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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of With the Procession, by Henry B. Fuller
+
+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: With the Procession
+
+Author: Henry B. Fuller
+
+Posting Date: August 4, 2012 [EBook #8891]
+Release Date: September, 2005
+First Posted: August 21, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH THE PROCESSION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HENRY B. FULLER
+
+With
+
+the
+
+Procession
+
+
+Introduction by Mark Harris
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+When old Mr. Marshall finally took to his bed, the household viewed this
+action with more surprise than sympathy, and with more impatience than
+surprise. It seemed like the breaking down of a machine whose
+trustworthiness had been hitherto infallible; his family were almost
+forced to the acknowledgement that he was but a mere human being after
+all. They had enjoyed a certain intimacy with him, in lengths varying
+with their respective ages, but they had never made a full avowal that
+his being rested on any tangible physical basis. Rather had they fallen
+into the way of considering him as a disembodied intelligence, whose sole
+function was to direct the transmutation of values and credits and
+resources and opportunities into the creature comforts demanded by the
+state of life unto which it had please Providence to call them; and their
+dismay was now such as might occur at the Mint if the great stamp were
+suddenly and of its own accord to cease its coinage of double-eagles and
+to sink into a silence of supine idleness. His wife and children
+acknowledged, indeed, his head and his hands--those it were impossible to
+overlook; but his head stopped with the rim of his collar, while his
+hands--those long, lean hands, freckled, tufted goldishly between joints
+and knuckles--they never followed beyond the plain gilt sleeve-buttons
+(marked with a Roman M) which secured the overlapping of his cuffs. No,
+poor old David Marshall was like one of the early Tuscan archangels,
+whose scattered members are connected by draperies merely, with no
+acknowledged organism within; nor were his shining qualities fully
+recognized until the resolutions passed by the Association of Wholesale
+Grocers reached the hands of his bereaved----
+
+But this is no way to begin.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The grimy lattice-work of the drawbridge swung to slowly, the steam-tug
+blackened the dull air and roiled the turbid water as it dragged its
+schooner on towards the lumber-yards of the South Branch, and a long line
+of waiting vehicles took up their interrupted course through the smoke
+and the stench as they filed across the stream into the thick of business
+beyond: first a yellow street-car; then a robust truck laden with
+rattling sheet-iron, or piled high with fresh wooden pails and willow
+baskets; then a junk-cart bearing a pair of dwarfed and bearded Poles,
+who bumped in unison with the jars of its clattering springs; then,
+perhaps, a bespattered buggy, with reins jerked by a pair of sinewy and
+impatient hands. Then more street-cars; then a butcher's cart loaded with
+the carcasses of calves--red, black, piebald--or an express wagon with a
+yellow cur yelping from its rear; then, it may be, an insolently
+venturesome landau, with crested panel and top-booted coachman. Then
+drays and omnibuses and more street-cars; then, presently, somewhere in
+the line, between the tail end of one truck and the menacing tongue of
+another, a family carry-all--a carry-all loaded with its family, driven
+by a man of all work, drawn by a slight and amiable old mare, and
+encumbered with luggage which shows the labels of half the hotels of
+Europe.
+
+It is a very capable and comprehensive vehicle, as conveyances of that
+kind go. It is not new, it is not precisely in the mode; but it shows
+material and workmanship of the best grade, and it is washed, oiled,
+polished with scrupulous care. It advances with some deliberation, and
+one might fancy hearing in the rattle of its tires, or in the suppressed
+flapping of its rear curtain, a word of plaintive protest. "I am not of
+the great world," it seems to say; "I make no pretence to fashion. We
+are steady and solid, but we are not precisely in society, and we are
+far, very far indeed, from any attempt to cut a great figure. However, do
+not misunderstand our position; it is not that we are under, nor that we
+are exactly aside; perhaps we have been left just a little behind. Yes,
+that might express it--just a little behind."
+
+How are they to catch up again--how rejoin the great caravan whose fast
+and furious pace never ceases, never slackens? Not, assuredly, by the
+help of the little sorrel mare, whose white mane swings so mildly, and
+whose pale eyelashes droop so diffidently when some official hand at a
+crowded crossing brings her to a temporary stand-still. Not by the help
+of the coachman, who wears a sack-coat and a derby hat, and whose frank,
+good-natured face turns about occasionally for a friendly participation
+in the talk that is going on behind. Can it be, then, that any hopes for
+an accelerated movement are packed away in the bulging portmanteau which
+rests squeezed in between the coachman's legs? Two stout straps keep it
+from bursting, and the crinkled brown leather of its sides is completely
+pasted over with the mementoes used by the hosts of the Old World to
+speed the parting guest. "London" and "Paris" shine in the lustre of the
+last fortnight; "Tangier" is distinctly visible; "Buda-Pest" may be
+readily inferred despite the overlapping labels of "Wien" and "Bâle";
+while away off to one corner a crumpled and lingering shred points back,
+though uncertainly, to the Parthenon and the Acropolis. And in the midst
+of this flowery field is planted a large M after the best style of the
+White Star Line.
+
+Who has come home bearing all these sheaves?
+
+Is it, to begin with, the young girl who shares the front seat with the
+driver, and who faces with an innocent unconcern all the clamor and evil
+of a great city? There is a half-smile on her red lips, and her black
+eyes sparkle with a girlish gayety--for she does not know how bad the
+world is. At the same time her chin advances confidently, and her dark
+eyebrows contract with a certain soft imperiousness--for she does not
+know how hard the world is nor how unyielding. Sometimes she withdraws
+her glance from the jostling throng to study the untidy and overlapping
+labels on the big portmanteau; she betrays a certain curiosity, but she
+shows at the same time a full determination not to seem over-impressed.
+No, the returned traveller is not Rosy Marshall; all that _she_ knows of
+life she has learned from the broadcast cheapness of English
+story-tellers and from a short year's schooling in New York.
+
+Is it, then, the older girl who fills half of the rear seat and who, as
+the cruel phrase goes, will never see thirty again? She seems to be tall
+and lean, and one divines, somehow, that her back is narrow and of a
+slab-like flatness. Her forehead is high and full, and its bulging
+outlines are but slightly softened by a thin and dishevelled bang. Her
+eyes are of a light and faded blue, and have the peculiar stare which
+results from over-full eyeballs when completely bordered by white. Her
+long fingers show knotted joints and nails that seem hopelessly plebeian;
+sometimes she draws on open-work lace mitts, and then her hands appear to
+be embroiling each other in a mutual tragedy. No, poor Jane is
+thoroughly, incorruptibly indigenous; she is the best and dearest girl in
+half the world, as you shall see; but all her experiences have lain
+between Sandusky and Omaha.
+
+Perhaps, then, the returned traveller is the elderly woman seated by her
+side. Perhaps--and perhaps not. For she seems a bit too dry and sapless
+and self-contained--as little susceptible, in fact, to the gentle dews of
+travel as an umbrella in a waterproof case. Moreover, it is doubtful if
+her bonnet would pass current beyond the national confines. One surmises
+that she became years ago the victim of arrested development; that she
+is a kind of antiquated villager--a geologic survival from an earlier
+age; that she is a house-keeper cumbered and encompassed by minute cares
+largely of her own making. It is an easy guess that, for Eliza Marshall,
+London is in another world, that Tangier is but a remote and
+impracticable abstraction, and that all her strength and fortitude might
+be necessary merely to make the trip to Peoria.
+
+There is but one other occupant of the carriage remaining--the only one,
+after all, who can or could be the owner of the baggage. He is a young
+man of twenty-three, and he sits with his back to the horse on a little
+seat which has been let down for the occasion between the usual two; his
+knees crowd one of the girls and his elbows the other. He seems
+uncommonly alert and genial; he focusses brilliantly the entire attention
+of the party. His little black mustache flaunts with a picturesque
+upward flourish, and it is supplemented by a small tuft at the edge of
+his underlip--an embellishment which overlays any slight trace of
+lingering juvenility with an effect which is most knowing, experienced,
+caprine, if you like, and which makes fair amends for the blanched
+cheeks, wrinkled brows and haggard eyes that the years have yet to
+accomplish for him. A navy-blue tie sprinkled with white interlacing
+circles spreads loosely and carelessly over the lapels of his coat; and
+while his clever eyes dart intelligently from one side to the other of
+the crowded thoroughfare, his admiring family make their own shy
+observations upon his altered physiognomy and his novel apparel--upon
+his shoes and his hat particularly; they become acquainted thus with the
+Florentine ideal of foot-wear, and the latest thing evolved by Paris in
+the way of head-gear.
+
+This young man has passed back through London quite unscathed. Deduce
+from his costume the independence of his character and the precise slant
+of his propensities.
+
+The carriage moves on, with a halt here, a spurt there, and many a jar
+and jolt between; and Truesdale Marshall throws over the shifting and
+resounding panorama an eye freshened by a four years' absence and
+informed by the contemplation of many strange and diverse spectacles.
+Presently a hundred yards of unimpeded travel ends in a blockade of
+trucks and street-cars and a smart fusillade of invective. During this
+enforced stoppage the young man becomes conscious of a vast unfinished
+structure that towers gauntly overhead through the darkening and
+thickening air, and for which a litter of iron beams in the roadway
+itself seems to promise an indefinite continuation skyward.
+
+"Two, three, four--six, seven--nine," he says, craning his neck and
+casting up his eye. Then, turning with a jocular air to the elder lady
+opposite, "I don't suppose that Marshall & Belden, for instance, have got
+up to nine stories yet!"
+
+"Marshall & Belden!" she repeated. Her enunciation was strikingly
+ejaculatory, and she laid an impatient and unforgiving emphasis upon the
+latter name. "I don't know what will happen if your father doesn't assert
+himself pretty soon."
+
+"I should think as much!" observed the elder girl, explosively; "or they
+will never get up even to seven. The idea of Mr. Belden's proposing to
+enlarge by taking that ground adjoining! But of course poor pa didn't put
+up the building himself, nor anything; oh no! So _he_ doesn't know
+whether the walls will stand a couple of extra stories or not. Upon my
+word," she went on with increased warmth, "I don't feel quite sure
+whether pa was the one to start the business in the first place and to
+keep it going along ever since, or whether he's just a new errand-boy,
+who began there a week ago! August, are we stuck here to stay forever?"
+
+The little sorrel mare started up again and entered upon another stage of
+her journey. The first lights began to appear in the store-fronts; the
+newsboys were shrieking the last editions of the evening papers; the
+frenzied comedy of belated shopping commenced to manifest itself upon the
+pavements.
+
+The throng of jostling women was especially thick and eager before a vast
+and vulgar front whose base was heaped with cheap truck cheaply ticketed,
+and whose long row of third-story windows was obscured by a great reach
+of cotton cloth tacked to a flimsy wooden frame. Unprecedented bargains
+were offered in gigantic letters by the new proprietors, "Eisendrath &
+Heide..."--the rest of the name flapped loosely in the wind.
+
+"Alas, poor Wethersby, I knew him well," observed Marshall, absently. He
+cast a pensive eye upon the still-remaining name of the former
+proprietor, and took off his hat to weigh it in his hands with a pretence
+of deep speculation. "Well, the Philistines haven't got hold of _us_ yet,
+have they?" he remarked, genially; he had not spent six months in Vienna
+for nothing. "I suppose we are still worth twenty sous in the franc, eh?"
+
+"I suppose," replied his mother, with a grim brevity. She rather groped
+for his meaning, but she was perfectly certain of her own.
+
+"I guess pa's all right," declared his sister, "as long as he is left
+alone and not interfered with."
+
+The evening lights doubled and trebled--long rows of them appeared
+overhead at incalculable altitudes. The gongs of the cable cars clanged
+more and more imperiously as the crowds surged in great numbers round
+grip and trailer. The night life of the town began to bestir itself, and
+little Rosy, from her conspicuous place, beamed with a bright intentness
+upon its motley spectacle, careless of where her smiles might fall. For
+her the immodest theatrical poster drooped in the windows of saloons, or
+caught a transient hold upon the hoardings of uncompleted buildings;
+brazen blare and gaudy placards (disgusting rather than indecent) invited
+the passer-by into cheap museums and music-halls; all the unclassifiable
+riff-raff that is spawned by a great city leered from corners, or
+slouched along the edge of the gutters, or stood in dark doorways, or
+sold impossible rubbish in impossible dialects wherever the public
+indulgence permitted a foothold.
+
+To Rosy's mother all this involved no impropriety. Eliza Marshall's
+Chicago was the Chicago of 1860, an Arcadia which, in some dim and
+inexplicable way, had remained for her an Arcadia still--bigger, noisier,
+richer, yet different only in degree, and not essentially in kind. She
+herself had traversed these same streets in the days when they were the
+streets of a mere town, Fane, accompanying her mother's courses as a
+child, had seen the town develop into a city. And now Rosy followed in
+her turn, though the _urbs in horto_ of the earlier time existed only
+in the memory of "old settlers" and in the device of the municipal
+seal, while the great Black City stood out as a threatening and evil
+actuality. Mild old Mabel had drawn them all in turn or together, and had
+philosophized upon the facts as little as any of them; but Rosy's brother
+(who had been about, and who knew more than he was ever likely to tell)
+looked round at her now and then with a vague discomfort.
+
+"There!" called their mother, suddenly; "did you see that?" A big lumpish
+figure on the crossing had loomed up at the mare's head, a rough hand had
+seized her bridle, and a raw voice with a rawer brogue had vented a piece
+of impassioned profanity on both beast and driver. "Well, I don't thank
+that policeman for hitting Mabel on the nose, I can tell him. August,
+did you get his number?"
+
+"No'm," answered the coachman. He turned round familiarly. "I got his
+breath."
+
+"I should think so," said Truesdale. "And such shoes as they have, and
+such hands, and such linen! Didn't that fellow see what we were? Couldn't
+he realize that we pay for the buttons on his coat? Mightn't he have
+tried to apprehend that we were people of position here long before he
+had scraped his wretched steerage-money together? And what was it he had
+working in his cheek?"
+
+"I think I know," responded August mumbling.
+
+"Like enough," rejoined Truesdale, with his eye upon the coachman's own
+jaw.
+
+His mother's sputter of indignation died rapidly away. It was, indeed,
+her notion that the guardians of the public peace should show some degree
+of sobriety, respect, neatness, and self-control, as well as a reasonable
+familiarity with the accents of the country; but her Arcadia was full of
+painful discrepancies, and she did not add to her own pain by too serious
+an attempt to reconcile them. Besides, what is a policeman compared with
+a detective?
+
+Mabel, released from the arm of the law, jarred over another line of car
+tracks, whereon a long row of monsters glared at one another's slow
+advances with a single great red eye, and then she struck a freer gait on
+the succeeding stretch of Belgian blocks. Presently she passed a lofty
+building which rose in colonnades one above another, but whose walls were
+stained with smoke, whose windows were half full of shattered panes,
+and whose fraudulent metallic cornice curled over limply and jarred and
+jangled in the evening breeze--one more of the vicissitudes of mercantile
+life.
+
+"Well, I'm glad the fire-fiend hasn't got Marshall & Co. yet," said the
+young man, restored to good-humor by the sight of another's misfortune.
+He used unconsciously the old firm name.
+
+"But he'd get us fast enough if the insurance was taken off," declared
+Jane. "Do you know, Dicky," she went on, "how much that item costs us a
+year? Or have you any idea how much it has amounted to in the last
+twenty, without our ever getting one cent back? Well, there's ten
+thousand in the Hartford and eight in the Monongahela and eleven in--"
+
+"Dear me, Jane!" exclaimed her brother, in some surprise; "where do you
+pick up all this?"
+
+Rosy turned her head half round. "Mr. Brower tells her," she said, with a
+disdainful brevity.
+
+Her face was indistinct in the twilight, but if its expression
+corresponded with the inflection of her voice, her nostrils were inflated
+and her lips were curled in disparagement. To Jane, in her dark corner of
+the carriage, this was patent enough. Indeed, it was sufficiently obvious
+to all that Jane's years availed little to save her from the searching
+criticism of her younger sister, and that Miss Rosamund Marshall bestowed
+but slight esteem--or, at least, but slight approval--upon Mr. Theodore
+Brower.
+
+"Supposing he _does_ tell me!" called Jane, absurdly allowing herself to
+be put on the defensive. "It's a mighty good thing, I take it. If there's
+anybody else in the family but me who knows or cares anything about poor
+pa's business, I should like to be told who it is!"
+
+"That will do, Jane," sounded her mother's voice in cold correction.
+"There's no need for you to talk so. Your father has run his own business
+now for thirty-five years, with every year better than the year before,
+and I imagine he knows how to look out for himself. Thank goodness, we
+are on a respectable pavement once more."
+
+Mabel, turning a sudden corner, had given them a quick transition from
+the rattle and jar of granite to the gentle palpitation that is possible
+on well-packed macadam. The carriage passed in review a series of
+towering and glittering hotels, told off a score or more of residences of
+the elder day, and presently drew up before the gate of an antiquated
+homestead in the neighborhood of the Panoramas.
+
+"Just the same old place," murmured Truesdale, as he writhed out of his
+cramped quarters and stood on the carriage-block in the dusk to stretch
+his legs. "Wonderful how we contrive to stand stock-still in the midst of
+all this stir and change!"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+It was at Vevey, one morning late in August, that Truesdale Marshall
+received the letter which turned his face homeward--the summons which
+made it seem obligatory for him to report at headquarters, as he phrased
+it, without too great a delay. He was pacing along the terrace which
+bounded the pension garden lakeward, and his eye wandered back and forth
+between the superscription of the envelope and the distant mountain-shore
+of Savoy, as it appeared through the tantalizing line of clipped acacias
+which bordered the roadway that ran below him.
+
+"'Richard T. Marshall, Esq.,'" he read, slowly, with his eye on the
+accumulation of post-marks and renewed addresses. "They keep it up right
+along, don't they? I can't make them feel that initials on an envelope
+are not the best form. I can't bring them to see that 'Esq.' on foreign
+letters is worse than a superfluity." He referred once more to the
+mountains of Savoy; they seemed to offer no loophole of escape. "Well,
+I've got to do it, I suppose."
+
+He made some brief calculations, and found that he could put himself in
+marching order within a month or so. There was the trunk stored at
+Geneva; there was that roomful of furniture at
+Freiburg--Freiburg-im-Breisgau; there was that brace of paintings boxed
+up in Florence; and there were the frayed and loosely flying ends of
+many miscellaneous friendships.
+
+"I should think the end of October might do for them," he droned,
+reflectively. "They can't mean to cut me off any shorter than that."
+
+He saw the steamer taking on passengers between the two rotund
+chestnut-trees that adorned the end of the stubby little stone pier.
+Voices of shrieking gladness came across from the coffee-tables on the
+terrace of the Three Crowns, his nearest neighbor to the right.
+
+"Well, America is meeting me half way," he said; "I don't want to seem
+reluctant myself. Suppose we make it Southampton, about October 15th?"
+
+Truesdale Marshall had been away from home and friends for about the
+length of time ordinarily required by a course through college, but it
+was not at college that most of this period had been passed. He had left
+Yale at the end of his sophomore year, and had taken passage, not for
+Chicago, but for Liverpool, compromising thus his full claims on nurture
+from an alma mater for the more alluring prospect of culture and
+adventure on the Continent. This supplementary course of self-improvement
+and self-entertainment had now continued for three years.
+
+He had written back to his family at discreet intervals, his
+communications not being altogether untinctured, it is true, by
+considerations of a financial nature; and his sister Jane, who charged
+herself with the preservation of this correspondence, would have
+undertaken to reconstruct his route and to make a full report of his
+movements up to date on ten minutes' notice. She kept his letters in a
+large box-file that she had teased from her father at the store; and two
+or three times a year she overhauled her previous entries, so to speak,
+and added whatever new ones were necessary to bring her books down to the
+present day.
+
+She pleased herself, on the occasion of such reviews, with the thought
+that her brother's long absence was so largely and so laboriously
+educational. There, for example, was his winter and spring at Heidelberg,
+which she figured as given over to Kant and Hegel. This sojourn was
+attested by a photograph which showed her brother in a preposterous
+little round cap, as well as with a bar of sticking-plaster (not markedly
+philosophical, it must be confessed) upon one cheek.
+
+Again, there was his six months' stay in Paris, during which time he had
+dabbled in pigments at one of the studios affected by Americans. Her
+vouchers for this period consisted of several water-colors; they were
+done in a violent and slap-dash fashion, and had been inspired,
+apparently, by scenes in the environs of the capital. They were marked
+"Meudon" and "St. Cloud" and "Suresnes," with the dates; both names and
+dates were put where they showed up very prominently. Jane was rather
+overcome by these sketches on a first view, and after she had pinned them
+up on the walls of her bedroom (she had made no scruple over an immediate
+individual appropriation) she was obliged to acknowledge that you had to
+step back some little distance in order to "get them."
+
+Then there was his year at Milan, during which he was engaged in the
+cultivation of his voice at the Conservatory. "A whole year," said
+innocent Jane to herself; "think of Dick's staying in one place as long
+as that!" She made no account of the easily accessible joys of Monte
+Carlo, but figured him, instead, as running interminable scales at all
+hours of day and night, and as participating, now and then, in the chorus
+at the Scala, for which purpose, as he wrote her, he had had a pair
+of tights made to order. In another letter he sent her a pen-and-ink
+sketch of himself as he appeared while studying the last act of
+"Favorita." He explained that the large looking-glasses surrounding him
+were designed to give the disillusioned Fernando opportunity to see
+whether his facial expression was corresponding to the nature of the
+music he was interpreting.
+
+All this completely overpowered poor Jane; it enveloped her brother's
+head in a roseate halo; it wrapped him in the sweet and voluminous folds
+of a never-failing incense; it imparted a warm glow to his coolish summer
+in the Engadine, and it illumined his archaeological prowlings through
+the Peloponnesus; it opened up a dozen diverging vistas to the
+enthusiastic girl herself, and advanced her rapidly in long courses of
+expansion and improvement. Above all, it filled her with a raging
+impatience for his return. "Between him and me," she would say to
+herself, "something _may_ be done. Pa'll never do anything to get us out
+of this rut; nor ma. Neither will Roger nor Alice. And Rosy--well, Rosy's
+too young to count on, yet. But Richard Truesdale Marshall, the younger
+son of the well-known David Marshall, of Lake Street, recently returned
+from a long course of travel and study abroad"--she seemed to be quoting
+from the printed column--"_can_. Especially when assisted by his sister,
+the clever and intellectual Miss Jane Marshall, who--"
+
+"Oh, bother this bang!" exclaimed Miss Jane Marshall, pettishly. She
+threw her comb down between pin-cushion and cologne bottle, and flattened
+a frowning and protesting glance against her mirror. "I guess I'll give
+up trying to be beautiful, and just be quaint."
+
+David Marshall received his son with less exaltation. He had a vivid
+recollection of the liberal letter of credit which had started the young
+man on his way, and this recollection had subsequently been touched up
+and heightened by the payment of many drafts for varying but considerable
+amounts; and he was now concerning himself with the practical question,
+What have I got for my money? He felt his own share in the evolution
+of this brilliant and cultured youth, whose corona of accomplishments
+might well dazzle and even abash a plain business person; and he awaited
+with interest a response to the reasonable interrogation, to what end
+shall all these means be turned? He received his son with a dry and
+cautious kindness, determined not to be too precipitate in ascertaining
+the young man's ideas as to the future--a week more or less could make no
+great difference now.
+
+David Marshall was a tall, spare man whose slow composure of carriage
+invested him with a sort of homely dignity. He wore a reddish beard, now
+largely touched with white--a mixture whose effect prompted the
+suggestion that his grandfather might have been a Scotchman; and the look
+from his blue eyes (though now no longer at their brightest) convinced
+you that his sight was competent to cover the field of vision to which he
+had elected to restrict himself. He seemed completely serious, to have
+been so always, to have been born half grown up, to have been dowered at
+the start with too keen a consciousness of the burdens and
+responsibilities of life. Coltishness, even by a retrospect of fifty
+years, it was impossible to attribute to him. You imagined him as having
+been caught early, broken to harness at once, and kept between the shafts
+ever since. It was easy to figure him as backing into position with a
+sweet and reasonable docility--a docility which saw no other course or
+career for a properly minded young horse, and which looked upon the
+juvenile antics of others in the herd as an unintelligible and rather
+reprehensible procedure. He knew what he was for, and his way was before
+him.
+
+He had acted on his knowledge, and now, at sixty, he seemed still to be
+travelling over the same long straight road, blinders at his eyes, a high
+wall on either side, no particular goal in the dusty distance, and an air
+of patient, self-approving resignation all about him. His burden, too,
+had increased with the years--just as his rut had grown deeper. Counting
+his family and his poor relations, and his employés and _their_ families
+and poor relations, five or six hundred people were dependent on him.
+Many of these, of course, had seats so low that they were almost choked
+by the dust of the roadway; but others, more pleasantly situated, were
+able to overlook the enclosing walls and to enjoy the prospect beyond.
+Among these last was his younger son, who sat in the highest place of
+all, and thence surveyed the universe.
+
+The Marshall house had been built at the time of the opening of the War,
+and as far "out" as seemed advisable for a residence of the better sort.
+In those days no definite building-line had been established, so that it
+was quite a walk from the front gate to the foot of the front steps.
+Neither, at that time, was ground too valuable to make a good bit of yard
+impracticable--so that the house had plenty of space on all sides. It was
+a low, plain, roomy building with a sort of belvedere and a porch or two.
+The belvedere was lingeringly reminiscent of the vanishing classic, and
+the decorative woodwork of the porches showed some faint traces of the
+romantico-lackadaisical style which filled up the years between the ebb
+of the Greek and the vulgar flood-tide of Second-empire renaissance.
+Taken altogether, a sedate, stable, decorous old homestead, fit for the
+family within it.
+
+In the back yard, behind a latticed screen-work, some shrubs and bushes
+survived from a garden once luxuriant, but now almost vanished. There had
+been a cherry-tree, too--a valiant little grower, which put forth a cloud
+of white blossoms late in every May, and filled a small pail with fruit
+early in every July. It was thus that Jane was enabled to celebrate her
+birthday (which fell about this time of year) with a fair-sized cherry
+pie; and in especially favorable seasons enough cherries were left over
+to make a small tart for Rosy.
+
+But the atmosphere had years ago become too urban for the poor
+cherry-tree, which had long since disappeared from mortal ken; and the
+last of the currant-bushes, too, were holding their own but poorly
+against the smoke and cinders of metropolitan life. One of Jane's
+earliest recollections was that of putting on her flat and taking her tin
+pan and accompanying her mother out to pick currants for the annual
+jelly-making. Her mother wore a flat, too, and carried a tin pan--both of
+proportionate size. The flats had long since been cast aside, and the
+pans had become less necessary with the dwindling of the currant-bushes;
+but the jelly-making returned with every recurring July. A great many
+quarts of alien currants and a great many pounds of white sugar were
+fused in that hot and sticky kitchen, and then the red-stained cloths
+were hung to dry upon the last remaining bushes. Jane would sometimes
+reproach her parent with such a proceeding--which seemed to her hardly
+less reprehensible than the seething of a kid in its mother's milk; but
+Eliza Marshall had scant receptivity for any such poetical analogies. The
+cloths, as seen through the lattice-work, had a somewhat sensational
+aspect; they spoke of battle and murder and sudden death, and sometimes
+the policeman passing by, if he was a new one, thought for a second that
+he had stumbled on a "clew."
+
+Eliza Marshall took this risk quite willingly; the idea of buying her
+jelly ready-made never crossed her mind. No; she made her own year after
+year, and poured it out into her little glass tumblers, and sealed each
+tumbler with a half-sheet of notepaper, and marked each sheet according
+to the sort of jelly it protected--sometimes she made grape or
+crab-apple, too. She doled out her products very economically during the
+winter and spring. Then she would discover, about the first of June,
+that she had a three months' supply still on hand. Then, during the
+summer, the family would live on jelly and little else.
+
+But she remained, year after year, the same firm, determined, peremptory
+person in her kitchen; she never spared herself there, and she never
+spared anybody else.
+
+She gave no more quarter at the front of the house than at the back. To
+get fresh air into her dim and time-worn parlor and to keep sun and dust
+and smoke out--this was her one besetting problem. There were those windy
+days at the end of autumn, after the sprinkling-carts had been withdrawn
+from the boulevard; there were the days (about three hundred and
+sixty-five in the year) when the smoke and cinders from the suburban
+trains made her house as untidy as a switch-yard; and there was her
+husband's unconquerable propensity for smoking--a pleasure which she
+compelled him to take outside on the foot pavement. Here, on pleasant
+evenings, he would walk up and down alone, in a slow, meditative
+fashion--having little to say and nobody to say it to--until bedtime
+came.
+
+This came early--from a habit early formed. The Chicago of his young
+married life had given him little reason for being abroad after half-past
+nine at night, and he appeared to find little more reason now than then.
+It would not, indeed, have been impossible to make him see that, in the
+interval, balls, concerts, spectacles, and such-like urban doings had
+come on with increasing number and brilliancy, and that there were now
+more interests to justify a man in remaining up until half-past ten, or
+even until eleven. But you could not have convinced him that all these
+opportunities were his.
+
+Yet the consciousness of festivities sometimes obtruded upon his
+indifference. Now and then on summer evenings, when the wind was from the
+west, certain brazen discords originating a street or two behind the
+house would come to advise him that the Circassian girl was on view, or
+that a convention of lady snake-charmers was in session. Then there would
+be weeks of winter nights when the frozen macadam in front of the house
+would ring with a thousand prancing hoofs and rumble for an hour with a
+steady flow of carriages, and the walls of the great temple of music a
+few hundred yards to the north would throw back all this clamor, with the
+added notes of slamming doors and shouted numbers and epic struggles
+between angry drivers and determined policemen; sometimes he would extend
+his smoking stroll far enough to skirt the edge of all this Babel. Then,
+towards midnight, long after all staid and sensible people were abed, the
+flood would roll back, faster yet under the quiet moon, louder yet
+through the frosty air. But he never met the Circassian beauty, and he
+would have found "l'Africaine," for example, both tedious and
+unreasonable. To him each of these publics was new, and no less new than
+alien. Besides, it would have seemed an uncanny thing to be abroad and
+stirring at midnight.
+
+Why did he go to bed at half-past nine? In order that he might be at the
+store by half-past seven. Why must he be at the store by half-past seven?
+Because a very large area to the west and northwest of the town looked to
+him for supplies of teas, coffees, spices, flour, sugar, baking-powder;
+because he had always been accustomed to furnish these supplies; because
+it was the only thing he wanted to do; because it was the only thing he
+could do; because it was the only thing he was pleased and proud to do;
+because it was the sole thing which enabled him to look upon himself as a
+useful, stable, honored member of society.
+
+But it need not be supposed that the Marshalls in their young married
+days had lived totally bereft of social diversion. Quite the contrary.
+They had had tea-parties and card-parties now and then, and more than
+once they had thrown their house open for a church sociable. But the day
+came when the church jumped from its old site three blocks away to a new
+site three miles away. And by that time most of their old neighbors and
+fellow church-members had gone too--some southward, some northward, some
+heavenward. Then business, in the guise of big hotels, began marching
+down the street upon them, and business in all manner of guise ran up
+towering walls behind them that shut off the summer sun hours before it
+was due to sink; and traffic rang incessant gongs at their back door, and
+drew lengthening lines of freight-cars across the lake view from their
+front one; and Sunday crowds strolled and sprawled over the wide green
+between the roadway and the waterway, and tramps and beggars and peddlers
+advanced daily in a steady and disconcerting phalanx, and bolts and bars
+and chains and gratings and eternal vigilance were all required to keep
+mine from becoming thine; until, in the year of grace 1893, the Marshalls
+had almost come to realize that they were living solitary and in a state
+of siege. But they had never yet thought of capitulation nor of retreat;
+they were the Old Guard; they were not going to surrender, nor to die
+either.
+
+As the advance guard of all, old David Marshall frequently occupied the
+most advanced bastion of all, the parlor bay-window. Here, in the
+half-dark, he was accustomed to sit and think; and his family let him sit
+and think, unconscious that it would sometimes be a kindness to break in
+upon the habit. He pondered on the markets and on the movements of trade;
+he kept one eye for the shabby wayfarers who threw a longing look upon
+his basement gratings, and another for the showers of sparks and black
+plumes of smoke which came to remind him of corporate encroachments upon
+municipal rights. And here one evening he sat, some few days after his
+son's return, while a hubbub of female voices came to him from the next
+room. His sister-in-law from three miles down the street, and his married
+daughter from ten miles out in the suburbs, had come to show some
+civility to the returned traveller, and the conjunction of two such stars
+was not to be effected in silence. Nor was silence to be secured even by
+a retreat from one room to another.
+
+"Well, pa, you _are_ here, sure enough." A hand pulled aside the curtain
+and made the bay-window a part of the parlor again. "Poking off by
+yourself, and thinking--I know. When I've told you so many times not to."
+
+It was Jane. It was her office to keep the family from disintegration.
+None of them realized it--hardly she herself.
+
+She perched on the arm of his big chair, placed her hand on his forehead,
+and looked in his face with a quizzical pretence of impatience. These
+little passages sometimes occurred in the bay-window--hardly anywhere
+else.
+
+"Well, what is it this time?" she asked. Her intention was
+tender, but her voice issued with a kind of explosive grate--the
+natural product of vocal cords racked by the lake winds of thirty springs
+and wrecked by a thousand sudden and violent transitions from heat to
+cold and back again. "Not Mr. Belden, I hope?"
+
+"No, Jennie. That will come out all right, I expect. We had a talk with
+the builder about it today."
+
+He looked at her with a kind of wan and patient smile. His own voice was
+dry, husky, sibilant--sixty years of Lake Michigan.
+
+She smiled back at his "Jennie"; that was always her name on such
+occasions. "It isn't about Oolong?" she asked, in burlesque anxiety.
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, then, is it the--Sisters?"
+
+"Not the Sisters. They were in last week."
+
+"Guess again, then," said Jane, perseveringly. "Is it--is it the
+Benevolent Policemen?"
+
+"No, not the Policemen. They won't be around for a month yet."
+
+Her hand dropped to his shoulder and her eyes searched his. To another
+they might have seemed staring; to him they were only intent. "Poor pa;
+he's like a ten-pin standing at the end of the alley, isn't he? They all
+take a turn at him, don't they?"
+
+"I'm afraid that's about it, Jennie." He smiled rather wanly again and
+smoothed her hand with his own.
+
+"Well, what else is there?" pondered Jane. "Is it the Afro-American
+bishop raising the mortgage on their chapel?"
+
+"No. I guess the Afro-Americans have about paid things off by this time."
+
+"How lonesome they must leave you? H'm! is it the Michigan Avenue
+Property Owners assessing you again to fight the choo-choo cars?"
+
+Her father shook his head and almost laughed.
+
+"Is it The Wives of the Presidents'? Is it 'The Mothers of Great Men'?"
+
+"What a girl!" he said, and laughed aloud. It seemed as if he wanted to
+laugh.
+
+She eyed him narrowly. "There's only one thing more I can think of," she
+declared, screwing up her mouth and her eyes. "But I sha'n't ask you
+that--it's too silly. If I imagined for a moment that you could be
+thinking about old Mother Van Horn--"
+
+She paused. Her father cast down his eyes half guiltily.
+
+"Don't say you are, pa. That would be too absurd. You, with all the
+important things you have to carry in your head, to waste a minute on
+that frowzy old hag! It isn't worth it; it's nonsense."
+
+"I don't know whether it is or not," responded her father, slowly. He
+passed a careful hand through the fringe of the chair. "That's what I'd
+like to find out."
+
+"Oh, fiddlesticks!" rejoined Jane. "You sha'n't sit poking here in the
+dark and thinking of any such thing as that--not another minute. Come in
+and hear Dick tell how those students in Paris tied him to the wall and
+daubed him all red and green, and what he did to get even. _That's_ worth
+while. And you haven't seen Aunt Lyddy yet, have you? So is _that_--isn't
+it? Then come along, do."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+  "'When I was a student at Cadiz
+   I played on the Spanish guitar;
+ I used to make love to the ladies'--"
+
+
+This brief snatch of song ended with the obvious and, indeed, inevitable
+rhyme for "Cadiz," and the singer completed the stanza by throwing an
+arch and rather insinuating glance at the young man who was lounging
+negligently on the chair beside her own. She herself leaned back rather
+negligently too, with her feet crossed; her elbows were crooked at
+varying angles, her fingers pressed imaginary frets or plucked at
+imaginary strings, and the spectator was supposed to be viewing an
+Andalusian grace and passion abandoned to the soft yet compelling power
+of music.
+
+It was thus that Truesdale Marshall was welcomed home by his aunt Lydia.
+
+His aunt Lydia--Mrs. Lydia Rhodes--was a plump and vivacious little
+brunette of forty, with a gloss on her black hair and a sparkle in her
+black eyes. She still retained a good deal of the superabundant vitality
+of youth; in her own house, when the curtains were down and the company
+not too miscellaneous, she was sometimes equal to a break-down or a
+cake-walk. She was impelled by social aspirations of the highest nature,
+and was always lamenting, therefore, that she possessed so little
+dignity. She was a warm-hearted, impulsive creature, who believed
+in living while on earth, and she was willing enough to believe that
+others would live too, so far as opportunity offered. It seemed to
+Truesdale, just now, as if she might be engaged in a mental review of his
+probable experiences abroad--there, certainly, was an opportunity
+offered.
+
+"But now that you are back again we expect you to settle down and be
+good--a useful member of society, you know." She threw a coquettish smile
+on the young man and banished the imaginary guitar.
+
+"Oh, really--" began Truesdale, with a flush and a frown. He glanced over
+his shoulder; his mother and sisters were in animated converse on the
+other side of the room.
+
+"Yes," his aunt proceeded; "you are old enough to think about marrying.
+You don't know how pleasant it would be to have a nice little home of
+your own, and your own little wifey to meet you every evening with a
+kiss!"
+
+"Dear, dear!" thought Truesdale to himself; "and now she's singing that
+song to _me_!" He remembered these familiar strains; they had been
+directed many a time and oft to the ear of his brother Roger. Year by
+year their plaintive poignancy had grown more acute, along with Roger's
+strengthening determination to remain a bachelor.
+
+Truesdale found himself wondering whether his aunt's intense allegiance
+to the idea of married life was the sincere expression of a nature
+overflowingly affectionate, or a species of sensitive dissimulation
+cloaking a disappointment which, by this time, might well have come to be
+numbered among the bygones. For it was now six years since Alfred Rhodes,
+the gay, the genial, had died. He had cost his wife many anxious moments
+and a few sleepless nights. He had left her a moderate fortune, an ample
+freedom, and a boy of eight. She had increased her freedom by sending the
+boy off to an Eastern school. He visited Eastern relatives during
+vacation time, and was doomed to a longer course of knickerbockers than
+it would have pleased him to forecast. His mother's heart still
+palpitated youthfully; she showed herself in no haste to take her stand
+in the ranks of the elder generation.
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Rhodes proceeded, "you must get into business, and then we
+shall have to find some nice girl for you."
+
+"The same thoughtful Aunt Lydia," he observed, ironically. He gave his
+mustache an upward screw, then dropped his eyes to his knees and his
+fingers to the rungs of his chair. His design seemed to be to figure a
+slave shrinking on the auction-block. "Do you mean to say you haven't got
+one for me already?" He ignored the business side of her proposal.
+
+"Well, you needn't put it _that_ way," she rejoined. "You know perfectly
+well that I am not a match-maker, nor anything like it. And it wouldn't
+please me at all to have anybody say so of me or to think of me in that
+way." She was quite sincere in all this.
+
+Truesdale, however, held the opposite view, and, considering all the
+circumstances, liked his aunt none the less. She _was_ a match-maker--a
+very keen and persistent one; but he felt that her excesses in this
+direction were to be viewed simply as an acknowledgement to fortune for
+having guided her own courses to such advantage. She had come out from
+Trenton some eighteen years before with a pretty face, a light wardrobe,
+a limited purse, and an invitation (extended by a benevolent aunt) to
+remain as long as she liked. She had never gone back. She met Alfred
+Rhodes, Eliza Marshall's younger brother; and from the slight foothold
+offered by her kindly relative she had advanced to an ample fortune and a
+complete freedom. She was grateful for all this, and gratitude took the
+form of her extending, in turn, unlimited invitations to other girls with
+pretty faces, light purses, and limited wardrobes. She almost always had
+some comely niece or younger cousin in the house. She drove with them,
+she shopped with them, she gave teas and receptions for them. She
+summoned young men in numbers; she had her billiard-table re-covered; she
+could always produce sherry and cigars when really put to it; she almost
+transformed her home into a club-house. "For," said she, "I can never
+forget how kind Aunt Marcia was to _me_!"
+
+Such wide-spread beneficence as this had not, of course, excluded her
+sister-in-law's daughters. It was really to her aunt Lydia that Rosamund
+Marshall was indebted for her year at the New York school; her mother had
+unquestioningly accepted Mrs. Rhodes's declaration that the institution
+was eminently fashionable and desirable, and her father had committed her
+with the greatest confidence and good-will to the conductor of the
+east-bound Lake Shore express. And it was to her aunt that the girl was
+now looking, after an obscure and wistful fashion, for an introduction
+into society, in which, according to the belief of the family, Mrs.
+Rhodes occupied a secure and brilliant position. Rosamund had been
+revolving matters in her pretty and self-willed little head, and in her
+proud and self-willed little heart she had decided upon a formal début.
+
+Her mother was completely nonplussed; she would as soon have wrestled
+with the differential calculus. "Why, dear me," she stammered, "there's
+Alice; she never came out, and I don't see but what she's got along all
+right: good home, nice husband, and everything she wants. And Jane,
+now--"
+
+"Oh, _Jane_!" said Rosy, in disdain.
+
+Then she sulked, and reproached her mother with the flat and unprofitable
+summer that had followed her return from school, and asked pointedly if
+the coming winter was to be like it. "Ha!" exclaimed the poor woman to
+herself; "Lyddy is to blame for this; I wish she had never mentioned New
+York!" But the year at school was only a remoter cause; the more
+immediate one was a pink tea which Rosamund had attended (casually, as it
+were, and quite informally) a month back. This was the tigress's first
+taste of blood--a pale, diluted fluid, it is true, but it worked all the
+effect of a fuller and richer draught.
+
+It developed in Rosamund a sixth sense--one which was to lead her to
+lengths that none of her kin could have anticipated. And to the rest of
+the family, clucking and scratching in their own retired and restricted
+barn-yard, there came the day when they discovered that their little
+flock contained at least one bird of a different feather--a bird that
+could paddle about the social pond with the liveliest, and could quack,
+if need be, with the loudest.
+
+Jane--who had even yet no adequate sense of the strength and pungency of
+her younger sister's spirit, but who would not in any event have
+hesitated to rush on an individual martyrdom that might secure some
+consideration for the collective family--threw herself into the
+discussion at once.
+
+"No, don't let's have any party or dance or reception or anything at all.
+Not even a two-by-four tea. Don't let's try to be anybody or know
+anybody, or give anything or be considered anything. Let's go right on
+rusting and vegetating; let's just dry up and shake apart and blow away,
+with nobody the wiser for our having been here or the sorrier for our
+having gone!"
+
+Her mother heard this outburst with some surprise and not a little
+resentment. "Well, Jane, you're quite surpassing yourself to-night. What
+do you mean by all this?"
+
+Jane exploded again.
+
+"I mean that I'm simply tired of being a nothing and a nobody in a family
+of nothings and nobodies. That's what it comes to. I'm tired of being a
+bump on a log. I'm tired of sitting on the fence and seeing the
+procession go by. Why can't _we_ go by? Why can't _we_ know people? Why
+can't _we_ make ourselves felt? Other folks do."
+
+Mrs. Rhodes passed over in silence this imputation of nullity; she was
+not so closely related, after all, that she need allow herself to be
+disturbed by it. But sister Alice took up the cudgel with all the ardor
+of an immediate connection and all the sensitiveness of a suburban
+resident. She even forgot the real, essential object of her visit: to
+intimate to her father that if he would give her a carriage, her husband
+could pay for the keep of a horse.
+
+She was a contentious blonde, with a thin, aquiline nose and a pair of
+flashing steel-blue eyes. Several wisps of straw-colored hair blew about
+her temples.
+
+"Thank you, Jane," she said, hotly; "I don't know that I feel myself a
+nobody, and I don't feel that I'm exactly a social outcast--even if I
+_do_ live beyond the city limits." She turned back a floating lock with a
+hasty wave. "It might be to your advantage if you moved somewhere or
+other yourselves. I don't see how you can expect to see anybody or know
+anybody as long as you are buried in such a sepulchre as this."
+
+Alice was the radical, the innovator of the family. She often brought her
+conservative mother to the verge of horror. Hers was the hardy, daring,
+and unconventional strain of the pioneer. She liked the edge; if the edge
+was a little ragged, so much the better.
+
+"Ho!" cried Jane, sarcastically. "To see anybody or to know anybody we
+ought to be out at Riverdale Park, perhaps. Riverdale Park!" she
+repeated, with scornful emphasis. "There isn't any river; there isn't any
+dale; there isn't any park. Nothing but a lot of wooden houses scattered
+over a flat prairie, and a few trees no bigger than a broomstick, and no
+more leaves on them either. In the morning the men all rush for the
+train, and the rest of the day the nurse-girls trundle the babies along
+the plank walks, while 'society' amuses itself. Society consists of Mrs.
+Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Alice Robinson. On Wednesday,
+Mrs. Smith gives a lunch to Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Robinson. On
+Thursday, Mrs. Brown gives a tea to Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs.
+Robinson. On Friday, Mrs. Rob--(no, Mrs. Jones--I'm losing the place)
+gives a card-party to Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Robinson--in the
+daytime, too, mind you. And on Saturday, Mrs. Robinson designs giving a
+breakfast to Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Jones, but finds that the
+cook is packing up her things to leave. Quiet in the suburb for a week.
+Then Mrs. Smith's sister comes out from town to spend a fortnight. Well,
+everybody is anxious to see Mrs. Smith's sister--a new face, you know.
+So, after Mrs. Smith has started the second round with another lunch,
+Mrs. Brown follows with a tea, as before, for Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Jones,
+Mrs. Robinson--_and_ Mrs. Smith's sister. Then Mrs. Jones--but you've all
+played the game: for breakfast I had this and that and the other. That is
+society in Riverdale Park. It would be too rich for _me_!"
+
+Alice flushed with vexation. Truesdale (who had not come home to treat
+local society with too great a degree of seriousness, and who, indeed,
+was like enough to take his pleasures beyond any bounds that society
+might set) looked on and listened with a kind of indulgent
+curiosity--like an explorer listening to the excited pow-wow of some
+flock of natives in some remote African jungle.
