. My wife made no
+pretence of indifference, but hurried to the window.
+
+"It's Uncle Ezra, with a big, black bundle. John, run down--No! there's
+a facchino."
+
+We looked at each other and laughed.
+
+"The three!"
+
+Our patron of art came in, with a warm, gentle smile, his tall, thin
+figure a little bent with the fatigue of the journey, his beard a
+little grayer and dustier than usual, and his hands all a-tremble with
+nervous impatience and excitement. He had never been as tremulous
+before an opinion from the Supreme Court. My wife began to purr over
+him soothingly; Watkins looked sheepish; I hurried them all off to
+breakfast.
+
+The omelette was not half eaten before Uncle Ezra jumped up, and began
+unstrapping the oil-cloth covering to the pictures. There was
+consternation at the table. My wife endeavored soothingly to bring
+Uncle Ezra's interest back to breakfast, but he was not to be fooled.
+My Uncle Ezra was a courageous man.
+
+"Of course you fellows," he said, smiling at Watkins, in his suave
+fashion, "are just whetting your knives for me, I know. That's right. I
+want to know the worst, the hardest things you can say. You can't
+destroy the intrinsic _worth_ of the pictures for us; I have lived with
+mine too long, and know how precious it is!"
+
+At last the three pictures were tipped up against the wall, and the
+Madonnas and saints in gold, red, and blue were beaming out insipidly
+at us. Uncle Ezra affected indifference. Watkins continued with the
+omelette. "We'll look them over after breakfast," he said, severely,
+thus getting us out of the hole temporarily.
+
+After breakfast my wife cooked up some engagement, and hurried me off.
+We left Uncle Ezra in the hands of the physician. Two hours later, when
+we entered, the operation had been performed--we could see at a
+glance--and in a bloody fashion. The pictures were lying about the vast
+room as if they had been spat at. Uncle Ezra smiled wanly at us, with
+the courage of the patient who is a sceptic about physicians.
+
+"Just what I expected," he said, briskly, to relieve Watkins, who was
+smoking, with the air of a man who has finished his job and is now
+cooling off. "Mr. Watkins thinks Painter's picture and Maud's are
+copies, Painter's done a few years ago and Maud's a little older, the
+last century. My Savoldo he finds older, but repainted. You said cinque
+cento, Mr. Watkins?"
+
+"Perhaps, Mr. Williams," Watkins answered, and added, much as a dog
+would give a final shake to the bird, "_Much_ repainted, hardly
+anything left of the original. There may be a Savoldo underneath, but
+you don't see it." Watkins smiled at us knowingly. My wife snubbed him.
+
+"Of course, Uncle Ezra, _that's_ one man's opinion. I certainly should
+not put much faith in one critic, no matter how eminent he may be. Just
+look at the guide-books and see how the 'authorities' swear at one
+another. Ruskin says every man is a fool who can't appreciate his
+particular love, and Burckhardt calls it a daub, and Eastlake insipid.
+Now, there are a set of young fellows who think they know all about
+paint and who painted what. They're renaming all the great
+masterpieces. Pretty soon they will discover that some tenth-rate
+fellow painted the Sistine Chapel."
+
+Watkins put on an aggrieved and expostulatory manner. Uncle Ezra cut in.
+
+"Oh! my dear! Mr. Watkins may be right, quite right. It's his business
+to know, I am sure, and I anticipated all that he would say; indeed, I
+have come off rather better than I expected. There is old paint in it
+somewhere."
+
+"Pretty far down," Watkins muttered. My wife bristled up, but Uncle
+Ezra assumed his most superb calm.
+
+"It makes no difference to me, of course, as far as the _worth_ of the
+work of art is concerned. I made up my mind before I came here that my
+picture was worth a great deal to me, much more than I paid for it."
+There was a heroic gasp. Watkins interposed mercilessly, "And may I
+ask, Mr. Williams, what you did give for it?"
+
+Uncle Ezra was an honest man. "Twenty-five hundred lire," he replied,
+sullenly.
+
+"Excuse me" (Watkins was behaving like a pitiless cad), "but you paid a
+great deal too much for it, I assure you. I could have got it for----"
+
+"Mr. Watkins," my wife was hardly civil to him, "it doesn't matter much
+what you could have got it for."
+
+"No," Uncle Ezra went on bravely, "I am a little troubled as to what
+this may mean to Maud and Professor Painter, for you see their pictures
+are copies."
+
+"Undoubted modern copies," the unquenchable Watkins emended.
+
+"Maud has learned a great deal from her picture. And as for Painter, it
+has been an education in art, an education in life. He said to me the
+night before I came away, 'Mr. Williams, I wouldn't take two thousand
+for that picture; it's been the greatest influence in my life.'"
+
+I thought Watkins would have convulsions.
+
+"And it has brought those two young souls together in a marvellous way,
+this common interest in fine art. You will find Maud a much more
+serious person, Jane. No, if I were Painter I certainly should not care
+a fig whether it proves to be a copy or not. I shouldn't let that
+influence me in my love for such an educational wonder."
+
+The bluff was really sublime, but painful. My wife gave a decided hint
+to Watkins that his presence in such a family scene was awkward. He
+took his hat and cane. Uncle Ezra rose and grasped him cordially by the
+hand.
+
+"You have been very generous, Mr. Watkins," he said, in his own sweet
+way, "to do such an unpleasant job. It's a large draft to make on the
+kindness of a friend."
+
+"Oh, don't mention it, Mr. Williams; and if you want to buy something
+really fine, a Van Dyck print--a----"
+
+Uncle Ezra was shooing him toward the door. From the stairs we could
+still hear his voice. "Or a Whistler etching for twenty-five pounds, I
+could get you, now, a very fine----"
+
+"No, thank you, Mr. Watkins," Uncle Ezra said, firmly. "I don't believe
+I have any money just now for such an investment."
+
+My wife tiptoed about the room, making faces at the exposed
+masterpieces. "What shall we do?" Uncle Ezra came back into the room,
+his face a trifle grayer and more worn. "Capital fellow, that Watkins,"
+he said; "so firm and frank."
+
+"Uncle," I ventured at random, "I met Fluegel the other day in the
+street. You know Fluegel's new book on the Renaissance. He's the coming
+young critic in art, has made a wonderful reputation the last three
+years, is on the _Beaux Arts_ staff, and really _knows_. He is living
+out at Frascati. I could telegraph and have him here this afternoon,
+perhaps."
+
+"Well, I don't know;" his tone, however, said "Yes." "I don't care much
+for expert advice--for specialists. But it wouldn't do any harm to hear
+what he has to say. And Maud and Painter have made up their minds that
+Maud's is a Titian."
+
+So I ran out and sent off the despatch. My wife took Uncle Ezra down to
+the Forum and attempted to console him with the ugliness of genuine
+antiquity, while I waited for Fluegel. He came in a tremendous hurry,
+his little, muddy eyes winking hard behind gold spectacles.
+
+"Ah, yes," he began to paw the pictures over as if they were live
+stock, "that was bought for a Bonifazio," he had picked up Maud's
+ruby-colored prize. "Of course, of course, it's a copy, an old copy, of
+Titian's picture, No. 3,405, in the National Gallery at London. There
+is a replica in the Villa Ludovisi here at Rome. It's a stupid copy,
+some alterations, all for the bad--worthless--well, not to the
+_antichita_, for it must be 1590, I should say. But worthless for us
+and in bad condition. I wouldn't give cinque lire for it."
+
+"And the Bissola?" I said. "Oh, that was done in the seventeenth
+century--it would make good kindling. But this," he turned away from
+Painter's picture with a gesture of contempt, "this is Domenico
+Tintoretto fast enough, at least what hasn't been stippled over and
+painted out. St. Agnes's leg here is entire, and that tree in the
+background is original. A damn bad man, but there are traces of his
+slop work. Perhaps the hair is by him, too. Well, good-by, old fellow;
+I must be off to dinner."