+
+"Yes," retorted Alice, "according to your own confession more happens
+with us in a week than happens with you in a year. And you might as well
+acknowledge, at the same time, that there are a few houses in the Park
+where the carpets are a little less than fifteen years old, and where
+they don't have hideous old what-nots loaded down with all the stuff
+accumulated since the year one."
+
+She lifted the corner of a rug with her toe, so as to disclose the
+threadbare breadth that it concealed, and she threw an ironical eye upon
+a sort of massive and convoluted buffet which displayed a number of
+antique Dresden figurines and a pair of old candelabra compounded of
+tarnished gilt and broken prisms. "And in the Park," she added, "we
+always have new wall-paper at the beginning of every century--it's a
+local ordinance!"
+
+"Alice," called her mother, tartly, "take your foot away from that rug.
+And don't annoy me about that worn breadth; you know very well I've tried
+everywhere to match it. And don't imagine, either, that I'm going to
+bundle my wedding presents out of sight for you or anybody else."
+
+"Match it!" cried Alice, unabashed. "Match it? They used the last to
+carpet the ark." She trod down the corner of the rug with a firm step.
+Then, with her scornful nostrils and sharply critical eyes, she seemed to
+be lifting it again.
+
+"Well, then," said her mother. "And now leave it alone." The old lady had
+not the slightest idea of replacing her time-accustomed patterns by
+anything more current. Nor was her husband, apparently, of a different
+mind as concerned the wallpaper. He had followed Jane in from the other
+room, and he now sat there, sending a careful eye slowly along the
+old-fashioned border, and finding it impossible to believe that any
+one could seriously judge it to be grotesquely out of date.
+
+"The carpet's all right, as far as I can see," declared Jane. "What if it
+_is_ fifteen years old? Have you got one at Riverdale that is even
+fifteen months old? You know you haven't; if you had you'd start a museum
+of antiques with it. And as for our budging from this dear old place,
+don't you look for it; we're attached to it, even if you're not. Besides,
+to move would be to throw away the one advantage that we really have.
+Why, think of it!" she continued with a gesticulating and wide-eyed
+eloquence. "We have lived right here in this one house over thirty
+years. How many families in this town have lived in one house thirty
+years? Or twenty? Or even ten? We've always had the same door-plate on
+the same door. We've always had the same number in the directory. We
+started in a good neighborhood, and we've always stayed here--the only
+one in all the town that has anything like an old-time flavor and an
+atmosphere of its own--the only one where nice people have always lived
+and do live yet. Isn't that better than a course of flats up one street
+and down another? Isn't that better than a grand chain through a lot of
+shingle-shangled cottages in the suburbs? I should say so. What are they
+doing in the East now? They're going back to their old neighborhoods, and
+the people who haven't left them at all are the ones who are right on the
+top of the pile. We might have some new furniture or something of the
+sort, perhaps; but that's different from asking the moving-wagons to come
+and cart us out on to the prairie."
+
+David Marshall followed his daughter's harangue with an indulgent
+interest and a sympathy by no means scant. He had no profound
+apprehension of social values, and no clear-cut conception of a social
+career; but he appreciated her loyalty to her lifelong home and to all
+its belongings and surroundings. He had reason for supposing that this
+loyalty would extend to himself; but Jane was wound up to go, and had no
+idea of allowing anything to stand in the way of her disposal of the
+question in all its bearings.
+
+"I suppose," she went on, inexorably, "that we imagine ourselves to be
+'prominent citizens.' Well, we make a mistake if we do. We may have been
+ten years ago, but not now. We've just been falling, falling, falling
+behind--that's the amount of it. Now, honest, pa, dear, do the papers
+ever come to you nowadays to know what you think about political
+prospects or to ask your opinion on the last new street-car route
+proposed? Or do they send men around for trade statistics who jubilate in
+the issue of Jan. one because we sold five thousand more barrels of flour
+this year than last? Now, do they?"
+
+Marshall could not escape the justness of this pointed presentation of
+new conditions. "We have enough to bother us," he said, with a slow
+reluctance, "without reporters coming round."
+
+"There it is," continued Jane. "Yes, and who cares nowadays about the
+volume of the lumber trade or the mortality at the stock-yards? Why, just
+those people themselves. The fact is, the town has moved to a higher
+plane, and we've got to move with it, or else get left. Why, dear me, if
+it wasn't for an intellectual daughter who had the gift of language and
+who wrote papers and read them at the club, this family would have
+scarcely a connection with latter-day society."
+
+"Good for you, Jane," called her brother. "Give me some of them to read."
+
+"They're pretty good," said their father, unruffledly judicial. Jane was
+in the habit of reading him passages that she considered particularly
+effective. In listening to her perorations he sometimes felt himself as
+assisting at the liquidation of the universe.
+
+"Now, here we are," proceeded Jane, with unabated exegetical energy, "an
+old family, with position and plenty of means and everything to make an
+impression. Why can't we do it? Why can't we manage to assert ourselves?
+I'm not speaking for myself, of course; I'm a back number"--this half
+hysterically, between a gulp and a giggle--"I'm 'gone beyond recall,' and
+nobody knows that better than I myself. No; I'm speaking for all of us.
+Besides, here's Rosy, just coming up, and--"
+
+"Thank you, Jane," remarked Rosamund, with some acerbity. "You needn't
+mind me. I can look after myself."
+
+"--and it seems to me," went on Jane, ardently, "that people who have
+succeeded might just as well give some outer token of it. I declare, when
+I called on Mrs. Bates and went over the place and compared their house
+and their way of living with ours--"
+
+Her aunt looked up suddenly. "Mrs. Bates? What Mrs. Bates? Mrs. Granger
+Bates?"
+
+"Yes. When I saw what magnificent style she lived in, and how she had
+about everything that--"
+
+"So you know Mrs. Bates, too," her aunt again interrupted. "Pleasant
+woman, isn't she? Have I ever told you how she and I used to play
+backgammon together at St. Augustine?"
+
+"_Have_ you?" muttered Jane. "I should think you had--a dozen times
+over!"
+
+"And what were you doing at _her_ house, may I ask?" her aunt queried
+further. The geniality of this interrogation hardly concealed its
+crudity; Jane felt herself accused of an incongruous and inexplicable
+intrusion into a region of unaccustomed splendor and distinction.
+
+"Oh, she was collecting money for her working-girls' lunchroom,"
+volunteered Rosy, with a cruel bluntness.
+
+Jane threw an air of outraged dignity upon her younger sister. "So I was.
+And I spent a very pleasant hour with her," she said, with some
+stateliness. "And I am going there next Wednesday to lunch," she added.
+
+Her aunt looked at her with increasing consideration. She herself had
+never been honored with an invitation to the house of Mrs. Granger
+Bates--though rather than fail to respond to such an invitation she would
+have crawled there (a trifle of some fourteen squares) on her hands and
+knees. "Have you known her long?"
+
+"Since ten this morning," contributed Rosy.
+
+"Always," corrected Jane, with a whimsical brevity.
+
+"And how do you find her?" persisted Mrs. Rhodes, with a curious
+intentness. "Dear me!" she laughed, self-consciously, "how she did hate
+to be beaten! How vexed she always was when I began throwing off first!
+How she would bang her dice-box! How she would--"
+
+"She's perfectly grand!" declared Jane, with the loud enthusiasm of a new
+and fervent loyalty. "She's the finest woman I ever met. She's the best
+woman in the world!" The poor girl attested her earnestness by a tremble
+in her voice and a tear in each eye. "And she spoke so nicely of you,
+poppy," Jane went on, turning to her father.
+
+"Did she?" said her father, in return. And a quiet smile of reminiscence
+played round his lips for full five minutes.
+
+"And she inquired about all of us," Jane proceeded. "She wants to renew
+the acquaintance, I think. And she asked about Rosy, too--whether she was
+pretty and bright; and I said she was. I expect she's inclined to take an
+interest in you," said Jane, in conclusion, turning towards her sister
+and dropping these few coals of fire upon her head.
+
+Rosamund caught the proper tone from her aunt and bowed in unaccustomed
+meekness to this shower. Alice, however, as a confirmed and condemned
+suburbanite, had no idea of exhibiting any great interest in one of the
+acknowledged leaders of urban society--an interest which, from the very
+nature of things, could have been but futile and unproductive. She
+accordingly toyed carelessly and absently with the evening paper, as it
+lay on the centre-table.
+
+"H'm," she observed, presently, "those game-dinners at the Pacific are
+still going on, aren't they? To-night's the thirty-eighth. Nice things,
+too, as I remember them. That's the way I learned to like venison. Here
+are some of the people to be there--your Mrs. Bates among them." She
+looked across to her father. "Why didn't _you_ go?"
+
+"Give me that paper, Alice," her mother called, with a sharp and sudden
+cry. She ran her eye down its column and then turned to her husband.
+"Why, David, how did you happen to forget? You know I wouldn't have
+missed this for anything."
+
+Marshall checked his lingering smile. He looked at his wife with an
+embarrassed pain, and then dropped his eyes to the carpet. "There must
+have been some misunderstanding," he stammered. "The invitation was
+delayed--or it miscarried. Perhaps it went to the store and got mixed up
+with the mail there," he ventured; any improbability would do to soften
+the shock.
+
+"Delayed! Miscarried!" cried Jane, in an acute access of anger and
+indignation. "Don't believe it! We're dropped, that's all! Well, what
+else can we expect? How are we going to hold our own against all these
+thousands and thousands of newcomers if we don't do anything? That's what
+I've been telling you all along. We've got to wake up and make an effort.
+Give me that paper." She snatched it from her mother. "Yes, they'll all
+be there--the Hubbards, the Gages, and the whole crowd of Parmelees, and
+Kittie Corwith and her father, and all the rest, and--and the Beldens!
+The Beldens--there!" She turned fiercely on her mother. "What do you
+think of that?"
+
+Eliza Marshall was cut to the quick. For twenty years and more she had
+attended this annual dinner; she had attached herself there to former
+friends and neighbors, who listened indulgently to her narrow little
+dribble of reminiscent gossip--the gossip and reminiscences of the
+smaller town and the earlier day. This dinner was her sole remaining
+connection (little as she had realized it) with the great and complex
+city of the present day, just as it was the sole reason for her
+plum-colored silk and for her husband's dress-coat; and the cutting of
+this last cable set her completely adrift on the wide and forlorn
+sea of utter social neglect. And the Beldens!--that was the last straw of
+all. She seemed to see her husband crowded from his seat at that cheery
+board by a man whom he himself had taken up and made--a man who was
+trying to push him from the social world, just as he was trying to push
+him out of the control of the business which he had founded and
+developed. It was all more than she could bear.
+
+Jane rushed headlong into another mood. "Oh, well, the end of the world
+hasn't come if we _are_ frozen out. And perhaps we're not, anyway; the
+invite may get round to-morrow--who knows? So don't let's order our
+sackcloth and ashes quite yet awhile. Life is still worth living, and we
+have got several other strings to our bow.
+
+"This one, for instance," nodding in the direction of Rosy, towards whom
+she seemed inexhaustibly forgiving. "I have the honor to present to the
+waiting world Miss Rosamund Marshall, the bud of the season and the
+success of the century. Also her brother, Mr. Truesdale Marshall, who has
+come home stuffed full of accomplishments, and who will now proceed to
+show them. He sings--"
+
+She stepped across to her brother, slipped her arm through his, and drew
+him towards the rug in the middle of the room.
+
+Her height was within an inch of his own. She bowed him over the edge of
+the rug as over a row of footlights, crooked his other arm so that his
+hand was placed over his heart, put her own hand sprawlingly in a like
+position, threw back her head, and abandoned herself to a shrill
+succession of scales and roulades.
+
+"Why don't you begin?" she presently broke off to inquire.
+
+"What a girl you are!" he said. He looked a bit sheepishly in the
+direction of his father; then he stepped behind his sister, laid a hand
+on each of her imperceptible biceps, and turned her face round to the
+wall.
+
+But Jane faced about at once. "Well, then, he paints--"
+
+She dragged him toward the centre-table, grasped his wrist, and forced
+him to make several dabs and passes at the fatal newspaper, which still
+lay there with a bland impassivity between drop-light and book-rack.
+"That's how we dash off our little sketches," she declared.
+
+"Goodness, Jane!" cried Alice, "you've almost upset the whole inkstand!"
+
+"And what else is there?" cried Jane, whose mood was mounting higher. She
+clamped her hand on her disordered bang. "Why, of course! He
+fences!--aha!"
+
+To this address Truesdale allowed himself to respond. He had no wish to
+obtrude his musical and artistic doings upon his father until a more
+definite _modus vivendi_ had been brought about; but he could no longer
+lend himself passively to being made an absurdity by the over-enthusiasm
+of his sister. Fencing, now, was a manly art of which his father might
+not disapprove.
+
+"On guard!" he cried. With his right hand he snatched up a paper-cutter
+from the table, curled up his left arm behind him, threw one of his long
+legs out in front and landed it with a _flump_! on the floor five feet
+ahead of his initial stand-point.
+
+"Hurray!" cried Jane, shrilly. "What other girls do you know who've got a
+brother like this?" She snatched up a brass-edged ruler that had lain
+alongside the paper-cutter. Mrs. Rhodes started back; Alice's husband,
+who had come in to lead the homeward march to Riverside Park, paused
+astonished on the threshold.
+
+"On guard!" echoed Jane in turn. With a _flump!_ of her own she threw
+herself into an imitation of the angular crouch that her brother had
+assumed. "Go it!" she called, and began to hack at the paper-cutter with
+her ruler.
+
+Save for the clash of weapons there was a complete silence. Suddenly
+Truesdale reversed his position. Jane did the same, bringing a sudden and
+unaccustomed weight upon her other foot. Her knee cracked loudly.
+Everybody heard it. Rosy snickered.
+
+Jane crossed the room and sat down in a shady corner. In that ten seconds
+she felt ten years older.
+
+"Where's pa?" she asked her mother in a sour tone, after Alice and her
+aunt had left the house. "I do hope"--crossly--"that the next time you
+let any of those wretched old women take anything away you'll have them
+pay for it in advance."
+
+"I guess your father isn't bothering much about a bedstead and a few old
+chairs," retorted her mother. "If you want to know what he's thinking
+about, it's that Belden again."
+
+"Belden?"
+
+"Yes. He has decided finally to let your father put on those two extra
+stories, and what do you think he wants in exchange? He wants to make the
+firm over into a stock company. He's fixing a place for that boy of
+his--that's what."
+
+"Well, haven't we got a boy, too?" retorted Jane, severely. She went out,
+and gave the door a loud slam behind her.
+
+But David Marshall, back again in the bay-window, was thinking neither of
+the sinuosities of Mother Van Horn, nor of the aggressions of his junior
+partner, nor even of the just-concluding courses of the annual
+game-dinner. His thoughts had slipped back into the early times; he and
+Sue Lathrop (the Mrs. Granger Bates of to-day) were sitting together in
+the old, long-vanished Metropolitan Hall listening to the "Nightingale
+Serenaders," and the year was 'fifty-seven.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+"Well, here goes!" said Jane, half aloud, with her foot on the lowest of
+the glistening granite steps. The steps led up to the ponderous pillared
+arches of a grandiose and massive porch; above the porch a sturdy and
+rugged balustrade half intercepted the rough faced glitter of a vast and
+variegated façade; and higher still the morning sun shattered its beams
+over a tumult of angular roofs and towering chimneys.
+
+"It _is_ swell, I declare!" said Jane, with her eye on the wrought-iron
+work of the outer doors and the jewels and bevels of the inner-ones.
+
+"Where is the thing-a-ma-jig, anyway?" she inquired of herself. She was
+searching for the doorbell, and she fell back on her own rustic lingo in
+order to ward off the incipient panic caused by this overwhelming
+splendor. "Oh, here it is! There!" She gave a push. "And now I'm in for
+it." She had decided to take the richest and best-known and most
+fashionable woman on her list so start with; the worst over at the
+beginning, she thought, the rest would follow easily enough.
+
+"I suppose the 'maid' will wear a cap and a silver tray," she observed
+further. "Or will it be a gold one, with diamonds around the edge?"
+
+The door-knob turned from within. "Is Mrs. Bates--" she began.
+
+The door opened half way. A grave, smooth-shaven man appeared; his chin
+and upper lip had the mottled smudge that shows in so many of those
+conscientious portraits of the olden time.
+
+"Gracious me!" said the startled Jane to herself. She dropped
+her disconcerted vision to the door-mat. Then she saw that the
+man wore knee-breeches and black silk stockings.
+
+"Heaven be merciful!" was her inward cry. "It's a footman, as I live.
+I've been reading about them all my life, and now I've met one. But I
+never suspected that there was really anything of the kind in _this_
+town!"
+
+She left the contemplation of the servant's pumps and stockings, and
+began to grapple fiercely with the catch of her hand-bag.
+
+The man, in the meanwhile, studied her with a searching gravity, and, as
+it seemed, with some disapproval. The splendor of the front that his
+master presented to the world had indeed intimidated poor Jane; but there
+were many others upon whom it had no deterring effect at all. Some of
+these brought art-books in monthly parts; others brought polish for the
+piano legs. Many of them were quite as prepossessing in appearance as
+Jane was; some of them were much less plain and dowdy; few of them
+were so recklessly indiscreet as to betray themselves at the threshold
+by exhibiting a black leather bag.
+
+"There!" remarked Jane to the footman, "I knew I should get at it
+eventually." She smiled at him with a friendly good-will; she
+acknowledged him as a human being, and she hoped to propitiate him into
+the concession that she herself was nothing less.
+
+The man took her card, which was fortunately as correct as the most
+discreet and contemporaneous stationer could fashion. He decided that he
+was running no risk with his mistress, and "Miss Jane Marshall" was
+permitted to pass the gate.
+
+She was ushered into a small reception-room. The hard-wood floor was
+partly covered by a meagre Persian rug. There was a plain sofa full of
+forbidding angles, and a scantily upholstered chair which insisted upon
+nobody's remaining longer than necessary. But through the narrow door
+Jane caught branching vistas of room after room heaped up with the
+pillage of a sacked and ravaged globe, and of a stairway which led with a
+wide sweep to regions of unimaginable glories above.
+
+"Did you ever!" exclaimed Jane. It was of the footman that she was
+speaking; he, in fact, loomed up to the practical eclipse of all this
+luxury and display. "Only eighty years from the Massacre, and hardly
+eight hundred feet from the Monument!"
+
+Presently she heard a tapping and a rustling without. She thought that
+she might lean a few inches to one side with no risk of being detected in
+an impropriety, and she was rewarded by seeing the splendid vacuity of
+the grand stairway finally filled--filled more completely, more amply,
+than she could have imagined possible through the passage of one person
+merely. A woman of fifty or more was descending with a slow and somewhat
+ponderous stateliness. She wore an elaborate morning gown with a broad
+plait down the back, and an immensity of superfluous material in the
+sleeves. Her person was broad, her bosom ample, and her voluminous gray
+hair was tossed and fretted about the temples after the fashion of a
+marquise of the old régime. Jane set her jaw and clamped her knotty
+fingers to the two edges of her inhospitable chair.
+
+"I don't care if she _is_ so rich," she muttered, "and so famous and so
+fashionable and so terribly handsome; she can't bear _me_ down."
+
+The woman reached the bottom step, and took a turn that for a moment
+carried her out of sight. At the same time the sound of her footsteps was
+silenced by one of the big rugs that covered the floor of the wide and
+roomy hall. But Jane had had a glimpse, and she knew with whom she was to
+deal--with one of the big, the broad, the great, the triumphant; with one
+of a Roman amplitude and vigor, an Indian keenness and sagacity, an
+American ambition and determination; with one who baffles circumstance
+and almost masters fate--with one of the conquerors, in short.
+
+"I don't hear her," thought the expectant girl, in some trepidation;
+"but, all the same, she's got to cross that bare space just outside the
+door before--yes, there's her step! And here she is herself!"
+
+Mrs. Bates appeared in the doorway. She had a strong nose of the lofty
+Roman type; her bosom heaved with breaths deep, but quiet and regular.
+She had a pair of large, full blue eyes, and these she now fixed on Jane
+with an expression of rather cold questioning.
+
+"Miss Marshall?" Her voice was firm, smooth, even, rich, deep. She
+advanced a foot or two within the room and remained standing there.
+
+"Yes," responded Jane, in unnecessary corroboration. She rose
+mechanically from her meagre chair. "I have come to see you," she began,
+awkwardly, "about a charity that I am interested in--no, not exactly a
+charity, but--"
+
+At the ominous word "charity" Mrs. Bates's eyes took on a still colder
+gleam. She faced poor Jane with the broad, even, pitiless glare of a
+chilled-steel mirror.
+
+"Really," she began, "I have a great many demands of this kind made on
+me; a great many--more than might generally be imagined." She showed none
+of the embarrassed evasion peculiar to the woman on whom such
+requisitions are made but at infrequent intervals; she employed the
+decisive, business-like tone of a woman of whom such requests are made
+daily. Jane seemed to see negation coldly crystallizing before her eyes,
+and she gave a mortified groan to find herself drawn so near to the
+brink of humiliation. She had never begged before, and she registered an
+inward vow never to beg again.
+
+"You don't know _me_ from Adam," she blurted out, at her bluntest and
+crudest, "but you must know my aunt, Mrs. Rhodes. I have heard her speak
+of you very often. She met you at St. Augustine, last winter."
+
+"Mrs. Rhodes?" the other repeated, doubtfully. She made her eyebrows take
+their part in an inquiring glance, and bestowed the result upon her
+caller.
+
+"Yes," insisted Jane; "Mrs. A. L. Rhodes. She lives on Michigan--near
+Thirtieth."
+
+"Mrs. Rhodes?"--again thoughtfully repeated. She seemed to move her head
+in doubt. "I _do_ go to Florida every winter, and sometimes, on the way
+to our place, I stop for a day or two at St. Augustine--yes."
+
+She looked at Jane again, as if to say, "That is really the best I can do
+for you."
+
+"She played backgammon with you there," Jane still persisted--"on the
+hotel veranda. I've heard her say so twenty times."
+
+Mrs. Bates did not change her expression. "Backgammon? Yes, I am very
+fond of backgammon; I play it a great deal. Mr. Bates keeps a board in
+the car especially for me. I'm always glad to meet anybody who cares to
+play; and it's pleasant, I'm sure, to be on easy terms with one's
+fellow-travellers."
+
+She laid one hand in the other and gave an imperceptible sigh; she wore a
+great many rings. "What more can I say for you than that?"--such seemed
+to be the meaning of the expression now on her face.
+
+"My father"--began Jane; she was loud, slow, deliberate, emphatic. What
+could the woman mean by receiving her in such a fashion? Were the
+Marshalls mere upstarts, nobodies, newcomers, that they must be snubbed
+and turned aside in any such way as this? Jane's eyes blinked and her
+nostrils quivered. "My father," she began again, in the same tone, "is
+David Marshall. He is very well known, I believe, in Chicago. We have
+lived here a great many years. It seems to me that there ought to--"
+
+"David Marshall?" repeated Mrs. Bates, gently. "Ah, I _do_ know David
+Marshall--yes," she said; "or did--a good many years ago." She looked up
+into Jane's face now with a completely altered expression. Her glance was
+curious and searching, but it was very kindly. "And you are David
+Marshall's daughter?" She smiled indulgently at Jane's outburst of spunk.
+"Really--David Marshall's daughter?"
+
+"Yes," answered Jane, with a gruff brevity. She was far from ready to be
+placated yet.
+
+"David Marshall's daughter! Then, my dear child, why not have said so in
+the first place, without lugging in everybody and everything else you
+could think of? Hasn't your father ever spoken of me? And how is he,
+anyway? I haven't seen him--to really speak to him--for fifteen years. It
+may be even more."
+
+She seemed to have laid hands on a heavy bar, to have wrenched it from
+its holds, to have flung it aside from the footpath, and to be inviting
+Jane to advance without let or hindrance.
+
+But Jane stood there with pique in her breast, and her long thin arms
+laid rigid against her sides. "Let her 'dear child' me, if she wants to;
+she sha'n't bring me around in any such way as that."
+
+All this, however, availed little against Mrs. Bates's new manner. The
+citadel so closely sealed to charity was throwing itself wide open to
+memory. The drawbridge was lowered, and the late enemy was invited to
+advance as a friend.
+
+Nay, urged. Mrs. Bates presently seized Jane's unwilling hands. She
+gathered those poor, stiff, knotted fingers into two crackling bundles
+within her own plump and warm palms, squeezed them forcibly, and looked
+into Jane's face with all imaginable kindness. "I had just that temper
+once myself," she said.
+
+The sluice-gates of caution and reserve were opening wide; the streams of
+tenderness and sympathy were bubbling and fretting to take their course.
+
+"And your father is well? And you are living in the same old place? Oh,
+this terrible town! You can't keep your old friends; you can hardly know
+your new ones. We are only a mile or two apart, and yet it is the same as
+if it were a hundred."
+
+Jane yielded up her hands half unwillingly. She could not, in spite of
+herself, remain completely unrelenting, but she was determined not to
+permit herself to be patronized. "Yes, we live in the same old place. And
+in the same old way," she added--in the spirit of concession.
+
+Mrs. Bates studied her face intently. "Do you look like him--like your
+father?"
+
+"No," answered Jane. "Not so very much. Nor like any of the rest of the
+family." The statue was beginning to melt. "I'm unique." And another drop
+fell.
+
+"Don't slander yourself," She tapped Jane lightly on the shoulder.
+
+Jane looked at her with a protesting, or at least a questioning,
+seriousness. It had the usual effect of a wild stare. "I wasn't meaning
+to," she said, shortly, and began to congeal again. She also shrugged her
+shoulder; she was not quite ready yet to be tapped and patted.
+
+"But don't remain standing, child," Mrs. Bates proceeded, genially. She
+motioned Jane back to her chair, and herself advanced to the roomier
+sofa. "Or, no; this little pen is like a refrigerator to-day; it's so
+hard, every fall, to get the steam heat running as it should. Come; it
+ought to be warmer in the music-room.
+
+"The fact is," she proceeded, as they passed through the hall, "that I
+have a spare hour on my hands this morning--the first in a month. My
+music-teacher has just sent word that she is down with a cold. You shall
+have as much of that hour as you wish. So tell me all about your plans; I
+dare say I can scrape together a few pennies for Jane Marshall."
+
+"Her music-teacher!" thought Jane. She was not yet so far appeased nor so
+far forgetful of her own initial awkwardness as to refrain from searching
+out the joints in the other's armor. "What does a woman of fifty-five
+want to be taking music-lessons for?"
+
+The music-room was a lofty and spacious apartment done completely in
+hard-woods; its panelled walls and ceiling rang with a magnificent
+sonority as the two pairs of feet moved across the mirror-like marquetry
+of the floor.
+
+To one side stood a concert-grand; its case was so unique and so
+luxurious that even Jane was conscious of its having been made by special
+order and from a special design. Close at hand stood a tall music-stand
+in style to correspond. It was laden with handsomely bound scores of all
+the German classics and the usual operas of the French and Italian
+schools. These were all ranged in precise order; nothing there seemed to
+have been disturbed for a year past. "My! isn't it grand!" sighed Jane.
+She already felt herself succumbing beneath these accumulated splendors.
+
+Mrs. Bates carelessly seated herself on the piano-stool, with her back to
+the instrument. "I don't suppose," she observed, casually, "that I have
+sat down here for a month."
+
+"What!" cried Jane, with a stare. "If I had such a lovely room as this I
+should play in it every day."
+
+"Dear me," rejoined Mrs. Bates, "what pleasure could I get from
+practising in this great barn of a place, that isn't half full until
+you've got seventy or eighty people in it? Or on this big sprawling
+thing?"--thrusting out her elbow backward towards the shimmering cover of
+the key-board.
+
+"So then," said Jane to herself, "it's all for show. I knew it was. I
+don't believe she can play a single note."
+
+"What do you suppose happened to me last winter?" Mrs. Bates went on. "I
+had the greatest setback of my life. I asked to join the Amateur Musical
+Club. They wouldn't let me in."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well, I played before their committee, and then the secretary wrote me a
+note. It was a nice enough note, of course, but I knew what it meant. I
+see now well enough that my fingers were rather stiffer than I realized,
+and that my 'Twinkling Sprays' and 'Fluttering Zephyrs' were not quite up
+to date. They wanted Grieg and Lassen and Chopin. 'Very well,' said I,
+'just wait.' Now, I never knuckle under. I never give up. So I sent
+right out for a teacher. I practised scales an hour a day for weeks and
+months. Granger thought I was going crazy. I tackled Grieg and Lassen and
+Chopin--yes, and Tschaikowsky, too. I'm going to play for that committee
+next month. Let me see if they'll dare to vote me out again!"
+
+"Oh, _that's_ it!" thought Jane. She was beginning to feel desirous
+of meting out exact and even handed justice. She found it impossible to
+withhold respect from so much grit and determination.
+
+"But your father liked those old-time things, and so did all the other
+young men." Mrs. Bates creased and folded the end of one of her long
+sleeves, and seemed lapsing into a retrospective mood. "Why, some
+evenings they used to sit two deep around the room to hear me do the
+'Battle of Prague.' Do you know the 'Java March'?" she asked, suddenly.
+
+"I'm afraid not," Jane was obliged to confess.
+
+"You father always had a great fondness for that. I don't know," she went
+on, after a short pause, "whether you understand that your father was one
+of my old beaux--at least, I always counted him with the rest. I was a
+gay girl in my day, and I wanted to make the list as long as I could; so
+I counted in the quiet ones as well as the noisy ones. Your father was
+one of the quiet ones."
+
+"So I should have imagined," said Jane. Her maiden delicacy was just a
+shade affrighted at the turn the talk was taking.
+
+"When I was playing he would sit there by the hour and never say a word.
+My banner piece was really a fantasia on 'Sonnambula'--a new thing here;
+I was the first one in town to have it. There were thirteen pages, and
+there was always a rush to see who should turn them. Your father didn't
+often enter the rush, but I really liked his way of turning the best of
+any. He never turned too soon or too late; he never bothered me by
+shifting his feet every second or two, nor by talking to me at the hard
+places. In fact, he was the only one who could do it right."
+
+"Yes," said Jane, with an appreciative sigh; "that's pa--all over."
+
+Mrs. Bates was twisting her long sleeves around her wrists. Presently she
+shivered slightly. "Well, really," she said, "I don't see that this place
+is much warmer than the other; let's try the library."
+
+In this room our antique and Spartan Jane was made to feel the need of
+yet stronger props to hold her up against the overbearing weight of
+latter-day magnificence. She found herself surrounded now by a sombre and
+solid splendor. Stamped hangings of Cordova leather lined the walls,
+around whose bases ran a low range of ornate bookcases, constructed with
+the utmost taste and skill of the cabinet-maker's art. In the centre of
+the room a wide and substantial table was set with all the paraphernalia
+of correspondence, and the leathery abysses of three or four vast
+easy-chairs invited the reader to bookish self-abandonment.
+
+"How glorious!" cried Jane, as her eyes ranged over the ranks and rows of
+formal and costly bindings. It all seemed doubly glorious after that poor
+sole bookcase of theirs at home--a huge black-walnut thing like a
+wardrobe, with a couple of drawers at the bottom, receptacles that seemed
+less adapted to pamphlets than to goloshes. "How grand!" Jane was not
+exigent as regarded music, but her whole being went forth towards books.
+"Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer; and Hume and Gibbon, and Johnson's
+_Lives of the Poets_, and--"
+
+"And twenty or thirty yards of Scott," Mrs. Bates broke in, genially;
+"and enough Encyclopaedia Britannica to reach around the corner and back
+again. Sets--sets--sets."
+
+"What a lovely chair to sit and study in!" cried Jane, not at all abashed
+by her hostess's comments. "What a grand table to sit and write papers
+at!" Writing papers was one of Jane's chief interests.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Bates, with a quiet toleration, as she glanced
+towards the shining inkstand and the immaculate blotting-pad. "But,
+really, I don't suppose I've written two lines at that table since it was
+put there. And as for all these books, Heaven only knows where the keys
+are to get at them with. I can't do anything with them; why, some of them
+weigh five or six pounds!"
+
+Jane shrivelled and shivered under this. She regretted doubly that she
+had been betrayed into such an unstinted expression of her honest
+interest. "All for show and display," she muttered, as she bowed her head
+to search out new titles; "bought by the pound and stacked by the cord;
+doing nobody any good--their owners least of all." She resolved to admire
+openly nothing more whatever.
+
+Mrs. Bates sank into one of the big chairs and motioned Jane towards
+another. "Your father was a great reader," she said, with a resumption of
+her retrospective expression. "He was very fond of books--especially
+poetry. He often read aloud to me; when he thought I was likely to be
+alone, he would bring his Shakespeare over. I believe I could give you
+even now, if I was put to it, Antony's address to the Romans. Yes; and
+almost all of Hamlet's soliloquies, too."
+
+Jane was preparing to make a stand against this woman, and here,
+apparently, was the opportunity. "Do you mean to tell me," she inquired,
+with something approaching sternness, "that my father--_my father_--was
+ever fond of poetry and--and music, and--and all that sort of thing?"
+
+"Certainly. Why not? I remember your father as a high-minded young man,
+with a great deal of good taste; I always thought him much above the
+average. And that Shakespeare of his--I recall it perfectly. It was a
+chubby little book bound in brown leather, with an embossed stamp, and
+print a great deal too fine for _my eyes_. _He_ always had to do the
+reading; and he read very pleasantly." She scanned Jane closely. "Perhaps
+you have never done your father justice."
+
+Jane felt herself driven to defence--even to apology. "The fact is," she
+said, "pa is so quiet; he never says much of anything. I'm about the only
+one of the family who knows him very well, and I guess I don't know him
+any too well." She felt, though, that Mrs. Bates had no right to defend
+her father against his own daughter; no, nor any need.
+
+"I suppose so," said Mrs. Bates, slowly. She crossed over to the radiator
+and began working at the valve. "I _told_ Granger I knew he'd be sorry if
+he didn't put in furnace-flues too. I really can't ask you to take your
+things off down here; let's go upstairs--that's the only warm place I can
+think of."
+
+She paused in the hall. "Wouldn't you like to see the rest of the rooms
+before you go up?"
+
+"Yes--I don't mind," responded Jane. She was determined to encourage no
+ostentatious pride; so she made her acceptance as indifferent as she felt
+good manners would allow.
+
+Mrs. Bates crossed over the hall and paused in a wide doorway. "This,"
+she indicated, in a tone slightly suggestive of the cicerone, "is
+the--well, the Grand Salon; at least, that's what the newspapers have
+decided to call it. Do you care anything for Louis Quinze?"
+
+Jane found herself on the threshold of a long and glittering apartment;
+it was full of the ornate and complicated embellishments of the
+eighteenth century--an exhibition of decorative whip-cracking. Grilles,
+panels, mirror-frames all glimmered in green and gold, and a row of
+lustres, each multitudinously candled, hung from the lofty ceiling.
+
+Jane felt herself on firmer ground here than in the library, whose
+general air of distinction, with no definite detail by way of guidepost,
+had rather baffled her.
+
+"Hem!" she observed, critically, as her eyes roamed over the spacious
+spendor of the place, "quite an epitome of the whole rococo period; done,
+too, with a French grace and a German thoroughness. Almost a real
+_jardin d'hiver_, in fact. Very handsome indeed."
+
+Mrs. Bates pricked up her ears; she had not expected quite such a
+response as this. "You are posted on these things, then?"
+
+"Well," said Jane, "I belong to an art class. We study the different
+periods in architecture and decoration."
+
+"Do you? I belong to just such a class myself--and to three or four
+others. I'm studying and learning right along; I never want to stand
+still. You were surprised, I saw, about my music-lessons: It _is_ a
+little singular, I admit--my beginning as a teacher and ending as a
+pupil. You know, of course, that I _was_ a school-teacher? Yes, I had a
+little class down on Wabash Avenue near Hubbard Court, in a church
+basement. I began to be useful as early as I could. We lived in a little
+bit of a house a couple of blocks north of there; you know those
+old-fashioned frame cottages--one of them. In the early days pa was a
+carpenter--a boss-carpenter, to do him full justice; the town was
+growing, and after a while he began to do first-rate. But at the
+beginning ma did her own work, and I helped her. I swept and dusted, and
+wiped the dishes. She taught me to sew, too; I trimmed all my own hats
+till long after I was married."
+
+Mrs. Bates leaned carelessly against the tortured framework of a
+tapestried _causeuse_. The light from the lofty windows shattered on the
+prisms of her glittering chandeliers and diffused itself over the
+panelled loves and graces around her.
+
+"When I got to be eighteen I thought I was old enough to branch out and
+do something for myself--I've always tried to hold up my own end. My
+little school went first-rate. There was only one drawback--another
+school next door, full of great, rowdy boys. They would climb the fence
+and make faces at my scholars; yes, and sometimes they would throw
+stones. But that wasn't the worst: the other school taught book-keeping.
+Now, I never was one of the kind to lag behind, and I used to lie
+awake nights wondering how I could catch up with the rival institution.
+Well, I hustled around, and finally I got hold of two or three children
+who were old enough for accounts, and I set them to work on single entry.
+I don't know whether they learned anything, but _I_ did--enough to keep
+Granger's books for the first year after we started out."
+
+Jane smiled broadly; it was useless to set a stoic face against such
+confidences as these.
+
+"We were married at the most fashionable church in town--right there in
+Court-house Square; and ma gave us a reception, or something like it, in
+her little front room. We weren't so very stylish ourselves, but we had
+some awfully stylish neighbors--all those Terrace Row people, just around
+the corner. 'We'll get there, too, some time,' I said to Granger. 'This
+is going to be a big town, and we have a good show to be big people in
+it. Don't let's start in life like beggars going to the back door for
+cold victuals; let's march right up the front steps and ring the bell
+_like_ somebody.' So, as I say, we were married at the best church in
+town; we thought it safe enough to discount the future."
+
+"Good for you!" said Jane, who was finding her true self in the thick of
+these intimate revelations; "you guessed right."
+
+"Well, we worked along fairly for a year or two, and finally I said to
+Granger: 'Now, what's the use of inventing things and taking them to
+those companies and making everybody rich but yourself? You pick out some
+one road, and get on the inside of that, and stick there, and--The fact
+is," she broke off suddenly, "you can't judge at all of this room in the
+daytime. You must see it lighted and filled with people. You ought
+to have been here at the _bal poudré_ I gave last season--lots of pretty
+girls in laces and brocades, and powder on their hair. It was a lovely
+sight."
+
+"It must have been. I believe Rosy would have looked real pretty fixed up
+that way."
+
+"Rosy?"
+
+"Our youngest; she's eighteen."
+
+"Is she out?"
+
+"Not quite; but I expect she's on the way."
+
+"Is she pretty?"
+
+"Yes," replied the just Jane. "Yes, Rosy is quite pretty. She's dark. She
+would look lovely in yellow tulle--with a red rose somewhere."
+
+"Is she clever?"
+
+"H'm," said Jane, thoughtfully, "I suppose so. She's beginning to
+understand how to get what she wants, anyway."
+
+"And just the least bit selfish and inconsiderate?" insinuated Mrs.
+Bates, shrewdly.
+
+"Y--yes, I'm afraid so."
+
+"Well, she might be quite a success; we must think about her. Come; we've
+had enough of this." Mrs. Bates turned a careless back upon all her Louis
+Quinze spendor. "The next thing will be something else."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Jane's guide passed swiftly into another large and imposing apartment.
+"This I call the Sala de los Embajadores; here is where I receive my
+distinguished guests."
+
+"Good!" cried Jane, who knew Irving's _Alhambra_ by heart. "Only it isn't
+Moorish; it's Baroque--and a very good example."
+
+The room had a heavy panelled ceiling of dark wood, with a cartouche in
+each panel; stacks of seventeenth-century armor stood in the corners,
+half a dozen large Aubusson tapestries hung on the walls, and a vast
+fireplace, flanked by huge Atlantes and crowned by a heavy pediment
+broken and curled, almost filled one whole side. "That fireplace is
+Baroque all over."
+
+"See here," said Mrs. Bates, suddenly; "are you the woman who read about
+the Decadence of the Renaissance Forms at the last Fortnightly?"
+
+"I'm the woman," responded Jane, modestly.
+
+"I don't know why I didn't recognize you before. But you sat in an
+awfully bad light, for one thing. Besides, I had so much on my mind that
+day. Our dear little Reginald was coming down with something--or so we
+thought. And the bonnet I was forced to wear--well, it just made me blue.
+You didn't notice it?"
+
+"I was too flustered to notice anything. It was my first time there."
+
+"Well, it was a good paper, although I couldn't half pay attention to it;
+it gave me several new notions. All my decorations, then--you think them
+corrupt and degraded?"
+
+"Well," returned Jane, at once soothing and judicial, "all these later
+forms are interesting from an historical and sociological point of view.
+And lots of people find them beautiful, too, for that matter." Jane slid
+over these big words with a practised ease.
+
+"They impressed my notables, anyway," retorted Mrs. Bates. "We
+entertained a great deal during the Fair--it was expected, of course,
+from people of our position. We had princes and counts and honorables
+without end. I remember how delighted I was with my first prince--a
+Russian. H'm! later in the season Russian princes were as plentiful as
+blackberries: you stepped on one at every turn. We had some of the
+English, too. One of their young men visited us at Geneva during the
+summer. I never quite made out who invited him; I have half an idea that
+he invited himself. He was a great trial. Queer about the English, isn't
+it? How can people who are so clever and capable in practical things ever
+be such insolent tom-fools in social things? Do you know Arthur Paston?"
+
+"No. Was he one of them?
+
+"Not exactly. He lives here. We thought we had Americanized him; but now
+he has slipped back and is almost as bad as he was to start with. Arthur
+Scodd-Paston--that's the way his cards read to-day. Do you care for
+paintings?"
+
+"Of course. Is Arthur Scodd-Paston like one?"
+
+"You bad girl! Well, we might just stick our noses in the picture-gallery
+for a minute.
+
+"We're almost beginners in this branch of industry," she expounded, as
+she stood beside Jane in the center of the room under the coldly diffused
+glare of the skylight. "In my young days it was all Bierstadt and De
+Haas; there wasn't supposed to be anything beyond. But as soon as I began
+to hear about Millet and the Barbizon crowd, I saw there was. Well, I set
+to work, as usual. I studied and learned. I _want_ to learn. I want to
+move; I want to keep right up with the times and the people. I got books
+and photographs, and I went to all the galleries. I read the artists'
+biographies and took in all the loan collections. Now I'm loaning, too.
+Some of these things are going to the Art Institute next week--that
+Daubigny, for one. It's little, but it's good; there couldn't be anything
+more like him, could there?
+
+"We haven't got any Millet yet, but that morning thing over there is a
+Corot--at least, we think so. I was going to ask one of the French
+commissioners about it last summer, but my nerve gave out at the last
+minute. Mr. Bates bought it on his own responsibility. I let him go
+ahead, for, after all, people of our position would naturally be expected
+to have a Corot. I don't dare tell you what he paid for it. If I
+did"--she pointed to their joint reflection in the opposite mirror--"we
+should have a fretful porcupine here in no time."
+
+"Don't, then," pleaded Jane, looking at her own reflection and clasping
+her hands across her forehead; "this miserable bang gives me enough
+trouble as it is."
+
+"There's some more high art," said Mrs. Bates, with a wave of her hand
+towards the opposite wall. "Carolus-Duran; fifty thousand francs; and he
+wouldn't let me pick out my own costume, either. You have never seen me
+on dress-parade; take a look at me now." She gathered up the tail of her
+gown and modestly scuttled out of the room.
+
+Poor dowdy Jane stood in silent awe before this sumptuous canvas, with
+her long, interlaced fingers strenuously tugging at each other and her
+wide eyes half popping from her head. She was as completely overpowered
+and shattered as an uncouth and angular raft under the thunderous
+downpour of Niagara. Presently she turned; Mrs. Bates stood peeping in
+from without, her eyes all a-twinkle.
+
+"And now," she said, "let's go up-stairs." Jane followed her, too dazed
+to speak or even to smile.
+
+Mrs. Bates hastened forward, lightfootedly. "Conservatory--_that's_
+Moorish," she indicated, casually; "nothing in it but orchids and things.
+Come along." Jane followed--dumbly, humbly.
+
+Mrs. Bates paused on the lower step of her great stairway. A huge vase of
+Japanese bronze flanked either newel, and a Turkish lantern depended
+above her head. The bright green of a dwarf palm peeped over the
+balustrade, and a tempered light strained down through the painted window
+on the landing-stage.
+
+"There!" she said; "you've seen it all." She stood there in a kind of
+impassioned splendor, her jewelled fingers shut tightly and her fists
+thrown out and apart so as to show the veins and cords of her wrists.
+"_We_ did it, we two--just Granger and I. Nothing but our own hands and
+hearts and hopes, and each other. We have fought the fight--a fair field
+and no favor--and we have come out ahead. And we shall stay there, too;
+keep up with the procession is my motto, and head it if you can. I _do_
+head it, and I feel that I'm where I belong. When I can't foot it with
+the rest, let me drop by the wayside and the crows have me. But they'll
+never get me--never! There's ten more good years in me yet; and if we
+were to slip to the bottom to-morrow, we should work back to the top
+again before we finished. When I led the grand march at the Charity Ball
+I was accused of taking a vainglorious part in a vainglorious show. Well,
+who would look better in such a rôle than I, or who has earned a better
+right to play it? There, child! ain't that success? ain't that glory?
+ain't that poetry?--H'm," she broke off suddenly, "I'm glad Jimmy wasn't
+by to hear that! He's always taking up his poor mother."
+
+"Jimmy? Is he humble-minded--do you mean?"
+
+"Humble-minded? One of my boys humble-minded? No, indeed; he's
+grammatical, that's all; he prefers 'isn't.' Come up."
+
+Mrs. Bates hurried her guest over the stairway and through several halls
+and passages, and introduced her finally into a large and spacious room
+done in white and gold. In the glittering electrolier wires mingled with
+pipes and bulbs with globes. To one side stood a massive brass bedstead
+full panoplied in coverlet and pillow-cases, and the mirror of the
+dressing-case reflected a formal row of silver-backed brushes and combs.
+
+"My bedroom," said Mrs. Bates. "How does it strike you?"
+
+"Why," stammered Jane, "It's all very fine, but--"
+
+"Oh yes; I know what they say about it--I've heard them a dozen times.
+'It's very big and handsome and all, but not a bit home-like. _I_
+shouldn't want to sleep here.' Is that the idea?"
+
+"About," said Jane.
+
+"Sleep here!" echoed Mrs. Bates. "I _don't_ sleep here. I'd as soon think
+of sleeping out on the prairie. That bed isn't to _sleep_ in; it's for
+the women to lay their hats and cloaks on. Lay yours there now."
+
+Jane obeyed. She worked herself out of her old blue sack, and disposed
+it, neatly folded, on the brocaded coverlet. Then she took off her mussy
+little turban and placed it on the sack. "What a strange woman," she
+murmured to herself. "She doesn't get any music out of her piano; she
+doesn't get any reading out of her books; she doesn't even get any sleep
+out of her bed." Jane smoothed down her hair and awaited the next stage
+of her adventure.
+
+"This is the way." Mrs. Bates led her through a narrow side-door, and
+Jane found herself in a small room where another young woman sat before a
+trim bird's-eye-maple desk, whose drawers and pigeonholes were stuffed
+with cards and letters and papers. "This is my office. Miss Marshall,
+Miss Peters," she said, in the tone of introduction.
+
+The other girl rose. She was tall and slender, like Jane. She had a pasty
+complexion and weak, reddish eyes. Her expression was somewhat plaintive
+and distressed--irritating, too, in the long run.
+
+"Step along," called Mrs. Bates. She traversed the "office," passed into
+a room beyond, pushed Jane ahead of her, and shut the door. "I don't care
+if it _does_ hurt her feelings." Mrs. Bates's reference appeared to be to
+Miss Peters.
+
+The door closed with a light click, and Jane looked about her with a
+great and sudden surprise. Poor stupid, stumbling child!--she understood
+at last in what spirit she had been received and on what footing she had
+been placed.
+
+She found herself in a small, cramped, low-ceiled room which was filled
+with worn and antiquated furniture. There was a ponderous old mahogany
+bureau, with the veneering cracked and peeled, and a bed to correspond.
+There was a shabby little writing-desk, whose let-down lid was lined with
+faded and blotted green baize. On the floor there was an old Brussels
+carpet, antique as to pattern, and wholly threadbare as to surface.
+The walls were covered with an old-time paper whose plaintive
+primitiveness ran in slender pink stripes alternating with narrow green
+vines. In one corner stood a small upright piano whose top was littered
+with loose sheets of old music, and on one wall hung a set of thin
+black-walnut shelves strung together with cords and loaded with a variety
+of well-worn volumes. In the grate was a coal fire. Mrs. Bates sat down
+on the foot of the bed and motioned Jane to a small rocker that had been
+re-seated with a bit of old rugging.
+
+"And now," she said, cheerily, "let's get to business. Sue Bates, at your
+service."
+
+"Oh, no," gasped Jane, who felt, however dumbly and mistily, that this
+was an epoch in her life. "Not here; not to-day."
+
+"Why not? Go ahead; tell me all about the charity that isn't a charity.
+You'd better; this is the last room--there's nothing beyond." Her eyes
+were twinkling, but immensely kind.
+
+"I know it," stammered Jane. "I knew it in a second." She felt, too, that
+not a dozen persons had ever penetrated to this little chamber. "How good
+you are to me!"
+
+Presently, under some compulsion, she was making an exposition of her
+small plans. Mrs. Bates was made to understand how some of the old
+Dearborn Seminary girls were trying to start a sort of clubroom in some
+convenient down-town building for typewriters and saleswomen and others
+employed in business. There was to be a room where they could get lunch,
+or bring their own to eat, if they preferred; also a parlor where they
+could fill up their noon hour with talk or reading or music; it was the
+expectation to have a piano and a few books and magazines.
+
+"I remembered Lottie as one of the girls who went with us there, down on
+old Dearborn Place, and I thought perhaps I could interest Lottie's
+mother," concluded Jane.
+
+"And so you can," said Lottie's mother, promptly. "I'll have Miss
+Peters--but don't you find it a little warm here? Just pass me that
+hair-brush."
+
+Mrs. Bates had stepped to her single little window. "Isn't it a gem?" she
+asked. "I had it made to order; one of the old-fashioned sort, you
+see--two sash, with six little panes in each. No weights and cords, but
+simply catches at the side. It opens to just two widths; if I want
+anything different, I have to contrive it for myself. Sometimes I use a
+hair-brush and sometimes a paper-cutter."
+
+"Dear me," asked Jane, "is that sort of thing a rarity? 'Most every
+window in our house is like this. I prop mine with a curling-iron."
+
+"And now," said Mrs. Bates, resuming, "how much is it going to take to
+start things? I should think that five hundred dollars would do to get
+you under way." She opened the door. "Miss Peters, won't you please make
+out a check for five hun--"
+
+"Oh, bless your soul!" cried Jane, "we don't need but three hundred all
+together, and I can't have one woman--"
+
+"Three hundred, then," Mrs. Bates called into the next room.
+
+"Oh, goodness me!" cried Jane, despairingly, "I don't want one woman to
+give it all. I've got a whole list here. You're the first one I've seen."
+
+"Well, how much, then? Fifty?"
+
+"Fifty, yes. That's quite as much as I expected--more."
+
+"Fifty, Miss Peters; payable to Jane Marshall." She looked at Jane
+quizzically. "You _are_ unique, sure enough."
+
+"I want to be fair," protested Jane.
+
+The door closed on Miss Peters. Mrs. Bates dropped her voice. "Did you
+ever have a private secretary?"
+
+"Me?" called Jane. "I'm my own."
+
+"Keep it that way," said Mrs. Bates, impressively. "Don't ever change--no
+matter how many engagements and appointments and letters and dates you
+come to have. You'll never spend a happy day afterwards. Tutors are bad
+enough--but, thank goodness, my boys are past that age. And men servants
+are bad enough--every time I want to stir in my own house I seem to have
+a footman on each toe and a butler standing on my train; however, people
+in our position--well, Granger insists, you know. But Minnie
+Peters--Minnie Peters is the worst of all. Every so often"--in a low
+voice and with her eye on the door--"she has one of her humble days, and
+then I want to die. That was what was the matter before you came--I
+didn't really mean to seem cross to you. I just have to take her and
+shake her and say, 'Now, Minnie Peters, how can you be so bad to me? How
+can you think I would do anything to hurt your feelings, when your mother
+was my very best friend? Why are you always looking for a chance to find
+a slight, when'--Oh, thanks, thanks!"--Miss Peters having appeared with
+the check. Mrs. Bates clapped on the signature at her little old desk.
+"There, my child. And good-luck to the club-room.
+
+"And now business is over," she continued. "Do you like my posies?" She
+nodded towards the window where, thanks to the hair-brush, a row of
+flowers in a long narrow box blew about in the draught.
+
+"Asters?"
+
+"No, no, no! But I hoped you'd guess asters. They're chrysanthemums--you
+see, fashion will penetrate even here. But they're the smallest and
+simplest I could find. What do I care for orchids and American beauties,
+and all those other expensive things under glass? How much does it please
+me to have two great big formal beds of gladiolus and foliage plants in
+the front yard, one on each side of the steps? Still, with our position,
+I suppose it can't be helped. No; what I want is a bed of portulacca, and
+some cypress vines running up strings to the top of a pole. As soon as I
+get poor enough to afford it I'm going to have a lot of phlox and London
+pride and bachelor's buttons out there in the back yard, and the girls
+can run their clotheslines somewhere else."
+
+"It's hard to keep flowers in a city," said Jane.
+
+"I know it is. At our old house we had such a nice little rosebush in
+the front yard. I hated so to leave it behind--one of those little
+yellow brier-roses. No, it wasn't yellow; it was just--'yaller.' And it
+always scratched my nose when I tried to smell it. But oh,
+child"--wistfully--"if I could only smell it now!"
+
+"Couldn't you have transplanted it?" asked Jane, sympathetically.
+
+"I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach-basket
+and a fire-shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of yellow
+sand. To-day there's seven stories of brick and mortar. So all I've got
+from the old place is just this furniture of ma's and the wall-paper."
+
+"The wall-paper?"
+
+"Not the identical same, of course. It's like what I had in my bedroom
+when I was a girl. I remembered the pattern, and tried everywhere to
+match it. At first I just tried on Twenty-second Street. Then I went
+down-town. Then I tried all the little places away out on the West Side.
+Then I had the pattern put down on paper, and I made a tour of the
+country. I went to Belvidere, and to Beloit, and to Janesville, and to
+lots of other places between here and Geneva. And finally--"
+
+"Well, what--finally?"
+
+"Finally, I sent down East and had eight or ten rolls made to order. I
+chased harder than anybody ever chased for a Raphael, and I spent more
+than if I had hung the room with Gobelins; but--"
+
+She stroked the narrow strips of pink and green with a fond hand, and
+cast on Jane a look which pleaded indulgence. "Isn't it just too quaintly
+ugly for anything?"
+
+"It isn't any such thing," cried Jane. "It's just as sweet as it can be!
+I only wish mine was like it."
+
+Mrs. Bates glanced from the wall-paper to the window-box, and from the
+window down into the back yard, where, beneath the week's washing,
+flapping in the breeze and the sun, she saw next summer's flowers already
+blooming.
+
+"Did you read that paragraph last week," she asked, suddenly, "about my
+having been a washer-woman once?"
+
+"No. What was it in?"
+
+"One of those miserable society papers. Do you know there's a man in this
+town who makes his living by sending such things to New York? Something
+scandalous, if possible; if not scandalous, then libellous; if not
+actually libellous, then derogatory and offensive."
+
+"I never read such stuff," said Jane; "especially about people I like. I
+always skip it,"
+
+"Yes, but it's true. I can't deny it. I _was_ a washerwoman for a whole
+year. I washed all Granger's shirts and starched them and ironed them,
+and put them away and got them out and washed them again for months and
+months. Every one went through the mill pretty often, too; there weren't
+very many of them.
+
+"Those are Granger's shirts out on the line there, now--the big ones.
+Those in the other row are Jimmy's--the little ones."
+
+"H'm!" observed Jane, standing beside her at the window; "which _are_ the
+little ones?"
+
+Mrs. Bates laughed. "Well, perhaps there isn't much difference. Jimmy is
+eighteen and large for his age, but of course his _seem_ the littlest. I
+had them made in the house, but he set off to college before I could
+finish with them. Perhaps they're just as well here, until the Sophomores
+have finished with _him_.
+
+"Yes," she went on, proudly, "I could wash shirts then, and I can make
+shirts now. A woman, it seems to me, may do anything for herself or for
+those belonging to her; and I've always tried to be a lady and a woman
+too. I made all Jimmy's button-holes and worked all the initials on the
+tabs." She looked appealingly at Jane. "I know you think I'm a silly old
+thing...."
+
+"I don't either!" cried Jane, loudly, with a tremble on her lip and a hot
+tear starting in each eye. "I don't either; you know I don't! You know
+what I think! You're a dear, good, lovely woman; and I've been just as
+mean and hateful to you as I could! I don't see," she went on, in a great
+burst on contrition, "how you could talk to me; I don't see how you could
+let me stay one minute in your house. If you only knew all the mean,
+ugly, uncharitable things I have thought about you since that man let me
+in! How could you stand me? How could you keep from having me turned
+out?"
+
+"I am used to being misunderstood," said Mrs. Bates, quietly. "I took you
+at first for your father's sake, and I kept you for your own. It's a long
+time since I have met a girl like you; I didn't suppose there was one
+left in the whole town. You are one of _us_--the old settlers, the
+aborigines. Do you know what I'm going to do some time? I'm going to have
+a regular aboriginal pow-wow, and all the old-timers shall be invited.
+We'll have a reel, and forfeits, and all sorts of things; and off to one
+side of the wigwam there shall be two or three beautiful young squaws to
+pour firewater. Will you be one of them?"
+
+"Well," Jane hesitated, "I'm not so very young, you know; nor so very
+beautiful, either."
+
+"You are to me," responded Mrs. Bates, with a caloric brevity.
+
+"Nobody shall come," she went on, "who wasn't here before the War. Those
+who came before the Incorporation--that was in '37, wasn't it?--shall be
+doubly welcome. And if I can find any one who passed through the Massacre
+(as an infant, you understand), he shall have the head place. I mean to
+ask your father--and your mother," she added, with a firm but delicate
+emphasis. "I must call on her presently."
+
+She fixed her eyes on the fireplace. "I suppose I was silly--the way I
+acted when your father married," she went on, carefully. "We were only
+friends; there was really nothing between us; but I was piqued and--oh,
+well, you know how it is."
+
+"I!" cried Jane, routed by her alarm from her contrite and tearful mood.
+"I? Not the least bit, I assure you!" She blushed and gulped and ducked
+her head and half hid her face behind her hand. "Not the least in the
+world. Why, if I were to die to-morrow nobody would care but pa and ma
+and Roger and Truesdale and Alice; well--and Rosy; yes, perhaps Rosy
+would care for me--if I was dead. But nobody else; oh, dear, no!" She
+stared at Mrs. Bates with a hard, wide brightness.
+
+Mrs. Bates considerately shifted her gaze to the front of the bureau. She
+ran her eye down one row of knobs: "I wonder who he is?" And up the
+other: "I hope he is worthy of her."
+
+Doubly considerate, she turned her back, too. She began to rummage among
+the drawers of her old desk. "There!" she said, presently, "I knew I
+could put my hands on it."
+
+She set a daguerreotype before Jane. Its oval was bordered with a narrow
+line of gilded metal and its small square back was covered with embossed
+brown leather. "There, now! Do you know who that is?"
+
+Jane looked back and forth doubtfully between the picture and its owner.
+"Is it--is it--pa?"
+
+Mrs. Bates nodded.
+
+Jane regarded the daguerreotype with a puzzled fascination. "Did my
+father ever wear his hair all wavy across his forehead that way, and have
+such a thing tied around his throat, and wear a vest all covered with
+those little gold sprigs?"
+
+"Precisely. That's just the way he looked the last time we danced
+together. And what do you suppose the dance was? Guess and guess and
+guess again! It was this."
+
+Mrs. Bates whisked herself on to the piano-stool and began to play and to
+sing. Her touch was heavy and spirited, but her voice was easily audible
+above the instrument.
+
+
+"'Old Dan Tucker, he got drunk;
+He jumped in the fire and he kicked up a chunk
+Of red-hot charcoal with his shoe.
+Lordy! how the ashes flew-hoo!'"
+
+
+Jane dropped the daguerreotype in time to take up the refrain:
+
+
+  "'Clear the road for old Dan Tucker!
+  You're too late to get your supper.
+  Clear the road for old Dan--'"
+
+
+"Aha! you know it!" cried Mrs. Bates, gayly.
+
+"Of course," responded Jane. "My education may be modern, on the whole;
+but it hasn't neglected the classics completely! Gentlemen forward!" she
+said, with a sudden cry, which sent Mrs. Bates's fingers back to the
+keyboard; "_gentlemen_ forward to Mister Tucker!" Mrs. Bates pounded
+loudly, and Jane pirouetted up to her from behind.
+
+"_Ladies_ forward to Mister Tucker!" cried Jane, and Mrs. Bates left the
+stool and began dancing towards her. Then she danced back and took her
+seat again; but with the first chord:
+
+"ALL forward to Mister Tucker!" called Jane again; and they met face to
+face in the middle of the room and burst out laughing. The door opened on
+a narrow crack, and there appeared Miss Peters's plaintive and inquiring
+countenance.
+
+Mrs. Bates banished her assistant by one look of pathetic protest.
+"There!" she said, transferring the look to Jane, "you see how it always
+is when I am trying to have a good time! Even at my own table I can't
+budge or crack a joke; with those two men behind my chair I feel like my
+own tombstone. Lock that door," she said to Jane; "I _will_ have a good
+time, in spite of them! Sit down; I'm going to play the 'Java March' for
+you."
+
+She struck out several ponderous and vengeful chords. "Why," called Jane,
+"is _that_ the 'Java March'?"
+
+She spread out her elbows and stalked up and down singing:
+
+
+  "'Oh, the _Dutch_ compa-_nee_
+  Is the _best_ compa-_nee_!'"
+
+
+"Right again!" cried Mrs. Bates. "You _are_ one of us--just as I said!"
+
+"Well, if that's the 'Java March,'" said Jane, "it's in an old book we
+used to have about the house years and years ago. Only, if you bring it
+up as an example of pa's taste--"
+
+"He liked it because I played it, perhaps," said Mrs. Bates, quietly.
+"Besides, why should you put it to those shocking words? It _is_ in that
+book," she continued, "and I've got one here just like it."
+
+"Is it the one with 'Roll on, Silver Moon,' and 'Wild roved the Indian
+maid, bright What's-her-name'?"
+
+"Bright Alfarata. Same one, exactly. Bring up another chair, and we'll go
+through a whole programme of classics--pruggrum, I mean."
+
+"Let's see, though," said Jane, looking at her watch. "Mercy me! where
+has the morning gone? It's after eleven o'clock."
+
+"Supposing it is after eleven; supposing it was after a hundred and
+eleven? You're going to stay to lunch."
+
+"I'd love to so much; but I just can't. I've got too many other scalps to
+take. So many thanks for yours! I'm going to work north towards the
+Monument--another Massacre!"
+
+"Well, Wednesday, then, without fail."
+
+They retraced their steps past the mournful Miss Peters and through the
+vast state bedroom. On the stairs Mrs. Bates said:
+
+"I _do_ remember your aunt, Mrs. Rhodes, now," The conscientious creature
+had been taxing her memory for an hour. Jane felt that this was a
+tribute, not to her aunt, but to herself.
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Bates went on, "she's a little, plump, dark woman, and when
+she sits down she wiggles and flounces and goes all in a heap--like
+this." Mrs. Bates illustrated by means of the window-seat on the landing.
+
+"Yes," assented Jane. She could not reproach Mrs. Bates for thus
+indulging her sense of humor in order to recoup herself for the tax on
+her memory.
+
+"And when she goes down-stairs, it's like this." She gathered up her gown
+and sidled down affectedly over the remaining steps.
+
+"That's it," said Jane, joining her in the hall below.
+
+Mrs. Bates opened the front door herself. "You can take the choo-choo
+cars at Sixteenth, you know, and get off at Van Buren. Oh, dear; excuse
+my baby-talk; our little Reginald--two months old, you know. I'll have
+Lottie home for that lunch of ours."
+
+"Don't apologize," said Jane. "I often use the same expression myself."
+
+"Why, is there a baby at your house!"
+
+"Well," said Jane, rather lamely, "Alice has got a little girl three
+years old."
+
+"So David Marshall is a grandfather? But what is there extraordinary in
+that?--I'm one myself." She stood in the big porch looking down the
+street--at nothing." Well, now I _am_ going to," she said, half to
+herself. "_That_ settles it!"
+
+She accompanied Jane half-way down the steps, bareheaded as she was, and
+in her morning-gown. A society reporter who happened to be passing
+originated the rumor that she had gone insane.
+
+"Good-luck, my child. Use my name everywhere. Take all that anybody
+offers. Good-by! Good-by!"
+
+Jane retraced her steps to kiss her. She had not kissed her own mother
+for ten years.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Within a month after Truesdale Marshall's return home the understanding
+between himself and his father might fairly have been classified among
+the facts accomplished; and it was brought about, too, by those
+indefinite courses, those impalpable procedures through which, in actual
+life, so many understandings are really arrived at. Truesdale, therefore,
+never received word that his father "wished to see him in the
+library"--as in the story-books. Nor did the two ever draw their chairs
+together in the middle of the stage close to the footlights, and have it
+out--as at the theatre. When Truesdale spoke at all he spoke
+casually--with more or less of implication or insinuation--to his mother
+or his sisters. When he spoke not at all, he acted--and his actions spoke
+as loudly and effectually as actions are held commonly to do. His father,
+therefore, learned presently, and with enough distinctness to serve all
+purposes, that the filial back was no more ready now than ever before to
+submit to harness; that rules and regulations were sure to be resented;
+that dates and duties were fretful affairs at best; that engagements and
+responsibilities were far too irksome to be endured; and, above all, that
+anything like "hours" would be most emphatically beyond the pale of a
+moment's consideration. Truesdale professed to regard himself as having
+returned once more to the life of the frontier; and being thus placed,
+what could he be but a pioneer? Very well; he _would_ be a pioneer--the
+pioneer of a leisure class.
+
+He made, however, one concession to his father: he consented to a
+reduction in his allowance.
+
+He had led himself to believe that now, at last, in the town of his birth
+the career of a man of leisure was completely practicable. During his
+long absence from home his family had sent him at intervals copies of the
+local newspapers--sheets whose utterances were triumphantly optimistic,
+even beyond their triumphant and optimistic wont. Furthermore, his
+courses over the Continent had brought him into contact with many
+travellers more lately from home than himself, whose strange and topping
+tales--carried, indeed, in a direction the reverse of that taken by most
+such reports--had told him much of contemporaneous achievement behind
+them, and had filled him with a half-belief that no expectations founded
+on such a base could be exorbitant. A great light had arisen; the city,
+notably a metropolis for many years already, had opened out into a
+cosmopolis; the poet had at last arrived, and the earth was now tolerable
+for the foot of man.
+
+He visited on the South shore the great white shell from which the spirit
+had taken its formal leave but a week before, and he acknowledged the
+potency of the poet's spell. "It _is_ good," he assented; "better than I
+could have thought--better than anybody over there could be made to
+believe. I might have tried to get home a fortnight sooner, perhaps."
+
+He met half-way the universal expectation that the spirit of the White
+City was but just transferred to the body of the great Black City close
+at hand, over which it was to hover as an enlightenment--through which it
+might permeate as an informing force.
+
+"Good!" he thought; "there's no place where it's needed more or where it
+might do more good." The great town, in fact, sprawled and coiled about
+him like a hideous monster--a piteous, floundering monster, too. It
+almost called for tears. Nowhere a more tireless activity, nowhere a more
+profuse expenditure, nowhere a more determined striving after the ornate,
+nowhere a more undaunted endeavor towards the monumental expression of
+success, yet nowhere a result so pitifully grotesque, grewsome,
+appalling. "So little taste," sighed Truesdale; "so little training, so
+little education, so total an absence of any collective sense of the fit
+and the proper! Who could believe, here, that there _are_ cities
+elsewhere which fashioned themselves rightly almost by intuition--which
+took shape and reached harmony by an unreasoned instinct, as you might
+say?"
+
+But let that pass; he must take the town as he found it. Between his own
+transplanted artistic interests on the one hand and his association with
+the great throng of artists that the _Aufklärung_ had doubtless brought
+and held, he should do well enough. He figured mornings given over to
+music and painting--his own; and afternoons of studio-rounds, when
+fellow-artists would turn him their unfinished canvasses to the light, or
+would pull away the clinging sheets from their shapes of dampened clay;
+and evenings when the room would thicken with smoke and tall glasses
+would make rings on the shining tops of tables, while a dozen agile wits
+had their own way with Monet and Bourget and Verlaine. For the rest,
+_concerts_, _spectacles_, _bals_; if need be, receptions; or, if pushed
+to it, five-o'clock tea--with the chance that one other man might be
+present. Thus the winter. As for the summer: "No canoeing, of course, on
+the Lahn and the Moselle; I must fall back upon the historic Illinois,
+with its immemorial towns and villages and crumbling cathedrals, and the
+long line of ancient and picturesque châteaux between Ottawa and Peoria.
+No more villeggiatura at Frascati or Fiesole; I shall have to flee from
+the summer heats to the wild ravines and gorges of DuPage County--and
+raise turnips and cabbages there with the rest of them."
+
+Putting aside for the present all thought of the coming summer, Truesdale
+set himself to the formation of a circle. He had gone away as a boy and
+had come back as a young man. He had grown beyond his old acquaintances,
+he thought, and apart from them--of which last there could be no doubt on
+either side; and it struck him that the easiest and simplest thing to do
+would be to drop them all and to start afresh. To drop everybody and to
+start afresh was something he was completely habituated to. He did it
+through the year at intervals of from three to six months; during the
+busy summer season among the Swiss pensions he had done it once every
+fortnight, or oftener. His nature was full of adaptability, receptivity,
+fluidity; he made friends everywhere he went, and snatched up
+acquaintances at every corner.
+
+Among the first in his new batch were Theodore Brower and Arthur Paston.
+They were both older than he, but he declared, _net_, that his
+non-travelled compatriots of his own age were impossible. These two new
+acquaintances he appeared to like equally well; and Jane, whose kindling
+ambition had devoted her brother to a brilliant social career, and whose
+forenoon with Mrs. Bates had done little enough to quench the mounting
+flame, wondered how such an augury was to be read; for Brower was wholly
+out of society, while Paston was understood to be (save for some slight
+but inevitable business entanglements) wholly in it. She decided,
+finally, that, as Truesdale had met Brower in their own
+house--involuntarily, as it were--while he had met Paston outside (as a
+result, inferentially, of his own endeavors and advances), the brilliant
+future of her brother was in no danger of being compromised. Then she
+restored the just balance between the two by the thought that Truesdale
+had taken very kindly to Theod--to Mr. Brower, after all; much more so
+than Rosy, whose sauciness (she could think of no other word) Jane found
+herself unable to forgive.
+
+Theodore Brower was some ten years older than Truesdale. His hair was
+beginning to retreat before his advancing forehead, and about his eyes
+were coming to appear those lines proper to the man who is in business
+for himself and pretty largely absorbed in it. He had a pair of shrewd
+but kindly brown eyes and a straightforward and serious manner. He held
+his hand more or less on the pulsing actualities of the town, and at one
+time or another he took Truesdale to most of his clubs--the Crepuscular,
+the Consolation, the Simplicity, the Universe. At most of these they
+dined moderately and discussed immoderately, except at the Simplicity,
+whose avowed object was to free Man from the tyranny of Things. There
+they discussed and did not dine at all.
+
+Brower called at the Marshall house at discreet intervals; now and then,
+provided there was a plausible pretext for business, the interval was
+shortened. He looked after all of old Mr. Marshall's insurance interests,
+and the alterations in the business premises of Marshall & Belden seemed
+to furnish him with such a pretext. The various policies required various
+permits from various companies, and numerous changes to correspond with
+the changes in the building itself. True, Brower might have sent one of
+his young men to the store; but he preferred to come himself to the
+house.
+
+His presence there, under this ruse, was attended by various phenomena.
+It was then that Jane would pant over the banister and palpitate in
+doorways, and start and hesitate and advance and retreat, and presently
+go gliding along the hall, and finally look in through the open door to
+say, with affected surprise and disappointment:
+
+"Why, dear me, it's only Mr. Brower, after all!"
+
+Then the humiliation which she joyfully supposed him to suffer through
+the infliction of such an indignity would be cancelled by a
+fifteen-minute talk which, as regarded Jane's intention at least, would
+be quite gracious and brilliant. Brower went through this ordeal serenely
+enough, and never hesitated to expose himself again.
+
+To Rosamund these subterfuges were too obvious for comment; this she
+reserved for those other occasions when Brower's attentions were not made
+to assume the mask of business. She objected that he came generally in a
+sack-coat, that he sometimes presented himself too early, that he
+dispensed with the mediatory services of a card, that he asked at the
+door for "Miss Jane," and that she herself was always treated by him as a
+child.
+
+"Doesn't he know," protested Rosy, "that Jane is 'Miss Marshall'? And
+does he think that I shall let him go on calling me by a mere nickname?"
+
+She appeared to feel instinctively the point and the justness of these
+her various exceptions, though where she collected her data it might have
+been difficult definitely to say. She was served by intuition, perhaps;
+or by a sixth sense--the social sense--which was now rapidly developing
+from some recess hidden and hitherto all unsuspected.
+
+Though Brower was out of Society, Truesdale did not find him on this
+account any the more in Bohemia; he merely occupied the firm and definite
+middle-ground of business. But Paston, on the other hand, while firmly
+set in the flowery field of society, was quite capable of lifting a foot
+now and then to put it within the borders of another and a different
+area. Truesdale first met him in a sculptor's studio, at the top of one
+of the great down-town office buildings; the young Briton was escorting a
+pair of young women of his own circle who seemed disposed to encourage
+art to the extent of seeing how the thing was done, and whose interest
+was largely exhausted with an understanding of certain mechanical
+processes. He and Truesdale subsequently grazed against each other at
+places where young women, again, were present, whose interest in matters
+aesthetic was in varying proportions, and whose social foothold was in
+the lower strata--or substrata, as the case might be. Paston handled life
+with the easy freedom of a man who, after all, was away from home; and
+Truesdale was not far behind. Home, with him, was everywhere--or, rather,
+nowhere; he had a great capacity for gypsy-like jauntings and an immense
+abhorrence of superfluous luggage, and among the most superfluous of all
+luggage he included scruples first and foremost. As soon expect a swallow
+to carry a portmanteau.
+
+During his first year abroad he had dabbled a good deal in French
+fiction; this was at Geneva, before his long and intimate sojourn in
+Paris. His taste had been formed, in the first instance, by the more
+frivolous productions of the Romantic school--by "Mademoiselle de
+Maupin," in part; by the "Vie de Boheme," more largely; and this taste
+had taken a confirmed set through the perusal of other works of a like
+trend--more contemporaneous and therefore still more deleterious. At
+Geneva he had permitted himself various fond imaginings of Mimi and
+Musette as they might disclose themselves in Paris--it was useless, all,
+to expect the encounter in this strenuous little stronghold of Calvinism;
+but Mimi and Musette, the actual, the contemporaneous, once met at short
+range, were far, far from the _gracieuse_ and _mignonne_ creations of
+Murger and of 1830. And if disappointing in Paris, how much more so in
+Chicago?--where impropriety was still wholly incapable of presenting
+itself in a guise that could enlist the sympathies of the fastidious.
+Truesdale, whether or no, found himself restricted within reasonable
+bounds by his own good taste. Nor was Paston permitted much greater
+latitude; whatever his taste, the condition of his finances would alone
+have checked him from straying too widely outside the beaten path.
+
+Paston was less reticent about the worldly status of himself and his
+family than might have been expected; he treated the subject in a broad,
+free fashion, with a great pretense to openness. Few apprehended the
+general and essential cautiousness of his disclosures; most people fell
+easily enough into the notion that so much frank jocularity had no other
+object than to entertain them; the young man was doubtless exaggerating,
+possibly inventing.
+
+"Absurd situation, isn't it?" he would set forth in his large and genial
+way. "Poor father! six girls to see married off; and five boys to start
+in life--quite as bad. One in the Army, one in the Navy, one in the
+Church, one in the Civil Service, and one--in America. No other way;
+somebody had to come to America--the youngest, naturally. And here he
+is."
+
+"Fancy that, Bessie! Imagine that, Allie!" his hearers would cry. Then
+they would ask him about the fox-hunting in Bucks, and tease him for
+further particulars about his sister Edith, who had married Lord
+Such-a-one.
+
+The subject of America he treated with some tact--with some forbearance,
+he himself may have thought. If asked point-blank whether he liked it, he
+would reply that his preference, naturally, must be for England. If asked
+further whether he liked Chicago--an inquiry which courtesy might well
+have withheld--he would answer promptly and plainly, No. And there the
+matter would end: he never gave detailed explanations. He was prepared,
+it came to be understood, to put the best face on a bad matter. He
+remained, however, a loyal subject of the Queen, and prayed for as speedy
+a sight of Boxton Park, Witham, Essex, as fortune would permit. And in
+the meantime he enjoyed such makeshift pleasures as came his way.
+
+Among these was that of leaving his card at several good houses--the card
+of Arthur Gerald Scodd-Paston. People met him at functions as Mr.
+Scodd-Paston, but most of them found his name rather a large mouthful;
+after they had used it enough times to show that they had caught it and
+were not unable to wield it, they would dispense with the forepart and
+use the Paston alone. This usage received the approval of a certain
+few who had had the privilege of addressing royalty--or subroyalty--and
+who remembered that, after they had used the expression "Your Royal
+Highness" a few times, they were entitled to an occasional lapse into the
+simpler "you." At the office, where he was by no means a royal highness,
+he was always Paston, and Paston merely.
+
+His father was a general in the British army, but lately retired. He
+never referred to this dignitary, as such, save twice. These early
+references, pointed but discreet he held to suffice; he estimated,
+properly enough, that his father's fame, once started, might be trusted
+to spread of itself; and it did--along with the son's modesty.
+
+It was doubtless to his father's personal influence that he was indebted
+for his connection with a great mortgage and investment company, which
+extended, in a chain of many links, all the way from London to Colorado,
+and a foothold in whose Chicago office he had been fortunate enough to
+secure. The salary connected with the place was but so-so; yet the place
+itself, as agreed to among the Englishry of Chicago, was in no degree
+unsuited to a young man of good family, fair education, small resources,
+and limited prospects, and a desire to make a decorous and
+self-respecting figure in society--such society as Western conditions
+offered. They said the position was as good--socially--as any in one of
+the branch Canadian banks; some of the more intensely English (the
+Canadians themselves) were fain to acknowledge that it was even better.
+
+So Paston did his "office work" of whatever kind during the day, and
+distributed his cards through the evening hours, and dined out with a
+good-will whenever occasion offered. This was often enough; he soon
+became known as one of the most persistent diners-out in town, and one of
+the most accomplished. His animal spirits were overflowing; his plump and
+ruddy person seemed to be at once grace, appetizer, and benediction; his
+fund of stories and anecdotes (constantly replenished from the most
+approved sources) was inexhaustible; he carried everything through almost
+single-handed, by reason of his abounding vitality and never-ending
+good-nature. Everybody wanted him who could get him; his presence
+lessened by half the rigors of entertaining. He therefore lodged quietly
+in a retired little house in the edge of a good neighborhood; they gave
+him his breakfast there, and warded off those who came to spy out the
+leanness of the land. He was thus seldom called upon to take thought
+for the morrow--having once passed, that is to say, the crucial hour of
+lunch.
+
+He led germans and promoted other social industries. His vacations he
+could have spent six times over at all manner of desirable places. On
+Sundays, through the summer, he was possessed briefly of the freedom of
+the scattered suburban settlements along the North shore. He always got a
+hundred cents out of every dollar, and in many instances he got the
+hundred cents and kept the dollar too.
+
+Truesdale was slow in making up his mind to introduce Paston into his own
+household. But Paston presently made his entrée there under other
+auspices; and within a month from that day Rosamund Marshall was studying
+Debrett and was taking hurdles at a riding-academy.
+
+For a third new acquaintance Truesdale was indebted to his aunt Lydia; he
+had felt certain, all along, that some such indebtedness would befall.
+His aunt lived two or three miles due south from his father's, near the
+last brace of big hotels. Her house had a rather imposing but impassive
+front of gray-stone, with many neighbors, more or less varying the same
+type, to the right and to the left and over the way. The house had never
+the absolute effect of extending hospitality; but he understood the
+possibilities of the interior, and knew that a cup of tea late on a
+November afternoon was among them.
+
+As he drew near he found this house and the other houses combined in a
+conspiracy of silence against the musical addresses of a swarthy
+foreigner who had a foothold a yard beyond the curbstone, and who was
+turning the crank of his instrument with all the rapid regularity of the
+thorough mechanician. The whole street rang. "'Ah, perchè non posso
+odiarti!'" hummed Truesdale in unison with the organ, as the performer,
+after an intricate cadenza, returned to the original theme. "That's the
+only recognizable thing I've heard these fellows play since I came over.
+I wonder who puts together all the shocking stuff they are loaded up with
+nowadays."
+
+The melody, so plaintive and cloying as a vocal performance, leaped
+forward briskly enough under the rapid lashings to and fro of the crank;
+the elbow of the organist moved with a swift rhythm as his searching eye
+tried vainly to wring a penny or two from some one of all these opulent
+facades. "Good Heaven!" cried Truesdale; "how little feeling, how little
+expression! Here," he said to the man in Italian; "take this half lira
+and let _me_ have a chance. Bellini was never meant to go like that."
+
+The man, with a cheerful grin, yielded up his instrument to this engaging
+youth who was able to address him so pointedly in his own language, and
+Truesdale, with his eye on his aunt's upper windows, proceeded to indulge
+himself in a realization of his ideal. His aunt was vastly susceptible to
+music, and he would heap upon her (in the absence of any other) all those
+passionate reproaches for cruelty and faithlessness proper to the
+rôle--welling crescendos and plaintive diminuendos and long, slow
+rallentandos, followed quickly by panting and impassioned accelerandos.
+In other words, he would show this music-cobbler the possibilities of his
+instrument and the emotional capacity of the human soul. Incidentally, he
+should earn his cup of tea.
+
+
+"Why, oh why do I strive in vain to h-a-te thee,
+Cruel creature, as deeply as I would?"
+
+
+began Truesdale, blithely, with his eye on the one window whose shade was
+not completely lowered. But at the third or fourth measure he paused
+disconcerted. He had adopted a varying rhythm to express each last fine
+shade of the text, and the air was already littered with abrupt and
+disjointed phrases which began with a quick snarl or with a prolonged
+nasal wail, leaving a sudden hiatus here, and giving there a long,
+lingering scream on some mere passing note.
+
+"Dear me!" exclaimed Truesdale, "this won't do at all. Here, signor
+organista, just set that thing back, will you, and we'll start again."
+
+
+"Why, oh why do I strive in vain to hate thee?"
+
+
+More notes shattered themselves on the stone walls about him--singly,
+in bunches, in long, detached wails. The organ yelped and snarled as
+Truesdale, time routed and accent annihilated, abandoned himself to the
+expression and the phrasing of the true Italian school. Two or three
+passing children paused on the pavement; a park policeman, stationed on
+the next corner, walked his sedate iron-gray slowly along to the point of
+disturbance.
+
+Presently the object of all this attention showed herself. Mrs. Rhodes
+appeared at the window with that expression of indignant protest which
+forecasts an appeal to the authorities. When she saw the offending cause
+her indignation did not greatly diminish; she refused to smile even when
+Truesdale extended his hat for the usual tribute. He saw her lips move,
+however, with a quick exclamation which brought a second person to the
+window. Then both immediately withdrew.
+
+"Another niece, I swear!" said Truesdale; "and I've walked right into
+it." He gave the man a second dime. "I guess you understand it better
+than I do, after all," he said, magnanimously.
+
+"What was your idea in making me ridiculous that way?" his aunt asked in
+severe reproach, as she advanced to meet him in the reception-hall. "Do
+you want to set me up as a laughingstock for all my friends and
+neighbors? After all I've told Bertie about your music, too! I don't know
+whether I shall let you know her or not."
+
+"It was pretty rocky, wasn't it?" Truesdale admitted, with a cheery
+impartiality. "I'm afraid it takes more practice than I've ever had a
+chance to give it. And perhaps I don't understand the genius of the
+instrument. Where do you suppose they learn to do it? How long a course
+is necessary, do you fancy, to get a complete grip on the technique?"
+
+His aunt's protest had been purely personal. With a broader outlook and a
+better understanding she might have protested on behalf of a slighted
+neighborhood, or, indeed, of a misprized town. A finer vision might have
+seen in Truesdale's prank a good-natured, half-contemptuous indifference
+alike to place and people. "I don't know _what_ the Warners over the way
+will think," she emitted, as if that were all.
+
+She presently relented as to the new inmate of her household. "Come,
+Bertie!" she called; "step up, like a good girl. This is my nephew
+Truesdale--you've heard all about him; Miss Bertie Patterson, of
+Madison."
+
+Miss Patterson of Madison was a shy, brown-eyed little girl who, at a
+guess, had been in long dresses but a year or two; as she faced Truesdale
+she seemed to be wondering if she might venture to smile. She had never
+before been south of the Wisconsin State line; but Mrs. Rhodes, having
+exhausted the ranks of her own nieces, was now giving a tardy recognition
+to the nieces of her late husband. Bertie Patterson had come for the
+winter, and she was finding a great deal of pleasure and interest
+(slightly tinctured with awe) in a town which for some years she had
+favored with a highly idealistic anticipation.
+
+"Nice little thing," admitted Truesdale, inwardly; "but Aunt Lydia has
+got to leave _me_ alone."
+
+Mrs. Rhodes took him into the drawing-room, and had Bertie Patterson make
+him his tea. She did this very nicely; she helped rather than hindered
+the effect by her hesitancy and lack of complete confidence. She had
+never poured tea many times before for a young man--never at all for just
+such a young man as this.
+
+"Now," said his aunt, presently. She emitted this monosyllable with a
+falling inflection, and followed it by a full stop. She took his teacup
+from him. "You know what little Tommy Tucker did." She placed her thumb
+on one of the upper black notes of the piano and waved her fingers over
+the remainder of the keyboard. "'Just a song at twilight,'" She quoted,
+with a coaxing smile.
+
+"All right," said Truesdale, promptly. "Thanks for this chance to redeem
+myself. I'll show you now how it really ought to go."
+
+And he did. At Milan he had seen reflected in his looking-glass not only
+Fernando, but Elvino, too, besides Edgardo and Manrico, and that whole
+romantic brotherhood. He resuscitated them all, with as much sentiment,
+romance, passion, drama, as each individual case required, while Bertie
+Patterson sat in the fading light behind the great three-cornered screen
+of the up-tilted cover and clasped her hands and brought her generous
+idealizing faculty into its fullest play.
+
+Then he sang a few German lieder of a more contemporaneous cast. Then his
+aunt asked him for that last sweet little thing of his own. "I don't
+believe Bertie has ever heard a composer sing one of his own songs."
+
+As he concluded, his aunt gave a long and appreciative sigh. "There!" she
+breathed. Then: "Why do you act like a crazy, when you can be so nice if
+you only will?"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+"Drive on a little farther, Martin," Mrs. Bates directed her coachman; "I
+can never work my way through all that mess."
+
+Beds of mortar and piles of brick half filled the roadway, and the posts
+of a kind of rough plank canopy, which formed a shelter for pedestrians,
+rose flush with the curbstone. Far above this improvised shelter
+bricklayers were adding the courses of a new story or two to the walls of
+a shabby and smoke-stained old structure, and immediately below it the
+march of traffic and the hubbub of trade proceeded upon the broad flag
+sidewalk as fully as contractors and their underlings would permit.
+"Right over there," Mrs. Bates indicated; "between that sand-pile and the
+row of flour-barrels."
+
+Porters in blue overalls hurried boxes and tubs across the wide walk to
+the waiting carts of suburban grocers. Through the dingy windows there
+showed rows of shelves set with bottles of olives or cluttered with glass
+jars containing various grades of molasses. From the narrow window of a
+small, close pen, a few feet within the door, a shipping-clerk, wearing a
+battered straw hat of the past summer, thrust out bills of lading to
+draymen and issued directions to a gang of German and Swedish
+roustabouts.
+
+"I have taken a great time to come," Mrs. Bates observed to herself. She
+rubbed a streak of lime from her fur coat, and stooped to pick a splinter
+from the hem of her skirt. "Who's the one to ask, I wonder?"
+
+She secured the interest of a plump, round-shouldered young German, whose
+viscous hands had just left a syrup-cask, and whose wide blue eyes stared
+at this unaccustomed visitor with an honest wonder. He ventured to lead
+her as far as a door in a grimy glass partition which closed off a large
+room filled with desks, gas-shades, clerks, and account-books. Circles of
+teacups stood on the round tops of oak tables; little pasteboard trays of
+coffee were disposed on the wide window-ledges, and were also ranged on
+the top of a substantial balustrade that shut off two or three gentlemen
+in high silk hats from the other occupants of the place.
+
+Mrs. Bates threw herself upon the guidance of a young office-hand--the
+sole person present who seemed sufficiently disengaged to notice her. He
+asked her, with a mixture of surprise and deference, what name he should
+give.
+
+"Sue Lathrop, say," she responded, in an access of large and liberal
+recklessness.
+
+She was led through another door, in another dingy glass partition, to a
+smaller room at one corner, and as she passed along she threw a general
+glance over her surroundings. "So _he's_ here, then!" she said, under her
+breath, as one of the gentlemen took off his hat and set it carefully on
+top of a desk. "I'd forgotten all about his being in business with David.
+It's just as well if he didn't see me. No love lost," she added, grimly.
+
+She paused on the threshold of this last doorway; apparently she had
+fallen upon the final moments of some small conference. A tall, spare old
+man was delaying the resumption of his correspondence to call a last word
+after a younger one, who had just set his hat upon the back of his head
+and was now moving towards the exit.
+
+"Try a summons--yes," said the elder; "that would have been the best
+thing to start with, wouldn't it?"
+
+"I don't quite see it that way,' replied the other, in the tone of heated
+defence. "he took the goods, and must have had them on the premises."
+
+"You didn't find them, though. I don't quite see the use of your having
+gone with a writ of replevin after goods that I were bought to be sold
+again as soon as might be."
+
+"Such old stuff isn't worked off in any such haste as that. It's as I
+tell you--word was got around to her that the writ had been issued. The
+place was all turned upside down; the things had been hidden away."
+
+"Who could have told her?"
+
+"Who?" cried the other, with a scornful impatience. "Somebody connected
+with the court. Who else could? Who else knew? Well, I'll try the other
+thing; there is plenty yet to be learned about justice-court justice, no
+doubt." He passed out with snapping eyes and a curl on his lips, and the
+older man again bent himself over his desk.
+
+It was a cramped little room with a breadth or two of worn oilcloth on
+the floor. Two or three shelves, set across the dingy window, supported a
+range of glass jars filled with nutmegs and orris-root. On the tilted
+flagging, outside, the tops of a row of blue gasoline barrels held each a
+half-pint of the past night's shower, and across the muddy street bunches
+of battered bananas hung from the rusty framework of several shabby old
+awnings.
+
+"Poor David! twenty years and more of _this_!" Mrs. Bates stood within
+the doorway. It was easy enough to figure her as already
+forgotten--easier still when the old man's half-guilty start at length
+acknowledged her presence.
+
+She stepped forward with an undaunted cordiality. "Well, David, here I am
+at last, you see. The mountain wouldn't come to Mohammed, so"--She tapped
+her foot smartly on the oilcloth. "Here stands Sue Lathrop, with a long
+memory and a disposition to meet the mountain half-way, or
+three-quarters, or seven-eighths, or to trudge the whole distance--even
+to the last yard. One, two, three!" she counted, as she stepped up to
+his desk and flung out her hand.
+
+The old man rose with something like alacrity. He banished his slight
+frown of preoccupation and hastened to replace it by an expression of--so
+to speak--apologetic cordiality.
+
+"Mrs. Bates," he murmured. "It's very kind of you to come here--very. My
+daughter--" he hesitated. He finished the sentence by drawing up a chair
+and clearing its seat of the ruck of morning papers.
+
+"I take the chair," she said, as if in burlesque assumption of the
+guidance of some public meeting, "but not as any 'Mrs. Bates.' You know,
+David, that I haven't come here to be treated with any such formality as
+that."
+
+He looked at her with a half-smiling wistfulness, as if he would be glad
+enough to take her tone, were the thing only possible. But for such a
+juncture as this he had little initiative and less momentum, and he
+realized it all too well.
+
+Mrs. Bates seated herself and threw open her furs. Her affluence, her
+expansiveness, her easy mastery of the situation seemed to crowd this
+square and ineffective old man quite into a corner. She counted his
+wrinkles and his gray hairs; she noted the patient dulness of his eye and
+the slow deliberation of his movements. "He _is_ old," she thought;
+"older than I should have imagined. I might have bestirred myself and
+come before."