+
+That was slight consolation; a leg, a tree, and some wisps of hair in a
+picture three feet six by four feet eight. Our dinner that evening was
+labored. The next morning Uncle Ezra packed his three treasures
+tenderly, putting in cotton-wool at the edges, my wife helping him to
+make them comfortable. We urged him to stay over with us for a few
+days; we would all go on later to Venice. But Uncle Ezra seemed moved
+by some hidden cause. Back he would trot at once. "Painter will want
+his picture," he said, "he has been waiting on in Venice just for this,
+and I must not keep him." Watkins turned up as we were getting into the
+cab to see Uncle Ezra off, and insisted upon accompanying us to the
+station. My wife took the opportunity to rub into him Fluegel's remarks,
+which, at least, made Watkins out shady in chronology. At the station
+we encountered a new difficulty. The ticket collector would not let the
+pictures through the gate. My uncle expostulated in pure Tuscan.
+Watkins swore in Roman.
+
+"Give him five lire, Mr. Williams."
+
+Poor Uncle Ezra fumbled in his pocket-book for the piece of money. He
+had never bribed in his life. It was a terrible moral fall, to see him
+tremblingly offer the piece of scrip. The man refused, "positive
+orders, _permesso_ necessary," etc., etc. The bell rang; there was a
+rush. Uncle Ezra looked unhappy.
+
+"Here," Watkins shouted, grabbing the precious pictures in a manner far
+from reverent, "I'll send these on, Mr. Williams; run for your train."
+Uncle Ezra gave one undecided glance, and then yielded. "You will look
+after them," he pleaded, "carefully."
+
+"You shall have them safe enough," my wife promised.
+
+"Blast the pasteboards," Watkins put in under his breath, "the best
+thing to do with them is to chop 'em up." He was swinging them back and
+forth under his arm. My wife took them firmly from him. "He shall have
+his pictures, and not from your ribald hands."
+
+A week later Rome became suddenly oppressively warm. We started off for
+Venice, Watkins tagging on incorrigibly. "I want to see 'Maud,'" he
+explained. The pictures had been packed and sent ahead by express. "The
+storm must have burst, tears shed, tempers cooled, mortification set
+in," I remarked, as we were being shoved up the Grand Canal toward the
+Palazzo Palladio. "There they are in the balcony," my wife exclaimed,
+"waving to us. Something is up; Maudie is hanging back, with Aunt Mary,
+and Professor Painter is at the other end, with Uncle Ezra."
+
+The first thing that caught the eye after the flurry of greetings was
+the impudent blue and red of Uncle Ezra's "Sancta Conversazione,"
+Domenico Tintoretto, Savoldo, or what not; St. Agnes's leg and all,
+beaming at us from the wall. The other two were not there. My wife
+looked at me. Maudie was making herself very gracious with little
+Watkins. Painter's solemn face began to lower more and more. Aunt Mary
+and Uncle Ezra industriously poured oil by the bucket upon the social
+sea.
+
+At last Maud rose: "You _must_ take me over there at once, Mr. Watkins.
+It will be such an enjoyment to have someone who really knows about
+pictures and has taste." This shot at poor Painter; then to my wife,
+"Come, Jane, you will like to see your room."
+
+Painter crossed to me and suggested, lugubriously, a cigar on the
+balcony. He smoked a few minutes in gloomy silence.
+
+"Does that fellow know anything?" he emitted at last, jerking his head
+at Watkins, who was pouring out information at Uncle Ezra. I began
+gently to give Charles Henderson Watkins a fair reputation for
+intelligence. "I mean anything about art? Of course it doesn't matter
+what he says about my picture, whether it is a copy or not, but Miss
+Vantweekle takes it very hard about hers. She blames me for having been
+with her when she bought it, and having advised her and encouraged her
+to put six hundred dollars into it."
+
+"Six hundred," I gasped.
+
+"Cheap for a Bonifazio, or a _Titian_, as we thought it."
+
+"Too cheap," I murmured.
+
+"Well, I got bitten for about the same on my own account. I sha'n't get
+that Rachel's library at Berlin, that's all. The next time you catch me
+fooling in a subject where I don't know my bearings--like fine art--You
+see Mr. Williams found my picture one day when he was nosing about at
+an _antichita's_, and thought it very fine. I admire Mr. Williams
+tremendously, and I valued his opinion about art subjects much more
+then than I do now. He and Mrs. Williams were wild over it. They had
+just bought their picture, and they wanted us each to have one. They
+have lots of sentiment, you know."
+
+"Lots," I assented.
+
+"Mrs. Williams got at me, and well, she made me feel that it would
+bring me nearer to Miss Vantweekle. You know she goes in for art, and
+she used to be impatient with me because I couldn't appreciate. I was
+dumb when she walked me up to some old Madonna, and the others would go
+on at a great rate. Well, in a word, I bought it for my education, and
+I guess I have got it!
+
+"Then the man, he's an old Jew on the Grand Canal--Raffman, you know
+him? He got out another picture, the Bonifazio. The Williamses began to
+get up steam over that, too. They hung over that thing Mr. Williams
+bought, that Savoldo or Domenico Tintoretto, and prowled about the
+churches and the galleries finding traces of it here in the style of
+this picture and that; in short, we all got into a fever about
+pictures, and Miss Vantweekle invested all the money an aunt had given
+her before coming abroad, in that Bonifazio.
+
+"I must say that Miss Vantweekle held off some time, was doubtful about
+the picture; didn't feel that she wanted to put all her money into it.
+But she caught fire in the general excitement, and I may say"--here a
+sad sort of conscious smile crept over the young professor's face--"at
+that time I had a good deal of influence with her. She bought the
+picture, we brought it home, and put it up at the other end of the
+hall. We spent hours over that picture, studying out every line,
+placing every color. We made up our minds soon enough that it wasn't a
+Bonifazio, but we began to think--now don't laugh, or I'll pitch you
+over the balcony--it was an early work by Titian. There was an attempt
+in it for great things, as Mr. Williams said: no small man could have
+planned it. One night we had been talking for hours about them, and we
+were all pretty well excited. Mr. Williams suggested getting Watkins's
+opinion. Maud--Miss Vantweekle said, loftily, 'Oh! it does not make any
+difference what the critics say about it, the picture means everything
+to me'; and I, like a fool, felt happier than ever before in my life.
+The next morning Mr. Williams telegraphed you and set off."
+
+He waited.
+
+"And when he returned?"
+
+"It's been hell ever since."
+
+He was in no condition to see the comic side of the affair. Nor was
+Miss Vantweekle. She was on my wife's bed in tears.
+
+"All poor Aunt Higgins's present gone into that horrid thing," she
+moaned, "and all the dresses I was planning to get in Paris. I shall
+have to go home looking like a perfect dowd!"
+
+"But think of the influence it has been in your life--the education you
+have received from that picture. How can you call all that color, those
+noble faces, 'that horrid thing?'" I said, reprovingly. She sat upright.
+
+"See here, Jerome Parker, if you ever say anything like that again, I
+will never speak to you any more, or to Jane, though you are my
+cousins."
+
+"They have tried to return the picture," my wife explained. "Professor
+Painter and Uncle Ezra took it over yesterday; but, of course, the Jew
+laughed at them."
+
+"'A copy!' he said." Maud explained, "Why, it's no more a copy than
+Titian's 'Assumption.' He could show us the very place in a palace on
+the Grand Canal where it had hung for four hundred years. Of course,
+all the old masters used the same models, and grouped their pictures
+alike. Very probably Titian had a picture something like it. What of
+that? He defied us to find the exact original."
+
+"Well," I remarked, soothingly, "that ought to comfort you, I am sure.
+Call your picture a new Titian, and sell it when you get home."
+
+"Mr. Watkins says that's an old trick," moaned Maud, "that story about
+the palace. He says old Raffman has a pal among the Italian nobility,
+and works off copies through him all the time. I won't say anything
+about Uncle Ezra; he has been as kind and good as he can be, only a
+little too enthusiastic. But Professor Painter!"
+
+She tossed her head.
+
+The atmosphere in the Palazzo Palladio for the next few days was highly
+charged.