+
+She turned on him with a flash of her own magnificent and abounding
+vitality. "I want you to assure me that I am not in the way--that I am
+not interrupting business. This is not the 'busy day,' I hope, that the
+little placards in the offices tell about." She must meet his unreadiness
+with the fluency over which she had such a fortunate and unfailing
+command. "This isn't the busy hour of the day, nor the busy day of the
+week, nor the busy week of the year?"
+
+Marshall smiled slowly. He felt himself coming to a better adjustment
+with her mature and massive comeliness, her rich and elaborate attire,
+her full-toned and friendly fluency. "We are always busy, and are
+expecting to be busier still; but we are never too busy for a call like
+this." He considered that that was doing pretty fairly for an old man who
+was immersed in affairs and altogether alien to the amenities of the
+great world.
+
+Mrs. Bates rubbed again at the lime-streak on her fur. "Expecting
+to be busier, yes; and preparing for it accordingly." But why "we"?--she
+was not calling on the firm. "I'm sure I broke in on something at the
+very start." She made him a determined tender of this handle--something
+or other, apparently, he must be offered to take hold of.
+
+"Only a little matter with my son. It was ending as you came in."
+
+"Your son?" Here was an opening, indeed. "Not the one just home from
+abroad?"
+
+"Oh no. That's Truesdale. Roger, now, has stayed at home; and he has done
+the better for it, I think. He looks after my law business. He has never
+had any of the disadvantages of European travel," the old man concluded,
+with a kind of gentle grimness.
+
+Mrs. Bates's eyes flashed; here, to her thinking, was a glimmer of the
+real David, after all.
+
+"My boys haven't been over either," she responded. She cast aside any
+lingering fear that no "talk" could ensue; it must, it should. "No," she
+went on, "neither one of them; and I'm none too sure that they ever
+_will_ go. But as for college--well, _that_ I absolutely insisted upon.
+When my first boy was getting along to that age the question gave me a
+good deal of anxiety. Mr. Bates had his views and I had mine. Granger was
+for clapping him right into business; for a week I was positively
+alarmed. Up to that time my husband and I had staved forward
+abreast--neither had ever disappointed the other, nor lagged behind the
+other; but I was afraid that the point had been reached at last
+where I must drop him behind and go ahead alone. 'My dear husband,' I
+began--and when I begin like that he knows I mean business--'my dear
+husband, do you realize what the next twenty years are holding for this
+town? Do you know the promise they have for a young man of family who is
+properly qualified and started? Do we want our boys to get their manners
+from the daily hustle of La Salle Street? Do we want them to get their
+physique by doubling over books all day in a close, unwholesome office?
+What's the good of all our millions if we can't start our children in
+life with good health and good manners? Let them build up sound bodies
+and let them learn the usages of good society--how to associate on equal
+terms, in fact, with men of their own class. Give them a chance at tennis
+and baseball. As for their Latin and Greek, it won't do them any real
+harm--they'll forget it all in due season.' And so forth, and so
+forth," added Mrs. Bates, conscious of the growing length of her
+tirade. "Well, I had my way in the end--I usually do--besides the
+satisfaction of finding that Granger Bates was still capable of stepping
+right along with his wife. Billy came home--a big, handsome, gentlemanly
+fellow--and was put into the business on the very day he was twenty-one.
+He's doing well, and Jimmy will follow in due course. Your oldest boy is
+a lawyer, then. What's the other one?"
+
+"He's a gentleman--so far," answered Marshall, rather ruefully. "I'm
+afraid he's almost too clever to be anything else."
+
+"H'm," pondered Mrs. Bates, with a sympathetic thoughtfulness; "that's
+bad--bad. I'd sooner have a boy of mine dead than a mere gentleman. And I
+shouldn't want him too clever, either. My Billy, before we sent him off
+to college, showed signs of cleverness; it worried me a good deal. He
+wanted to write; and there was one time when he thought he wanted to
+paint. Of course we couldn't allow anything like that. I was willing
+enough that he should be posted on the best books, and be able to tell a
+good painting from a bad one--to be a patron of the arts, if so minded.
+But to do things of that sort himself--oh, really, you know, that was
+altogether out of the question. He's with his father now, as I say, and
+he's where he belongs. How old is your other boy--Roger? Twenty-eight?
+Twenty-nine?"
+
+"Thirty. He went right from the High School to the Law School. No
+college, no Europe; yet for all that--"
+
+"For all that, he's doing well, eh? He's got quite a practice, has he?
+He's a smart fellow? He's a good lawyer?"
+
+Marshall hesitated. A week previous his affirmative would have come more
+promptly. "Yes," he said at length, "Roger is pretty good in his line. He
+does for himself; he never makes any demands on his father. He is
+practising right along, and--and learning. He does quite well--in some
+things." The old gentleman's tone and manner expressed a delicate and
+disappointed qualification; and his thought seemed gliding away to
+something in no wise connected with the present talk.
+
+Mrs. Bates brought him back to the actualities of the moment; she had no
+idea of permitting her impromptu address on education (furthest of all
+things from her thoughts as she had entered) to be succeeded by an
+absolute hiatus. She therefore made inquiries of the customary civility
+about the other members of the Marshall family. She asked with a firm and
+ceremonial emphasis after Mrs. Marshall, and expressed herself as pleased
+at the prospect of renewed relations between the two families. "We are
+the old settlers, you know. There are only a few of us left, and we ought
+to hang together." She inquired further about his youngest daughter,
+whose social fortunes she seemed disposed to promote; she even made a
+civil reference to the remote dweller at Riverdale Park. And then, with
+every appearance of relish, she approached the subject of the other
+daughter who came between--"the girl who gave me an art course in my own
+house," she declared, with twinkling eyes.
+
+Marshall smiled. "That's Jane, true enough. She has always been kind of
+literary and artistic, and lately she has become architectural too. She
+is down here once or twice a week to help Bingham put on these extra
+stories."
+
+"Bingham? My Bingham? Tom Bingham? He's the one who built our house," she
+explained.
+
+"That's the one. Jane held out, at first, for an architect and a design;
+she had an idea that here was the chance, finally, to make this old block
+an ornament to the city. But I thought differently. So I had Bingham's
+people take off the cornice and run up two stories like the others.
+To-morrow they'll put the cornice back again, and we shall be under cover
+before the snow flies."
+
+"Well, between Jane and Tom Bingham you're in pretty good hands. Have you
+had him before for anything? He's a grand fellow. It'll do you lots of
+good to know him--as much good as it has done me to know your girl.
+David," she went on, with a little touch of solemnity, "she's a fine
+girl, she's a splendid girl; and she thinks everything of her father."
+
+"So she does," admitted the old gentleman, with a guarded smile. His
+comments on his daughter's affection for him were never profuse.
+
+"When she came to see me the other day," Mrs. Bates continued, "it was
+like a whiff of air from the old times. It was like one of the Old
+Settler receptions that the Calumet people used to give--only better. Why
+did they stop them, I wonder? Are the old settlers giving out? Or has the
+town become too proud and indifferent? Or what?"
+
+"I'm afraid it's the fault of the old settlers themselves," responded
+Marshall, with a grave and quiet smile. "They won't stay to be received."
+
+"Yes, I know," said Mrs. Bates, with a soft little sigh. "They are
+dropping off one by one. David!" she exclaimed suddenly, leaning forward
+with a wistful smile, "we ought never to have drifted apart as we did. We
+ought not to have lost sight of each other for all these years. I'm
+sure"--in earnest questioning--"that we remember enough about the old
+times to care to see each other once in a while still?"
+
+Marshall dropped his eyes to his desk, and his long, lean fingers picked
+out the border of its blue baize covering. He was half touched, half
+embarrassed. "I hope so," he said.
+
+"What gay times we used to have!" she went on, still determined, despite
+his meagre response, upon an evocation of their youthful past. "Such
+dances and sleigh-rides, and everything! You were ever so good to me in
+those old days; I haven't forgotten how you took me to the Diorama and
+the Bell-Ringers and what all besides. And 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' too--I'm
+sure I should never have seen it but for you; certainly I haven't had
+much disposition to see it of _late_ years--especially since they have
+put the blood-hounds in! And there was Topsy and Eva, too--oh, dear, I
+believe I should like to see it again, after all; don't they give it over
+on the West Side now and then? You must remember how they wore those tall
+pointed hats and those red petticoats and those black velvet bands across
+themselves in front--not the blood-hounds--and how they had the bells on
+different little tables according to their size--not Topsy and Eva; I'm
+talking about the Peake family, you understand. And there was Adelina
+Patti, too--a mere slip of a girl, in the quaintest little old clothes. I
+go every time she comes; I wouldn't miss one of her farewells for
+anything. You go, too, I suppose?"
+
+"The same old Sue," he said, smiling. "I? No; I haven't seen her since
+that first time, so long ago."
+
+"Yes," she cried, "I _am_ the same old Sue; and I always shall be to the
+friends of those dear old days! But you, David--how is it with you
+yourself?"
+
+She looked at him closely, earnestly, studiously. He felt that she was
+disappointed in him, and he felt almost disappointed in himself. She had
+come to him extending, as it were, an olive branch--living, lustrous,
+full-foliaged; and in return he seemed able to offer nothing beyond a
+mere splinter-like twig--dry, sapless, unpliant. He was conscious that he
+was not all she had expected to find him, nor all that she was entitled
+to expect to find him; he was even conscious, but more dimly, that he
+was not quite all that he had meant to be; no, nor all that, in her eyes,
+he should have liked to be. Yet, in the end, he was a successful man, and
+she must know it. True, he had not rolled up any such enormous fortune as
+that of Granger Bates, nor did he make in the public eye any such
+splendid and enviable figure. All the same, however, he could command the
+world to the extent of three million dollars; nor was he displeased
+that his caller should have come at a time when indications of future
+prosperity greater still were so patent all over the premises.
+
+Mrs. Bates smoothed her gloves upon each other and cast her eye over the
+nutmegs and orris-root and the other furnishings of the apartment, and
+heaved a little sigh and rose to go.
+
+"I am glad to have had these few minutes with you, David; but I feel that
+I have no right to take up any more of them. I am sure this _is_ your
+busy day, after all."
+
+She looked up into his face, which was coming once more to be overcast
+with its accustomed aspect of preoccupation, and gave him her hand. He
+took it kindly enough, and she bestowed on his a quiet little pressure.
+It was hardly cordial; it was far indeed from effusive. Yet she had
+hoped, half an hour before, to have it both.
+
+"Ten years ago," she said, "I might have satisfied myself about you
+without coming here at all." She stood at the end of his desk, and
+stirred with an unconscious finger the loose memoranda in a wire basket
+on the corner of it. "The papers used to speak of you, and now and then
+something would come by word of mouth. But I am hearing less about you of
+late. Hold your own, David. Don't let the world forget you. You have done
+well, as I know, and you are entitled to your place in the public eye."
+
+She looked him in the face, smilingly but very earnestly. "I had great
+hopes for you in the early days, and I find that I am jealous for you
+even yet. You have made a good deal of money, they tell me, and you are
+getting ready to make a good deal more--_that_ I see for myself. But
+doesn't it seem to you," she proceeded, carefully, "that things are
+beginning to be different?--that the man who enjoys the best position and
+the most consideration is not the man who is making money, but the man
+who is giving it away--not the man who is benefiting himself, but the man
+who is benefiting the community. _There_ is an art to cultivate,
+David--the art of giving. Give liberally and rightly, and nothing can
+bring you more credit."
+
+Marshall regarded her with a dubious smile. Nobody had ever before
+attempted to fit his head to such a cap as this.
+
+"As I have said so many times to Mr. Bates, 'Make it something that
+people can _see_.' Imagine a man disposed to devote two or three hundred
+thousand dollars to the public, and giving it to help pay off the
+municipal debt. How many people would consider themselves benefited by
+the gift, or would care a cent for the name of the giver? Or fancy his
+giving it to clean up the streets of the city. The whole affair would be
+forgotten with the coming of the next rain-storm. 'No,' said I to
+Granger, it must be something solid and something permanent; it must
+be a building.' And it's _going_ to be a building. You drive out with me
+to the University campus this time next year, David, and you'll see Bates
+Hall--four stories high, with dormers and gables and things, and the name
+carved in gray-stone over the doorway, to stay there for the next century
+or two. I think I shall name it Susan Lathrop Bates Hall (Granger is
+willing), and make it a girls' dormitory. They'll call the girls
+'Susans,' I dare say; but I sha'n't mind, and I don't suppose they will
+either. Besides, boys would be sure to be called 'Grangers,' so what's
+the difference?" She smiled whimsically, and made a feint to depart.
+
+"But there are plenty of other things," she paused to impart. "People are
+always running to us about schools and hospitals. A few loose thousands,
+for example, would help the Orchestra guarantee--Granger has contributed
+there, too. And lately he has been approached about an endowed theater.
+There are plenty of ways."
+
+"Your husband is fond of music?"
+
+"Oh, well, he doesn't object to it. He can sit out an evening in our box
+very comfortably. But a man of his position is naturally expected to
+support a great artistic enterprise. Besides, Granger thinks a good deal
+of the reputation of the city."
+
+"Yes, there are plenty of ways, as you say," the old man rejoined, with
+his preoccupied smile. "The 'charity' page of our ledger shows that. No
+man in business is allowed to forget his obligations to the 'public.' I
+am just beginning to become acquainted with the public--our public. A
+justice-court is a good place for us to learn what it is and who compose
+it, and what their attitude is toward us--the public that we are expected
+to do so much for."
+
+Mrs. Bates, with her hand on the door-knob, felt herself obliged to
+decline this theme so tardily introduced--though the old man's tart tone
+promised great possibilities. She would have thanked David Marshall for a
+prompter contribution of conversational material; she felt that her own
+efforts during this interview had been out of all proportion to his. She
+made no response, and he stepped forward to conduct her through the outer
+office to her carriage. "You needn't go through all those porters again,"
+he said.
+
+Just inside the outer doorway stood two gentlemen; their faces were
+turned towards the street as they watched the preparations for the upward
+trip of a great length of metallic cornice. "Why," said Mrs. Bates, as
+one of them turned half round, "isn't that Tom Bingham, now?"
+
+"Yes," said Marshall; "he looks in occasionally."
+
+"How do you do, Mr. Bingham?" she said, hastening up to him with a jocular
+cast in her eye. She knew the Bingham Construction Company as the
+builders of a score of handsome residences, and of as many of the vast
+structures which towered all over the business district. It seemed droll
+to her to find him here, giving personal heed to mere alterations and
+repairs. "What will be the next thing--building-blocks? Let me send you a
+box of them, I beg of you."
+
+Bingham turned round altogether--a tall, stalwart man whose face was full
+of the serenity that comes from breadth and poise, but whose mind, as she
+herself knew well enough, was too habituated to the broad treatment of
+big matters to have any aptitude for repartee and chatter. She liked to
+disconcert him, and it was usually an easy thing to do. "And I wish,
+while you have your hand in, you would just come up and nail some
+weather-strips on my dining-room windows."
+
+Bingham smiled slightly. "Send on your blocks," he said--"if you think
+they will help me any _there_." He pointed towards the cornices of the
+building opposite. Above their broken skyline a tall steel frame (on the
+next street behind) rose some two hundred feet into the air; along the
+black lines which its upper stage etched against the sky a dozen men
+swarmed in spidery activity and sent down the sharp clang of metal on
+metal to the noisier world below.
+
+"Mine, too," he said, shortly, as if the vast monument were its own
+sufficient spokesman. He seemed proud of himself and of the town where
+such things could be accomplished.
+
+Mrs. Bates flashed forth a look full of admiration for both man and work.
+"I'll take that all back about the weather-strips; but if you _could_
+bring up your kit to-morrow morning and make us an extra coal-bin in the
+furnace-room---Too proud for that, too? Well, then, just come up to
+dinner to-morrow evening--only the family. And bring your sister, if
+she'll accept on such short notice."
+
+The other gentleman, whom Mrs. Bates had overlooked, and indeed
+forgotten, turned round. "You know Mr. Belden, Mrs. Bates?" was
+Marshall's introduction.
+
+Belden was a man between forty-five and fifty. His costume and
+countenance were alike much more contemporaneous than his partner's. His
+dress was self-consciously fashionable, and he wore a carefully trained
+mustache, whose dark brown was beginning to show threads of gray. His
+cheeks and his forehead seemed in their smoothness as if coated with some
+impermeable and indestructible hard-finish. He had a resolute chin and a
+pair of hard, steel-gray eyes, which were set much too close together to
+leave great room for any attribution of an open-minded generosity. He and
+Mrs. Bates, under Marshall's promptings, bowed icily, and a cold and
+chilling silence immediately ensued.
+
+"Just like me," said Mrs. Bates, as she effected a hurried departure,
+"to blunder up against him as I did. I wonder if he and David get along
+at all well together. And the idea of my extending invitations to dinner
+under his very nose! Well, it can't be helped now."
+
+She thought this the only offence of which Belden might accuse her. But
+he was piqued by her apparent disparagement of their building, and he was
+still more incensed by her having called on his partner at their place of
+business. For Marshall must know--everybody must know--that the Beldens,
+though neighbors of the Bateses, had never been admitted, and never
+were to be admitted, into their house.
+
+Belden stood behind the vast spread of dingy plate-glass, and watched
+Bingham putting Mrs. Bates into her carriage. He found additional offence
+in the gay nod which she sent to Marshall through the carriage window.
+
+"In spite of you," he muttered; "we are moving up in spite of you.
+Prevent us, if you can!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Susan Bates drove homeward, filled with a vague dissatisfaction. "I
+expected too much," she said to herself, as she half opened the door
+again to free the skirt that Bingham had fastened there. "I ought to have
+chosen a different time and place. I might have known that he would be
+deep in his business--I ought not to have taken him with the harness
+actually on his back."
+
+She sighed as she thought of all the things she had meant to say, but had
+come away without saying--the thousand and one minor reminiscences of
+those early days in the straggling and struggling prairie town. She had
+imagined a mutual evocation of the past, and it had not been
+accomplished. But presently consolation came: she realized all at once
+that her present mood was but one of those early reminiscences made
+modern. She recalled now how many times he had taken his departure from
+that little parlor, leaving her to feel just as she felt now--piqued,
+balked, impatient over his slow, taciturn, unresponsive ways. But her
+impatience and her pique had always passed off in due time, and he had
+always returned, his same kindly and inscrutable self. "I believe he
+meant to do the best he could. Anyway, I shall follow things up, all the
+same," she declared to the opposite cushions. Her thought deflected in
+the direction of Belden. "I wonder how they get along together. He is not
+at all the man that I should think of David being associated with--as a
+matter of choice. I never heard how the partnership began. I never
+understood why it kept up so long as it has."
+
+The partnership, as a matter of fact, dated back twenty years, and had
+originated through a kind of crisis in the affairs of Marshall & Co.--the
+only weak spot in the history of the firm. After several years of
+unbroken prosperity, David Marshall (with thousands of others) had been
+overtaken by fire. A year or two later fire was followed by panic, and
+Marshall felt himself crowded towards the brink of ruin. In a moment of
+weakness he permitted himself a course to which only so great an
+emergency could have prompted him. The situation was saved by a species
+of legerdemain--of card-shuffling, so to speak--which was quite outside
+the lines of mercantile morality, and barely inside the lines of legality
+itself. An instrument willing to lend itself to this feat of juggling was
+needed, and was found in a pushing young fellow who left a rival house to
+play discreetly and shrewdly the rôle of figure-head that the juncture
+required. Marshall had long ago made full amends to the men whose
+welfare he had temporarily sacrificed to his own salvation, but he had
+never shaken off Belden, who remained constantly as a reminder of his
+early and only lapse from rectitude. In moments when conscience became
+tender under the quickening touch of reminiscence, Belden was upon him
+not only as a punishment, but as an incubus.
+
+Belden had never yielded a single inch of the foothold gained by his
+sudden intrusion upon the affairs of the concern. His first demand was
+for the headship of a department; he had required, next, an interest as a
+partner; he had exacted, more lately, the presence of his name in the
+style and title of the firm; and to-day he was moving towards the making
+of the firm over into a stock company. He was younger than Marshall,
+stronger, more aggressive, more ambitious, more adventuresome; nor was it
+difficult to imagine him as fundamentally insolent and selfish.
+
+His standard of mercantile morality was never higher than at the
+beginning, and his standard of social propriety was felt to leave much to
+desire. His first entry into the firm seemed to have been accompanied by
+a clairvoyant confidence and assurance and ambition. He was understood to
+have divorced his first wife, an amiable, faithful, but limited little
+creature, under circumstances of some cruelty, and even barbarity, to
+form a second union more in harmony with his mounting ideas for the
+future. A subtle atmosphere of distaste and disapproval had enveloped him
+and his for many years, and the social advances of himself and his wife
+had been, however determined, but slow--almost imperceptible.
+
+Finally, what could not be accomplished in the West was accomplished, to
+some extent, in the East. Statira Belden was of New England origin; her
+family had resided for years in a small town which the taste of a few
+Boston families of consideration was turning into a summer resort. They
+contrived their cottages, and she contrived hers. She discreetly
+renovated the old "homestead," as she called it, and arranged to reside
+in eastern Massachusetts through the summer season. She made a few
+careful acquaintances among her neighbors, and presently found it
+possible to spend a profitable and distinguished winter month in the Back
+Bay. One step more brought her to her goal. Social exchange between
+Boston and New York being practically at par, she passed from one town to
+the other with an unimpaired currency. In Manhattan she was received with
+sufficient frequency by people sufficiently distinguished, and
+announcements in correspondence with the facts were borne westward by
+various metropolitan dailies and weeklies. She herself followed, in due
+course; she had now conquered a certain foothold at home, and her
+progress there was distinctly perceptible.
+
+The last stronghold of the opposition existed, much to her mortification,
+in her own immediate neighborhood, where a stubborn little clique (as she
+called it) continued, under the leadership of Susan Bates, to ignore her.
+The Belden carriage-block, measuring diagonally across the street, was
+three hundred feet from that of the Bateses, but the distance might as
+well have been three hundred miles. Mrs. Bates, who, on some occasion or
+other, had met her face to face, continued to hold sturdily the
+impression that her eyes were at once too furtive and too bold, and that
+her hair was too yellow for a woman of her age; "or, for that matter, too
+yellow for a woman of _any_ age."
+
+In view of these considerations and others, Mrs. Bates was the reverse of
+pleased when Jane, one morning, came up to her little room, sat down on
+the foot of the bed, and announced that Mrs. Belden, among others, was
+likely to be bidden to Rosy's coming-out.
+
+"Ma doesn't like her so extra well," Jane admitted, candidly; "she thinks
+they might have done something for Rosy this past summer. But it would
+seem awful to pa if his own partner's wife wasn't asked; and, besides, we
+don't know so very many people _to_ ask, anyway."
+
+Mrs. Bates had made her advances in due form to the women of the Marshall
+family. Throughout the call the talk had been frankly, inevitably
+personal, and Susan Bates had treated Eliza Marshall, whose difficult and
+captious character she at once apprehended, with the most elaborate and
+ingenious simplicity. Rosy was passed in review and then dexterously
+dispensed with, after having aroused the caller's interest and approval;
+and the subsequent talk ran along quite freely on the child's deserts and
+prospects. Mrs. Bates was quite direct and unadorned; and, though Rosy's
+future was the only common ground upon which the two women could meet,
+yet she handled this material with such a sympathetic persistence that
+Eliza Marshall was fain to believe that she and her caller had been knit
+in a close community of interests from time immemorial.
+
+Mrs. Bates divined readily enough that nothing would be more galling to
+Eliza Marshall than a betrayal of her own social ignorance. "How glad we
+ought to be," she said, in an innocent, left-handed fashion, "that girls
+are no longer brought out at a crush. Imagine, once more, that crowd of
+people surging up and down your stairs, and trampling each other
+underfoot as they try to dance in a room not a quarter big enough, and
+ten times too many poor flowers wilting all over the house, and a big
+band of music going it for dear life, and fifty or a hundred carnages
+tangled up in a noisy crowd outside;--why go through all that for the
+sake of getting a new little girl acquainted with a few of her mother's
+friends?"
+
+Eliza Marshall fastened her intent but inexpressive gaze upon her
+caller's face and said never a word. The function thus sketched by Mrs.
+Bates was the precise function that for the past fortnight she had been
+imagining and dreading. She had filled her secluded old parlors with the
+squeak and the blare of music; alien draperies in their swift gyrations
+had whisked her immemorial ornaments from her immemorial old "whatnot";
+in the dining-room a squad of custard-colored waiters had opposed a firm
+front to the hungry hordes that assaulted the various viands on the
+table; and a thousand teasing points of form and usage had afflicted her
+with worry, uncertainty, and possible mortification and despair. She saw
+now that nothing like her imagined entertainment was desirable, or even
+tolerable, to-day, and she gave unconsciously a little sigh of relief.
+
+Mrs. Bates divined further that, having instructed ignorance, she must
+now allay timidity. She must represent the coming function as a mere
+bagatelle for simplicity and informality.
+
+"Isn't it pleasant to think that things are being made so much easier
+for us than they used to be? Otherwise, I should have been dead long
+before this. Nothing to do but for our little girl to stand up with her
+mother and two or three of her mother's friends in one room, and for two
+or three other people to look after the tea and other things in some
+other room off behind somewhere or other." Mrs. Bates waved her hand
+genially towards the rear rooms. "When Lottie came out I said to Mrs.
+Ingles, 'Now you must just take the tea part of it off my hands. Get
+some girls for me--you know about the ones I want--and see that their
+gowns are right; and then I shall be at peace, knowing that people are
+nibbling their biscuits'--or crackers" (this in a tone unconsciously
+expository)--"'dawdling with their spoons, as they ought to.' A few, of
+course, really drank tea; but the others--well, they had had tea
+somewhere half an hour before, or expected to have it somewhere half an
+hour after. How tired we all get of this old rigmarole, don't we?"
+
+Eliza Marshall bowed gravely. For her this tiresome old rigmarole was a
+complete novelty. "Lyddy's niece," she said, turning to Jane; "that girl
+from Madison--she could pour for one, couldn't she?"
+
+"Sure," assented Jane. "_Our_ niece, too--sort o'," she added,
+correctively; for Eliza Marshall made little of certain vague ties to a
+half-brother.
+
+Mrs. Bates cast her eye round the dim, old-fashioned room. One might have
+fancied her as exploring for the portraits of two or three mature female
+relations of the Marshalls.
+
+"I don't know whether I am right in asking it," she began, with a
+fetching pretence of hesitancy; "but I am an old friend of the family--in
+a sense--and so interested in Rosy, too. If I might help you receive--"
+
+Mrs. Marshall heard this proposal with a second little sigh of relief,
+and accepted as a matter of course. Indeed, outside of Mrs. Rhodes--and
+possibly Mrs. Belden--she had absolutely no one to whom she could turn.
+
+"And Aunt Lyddy for another," said Jane.
+
+"Yes," assented Mrs. Bates, in the tone of indorsement. "Mrs. Rhodes and
+I are acquainted"--with a sly look towards Jane; "and there--with your
+other sister, perhaps--our little party is made up."
+
+"And about the people to be invited," Eliza Marshall proceeded, with some
+little show of initiative. Her task was becoming less and less
+formidable; she felt herself approaching this supposed ordeal with
+something almost like buoyancy.
+
+"Let's have it nice and little and cosey," suggested Mrs. Bates, with a
+cosey little air of her own. "Twenty-five or thirty at the outside." She
+wondered inwardly where even so small a number could be got. "Why, _six_
+would do--if they were the right six! And why should we want more than
+three carriages before the house at any one time?--not to have a man
+shouting numbers, I hope!"
+
+She drew her wraps together and rose to go. "If I might ask for cards for
+one or two of my own friends?--nice, pleasant people, who would be glad
+to become acquainted among the old families," she added, diplomatically.
+"If she can only be kept from suspecting how swell they really are, till
+it's all over!" was the good creature's inner thought. "Of course Rosy's
+appearance here isn't public, nor any equivalent for it; that will come
+later. I myself shall want to do something for her on the South side, and
+there will be one or two good houses for her on the North side--oh, our
+little duck will swim, when once put into the pond, as you shall see.
+After _that_, we shall want only a kind papa to pay the bills and a
+patient maid to sit up until three or four in the morning."
+
+Mrs. Bates got herself away in great good-humor and kept that humor until
+the following day, when Jane came to announce the participation of Mrs.
+Belden.
+
+"Have her pour tea!" cried Susan Bates, without a moment's hesitation.
+"Let her come early, and let her stay late, and pour and pour and pour
+until the last cup is drunk. I can't promise your mother that I shall be
+there throughout, but I will be there for half an hour--during the
+middle, perhaps. And tea--well, I never drink it, even at home."
+
+Jane looked at her in some surprise.
+
+"And don't let your mother change her rooms any," Mrs. Bates went on,
+rapidly. "They're right as they are--in perfect agreement. They have a
+quiet tone; and a low, quiet tone, after all, is the best thing--and the
+hardest thing to get. And not too many flowers."
+
+"Never fear," said Jane, grimly. "She won't change anything."
+
+"And don't let her have too much on the table. Give them tea and
+chocolate and sandwiches and Albert biscuits--that's plenty. And if your
+second girl shows, a cap would do no harm. Put a slice of lemon in every
+cup--that discourages lots of people."
+
+Jane laughed. "But ma doesn't want to discourage her friends."
+
+"My good girl," said Mrs. Bates, impressively, "this whole function has
+only one object. That object is to show your sister for five minutes to
+Cecilia Ingles."
+
+"Oh, that's it?"
+
+"That's it, and all of it."
+
+Mrs. Bates's function came off on the appointed afternoon, and was so
+limited in size and so simple in character that Eliza Marshall would have
+reproached herself for slighting her own child, had not Susan Bates,
+before her early departure, whispered in the old lady's ear a word of
+complete approbation.
+
+Rosy herself flashed and sparkled in the dim and depressing old parlor
+like a garnet set in dull gold. Indeed, it must be confessed that she
+showed some of the hard glitter of such a jewelled fabrication, as well
+as its splendor. Cecilia Ingles, who could not but admire her beauty and
+her readiness, thought that her tone was a little too hard, and that in
+her excess of aplomb she pushed self-possession to the verge of
+self-assertion. Rosy, in fact, entered society not with the tentative
+step and slow advance of one who cautiously feels an unaccustomed way,
+but by a single confident and intuitive leap. As she stood there beside
+her mother, dressed in a pale yellow gown and playing carelessly with her
+bunch of red roses, she shifted any embarrassment incident to the
+occasion from her own shoulders to those of her mother's friends--two or
+three of whom, retired and aging persons, withdrew feeling their own
+social rustiness quite keenly.
+
+Jane, who had no definite rôle to play, but who did general utility all
+over the house, was enabled to observe various episodes from various
+points of view. When the actual test came she had little more aptitude
+for the social graces than her mother had, and she imitated her mother's
+own cautious reserve. She did not meet Mrs. Ingles at all, but she
+witnessed from a distant doorway the conjunction which Mrs. Bates
+effected between the leading luminary of the day and the newly-discovered
+asteroid. Jane ungrudgingly acknowledged Cecilia Ingles to be
+magnificently beautiful, and her dress to be a miracle of taste, and her
+advances to be most winningly gracious. "And she's just about my own age,
+too," thought poor Jane, in half-unconscious comparison. "And the way
+that little chit stands up there and talks to her! I couldn't, for a
+hundred worlds. Rosy acts as if she was just as pretty herself--well, I
+suppose she is; and of just as good position--h'm, _that's_ all
+right enough, I'm sure; and just as used to the ways of the world--well,
+so she will be, fast enough." And the dear girl gave a long slow
+sigh--partly that the family had at last such a champion, partly that she
+herself should have been doomed to such complete uselessness in so high a
+cause. She quite failed to realize that she alone and no other was the
+real motive-power of her family's tardy spurt.
+
+As for Mrs. Bates, Jane caught quite another side of her. She showed
+herself profoundly formal and punctilious. She seemed to have dilated for
+the occasion, with the express determination of dominating it. "She acts
+mighty queer," said honest Jane, who was the same to one and all, to-day
+and tomorrow; "but I suppose she knows what tone to take. If she acts
+like that, though, the next time I see her, I shall want to stop knowing
+her. She calls it a 'function,' and I suppose she's trying to make it
+like one. But one's enough."
+
+Jane observed, furthermore, that her aunt Lydia was inclined to neglect
+her own part in the ceremony in order to perform pirouettes and
+pigeon-wings (so to speak) before the backgammon-player of the tropics.
+"If Aunt Lyddy forgets, after all," said Jane, anxiously, "and _does_
+mention Florida, why, I've told a fib for nothing." Jane had informed
+Mrs. Rhodes that the Bateses had lost their youngest child at
+Jacksonville, and so could not bear the slightest mention of the South;
+though she knew perfectly well that the youngest child of the Bateses was
+a lusty youth of eighteen, with strong hopes of becoming one of the Yale
+football team next season.
+
+In the midst of the ceremonial Truesdale sauntered in and passed through
+the rooms with a graceful indifference; he was the last to be
+disconcerted by an assemblage purely feminine. He had doffed for the hour
+most of his imported eccentricities in the way of dress, and had
+consented to appear, properly enough, in a double-breasted black
+frock-coat with extremely long skirts. He had an orchid in his
+button-hole--a large one, very vivid and flamboyant. Jane had looked,
+rather, for a chrysanthemum--one of those immeasurable blooms worn by the
+young men in _Life_. "But Dick _will_ be individual," she acknowledged.
+"Thank goodness it wasn't a peony, or worse. He _does_ look nice, if he
+is my brother; and he's the only young man I know with violet eyes."
+
+Truesdale drifted into the tea-room, and Jane presently saw him lounging
+in a chair alongside Bertie Patterson. The table was officered after the
+fashion that Mrs. Bates had suggested--by Mrs. Belden, who, in the
+absence of her own daughter, kept away by illness, had brought, instead,
+another girl, her daughter's friend, a visitor from New York. Truesdale
+failed to catch her name.
+
+Mrs. Belden herself was somewhat large and inclined to be a bit
+high-colored and full-blown. An excess of blond down lined her cheeks
+just below and before her ears, and her light-colored eyebrows spread
+themselves rather broadly and dispersedly on her forehead. A superfluity
+of straw-colored hair, of a shade essentially improbable waved about her
+ears and temples, and a high gold comb emphasized the loose knot into
+which it was drawn behind. "She would do better on the stage," Truesdale
+said to himself; "she has gotten herself up for the photographer. And if
+all those rings are her own, she has more than any one woman needs."
+
+The girl with her, whose name presently came to him as Gladys--"Gladys
+what?" he wondered--let herself loose on him at once with a fusillade of
+ready familiarities. The field was clear, for Bertie Patterson, at his
+side, had few words to interpose. Her large brown eyes rested half
+appealingly upon him in the intervals of her constrained and halting
+little service, and he readily divined the poor child as in a lonely and
+uncomfortable minority.
+
+"To-day is only my second time," she said to him, with a kind of
+appealing protest; "you mustn't watch me and criticise me." She had just
+finished her ministrations on a pair of old-time family friends whom
+Rosy, in the fulness of her social efflorescence, had banished for
+consolation and reassurance to the tea-room. Somehow, the guests that had
+fallen to her side of the table had all been of this character. "When was
+the first?"
+
+"Why, don't you know? The day you--you--"
+
+"Oh, _that_ day!" laughed Truesdale. "I didn't know you were there, of
+course. You must have thought me absurd."
+
+"No; not--not--absurd. But on such a long, wide street, with so many
+handsome houses all around--"
+
+Truesdale smiled. "Poor little thing! I believe she admires Michigan
+Avenue; I believe she's impressed by it." To him this thoroughfare was
+not completely innocent of the cheap and vulgar restlessness which is the
+dominant note of all American street architecture. "But let her admire
+it, if she can. Think what I expected to find Piccadilly!"
+
+"I enjoy driving down it so much," she continued, confidentially, yet
+with a shy little look as if trying to learn whether her confidence was
+misplaced. "Aunt Lydia and I go shopping almost every day."
+
+"Ten kilometres down and back," estimated Truesdale; "ten kilometres of
+luxury and grandeur--don't let it overpower you. And you are learning
+where the shops are, I suppose, and the theatres, and the post-office,
+perhaps, and the hotels, and what all besides."
+
+"No," said Bertie Patterson, proudly; "I knew all that before I came.
+There are books, you know--and maps. I studied them at home beforehand."
+
+Truesdale had never seen any of the books, but he thought their existence
+probable enough. He remembered, to, his own maps--how he had become
+familiar with the London clubs long before walking through Pall Mall, and
+how he knew where to find all the Paris theatres years previous to his
+first stroll along the Boulevard. "And you have been to all the high
+places, I suppose?"
+
+"I've been to the top of the Masonic Temple."
+
+"And to the places were they have the sun-dials, and the gates ajar, and
+the American flag made of--of--Heaven knows what?"
+
+"The parks? Yes, we have been to one or two of them, but we were a little
+late for all those lovely things; most of them had been dug up."
+
+"Lovely things!" groaned Truesdale. "Fancy them in the Bois or along the
+Row--or anywhere but here!" Yet he felt sure that she had his own
+fondness for pleasure-grounds and points of view. She had doubtless
+anticipated the Masonic Temple and Washington Park, just as he had
+anticipated the Pincian and the Tower of the Capitol. His fellow-feeling
+forgave her this crudity; after all, she was praising what she had never
+seen.
+
+"I've been to your parks myself," the other girl broke in, as she glanced
+round the vase of chrysanthemums from the other side of the table. "But
+if you want to see a park, come to New York." She was rather abrupt and
+boisterous; Truesdale wondered if she had not at one time been a tomboy.
+
+"And I know where ever so many of the society people live," Bertie went
+on in a low tone, which implored him not to repeat, and above all not to
+laugh. "I saw a book once with all their addresses, and I marked the
+places on the map."
+
+Truesdale did smile here--crumbling, the while, a biscuit on the corner
+of the table. He smiled, not because she had seemed to refer to society
+people as a distinct and unique order of beings, but from pure sympathy.
+He himself had placed Stafford House and Bridgewater House and all the
+other town residences of the English aristocracy in those same days when
+he had found sites for the Pall Mall clubs.
+
+"Yes," she went on, "I know where Mrs. Bates lives, and Mrs. Ingles, and
+lots of other prominent people."
+
+"Upon my word!" cried Truesdale, in generous emulation. "Just what I did
+in Paris. I went all up and down the Rue de Crenelle and the Rue St.
+Dominique trying to select the right sort of hotels--houses, you
+know--for the Viscountess of Beauseant and the Duchess of Langeais and
+the Princess Galathionne, and all those great ladies in Balzac--in
+Balzac's novels," he added, considerately.
+
+"But Mrs. Bates isn't in a novel?"
+
+"Oh no; she's real, I hope. So you have covered the North side and the
+South side and all? You know us through and through?"
+
+"This talk about 'sides'!" the girl opposite broke in again. She took the
+other way round the chrysanthemums. "We have 'sides' in New York, but
+nobody you know lives on them. Fancy nice people scattered in squads all
+over a city and having their shops and clubs and theatres all jumbled up
+in the middle along with everything else! It's horrid."
+
+Truesdale nodded across to the girl and smiled brightly. He wondered if
+she were really quite second-rate.
+
+"Where do you suppose I went night before last with Aunt Lydia?" Bertie
+resumed, as she fingered the remaining two or three of a row of shining
+teaspoons. "To the opera"--in an awe-struck undertone; "to _Rig-o-letto_.
+Aunt Lydia couldn't get a box--she said they were all taken for the
+season; but we had seats close to one side, just below the boxes. Such a
+grand place! Ever since the Auditorium was opened I've been hoping to see
+it, and now I have."
+
+"Congratulations!" cried Truesdale, heartily, and Mrs. Belden turned
+round to see the reason for it. He remembered how he himself had panted
+for the Scala, and for the Apollo at Rome--that poor Apollo, razed to the
+ground before ever he could behold its historic stage.
+
+"I've been to your opera myself," the other girl proclaimed. "What was
+the matter with all the box people, anyway? They seemed afraid to assert
+themselves. I never saw a lot of rich people so cowed-like."
+
+"Do you mean that they kept quiet during the performance?" asked
+Truesdale. "The effect _was_ rather primitive, wasn't it? Whenever
+_I_ sing I always ask the whole room to shout-especially if somebody
+shows any sign of listening."
+
+"And I thought they looked pretty plain, too," the girl volunteered
+further. "If you want to see style and display, take the Metropolitan on
+a real gala night. I didn't see half a dozen necklaces among your
+people--and not a single tiara."
+
+"You should have worn yours," declared Truesdale, genially. "Every one
+would have helped." Yes, she seemed second-rate, truly, and the worst
+type of a second-rate person at that--the second-rate person away from
+home. "Let _her_ have them," he whispered to Bertie, as a brace of
+new-comers crossed the threshold.
+
+"She'll take them anyway," said Bertie, ruefully. She did not at all seem
+to realize the greater triumph of completely monopolizing the one man
+present.
+
+"I wanted to walk in the foy--in the place where they promenade," Bertie
+went on; "such a lovely place, and such a grand crush under all those
+yellow arches! But we didn't have any gentleman," she concluded, lamely.
+
+"Never mind; you'll have one next time," responded Truesdale; gallantly.
+"I'm awfully fond of that place, already--the whole of it. It's one of
+the few good things they've got here. It's the only place in town where
+you can see any number of nice people together."
+
+"Oh, really," protested Mrs. Belden, speaking to him for the first time.
+She had decided that he was worth talking to, as well as concluded that
+his attentions had been given too exclusively to one side of the table.
+"Oh, really, now!" Her voice was thickly, sweetly sibilant. "I shall hope
+to show you that you are wrong. Gladys, child, remind me to send this
+young man a card for a week from Wednesday."
+
+"Very well," answered Truesdale; "I'm perfectly willing to be convinced.
+Only don't ask me to a dinner--I can't sit through a dinner. A little bit
+of a tea--well, that's different." And he turned his friendly eyes in the
+direction of Bertie Patterson.
+
+"It isn't a dinner," said Mrs. Belden, as brusquely as her vocalization
+would allow. "It's--" But a new-comer advanced, and she turned to
+manipulate her teapot with her large, fair, plump hands.
+
+Bertie Patterson smiled at Truesdale in return. She seemed to consider
+herself indebted to him not only for that vague promise of future
+festivities, but for a certain degree of moral support at a juncture
+which might have brought her mortification, if not actual tears.
+
+"What a downright nice little soul she is, anyway!" thought Truesdale.
+"There are nice good girls in this world, after all, and some of them are
+right here. And how she idealizes this brutal and ugly town! If only she
+doesn't idealize _me_!"
+
+Truesdale had been idealized more than once before. Sometimes the result
+had been merely embarrassing, sometimes disastrous.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+It may be remembered that Truesdale, in making an estimate of the
+resources of his native town upon the occasion of his return to it, had
+scheduled the five-o'clock tea as the last resource of all. If we find
+him present, then, at such a function, we may imagine him to have found
+the possibilities of local entertainment much slighter than he had
+figured, and time already hanging somewhat heavily on his hands.
+
+Nor need we make any allowance for the fact that the debutante was his
+sister, and the scene of her coming-out his own mother's house. The
+catholic tolerance of his sympathies was such as to make his interest in
+his relatives, as relatives, no greater than his interest in other people
+whose general qualities would be likely to receive equal recognition from
+the world at large; and his outlook was so broad as to make his father's
+house but one of many houses, and to subject happenings in it to the same
+criterion as would be used to judge and rate the happenings in any other
+house throughout Christendom. Truesdale considered himself as admirably
+and flawlessly a cosmopolite.
+
+Yes, he had done his sister's tea, but not until he had done almost
+everything else. He went to the few good concerts that offered, he made a
+fortnightly visit to the art stores, and he patronized (so far as he
+could endure them) the theatres--the chief and final resource of the
+town. But the concerts were a factor far from constant; and the theatres
+offered scarcely once a month a play that a person of taste and
+intelligence cared to sit through. Abroad he had been a valiant
+first-nighter; but he learned presently that at home the house for a
+premiere was composed largely of people whose tickets came from the
+exposition of theatre "paper" throughout the week in their
+storefronts--it was on Monday evening that they were paid off; and
+he found himself little disposed to join in judgment with a raft of small
+shop-keepers, until he recollected that a premiere was not a premiere,
+after all--the play's footing having already been secured at some other
+place, at some other time, before some other audience.
+
+As for the picture-dealers, he complained that a canvas of any importance
+was likely to be displayed after a fashion frankly mercantile, in the
+show-window of the shop--a step which met more than halfway the public
+demand for free art, but which unjustly caused many an original to be
+taken for a copy. "Perhaps, though," he would say, "the public has got so
+far along as to judge of a picture independent of its surroundings.
+Possibly the crimson draperies and the row of gas-jets have really come
+to be superfluous."
+
+He missed, furthermore, many of his accustomed pleasures and
+conveniences. He was astonished to find a metropolis without a promenade.
+True, on Sunday afternoons there was a good deal of strolling up and down
+along a half-mile of the lake shore; but he never observed that the
+people whose houses overlooked all this strolling ever took any part in
+it, and he never learned that they enjoyed this diversion anywhere else.
+"Singular," he said; "no concerted walking or driving. No understanding
+as to any time for it; no understanding as to any place for it. Not the
+slightest social organization for out-door life; how much there must
+be"--(with a backward thought towards Rosy's debut)--"in-doors--somewhere!"
+
+He deplored the absolute non-existence of the institution known as the
+café--all the more, in view of the long months of waiting that must
+intervene before he should be able to gain membership in some club. The
+café, that crowning gem in the coronet of civilization--the name was
+everywhere, the thing nowhere. Nothing offered save a few large places of
+general and promiscuous resort, which, under one ameliorative title or
+another, dispensed prompt refreshment amid furnishings of the most
+reverberant vulgarity.
+
+"It's impossible!" he said in one of these places one day to one of his
+artists, a new-comer from Milan. "Either you stand here in front of this
+counter facing all that superfluous glassware, and that cheap young man
+with the dreadful hair, and the reflections of all those hideous daubs
+behind you, or else you retire to one of those cubby-holes along the side
+there and make the disposal of a bottle of light beer seem a disreputable
+orgy or a dark conspiracy, or a combination of both."
+
+"Not one word against the pictures," replied the other. "How else here do
+I live?"
+
+"No journals," pursued Truesdale; "no demi-tasse, no clientèle, no
+leisure. No," he added, with the idea of a more general summing up, "nor
+any excursions; nor any general market; nor any military; nor even any
+morgue. And five francs for a cab. _Quelle ville_!"