+
+At dinner Uncle Ezra placidly made remarks about the Domenico
+Tintoretto, almost vaingloriously, I thought. "Such a piece of Venice
+to carry away. We missed it so much, those days you had it in Rome. It
+is so precious that I cannot bear to pack it up and lose sight of it
+for five months. Mary, just see that glorious piece of color over
+there."
+
+Meantime some kind of conspiracy was on foot. Maud went off whole
+mornings with Watkins and Uncle Ezra. We were left out as
+unsympathetic. Painter wandered about like a sick ghost. He would sit
+glowering at Maud and Watkins while they held whispered conversations
+at the other end of the hall. Watkins was the hero. He had accepted
+Fluegel's judgment with impudent grace.
+
+"A copy of Titian, of course," he said to me; "really, it is quite hard
+on poor Miss Vantweekle. People, even learned people, who don't know
+about such things, had better not advise. I have had the photographs of
+all Titian's pictures sent on, and we have found the original of your
+cousin's picture. Isn't it very like?"
+
+It was very like; a figure was left out in the copy, the light was
+changed, but still it was a happy guess of Fluegel.
+
+"Well, what are you going to do about it?" I said to Maud, who had just
+joined us.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Watkins has kindly consented to manage the matter for me; I
+believe he has a friend here, an artist, Mr. Hare, who will give expert
+judgment on it. Then the American vice-consul is a personal friend of
+Mr. Watkins, and also Count Corner, the adviser at the Academy. We
+shall frighten the old Jew, sha'n't we, Mr. Watkins?"
+
+I walked over to the despised Madonna that was tipped up on its side,
+ready to be walked off on another expedition of defamation.
+
+"Poor Bonifazio," I sighed, "Maud, how can you part with a work of fine
+art that has meant so much to you?"
+
+"Do you think, Jerome, I would go home and have Uncle Higgins, with his
+authentic Rembrandt and all his other pictures, laugh at me and my
+Titian? I'd burn it first."
+
+I turned to Uncle Ezra. "Uncle, what strange metamorphosis has happened
+to this picture? The spiritual light from that color must shine as
+brightly as ever; the intrinsic value remains forever fixed in Maud's
+soul; it is desecration to reject such a precious message. Why, it's
+like sending back the girl you married because her pedigree proved
+defective, or because she had lost her fortune. It's positively brutal!"
+
+Maud darted a venomous glance at me; however, I had put the judge in a
+hole.
+
+"I cannot agree with you, Jerome." Uncle Ezra could never be put in a
+hole. "Maud's case is a very different one from Mr. Painter's or mine.
+We can carry back what we like personally, but for Maud to carry home a
+doubtful picture into the atmosphere she has to live in--why, it would
+be intolerable--with her uncle a connoisseur, all her friends owners of
+masterpieces." Uncle Ezra had a flowing style. "It would expose her to
+annoyance, to mortification--constant, daily. Above all, to have taken
+a special gift, a fund of her aunt's, and to apply it in this mistaken
+fashion is cruel."
+
+Painter remarked bitterly to me afterward, "He wants to crawl on his
+share of the responsibility. I'd buy the picture if I could raise the
+cash, and end the whole miserable business."
+
+Indeed, Watkins seemed the only one blissfully in his element. As my
+wife remarked, Watkins had exchanged his interest in pictures for an
+interest in woman. Certainly he had planned his battle well. It came
+off the next day. They all left in a gondola at an early hour. Painter
+and I watched them from the balcony. After they were seated, Watkins
+tossed in carelessly the suspected picture. What went on at the
+_antichita's_ no one of the boat-load ever gave away. Watkins had a
+hold on the man somehow, and the evidence of the fraud was
+overwhelming. About noon they came back, Maud holding an enormous
+envelope in her hand.
+
+"I can never, never thank you enough, Mr. Watkins," she beamed at him.
+"You have saved me from such mortification and unhappiness, and you
+were so _clever_."
+
+That night at dinner Uncle Ezra was more than usually genial, and
+beamed upon Maud and Watkins perpetually. Watkins was quite the hero
+and did his best to look humble.
+
+"How much rent did the spiritual influence cost, Maud?" I asked. She
+was too happy to be offended. "Oh, we bought an old ring to make him
+feel pleased, five pounds, and Mr. Hare's services were worth five
+pounds, and Mr. Watkins thinks we should give the vice-consul a box of
+cigars.
+
+"Let's see; ten pounds and a box of cigars, that's three hundred lire
+at the price of exchange. You had the picture just three weeks, a
+hundred lire a week for the use of all that education in art, all that
+spiritual influence. Quite cheap, I should say."
+
+"And Mr. Watkins's services, Maud!" my wife asked, viciously. There was
+a slight commotion at the table.
+
+"May I, Maud?" Watkins murmured.
+
+"As you please, Charles," Maud replied, with her eyes lowered to the
+table.
+
+"Maud has given herself," Uncle Ezra said, gleefully.
+
+Painter rose from the table and disappeared into his room. Pretty soon
+he came out bearing a tray with a dozen champagne glasses, of
+modern-antique Venetian glass.
+
+"Let me present this to you, Miss Vantweekle," he pronounced, solemnly,
+"as an engagement token. I, I exchanged my picture for them this
+morning."
+
+"Some Asti Spumante, Ricci."
+
+"To the rejected Titian--" I suggested for the first toast.
+
+VENICE, May, 1896.
+
+
+
+PAYMENT IN FULL
+
+The two black horses attached to the light buggy were chafing in the
+crisp October air. Their groom was holding them stiffly, as if bolted
+to the ground, in the approved fashion insisted upon by the mistress of
+the house. Old Stuart eyed them impatiently from the tower window of
+the breakfast-room where he was smoking his first cigar; Mrs. Stuart
+held him in a vise of astounding words.
+
+"They will need not only the lease of a house in London for two years,
+but a great deal of money besides," she continued in even tones,
+ignoring his impatience.
+
+"I've done enough for 'em already," the old fellow protested, drawing
+on his driving gloves over knotted hands stained by age.
+
+Mrs. Stuart rustled the letter that lay, with its envelope, beside her
+untouched plate. It bore the flourishes of a foreign hotel and a
+foreign-looking stamp.
+
+"My mother writes that their summer in Wiesbaden has made it surer that
+Lord Raincroft is interested in Helen. It is evidently a matter of
+time. I say two years--it may be less."
+
+"Well," her husband broke in. "Haven't they enough to live on?"
+
+"At my marriage," elucidated Mrs. Stuart, imperturbably, "you settled
+on them securities which yield about five thousand a year. That does
+not give them the means to take the position which I expect for my
+family in such a crisis. They must have a large house, must entertain
+lavishly," she swept an impassive hand toward him in royal emphasis,
+"and do all that that set expects--to meet them as equals. You could
+not imagine that Lord Raincroft would marry Helen out of a pension?"
+
+"I don't care a damn how he marries her, or if he marries her at all."
+He rose, testily. "I guess my family would have thought five thousand a
+year enough to marry the gals on, and to spare, and it was more'n you
+ever had in your best days."
+
+"Naturally," her voice showed scorn at his perverse lack of
+intelligence. "Out contract was made with that understanding."
+
+"Let Helen marry a feller who is willing to go half way for her without
+a palace. Why didn't you encourage her marrying Blake, as smart a young
+man as I ever had? She was taken enough with him."
+
+"Because I did not think it fit for my sister to marry your junior
+partner, who, five years ago, was your best floor-walker."
+
+"Well, Blake is a college-educated man and a hustler. He's bound to get
+on if I back him. If Blake weren't likely enough, there's plenty more
+in Chicago like me--smart business men who want a handsome young wife."
+
+"Perhaps we have had enough of Stuart, Hodgson, and Blake. There are
+other careers in the world outside Chicago."
+
+"Tut, tut! I ain't going to fight here all day. What's the figure?
+What's the figure?" He slapped his breeches with the morning paper.
+
+"You will have to take the house in London (the Duke of Waminster's is
+to let, mamma writes), and give them two hundred thousand dollars in
+addition to their present income for the two years." She let her eyes
+fall on his toast and coffee. The old man turned about galvanically and
+peered at her.
+
+"You're crazy! two hundred thousand these times, so's your sister can
+get married?"
+
+"She's the last," interposed Mrs. Stuart, deftly.
+
+"I tell you I've done more than most men. I've paid your old bills,
+your whole family's, your brothers' in college, to the tune of five
+thousand a year (worthless scamps!) and put 'em in business. You've had
+all of 'em at Newport and Paris, let alone their living here off and on
+nearly twenty years. Now you think I can shell out two hundred thousand
+and a London house as easily as I'd buy pop-corn."
+
+"It was our understanding." Mrs. Stuart began on her breakfast.
+
+"Not much. I've done better by you than I agreed to, because you've
+been a good wife to me. I settled a nice little fortune on you
+independent of your widder's rights or your folks."
+
+"Your daughter will benefit by that," Mrs. Stuart corrected.
+
+"Well, what's that to do with it?" He seemed to lose the scent.
+
+"What was our understanding when I agreed to marry you?"
+
+"I've done more'n I promised, I tell you."
+
+"As you very well know, I married you because my family were in
+desperate circumstances. Our understanding was that I should be a good
+wife, and you were to make my family comfortable according to my views.
+Isn't that right?"
+
+The old man blanched at this businesslike presentation; his voice grew
+feebler.
+
+"And I have, Beatty. I have! I've done everything by you I promised.
+And I built this great house and another at Newport, and you ain't
+never satisfied."
+
+"That was our agreement, then," she continued, without mercy. "I was
+just nineteen, and wise, for a girl, and you had forty-seven pretty
+wicked years. There wasn't any nonsense between us. I was a stunning
+girl, the most talked about in New York at that time. I was to be a
+good wife, and we weren't to have any words. Have I kept my promise?"
+
+"Yes, you've been a good woman, Beatty, better'n I deserved. But won't
+you take less, say fifty thousand?" He advanced conciliatorily. "That's
+an awful figure!"
+
+His wife rose, composed as ever and stately in her well-sustained forty
+years.
+
+"Do you think _any_ price is too great in payment for these twenty-one
+years?" Contempt crept in. "Not one dollar less, two hundred thousand,
+and I cable mamma to-day."
+
+Stuart shrivelled up.
+
+"Do you refuse?" she remarked, lightly, for he stood irresolutely near
+the door.
+
+"I won't stand that!" and he went out.
+
+When he had left Mrs. Stuart went on with her breakfast; a young woman
+Came in hastily from the hall, where she had bade her father good-by.
+She stood in the window watching the coachman surrender the horses to
+the old man. The groom moved aside quickly, and in a moment the two
+horses shot nervously through the ponderous iron gateway. The delicate
+wheels just grazed the stanchions, lifting the light buggy in the air
+to a ticklish angle. It righted itself and plunged down the boulevard.
+Fast horses and cigars were two of the few pleasures still left the old
+store-keeper. There was another--a costly one--which was not always
+forthcoming.
+
+Miss Stuart watched the groom close the ornate iron gates, and then
+turned inquiringly to her mother.
+
+"What's up with papa?"
+
+Mrs. Stuart went on with her breakfast in silence. She was superbly
+preserved, and queenly for an American woman. It seemed as if something
+had stayed the natural decay of her powers, of her person, and had put
+her always at this impassive best. Something had stopped her heart to
+render her passionless, and thus to embalm her for long years of
+mechanical activity. She would not decay, but when her time should come
+she would merely stop--the spring would snap.
+
+The daughter had her mother's height and her dark coloring. But her
+large, almost animal eyes, and her roughly moulded hands spoke of some
+homely, prairie inheritance. Her voice was timid and hesitating.
+
+At last Mrs. Stuart, her mail and breakfast exhausted at the same
+moment, Rose to leave the room.
+
+"Oh, Edith," she remarked, authoritatively, "if you happen to drive
+down town this morning, will you tell your father that we are going to
+Winetka for a few weeks? Or telephone him, if you find it more
+convenient. And send the boys to me. Miss Bates will make all
+arrangements. I think there is a train about three."
+
+"Why, mamma, you don't mean to stay there! I thought we were to be here
+all winter. And my lessons at the Art Institute?"
+
+Mrs. Stuart smiled contemptuously. "Lessons at the Art Institute are
+not the most pressing matter for my daughter, who is about to come out.
+You can amuse yourself with golf and tennis as long as they last. Then,
+perhaps, you will have a chance to continue your lessons in Paris."
+
+"And papa!" protested the daughter, "I thought he couldn't leave this
+winter?"
+
+Mrs. Stuart smiled again provokingly. "Yes?"
+
+"Oh, I can't understand!" Her pleading was almost passionate, but still
+low and sweet. "I want so much to go on with my lessons with the other
+girls. And I want to go out here with all the girls I know."
+
+"We will have them at Winetka. And Stuyvesant Wheelright--you liked him
+last summer."
+
+The girl colored deeply. "I don't want him in the house. I had rather
+go away. I'll go to Vassar with Mary Archer. You needn't hunt up any
+man for me."
+
+"Pray, do you think I would tolerate a college woman in my house? It's
+well enough for school-teachers. And what does your painting amount to?
+You will paint sufficiently well, I dare say, to sell a few daubs, and
+so take the bread and butter from some poor girl. But I am afraid, my
+dear, we couldn't admit your pictures to the gallery."
+
+The girl's eyes grew tearful at this tart disdain. "I love it, and papa
+has money enough to let me paint 'daubs' as long as I like. Please,
+please let me go on with it!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon the little caravan started for the deserted summer home
+at Winetka, on a high bluff above the sandy lake-shore. It had been
+bought years before, when not even the richest citizens dreamed of
+going East for the summer. Of late it had been used only rarely, in the
+autumn or late spring, or as a retreat in which to rusticate the boys
+with their tutor. When filled with a large house-party, it made a jolly
+place, though not magnificent enough for the developed hospitalities of
+Mrs. Stuart.
+
+Old Stuart came home to an empty palace. He had not believed that his
+reserved wife would take such high measures, and he felt miserably
+lonely after the usual round of elaborate dinners to which he had grown
+grumblingly accustomed. His one senile passion was his pride in her,
+and he was avaricious of the lost days while she was absent from her
+usual victorious post as the mistress of that great house. The next day
+his heart sank still lower, for he saw in the Sunday papers a little
+paragraph to the effect that Mrs. Stuart had invited a brilliant
+house-party to her autumn home in Winetka, and that it was rumored she
+and her lovely young daughter would spend the winter in London with
+their relatives. It made the old man angry, for he could see with what
+deliberation she had planned for a long campaign. Even the comforts of
+his club were denied him; everyone knew him and everyone smiled at the
+little domestic disturbance. So he asked his secretary, young Spencer,
+to make his home for the present in the sprawling, brand-new "palace"
+that frowned out on the South Boulevard. Young Spencer accepted, out of
+pity for the old man; for he wasn't a toady and he knew his own worth.
+
+People did talk in the clubs and elsewhere about the divided
+establishments. It would have been worse had the division come earlier,
+as had been predicted often enough, or had Mrs. Stuart ever given in
+her younger days a handle for any gossip. But her conduct had been so
+frigidly correct that it stood in good service at this crisis. She
+would not have permitted a scandal. That also was in the contract.
+
+Of course there was communication between the two camps, the gay
+polo-playing, dinner-giving household on the bluff, and the forlorn,
+tottering old man with his one aide-de-camp, the blithe young
+secretary. Now and then the sons would turn up at the offices
+down-town, amiably expectant of large checks. Stuart grimly referred
+them to their mother. He had some vague idea of starving the opposition
+out, but his wife's funds were large and her credit, as long as there
+should be no recognized rupture, perfect.