+
+To Truesdale the café was the great social foothold; it was here that he
+was accustomed to meet on common ground the whole male section of
+society. It was to the café that he would like to lead his young
+water-colorist with the portfolio of views from rural Missouri, or his
+last new poet with his thin little volume so finely flattened out between
+the two millstones of journalism and literature--neither of which, alone,
+could have ground him out his grist in livable quantities. In the absence
+of the café he led two or three such to the house. It was like thrusting
+a lighted candle into a jar of nitrogen. The candle went out at once. And
+never came back. To David Marshall, art in all its forms was an
+inexplicable thing; but more inexplicable still was the fact that any man
+could be so feeble as to yield himself to such trivial matters in a town
+where money and general success still stood ready to meet any live,
+practical fellow half-way--a fellow, that was to say, who knew an
+opportunity when he saw it. The desire of beauty was not an inborn
+essential of the normal human being. Art was not an integral part of the
+great frame of things; it was a mere surface decoration, and the artist
+was but for the adornment of the rich man's triumph--in case the rich man
+were, on his side, so feeble as to need to have his triumph adorned. He
+himself had taken hold of practical things at an early age; he had made
+something out of nothing--a good deal out of nothing; and compared with
+this act of creation the fabrication of verses or of pictures was a
+paltry affair, indeed.
+
+He was willing enough that his daughters should improve themselves; he
+was even proud, in a way, of Jane's ability to keep step with the general
+advance of female culture. But for any such turn in one of his sons he
+had no sympathy, no patience. He conferred with Truesdale on the possible
+reorganization of the business, and put before him the appositeness of
+his coming in at such a time; but Truesdale would lift his brows and suck
+his lips and study the pattern of the carpet, and mumble something about
+packing his trunk and "going somewhere."
+
+His days, in fact, were becoming long--inordinately so; it was to his
+evenings that he was coming to look exclusively for diversion. He made
+the most of these; he drew them out as long as possible--to
+counterbalance the days. He seldom came home before midnight, frequently
+not before two or three in the morning; occasionally not at all. In
+company with three or four choice spirits, Arthur Paston and his like, he
+turned night into day, and was seen now and then at such conjunction of
+place and time as would well have justified an explanation to the
+sober-minded or even to the comparatively correct. Like his other
+associates on these occasions, he still retained the enviable faculty of
+being able to "be nice to nice people"; but he acknowledged his taste and
+his sensibilities both to be badly lacerated, and he confessed now and
+then with a sigh that he had never amused himself so indifferently in his
+life.
+
+His sense of ennui was, in fact, driving him out upon society; and the
+hopes of his sister, which had drooped somewhat after their first
+leaving-out, now began to lift themselves again. Jane, on reviewing
+Rosy's début, had arrived at a juster estimate of her own share in it;
+she had launched one member of the family very satisfactorily, and she
+felt herself prompted to the launching of another.
+
+Rosy was now in the full tide of success. The edge of the wedge had been
+set with singular acumen, and the two or three smart blows that followed
+had opened up society to her in a twinkling. She had appeared at a few of
+the best houses, and had at once entered upon a vogue. Her mirror was
+always full of cards, her cards were always full of names, and her own
+name was always filling the newspapers. She figured in boxes at
+theatre-parties, in booths at fancy fairs. She had already poured tea at
+six receptions, and had acted as bridesmaid at two weddings. An incessant
+stream had run from the six teapots, and nobody had looked at the two
+brides. Jane would sit up in the dim library through the small hours
+waiting for Rosy's ring and planning corresponding triumphs for
+Truesdale.
+
+Her first and chiefest task was to get him to take society seriously. He
+had professed himself as unable to put his finger on it; he asked her
+where it was to be found--what was the general platform on which it met.
+At the Charity Ball, she had answered him--rightly, perhaps; wrongly,
+perhaps. Let us waive the point.
+
+"Then to the Charity Ball I shall go," he had answered, promptly.
+
+"Will you?" shrilled Jane. "Oh, goody! And you won't be disappointed,
+either. It's the one great, magnificent thing of the year. Everybody
+goes. And they have 'C-h-a-r-i-t-y' in electric lights, and palm-trees,
+and champagne, and two different places to eat supper in." Jane had never
+attended one of these entertainments; her wealth of picturesque detail
+was gathered from the newspapers.
+
+"Ouf!" said Truesdale, indifferently, discounting the magnificence. He
+had been to one ball at the British embassy in Rome, and to another at
+the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, and did not expect to be impressed. He
+rather looked to find this coming occasion like the latter--a
+heterogeneous assemblage of elements whose value was doubtful separately
+and not much greater collectively.
+
+Jane ran to her fairy godmother; through Mrs. Bates everything appeared
+possible. "You must put him on the committee," said Jane; "or you must
+make him a floor-manager or something." Jane's head swam with a social
+vertigo; she could call spirits from the vasty deep and feel perfectly
+sure of their coming.
+
+"Very well," responded Mrs. Bates; "a floor-manager he shall be."
+
+"He'll do it splendidly, too," declared Jane; "he's so alert, and so
+self-possessed, and so awfully graceful and good-looking. Just the right
+height, and a very handsome figure--don't you think?"
+
+"Too slender."
+
+"Well, of course he's no slugger," retorted Jane, whose thought turned
+suddenly towards the youthful footballist at Yale. "Yes," she went on,
+"he's got plenty of assurance and readiness, and he'll do beautifully--if
+he'll just be disposed to take the trouble. Only--only he doesn't know
+anybody, hardly," was her dubious conclusion.
+
+"Never mind," returned Mrs. Bates, genially; "lots of 'em he couldn't
+know--there's too many; and lots of 'em he wouldn't want to know. He can
+jump about, I imagine, and see that other people are kept jumping about
+too. The fewer he knows the better he'll do his work."
+
+She looked at Jane steadily for a moment or two. "One thing more; I want
+you to come and sit in my box."
+
+"Me!" squealed Jane. "Oh-h-h!" It was a complicated cry; it indicated
+surprise, gratitude, self-depreciation, and (before all) a sense of
+divided duty.
+
+Mrs. Bates, all unsuspected by her subject, had taken Jane in hand a
+month ago, and had made her at length fairly presentable. Incidentally
+she had made herself a martyr. "But never mind," she would say; "the poor
+child doesn't know how to do herself justice, so somebody else has got to
+do it for her."
+
+After a pretty thorough canvass of Jane--her hands, her hair, her dress,
+her carriage, her complexion--she began operations. She went, for
+example, to a widely celebrated beautifier, as well as to other dealers
+in those lotions and cosmetics which have secured the recommendation of
+various singers and professional beauties, and she took Jane with her.
+The good woman pretended alarm at the state of her complexion--as if her
+robust health, her careful table, her good allowance of sleep, her active
+circulation, and her hundred varied forms of daily exercise all went for
+naught. So she sat in "parlors" with cloths tied round her neck, and let
+people smear her with creams and prod her with electric needles and work
+their will on her for the removal of all the "facial blemishes" that
+flesh is heir to.
+
+"My dear girl," she would call over her shoulder to Jane, "I know this is
+awfully tiresome to you, and it must be very painful to see your old
+friend suffering so; but if you will just wait patiently for ten or
+fifteen minutes more--"
+
+"Oh, don't mind me," Jane would respond, outwardly bored, but inwardly
+interested. "I'm getting along all right. Go on enjoying your sufferings
+as long as you please." And after a few of these forenoons Jane had
+realized her own imperfections, and had learned the means of getting
+round them.
+
+Then Mrs. Bates would convey her unconscious pupil to the hair-dresser's.
+She would abandon her gray tresses to the manipulations of operatives
+skilled to show the possibilities of the natural material and the magical
+supplementary powers of the unnatural; every frown occasioned by a tug,
+every tear produced by a tangle, was borne cheerfully for the sake of an
+ultimate good, and Jane acquired indirectly a complete knowledge of
+all those preparations and processes which her preceptress felt her needs
+required.
+
+"Yes, my hair _is_ thinning on the forehead," Mrs. Bates would admit. "If
+you should happen to have the precise match...."
+
+The match was always difficult, but Jane did not fail to observe how easy
+the same would be for herself.
+
+Then Mrs. Bates would have her manicure at the house twice as often as
+before, to increase the chance of her being on hand some morning when
+Jane should drop in. "Try it yourself--just to see what it's like," she
+would suggest; and her own plump and shapely hands would yield their
+place on the small red velvet cushion to the long and graceless fingers
+of her protégée. And presently the other processes--the soakings, the
+washings, the rubbings--would follow.
+
+She also recommended exercise--dumb-bells, for example.
+
+"What's the matter with fencing?" asked Jane. "Truesdale, you know; he's
+awfully good to me." She might have found it difficult to cite any
+definite example of Truesdale's goodness; perhaps she meant merely that
+he never snubbed her, never hectored her.
+
+"Better yet. Fencing by all means."
+
+Jane, moreover, always accompanied Mrs. Bates to the milliner's and to
+the dress-maker's. They priced things, debated things, and tried on
+things--on themselves, on each other, on the attendants. Mrs. Bates
+purchased lavishly for herself, and suggested lavishly in regard to
+purchases by Jane.
+
+"You'd better have this," she would say. "It becomes you first-rate--you
+won't find anything nicer."
+
+"But the price!" Jane would demur. For Mrs. Bates frequented the most
+expensive places, and spent money with a prodigal recklessness. "I can't;
+it isn't right; I couldn't think of costing poor pa so much--especially
+with Rosy and everything making such an expense for him."
+
+"Nonsense. You're entitled to some of the good things of life, too. Your
+father can stand it, I should hope. If he hasn't learned how to spend
+money, it's high time he did. Have you any idea, you poor, simple soul,
+what's he worth?"
+
+"I suppose he is pretty well off," Jane would acknowledge, reluctantly,
+indefinitely.
+
+"Well off? I should say so! You ought to have twenty times what you do.
+Let them send this home for you--I'll take the risk."
+
+Thus in the course of a month or two Jane, to the bewilderment and
+surprise of her mother and sisters and everybody else, became more
+presentable than ever before in the whole course of her life. She fully
+merited, in fact, the sincere encomium finally bestowed by Mrs. Bates
+herself:
+
+"There, now! You're not the worst-looking girl in this town--not by a
+jugful!"
+
+Jane was seriously affected by this unstinted praise, and she was almost
+overwhelmed when her monitress showed the courage of her convictions by
+offering a place in her box.
+
+"Oh-h-h!" she mimicked, after Jane. "What does that mean? Will you or
+won't you?"
+
+"If I only could," said Jane; "it's the first thing of any account I've
+had a chance at since I don't know when. But I've got another engagement
+for that evening. I'm going to the university extension lecture with--I'm
+going to the university extension lecture; it's my regular night." She
+ended with a heavy downward inflection which she hoped was pronounced
+enough to conceal the tell-tale dislocation that had preceded it.
+
+"Indeed? Where does your lecture carry you?"
+
+"Over on the West side--to that Settlement."
+
+"Um. Bad neighborhood to be going into alone, at night."
+
+"I'm not going alone," returned Jane, with a kind of fluttering
+joyfulness.
+
+"Oh! with some girl friends, then? Not much better--that way."
+
+"I'm not going with any girl friends"--this accompanied by a perceptible
+palpitation of delight. She looked at Mrs. Bates with eyes that seemed to
+say, "Please go on; don't stop right there."
+
+"Oh, then, that kind, good brother, perhaps," suggested Mrs. Bates--going
+on.
+
+"No, not that kind, good brother." Jane's face was fairly beaming.
+
+"Some other kind, good young man, then."
+
+"Yes," responded Jane, with a challenging light on her countenance; "some
+other kind, good young man."
+
+"Ah! And when does your lecture end?"
+
+"At nine."
+
+"Before the other thing begins. Of course the lecture is much too
+instructive to lose, and then there's the fascination of a mile or two in
+a dirty street-car; but couldn't you look in on us between ten and
+half-past? The box is small, but I have a great fondness for those kind,
+good young men. Couldn't you induce one of them--any one at all, of
+course--to bring you, if he knew there was a place waiting for you both?"
+
+"The gentleman who is going to escort me," began Jane, rising suddenly to
+a very formal tone, "is--well, in fact, he--he doesn't go out very much,"
+she proceeded, lapsing back into her former manner. "He's kind of quiet
+and retiring. I don't believe he'd ever go to anything like this."
+
+"Not when he's got a good place offered him--and a nice girl to take,
+with a brand-new dress of just the right sort to go in? I should want a
+beau of mine to have a little more spunk than that."
+
+"How can you talk that way?" whimpered Jane, quite quivering with
+pleasure. "I can't sit here and listen to anything like that. What
+right"--with a feint of maiden indignation--"what right have you to say
+that Mr. Br--that anybody is--is my--"
+
+"Beau," supplied Mrs. Bates, serenely. "Beau--that's what I said.
+Old-fashioned word, I know; but I can't think of a better one."
+
+"You're just dreadful; you are," stammered Jane, trying to withdraw as
+best she might from too pronounced an attitude of protest. She fingered
+the length of ravelled bordering that drooped from the hair-cloth cushion
+of her chair and ran an eye, pretendedly speculative, up and down the
+pink and green stripes of Mrs. Bates's wall-paper.
+
+"I'm pretty sure he wouldn't go--the gentleman who is to escort me to the
+lecture," she said, with another return to her vain paraphrase. "He's
+earnest. He's serious. Besides, he hasn't got a dress-coat."
+
+"Hasn't got a dress-coat?"
+
+"He doesn't approve of them. He thinks they're ugly and foolish and--and
+not right. He believes that society is--well, not exactly wrong, but--"
+
+"All the same," declared Mrs. Bates, "he will receive a ticket, and I
+shall contrive to let him know that there's a place waiting for him."
+
+"Oh, no! No, you mustn't! What would he ever think of me?"
+
+"I shall, too."
+
+"No! Don't--please don't. He wouldn't know what to think. He might think
+that I--"
+
+"I shall, too!" repeated Mrs. Bates, more loudly and stubbornly. "I
+shall, too!" She knew that anything less marked than this would be a
+chilling disappointment to the girl before her. "And if he hasn't got a
+dress-coat, why, he can just get one. I'm sure if a young man cared
+anything for me--"
+
+"Oh, don't talk that way--please don't!" implored Jane, half hiding her
+face with a kind of despairing joy. "Don't say such things, I beg of
+you!"
+
+"--I should expect him to make some little sacrifice for me," Mrs. Bates
+completed. "Let him come and look at us; we may not be half so bad as he
+imagines."
+
+"Sacrifice." What a delightful and comforting sound the word had to Jane.
+It vitalized in a moment all her story-reading of the past ten years.
+That anybody should ever be moved to make a sacrifice for _her_!
+
+"But he used to live in the Settlement," persisted Jane; "he used to work
+there. He doesn't approve of Charity Balls; he thinks that isn't at all
+the way to do things."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Bates, thoughtfully, "it's _a_ way; but there are
+better ones, no doubt. Come, cut that lecture altogether. He could pick
+up more in half an hour with me there at his elbow than he could learn in
+half a dozen courses of lectures, however extended they were."
+
+"And have you act as you acted at Rosy's afternoon? You'd paralyze us
+both." Jane blushed at her "both."
+
+"Oh, that's only my little way," returned Mrs. Bates, laughing. "You'd
+_both_ understand." Jane blushed again. "A way," she repeated; "but there
+are better ones, no doubt." And she laughed once more.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Bingham half folded the newspaper, and laid it again on Marshall's desk.
+Then he settled his large, long figure back in Marshall's other chair,
+and placed a broad finger or two upon each of its curved and varnished
+arms.
+
+"Yes," he observed, slowly, with a smile in the direction of the old man,
+"the younger generation are holding up their end."
+
+"So it seems," said Marshall, in return, while he scanned the other's
+face closely to see what his precise meaning might be. Bingham's remark
+had been uttered with an even intonation; it was difficult to determine
+whether, after all, he had emphasized "younger" more than "generation,"
+or "their" more than "end," or, indeed, whether he had given an undue
+stress to either.
+
+"Yes," the old man repeated. He made another reference to the newspaper.
+"Yes; that is my child."
+
+He fixed an eye, half fascinated, half protesting, upon a large cut which
+was set to fill the width of two columns. It was a portrait of Rosy--of
+"Miss Rosamund Marshall," as it read--with a line or two more, vaguely
+biographical in character, in italics, beneath. It was engraved with more
+than the usual care, and printed with more than the usual success.
+
+This was the first time that any woman of his family had ever been
+exposed in the public prints. "And here are five or six lines telling how
+she was dressed. Is that right, Bingham?"
+
+"Well, I'm no hand at describing. I suppose it reads correctly enough. At
+any rate, Rosamund was the handsomest girl there, and the best
+dressed--so several said--and the one who drew the most attention."
+
+"Is that right, Bingham?" the old man repeated. He was accustomed enough
+to the public presentation of other men's daughters, but this was the
+first time that such a thing had befallen one of his own.
+
+"Oh," replied Bingham; "you mean _that_ way. Well, times change. Ten
+years ago this would have brought a protest, and twenty a flogging. And
+we change with them. However, if this is the Miss Rosamund Marshall who
+has begun lately to figure at teas and receptions and cotillons, and
+always contrives to be the bright particular--Is it?"
+
+Marshall smiled slowly. All this was true enough, and he could not
+profess himself completely displeased. He nodded.
+
+"Well, then, you'll have to stand it; you can't avoid it; it can't be
+helped. And there's one more thing, too."
+
+"What?"
+
+"There was a young man present on this same occasion," Bingham proceeded;
+"a decorative, diffusive young man--with a badge. Richard Truesdale
+Marshall--was that his name? Any son of yours?"
+
+Marshall nodded again, but his smile was distinctly less complacent.
+
+"I am beginning to meet his name in print quite frequently," pursued
+Bingham, serenely. "Is he the same Truesdale Marshall who has a
+collection of water-colors in the current exhibition at the Art
+Institute?"
+
+"I believe so," responded the old man, with some lack of warmth.
+
+"Is it the same Truesdale Marshall who sang last Friday at the residence
+of Mrs. Granger S. Bates, for the benefit of--of--"
+
+David Marshall smiled broadly. "Our Jennie--what a girl she is coming to
+be! That Lunch Club is one of her pet notions; she pushes it at all
+times--in season and out."
+
+"She seems to be pushing it to good purpose just now," commented Bingham.
+"By-the-way, I suppose she is the same Miss Marshall I danced with last
+night. She sat in one of the upper places, so to speak, but she was
+induced to go down on the floor for a few minutes."
+
+"Well, Bingham," said Marshall, "I knew you went to that sort of thing
+once in a while, and I thought that that in itself was a good deal for a
+man like you; but for you to dance there--I shouldn't have imagined your
+doing it; well, no."
+
+"I didn't but once," responded the other, apologetically. "Still, if
+you're going to get along in this world, you've got to be of it. Besides,
+I thought"--_argumentum ad hominem_--"that she was entitled to show that
+dress; hers was described, too."
+
+"Um!" said her father, soberly, with a sidelong glance towards his
+pigeon-holes. "But no picture."
+
+"Well, let that pass," responded Bingham, with a slight touch of pique.
+"Is this the Miss Marshall who read lately at the Fortnightly?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Is it the same one who is announced to lecture at Hull House on the
+Russian novelists?"
+
+"See here, Bingham!" The old man wheeled about sharply in his chair, and
+fastened a keen scrutiny upon the other's face. Bingham had never talked
+to him like this before; he had never seemed so light-minded, so slanted
+towards the jocular. "See here, Bingham, what are you driving at?"
+
+Bingham fitted himself solidly into the curved back of the chair, and
+laid his hands out ponderously upon its arms. He had something to say,
+and he wondered how best he might say it. "Marshall is twenty years older
+than I am," he thought, as his eye traversed the shelves of nutmegs and
+orris-root and lit upon the discolored awnings over the way, "and I must
+be careful. I'm young to him, of course; but I can't ask the indulgence
+due to a boy. How shall I work it?"
+
+He felt that he had earned the right to speak. He had done well by
+Marshall, and he knew that Marshall was pleased. It was more as a
+personal favor than anything else that he had undertaken the work upon
+the warehouse; he had put it through more promptly than anybody else
+could have done, and with less interruption to the course of trade than
+either of the firm would have imagined possible. For the past month the
+business had been comfortably accommodated in its enlarged quarters,
+and the two new floors were already habituated to the occult processes
+which competition and a minutely graded scale of prices impose upon even
+the most righteous of the trade. It is but fair to say, however, that
+Marshall & Belden always saw that their sugar was as saccharine as a
+specified price would permit, and that their coffee-roasters met the
+lowered standard of cheap purchasers as well as the apparatus of any
+rival did.
+
+Yes, everything was running smoothly, and Bingham felt that he might
+venture a slight trespass upon the friendliness and tolerance of his last
+client.
+
+He looked at Marshall for a moment with a slow and cautious smile. "Yes,
+the young people are holding up their end; but how about the 'old man'
+himself?"
+
+"Oh, that's it!" thought Marshall. He made an instant and intuitive
+application of this remark. He _was_ declining towards the horizon; he
+_was_ shining but dimly compared with the twinkling of his attendant
+satellites.
+
+"Well, the 'old man' isn't altogether useless by a long shot. The young
+people dance--and the old people furnish the platform. See here, Bingham.
+I don't have to go to the papers to learn what my daughters wear to
+parties; I've got my own papers here right within easy reach." He
+contracted his brows as his eyes turned towards the pigeon-holes. "A
+better account, too, than the newspaper one--fuller, exacter, more
+detailed, backed up by figures--down three long sheets and half-way down
+a fourth. And I don't need to go to art-galleries to understand what
+opportunities my son has had to learn to paint; the foreign exchange man
+at our bank could tell me all about that. And I don't have to go to
+concerts, either, when I want to make my contribution to a benevolent
+object: I can sit right in this room and draw checks, and be told just
+how much to draw them for, too. Yes, Bingham, there are a great many ways
+for an old fellow like me to make himself useful, and I am not allowed
+to overlook any of them."
+
+Marshall's tone and expression during this exposition had wavered back
+and forth between jest and protest. But his eyes wandered towards those
+pigeon-holes again, and his mien and accents drew on a shade of distinct
+melancholy.
+
+These receptacles contained other bills than those of the dress-makers.
+There was one, for example, from a carriage-maker, and another from a
+horse-dealer. For Rosamund, at the very outset of her career, had set her
+face against old Mabel and the carry-all. She declined to appear in any
+such fashion among the landaus and broughams of her newly-chosen
+associates. She represented, furthermore, that it was extremely awkward
+to depend upon the equipages of friends; and she protested that it was
+far beneath their dignity to hire a conveyance from a livery-stable. Her
+father had succumbed. Along with the bills for the new carriage and pair
+were bills for a coachman's hat and cape-coat. Besides these, there was
+the first month's statement of board for Mabel and storage for the
+carry-all--both having been crowded out of the cramped stable to another
+across the alley.
+
+"Yes," resumed Bingham, availing himself of Marshall's own figure, "the
+young people are dancing--though no more briskly than they should; but
+why may not the old people dance, too? When the young ones are making
+their youth and their beauty and their cleverness tell as they do, may
+they not _expect_ the old ones to come forward as well? Aren't there
+times when they should do it in mere justice to themselves? After your
+children have led so many more germans and adorned so many more
+receptions and founded so many more clubs and really worked their way
+into the life of the town, they may look to their father to put himself
+in evidence also. One of them, I can swear, is already a little jealous
+on your account."
+
+"Jane? Oh yes; she is always trying to make her poor old father toe the
+mark."
+
+"She has plans for you--ambitions for you. If you meet the expectations
+that the future is likely to develop, you will be carrying through a
+pretty big contract. I was surprised, myself, to learn how many diverse
+opportunities this town offers--enough to extend through three dances.
+People may preside at banquets, I learned, and address political
+meetings, and head subscription papers, and found public baths, and build
+and endow colleges. And there are others who donate telescopes, or erect
+model lodging-houses, or set up statues and fountains, or
+give--Marshall," he said, suddenly, "do something for yourself and for
+the town; nothing that you are doing here"--he waved his hand towards the
+larger office outside--"is enough for a man of your means and standing."
+
+Bingham was now speaking with increased confidence and with greater
+seriousness. He felt himself entitled to say these things by reason of
+their personal relations and by virtue of his own standing before the
+public. He was twenty years younger than Marshall, but he was twenty
+times as great a figure in the public eye. He had had no mean share in
+those two fast and crowded years through which the city had striven
+towards readiness for the coming of the world. Like the Christians
+at Ephesus, he, too, had "fought with the wild beasts"--with time, with
+the elements, with Labor, with National niggardliness, with a
+hundred-headed management; and he had expanded and ripened in the
+struggle. He saw the world with a wider vision; he inhaled the vast and
+palpitating present with a deeper breath. He beheld, too, a triumphant
+and wide-spreading future, and he felt with the utmost keenness the
+opportunities that the town offered even to the older and departing
+generation--crabbed and reluctant though it be.
+
+Marshall listened to his remarks and indicated an unremitted attention by
+bowing now and then with a subdued gravity. The strain seemed familiar;
+where had he heard it before? Why, from Susan Bates, to be sure--and in
+this very place: strophe and antistrophe. Could it be possible that he
+was so remiss towards himself and towards the community? Could it be true
+that he was doing himself such scant and graceless justice? What answer
+had he to make to this new advocate? The old one--with additions.
+
+"I have been thinking about these matters. I have been considering the
+public that so much is asked for. It is not the old public I used to know
+twenty years ago--it has changed a good deal. It is better organized
+against us--a banding together of petty officials with their whole
+contemptible following: steerage-rats that have left their noisome holds
+to swarm into our houses, over them, through them, everywhere--between
+the floors, behind the wainscoting--everywhere. Do you know anything
+about cheap law?"
+
+"Justice courts? Don't let's go into that," said Bingham, quickly.
+
+"I _am_ in that," retorted Marshall, angrily. His blue eyes took on an
+unwonted gleam. "And I shall stay in until I have satisfied myself."
+
+"Drop it," said Bingham. "It's a terrible thing--rotten, deplorable, an
+out-and-out curse."
+
+"I will not," returned Marshall. He struck his thin old hand on the edge
+of his desk. "I'll see it through. They live within two blocks of my
+house. Her son is an alderman; her nephew is a bailiff; two or three
+others of them keep saloons. They are Poles, or Bohemians, or
+Jews--Heaven knows what. They do business on the premises--they stick to
+their burrow. Yet we couldn't get a summons served by a constable. And
+when we finally got the matter before a court--it was continued. No
+defendants there--only a filthy little creature who called himself
+their attorney. We were never so blackguarded in our lives. Then another
+continuance; and a third. Roger, poor boy, makes no headway at all. He
+knows the law; he has a good practice; he leases and collects for me--and
+buys and sells. But he is getting to be almost ashamed to come here to
+see me about it."
+
+"I know," assented Bingham; "a kind of _camorra_. Get a shyster; fight
+the devil with fire. What can a gentleman do in a justice's court? If the
+rats are behind the wainscot, don't stick your own hand into the hole.
+Hire somebody else."
+
+"I won't!" cried the old man, stubbornly. "I want to see for myself how
+things actually are. I want to learn what conditions we are living under.
+I want to understand the things that are really going on about us. I want
+to see what a good citizen and a tax-payer can count upon by way of
+redress." He picked at his petty grievance as a child torments a sore.
+Yet a sore, in justice, may mean little, or it may mean much. Any
+physician will tell you that.
+
+"Drop it," counselled Bingham again. "It will irritate you and exasperate
+you out of all proportion to its importance. And if you have been wronged
+in a lower court, remember that many poorer men have been wronged in
+higher ones. Come; keep your head clear and your temper calm, and save
+them for important things."
+
+The door of the little office opened softly, and one of the important
+things began. The door had opened none too widely, yet sufficiently for
+the entrance of the thin edge of a wedge--a wedge that was to gain a
+tyrannizing force with each inch of advance, as is the wont.
+
+To Bingham it seemed like another of those rats--one that had left the
+wainscoting and taken to the floor, regardless (in a boldness at once
+insolent and sly) of the presence of humankind. To Marshall it was only
+an office-hand from the outer room who now entered with a handful of mail
+matter, which he placed, with an air not wholly guiltless of servility
+and stealth, upon his employer's desk.
+
+He was a dark man of forty-five, with a black beard and a pair of narrow
+eyes. He looked neither of the two occupants of the room full in the
+face. His glance was searching and sidelong rather, not so much from the
+presence of anything to spy upon as from habit and instinct. One fancied
+a man too accustomed to the heavy foot of superiors to decline willingly
+any minor advantage that came his way--or any major one.
+
+Bingham's eyes followed him out. "Whom have you there?"
+
+"Somebody of Belden's--a new hand; some of the sediment left from the
+Fair."
+
+"That's where I've seen him. He was in the Service building--draughtsman,
+clerk, or something. Swiss? Alsacian?"
+
+"I don't know," replied Marshall. "He speaks German and some French."
+Half unconsciously he began upon his mail. "It would be more to the
+purpose if he spoke English--better."
+
+Bingham reached for his hat. "Well, time's money to both of us. English
+is an easy thing to pick up--as witness Midway. I dare say he'll be able
+to express himself fluently enough inside of another six months.
+Good-morning."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+"There!" Jane had said to herself, as he stood before her small
+looking-glass to give a final touch to her hair and to pull out her
+puffed sleeves to their widest for the tenth and last time; "if I can
+keep in mind that I am thirty-three years old, and not a day less, I
+imagine I shall get through all right. Of course I sha'n't go on the
+floor and dance--at least, not very much. Perhaps nobody will ask me,
+anyway; of course I can expect nothing from Theodore Brower, who couldn't
+waltz any more than he could fly. No; I'll just sit in the box, and then
+nobody can say that I am giddy, or flighty, or trying to be too young."
+
+She cast a last glance towards her looking-glass, which seemed smaller
+than ever. "I do wish I could see both of them at once. I hope Theodore
+will like 'em; the chances are, though, he'll never notice 'em at all."
+
+Such had been Jane's modest and cautious programme, and she carried it
+out pretty closely. She sat in the box with Mrs. Bates a good part of the
+evening, and bowed a great many times to a great many gentlemen, young
+and old, whom she had never seen before and never expected to see again,
+and whose names, therefore, she made no effort to secure. She talked with
+two or three with whom it seemed possible and profitable to talk, and
+learned their names afterwards.
+
+Mr. Bates himself spent very little time in his wife's box. He lounged on
+one of the springy sofas in the narrow lobby behind, or leaned over the
+burnished barriers of other boxes to talk murmurously with other magnates
+about the Stock Exchange or the volume of traffic. He was a grave and
+somewhat inexpressive person, with reticent eyes and snow-white bunches
+of side-whiskers, and a rather cold and impassive manner. His wife
+followed his peregrinations with an indulgent eye.
+
+"Poor Granger," she said to Jane; "this thing tires him more and more
+every year. So I give him plenty of leeway. See him now." She looked over
+her shoulder, where, twenty feet away, her husband was talking across the
+bronze bar with another elderly man in the adjoining box.
+
+"It's a conference," she went on--"it's a deal; it's on my account--he
+told me so himself. If it goes through it means another string to this
+necklace."
+
+She suddenly became quite smileless and rigid. "Why, what's the matter?"
+asked Jane.
+
+Mrs. Bates presently relaxed. "That woman who just passed," she
+explained; "she was wondering if these diamonds weren't imitations, and
+the real ones in the safety vaults down-town. Notice that other one over
+there; yes, the one in nile-green, with the garnet velvet sleeves. She's
+looking for me, and can't find me. There! she sees Granger--everybody
+knows _him_. And now she's quieter; she's satisfied; she has taken old
+Mrs. McIntosh for me, just because Granger happens to be in their box for
+a moment. See, the man alongside of her is smiling and looking the same
+way. I know what she's saying to him: 'Is _that_ Mrs. Bates--that plain
+old woman in that dowdy gown? Well, I never!--after all I've heard and
+read.' And she's so happy over it. Tell me, child; _am_ I plain, _am_ I
+dowdy?"
+
+"You are magnificent," said Jane, squeezing her hand. "Carolus-Duran is
+only a dauber--and a half-blind one at that!" Jane, after the first
+half-hour, had become quite habituated to her new and unaccustomed
+environment. Her attitude was neither too self-conscious nor too relaxed;
+and she never lost sight of the fact that she was thirty-three. Her dress
+was a fabric in a soft shade of blue-gray run through by fine black
+lines. Her ample sleeves took full advantage of the prevailing mode,
+and several falls of wide lace passed between them, both before and
+behind. Her hair was done up high, in a fashion devised by her fairy
+godmother--a piece of discreet but fetching phantasy. Jane leaned back
+graciously in her chair, after the manner of her favorite heroines,
+losing in height and gaining in breadth; never before had she felt so
+amplitudinous, so imperial.
+
+"Whoever would suspect," she asked, turning over her shoulder to Susan
+Bates, "that I was a natural-born rail?"
+
+"Nobody," the other responded. "You never looked so well in your life."
+
+Jane blushed with pleasure. At that moment two of the Fortnightly ladies
+passed--clever creatures, who could drive culture and society abreast.
+Jane, with the flush still on her face and a happy glitter in those wide
+eyes, leaned forward and bowed in the most marked style at her command.
+"I am here myself," she seemed to announce.
+
+"Well," said one of the Fortnightly ladies, "where is the 'Decadence'
+now?"
+
+"Ah!" smiled the other, "that's past, and the 'Renaissance' is here
+again!"
+
+However, Jane was not so taken up with her literary affinities as to lose
+sight of her own kith and kin. She saw Rosy swim past once or twice, and
+was gratified by constant glimpses of an active and radiant Truesdale.
+Once Statira Belden drove by in saffron satin and a mother-of-pearl
+tiara. "And that's her daughter with her," commented Jane. "And there's
+that girl from New York. And there goes her son--that smooth-faced little
+snip. Huh!--compare him with our Truesdale!"
+
+She leaned forward eagerly as her brother came once more into view.
+"Yes," she said, "his flower is all right, and the soles of his shoes. I
+wonder if--" and she leaned still farther forward and drew in a long
+breath through her nose. "No, I can't smell it; I don't believe it's
+bothered him any!"
+
+Jane, in the earlier part of the evening, had sent Truesdale to the ball
+as a lady sends a knight to battle. She had stopped him on the moment of
+his departure at the foot of the stairs, close to the grotesque old
+newel-post, to look him over with a severely critical eye.
+
+"Has it got its posy in its button-hole?" she inquired, throwing open his
+ulster. There was a gardenia there. "Yes, _that's_ all right." Then:
+
+"Has it got its little soles blacked?" Truesdale laughed, and turned up
+one of his long, slender, shining shoes, while he supported himself by
+his other leg and the newel-post. "Yes, that's first-rate," she assented.
+"What else is there, now?" she pondered.
+
+"Oh! wait one second." She ravaged his inner pocket with a sudden hand.
+"Has it got its 'foom'ry on its little hanky?" She drew out the
+handkerchief and clapped it to her nose. "Not a drop--just wait one
+second."
+
+She tore up-stairs in great haste, and in a moment more she came tumbling
+down with her own cologne bottle in her hand. "You'll kill yourself,
+Jane," her mother called.
+
+"Here!" She seized her brother's handkerchief again and drenched it with
+a plentiful and vigorous douse. "There!" she said, with great
+satisfaction, as she restored it to him.
+
+"Goodness, Jane!" Truesdale cried, in laughing protest, "they'll all
+smell this for fifty feet around."
+
+Jane gave her brother a commendatory pat, and said no word. She felt that
+he was now ready for conquest. Speech was superfluous.
+
+"No, I can't smell it," said Jane, again; "I think he must have
+exaggerated. He's going off in the other direction, anyway."
+
+Mrs. Bates touched her elbow. "Who's that dark girl in pink? No; not to
+the left--straight ahead."
+
+"Why, I declare, it's Rosy!" exclaimed Jane. "And doesn't she look
+lovely! She's the prettiest girl here, isn't she?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And how well that little curly-cue curl on her forehead keeps its shape!
+But do you think she should have worn Maréchal Niels?"
+
+"I dare say she's had red until she is tired of them. Who is the young
+man with her?"
+
+"Don't know," said Jane. "These new young men are getting to be too many
+for _me_."
+
+"Well, then, I'll tell you. It's Arthur Paston."
+
+"Arthur Scodd-Paston?" asked Jane, contributing a conscientious hyphen to
+the name and a laborious accent to the forepart of it. "Why, he doesn't
+look so very hateful and supercilious."
+
+"Oh, he's never that. He's a nice enough fellow. You mustn't take all my
+exaggerations seriously. He's jolly and pleasant, as you see for
+yourself."
+
+"He'd better be--with Rosamund. She won't stand any great 'I' and little
+'u' from anybody. But he does look real nice and stout and healthy and
+rosy, and everything, doesn't he?"
+
+"Especially rosy," said Mrs. Bates, wickedly.
+
+"I'm ashamed of you," remonstrated Jane; and the two young people swept
+on, while the music swirled and crashed, and the vast illumined ceiling
+bent above them like a rainbow of promise.
+
+During one of the promenades Truesdale passed by with Bertie Patterson on
+his arm. The decorum of the walk could not exclude all of Truesdale's
+lithe and swaying ease; he held his head high, and sent his eyes abroad
+to right or left with an assurance that some might have felt to be an
+impertinence and others an insolence. To Jane he seemed just descended
+from some heaven-kissing hill. She sniffed once or twice as he went past.
+"I _hope_ I didn't put too much on--I'm sure I didn't. I just sha'n't
+worry about it any more."
+
+Bertie Patterson kept step beside him bravely, though she knew that Jane
+was looking at her from one side of the house and her aunt Lydia from the
+other. She was striving faithfully to be worthy of her environment. To
+take the arm of this brilliant young personage on any occasion at all
+would have been a test of spirit; how much more so on an occasion so
+brilliant and entrancing as this--particularly when the badge upon the
+young man's breast connected him so closely with it, and made the
+connection patent to all? She fused everything, and filled him with it
+and it with him: the mounting tones of violins and trumpets, the
+sparkling quincunxes of the girdling balcony-front, the wide band of
+fresco which ran in unison with the arches of glittering bulbs above
+their heads, the circling and swaying throng--all the sheen and splendor
+of a vast and successful city.
+
+"Nice little girl with your brother," said Mrs. Bates.
+
+"A real dear," responded Jane. "She poured tea for Rosy."
+
+"Did she, indeed?" And Mrs. Bates looked at her harder to avoid seeing
+the passage of Gilbert Belden and his wife.
+
+"There's another real dear," she said, presently, "if I can only catch
+his eye." She held up her finger to a young man who had just conducted
+Rosamund back to her aunt Lydia's box. Rosy had quite scorned the
+antiquated usage of the balls of an earlier and less sophisticated day.
+"Of _course_ I shall not go with any young man; I shall go with a
+chaperon, and if the young men wish to see me they may see me there. It's
+all right if Jane wants to go with Theodore Brower; they might do
+anything after the way they bang around together in the street-cars. And
+I sha'n't go even with a chaperon unless she is in a box, where I can be
+taken afterwards"--a declaration which led to financial negotiations
+between David Marshall and his sister-in-law, and which brought him to a
+still higher appreciation of the general preciousness of his youngest
+daughter.
+
+"There! he's coming--my boy Billy. Isn't he about right?"
+
+A tall, broad-shouldered young man of twenty-five was making his way
+across the floor, and presently passed through the exit in the midst of
+the lower boxes to gain the level of the upper ones.
+
+"College all over, isn't he?" commented Jane; "his shoulders, and the way
+he parts his hair."
+
+"The best boy in the world," said Mrs. Bates, plumply, "He has been with
+his father for the last four years, and he's come to be a real help to
+him. Gets to the office at eight o'clock, rain or shine, and loves
+nothing better than to sit and grub there all day long. Steady as a rock.
+Splendid future. Holds his own nose to the grindstone like a real little
+lamb. I hope he asked Rosamund for supper."
+
+The young man presently reappeared, making his way behind the long tier
+of upper boxes.
+
+"Well, my boy, were you forgetting all about your mother and her elderly
+friends? I'd never figured on your meeting the younger daughter first. My
+son William, Miss Marshall. William, here's an awfully good girl; her
+father thinks as much of her as I do of you."
+
+The young man bowed, but blushed and halted before this singular
+presentation.
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Jane, filling up the breach in the first
+fashion that presented itself. "If pa had the same gift of language that
+you have, I should feel surer." She picked out her puffs, and then leaned
+back negligently with her hands crossed. She was too thoroughly grounded
+by this time to be discomposed by any youth seven or eight years her
+junior.
+
+The youth shifted his feet.
+
+"I saw you with my sister a minute ago," continued Jane. She knew,
+without looking round to see, that Mrs. Bates was smiling in the anxious,
+would-be-helpful way of parents who have put their offspring at a
+disadvantage.
+
+"Yes--oh yes," the young man responded, with precipitation. "We had a
+very nice polka, indeed."
+
+"Well," said Jane to herself, "I can talk about polkas and lots of other
+things." And she did. She held and entertained the young man for a full
+ten minutes. She found, after all, that he was in no degree constrained
+or backward, and she made him do himself justice.
+
+"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Bates, as he withdrew, "you made my Billy
+quite brilliant. I don't know when I have heard so much real
+conversation!"
+
+"That's all right," responded Jane; "I was young myself once. I haven't
+forgotten that."
+
+"Only you mustn't fascinate him," protested the elder woman, with a
+burlesque of maternal anxiety. "I want somebody else to do _that_." She
+gave Jane a smile full of meaning.
+
+"Aha!" thought Jane, and wondered if she were to see a certain little
+romance resumed after the lapse of so many lumbering years.
+
+"But she didn't seem to mind Paston any. Well, why should she?" concluded
+Jane.
+
+Presently Truesdale came along and asked his sister to waltz. "All
+right," she said; "just for a minute; but not out in the middle--yet."
+She wished to test herself first.
+
+"You're awfully good to me, Dicky," she whispered, as he led her back.
+
+"Cut it," said Truesdale; "I'm proud of you."
+
+Jane got back to her lofty perch. "I'll do it once more--if anybody
+asks me; yes, I will."
+
+In another ten minutes she was on the floor again. "Quite happy, I'm
+sure," she had said to Bingham.
+
+"Only I'm no great dancer," this big and bearded bachelor had warned her.
+
+"Neither am I," declared Jane. "I can just totter around and that's about
+all." She arose quickly, shook out her plumage, took his arm, and in less
+than a minute was waltzing again. "Lucky it _is_ a waltz," she thought;
+"I don't want to be trying too many novelties."
+
+Mrs. Bates moved to let them pass out. "Really," she said, "I don't want
+to sit here all alone. Oh, Mr. Brower, I rely upon you. Let me have your
+arm. I suppose"--with a resigned submission to the inevitable--"that I am
+expected to walk around once, at least."
+
+Brower had returned to the box, after diverting himself for some time
+rather shyly in the foyer. He had given Jane a promenade earlier in the
+evening, and had hoped to pass the rest of the time as inconspicuously as
+might be. Jane had been much pleased by his efforts to do the right
+thing--to be correctly dressed, for example. She knew from her own
+experience how one thing led to another, and she was appreciative of the
+pains he had taken on her account. It was easy for her to fancy how
+dress-suits must lead to dress-shirts, and shirts to studs and collars
+and ties and shoes and boutonnières--but Brower wore no boutonnière;
+there he drew the line. "Never mind," said Jane; "that isn't necessary,
+anyway. He has done quite enough as it is, and he's a good fellow to have
+done it." She knew how he regarded all this: as a sacrifice to Mammon, if
+not indeed to Moloch. "On my account, too," thought Jane--"every bit of
+it. Isn't it splendid of him!"
+
+Brower was vastly disconcerted on receiving this command from Mrs.
+Bates--it was nothing less than a command, of course, and he must obey
+it. He had found it something of an ordeal to lead even Jane round the
+floor once; how much greater a one, then, to perform the like service for
+Mrs. Granger Bates, whose escort could not but expect to draw scrutiny
+and to provoke inquiry. He was a modest man with no pronounced social
+ambitions; he would immensely have preferred to pass the same length of
+time staring into a locomotive head-light.
+
+Mrs. Bates presently effected a clearance, and with Brower as a convoy
+steered straight for the open sea. She carried a bunch of plumes aloft,
+showed a flashing brilliant on both the port and the starboard side, and
+left a long trail of rustling silk and lace behind her. And as she
+pursued her course, other craft, great and small, dipped their colors
+right and left.
+
+"I want you to see both ends of the scale," she presently said to Brower.
+"You are trying to bring them closer together, they tell me."
+
+"That is a part of our object," replied Brower.
+
+"Well, you have one end in your Nineteenth Ward, and the other here. I
+want you to get the good side of this."
+
+"I should be glad to; there _is_ one, I'm sure."
+
+"To begin with, don't encourage your associates to talk about the
+'butterflies of fashion,' and that sort of thing. There are no
+butterflies in this town, except young girls under twenty, and you surely
+won't quarrel with _them_. Yes, we are all workers; what could Idleness
+herself do with her time in such a place as this? You've got to work in
+self-defence. Do you see that woman up aloft there?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"She's the president and responsible manager of an orphan asylum. That
+one over across on the other side is an officer of the Civil Federation.
+Do you believe in that?"
+
+"Devoutly."
+
+"The woman just ahead of us--the purple velvet one--is a member of the
+Board of Education; she helps to place teachers and to audit coal bills.
+Why, even I myself have got a good many more things to look after than
+you could easily shake a stick at!"
+
+"And the one you this instant bowed to?"
+
+"You mean the one who bowed to me." For Mrs. Rhodes had leaned completely
+out of her box, and had then looked both right and left to observe
+whether her neighbors had done full justice to the episode. "Oh, she's a
+good little woman who is--climbing.
+
+"The fact is," Mrs. Bates proceeded, "that there are not a dozen real
+grown-up butterflies in town. We're coming to one now." They were
+skirting one range of the lower boxes. "It's Mrs. Ingles; you must meet
+her."
+
+"Some other time, please," implored Brower, as Mrs. Bates nodded to a
+sumptuous young creature not ten feet away.
+
+"Very well." Mrs. Bates shrugged her shoulders "Yes," she proceeded,
+presently, "Cecilia Ingles and her immediate set are about the only real
+butterflies we have. However, I'm going to take her in hand pretty soon
+and make a good, earnest woman of her."
+
+"There is work for them all," said Brower.
+
+"But don't let's be too serious just now," rejoined Mrs. Bates in
+friendly caution.
+
+"Who was that young man you had with you last night?" somebody demanded
+of her next day.
+
+"Mr. Brower."
+
+"Who is Mr. Brower, may I ask?"
+
+"A friend of Jane Marshall's." This (save that he had a trusty face) was
+all that she knew of Theodore Brower; but she thought it enough.
+
+"And who is Jane Marshall?"
+
+Mrs. Bates gave her questioner one look. "Really, you surprise me," she
+observed, and said no word more. Within a week Jane was known throughout
+the inquirer's whole set.
+
+Truesdale presently passed Mrs. Bates with a girl on his arm. "I wonder
+if that's another one of the tea-pourers?" she asked herself.
+
+It was. Truesdale was escorting Gladys--Gladys McKenna, as her complete
+name had finally come to him. He had laughed on first hearing it.
+"There's a _chaud-froid_ for you, sure enough!"
+
+Gladys wore a flame-colored gown, and her eyes, curiously fringed with
+black above and beneath, had an _outré_ and dishevelled appearance that
+lingered in the memory as wax-works do. She kept a strong clutch on his
+arm, and galloped alongside him with a persistent _camaraderie_ which
+conveyed no hint of cessation.
+
+"Why insist so strongly on a _quadrille d'honneur_?" he was asking her.
+"Wasn't a march good enough?"
+
+"We always look for a quadrille at one of the best functions--at home."
+
+"But why draw lines? You don't object if people meet for pleasure on
+terms free and equal?"
+
+"Oh, of course if you have no celebrities here--no great figures--"
+
+"Not one--not till you came. We are all plain people here. If any of us
+forget our plainness there are plenty who are glad enough to remind us of
+it."
+
+"Are you plain, too?"
+
+"The plainest of the lot."
+
+"You don't seem so; you look awfully ornamental, with that ribbon and
+all." The "all" meant the wave in his hair, the lustre of his eyes, the
+upward flaunt of his mustache which hid in no degree the white, firm
+evenness of his teeth, the freshness of a second gardenia--even the sheen
+of his shapely shoes.
+
+"The ribbon--you like it? Sorry I'm wearing only one. How would you have
+liked a second running the opposite way? Or a third pinned on behind?"
+
+"Oh, you!--How about all these other young men; are they anybody?"
+
+"What other young men?"
+
+"The ones with these criss-cross red ribbons."
+
+"Oh! Well, some few of them have what you might call position, and some
+are working for it, and some are not thinking anything about it; and
+some, after having served their purpose, will be dropped soon enough, I
+promise you."
+
+"And you yourself--are you in, or out, or not thinking about it, or-"
+
+"I?" returned Truesdale, carelessly. "I'm just a passer-by; I'm on my way
+to Japan."
+
+"Oh no; not Japan!" said the girl, quickly.
+
+"Japan, I assure you," he smiled.
+
+She caught herself. "To escape my uncle, then?"
+
+"Why that, in Heaven's name?"
+
+"You have offended him."
+
+"Dear me! How?"
+
+"By what you said at the house the other night. About the costumes, you
+know."
+
+"Nonsense. How could that have reached him?"
+
+"Those things do get around. Do you know what he's going to do? He's
+going to cut your comb. My aunt--she cried like anything."
+
+To Truesdale the girl's tone seemed preposterously confidential. "You
+were in the wrong," she seemed to imply; "but I am on your side for all
+that."
+
+"Ouf!" said Truesdale; "this comes of trenching on Biblical ground. I'll
+never quote scripture again."
+
+Truesdale had gone to the Belden house in pursuance of the invitation
+extended at his mother's own tea-table. Eliza Marshall had made a faint
+effort to dissuade him; despite Mrs. Belden's presence at her own
+function, his going seemed, in one way or another, too much like an
+excursion into the enemy's country. But the occasion was a fancy-dress
+ball, and Truesdale declared himself much too curious to remain away. "I
+must go," he said, and at once took steps to equip himself for this
+voyage of discovery.
+
+He wore the dress of a Spanish grandee of the early seventeenth
+century--he recalled the Spaniards as famous explorers. He was in black
+throughout, save for the white lace of his wide collar and cuffs, and for
+the dark purple lining of his mantle. If the Beldens, for their part, had
+costumed themselves half so discreetly, he would never have fallen from
+their good graces. But Statira Belden (keeping her own given name in
+view) had based her costume upon one of the old French tapestries--the
+Family of Darius at the Feet of Alexander; you may see the original, a
+Veronese, in the National Gallery. She had counterfeited the distressed
+queen by flowing robes and pearls strung through her yellow hair. She had
+revivified and heightened the faded ideal of the oldtime artist, and
+incidentally she had extinguished every other woman in the room.
+
+But the difficulty would still have been avoided had not Belden himself
+so far lapsed from discretion as to put himself forward in the guise of
+Shylock. It mended matters little that he had abandoned the costume
+within half an hour after donning it. Thus it was that Truesdale saw him
+for the first time in four or five years; the young man had completely
+disdained, thus far, to visit the store. With eyes freshened by long
+absence, and wits sharpened by contact with the world, he saw his
+father's partner in a dress which seemed to throw into greater prominence
+every lineament of his face and every trait of his character. The young
+man instantly doubted, mistrusted him. His Hebraic garments suggested
+another character held in still lower esteem. Truesdale, at a certain
+stage of the entertainment, observed his host and hostess in momentary
+conjunction on the threshold of the drawing-room; it was then that he
+uttered his little jest, whimsically careless of accuracy and loftily
+indifferent to outlying ears.
+
+"Ananias and Statira," he said, and his words travelled through the house
+like escaping gas.
+
+"They're awfully offended," said Gladys, continuing her confidential
+tone. "You can't come there any more--I don't believe. I'm so glad to
+have seen you here--who knows where I shall ever see you again? Why
+wouldn't you talk to me any, that first time? Why were you so long in
+asking me to dance to-night?"
+
+She seemed to be pushing the claim of proprietorship first advanced at
+the Belden ball.
+
+"Well, I hope I've talked enough since."
+
+"But where shall we talk together next time? I don't believe you can come
+to the house," she repeated.
+
+She seemed to be drawing attention romantically to obstacles in the
+way--in their way--and to be calling on him to remove them.
+
+"Perhaps they won't let me see you again. Perhaps they're offended by my
+having danced with you here." She was adding to the barricade, but he was
+bold and resourceful enough to level it.
+
+"Ouf!" thought Truesdale. "Girls--they're alike, every one of 'em, after
+all!"
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+It was two o'clock in the morning when Jane said good-bye to Theodore
+Brower in the vestibule and burst into the house. There was a light
+burning in the library, and thitherward Jane swept in high feather. Her
+father was sitting there; as she entered he took up a newspaper that he
+had completely read out three hours before.
+
+"Why, poppy!" she cried; "isn't this pretty late for you? But I know what
+you've been sitting up for so long: to have me tell you all about the
+party. Now, haven't you?"
+
+Her father looked up at her in some wonder. Jane was distinctly in a
+state of exhilaration. She seemed conscious of having played well her
+part--no mean part, either--in a large performance; one might have
+fancied indeed that the splendor and success of the occasion was in some
+degree due to her own participation. She was decidedly gay, bright,
+sparkling; her father felt that here at last was his daughter almost
+pretty.
+
+"Maybe I was," he answered. He threw down the newspaper so as to make it
+cover several loose sheets full of figures. "Did you enjoy yourself?"
+
+"I should say I did!" She seated herself on the arm of his
+chair; one of her big puffed sleeves almost covered his face.
+"Don't think I was a wallflower, either; I wasn't. I went out
+on the floor three times. Mr. Brower walked me around once, and Mr.
+Bingham waltzed with me once. And so did Truedy. Oh, poppy, he was so
+good to me! And he was the only young man there with violet eyes--I
+didn't see another one."
+
+Her father gave vent to a low, inarticulate monosyllable; it seemed to
+convey little appreciation of his son's eyes.
+
+Jane had met Truesdale for a moment just before she came away. "How's the
+handkerchief?" she had asked. "All right," he responded, cheerfully. He
+took it folded and crumpled from his coat-pocket and showed it to her. He
+had carried it in his trousers pocket until a moment before; but Jane
+never knew.
+
+"And I went to supper with Mrs. Bates and Theo--Mr. Brower," she
+continued. "And the oldest Bates boy took Rosy. We all went up in the
+elevator together and had a table quite to ourselves. I saw Mr. Bates
+there too. And lots of other elderly gentlemen. I wish _you_ had been
+there. Several of them made themselves prominent enough--no younger than
+you, no richer, no more deserving of notice. Poppy, you must get out that
+coat some time and brush it up, and go somewhere with _me_."
+
+Marshall thrust a finger under the edge of the newspaper. "I don't know,
+Jennie. There are lots of other things to think about."
+
+Rosy came home at four. Mrs. Rhodes dropped her on her own way southward.
+Bertie Patterson nodded sleepily in one corner of the carriage. She was
+unused to late hours, and had been ready to go long before. But Rosy made
+it plain to all involved that she regarded herself as the first to be
+considered; she did not design leaving a minute sooner or a minute later
+than her own good pleasure should will. Her card was filled to the last
+line, and she danced it out--with William Bates, with Arthur Paston, and
+with a score of other young men for whose names the present pages have no
+need.
+
+In the course of a week Arthur Paston called. Truesdale, who happened to
+be at home, found himself regarding Paston's presence with something the
+reverse of complacency, and his bearing with something that distinctly
+approached disapproval. He recalled to mind many of the diversions in
+which they had participated together, and he felt offended that Paston
+should bring here the same jaunty, familiar, off-hand ways that he had
+displayed in other scenes but slightly approved by Propriety. He
+would have preferred a line of conduct suggestive, in some small degree
+at least, of the penitent, the chastened, the abashed; a laugh less
+ready; a smile less confident; a bearing less self-assured, less divested
+of any sense of his need of tolerance, charity, forbearance. "I don't
+precisely like his acting in that free fashion here with Rosy," thought
+Truesdale; "there are times and times, and there are places and places."
+
+His thought presently turned towards himself. He had no less need, truly,
+of charity and forbearance than Paston, yet he was not in the habit, to
+any great degree, of adjusting his own manner to varying conditions. He
+treated other fellows' sisters just as Paston was treating his. The
+idealizing gaze of little Bertie Patterson was upon him; it was not
+precisely with reverence, certainly, that he was in the habit of treating
+her, for example. And the other girl with the red gown and the wax-work
+eyes--her he had treated almost with open derision. But that was
+different.
+
+Paston's cheery laugh rang out from the parlor. Truesdale stood in the
+library before the bookcase, reading the tarnished titles of the few
+spare volumes, as he shifted his weight from one foot to another,
+uncertain whether to advance or to retire. Paston knew him for what he
+was; but Bertie Patterson, he felt sure, would never acknowledge that he
+could be guilty of any wrong. "Hideous thing to be poetized," thought
+Truesdale; "but they all do it in one way or another." He thought of the
+faithful little hearts that beat in the German garrison towns. "'Byron's
+Poems'--I could easily be better than I am--'Lossing's History of the
+American Revolution,' volume one, volume two--and I must try to be. 'The
+Lamplighter'; 'The Wide, Wide World';--oh, curse that fellow's funny
+stories!" as Rosy's ready laugh came from the next room. Truesdale
+blushed as he thought of some of the stories that Paston could tell, when
+so minded; and he stamped his foot that such a--such a--(he found no
+word)--should be telling his sister any story at all. "But he's as good
+as I am," Truesdale was forced to avow, as he passed through the hallway
+and ascended to his room. "And better than lots of others. What can _I_
+say or do?"
+
+Rosy herself, however, would have asked for no change in Paston's manner.
+She found him charming, fascinating; compared with him, William Bates was
+far from entertaining. If Paston had attempted the chastened, the
+deprecatory, she would have feared that he was not enjoying himself. She
+would have taken but little satisfaction in deference pushed to humility.
+She was beginning to idealize him, as Bertie Patterson had begun to
+idealize her brother; but Rosy's idealization was not half so
+generous.
+
+While walking on his arm a week ago, she had not felt her self in a
+public hall within a few hundred yards of her own home; no, she was at
+Buckingham Palace or at St. James's--she was not sure which. There were
+moments, indeed, when it was not a palace at all: it was the terrace of
+some Tudor house, with stone balls on all the posts, or it was the trim
+path of some village church-yard, bordered by yew-trees and by tombstones
+with cherubs' heads and hour-glasses. She was the bride of a month, and
+this was her first service in England. The people around them figured no
+longer as the swell crush of London, but as a respectful, lock-tugging,
+courtesy-dropping tenantry who fell off on either side as she passed out
+to her carriage on her husband's arm. There were side-long glimpses, too,
+of forgeries and murders and lost wills and stolen jewels and people
+drowned in wells; in one book there had been a maniac girl shut up in a
+room--but she should try to avoid all these superfluities; a duchess in
+possession of her senses would be decidedly preferable. A week later and
+she was deeper in Burke and Debrett than ever.
+
+"Well, here it is finally--Saltonstall, Scamperdown, Scodd-Paston."
+Rosy bent her head and studied the large gilt volume with redoubled
+vigor. "It's pretty near the end, after all."
+
+Rosy sat at a desk in a big new granite building to one side of a small
+park. Above the window-ledge appeared the tops of trees, the towers and
+gables of a pair of churches, the dark and dignified façade of a
+club-house, and the various elements that make up one of the half-dozen
+local views which bear in any great degree the stamp of civilization.
+Around her people fluttered leaves, or put books back on their shelves,
+or carried on the cataloguing of a large and but half-arranged library.
+But Rosy gave heed to none of this. "Scodd-Paston," she said; "here's a
+whole paragraph." And she buried herself in it at once.
+
+She had begun with the Queen and the royal family and the order of
+precedence. Then she had gone through the dukes, very carefully; then
+through the marquesses, not so carefully; then through the earls,
+somewhat cursorily: "Here's one with eight daughters, the Honourable
+Gertrude-Adeline, and seven more." Then she had bolted through the
+viscounts and barons: "This one's awfully new--only from 1810." Then she
+slid lightly over the baronets. Then she passed on to the knights. "I
+don't suppose it's _here_." But it was.
+
+"'General Sir John-George-Alexander Scodd-Paston,'--that's a pretty good
+name," thought the girl--"'born in 1835; entered Life Guards in 1855;
+married in 1857 to Mary-Victoria, dau. of James, Lord Lyndhurst'--I
+wonder if she was of higher rank than he. Oh, here we come to his own.
+'Attained rank of colonel, 1869; general, 1877; served in Egyptian
+campaign of 1882; appointed Groom-in-Waiting to Her Majesty in
+1883'--ever so many capital letters. 'C.B., 1882; K.C.B., 1885'--a lot
+more. Whatever do they mean? Does he wear stars and things? And here's
+where he lives: 'Boxton Park, Witham, Essex.' And somewhere else, too:
+'10, King's-gate Gardens, S. Kensington'--that's in London, I suppose.
+And here are his clubs: 'Whitehall and United Service.' Only two; why,
+lots of the others have five or six. But papa hasn't got one, even.
+Besides, think of _our_ ever being in a book!"
+
+She paused a moment in perplexity. "But where are his children--all
+the sons and daughters, and when they were born, and who they married,
+and everything? It tells in the dukes and earls. Never mind, though; I
+don't need a book for that. Boxton Park, Witham, Essex," she mused. The
+posts came back again with the stone balls on top of them; and a few
+oriel-windows; and a peacock or two strutting on a terrace. The prospect
+widened; ditches and hedge-rows under a low, gray sky, packs of yelping
+hounds, hunters following in red coats....
+
+Rosamund went home in a thoughtful mood. It was within a fortnight of
+this that she was taking hurdles at her riding-school.
+
+This involved still another horse, and a habit, and a saddle. Rosamund
+was teaching her father how to spend money; no other member of the
+family, save Truesdale, had ever attempted as much.
+
+"Are we going on forever living in this same old place?" Rosy asked her
+mother one day. She had fallen into the way of making comparisons between
+Boxton Park and No. two hundred and whatever-it-may-have-been Michigan
+Avenue--just as she had made comparisons with the many fine houses where
+she had lately been entertained.
+
+"I don't expect to live anywhere forever," replied her mother, tartly.
+
+"It's so old and dismal," Rosy went on. "I declare, I hate almost to ask
+anybody here. And it's getting so noisy and dirty--and all those awful
+people over there on those streets behind us."
+
+Eliza Marshall's thought flew swiftly towards the second-hand dealer of
+those purlieus who had carried away so much good, solid furniture, and
+then had declined to pay for it. But this did not prevent her from
+looking on her child now as if a viper, warmed at her hearth, had roused
+to life and stung her.
+
+"Why can't we change?" Rosy proceeded; "why can't we move? Why can't we
+build somewhere--where we can have neighbors, and a house to invite them
+to?"
+
+"What do you call the Blackburns and the Freemans?" asked her mother,
+severely. "Where can you find nicer folks? Why do we want to chase after
+a lot of new people that we don't know anything about?"
+
+"The Blackburns and the Freemans are no company for me," Rosy declared.
+"All the people I know are up on the North side or down on Prairie
+Avenue."
+
+"The North side!" repeated her mother, out of all patience. "I see myself
+moving to the North side at my time of life, after living on this side
+for more than forty years. I should feel as much at home in Milwaukee.
+And don't talk to me about Prairie, either; as long as I live, I live on
+Michigan, and nowhere else. I don't want to hear any more about it--no,
+not a word."
+
+While Rosy assailed her mother about the house, Jane attacked her father
+about himself. Her social triumphs (so she regarded them) had made her
+more ambitious and more aggressive than ever. She was less solicitous
+about the family in general, which seemed to be moving on satisfactorily
+enough, than she was about the head of it himself, who appeared
+distinctly to be lagging behind.
+
+Marshall now listened to his daughter's urgings with a more serious
+consideration; she was only saying to him what older and more experienced
+people had said already--Susan Bates, for example, and Tom Bingham. Susan
+Bates, in fact, had renewed the attack, and she prosecuted it whenever
+occasion offered. She had not scrupled, indeed, to pursue the theme
+within the precincts of her own house.
+
+Mrs. Bates had not yet achieved the peculiar aboriginal function which
+she had outlined to Jane in the course of their first talk--the reel, the
+old settlers, and the young squaws to pour firewater were still in the
+future; but she had entertained the Marshalls at dinner, _en famille_,
+and she had pushed the subject with still greater insistency in her own
+house than at David Marshall's office.
+
+For the occasion of the Marshall dinner Mrs. Bates put her household on a
+peace footing. She banished, as far as possible, all traces of social
+war-paint. She determined to dispense with as many of the men-servants as
+might be, and to have those who were left over wear their plainest
+liveries; she even thought of arranging to have the Marshalls' ring
+answered by a maid instead of a footman. So when David Marshall came, in
+the dress-coat that had not seen the light for over a year, and Eliza
+Marshall, in the plum-colored silk whose only recent airing had been at
+Rosy's coming-out, they had little to contend against save the house
+itself and its furnishings.
+
+Jane accompanied them. "Tom Bingham is going to take you out," Mrs. Bates
+announced. "He is very much interested in you. He thinks you are quite a
+clever girl."
+
+"All right," replied Jane. "I'm interested in him, too. I think him a
+person of great discernment."
+
+"I had some notion of asking Rosy at first; Billy was so taken with her.
+But this is really an old folks' party, after all. Besides, Billy had a
+theatre engagement."
+
+"Sorry," said Jane; "I'm sure pa and ma would have liked to meet him."
+Whatever little plan Mrs. Bates may have been revolving in her mind, Jane
+was too loyal to throw cold water on it. "So should I myself."
+
+Susan Bates gave the Marshalls a short, plain dinner; she had no desire
+to glorify herself or to embarrass her guests. But Eliza Marshall learned
+more of contemporanics in that one evening than she had picked up in the
+previous decade. She learned how people received, how they set their
+tables and served them, how they built their houses and furnished them.
+She learned not only the possibilities but the actualities of splendor
+and luxury in the town where she had led a retired and humdrum existence
+for nearly a lifetime. She now thrust her head forth from her dim old
+cavern, and fed her eyes on the flowers and fields and skies and goodly
+streams of the great world outside.
+
+While Jane supported her mother against the lumbering charges of Granger
+Bates's conversational cavalry, his wife engrossed Marshall's attention
+for her dormitory. Her plans had taken shape in her own mind, and were
+now beginning to take shape on paper.
+
+"It's more than a mere dormitory, of course." She cleared a space between
+them, and took up a dessert-spoon. "Here's the vestibule and
+entrance-hall," she began, drawing with the spoon on the table-cloth;
+"and here's where the stairs run up. Off to this side--John, do take some
+of these glasses away--off to this side"--with a wider sweep of the
+spoon--"is a sort of parlor and reception-room--quite a good size, you
+see. Right next to it is the dining-room--so that they can be thrown
+together, when the girls receive."
+
+"Good," said Bingham; "nothing more civilizing than receptions."
+
+"On this side of the dining-room," pursued Mrs. Bates, "is going to be a
+sort of alcove--Jane, dear, just push me over that salt and pepper.
+There!" She planted the two bottles in her alcove; "that's the tank for
+tea, and this is the tank for coffee. Practical, don't you think?"--to
+Bingham.
+
+"First-rate. And I suppose you have a screen that you can put in front."
+
+"Precisely." She laid a tiny spoon across her alcove. "Hardwood floors
+down-stairs, throughout. Up-stairs, bedrooms for fifty girls, and each
+one shall have a closet, if possible. We begin the foundations in five or
+six weeks--as soon as the frost is out."
+
+Susan Bates cleared a larger space, and appropriated more knives and
+forks and spoons, and went on in a lower tone for Marshall's ear alone.
+Jane strained to catch her words. She, saw her father blush once,
+slightly, and then smile, as if partly flustered--as Jane herself phrased
+it.
+
+"What a dear good old sentimental soul she is!" thought the girl. "I'll
+bet a cent she is asking pa to put up a dormitory for boys on the other
+side of the campus!"
+
+Mrs. Bates presently carried Jane and her mother into the library,
+leaving the men behind to contemplate a litter of disordered wineglasses
+and dishevelled napkins, and to smoke themselves out, in the course of
+half an hour, to the women.
+
+Mrs. Bates's talk, here as heretofore, was frankly personal. On a
+previous occasion she had talked to Rosy's mother about Rosy; now she
+exacted that Rosy's mother should talk to her about her own boy Billy.
+
+"The best boy in the world; his father says he's making a splendid
+business man." She took a cabinet photograph from over the fireplace.
+"There; this is the latest, but it doesn't do him any kind of justice."
+
+"Well, he's got a real _good_ face," said Eliza Marshall.
+
+"And a real good-looking face, too," rejoined his mother, quickly. "Jane,
+dear, run up to my room and get the one before this--that's something
+like; second drawer on the left. And stop eying those books; you can't
+get at them with anything less than a cold-chisel!
+
+"But why should you depend on pictures?" Mrs. Bates observed, presently.
+"See the boy yourself. Go down-stairs next time he calls. Oh, he will
+call again, I assure you," concluded Susan Bates, archly.
+
+"Tell him to inquire for ma, and send in a card for her, too," whispered
+Jane. "Rosy's getting awfully sticky."
+
+"'Sticky'?"
+
+"Yes; fussy, stiff, critical--that's what it means, as near as I can make
+out. It's a word Dick brought home from London."
+
+"H'm," said Susan Bates, "I'll remember it."
+
+The men, meanwhile, sat round the dining-room table. Marshall smoked with
+the others and tried to forget his boutonnière--the first he had ever
+worn.
+
+"I shall make them very small and unobtrusive," Susan Bates had said;
+"only a dozen violets." Marshall noticed that Bates had put his flowers
+into his right-hand button-hole, and Bingham his into his left. Jane saw
+her father hesitate; finally he imitated Bates. "Well, that's cutting it
+pretty fine," thought the girl; "I wonder if there is a right or wrong
+way. But think of pa with any button-hole bouquet at all! We shall budge
+him yet!" She smiled; she knew the forces were all arrayed against him
+to-night.
+
+"What this town needs more than anything else," Bingham was saying, "is a
+big assembly hall--one with a capacity of ten thousand, say. Something
+not too fine--we've got that already; and something not too rough--we've
+had that in plenty. A hall suitable for conventions, for promenade
+concerts, for mass-meetings, for horse shows--in short, something after
+the fashion of that magnificent thing in New York."
+
+"The Madison Square Garden?" asked Bates. "You're perfectly right."
+
+"Now that Garden," pursued Bingham, "is not exactly a paying
+investment--wasn't meant to be. The last time I was down East--"
+
+"Yes--"
+
+--"some fellows there quoted it to me as an evidence of public
+spirit--the spirit that we here suppose not to exist in New York at all.
+The men who put it up could easily have got more on their money; but
+there it stands, one of the most useful and beneficent features of the
+whole city."
+
+"We ought to have one here," declared Bates.
+
+"And I should like to build it," declared Bingham. "The man who would
+give such a thing to Chicago, or who would even take the headship of it
+and make a suitable contribution, would be doing as much for himself and
+for the town as any one man well could."
+
+"But don't look at me," said Bates. "My wife has drained me: dry--you
+know about her dormitory and all her other schemes. Look at--well, look
+at Marshall. What is Marshall doing for the good of the city?"
+
+Marshall lowered his eyes and fingered the broad foot of an empty
+wineglass. He sat between two of the great powers of the town, and he had
+never felt smaller. He wondered whether he had deserved his success; he
+wondered if he himself had really made it. After all, he had come on the
+ground before competition had fairly set in. He had done nothing by force
+or by audacity; he had been slow, cautious, even timorous, and he
+confessed inwardly that there were men in his own employ--men on a mere
+salary--who were cleverer, readier, more resourceful than he--men who, in
+a fair field and on even terms, could have distanced him completely. He
+gave the wineglass another turn or two, and did not lift his eyes.
+
+He heard Bingham's voice again. It was declaring that in the history of
+every great mercantile city there was a single short period--a passing
+moment, almost--on which the citizen who wished to impress himself upon
+the community and to imbed himself in the local annals must seize.
+Marshall heard him instancing the Fuggers, of Augsburg, and the Loredani
+and Morosini, of Venice, and the Medici and Tornabuoni, of Florence,
+and many other names alien and all unfamiliar--merchants, most of them,
+it seemed, who had perpetuated their name and fame by improving the
+precise moment when their town, like plaster-of-Paris, was taking its
+"set."
+
+"Make your impression while you may," concluded Bingham. "This is the
+time--this very year. The man who makes his mark here to-day will enjoy a
+fame which will spread as the fame of the city spreads and its power and
+prosperity increases. You know what we are destined to be--a hundred
+times greater than we are to-day. Fasten your name on the town, and your
+name will grow as the town itself does."
+
+Marshall drove home thoughtfully in the new carriage, with the new
+horses, and August in his new cape-coat. Eliza Marshall, who had sat
+gingerly upon the edge of her seat in driving out, now leaned back at her
+ease when returning; it seemed that, with a little practice, she might
+easily become habituated to luxury. As she re-entered her old familiar
+parlor, she almost gave a gulp of mortification over its plainness and
+shabbiness; for the first time in years she had given herself a chance to
+know it for what it was.
+
+"There, now," Jane declared loudly, "you've both seen what money and
+brains can do. Well, haven't _we_ got money? Haven't _we_ got brains? Is
+there any reason why _we_ shouldn't be known, and looked up to, and
+respected?" And at breakfast next morning she opened out upon her father
+once more. Her lunch-room was now, thanks to her solicitings and her
+concert, in full running order, and moving on to a marked success. To-day
+she was rising to a more ambitious plane. Not a college building, not
+an assembly-hall; no, during the watches of the night she had risen to
+the conception of a working-girls' home. Her father had been listening to
+the mellow and flowing hautboy of Susan Bates, and to the deep diapason
+of Tom Bingham; but his daughter had now pulled out the coupler and was
+screaming shrilly above all the other voices of the organ. He felt almost
+deafened, stunned.
+
+The "second girl" came in, frightened. "What is it?" asked Eliza
+Marshall.
+
+"August is in the kitchen, with his face all cut and bleeding." Jane left
+her father. "Let me go out and see what it is." It was another chapter in
+the Van Horn matter. Roger, having become more familiar with police-court
+methods, had been pushing things with greater vigor and effect. During
+the past night two or three ruffians had broken into the stable, had
+shattered the windows of the new carriage and defaced its panels, and had
+beaten the coachman.
+
+"There!" cried Rosy. "How much longer have we got to live down here among
+all these savages and hoodlums?"
+
+Eliza Marshall made no reply, and Rosy felt that this in itself was to
+have gained a point.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Eliza Marshall meditated on the Bates dinner for several days succeeding,
+and when the following Saturday morning came round she was still busy
+with it. Saturday was her day for going over the antiquated accumulations
+of her parlor; no hands ever dusted and replaced the ornaments on her
+what-not save her own. She had been very chary of expressing herself
+about Susan Bates's entertainment, even to Jane. But now she felt that
+the time had come when she might trust herself to speak.
+
+"I can't say I see the need of so many kinds of spoons," she said, as she
+transferred one of her gilt candelabra from the what-not to the contorted
+old rosewood centre-table: the candelabra were of an operatic cast--the
+one under removal represented (though all unknown to Eliza Marshall)
+Manrico and Leonora clasped in each other's arms beneath a bower-like
+tree. "Cut right through the middle, too--so that you could hardly tell
+whether they were spoons or forks."
+
+"What could be better for ice-cream or salad?" asked Jane, who was
+blooming forth as an authority on matters social. She sometimes assisted
+her mother on these Saturday mornings--under close supervision.
+
+"And three kinds of wineglasses," observed her mother, with some
+disapproval. "Sort of showy, I thought. Kind of as if they wanted to
+impress us, and let us see what--No!" she cried, as a figure came up the
+front walk, carrying a tray fastened in front. "No! 'Melia, tell him we
+don't want any suspenders or collar-buttons; we don't wear them."
+
+"Showy!" called Jane. "My sakes! it was the plainest thing, I ever saw at
+their house. If you could see _some_ of their doings!"
+
+Eliza Marshall set back the candelabrum and transferred her attention to
+a Rock of Ages in Parian marble. "I believe things get dirtier here every
+year. I'm sure more dust comes in at that window than goes out." Then:
+"Well, I don't see but what we're as good as anybody else; I don't see
+but what we are as well worth taking pains for." She ran her cloth
+resentfully between the arms of Faith and the arms of the cross.
+
+"Oh, dear me suz!" cried Jane; "are you trying to get the poor woman both
+ways? Her dinner was just right, and I am sure she took every possible
+pains to have it so."
+
+"What?" called her mother, craning her neck and contorting her features.
+A locomotive was letting off steam opposite the house, and the noise and
+the vapor came across the hundred yards of dead grass together.
+
+"I say it was all right," shouted Jane. "Don't you suppose she knows how
+to--Dear me! what's the use of trying to talk here?" She fell on the
+mantel-piece and dusted its vases in silent desperation.
+
+Her mother accepted this dictum as final--a proof of Jane's altered
+status, and of the discretion with which she was carrying herself. "Of
+course I am not a society girl," was the way Jane turned the matter over
+in her own head; "I am a benevolent old maid, with a capacity for society
+when occasion offers." Jane had kept this point distinctly in view, and
+had now extricated herself from the squeezed and anomalous position
+which, for the last few years, she had occupied between her two sisters.
+"Alice thinks she knows everything, just because she's married," Jane
+had said to herself a year back; "and Rosy thinks she knows everything
+just because--well, I'm sure I can't exactly tell why.
+
+"But anyhow, between the two, I'm being pretty well flattened out. I've
+got to do _something_." And she had.
+
+Jane, running on the new track she had laid down for herself, had
+regained the consideration of Alice, and had even conquered the respect
+of Rosy. Indeed, so far had she triumphed with her younger sister that
+Rosy was even showing civility and goodwill to Theodore Brower, whose
+regard for Jane had brought about his social rehabilitation. "I wonder
+why he never cut his beard to a point before," Rosy said one day; "he
+looks ever so much better. And I see that he has finally provided himself
+with calling-cards. Well, if he leaves one behind every time he comes, we
+shall soon have a fine litter."
+
+"He won't, though," said Jane, "except when he calls on you."
+
+"Well, he may call on me if he chooses," responded Rosy, with a gracious
+condescension. "I'm sure he talks very sensibly."
+
+"Never fear," retorted Jane; "he isn't competing with the British
+aristocracy!"
+
+Then Rosy would go up-stairs for a bit of pen-and-ink practice--to cover
+a sheet with such words as these: Lady Rosamund This-or-that; Rosamund,
+Countess of Thus-and-so; the Honourable Rosamund Such-a-one. She lingered
+fondly over the baptismal "Rosamund"; what word could match more fitly
+with a title, or harmonize more completely with the grand old names
+of the peerage? Once she wrote on the extreme lower corner of the sheet:
+Mrs. W. F. Bates. "Oh, pshaw!" she exclaimed, and tore the corner off and
+threw it into the fire.
+
+The locomotive had relieved itself, and no noise remained save the
+jangling of a long line of freight-cars on another track. "Those people
+who repaired the carriage," resumed Eliza Marshall, now beginning on one
+of her Dresden figures--"those people who repaired the carriage spoke to
+your father about--'Melia, shoo that tramp out of the side yard; of
+_course_ we haven't got anything for him this time of day. They spoke to
+your father about--"
+
+She paused, and began to bestow an exaggerated care upon the figure now
+under her hands--a dancing-girl of Seville. Jane paused in her own work
+and waited for the rest. "Well?" she asked, presently.
+
+Her mother wiped the head of the dancing-girl very carefully. The girl
+had black hair parted in the middle and laid in two wide scallops over
+her ears. "They told your father they were looking for a site to build a
+new warehouse on."
+
+Jane's heart gave a throb. "Well?"
+
+Her mother applied herself painstakingly to the apron and petticoat of
+the dancer--a petticoat striped in purple and green, and sprigged over
+with some species of flower wholly non-botanical. She drew her cloth down
+every stripe.
+
+"They said they were hoping to find something just about in--in this
+neighborhood."
+
+Jane shrank and trembled as if before a knife. "Well?"
+
+Her mother passed on to the girl's slippers. She wiped the worn gilt of
+one stubby foot and then of the other. "They asked him to put a price
+on--on--"
+
+"On our home!" cried Jane. There was a tear in each eye as she bowed her
+head over the mantel-piece.
+
+Her mother returned to the Rock of Ages, and began to dust it again--as
+carefully as before.
+
+"Well," she said, slowly, without turning round, "there's a building of
+that same sort a block or two south of us, already." She lingered on the
+short arm of the cross. "The Blackburns are talking of going, you know."
+
+Jane bowed her head again and picked at the fringe of the
+mantel-covering--a foolish thing that she herself had embroidered and
+draped. Now, for the first time, she formulated her mother. "I've half
+known it all along," she thought, "and now I know it for sure." In this
+moment she definitely saw her mother, not as a creature of the
+affections, but as a creature of, mere habit. "And it's been so for the
+last twenty years," thought the poor girl.
+
+Eliza Marshall passed back to one of the candelabra; its cracked prisms
+tinkled as her broken talk went on. "Well, I don't know, I'm sure. Our
+last neighbors are leaving us. Business and boarding-houses all around.
+And Rosy wants to change. And there's so much noise and dirt, and so many
+peddlers and beggars. And--and--" She was thinking of Susan Bates's
+library, but would not permit herself a spoken reference to it. "And
+so much work to keep things tidy. And those miserable fellows breaking
+into our barn. I don't know, I'm sure."
+
+Marshall himself, meanwhile, talked the matter over with Belden and with
+Roger, when Roger came in to consider the assault on the stable and the
+policy of employing the police. "I don't know that I should depend too
+much on the city's detectives," he had observed; "but I will have them go
+down to the house, if you say."
+
+Accordingly, one morning a brace of young Irishmen modestly traversed the
+sidewalk which led around the house, and knocked with some show of
+decorum at the kitchen door. Each had the fresh complexion of a recent
+arrival, chestnut hair plastered in a scallop on his forehead, room under
+his nose for a large red mustache, and room under his finger-nails for a
+noticeable quantity of "matter misplaced." Presently they put on their
+derby hats again and went out to visit the stable. Then they took their
+departure and were never heard of more.
+
+The next detective rang at the front door. He wore gloves and a high silk
+hat. He was a tough and determined-looking person, whose progress
+rearward the family attended with a close watch on their portable
+property: he seemed much more corrupt and knowing than any mere
+barn-breaker could be. He was more efficacious, too, than the duo that
+had preceded him. Even in the stable he gave much less heed to August
+than to August's mistress, and in the course of a few days he put his
+hands on the offenders. Ten to one he could have done that without having
+visited the premises at all.
+
+Roger was the family counsellor in matters of investment as well as
+matters of law. He had early made the observation that few lawyers
+amassed a fortune in the strict practice of their profession; and he had
+accordingly turned a prompt attention to building and to land, operating
+largely for himself and for his father, and to the advantage of both.
+Indeed, manipulations in real estate had done more for David Marshall's
+fortune than had the pursuit of the grocery business--just as they had
+done more for his son than the pursuit of the law.
+
+"Your mother won't live anywhere but on Michigan, though," he declared to
+Roger.
+
+"She needn't," the other rejoined. "Move south three miles--if you mean
+to make any change at all. The best houses in town are going up along
+that stretch--just within the old limits. And a house there could be
+turned into money at any time."
+
+Roger, as a practical real-estate man, naturally put convertibility
+before domesticity.
+
+Marshall also canvassed the matter with Belden. Belden listened to him
+somewhat coldly and impassively--with less interest, the old man thought,
+than one's partner rightly should. But Belden took the idea of a new
+house as another step in the social advance of the Marshalls. It seemed
+to him almost like the challenge of a rival; and a rivalry like this
+nettled him none the less from being so sudden, so unexpected; so
+impracticable, as--six months back--he would have considered it. He felt
+himself and his family outdone at every point. Rosamund Marshall had
+eclipsed his own daughter at a dozen dances; Truesdale Marshall, thanks
+to the half-jocular patronage of the press, was becoming in his way a
+celebrity, while his own son merely led a dubious existence which
+oscillated between the bar of the Metropole and the billiard-room of the
+Lexington, and conferred little distinction upon himself of anybody else;
+and even dusty old Eliza Marshall, almost despite herself, was being
+dragged up into a circle to which his own wife, notwithstanding all her
+lavish and industrious endeavor, remained as alien as at the beginning.
+
+And, to crown all, Marshall himself had finally come forth as a public
+figure. Belden had actually been obliged to sit at a banquet-board and to
+hear this old man, usually so quiet and inexpressive, loudly applauded by
+a hundred hard-headed businessmen, who, a month before, had received an
+effort of his own with mere civil toleration.
+
+This new advance of Marshall's was made partly by Jane's help, partly in
+spite of it. "Speak?" she had said, when her father broached the subject
+one evening; "of course you'll speak. You know all about the topic, if
+anybody does; and here's an opportunity right at your hand. I'll help you
+get up your speech, myself."
+
+She did. She prepared a long address after the most approved rhetorical
+models: a flowing introduction which walked all around the subject before
+going into it; a telling peroration whose emphatic periods seemed to
+render any subsequent consideration of the matter a mere piece of
+futility; and in between, briefly and cursorily, the one or two vital
+points of the whole discourse. Thus equipped, David Marshall was to rise
+at half an hour before midnight, the last but one of a long line of
+speakers, to claim the attention of a great roomful of men sated with
+meat and drink and sodden with oratory.
+
+But in the cloak-room the manuscript had slipped from his pocket, and at
+the table all its overwrought periods had slipped from his mind. And at
+midnight he rose to confront an expanse of disordered table-cloths and an
+array of wearied faces, his own ace full of uncertainty, and nothing to
+nerve his inexperience save a desperate determination not to disappoint
+his daughter.
+
+"Another old bore getting up"--from a distant corner of the smoky room.
+"Any idea who he is?"
+
+"Not the slightest." A yawn. "Take another regalia."
+
+David Marshall had forgotten everything but his main points and the facts
+that supported them. He began in the very midst of things. He spoke a
+minute and a quarter--plainly, simply; and sat down the instant he had
+finished.
+
+He had spoken in his usual husky and sibilant voice. Nobody had called
+"Louder!" however--because nobody had really wished to hear.
+
+On his ending, the room rang with applause--the applause of gratitude,
+largely.
+
+"Well, the old fellow can say his say, after all, eh? And no blooming
+oratory, either."
+
+"And sense enough to cut it short--the last man usually shows the least
+mercy."
+
+As Marshall sat down his neighbor on the right shook his hand warmly.
+"Why haven't you been doing this for us before?"
+
+As he was leaving the hall, the secretary of another club, present by
+accident, solicited an address on a cognate subject for a coming meeting
+of his own organization. "Why didn't you give yourself a little more
+time?" he asked.
+
+Jane was wild with pride and pleasure; her father had given her the
+results and not the process. "I knew you could, poppy; I just knew you
+could. We'll start in on the other speech right away, and make it even
+better than this. We'll show 'em, yet!"
+
+But it was not Marshall himself, for all the inexplicable ease of this
+success, who chiefly angered Belden. Nor had he any great feeling against
+Rosamund, having no undue interest in the social rivalries of young
+girls. Nor was he particularly incensed against her mother, being
+offended chiefly by the ostentatious and invidious good-will shown her
+by Mrs. Bates. But against Truesdale Marshall he nourished a hot and
+rancorous grievance. He did not apprehend Truesdale's attitude towards
+the town at large, and the young man's manner in his own house
+(regardless of his insolent utterance) seemed to have carried a
+half-contemptuous curiosity beyond all decent bounds. "That young
+cockerel--I'll soon find a way to quiet his crowing. What does all his
+singing and painting and fencing amount to, after all? He couldn't post
+an item into a ledger; he couldn't even tie up a pound of tea. He can't
+work off any of his foreign smartness on _me_!"
+
+Truesdale, readily figured himself the reverse of _persona grata_ to the
+Beldens, and stayed away; but this did not prevent his reception of
+advices more or less regular from the heart of the Belden household.
+"What's that absurd girl up to _this_ time?" he asked one morning,
+as an envelope, directed in a hand already too familiar, came to the
+door. He recognized readily enough the sprawling, half-masculine
+penmanship of Gladys McKenna, as readily as he divined the rôle which she
+must imagine herself to be playing. She was pretending herself to be
+a prisoner in some hostile camp--a hostage in some dismal dungeon; and,
+despite the close and suspicious watchfulness of those surrounding her,
+she was still sending her little messages, all the same, to her _preux
+chevalier_ on the opposing side. In the end her reward would come; she
+and her knight....
+
+"Ouf!" cried Truesdale, who scented all this crass and forward
+romanticism between the trivial lines of her communications; "why does
+she write, when she hasn't got anything to say?"
+
+Sometimes she _did_ have something to say--a little. To her statements of
+the disposition of the Belden family towards her correspondent, and to
+her general recommendation to "beware," would be tagged indications of
+her own individual movements. "Poor auntie is laid up with the neuralgia,
+and Ethel has gone visiting in Kenwood, so I am the only one to be sent
+to Field's for those gloves. Auntie says the best time for the glove
+counter is about twelve-thirty, when the crowd is smallest."--"Yes,"
+mumbled Truesdale, irritably; "and lunch at one."
+
+Or: "They are going to let me go alone to Modjeska tomorrow afternoon--in
+the street-car; just think of it! I think I shall ask for a seat in the
+last row--I am so timid about fires." Sometimes she would add "destroy
+this," or, "burn this." "Most willingly!" Truesdale would exclaim, and
+throw "this" in the fire at once.
+
+Or, again "Imagine; I am to have a tooth filled. Auntie says I needn't
+trouble to go away down-town--there is a very good man right on
+Twenty-second Street. 'Go early,' she says; 'and try to be over with it
+by eleven, so that you can enjoy your lunch.' Did you ever know of such
+thoughtfulness?"
+
+"No, I never did," acknowledged Truesdale, grimly.
+
+By these and other such subterfuges did Gladys keep her epistolary hand
+in, until the time came when she really had something of consequence to
+communicate.
+
+Once or twice she also regaled him with the comments of the Beldens on
+the building projects of the Marshalls. Truesdale had the same tepid
+interest for these advices as for her other notes and comments. He did
+not consider himself as particularly concerned. At best he was but a bird
+of passage. And it seemed to him a sad error to load one's self down with
+so dense and stationary a thing as a house.
+
+The conferences over this matter went on, however, regardless of
+Truesdale's non-participation. Jane discussed it with her father and
+mother; and Rosy handled it, and Roger; and Alice came in from Riverdale
+Park to stay overnight, and to contend with Jane and Rosy through the
+steak and the griddle-cakes in the morning, as well as to intimate to her
+father that if he would build out a little library from her parlor, her
+husband could pay for the carpet and furniture; and Aunt Lydia Rhodes
+came now and then and fluttered around the question, unsettling points
+that had been looked on as settled for good and all, and raising other
+points of her own that needed no consideration whatever. And, at the end
+of a wearisome and contentious month, the matter--with what seemed to
+everybody an extraordinary and reckless precipitation, the end once
+reached--was finally arranged. Tom Bingham was to build them a house
+in the neighborhood favored by Roger, and was to find an architect for
+them--a reversal of the usual procedure which afflicted Jane with grave
+doubts. And on the morning of the earliest day of spring, when the
+piano-organs were trilling through the side streets, and the flower-men
+were offering hurried shoppers their earliest verbenas and fuchsias from
+the tail ends of their carts, Jane walked down to the store to look at
+the signatures on the contracts for the new house.
+
+"Ah!" she said to herself, thoughtfully; "we _are_ moving--faster than I
+anticipated, and not precisely in the direction I had fancied."
+
+She was in no degree elated; she experienced, on the contrary, a distinct
+feeling of depression.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+During those active weeks which followed the decision of the family to
+surrender their old home to business and to contrive another one in a new
+neighborhood towards the south, Jane had taken her full share in all the
+debates and consultations. Hers, indeed, was the personality which
+impressed itself most strongly upon the young architect whom Bingham
+brought forward to evolve the plans, elevations, and specifications upon
+which he himself was to work. In matters architectural Jane was a purist
+of the purists, a theorist of the theorists; she fought this young man
+steadily on points of style, and never abandoned her ground until the
+exigencies of practicalities, reinforced by the prejudices of her mother
+and the unillumined indifference of her father, proved too strong to be
+withstood. "Well," she would say, "if we have got to sacrifice Art to
+steam-heat and speaking-tubes...." The young man was both amazed and
+exasperated by her spirit and her pertinacity; he could only be kept in
+trim and in temper by Bingham's frequent assurances that she was a very
+clever girl--and a very well-meaning one, after all.
+
+Jane saw the plans composed, discomposed, recomposed, and, finally,
+accepted as a working basis; then, in the interval between this and the
+actual commencement of construction, she turned back a diverted attention
+to her lunch-club.
+
+This institution, at the start, had required her attendance and
+ministrations but once a week. At present she was on hand twice a week,
+and in the near future she was to be there still more frequently. Every
+kind of co-operative endeavor, whether it involves the politics of a
+ward, the finances of a bank, or the refreshment-table of a church
+social, falls in the end on the shoulders of two or three people, and
+Jane's undertaking was no exception. And as it became more a matter of
+personal endeavor, it became, at the same time, more a matter of personal
+pride. She frequently asked people to call and inspect it, and she was
+coming more and more to feel that if the line of natural evolution were
+followed out, then her own lunch-room for girls would be developed into a
+home for working-girls by her father.