+
+The daughter, Edith, frequently established connections. In some way
+she had got permission to take her lessons at the Art Institute. Her
+mother's open contempt for her aesthetic impulses had ruined her
+illusion about her ability, for Mrs. Stuart knew her ground in
+painting. But she still loved the atmosphere of the great studio-room
+at the Art Institute. She liked the poor girls and the Western
+bohemianism and the queer dresses, and above all she liked to linger
+over her own little easel, undisturbed by the creative flurry around,
+dreaming of woods and soft English gardens and happy hours along a
+river where the water went gently, tenderly, on to the sea. And her
+sweet eyes, large and black like her mother's, but softer and gentler,
+to go with her low voice, would moisten a bit from the dream. "So
+nice," he would murmur to her picture, "to sit here and think of the
+quiet and rest, such as good pictures always paint. I'd like not to go
+back with Thomas to the train--to Winetka where they play polo and
+dress up and dance and flirt, but to sail away over the sea----"
+
+Then her eyes would see in the purplish light of her picture a certain
+face that meant another life. She would blush to herself, and her voice
+would stop. For she couldn't think aloud about him.
+
+Some days, when the murky twilight came on early, she would steal away
+altogether from the gay party in Winetka and spend the night with her
+lonely father. They would have a queer, stately dinner for three served
+in the grand dining-room by the English butler and footman. Stuart
+never had much to say to her; she wasn't his "smart," queenly wife who
+brought all people to her feet. When he came to his cigar and his
+whiskey, she would take young Spencer to the gallery, where they
+discussed the new French pictures, very knowingly, Spencer thought. She
+would describe for him the intricacies of a color-scheme of some tender
+Diaz, and that would lead them into the leafy woods about Barbizon and
+other realms of sentiment.
+
+When they returned to the library she would feel that there were
+compensations for this dreary separation at Winetka and that her
+enormous home had never been so nice and comfortable before. As she
+bade the two men good-night, her father would come to the door, rubbing
+his eyes and forlorn over his great loss, and to her murmured
+"Good-night" he would sigh, "so like her mother." "Quite the softest
+voice in the world," thought Spencer.
+
+Once in her old little tower room that she still preferred to keep,
+covered with her various attempts at sea, and sky, and forest, she was
+blissfully conscious of independence, so far from Stuyvesant Wheelright
+and his mother--quite an ugly old dame with no better manners than the
+plain Chicago people (who despised them all as "pork-packers" and
+"shop-keepers," nevertheless).
+
+On one of these visits late in October, Edith had found her father
+ailing from a cold. He asked her, shamefacedly, to tell her mother that
+"he was very bad." Mrs. Stuart, leaving the house-party in full go,
+started at once for the town-house. Old Stuart had purposely stayed at
+home on the chances that his wife would relent. When she came in, she
+found him lying in the same morning-room, where hostilities had begun
+three months before. He grew confused, like an erring school-boy, as
+his wife kissed him and asked after his health in a neutral sort of
+way. He made out that he was threatened with a complication of diseases
+that might finally end him.
+
+"Well, what can I do for you now," Mrs. Stuart said, with business-like
+directness.
+
+"Spencer's looking after things pretty much. He's honest and faithful,
+but he ain't got any head like yours, Beatty, and times are awful hard.
+People won't pay rents, and I don't dare to throw 'em out. Stores and
+houses would lie empty these days. Then there's the North Shore
+Electric--I was a fool to go in so heavy the Fair year and tie up all
+my money. I s'pose you know the bonds ain't reached fifty this fall.
+I'm not so tremendously wealthy as folks think."
+
+Mrs. Stuart exactly comprehended this sly speech; she knew also that
+there was some truth in it.
+
+"Say, Beatty, it's so nice to have you here!" The old man raised
+himself and capered about like a gouty old house-dog.
+
+He made the most of his illness, for he suspected that it was a
+condition of truce, not a bond of peace. While he was in bed Mrs.
+Stuart drove to the city each day and, with Spencer's help, conducted
+business for long hours. She had had experience in managing large
+charities; she knew people, and when a tenant could pay, with a little
+effort, he found Madam more pitiless than the old shop-keeper. Every
+afternoon she would take her stenographer to Stuart's room and consult
+with him.
+
+"Ain't she a wonder?" the old man would exclaim to Spencer, in new
+admiration for his wife. And Spencer, watching the stately,
+authoritative woman day after day as she worked quickly, exactly, with
+the repose and dignity of a perfect machine, shivered back an unwilling
+assent.
+
+"She's marvellous!"
+
+All accidents played into the hands of this masterful woman. Her own
+presence in town kept her daughter at Winetka _en evidence_ for
+Stuyvesant Wheelright and Mrs. Wheelright. For Mrs. Stuart had
+determined upon him as, on the whole, the most likely arrangement that
+she could make. He was American, but of the best, and Mrs. Stuart was
+wise enough to prefer the domestic aristocracy. So to her mind affairs
+were not going badly. The truce would conclude ultimately in a senile
+capitulation; meantime, she could advance money for the household in
+London.
+
+When Stuart had been nursed back into comparative activity, the grand
+dinners began once more--a convenient rebuttal for all gossip. The
+usual lists of distinguished strangers, wandering English story-tellers
+in search of material for a new "shilling shocker," artists suing to
+paint her or "Mademoiselle l'Inconnue," crept from time to time into
+the genial social column of the newspaper.
+
+Stuart spent the evenings in state on a couch at the head of the
+drawing-room, where he usually remained until the guests departed. In
+this way he got a few words with his wife before she sent him to bed.
+One night his enthusiasm over her bubbled out.
+
+"You're a great woman, Beatty!" She looked a little pale, but otherwise
+unworn by her laborious month. It was not blood that fed those even
+pulses.
+
+"You will not need my help now. You can see to your business yourself,"
+she remarked.
+
+"Say, Beatty, you won't leave me again, will you!" he quavered,
+beseechingly. "I need you these last years; 'twon't be for long."
+
+"Oh, you are strong and quite well again," she asserted, not unkindly.
+
+"Will a hundred thousand do?" he pleaded. "Times are bad and ready
+money is scarce, as you know."
+
+"Sell the electric bonds," she replied, sitting down, as if to settle
+the matter.
+
+"Sell them bonds at fifty?" The old shop-keeper grew red in the face.
+
+"What's that!" she remarked, disdainfully. "What have I given?" Her
+husband said nothing. "As I told you when we first talked the matter
+over, I have done my part to the exact letter of the law. You admit I
+have been a good and faithful wife, don't you? You know," a note of
+passion crept into her colorless voice, "You know that there hasn't
+been a suggestion of scandal with our home. I married you, young,
+beautiful, admired; I am handsome now." She drew herself up
+disdainfully. "I have not wanted for opportunity, I think you might
+know; but not one man in all the world can boast I have dropped an
+eyelash for his words. Not one syllable of favor have I given any man
+but you. Am I not right?"
+
+Stuart nodded.
+
+"Then what do you haggle for over a few dollars? Have I ever given you
+reason to repent our arrangement? Have I not helped you in business, in
+social matters put you where you never could go by yourself? And do you
+think my price is high?"
+
+"Money is so scarce," Stuart protested, feebly.
+
+"Suppose it left you only half a million, all told! What's that, in
+comparison to what I have given? Think of that. I don't complain, but
+you know we women estimate things differently. And when we sell
+ourselves, we name the price; and it matters little how big it is,"
+
+Her scorn pierced the old man's somewhat leathery sensibilities.
+
+"Well, if it's a question of price, when is it going to end--when shall
+I have paid up? Next year you'll want half a million hard cash."
+
+"There is no end."
+
+The next morning, Mrs. Stuart returned to Winetka; the rupture
+threatened to prolong itself indefinitely. Stuart found it hard to give
+in completely, and it made him sore to think that their marriage had
+remained a business matter for over twenty years. And yet it was hard
+to face death without all the satisfaction money could buy him. The
+crisis came, however, in an unexpected manner.
+
+One morning Stuart found his daughter waiting for him at his office.
+She had slipped away from Winetka, and taken an early train.
+
+"What's up, Ede?"
+
+"Oh, papa!" the young girl gasped "They make me so unhappy, every day,
+and I can't stand it. Mamma wants me to marry Stuyvesant Wheelright,
+and he's there all the time."
+
+"Who's he?" Stuart asked, sharply. His daughter explained briefly.
+
+"He is what mamma calls 'eligible'; he is a great swell in New York,
+and I don't like him. Oh, papa, I can't be a _grande dame_, like mamma,
+can I? Won't you tell her so, papa? Make up with her; pay her the money
+she wants for Aunt Helen, and then perhaps she'll let me paint."
+
+"No, you're not the figure your mother is, and never will be," Stuart
+said, almost slightingly. "I don't think, Ede, you'll ever make a great
+lady like her."
+
+"I don't think she is very happy," the girl bridled, in her own defence.
+
+"Well, perhaps not, perhaps not. But who do you want to marry, anyway?
+You had better marry someone, Ede, 'fore I die."
+
+"I don't know--that is, it doesn't matter much just now. I should like
+to go to California, perhaps, with the Stearns girls. I want to paint,
+just daubs, you know--I can't do any better. But you tell mamma I can't
+be a great swell. I shouldn't be happy, either."'
+
+The old man resolved to yield. That very afternoon he drove out to
+Winetka along the lake shore. He had himself gotten up in his stiffest
+best. He held the reins high and tight, his body erect in the approved
+form; while now and then he glanced back to see if the footmen were as
+rigid as my lady demanded. For Mrs. Stuart loved good form, and he felt
+nervously apprehensive, as if he were again suing for her maiden
+favors. He was conscious, too, that he had little enough to offer
+her--the last months had brought humility. Beside him young Spencer
+lolled, enjoying, with a free heart, his day off in the gentle,
+spring-like air. Perhaps he divined that his lady would not need so
+much propitiation.
+
+They surprised a party just setting forth from the Winetka house as
+they drove up with a final flourish. Their unexpected arrival scattered
+the guests into little, curious groups; everyone anticipated immediate
+dissolution. They speculated on the terms, and the opinion prevailed
+that Stuart's expedition from town indicated complete surrender.
+Meanwhile Stuart asked for an immediate audience, and husband and wife
+went up at once to Mrs. Stuart's little library facing out over the
+bluff that descended to the lake.
+
+"Well, Beatty," old Stuart cried, without preliminary effort, "I just
+can't live without you--that's the whole of it." She smiled. "I ain't
+much longer to live, and then you're to have it all. So why shouldn't
+you take what you want now?" He drew out several checks from his
+pocket-book.
+
+"You can cable your folks at once and go ahead. You've been the best
+sort of wife, as you said, and--I guess I owe you more'n I've paid for
+your puttin' up with an old fellow like me all these years."
+
+Mrs. Stuart had a new sensation of pity for his pathetic surrender.
+
+"There's one thing, Beatty," he continued, "so long as I live you'll
+own I oughter rule in my own house, manage the boys, and that." Mrs.
+Stuart nodded. "Now I want you to come back with me and break up this
+party."
+
+Mrs. Stuart took the checks.
+
+"You've made it a bargain, Beatty. You said I was to pay your family
+what you wanted, and you were to obey me at that price?"
+
+"Well," replied Mrs. Stuart, good-humoredly. "We'll all go up
+to-morrow. Isn't that early enough?"
+
+"That ain't all, Beatty. You can't make everybody over; you couldn't
+brush me up much; you can't make a grand lady out of Edith."
+
+Mrs. Stuart looked up inquiringly.
+
+"Now you've had your way about your family, and I want you to let Ede
+alone."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"She doesn't want that Wheelright fellow, and if you think it over
+you'll see that she couldn't do as you have. She ain't the sort."
+
+Mrs. Stuart twitched at the checks nervously.
+
+"I sort of think Spencer wants her; in fact, he said so coming out
+here."
+
+"Impertinent puppy!"
+
+"And I told him he could have her, if she wanted him. I don't think I
+should like to see another woman of mine live the sort of life you have
+with me. It's hard on 'em." His voice quivered.
+
+Beatrice, Lady Stuart of Winetka, as they called her, stood silently
+looking out to the lake, reviewing "the sort of life she had lived"
+from the time she had made up her mind to take the shop-keeper's
+millions to this moment of concession. It was a grim panorama, and she
+realized now that it had not meant complete satisfaction to either
+party. Her twenty or more frozen years made her uncomfortable. While
+they waited, young Spencer and Miss Stuart came slowly up the terraced
+bluff.
+
+"Well, John," Mrs. Stuart smiled kindly. "I think this is the last
+payment,--in full. Let's go down to congratulate them."
+
+CHICAGO, March, 1895.
+
+
+
+A PROTHALAMION
+
+_The best man has gone for a game of billiards with the host. The maid
+of honor is inditing an epistle to one who must fall. The bridesmaids
+have withdrawn themselves, each with some endurable usher, to an
+appropriate retreat upon the other coasts of the veranda. The night is
+full of starlight in May. The lovers discover themselves at last alone._
+
+_He._ What was that flame-colored book Maud was reading to young Bishop?
+
+_She. The Dolly Dialogues_; you remember we read them in London when
+they came out.
+
+_He._ What irreverent literature we tolerate nowadays! I suppose it's
+the aftermath of agnosticism.
+
+_She._ It didn't occur to me that it was irreligious.
+
+_He._ Irreverent, I said--the tone of our world.
+
+_She._ But how I love that world of ours--even the _Dolly Dialogues_!
+
+_He_. Because you love it, this world you feel, you are reverent toward
+it. I have hated it so many years; it carried so much pain with it that
+I thought every expression of life was pain, and now, now, if it were
+not for Maud and the _Dolly Dialogues_, these last days would seem to
+launch us afresh upon quite another world.
+
+_She_. Yes, another world, where there is a new terror, a strange,
+inhuman terror that I never thought of before, the terror of death.
+
+_He_. Why, what a perversity! You think of immortality as so real, so
+sure! Relief from that terror of death is the proper fruit of your firm
+belief.
+
+_She_. But I never cared before about the shape, the form, the kind of
+that other life. I was content to believe it quite different from this,
+for I knew this so well, enjoyed it so much. When the jam-pot should be
+empty, I did not want another one just like it. But now....
+
+_He_. I know. And I lived so much a stranger to the experiences I could
+have about me that I was indifferent to what came after. Now, what I
+am, what I have, is so precious that I cannot believe in any change
+which should let me know of this life as past and impossible. That
+would be "the supreme grief of remembering in misery the happy days
+that have been."
+
+_She._ It makes me shiver; it is so blasphemous to hate the state of
+being of a spirit. That would seem to degrade love, if through love we
+dread to lose our bodies.
+
+_He._ Strange! You have come to this confession out of a trusting
+religion and I from doubt--at the best indifference. You are ashamed to
+confess what seems to you wholly blasphemous against that noble faith
+and prayer of a Christian; and I find an invigorating pleasure in your
+blasphemy. There is no conceivable life of a spirit to compare with the
+pain, even, of the human body; it is better to suffer than to know no
+difference.
+
+_She._ But "the resurrection of the body": perhaps the creed, word for
+word without interpretation, would not mean that empty life which we
+moderns have grown to consider the supreme and liberal conception of
+existence.
+
+_He._ Resurrection in a purified form fit for the bliss, whatever one
+of all the many shapes men have dreamed it may vision itself in!
+
+_She._ But this love of life, this excessive joy, must fade away. The
+record of the world is not that we keep that. Think of the old people
+who dream peacefully of death, after knowing all the fulness of this
+life. Think of the wretches who pray for it. That vision of the life of
+spirits which is so dreadful to us has been the comfort of the ages.
+There must be some inner necessity for it. Perhaps with our bodies our
+wills become worn out.
+
+_He_. That, I think, is the mystery--the wearing out, which is death.
+For death occurs oftener in life than we think; I know so many dead
+people who are walking about. As for sick people, physicians say that
+in a long illness they never have to warn a patient of the coming end.
+He knows it, subtly, from some dim, underground intimation. Without
+acknowledging it, he arranges himself, so to speak, for the grave, and
+comforts himself with those visions that religion holds out. Or does he
+comfort himself?