+
+"There, poppy," she said to him one evening, as she put several sheets of
+paper into his hands; "that's my notion of what could be done on a
+hundred-foot lot. I haven't drawn the front yet, but here's the plan for
+down-stairs, and another for one of the upper floors."
+
+The germ of Jane's unexpected architectural facility was to be found,
+perhaps, in Susan Bates's table-cloth drawings; and it had developed
+during her long labors on those big brown sheets which Bingham's young
+man had brought so many times both to house and store.
+
+"But if you really want some notion of the front," she went on, "I can
+give it to you fast enough." She turned over one of her sheets and began
+to draw on the back of it. "Pooh! architecture's easy enough! It'll be
+about five stories high." She sketched the five stories with five or six
+lines. "In red brick--Romanesque style like this." She gave a broad sweep
+with the pencil, grouping several rapidly evolved windows under a wide,
+round arch. "And the cornice will be brick and terra-cotta; no galvanized
+iron--_that_ I will not have. And a good-sized terracotta panel here over
+the doorway, to tell who we are--like that."
+
+She outlined a large oblong, and filled it with an indefinite jumble of
+curly-cues.
+
+Her father looked at the drawing, and laid it back on the table with a
+wan and patient smile. "Some other time, Jennie; we'll think about it
+when we haven't got so many other things on hand. Isn't the new house
+enough for now?"
+
+Jane studied her father's face for a moment, and then thrust the
+drawings aside with a sudden and remorseful sweep. For he looked tired
+and worn, and in the slight pallor of his face she noted the deepening
+of old wrinkles and the appearance of new ones. "You poor old pa!" she
+cried, "I didn't mean to worry you. It can wait, of course; and the more
+we learn about building in the meanwhile the better we shall be prepared
+for this when the time comes round."
+
+She looked into his eyes; they seemed to her both haggard and appealing.
+"I declare, you look just dragged out. Poor pal--just bother, bother,
+bother. Something at the store?"
+
+"There's always something at the store," he said, looking away. "I
+haven't been feeling very well all day. I guess I didn't get my full
+share of sleep last night."
+
+Yes, there was always something at the store, and this time it was an
+affair between Belden and the South town assessor. Belden--largely on his
+own account, certainly without anything like a consultation--had
+undertaken to secure a revaluation of the warehouse property; and he
+had been so successful (through the use of arguments by which an assessor
+may be moved) as to get a figure even lower than that of the previous
+year, despite the increased value of the building. Unfortunately, he had
+selected the very time when the scandalous inequality in assessments was
+engaging the attention of an ambitious evening paper; and this paper had
+just printed a cut of the enlarged building in juxtaposition to some
+small retail grocery in a remote ward and precinct, which was assessed in
+a ratio ten times as great--a vivid illustration of the manner in which
+the rich were favored at the expense of the poor. Marshall felt himself
+put forward as a criminal--a malefactor; he was assured, furthermore,
+that a man who offered a bribe was worse than the man who accepted it.
+
+He might have added too, that Belden was showing some disposition to
+divert the house from its old conservative paths into the wild courses of
+speculation. His dash and daring found an outlet in an endeavor to
+manipulate the tea market, with less eye, perhaps, to profit than to
+prestige--to primacy in the trade. The old man had given but a
+half-hearted assent; he felt the credit, if any were involved, would
+outrun the profit, and that the promise of profit was too little to
+justify all the worry and care.
+
+Nor was Jane's own enterprise, meanwhile, wholly free from difficulties.
+There were distinctly days when the postponement of the millennium seemed
+indefinite--when there appeared to be enough human nature remaining in
+the world to secure the present state of things for many years to come.
+
+"It's a good deal more complicated than I thought," she confessed to her
+aunt Lydia, upon calling, one day, to invite her to visit the institution
+and to inspect its workings. "Now, Miss Casey and Miss Erlanger, for
+example, get along together all right, because Miss Casey is the cashier
+in an insurance office, and Miss Erlanger is the stenographer for a
+railroad president. Both of them kind of edge off from some of the
+salesladies; and the salesladies are pretty nearly as bad among
+themselves. Miss Maddox, who sells gloves on the first floor of
+Bernstein's Bazaar, never quite wants to sit at the same table with Miss
+Slopinka, who sells bolts and padlocks in the basement. So we have to
+trim and fuss and compromise all the time; in fact, we've been obliged to
+take in another room or two. However, that makes all the more to see."
+
+Jane then added a few words to cover what she conceived to be the
+etiquette of such a call. Aunt Lydia was not one of the kind to find any
+force in a delicate intimation; so Jane said what she had to say as
+plainly and pointedly as possible.
+
+"Don't call during the rush; you'd only be in the way. And don't look at
+the girls as if they were natural history specimens in glass cases. And
+don't whatever else you do, be flip--"
+
+"Flip? What a word! Where did you get it--there?"
+
+--"and gushing, and effusive, and as condescending as if you had come
+down sixteen pairs of stairs. I lost three girls the day after Mrs. Bates
+brought Cecilia Ingles up. 'Why did you do it?' I asked her. 'I want her
+to see things,' she told me; 'I want to make a good earnest woman of
+her.' I hope she won't do it again. I sha'nt encourage many visitors
+after this. I don't think it helps a place like that to be made into a
+show."
+
+"Well, I don't know," returned her aunt. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to
+have entertainments and things, to bring the different sections of
+society together? I should be very glad to help," she added, as she
+debated the probable participation of Susan Bates and Cecilia Ingles.
+
+"No, I'm not going to have any picnic business," returned Jane. "That's
+all nonsense. I'm going to keep this thing within its own lines."
+
+"I suppose I could bring Bertie with me," suggested the chastened Lydia.
+"She thinks you're a perfect little tin thing-a-ma-jig on wheels."
+
+"Yes," said Jane, "she can come; only don't bring a whole raft with her."
+
+"I won't," Mrs. Rhodes reassured her; "only one more besides. You
+wouldn't mind a third?"
+
+"No, I shouldn't mind just one."
+
+Then Lydia Rhodes made an immediate request of Truesdale to act as
+escort; _he_ was her third. She took, in this malapropos manoeuvre, the
+same delight that a child experiences through the consciousness of being
+engaged in some mischievous wrong.
+
+"Lunch with us at Fields," she directed him, "and then we shall get
+around in time to see Jane wiping off her tables and putting away her
+crockery. We go very simply--we wear sackcloth and ashes. As for the
+portrait--that can wait a day or two."
+
+Then she told Bertie very solemnly that they were to begin a study of the
+philanthropies of a great city. But Bertie took her own view of the
+expedition; Truesdale's participation made it seem rather like an
+excursion into fairy-land. Now, more than ever, was she under the glamour
+of this young man's accomplishments; now, more than ever, did she feel
+the embellishing and decorative qualities of his presence. Not only had
+she heard the composer sing his own songs; she had lately seen him paint
+his own picture--and hers. "Why can't you do a little water-color or
+something of Bertie?" his aunt had suggested to him one day, upon
+encountering him in an attitude of graceful negligence before the
+exposition of his own pictures. "It would please her so much. Do you
+know"--lowering her voice as she looked towards the girl over her
+shoulder--"the dear child has been down here eight or ten times to see
+these things? Fancy how much it would please her to watch you actually at
+work--on a portrait of herself, too."
+
+Truesdale glanced sidewise towards Bertie, who stood in painstaking
+scrutiny before one of the outlying pictures of his group. A pair of art
+students in their careless working clothes, stood a little apart with
+their eyes on the same work.
+
+"Terrible knowing, ain't it?" remarked one.
+
+"Yep," rejoined the other; "awful lot of snap."
+
+"Just knocks it right out, doesn't it?"
+
+"Fearfully up to date, ain't it? Doesn't need any '1893' on it!"
+
+"Full of jump! Why can't we fellows here at home get more of that sort of
+thing?"
+
+Bertie's heart swelled proudly as she heard this jargon. It was quite
+unintelligible to her, but she felt sure it conveyed extreme approval.
+She turned to look at Truesdale just as he turned to look at her.
+
+He shook his head in burlesque deprecation of her too obvious
+appreciation, and then brought his attention back to his aunt.
+
+"All right," he said; "I'll do it. I'll come down some day and paint her,
+or you, or the front doors, or anything else you say." He pondered for a
+moment, as he edged away a little from Bertie, and tried to carry his
+aunt with him. "I suppose I shall be expected to look the part?"
+
+"Yes," she responded, sympathetically. "Bertie has never seen an artist,
+of course, but she has her ideas of how one would look. If it wouldn't be
+too much trouble for you to...."
+
+"Oh, I don't mind the trouble so very much," replied Truesdale,
+magnanimously. "I hope I can put myself out a little. She might look for
+a loose red tie, perhaps, and a Tam O'Shanter, eh?"
+
+"And a velvet coat," suggested his aunt, ardently.
+
+"Oh, bother a velvet coat; that's going a little _too_ far. She would be
+more likely to look for a palette and a maul-stick."
+
+"Why, certainly."
+
+"Yes, they use those things sometimes. I wonder if she would insist upon
+an easel?"
+
+"I think I could arrange that," replied his aunt. She drew on an
+expression of decorous and pensive sadness, and Truesdale knew that she
+was mentally detaching her crayon of the dear departed from that
+elaborate white and gold apparatus in her parlor. "And if you should care
+for a few Persian rugs hung up around...."
+
+"By all means!" cried Truesdale. "And a few Bedouin rifles; and a few
+bits of brasswork from Cairo; and a few scraps of drapery from Bombay or
+Trebizond; and one of those inlaid Turkish tables; and one or two stacks
+of old French armor. I think with all that help I could do a water-color
+or so."
+
+"You're going to do her in oil," declared his aunt, stoutly.
+
+"I am? Then I must have that table, sure. And a nargileh. And a dozen
+Japanese swords, if you happen to have them about the place. And what
+else?--oh yes; a small bit of canvas, now I think of it."
+
+Bertie looked round once more, and divined herself under discussion. She
+sidled away, past a long row of landscapes and marines, and drifted out
+into the hall, where she leaned over the balustrade and studied the
+mosaics of the vestibule below.
+
+"Good little subject," said one of the students, looking after her. He
+ran a sudden hand upward through his hair, which had lately fallen from
+its high estate and had come to look like the hair of anybody else. "Get
+that profile against a red plush curtain--"
+
+"And drape her in a red silk kimono or something."
+
+"And have a vase of Jacqueminots to one side--a study in reds, you know."
+
+"Yes, I know, you know." He turned on his heel. "Well, this ain't work,
+or anything like it. Come along up-stairs."
+
+And up-stairs they went--through the main hallway.
+
+Lydia Rhodes followed her protegee with a fond eye. "You know, Truesdale,
+that she's just the sweetest little thing in the world."
+
+"Oh, yes, I know."
+
+"Why don't you go into the business?" asked his aunt, impulsively, as she
+placed a cajoling hand upon his arm.
+
+"The business? So I might. Well, you may pay me a hundred dollars for
+this commission, if you like!"
+
+"You know what I mean--your father's business. Now that they are making
+it all over, they might easily find a place for you."
+
+"Um," observed Truesdale, falling into a gloomy and chilling reserve.
+
+His aunt saw the necessity of abandoning this new ground at once. "You'll
+take pains, won't you?" she said, struggling back to her former position.
+"You'll make it as nice as you can?"
+
+"Well, it will be a sort of sketch, of course," said Truesdale, still
+rather coldly.
+
+"It won't, either," insisted his aunt; "it will be a real, regular
+picture."
+
+"She'd get tired of it. Do you think it's any fun to pose?"
+
+"Tired!" said his aunt, scornfully. She thrust the supposition into the
+outer darkness and slammed the door behind it. "How are you going to
+dress her?" she asked, passing on with a resolute swiftness to detail.
+"If you want anything of mine ... I've got a lovely breadth of old gold
+satin; and then there are those Roman pearls you brought me."
+
+"Dress her? I sha'nt dress her at all. I don't believe I shall want any
+of your rugs, either. If they are on the floor, keep them there; that's
+where they belong. No; I shall just put her before a plain wall in her
+every-day clothes--the black hat and jacket she's wearing now. Won't that
+do well enough?"
+
+"We--ell," said his aunt, doubtfully.
+
+Truesdale had juggled enough in his time with draperies and accessories
+to know how to employ them here, if so minded; but he felt instinctively
+that any such manipulations would now be quite out of place. "She's a
+good, sincere, simple little thing," he said to himself, "and she will
+speak better for herself than all those things could speak for her. I
+shall make just a sketch--but a careful one. I shall do the best I can; I
+shall make a very lady-like thing of it." Suddenly he flushed. "I shall
+tear those old things up to-morrow--they've got to go sometime." He was
+thinking of certain studies at the back of one of his portfolios; they
+were _not_ ladylike. "Those models!" he muttered, in a tone at once of
+objurgation and of self-reproach.
+
+Truesdale came for the first sitting in a costume discreetly picturesque,
+and his aunt frisked through all the preliminary preparations in a state
+of great glee. Bertie surrendered herself to the process with an
+expression of wondering self-depreciation; her large dark eyes shone with
+a kind of surprised humility.
+
+"If she wouldn't look _quite_ so much like one of Murillo's Madonnas,"
+thought Truesdale. "This isn't really the most important thing that has
+ever happened in the universe, after all." Then he sighed lightly.
+"Still, I suppose she _is_ a good deal nearer to a Madonna than I am to a
+Murillo."
+
+Mrs. Rhodes seemed to feel the necessity of upsetting the whole
+apartment. She had the inside man bring up the stepladder. "What's this
+for?" Truesdale asked.
+
+"To fix the curtains right. I can have them taken down, if you say. How
+far up do you want the shades? Are those lambrequins in the way?"
+
+"Good heavens!" cried Truesdale, "do you want to tear the house down? Do
+you think I am Raphael painting the Pope?" But all this was only his
+aunt's way of flattering him into a good-humor, and of making him share
+her sense of the importance of the occasion.
+
+As the work went on, however, his aunt's song changed imperceptibly from
+allegretto to adagio, and from the major mode to the minor.
+
+The change first appeared as she studied his charcoal outline. "Well,"
+she observed, "I think you might have put Bertie somewhere near the
+middle of the picture, instead of away off to the left, like that."
+
+"They put them in the middle sometimes--yes," admitted Truesdale,
+cheerily waving his aunt back. "I'm leaving the other side for you," he
+added, with a genial impudence.
+
+"Oh, that's it, is it?" And she half believed it true.
+
+On the day following she was distinctly mournful. "Do you mean to tell me
+that you can ever work over that mass of red and blue and yellow freckles
+into anything resembling Bertie's complexion?--such a beautiful one,
+too!" Bertie blushed. "There! look at it now!" cried his aunt, with a
+mounting enthusiasm; and Bertie blushed still more violently. Truesdale
+gave her a brief glance, which he at once transferred to his palette.
+This was the first time in his life that he had ever lowered his eyes
+from a woman's face, merely because there happened to be a blush upon it.
+
+"Work it over?" he presently inquired, as he looked up to his aunt across
+his shoulder. "I never work anything over."
+
+"Is it going to stay that way?" demanded his aunt, peremptorily. Bertie's
+own face was overcast, with an expression of plaintive distrust.
+
+"Of course it is. I work in the primary colors. If you should prefer
+something a little less advanced...." He waved his maulstick vaguely, as
+if in reference to the professorial practice of Munich, or to the
+antediluvian school of England.
+
+"Well, if that's the way it's going to stay...." commented his aunt, with
+her face close to the canvas.
+
+"My dear aunt," protested Truesdale, "we don't look at a painting with
+our noses, but with our eyes. I decompose what is before me into the
+primary colors. Now the thing for you to do is to step back ten or twelve
+feet and recompose them. That armchair over there is just about your
+point of view precisely--and so inviting and comfortable! Try it."
+
+His aunt removed herself to the point suggested. "Well, perhaps it
+_does_ look a little better from here." And Bertie Patterson breathed a
+tiny sigh of relief; for the last thing in the world she wished to be was
+a witness to her young artist's failure.
+
+"Of course," responded Truesdale. He gave an invocatory sweep with his
+brush, and the spirit of complete modernity descended and perched upon
+the top of his easel. "Just wait; it will be so naïve; it will seem so
+improvised, so spontaneous--a regular little impromptu. Of course."
+
+But the next day his aunt accompanied him to the front door when he took
+his leave. Her tone to-day was one of out-and-out protest.
+
+"Now, Truesdale, this has gone far enough. You may muss up the house as
+much as you like, but I can't let you make a laughing-stock of Bertie.
+When it comes to streaks of green under her chin, and purple shadows
+under her hair, I--I don't think it is right. And she--she admires you so
+much." His aunt's voice broke, and she seemed at no great remove from
+tears.
+
+"Dear Aunt Lyddy," returned Truesdale, with an unruffled imperturbability
+and an exhaustless and patronizing patience, "you have never learned to
+use your eyes; you don't know how to see. Did you ever try looking at
+things from under your elbow?" He raised his own, as he fastened the last
+button of his glove, and gave her a teasing glance from beneath his arm.
+"You are quite transfigured," he declared; "it makes all the difference
+in the world. Try it some time. Well, good-bye." He gave her his hand
+without lowering his elbow, and then sauntered complacently down the
+front steps.
+
+Bertie watched him from behind the curtains of the front window. He wore
+a black cape-overcoat, which swung gracefully as he moved along, and a
+soft Fedora hat with a brave dent in the crown. "The most becoming thing
+he could possibly have picked out," she thought.
+
+Mrs. Rhodes came back to take one more look at the canvas. "It's a
+perfect living picture of you, Bertie, except for the color. I can't get
+around that." She leaned forward and twisted her neck round and looked at
+Bertie from under her elbow, and then looked again at the canvas and
+shook her head. "And as for naïvete from Truesdale...." she murmured. She
+would as soon have looked for sunbeams from cucumbers.
+
+Bertie, intent upon the painting, saw nothing of these manoeuvres. "I
+guess it will come out all right," she said, with a reviving trust.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+When Jane looked up at the stroke of one and saw her aunt Lydia and
+Bertie Patterson enter under the escort of Truesdale, she was not
+completely pleased. Her rooms were no place for men, anyway--especially
+young ones; and she had often wished that Truesdale, however worthy her
+admiration and the world's, were a little less ready as to bringing his
+fascinations into play. "If ever he comes down here," she thought, "he'll
+wear something too striking, and he'll want to talk to the girls about
+the continued stones in the magazines, or play the piano, or something;
+and they'll think he's trying to flirt with them. I hate anything of that
+kind--here," said Jane, virtuously.
+
+Truesdale, however, conducted himself with an immense discretion, and
+wore nothing out of the ordinary. His hats and shoes were now quite like
+those of other people. His Florentine _stivaletti_ had drawn so much
+attention in the street-cars that he had been obliged to give them up;
+and as for the flat-brimmed high silk hat which he had brought home from
+the Boulevard St. Michel, _that_ he had had to leave off after a
+second trial: there were some things, he found, that people would not
+stand. And his manner to-day was utterly stripped of gallantry; it was
+gauged with the precise idea of meeting the approval of Bertie Patterson.
+"I expect I shall seem awfully insipid," he said to himself.
+
+Jane came to meet them from a room beyond, where she left a doughnut and
+a half cup of coffee standing on a round-topped oak table. The regular
+noon hour enjoyed by most of the girls was done; two or three remained
+finishing their lunch or looking over the picture papers, and a couple of
+them, in the little parlor, were trying duets on the piano.
+
+"I'm the only one of the board on hand to-day," Jane explained. "So I've
+been doing a little book-keeping and a little waiting and a little
+everything. This is Miss Casey," she said, introducing one of the
+piano-players; "and this is Miss O'Brien," introducing the other.
+
+Miss Casey and Miss O'Brien bowed and smiled, and made a dexterous remark
+apiece without too apparent an effort, and presently took an adroit
+departure. They had already overrun their time, they explained.
+
+"Walk around and look at things," suggested Jane. "We're pretty high up,
+you see, but we don't save any rent, because the elevators make one floor
+worth as much as another. Still, the light's good, and the air; and
+there's a great deal less noise."
+
+The others followed Jane's lead with much docility. Truesdale was
+profoundly impressed by his sister's aspect under these novel conditions;
+Bertie Patterson seemed to find in her the incarnation of all the town's
+philanthropy; even Aunt Lydia was almost too deeply affected to chirp and
+chatter with her wonted volubility.
+
+"Here's the office," said Jane, leading them into a small, lighted closet
+to one side. "This book is for our account with the butcher, and that one
+is for our account with the baker. Our supplies are brought up on the
+freight elevator every morning. Come and see the gas-stove, where we cook
+eggs."
+
+As they passed through the adjoining room a girl sat at one of the tables
+with a piece of pie and a cup of tea. She was turning the leaves of one
+of the comic weeklies, and a slight frown of intentness upon her face
+indicated either a limited sense of humor or some unfamiliarity with the
+subjects under review. The latter, perhaps; her face and air were
+distinctly foreign.
+
+"Poor Sophie!" said Jane, indulgently; "she's trying her English on those
+jokes. She's improving, however; and she can speak French and German like
+a fire-engine. I guess she's smart enough; anyway, she looks so."
+
+The girl seemed of a type that might have come from Baden, or Alsace, or
+the Franco-Swiss frontier. She had a high color and an abundance of black
+hair. Her eyes, as she lifted them to Bertie Patterson, were dark and
+narrow and full of sparkle and decision, and the half-frown, which still
+survived from her study of the comic paper, helped to give her a look of
+some force and determination.
+
+Truesdale, on seeing her, gave a sudden start, and turned his eyes and
+his face away at once. Then, with a quickened pace, he followed his
+sister's lead towards the kitchen and pantry. He smiled half grimly.
+"Such a thing may happen anywhere, of course," he said to himself; "but I
+shouldn't have chosen it to happen right here. No--not exactly."
+
+Bertie and Mrs. Rhodes followed after, to see the gas-stove that cooked
+eggs. As they crossed the threshold, Truesdale looked back between them
+towards the subject of his speculation. She had grasped her paper firmly
+with both fists, and now sat with an intent stare fixed on its pages. She
+neither raised nor lowered her head, nor could he observe that she looked
+either to the right or to the left. "Ouf!" said Truesdale, as Jane lit up
+the stove, "you never know when a thing is at an end."
+
+Jane presently turned off her gas-stove. "You can go back through the
+other room. It isn't quite so swell," she expounded, as she moved along;
+"but we have several grades of girls, and each one finds her own level
+and her own society for herself." She led the way back into the parlor,
+and drew a finger along the key-board of the piano as she passed by.
+"Anybody who wants to send a few new pieces of lively music may do so."
+
+Two or three late lunchers had come in and were clattering their knives
+and forks at the table opposite the girl whom Jane had called Sophie.
+Sophie still sat in her place; she held her paper with a firm hand, and
+turned the leaves at intervals. She looked up once--as the party was
+passing out. Truesdale stepped over the door-mat rapidly, on the far side
+of Jane and Bertie and Mrs. Rhodes. He dropped his glove that he might
+stoop for it, and as he stooped he shot a rapid glance through the narrow
+door of the other room. The girl still held her paper before her face,
+but she sent a single look after the party athwart its side.
+
+Truesdale stepped into the hall and pressed the button of the elevator.
+"It's Sophie, true enough--not a bit of doubt about it. If she didn't
+recognize me just now, she'll never have I another chance to--here."
+
+He handed his charges into the elevator. "Well, what do you think of Jane
+and her doings now?" he asked, briskly, as he stepped in after them. "Can
+you think of any better opening for the investment of your idle funds?
+Isn't she an able financier? Hasn't she got a great administrative
+capacity? Isn't she one of the rising young men of the day?" As he flung
+off this string of stock phrases from the newspapers, his eyes flashed
+brightly, a mounting color came into his cheeks, and a triumphant smile
+to his lips, and a caressing and ringing vibration into his voice. He
+seemed to coruscate with all the conquering insolence of youth; Bertie
+Patterson had never seen him quite so handsome.
+
+"Down we go!" he cried to his aunt, as the cab resumed its course with a
+sudden, breath-taking drop. "No; don't catch hold of me--I'm only a
+broken reed. Yes; try the door-jamb--much more satisfactory. But look out
+for your fingers--never get your fingers caught." Then, as they arrived
+at the street level: "Wait a second; don't hurry. Be sure of your
+footing; don't stumble and break your neck at the last minute--one poor
+last little chance, after so many glorious opportunities have gone by!"
+
+"'Sh, Truesdale!" whispered his aunt.
+
+For there were other people in the elevator, and they looked askance at
+this smart volley of verbal superfluities.
+
+He led them out to the carriage. "Here we are on solid ground once more,"
+he continued; "best place in the world to be. No; don't ask me to get
+in--I'll walk on a bit. I wouldn't leave terra firma now for anything."
+He handed his aunt in, and then Bertie. He exacted from Bertie a
+perfectly superfluous shake of the hand, bowed over that hand with a
+sudden access of gravity, and lost himself in an abysmal reverie before
+he had traversed a hundred yards.
+
+He saw before him a high-heaped assemblage of red-tiled roofs, and above
+them rose the fretwork of a soaring Gothic spire. A narrow river half
+encircled the town, and a battered old bridge, guarded by a round-towered
+gateway, led out into the open country towards a horizon bounded by a low
+range of blue hills. Trumpet-calls rang out from distant barrack-yards,
+and troops of dragoons clattered noisily over the rough pavement of the
+great square. The dragoons passed, and a colony of awnings and umbrellas
+sprang up in their place, and bands of stocky peasantry chattered and
+chaffered, and left the pavement strewn with the loose leaves of cabbages
+and carrot-tops. Then night came and blotted these out, and the moon rose
+and music played, and throngs of officers and students and towns-people
+sat through a long-drawn evening before the coffee-houses round-about.
+High towards the stars towered the columns and pediments of a vast
+official structure, whose broken sky-line sawed the heavens, and whose
+varied cornices and ledges were disjointed by deep and perplexing
+shadows. On each side of the great portal which opened through the
+pillared arcade there was stationed a mounted cuirassier, and above it
+there appeared in large letters--
+
+"Marshall & Belden," said Truesdale, suddenly emerging from his reverie.
+He sprang lightly over the muddy gutter and found a foothold on the damp
+flagging. "Pshaw!" he said, rather ruefully; "in a moment more she would
+have come to meet me."
+
+He looked up at the building before him. "Well, really, they've made
+quite a decent affair of it. But what are they doing to the sign? Oh, I
+see: putting 'The' to the front of it, and 'Co.' to the back. That ladder
+looks rather shaky. The Marshall & Belden Co.' Perhaps it would be civil
+of me to call on the new concern--seeing that I have chanced their way."
+
+Truesdale picked his way choicely through the office, with the urbane
+affectation of never having seen the place before. One or two of the
+clerks recognized him, and a hurried word, passed from desk to desk,
+effected an immediate establishment of his identity throughout the room.
+Those who had never seen him had at least heard about him. Some of them
+had visited his pictures at the Art Institute, and, as devotees of the
+old school, if of any, had mildly guyed them. Others had read paragraphs
+in the "Chappie Chat" of the newspapers about his trousers and
+cravats--those genial paragraphs which may so easily endow a young man of
+parts and peculiarities with a quasi-celebrity. One of them now smiled
+broadly, and another so far forgot himself and his dignity as to wink;
+but all the rest, as American freemen by birth or adoption, united in a
+stolid determination to refrain from seeing, or at least from
+acknowledging, any distinguishing peculiarity, any differentiation--above
+all, any savor of superiority. The one of whom Truesdale inquired for his
+father was so Spartan in his brusqueness that Truesdale, despite himself,
+smiled in his face.
+
+In the private office he found his father closeted with Roger. Crumpled
+and trampled on the floor, and with the effect of a matter abandoned or
+at least superseded, lay a large sheet of paper printed with the outlines
+of a real-estate subdivision, while a hundred similar sheets rested in a
+roll on the end of the old man's desk. Marshall himself lay back in his
+chair, with marks of the exhaustion that follows intense indignation and
+exasperation, while Roger paced the floor with all the vehemence and
+choler of younger blood.
+
+"Yes," Roger was saying, explosively, "the bond was opened, and all they
+found was a blank paper--the alderman's name, and nothing more. Why do
+you blame _me_? What more can _I_ do? What more could you do? What more
+could any decent man do? And if you wanted to find out how things are run
+here, you're doing it."
+
+"What's the trouble?" asked Truesdale. He sat down with an engaging
+disposition to show himself interested.
+
+Marshall passed his hand feebly over his forehead. "It's that police
+affair of your mother's," he said, in a tired voice.
+
+"Well, I hope those two scamps have been sent to jail, or to Bridewell,
+or wherever they belong. August will carry that scar to his dying day."
+
+"Jail!" cried Roger. "No ward-worker need ever go to jail. They sent for
+their alderman the minute they were caught. Our ward hasn't elected
+anything but crime-brokers for the last ten years."
+
+"Well, what did the present crime-broker do?"
+
+"He went bail for them. He made out the bond himself--inside of thirty
+seconds. He marked it so on the envelope, and the police-captain took it
+for what he called it. So when these fellows jumped their bail--"
+
+"Our alderman lost--his autograph. A bad take-in for the police, wasn't
+it?" queried Truesdale, impartially.
+
+"Take-in!" cried Roger. "It's easy enough to be taken in if you want to
+be taken in--if you lend yourself to being taken in!"
+
+His father gave a long sigh and dropped a helpless hand on his desk.
+Truesdale looked into vacancy and gave a long, low whistle.
+
+"And there you have it!" ended Roger. "You have lifted off the cover and
+looked in. Do you want to go deeper? You'll find a hell-broth--thieves,
+gamblers, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, saloon-keepers, aldermen, heelers,
+justices, bailiffs, policemen--and all concocted for us within a short
+quarter of a century." He drew his hands across each other. "I've never
+felt so cheap and filthy in my life."
+
+Truesdale made no further inquiries about the Van Horns. His fastidious
+nature shrank back from all these malodorous actualities. He added his
+own footprints to those which already defaced the map lying on the floor,
+and asked about that.
+
+"You're interesting yourself in buying land, I imagine."
+
+"In selling," replied Roger, curtly.
+
+David Marshall leaned laboriously over the arm of his chair with the
+intention, perhaps, of crowding the crumpled map into his waste-basket.
+Instead, he gave it several neat and careful folds and thrust it
+abstractedly into one of his pigeon-holes. It found place alongside of a
+bill for doctor's services handed in that morning. A porter who had
+fallen down three floors of the elevator shaft had been attended by one
+of his own friends. The bill was exorbitant--everybody concerned knew
+that. But it was rather less than a probable award for damages--everybody
+knew that, too. The excess was to be shared, of course, between doctor
+and patient.
+
+"Was there anything special?" his father asked presently, with a wan and
+dejected glance towards his younger son. "If not, I think I'll put on my
+things and go home. I don't quite feel myself today."
+
+"Perhaps you'd better," recommended Roger, taking the roll of maps under
+his arm. "I'll have these distributed from my office during the week."
+
+"No, nothing special," answered Truesdale; "I just happened in. And I
+think," he added to himself, "that I had better lose no time in happening
+out. The idea of my running up against such a tar-kettle as this! Pouf!"
+
+As he went out he passed along the front of Belden's desk. Belden himself
+sat there attended, with the sort of deferential familiarity that
+suggests the confidential clerk, by the Swiss, the Alsacian, or whatever
+else, who on a previous occasion had moved the curiosity of Bingham.
+
+This man caught sight of Truesdale as he passed, and gave him an instant
+glance of recognition. He at once bowed his head over Belden's desk, so
+as to hide his face among its papers. "A gentleman to see you sir?" he
+suggested with a magnificent readiness.
+
+Belden raised his own head and met the careless nod of the passing
+Truesdale with a forbidding frown. "No, he doesn't want to see me. And I
+don't want to see him," he muttered in a lower tone.
+
+"You know him--is it not so?" the man insisted, with a kind of smothered
+determination.
+
+"Know him? Yes"--with extreme distaste. "It's young Marshall."
+
+"Mr. Marshall's son?"
+
+"Yes," Belden thrust some papers towards him. "Take these as you go."
+
+The man put out his hand. "I know him, I myself, also," he said, looking
+Belden full in the face with a steady eye. "Ich selbst." He struck his
+breast and ventured on the liberty of a smile--a smile slow and sinister,
+one that called for an understanding and challenged co-operation.
+
+One might have fancied such a conjunction effected when, an evening or
+two later, Truesdale received a "note" from Gladys McKenna. As he sifted
+apart its numerous sheets he tried to recall whether he had replied to
+her last; he could not remember having done so. "But sometimes they
+_will_ write," he said, discontentedly, "and nothing can stop them."
+
+Her pages led him a rough and rugged chase. She wrote a large, hasty
+hand, with an unstinted expenditure of ink. "I declare," he said, running
+several sheets over in succession, "she gets blinder and blinder the
+further along she goes. And now"--turning back to the beginning--"let's
+see what it's all about."
+
+The letter assumed from the outset a mysterious and melodramatic
+tone. "Perhaps, finally, she really has something to say," commented
+Truesdale. But she went on, circling round her theme, dipping down to it
+now and again, and then soaring up and away from it altogether. "Well,"
+asked Truesdale presently, with a slight show of impatience, "what is
+it?--something she doesn't fully understand, or something she does
+understand but can't bring herself to write about? She 'listened,' she
+says; to very small purpose, say I." He felt one moment that she was
+more or less in the dark; the next, that she was making passes at some
+forbidden theme; the third, that she was asking a more ardent recognition
+of her loyalty and devotion. "She speaks of her 'position,' too. It's
+'awkward,' it seems, and 'embarrassing,' and 'dangerous.' It needn't be,
+though. She made it for herself, and she can unmake it whenever she
+chooses. Well, I'll try all this again, when I've got more time; it will
+keep. What is this, though, it says at the end? H'm; I am to remember
+that if I have enemies I also have fast friends, ever yours
+sincerely--oh, _that's_ all right." He crammed the sheets into his
+bureau-drawer, drew on his gloves, selected a stick to his taste, gave
+himself a last look in the glass, and sauntered out to dinner.
+
+He had discovered a French restaurant within a kilometre of the house,
+where he could dine _à prix fixe_ in a _cabinet particulier_ for five
+francs, including a _demi-bouteille_ of _ordinaire_.
+
+"That's something like," he declared. "That's what I'm used to!" He
+thought with a shudder of the rest of the family going down to supper in
+the basement dining-room--that time-honored, semi-subterranean dungeon.
+"I'm glad, I'm sure, that they are going to have their new dining-room
+above-ground; for their own sakes, that is to say--not that it will
+matter the least to _me_!"
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+Truesdale airily waved the remaining coin from the plate to the waiter's
+pocket and rose to go. He never omitted the giving of a _pour-boire_; "it
+helps so much to increase the illusion," he said. The waiters,
+accordingly, bestowed an exaggerated attention upon his hat and coat, and
+had developed an almost clinging affection for his stick. They also
+insisted upon passing things that he could very well reach for himself,
+and their "bon soir, m'sieu'" was quite unfailing in its regularity.
+"This shaggy town may have a silver lining, after all," he would think;
+"but you've got to turn things inside out to find it."
+
+Near the exit Truesdale noticed Theodore Brower sitting with a
+_demi-tasse_ before him. "Hallo!" he called to Brower, "I didn't know you
+came here."
+
+"Once in a while," returned Brower. "I shop around. I'm a tramp. I eat
+anywhere. And I'm getting tired of it, too." He rose. "Give me a lift
+with this coat and I'll go along with you."
+
+Brower was too incorruptibly native to give a fee; usually therefore, he
+put on his coat for himself. "Well, what's the programme?" he asked,
+feeling for his inside sleeves.
+
+"Nothing," said Truesdale; "or anything. Only, I bar law, and
+philanthropy, and the _Complete Letter-writer_. What have you got in
+mind yourself?
+
+"I though of going up to the Consolation Club; this is their night."
+
+"Sounds sort of soothing," observed Truesdale. "Well, what do _they_
+do?--nothing like the pow-wow at the Crepuscular, I hope. Are strangers
+admitted?"
+
+"What do they do? They try to show that the world isn't so bad as it
+seems. They'll let you in all right."
+
+"Because I'm not so bad as I seem? Thanks. They don't have a dinner, I
+hope."
+
+"No dinner."
+
+"But they give you a bite later on, don't they? I was almost famished at
+the Simplicity. What will they talk about?"
+
+"Almost anything; you never can tell. Come along." Truesdale, as an
+individual, interested Brower but moderately; Truesdale, as Jane's
+brother, interested him extremely. "You state your case--that's the idea;
+and the worse you make it, the better the face they try to put on it."
+
+"Do I? Well, I don't know that I've _got_ a case. And if I had, I might
+prefer to keep it to myself. However...."
+
+The Consolation Club met in an upper chamber on Erie Street, and carried
+on their deliberations under a large plaster bust of the prince of
+optimists. The patient Emerson listened to the discussion of many a
+burning question, and witnessed the application of many an alleviating
+salve. Sometimes the question was personal; they soothed the book-keeper
+who had been cut on the street by his employer's daughter. Sometimes it
+was national; they commiserated the citizen who had been intimidated
+at the polling-booth. Sometimes it was a question of right--like a
+uniform divorce law; sometimes merely a question of expediency--like the
+tariff. But principally they discussed the affairs of a vast and sudden
+municipality; they bade one another not to despair, after all, either of
+the city or of the republic. And towards eleven o'clock the priests of
+the cult saw an offering of cheese-sandwiches and beer set before their
+idol, and presently, in true sacerdotal fashion, they fell upon these
+viands on their own account.
+
+"Oh, come," said Truesdale, shrugging his shoulders, as he cast on Brower
+and his circle a look half of expostulation and half of embarrassment,
+"I'm not entitled to annoy your friends with any such filthy trifle as
+_that_. Besides, I don't claim it as any grievance of _mine_." He
+thought, privately, that his mother's disposition to dicker with the
+populace was no more creditable than necessary; he could take no great
+pleasure in dwelling upon it too lingeringly.
+
+"Oh, go ahead," urged Brower; "our fellows here are interested in just
+that sort of thing. If you should want to come in, we'll take it as your
+initiation."
+
+"Do," added another member. "I believe that for every one man who leaves
+the polling-place with a waning confidence in the present and a clouded
+hope for the future, there are scores who thus leave the lower courts of
+justice."
+
+"Oh, very well," replied Truesdale, throwing out his hands in his light
+French fashion. And he recounted the whole chain of circumstances which
+had so exasperated his father and baffled his brother, from the first
+panting appearance of frowzy old Mother Van Horn on his own mother's
+door-step down to the forfeiture of the fictitious bail-bond by her two
+grandnephews. He gave his narrative in a series of light, graphic,
+delicate touches. He almost saw it print itself before his very eyes,
+like a page from one of those beautiful little volumes made by Hachette
+or by Lemerre--those sprightly, broken pages, where a paragraph consists
+of a line or even a word, where brief exclamatory phrases abound, and
+where short rows of dots leave the reader to complete the meaning at his
+own pleasure. He even gesticulated a tiny illustration or two into the
+edge of the text. Seldom had these earnest and intent young men heard
+such a theme presented with so many nods and becks and wreathèd smiles;
+it seemed like the stirring of a cesspool with a silver soup-ladle.
+
+"And what consolation have you to offer me for that?" smiled Truesdale,
+as he finished.
+
+He himself appeared to share but slightly the indignation that his
+recital aroused; after all, these doings were alien to him--like the
+domestic difficulties that might be distracting some ant-hill in
+mid-Africa. But on the others it produced the effect that the recital of
+specific injuries always does--and should.
+
+"This, for example," answered a sardonic young man, whose close-shaven
+black beard showed through his drawn and sallow skin: "that we are at
+last playing the game with all the pieces on the board, with all the
+cards in the pack; with all the elements, in other words, of a vast and
+diversified human nature. The simple hopes and ideals of this Western
+world of fifty years ago--even of twenty years ago--where are they now?
+What the country really celebrated at Philadelphia in 1876, however
+unconsciously, as the ending of its minority and the assumption of full
+manhood with all its perplexities and cares. The broad life of the real
+world began for us the very next year--"
+
+"You mean with the railroad riots?" asked Brower.
+
+--"and has been going on more fiercely ever since. Take a man who was
+born in 1860, and who is to die with the century--what would be _his_
+idea of life? Contention, bickering, discontent, chronic irritation--a
+régime of hair-cloth tempered by finger-nails."
+
+"Yes," said another, "as you say, we have all the elements at last. And
+the elements of human nature are unchanging--like the elements of
+chemistry; and they combine in the same unchanging fashions. Imagine a
+reconstructed universe without sulphur or nitrogen; or imagine elements
+that combine to one purpose in this corner of the laboratory combining to
+another purpose in that. The same human compounds are produced through
+the ages, and the elements that follow one formula in the old world will
+follow the same formula in the new--even if they break the crucible. A
+generation ago we thought--poor pathetic creatures--that our pacific
+processes showed social science in its fullest development. But to-day we
+have all the elements possessed by the old world itself, and we must take
+whatever they develop, as the old world does. We have the full working
+apparatus finally, with all its resultant noise, waste, stenches, stains,
+dangers, explosions."
+
+"Um," said Truesdale, to whom these observations sounded disagreeably
+like oratory; "how does all this bear on my case? I _call_ it mine,
+to observe the forms," he added, with a smile to which no one responded.
+
+"I can tell you that myself," broke in Brower. "The last twenty years
+have brought us elements that have never been in our national life
+before: a heavy immigration from southeastern Europe, for example. The
+populations of Italy and Poland and Hungary--what view, now, do _they_
+take of the government--their government, all government? Isn't it an
+implacable and immemorial enemy--a great and cruel and dreadful monster
+to be evaded, hoodwinked, combated, stabbed in the dark if occasion
+offers?"
+
+"Quite right," acknowledged Truesdale. "Why, to-day, when the peasants
+come into Rome from the Campagna, they always bring their pitchforks with
+them--you can see them any Sunday behind the Capitol. They're going to be
+murdered or robbed or imprisoned or something."
+
+"And when these people have been out of the government from generation to
+generation, and opposed to it and mistrustful of it, is it an easy
+matter, on their coming over here, to make them feel themselves a part of
+it, and to imbue them with a loyalty to it?"
+
+"One thing more," broke in the first speaker. "There is another element;
+it is imported from the nearer half of Europe, and is a more dangerous
+element still. I mean the element of feudality."
+
+"Oh," said Truesdale, "now I begin to see."
+
+"The essence of feudality is the idea of personal loyalty. Now, loyalty
+to another individual is a good thing in its way and in its own field and
+in a certain measure and at a certain juncture.
+
+"But it is not the right prop for a great republic. That requires not the
+idea of personal loyalty to some chief, but the idea of personal
+responsibility to a cause above all chiefs. This takes a breadth of view
+and a loftiness of ideal that only one race in the world has ever
+possessed--our own. The great man, politically, is the man who can
+eliminate the personal element from a great cause. The little man is
+the--well," turning to Truesdale, "there are the general data; make your
+own application of them."
+
+"I see," said Truesdale; "my people are naturally against the governing
+powers anyway, from instinct and heredity; even when one of them does
+attain official position, it is only the position of the worm in the
+apple. And they think, too, that it is a more sane and practical thing to
+help one another out of a tangible difficulty than to sacrifice one
+another to an intangible cause. I never contended they were not human!"
+
+"That isn't all, by any means," said Brower, determinedly. "There's just
+as bad behind." He resettled himself in his chair, as he claimed the
+attention of the room. He seemed to Truesdale as if seating himself in a
+saddle--a saddle on the back of some well-ridden hobby. Truesdale already
+heard the steed pant and champ.
+
+"This town of ours labors under one peculiar disadvantage: it is the only
+great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one
+common, avowed object of making money. There you have its genesis, its
+growth, its end and object; and there are but few of us who are not
+attending to that object very strictly. In this Garden City of ours every
+man cultivates his own little bed and his neighbor his; but who looks
+after the paths between? They have become a kind of No Man's Land,
+and the weeds of a rank iniquity are fast choking them up. The thing to
+teach the public is this: that the general good is a different thing from
+the sum of the individual goods. Over in the Settlement we are trying to
+make those new-comers realize that they are a part of the body politic;
+perhaps we need another settlement to remind some of the original
+charter-members of the same fact!"
+
+"H'm," thought Truesdale, "I believe Brower is an awfully fine fellow;
+but if he keeps up this kind of talk all the time with Jane...."
+
+Then, as they passed out into the street a few minutes later: "I don't
+just see where my consolation comes in, after all."
+
+"Perhaps they thought," responded Brower, "that you wouldn't appreciate
+the beauty of consolation until you had first appreciated the gravity of
+your case. I think their idea was less consolation than instruction."
+
+"Ouf!" said Truesdale, who disdained instruction from whatever source.
+
+"Do you know," said Brower, at the first crossing, "I'm going to talk to
+your father about this justice business."
+
+"Well," rejoined Truesdale, "he'll listen to you if he'll listen to
+anybody; but he's awfully sore about it."
+
+"So are other people sore about it--hundreds of people much poorer and
+humbler than any of us, people to whom the miscarriage of justice is not
+a mere matter of exasperation and annoyance, but a real matter of life
+and death. They want care and attention--as the doctors say; they need a
+law-dispensary--that's about it. There are institutions that look after
+people's minds and bodies gratis; I want to see an institution started up
+that will do as much for their estates. I want to see a building for it,
+with an endowment and a library and a force of practitioners. To think of
+all the things that a man with money and ideas and sympathies might
+do--and should do--in a town like this!"
+
+"You might try him," said Truesdale, doubtfully; "but I think Jane has
+got the inside track. You've heard about her Home, I suppose, and seen
+the plans for it. I should _want_ to put up an architectural monument in
+such a ghastly town as this; I should as soon think of ramming an angel
+into a coal-hole."
+
+Yes, Brower knew all about Jane's Home--much more than Truesdale did, in
+fact; but this did not prevent him from asking for all manner of
+information about the project. He did this purely for the pleasure of
+talking about Jane herself; and he wondered time and time again whether
+he had not betrayed to Jane's brother the particular kind of interest he
+was developing in her. He felt that his beard offered but a slight
+concealment to the nervous twitching of his mouth, and that, despite the
+muffling of his heavy overcoat, the throbbings of his heart must be as
+perceptible to Truesdale as to himself. And when Truesdale presently made
+the ungrudging avowal that Jane was a pretty good sort of girl, after
+all--the _ne plus ultra_ of a brother's praise--Brower was driven to
+thrust a trembling hand inside his coat to reduce his thumping organ to
+something like subjection.