+
+But apart from the dying, there are so many out of whose bodies and
+spirits life is ebbing. It may have been a little flood-tide, but they
+know it is going. You see it on their faces. They become dull. That
+leprosy of death attacks their life, joint by joint. They lay aside one
+pleasure, one function, one employment of their minds after another.
+The machine may run on, but the soul is dying. That is what I call
+_death in life_.
+
+
+
+THE EPISODE OF LIFE.
+
+Jack Lynton is becoming stone like that. His is a case in point, and a
+good one, because the atrophy is coming about not from physical
+disease, or from any dissipation. You would call him sane and full of
+fire. He was. He married three years ago. Their life was full, too,
+like ours, and precious. They did not throw it away; they were wise
+guardians of all its possibilities. The second summer--I was with them,
+and Jack has told me much besides--Mary began talking, almost in joke,
+of these matters, of what one must prepare for; of second marriages,
+and all that. We chatted in as idle fashion as do most people over the
+utterly useless topics of life. One exquisite September day, all
+steeped in the essence of sunshine--misty everywhere over the
+fields--how well I remember it!--she spoke again in jest about
+something that might happen after her death. I saw a trace of pain on
+Jack's face. She saw it, and was sad for a moment. Now I know that all
+through that late summer and autumn those two were fighting death in
+innuendoes. They were not morbid people, but death went to bed with
+them each night.
+
+Of course, this apprehension, this miasma, came in slowly, like those
+autumn sea-mists; appearing once a month, twice this week--a little
+oftener each time.
+
+Jack is a sensible man; he does not shy at a shadow. His nerves are
+tranquil, and respond as they ought. They went about the business of
+life as joyfully as you or I, and in October we were all back in town.
+Now, Mary is dying; the doctor sees it now. I do not mean that he
+should have known it before. _She_ knew it, and _she_ noted how the
+life was fading away until the time came when what was so full of
+action, of feeling, of desire, was merely a shell--impervious to
+sensation.
+
+And Jack is dying, too--his health is good enough, but pain which he
+cannot master is killing him into numbness. He watches each joy, each
+experience with which they were both tremulous, depart. And do you
+suppose it is any comfort for those two honest souls to believe that
+their spirits will recognize each other in some curious state that has
+dispensed with sense? Do you suppose that a million of years of a
+divine communion would make up for one spoken word, for even a shade of
+agony that passes across Mary's face?
+
+_She_. If God should change their souls in that other world, then
+perhaps their longings would be quite different; so that what we think
+of with chill they would accept as a privilege.
+
+_He_. In other words, those two, who have learned to know each other in
+human terms, who have loved and suffered in the body, will have ended
+their page? Some strange transformation into another two? Why not
+simply an end to the book? Would that not be easier?
+
+_She_. If one had the courage to accept these few years of life and ask
+for no more.
+
+_He_. I think that it is cowardice which makes one accept the ghostly
+satisfaction of a surviving spirit.
+
+
+
+WHEN THE BODY IN LIFE FEELS THE SPIRIT.
+
+_She_. But have you never forgotten the body, dreamed what it would be
+to feel God? You have known those moments when your soul, losing the
+sense of contact with men or women, groped alone, in an enveloping
+calm, and knew content. I have had it in times of intoxication from
+music--not the personal, passionate music of to-day, but some one or
+two notes that sink the mazy present into darkness. I knew that my
+senses were gone for the time, and in their place I held a comfortable
+consciousness of power. There have been other times--in Lent, at the
+close of the drama of Christ--beside the sea--after a long
+dance--illusory moments when one forgot the body and wondered.
+
+_He._ I know. One night in the Sierras we camped high up above the
+summits of the range. The altitude, perhaps, or the long ride through
+the forest, kept me awake. Our fires died down; a chalky mist rose from
+the valleys, and, filtering through the ravines, at last capped the
+granite heads. The smouldering tree-trunks we had lit for fires and the
+little patch of rock where we lay, made an island in that white sea.
+Between us and the black spaces among the stars there was nothing. How
+eternally quiet it was! I can feel that isolation now coming over my
+soul like the stealthy fog, until I lay there, unconscious of my body,
+in a wondering placidity, watching the stars burn and fade. I could
+seem to feel them whirl in their way through the heavens. And then a
+thought detached itself from me, the conception of an eternity passed
+in placidity like that without the pains of sense, the obligations of
+action; I loved it then--that cold residence of thought!
+
+_She._ You have known it, too. Those moments when the body in life
+feels the state of spirit come rarely and awe one. Dear heart, perhaps
+if our spirits were purified and experienced we should welcome that
+perpetual contemplation. We cannot be Janus-faced, but the truth may
+lie with the monks, who killed this life in order to obtain a grander
+one.
+
+
+
+TWO SOULS IN HEAVEN REMEMBER THE LIFE LIVED ON EARTH.
+
+_He._ Can you conceive of any heaven for which you would change this
+shameful world? Any heaven, I mean, of spirits, not merely an Italian
+palace of delights?
+
+_She._ There is the heaven of the Pagans, the heaven of glorified
+earth, but----
+
+_He._ Would you like to dine without tasting the fruit and the wine?
+What attainment would it be to walk in fields of asphodel, when all the
+colors of all the empyrean were equally dazzling, and perceived by the
+mind alone? For my part, I should prefer to hold one human violet.
+
+_She_. The heaven of the Christian to-day?
+
+_He_. That may be interpreted in two ways: the heaven where we know
+nothing but God, and the heaven where we remember our former life. Let
+us pass the first, for the second is the heaven passionately desired by
+those who have suffered here, who have lost their friends.
+
+Suppose that we two had finished with the episode of death, and had
+come out beyond into that tranquillity of spirit where sorrows change
+to harmony. You and I would go together, or, perhaps, less fortunate,
+one should wait the other, but finally both would experience this
+transformation from body into spirit. Should you like it? Would it fill
+your heart with content--if you remembered the past? I think not.
+Suppose we should walk out some fresh morning, as we love to do now,
+and look at that earth we had been compelled to abandon. Where would be
+that fierce joy of inrushing life? for, I fancy, we should ever have a
+level of contentment and repose. Indeed, there would be no evening with
+its comforting calm, no especially still nights, no mornings: nothing
+is precious when nothing changes, and where all can be had for eternity.
+
+We should talk, as of old, but the conversation of old men and women
+would be dramatic and passionate to ours. For everything must needs be
+known, and there could be no distinctions in feeling. Should you see
+your sister dying in agony at sea, you would smile tranquilly at her
+temporary and childish sorrow. All the affairs of this life would not
+strike you, pierce your heart, or move your pulse. They would repeat
+themselves in your eyes with a monotonous precision, and they would be
+done almost before the actors had begun. Indeed, if you should not be
+incapable of blasphemy, you would rebel at this blind game, played out
+with such fever.
+
+We must not forget that our creative force would be spent: planning,
+building, executing, toiling patiently for some end that is mirrored
+only in our minds--how much of our joy comes from these!--would be laid
+aside. We should have shaken the world as much as we could: now,
+_peace_.... Again, I say, peace is felt only after a storm. Like
+Ulysses, we should look wistfully out from the isolation of heaven to
+the resounding waves of this unconquered world.
+
+Of course, one may say that the mind might fashion cures for all this;
+that a greater architect would build a saner heaven. But, remember,
+that we must not change the personal sense; in heaven, however you plan
+it, no mortal must lose that "I" so painfully built from the human
+ages. If you destroy his sense of the past life, his treasures acquired
+in this earth, you break the rules of the game: you begin again and we
+have nothing to do with it.
+
+_She._ You have not yet touched upon the cruellest condition of the
+life of the spirit.
+
+_He._ Ah, dearest, I know that. You mean the love of the person.
+Indeed, so quick it hurts me that I doubt if you would be walking that
+morning in heaven with me alone. Perhaps, however, the memories of our
+common life on earth would make you single me out. Let us think so. We
+should walk on to some secluded spot, apart from the other spirits, and
+with our eyes cast down so that we might not see that earth we were
+remembering. You would look up at last with a touch of that defiance I
+love so now, as if a young goddess were tossing away divine cares to
+shine out again in smiles. Ah, how sad!
+
+I should have some stir about the heart, some desire to kiss you, to
+embrace you, to possess you, as the inalienable joy of my life. My hand
+could not even touch you! Would our eyes look love? Could we have any
+individual longing for one-another, any affection kept apart to
+ourselves, not swallowed up in that general loving-kindness and
+universal beatification proper to spirits?
+
+I know upon earth to-day some women, great souls, too, who are
+incapable of an individual love. They may be married, they may have
+children; they are good wives and good mothers; but their souls are too
+large for a single passion. Their world blesses them, worships them,
+makes saints of them, but no man has ever touched the bottom of their
+hearts. I suppose their husbands are happy in the general happiness,
+yet they must be sad some days, over this barren love. Hours come when
+they must long, even for the little heart of a coquette that has
+dedicated itself to one other and with that other would trustingly
+venture into hell.
+
+Well, that universal love is the only kind such spirits as you and I
+should be, could know. Would that content you?
+
+We should sit mournfully silent, two impotent hearts, and remember,
+remember. I should worship your exquisite body as I had known it on
+earth. I should see that head as it bends to-night; I should hear again
+your voice in those words you were singing when I passed your way that
+first time; and your eyes would burn with the fire of our relinquished
+love. It would all come faintly out of the past, deadened by a thin
+film of recollection; now it strikes with a fierce joy, almost like a
+physical blow, and wakes me to life, to desire.
+
+_She._ Yes. We women say we love the spirit of the man we have chosen,
+but it is a spirit that acts and expresses itself in the body. To that
+body, with all its habits, so unconscious! its sure force and power, we
+are bound--more than the man is bound to the loveliness of the woman he
+adores. We--I, it is safer so, perhaps--understand what I see, what I
+feel, what I touch, what I have kissed and loved. That is mine and
+becomes mine more each day I live with it and possess it. That love of
+the concrete is our limitation, so we are told, but it is our joy.
+
+_He_. So we should sit, without words, for we would shrink from speech
+as too sad, and we should know swiftly the thought of the other. And
+when the sense of our loss became quite intolerable, we should walk on
+silently, in a growing horror of the eternity ahead. At last one of us,
+moved by some acute remembrance of our deadened selves, would go to the
+Master of the Spirits and, standing before him in rebellion, would say:
+"Cast us out as unfit for this heaven, and if Thou canst not restore us
+into that past state at least give us Hell, where we may suffer a
+common pain, instead of this passive calm and contemplation."
+
+
+
+THE MEASURE OF JOY IN LIFE.
+
+_She._ Yet, how short it will be! How awful to have the days and weeks
+and months slip by, and know that at the best there is only a reprieve
+of a few years. I think from this night I shall have my shadow of
+death. I shall always be doing things for the last time; a sad life
+that! And perhaps we change; as you say, we may become dead in life,
+prepared for a different state; and in that change we may find a new
+joy--a longing for perfection and peace.
+
+_He_. That would be an acknowledgment of defeat, indeed, and that is
+the sad result of so much living. The world has been too hard, we
+cry--there is so much heartbreaking, so much misery, so few arrive! We
+look to another world where all that will be made right, and where we
+shall suffer no more.
+
+Let the others have their opiate. You, at least, I think, are too brave
+for that kind of comfort. Does it not seem a little grasping to ask for
+eternity, because we have fifty years of action? And an eternity of
+passivity, because we have not done well with action? No, the world has
+had too much of that coddling, that kind of shuffle through, as if it
+were a way station where we must spend the night and make the best of
+sorry accommodations. Our benevolence, our warmheartedness, goes
+overmuch to making the beds a bit better, especially for the feeble and
+the sick and old, and those who come badly fitted out. We help the
+unfortunate to slide through: I think it would be more sensible to make
+it worth their while to stay. The great philanthropists are those who
+ennoble life, and make it a valuable possession. It would be well to
+poison the forlorn, hurry them post haste to some other world where
+they may find the conditions better suited. Then give their lot of
+misery and opportunity to another who can find joy in his burden.
+
+_She._ A world without mercy would be hard--it would be full of a
+strident clamor like a city street.
+
+_He._ Mercy for all; no favoritism for a few. Whoever could find a new
+joy, a lasting activity; whoever could keep his body and mind in full
+health and could show what a tremendous reality it is to live--would be
+the merciful man. There would be less of that leprosy, death in life,
+and the last problem of death itself would not be insurmountable.
+
+So I think the common men who know things, concrete things,--the price
+of grain, if you will; the men of affairs who have their minds on the
+struggle; the artists who in paint or words explore new
+possibilities--all these are the merciful men, the true comforters whom
+we should honor. They make life precious--aside from its physical value.
+
+You know the keen movement that runs through your whole being when you
+come face to face with some great Rembrandt portrait. How much the man
+knew who made it, who saw it unmade! Or that Bellini's Pope we used to
+watch, whose penetrating smile taught us about life. And the greater
+Titian, the man with a glove, that looks at you like a live soul, one
+whom a man created to live for the joy of other men. In another form, I
+feel the same gift of life in a new enterprise: a railroad carried
+through; a corrupt government cleaned for the day. And, again, that
+Giorgione at Paris, where the men and women are doing nothing in
+particular, but living in the sunlight, a joyful, pagan band.
+
+And then think of the simpler, deeper notes of the symphony, the
+elements of light and warmth and color in our world, the very seeds of
+existence. I count that day the richest when we floated into the Cape
+harbor in the little rowboat, bathed in the afternoon sun. The
+fishermen were lazily winging in, knowing, like birds, the storm that
+would soon be on them. We drank the sun in all our pores. It rained
+down on you, and glorified your face and the flesh of your arms and
+your hands. We landed, and walked across the evening fields to that
+little hut. Then nature lived and glowed with the fervor of actual
+experience. You and the air and the sun-washed ocean, all were some
+great throbs of actualities.
+
+_She._ You remember how I liked to ride with you and sail, the stormy
+days. How I loved to feel your body battling even feebly with the wind
+and rain. I loved to see your face grow crimson under the lash of the
+waves, and then to _feel_ you, alive and mine!
+
+_He._ It would not be bad, a heaven like that, of perpetual physical
+presentiment, of storms and sun, and rich fields, and long waves
+rolling up the beaches. For nerves ever alive and strung healthily all
+along the gamut of sensation! Days with terrific gloom, like the German
+forests of the Middle Ages; days with small nights spent on the sea;
+September days with a concealed meaning in the air. One would ride and
+battle and sail and eat. Then long kisses of love in bodies that spoke.
+
+_She._ And yet, how strange to life as it is is that picture--like some
+mediaeval song with the real people left out; strange to the dirty
+streets, the breakfasts in sordid rooms, the ignoble faces, the houses
+with failure written across the door-posts; strange to the life of papa
+and mamma; to the comfortable home; the chatter of the day; the horses;
+the summer trips--everything we have lived, you and I.
+
+_He._ Incomplete, and hence merely a literary paradise. It is well,
+too, as it is, for until we can go to bed with the commonplace, and
+dine with sorrow, we are but children,--brilliant children, but with
+the unpleasant mark of the child. Not sorrow accepted, my love, and
+bemoaned; but sorrow fought and dislodged. He is great who feels the
+pain and sorrow and absorbs it and survives--he who can remain calm in
+it and believe in it. It is a fight; only the strong hold their own.
+That fight we call duty.
+
+And duty makes the only conceivable world given the human spirit and
+the human frame: even should we believe that the world is a revolving
+palaestrinum without betterment. And the next world--the next? It must
+be like ours, too, in its action; it must call upon the same
+activities, the same range of desires and loves and hates. Grander,
+perhaps, more adorned, with greater freedom, with more swing, with a
+less troubled song as it rushes on its course. But a world like unto
+ours, with effort, with the keen jangle of persons in effort, with
+sorrow, aye, and despair: for there must be forfeits!
+
+Is that not better than to slink away to death with the forlorn comfort
+of a
+
+"_Requiescat in pace?_"
+
+PARIS, December, 1895.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories, by
+Robert Herrick
+
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