+
+His admiration for Jane had been based originally on her essential
+qualities; certainly he had received no quickening impulse, at the
+beginning, from a contemplation of her mere exterior. He had looked upon
+her as a valuable text put at a disadvantage by an unprepossessing
+binding. But now there came the issue of a new edition, in a tastefully
+designed cover, with additions and corrections, with extra illustrations,
+too--illustrations of a startling social aptitude; and with even a hint
+of illumination--the illumination that comes from the consciousness
+of a noble purpose. Brower now began to feel, with a rising pride and
+pleasure, that Jane was at last doing herself the fullest justice.
+
+Jane, in the meanwhile, with no thought of a possible competition between
+rival collectors for a certain rare old volume, was helping Tom Bingham
+to build the new house. She went out southward two or three times a week,
+and carried a tape-line with her. As she once explained it to Bingham:
+"You can't be too sure of having things right at the start." So she
+measured the foundations with her tape-line when the distances were
+short, and paced them off when they were long. She kept a close eye on
+the work through each advancing stage, and saw that it was good.
+
+One Sunday morning in mid-May, Jane took the street-car--one of those
+leisurely green ones that run to the Old People's Home--and went out to
+satisfy herself that the first courses of dressed stone were going into
+place as they should. May was speaking truly in the mildness and
+freshness of the air, in the slow passing of the light and expansive
+cumuli across the wide blueness of the sky, in the grasses and dandelions
+springing up among the stark weeds of last year that swayed and rustled
+on every vacant lot. From her stand-point among the heaps of brick and
+sand and yellow lumber that surrounded the site of the new house, Jane
+saw the fronts or sides or backs of other new houses placed dispersedly
+round about: their towers and turrets and porches and oriels and the
+myriad other massive manifestations proper to the new Stone Age. Between
+them and beyond them her eye took transversely the unkempt prairie as it
+lay cut up by sketchy streets and alleys, and traversed by street-car
+tracks and rows of lamp-posts and long lines of telegraph poles and the
+gaunt framework of an elevated road. In one direction she saw above the
+dead crop of rustling weeds the heads of a long line of people on their
+way to church; in the other direction, the distant clang of a passing
+gong drew her eye to the vast advertisement which glared in the sun from
+the four-story flank of an outlying shoe-store. "I hope the next man who
+builds will shut _that_ out," she thought.
+
+Presently a light buggy drove up to the curbstone, and a large, stout man
+within it squeezed his way out carefully between its muddy wheels. Then
+with a jerk he landed his hitching-weight in the roadway, clicked the
+catch in the end of its strap to the ring at his horse's bit, and
+advanced towards the house. It was Bingham.
+
+"So you have concluded to give us a little attention, finally?" was
+Jane's greeting. Her tone was slightly hectoring; this was to punish him
+for having lately taken more of her thought than she felt him entitled
+to.
+
+As a matter of fact, Jane was uncomfortably mindful that more than once
+within the past month she had opened the morning paper to Building Notes
+before giving due heed to Insurance News. She had been distinctly pleased
+to read that the Bingham Construction Company had just got one big
+building ready for tenancy, or had just been awarded the contract for
+another; and once, for a week, she had followed the head of it through a
+particularly stubborn bricklayers' strike with the most avid interest.
+Indeed, she had only been brought back to herself by a fire which had
+damaged one of Brower's companies to the extent of five thousand dollars
+and another to the extent of ten. After that she chained her wandering
+attention to such matters as short rates and unearned premiums, the
+organization of new companies and the bankruptcies of old ones, the
+upward climbing of sub-solicitors and assistant managers, the losses
+suffered by the companies represented by the agency of Brower & Brand,
+and, above all, the closest scrutiny for the name of Theodore L. Brower
+himself. Nothing pleased her more than to read a paragraph announcing
+that he had gone East to attend a general conference--except, of course,
+his return.
+
+Sometimes, as she sat alone in her room, mending her stockings or taking
+timely stitches in the fingers of her gloves, she would further fortify
+herself by humming a scrap from the refrain of a song she had once heard
+at a concert. "_Toujours fidèle_," she would moan in a deep contralto
+voice, as she drew her needle slowly in and out; "_toujours fidèle_." She
+paused lingeringly on the second syllable of _toujours_ and on the
+middle syllable of _fidèle_, and repeated the phrase over and over again
+at short intervals--that was all of the song that she knew. And after she
+had chanted it a dozen times or so, her heart would soften and her eyes
+would overflow, and she would have to pause in her work. Then she would
+look at her brimming eyes in the glass, and wonder how she could ever
+have had a thought for any other man than Theodore.
+
+While poor Brower would sit at his desk and bemoan the fate that
+compelled him to insure houses instead of building them. He had waited
+until thirty-five for his first affair, and he was foredoomed to take it
+has hard as a man may.
+
+"Yes," pursued Jane, "you thought you would come and see whether they
+were building us upside down or hindside before, I suppose."
+
+"Everything looks all right," said Bingham, serenely. "The foreman can be
+trusted, I imagine. What's that you've got in your hand?"
+
+Jane held out a battered horseshoe, to which a few twisted nails were
+still clinging. "I picked it up a minute ago. I was thinking about laying
+a corner-stone--or relaying it."
+
+"Good!" said Bingham; "the better the day, the better the deed. Do you
+want to put that horseshoe under it?"
+
+"Um, h'm," replied Jane. She walked along the top of the foundation, and
+Bingham followed her.
+
+Jane moved on until she found a practicable stone in a suitable angle.
+"About here, I think," she said, tapping the stone with her toe.
+
+"Do you want me to pry it out?"
+
+"If you can. There's a sort of sharp stick over on that sand-pile."
+
+Bingham removed the stone, and imbedded the horseshoe among the
+sharp-edged fragments which had been worked into the course beneath.
+
+"I want it to stay, too," declared Jane, as her eye roamed towards the
+half-dried mortar-bed just beyond the foundation trench. "Wait a second."
+She skipped across the small chasm which intervened between the
+foundation-wall and solid ground. She scooped up some water from a hallow
+puddle with a battered tin can, and began the formation of an oozy little
+pocket in the middle of the mortar-bed. "Now if I only had a shingle,"
+she said, after she had reduced the mortar to the consistency of slime.
+
+"No shingle would hold that," said Bingham, jumping across after her.
+"Here, give me that can."
+
+He poured a quart or two of mortar on top of the horseshoe and reset the
+stone "There!" said Jane, bringing her whole weight upon it.
+
+"Good-luck to this house and household!" said Bingham. He raised his hat;
+she could not tell whether he were in jest or in earnest.
+
+"It needs all the luck it can have," said Jane. "It may be a nice house,
+but it will never be home."
+
+"Oh yes, it will," said Bingham, soothingly.
+
+"Oh no, it won't," returned Jane, permitting herself the luxury of a
+little woe. "Even if we _do_ have wreaths of flowers in all the
+washbowls, and transoms that you can open and shut without getting on to
+chairs, and a what-you-may-call-it to regulate the furnace heat without
+going down cellar--all the same, it won't be our dear old home."
+
+"No; a better one."
+
+"Well," said Jane, resignedly. She lifted her eyes and pointed her finger
+aloft. "I suppose I shall be up there, somewhere."
+
+"Oh, not yet," replied Bingham, bringing his eyes back from the clouds.
+"You look very well fitted for your present sphere."
+
+"I didn't mean all the way up," said Jane, smilingly dismal. "I only
+meant the next floor--yet awhile."
+
+"That's better. Don't be an angel just yet; you're too useful here."
+
+"If not ornamental."
+
+"Too ornamental, too."
+
+"I never claimed to be that," observed Jane, dropping her eyes. "Do you
+think I'm--improving?"
+
+Jane stood there on the foundations, clad in the ample and voluminous
+fashion of the day and topped off with a distinctly stylish hat. She had
+had a long regimen of fencing and dumbbells, and her self-imposed
+superintendence of the new house had led to many hours spent in the open
+air. Her hair was blowing airily about her face, and on her cheek there
+was a slight flush--produced, perhaps, by her own question.
+
+"Decidedly," replied Bingham, promptly.
+
+"Thanks. There's always room for improvement. It's the biggest room in
+the world, somebody says."
+
+She gave another look at her corner-stone. "Well, what do they do after
+the last sad rites? They go home, don't they? Yes; let's go home."
+
+"Suppose I drive you down? I'm going your way."
+
+"I _have_ got a nickel, somewhere," said Jane, "and I was going back on
+the elevated, for a change; but--well, all right."
+
+And she let him help her into the buggy.
+
+"Monstrous big house, isn't it?" she commented, as she overlooked the
+foundations from this loftier point. "I don't know how we are ever going
+to fill it."
+
+"Oh yes, you will," said Bingham, gathering up the lines. "Your father
+and mother, and your brother and Rosy..."
+
+"I don't know as to Truesdale; he's such a fly-about. You can't depend
+very much on him. And I don't feel any too sure about Rosy, either," she
+added, inwardly.
+
+Her state of uncertainty about Rosy was shared, in fact, by all the rest
+of the family; it looked decidedly as if the youngest daughter were to
+leave the shelter of her father's roof before the completion of her first
+year in the world. She was a maiden choosing, and the absorbing question
+was--which? On the side of William Bates there was his position, his
+ability, his certain future, and the sentimental resumption of old family
+relations. On the side of Paston there was an entertaining personality
+and the paragraph in Debrett. The two met occasionally in the Marshalls'
+front parlor, and sat each other out with much civility and
+pertinacity--Bates somewhat firm and severe, Paston extremely gay and
+diverting. Jane and her mother lingered in the _coulisses_ and even
+ventured a word now and then with the _ingénue_ after she had left the
+boards. But the more the family found to say directly and indirectly on
+behalf of William Bates, the more resolutely Rosamund turned her face in
+the opposite direction.
+
+"You can't influence Rosy," said Jane; "she'll have her own way--that's a
+point there needn't be any doubt on. And that boudoir of hers in the new
+house may come around to me, after all, unless I--"
+
+Jane flushed vividly as she thus cast her own horoscope. Bingham at this
+moment drew the buggy up alongside the curb in front of the old house. A
+young man on the sidewalk was just approaching the front gate. "Dear me!"
+gasped Jane, inwardly, "what a miserable sinner I am!" Her heart sank and
+her appetite left her. The young man was Theodore Brower; she had invited
+him to dinner and had forgotten all about it.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+"Well, those are my views," said Belden. He elevated his eyebrows
+slightly as he dropped his glance to a row of shapely nails that lay
+closely together on the thick of his thumb, and an imperceptible smile
+moved slowly under the cover of his thick mustache. "To right completely
+such a wrong as this there is only one course that _I_ know of."
+
+Marshall ceased his earnest scrutiny of his partner's face to rest his
+elbow on the edge of his desk and to drop his weary old face into the
+hollow of his hand. There were more wrinkles on his cheeks, more white
+hairs in the dull dry red of his beard, more signs of sleepless hours in
+his anxious eyes.
+
+Belden raised his hand and swept it across his mustache. The smile
+beneath escaped and spread upward over his face. His nostrils, too,
+dilated--half triumphally.
+
+"It's a most unfortunate affair," he observed further, continuing his
+series of careful modulations. "There is an error made, a false step
+taken; the family flee their past to begin life anew in another land; yet
+at the very threshold of their new life they meet the first cause of all
+their misfortune and misery." Belden sighed.
+
+His sigh seemed at once to breathe a deep sympathy and to call for the
+meting out of justice at whatever cost--to some one else. As Belden
+sighed, Marshall himself almost gave a groan.
+
+He accepted these carefully composed observations for precisely what they
+seemed. He was too inexperienced in the drama to detect the essential
+insincerity of every word, though there was not one of the lowliest of
+his clerks but had heard every one of these phrases bandied across the
+footlights time and time again.
+
+"I must acknowledge," continued Belden, as he moved towards the door,
+"that her father has acted with a good deal of reasonableness and
+forbearance. You can imagine Leppin's anxiety, without any word from me.
+You can feel how keenly he looks forward to having justice done--to
+having complete reparation made. You know what that means as well as I
+do."
+
+And he passed out, leaving his senior to ponder the matter alone.
+
+Belden was the first person with whom Marshall had permitted himself a
+full canvass of the situation, the sole husbandman towards whom he had
+turned for assistance in garnering the first-fruits of Truesdale's career
+abroad. Never before had evil grazed against him and his; he had regarded
+it, in fact, as something appertaining principally to ill-regulated
+persons in a lower walk of life. He had heard of such subjects as being
+handled in fiction, and he had noticed them touched upon in the
+theatrical reviews of the newspapers. But nothing of the sinful, the
+vicious, the malodorous had ever, within his recollection, come to his
+family, to his friends, or even to any of his business associates. Yet
+here it had come at last, and it must be confronted.
+
+He had quite shrank from the ordeal of considering the matter with so
+nimble and experienced a person as Truesdale himself, and he was almost
+too Anglo-Saxon in his pure-mindedness to attempt an over-intimate
+discussion of it with his own wife; it took a large share of his
+fortitude to broach the matter even to his elder son.
+
+"I can't talk to Truesdale about it," said this virginal old man, as he
+sat in Roger's office; "you've got to do it. I can't."
+
+"Well, really, father," began Roger. He had almost the air of resenting
+an imputation.
+
+"I don't mean that, Roger," said his father, in some distress. "I have
+every confidence in you; I believe you're all right. But--"
+
+"Has anybody seen the girl?"
+
+"Your mother says that--well, she says that Jane has seen her"--he
+brought in his daughter's name with a great distress--"and your aunt
+Lydia. She told your mother she was sure this girl was one to lend
+herself to--to--"
+
+"H'm," said Roger, in a non-committal way. He always subjected his aunt
+Lydia's opinions and impressions to a double discount.
+
+Meanwhile the odor of Truesdale's offence permeated the house as
+completely as the office. Rosy wondered what could be under way as she
+saw her mother and Jane seated on unaccustomed chairs in unaccustomed
+attitudes at unaccustomed times in unaccustomed rooms while they engaged
+in brief and infrequent interchanges of words, or co-operated for the
+production of long and eloquent silences. Jane, in fact, took the matter
+with the rigorous thoroughness of the complete theorist. She knew what it
+was to thread the mazes of a guilty conscience through half a dozen
+consecutive chapters; she knew how it felt to see the agonies of
+acknowledged sin transferred from chair to sofa and sofa to chair over
+the full extent of a large and well-equipped stage. How the leaves had
+fluttered! How the footlights had palpitated! How those people had
+suffered--and how she had suffered with them! How she was suffering
+now--and how much greater still must be the suffering of her erring and
+idolized brother!
+
+"If he had only been born with eyes like other people's!" she would moan.
+
+The actual mental state of Truesdale was, however, with Jane and with
+everybody else, a matter of pure conjecture. Very little, in fact, was
+seen of him. He breakfasted in his own room, as he had done ever since
+his return home. When the waitress had declined to enter the chamber with
+his coffee and rolls he had shrugged his shoulders and had directed to
+have them set on the floor outside. "_Quelle pudeur!_" he more than once
+observed, as her knock drew him towards the door. His lunch he took
+wherever he happened to be, and he dined at his French restaurant, or at
+a new Italian one where the _spaghetti_ was unapproachable, and where
+everything was cheap, plentiful, and informal. He returned home at his
+own discretion, and sometimes was heard working upon the obdurate old
+night-lock at midnight or later.
+
+Among the first of the family to have extended speech with him after the
+_exposé_ was his aunt Lydia. He had gone to her house to put the
+last few finishing touches to Bertie Patterson's portrait. To his aunt
+and to Bertie herself the portrait seemed already finished, but it is
+only the artist who knows when the end has really been reached. He asked
+his aunt for Bertie.
+
+"Well," she hesitated, as she looked at him with a kind of furtive and
+wondering interest, "Bertie is very busy this afternoon. If there is
+anything more to be done--and I don't exactly see that there is--it must
+be done without her, I'm afraid."
+
+"Can't I see her?" he asked, brusquely. "This is the very time I need
+her. What is she so busy about?"
+
+"She is packing. You know I've kept her a good deal longer already than I
+expected to--she can't stay into summer. Her mother has written several
+times, asking for her, and now, finally, she's really got to go." There
+was a grieving disappointment in Mrs. Rhodes's voice, and a cast of keen
+but discreet curiosity in her eye.
+
+"When is she going?"
+
+"In the morning. Then her own people will get her well before dark."
+
+"I'm not to see her to say good-bye?--my own cousin, almost."
+
+"Nonsense--not at all. I'll tell her good-bye for you."
+
+"And the picture?"
+
+"Well, _that_ we may consider finished, I think." Her eyes were resting
+on the wall behind him. He turned and saw the portrait fastened upon it.
+
+"So she is not even to have--" he began.
+
+"Now, Truesdale," interrupted his aunt, "the picture is not Bertie's, but
+mine. I thought you understood that."
+
+She followed him to the door. "You won't stay a few minutes longer?" she
+inquired, with an emollient intention. He shook his head.
+
+"I won't say, Truesdale," she proceeded, with her hand on the knob, "how
+disappointed I am. Everything, of course, is at a stand-still now.
+Whether things ever go on again will depend upon you yourself. I am sure
+that any--any expression of regret, any promise of--of--"
+
+"Ouf!" said Truesdale, as he descended the steps, undecided whether to
+laugh or to curse. "'When I was a student at Cadiz,'" he found himself
+humming, half-unconsciously. "H'm! one thing learned in the study of this
+peculiar civilization: general badness jollied up, specific badness
+frowned down. What other discoveries await me, I wonder?"
+
+Before he had taken a dozen steps a brougham drawn by a pair of blacks in
+glittering, gold-plated harness drew up suddenly at the curbstone, in
+obedience to directions given through the half-open door. In a second the
+door opened wide, and Gladys McKenna beckoned to him. "Get in," she
+uttered, in a half-repressed cry.
+
+She had divined the situation in two swift glances. She had witnessed the
+moody exit of Truesdale, and she had had a glimpse of the anxious little
+face of Bertie Patterson in the bay-window above. Her desire to live
+life, to dramatize it as promptly and effectively as possible, had led
+her to the instant appropriation of the banned and rejected
+Truesdale--thus it was that she figured him.
+
+"Get in," she repeated; "I can take you along six or eight blocks. The
+coachman knows you by sight, I'm sure. But never mind; nothing matters
+now. My letter--did you get it?"
+
+"Another!" thought Truesdale. He made the door fast. "No."
+
+"I felt sure you wouldn't," she panted, excitedly. "I gave it to that man
+to mail." She pointed towards the occupant of the box-seat. "He has
+played me false."
+
+Truesdale smiled at her phrase. "Well, never mind; you can tell me what
+there was in it." He stretched out his long legs negligently under the
+opposite seat, determined to take this new ordeal as lightly as possible.
+From his point of view the girl was doing nothing towards gaining a
+greater measure of approval. "She never had any consideration for me," he
+was thinking, "until she saw that I cared for the town as little as she
+did; and she has waited to fling herself at me unreservedly until I
+have shown myself too awful for anybody else. Why did I let her pick me
+up? and how soon can I have her set me down?"
+
+"You will learn now who your real friends are," she declared, casting
+herself energetically into a leading _rôle_; "not fair-weather
+friends, but friends through thick and thin. Let me tell you: there is a
+conspiracy against you." She laid her hand on his arm, and looked at him
+with a wide stare; she seemed to thrill with the consciousness of an
+important participation in a succession of stirring actualities.
+
+"Is there, indeed?" Whatever one's plight, there is little consolation
+in the ministrations of an unwelcome hand. Considering this, that, and
+the other, he was now, as at his aunt's door, again midway between a
+laugh and a curse.
+
+"Yes. That man--that German, or whatever--was at the house last evening,
+and--oh, why will Albert drive so fast?" she complained, as she made a
+seeming calculation of the many things she had to say and the little time
+she had to say them in. "Can't something be done to make him go a little
+slower?"
+
+"The horses feel lively," answered Truesdale, to whom the present rapid
+course was perfectly agreeable; "I expect he'll have to let them go their
+own gait." He glanced out at a passing church or two, and frowned
+slightly; why did this girl insist upon doing his mathematical problems
+for him? Had not he himself already put his two and two together and made
+them four?
+
+Gladys went on, telling him what she knew, guessed, surmised, suspected.
+"And they--they suspect _me_," she continued, in a mounting tone of
+tragedy. "And I'm--I'm going home in a few days." There were tears on the
+dark fringes of her eyes; he thought of a wax image exposed overnight to
+a heavy dew. "And all for your sake," the moisture seemed to say.
+Truesdale began to feel uncomfortable and a shade ungrateful. "I dare
+say she means well," he thought; "but I--I wish she wouldn't."
+
+The carriage was passing between two other churches; he saw that he might
+alight after another square of it. "One more will be plenty," he
+muttered, and already his hand stole towards the handle of the door.
+
+"You can't think how they both hate you--my aunt and uncle--and me, too,
+I'm afraid. They're really driving me out of the house. But never mind; I
+can endure even more than that for one that--for the right."
+
+"When did you say you were going?" inquired Truesdale. It was only by
+asking plain, every-day questions that he could oppose this robust
+romanticism.
+
+"Day after to-morrow--or the next."
+
+"Well," said Truesdale, quietly, "I should think you would do very well
+at home--much better than here."
+
+"But where am I to see you before I go? Where are we to say good-bye?"
+
+A cable-car clanged along the cross-street immediately ahead of them, and
+the ten yellow stories of a vast hotel loomed up just beyond. "Right on
+this corner," replied Truesdale, as the carriage bumped across the
+tracks. "The interval is short, as you suggest, and there is no time like
+the present." He put his hand on the door and fixed his eye upon the
+corner shop; he often bought a cigar there, and meant to buy one now. He
+also meant this good-bye as literally final.
+
+"You want me to let you out here? Stop, Albert. Well, good-afternoon,"
+she said, smilingly waiving the idea of finality; "you shall know
+to-morrow where you can meet me. You are not deserted by everybody, after
+all, you see." She gave him her hand, or rather laid hold of his. "But
+take good care of yourself, all the same."
+
+Truesdale stepped out. "I'll try to," he said, mumblingly; "I always
+have."
+
+Being thus minded, Truesdale received but grudgingly the tenders of his
+brother Roger to assist in the caretaking. He admitted, however, that it
+would be less embarrassing to confer with one person than a dozen, and
+that if the whole connection were to be represented by a single
+spokesman, then Roger was the one that he preferred.
+
+Roger was held by his family to be above all foibles and frailties; his
+aunt Lydia had once told him, on the day of a niece's hopeless return to
+the East, that he had too much head and not enough heart. It is certain
+that he had marked out a definite course for himself, and that nothing,
+so far, had had the power to divert him materially from it; and he had a
+far-reaching contempt for the man who permitted the gray matter of his
+brain to be demoralized by the red matter in his veins. He kept a firm
+hand on his own affairs and on those of his father that were not
+immediately connected with the business of his father's firm. His severe
+face was smooth-shaven, as he thought the face of a lawyer ought to be,
+and he could address the higher courts with such a loud and brazen
+utterance as to cause the court-loungers almost to feel the judges
+shrinking and shrivelling under their robes. His was a hot and vehement
+nature, but it burned with a flame blue rather than red.
+
+"Well," he said, with a look of extreme distaste fixed half on his
+brother and half on his book-shelves, "we can accept her and make the
+best of her. I have seen her and her father. While I can't say I admire
+the personal character of either, I am not prejudiced by the fact that he
+is only a clerk and she only a shop-girl. They are beginners here; I am
+willing to believe that they were something better at home. We can accept
+her; we shall have to, I suppose."
+
+Truesdale reared his beautiful brazen front and flashed on his brother a
+haughty and disdainful smile. "You can accept her? Will you please tell
+me what you mean by that? And 'better at home'!" He burst into open and
+derisive laughter. "What new Arcadia is this, where even the lawyers walk
+about with their beribboned crooks and the little baa-lambs following
+behind them? We have been sitting in conclave, have we, on a mossy bank
+in some sylvan shade, with chaplets on our brows, and we have piped and
+twittered over the matter, and have decided that we can 'accept her'?
+Well, you can do more than I can," he added, abruptly. His foot slipped
+from the rung of the opposite chair and fell to the bare floor with a
+contemptuous clump.
+
+"You've got your own character to clear, haven't you?" asked Roger, with
+a severe brevity.
+
+Truesdale replaced his foot on the rung of the other chair and slid down
+into his own as he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. "Dear me,"
+he said, in affected apprehension, "am I in any danger? Well, well; if
+such a thing can hurt a young man, I shall be glad to know it--I never
+knew it before. Now, _là-bas_, for example--"
+
+He drew out one of his hands and waved it vaguely; he seemed to be
+conjuring up a wider and more liberal world--the only one he had learned.
+
+"It can," insisted his brother; "it will. Both you and your family."
+
+Truesdale's thought flashed back to Bertie Patterson and the unfinished
+picture. It came to him all at once that his brother might be better
+worth listening to than he had been disposed to concede.
+
+"And your family," Roger repeated.
+
+But Truesdale's thought, lingering over the picture, made little of this
+second point. He did scant justice to the mortification of his mother
+before her church-members and her few remaining neighbors, or that of his
+sisters within the circle which they had lately constructed for
+themselves. Nor did he yet realize, even with Bertie's picture in mind,
+the hundred checks and bars that awaited him in a society of whose
+primitive purity he had made a jest whenever occasion came.
+
+"Dear Roger," he presently rejoined, in his most genial and winning
+voice, "you mean well, I am sure--well by me and by the family and by
+everybody. And I dare say you do very nicely in your own narrow field;
+but as for knowing life--well, really now, do you think you understand
+what it is to live?"
+
+"Live!" cried Roger, with a sonorous contempt. "Who _does_ understand
+what it is to live, then--the man who has all his work and worry done for
+him by some one else?"
+
+Truesdale smiled, serene and unabashed. "The world is wide," he said,
+with an exquisite tolerance. "It is a very comprehensive subject. You
+must take it up one of these days--you've hardly made a beginning on it
+yet."
+
+"The world!" cried Roger again, with a vibrant indignation at this
+impertinence. "Who _are_ the world if not my father and I and all the
+other earnest men who work to make the frame of things and to hold it
+together? _We_ are the world, and you--you are only the rubbish strewn
+over the top of it!"
+
+He collected this rubbish and constructed from it a Frankenstein monster,
+with a heart of cork, a brow of brass, and a triple-plating of
+self-conceit. Then with a harsh laugh and a wide-flung arm he scattered
+it apart again.
+
+Perhaps Truesdale took these words and gestures merely as an example of
+Roger's forensic eloquence. For--
+
+"My dear brother," he began, quietly, while Roger beat his foot upon the
+floor, stung to increased indignation by the conscious artificiality of
+such an address--"my dear brother," said Truesdale, "you don't quite get
+my position in this trifling episode. Every little _conte drolatique_
+has its Monsieur X, of course--myself, in this instance, and rightfully
+enough. But is Monsieur X the only gentleman involved? Let us see. Who
+comes before Monsieur X? Why, Monsieur W, to be sure. And who before
+Monsieur W? Monsieur V, _n'est-ce pas?_ And there is somebody still in
+front of Monsieur V. And if we go far enough back, we may come at last
+even to Monsieur A. Now, why are all these worthy gentlemen passed over
+in favor of _ce cher_ Monsieur X? Well, perhaps Monsieur W, for example,
+is a captain of dragoons and already mated. And maybe Monsieur V is a
+young baron whose family won't stand any nonsense about him--families are
+different. And as for Monsieur A--well, let us put him down for a poor
+devil of a student who cuts no figure at all. But Monsieur X--ah, that is
+different! he is pounced upon in the bosom of his family. It is Monsieur
+X who has the scrupulous and strait-laced mother--"
+
+"Truesdale!"
+
+"And the little coterie of lily-sisters who never--"
+
+"Truesdale! For shame!"
+
+"And the over-conscientious and supersensitive father with millions and
+millions stored away in bursting money-bags somewhere or other. Oh, those
+money-bags, those money-bags, those money-bags!"
+
+"Truesdale, what do you mean? Are they adventurers? Are they after
+black-mail?"
+
+Truesdale threw back his head, closing his eyes and twirling his thumbs.
+"I knew them there; I know them here." Then he opened his eyes and gave
+his brother a glance of satirical approval. "_Complimenti_, Roger; you
+are ending where I should have expected you to begin."
+
+"It is not the end," cried Roger, savagely. He saw that he had allowed
+his view of the matter to be wrongly colored by the impressions of his
+father and the representations of Belden; and Truesdale's comments
+lacerated his self-esteem as with griffins' claws. "Haven't I told you
+that they have taken legal advice, and that--"
+
+"And that the whole grovelling tribe of Leppins, outnumbering the Van
+Horns, possibly, are ready with oral testimony and a shower of
+depositions, and what all besides. Ouf! not an inch do I yield. _J'y
+suis; j'y reste_. Not an inch should anybody else yield. Well, thank me,
+Roger, for having given you this little glimpse into the great big world.
+It's full of interest." He rose suddenly, stiff and straight and slender
+as some young fir-tree. "Come, Roger, put on your hat and go with me to
+Japan."
+
+He looked over into the half-open drawer of his brother's desk. "More of
+those maps, I see."
+
+"Other maps; another subdivision. I can do my work without trotting over
+the whole globe; Cook County is big enough for me."
+
+"H'm; you seem to be branching out quite extensively. Only, don't get in
+too deep." Truesdale gave this valuable advice in a patronizing tone of
+which he alone was master. "Yes, I should think Cook County would do very
+well for you--until you have learned to spik something besides ze
+Engleesh." He picked up his hat and moved towards the door.
+
+"English will do for _me_!" retorted Roger, savagely.
+
+"Well, turn the thing over in this new light," continued his brother,
+pleasantly. "And one thing more--a little suggestion: you have some
+notion of the man who comes before Monsieur X; give a bit of attention,
+now, to the man who comes after. He could be of the greatest service to
+us--permanent service. _Comprenez-vous_? Find him; find Monsieur Y--and
+arrange it that he shall be the last!"
+
+And Truesdale sauntered airily out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+"You might have thought it no great concern of his--you might have
+imagined all our efforts as only a part of a play, and his interest
+merely the interest of a looker-on." There was an indignant rasp in
+Roger's voice, and he looked across to his father with a protesting
+scowl. "He almost made me feel as if I had never learned the alphabet."
+
+David Marshall fixed an intent and anxious gaze on his son's face, and
+ran his hand tremulously along the arm of his chair. He knew about how
+Roger felt; Truesdale had more than once made him feel the same way
+himself.
+
+The old man had remained at home throughout the day. Too ill and nervous
+for the store, and too resourceless for the house, he had worried through
+twelve hours as wearing as any he could recollect. He had never been more
+unfitted for business, yet never (as he made it seem) more demanded by
+it. He imagined himself as still the king-pin of the Marshall & Belden
+Company--indeed, he found in that belief some consolation for his
+difficulty in reconciling himself to the style and title that the course
+of the business had finally evolved. He tormented himself with thoughts
+of odds and ends of work left over from yesterday or from last week, or
+with the apprehension of some fresh step taken, some new course entered
+upon by the younger and more ardent men of whom the company was largely
+composed. He had laughed more than once over the joke of business
+acquaintances who told him they had had to take young men into
+partnership because it was impossible to pay the salaries they demanded;
+yet something more radical had happened to himself: the young men had not
+only come in, but they were showing a disposition to get things into
+their own hands. Their former manager, their credit man, several heads
+of departments--all these had rallied under Belden, and together seemed
+to be trimming the sails to as speculative a course as a craft
+essentially conservative in its nature could well be made to take.
+Marshall had not formulated so clearly as this the practical primacy of
+Belden, but he felt the necessity of his own presence, and chafed under
+the temporary withdrawal of his own guiding hand.
+
+But more than the course of affairs at the store, more than the avalanche
+of complicated minutiae involved in the progress of the new house, more
+than the dawning risks attendant upon Roger's widening operations in
+land, more than the amiable persecutions of friends whose ambitions for
+him were greater than his own, did the courses of his younger son and all
+their threatening consequences disturb his days and harass his
+nights--haunting alike the hours set apart for work and for sleep, and
+even the few brief intervals between. He would rise in the morning
+haggard and dry-eyed after a sleepless night; he would toil through the
+weary and perplexing hours of a dragging day; and he would spend his
+evenings, usually, in a miserable and solitary contemplation of all his
+thickening annoyances and ills.
+
+"Poor pa," Jane would say to her mother, as she watched his bent and
+lagging steps moving towards the recess of the bay-window; "there he goes
+worrying, all off by himself again."
+
+Her mother, over her sewing or the evening paper, perhaps, would check
+the girl's impulse to follow. "Don't chase after your father, Jane; he's
+got enough things to bother him already." So that, except for the
+occasional charitable moment when Jane, unimpeded, perched on the arm of
+his chair and attempted to divert his wearing thoughts from their
+ever-deepening channel, the old man spent his evenings largely--too
+largely--alone.
+
+The rare visits of Roger, never highly ameliorative, were none the more
+so now; the grisly wrestling with realities does little to promote the
+exudation of balm. Roger was tough and technical and litigious; his was
+the hand to seize, not to soothe.
+
+Roger had had a second and more explicit interview with Truesdale, before
+Truesdale had taken an airy and irresponsible flitting from town. He had
+also prosecuted various inquiries of his own in various directions, and
+these inquiries had resulted in his coming to look up Truesdale's frothy
+suggestion with more seriousness, and upon Truesdale himself with more
+consideration, if not with more respect--_that_ he still withheld.
+
+"He isn't a complete fool, after all," admitted Roger.
+
+"I never thought he was," responded his father, dully.
+
+"He has some little sense, I acknowledge."
+
+"If it were only common-sense," said the old man, with a mournful,
+dragged-out smile.
+
+Roger looked forth streetward, pondering. A long passenger-train shifted
+its line of glimmering squares rapidly southward; two or three couples
+passed by on the pavement, respiring the suave air of an early June
+evening.
+
+"It means money," said Roger, presently.
+
+"As much as is necessary," replied his father, tremulously; "though I
+never could spare it worse than now."
+
+"And more--well, more dirty work for me." He thought of the Van Horn
+matter, now as good as abandoned. "Never mind, though; I'm getting used
+to it."
+
+"You are the only help I have, Roger--the only one to save us from this
+disgrace."
+
+There were tears in his eyes, and a feeble tremor ran through the
+fore-arm and fingers that he advanced towards Roger's shoulder.
+
+"Father is not the man he used to be," thought Roger. He felt that his
+sympathy was largely qualified by the impatience and aversion which must
+always move a young man when he observes the first signs of physical and
+mental impairment in an older one, and he regretted that it was so. And
+he was almost ashamed to feel relieved when his father withdrew his hand.
+
+Besides Roger and his father, only Mrs. Marshall and Jane were at home.
+Rosamund was in Wisconsin, and no one was sorry to have her away. She was
+a guest of Mrs. Bates at Lake Geneva--the central figure of a
+house-party, in fact. Mrs. Bates's fondness for nature did not stop with
+flowers; it led her to the fields and woods where they grew. No sooner
+was the back of the winter fairly broken than she began to preach the
+gospel of country life. She took the cream of June, and left to later
+comers the skimmed milk of July and August. She always saw that her
+Wisconsin place was ready for her by the middle of May; then for the next
+five months she passed back and forth between town and country, according
+to the nature of her engagements and the character of the weather.
+
+Truesdale was in Wisconsin, too--but not of the house-party. "You know,
+my dear," Mrs. Bates said to Jane, "I had meant to have your brother,
+but--"
+
+Jane bowed her head and never thought of venturing to ask her how she
+_knew_. That same night Jane slowly tore her plans for the working-girls'
+home into long strips and burned them in the gas, one at a time. "Pa'll
+never listen to a word about anything like this now."
+
+Truesdale left behind no precise indications of his movements. The only
+person to whom he announced anything like a programme was Arthur Fasten,
+who met him on the way to the station, with his bag in one hand and his
+kit in the other.
+
+"Off, are you?" called Paston. "Don't you begin the season rather early?"
+
+"Just for a few days," replied Truesdale; "a little sketching tour up
+North. Change of scene and air, you know."
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"Oh, 'most anywhere. I shall be at Bellagio to-morrow, and at Pontresina
+the day after. Then I shall dip down towards Scheveningen. And Zante, if
+possible--I have always wanted to try Zante." He smiled jovially. "I hear
+there's a lovely ruined abbey at Fort Atkinson--everybody does it; and
+they say, too, that the capital at Madison is a grand old structure."
+
+He gave a hitch to his light valise and moved on with a diminished smile.
+
+"Of course you've got your Cook's ticket and your meal coupons?" called
+Paston, grinning broadly.
+
+"Don't," protested Truesdale, turning back; "you never looked less like a
+gentleman."
+
+"I hope your ticket takes in Geneva," said Paston, in no degree offended.
+"If it does, I may meet you there; I'm going up to stay over Sunday."
+
+"I can't tell without looking," replied Truesdale; "it's away at the
+bottom of my trunk." And he moved on. "Rosy's there, though," he called
+back. He did this largely under the promptings of a sense of justice:
+Paston was as much entitled to push one project as he himself was to push
+another.
+
+"Yes, I know," said Paston.
+
+This ubiquitous and ever-welcome person made his presence known
+throughout Geneva with no loss of time. He caused himself to be
+remembered by Mrs. Bates for a small dance on Saturday night, and also
+secured himself from forgetfulness in connection with her steam-yacht
+excursion for Sunday morning. This active and well-intentioned woman was
+the prime mover in a poor children's camp which was in process of
+construction near the far end of the lake. She could not expect her dozen
+young people to take an absorbing interest in her middle-aged
+philanthropies; but she knew that an excursion was none the worse for
+having an objective point, and she did not feel that she was likely to
+please her guests the less by giving a little incidental pleasure to
+herself.
+
+"I've got to have something to _do_," she explained to Paston. "I
+couldn't be content to come up here and pass the summer in mere
+idleness." They were sitting on a pair of camp-stools up near the bow.
+Paston, looking backward, saw Rosamund and William Bates together near
+the stern.
+
+"It must be a terrible thing to be cursed with ambition and executive
+ability," observed Paston. "I'm awfully glad _I_ haven't got any."
+
+"Well, there it is," she responded. "I've got to have something on hand.
+I've got to engineer. I've got to manage."
+
+Paston brought back his eyes from William Bates and Rosamund. "Everybody
+knows what a capable manager you are." He said this, as he said so many
+other things, with a frank and bold directness that made any suspicion of
+an _arrière-pensée_ almost an impossibility.
+
+"Well, don't commit yourself until you get there; then you can make your
+own observations." She took his remark as almost anybody else would have
+felt obliged to take it--just for what it sounded. Nobody understood
+better than Paston the deceptive quality resident in a truth plumply
+told.
+
+"Shall I see Cecilia Ingles there?" Paston was stopping with the
+Ingleses, and had rowed across immediately after breakfast. "I think I
+heard them speak about driving down. I say," he added, "it's a rum go for
+her."
+
+"I don't see why," rejoined Susan Bates, disputatiously. "She is old
+enough to take things seriously; she has got far enough along to begin to
+be in earnest. The first thing she asked me was how much money I wanted.
+'I don't want any of your money at all,' I told her; 'for such a cause as
+this I can scoop up all the money I want by the shovelful. No; what I
+want is your personal interest.' That's about the hardest thing _to_ get
+in cases like this."
+
+"Well, I believe you've got it," declared Paston, hitching about on his
+seat. "She has given up all hope of escaping from you. You're a
+tyrant--an inexorable tyrant, she says. She's going to do as you direct."
+
+"All right," returned Susan Bates; "only don't be so sticky about it."
+She pronounced this epithet very distinctly and deliberately; she had
+long meant to use it with Paston, some time or other--ever since Jane had
+imparted it to her, in fact.
+
+"Sticky!" cried the young man. "Me--sticky?"
+
+"Yes--fussy, critical, disagreeable, censorious." She moved her fingers
+as if disentangling them from a sheet of fly-paper. "It's one of your own
+words, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, but what it means is stiff, poky, awkward; and nobody else has ever
+called me that!"
+
+Susan Bates, with a slight touch of mortification, at once set the whole
+matter aside. "Cecilia is good enough at heart," she went on, instantly.
+"No, I don't want her money," she ploughed rapidly ahead, "except as a
+visitor. Every visitor must give something, and the first must give the
+most. You are the first."
+
+"I?" stammered Paston, with an uneasy laugh.
+
+"All of you, I mean." She waved her hand over the whole yacht. "Feel for
+your dollars; you will find a contribution-box fastened to the first
+tree, at the landing."
+
+"Really?" said Paston, vastly ill at ease.
+
+Susan Bates merely laughed, feeling that she had regained the upperhand.
+She had not been so tickled since the day when Minnie Peters had put into
+her hands the official notification that she was at length a member of
+that obdurate and exacting musical society. "But, poor fellow," she said
+to herself, "I mustn't tease him!" She looked back the length of the boat
+towards Rosy; Rosy, at the same moment, was looking forward the length of
+the boat towards her. A pause had apparently come in William Bates's
+careful enumeration of the country-seats which covered the wooded slopes
+of either shore. Many of them were the residences of people whom Rosy had
+met for the first time during the past winter, and their interest was
+therefore biographical as well as topographical. But now the interest, of
+whatever kind, was running a bit thinly; Rosy gave a careless word now
+and then to another young girl beside her or to a new young man sprawling
+at her feet, but her eyes turned every few minutes towards the bow.
+
+"You catch the idea?" Mrs. Bates was saying. "We bring them out on the
+train in two hours, and give them a ride on the public steamer to the
+camp; we keep them a week. We start in with a fresh lot every Monday
+morning, right through the summer."
+
+"Where do you get them?" asked Pasten, making talk industriously. "Do you
+set traps for them? Or perhaps you go to the Bureau of Child Labor and
+say: So many tons of orphans, to be delivered on the fifth instant, at
+nine-thirty A.M., sharp; eh?" He had quite recovered his spirits.
+
+"Get them? Dear me, there are plenty to be got. I expect we shall have to
+enlarge the dormitories before the summer is half over."
+
+"And what is Mrs. Ingles to do with them after they _are_ got?" he asked,
+with his eye on the foam and bubbles of the wake. "Is she to take the
+kinks out of their hair every morning by early candle-light? Is she to
+wash all their little porringers and hang them up in rows on their little
+hooks? Is she to keep tab when they go in paddling and check them off as
+they come out, to see how many have been carried away by the undertow?"
+
+Mrs. Bates declined to consider the undertow. "See; there it is." The
+yacht had rounded a small wooded promontory and now approached a shallow
+shore, where a gingerly landing was to be effected at a rude and rickety
+little pier.
+
+A grove of oak and maple came almost to the water's edge, and within it a
+number of barrack-like structures of clean yellow pine were taking shape
+and substance. The odor of the pine mingled with the earthy smells of the
+grove; now and then a little pile of sawdust was taken swirlingly by the
+breeze, and here and there a long, fresh shaving was seen caught upon the
+prickly branches of some June rose.
+
+Paston helped Mrs. Bates out on to the pier with a cautious gallantry,
+and immediately betook himself to the younger members of the party; he
+considered the courtesies due from a guest as now amply accomplished. He
+attached himself at once to Rosamund; he helped her over the loose litter
+of lumber; he steadied ladders for her at every fresh feint of mounting;
+he bestirred himself to a rapacious culling of wild-flowers for the mere
+opportunity of tying them together with a shaving. Once he sprinkled them
+over with a handful of sawdust, after the manner of a florist
+extemporizing a heavy dew. Rosy laughed and nodded, and thrust the
+flowers into her belt.
+
+"You will never be serious," she protested.
+
+"Oh yes, I shall. I am always a good deal more serious than people
+suppose." He bestowed upon her a look serious enough to match his words.
+It was as serious as any one could have wished, and Rosy dropped her eyes
+and was distinctly pensive for a minute or two.
+
+Presently the Ingleses came picking their way through the grove in a
+surrey. Cecilia Ingles alighted with the air of one somewhat at sea. She
+greeted Rosy quite pleasantly, but seemed to be looking about for the
+captain. The dry, shrewd, middle-aged face of her husband adjusted its
+expression readily enough to the matter before them. He was a born
+manager and manipulator. When he could not juggle with a dollar for
+profit, he was content to juggle with a penny for pleasure.
+
+Susan Bates hastened up to his wife at once, and kissed her roundly. "So
+good of you to come! And on Sunday, too!"
+
+"Never mind," said Ingles; "we can put twice as much on the plate next
+Sunday."
+
+Mrs. Ingles at once appropriated William Bates for a walk through the
+framework of the unfinished dormitories. Ingles followed with Mrs. Bates.
+
+"Things are going first-rate," declared Susan Bates. "We shall be under
+cover in a week, and ready for the painters."
+
+"No plaster?" asked Ingles.
+
+"Dear me, no. Two coats of paint will be quite warm enough."
+
+Rosy, meanwhile, sat upon a pack of shingles under a young maple-tree
+which grew within a few steps of the water. Paston lay at her feet and
+dug in the sand with a split shingle drawn from the pack, while the other
+young people tramped and frolicked with shrill cries through the
+dismantled grove and unfinished buildings.
+
+"It was at her house, you remember, that I first met you," said Paston.
+He nodded to Mrs. Ingles, who was just moving by with the reluctant
+William Bates.
+
+"And a handsome house, too," declared Rosy. "Still, I suppose that hers,
+or even Mrs. Bates's, can't be compared with some in London."
+
+"Don't be so sure," rejoined Paston. He thought of "10, King's-gate
+Gardens, S. Kensington"; he would have been the last to force a
+comparison between that and the town-house of Cecilia Ingles. "A house is
+no better for being more than a home," he said, somewhat ruefully.
+
+Rosy was far from subscribing to this. Her ideal home was one that had
+been immemorially a palace and a show-place, with troops of servants to
+show the troops of tourists through.
+
+"All these places around here are nice enough," she acknowledged,
+"but--new. That one over there, now." She pointed across the lake to the
+roofs and gables of a large country-seat set on a wooded hill-top. "They
+have had to stain it green to make it look old and mossy."
+
+"Sometimes the appearance of age is to be preferred to the reality,"
+observed Paston, thoughtfully. His mind was on "Boxton Park, Witham,
+Essex," and he was wishing devoutly enough that means were available for
+keeping that in a state of fresh repair equal to the state of the house
+where he was now staying.
+
+But Rosy was entertaining her own vision of Boxton Park. It was a
+spacious and glorious domain, and its noble manor house was a perfect
+commingling of old-time picturesqueness and modern comfort. And the
+peacocks paraded again on the terrace.
+
+Rosy shifted her seat on the pile of shingles in order to take a more
+general view of the landscape. She shrugged her shoulders slightly. "No
+lanes, no hedge-rows, no weirs, no coppices..."
+
+"What's the matter with these maples?" asked Fasten, abandoning himself
+to the American idiom. "And where are there handsomer elms than right
+here in Wisconsin? And what have you against those hills?" He thought of
+the wide flatness of Essex; what would not Boxton Park give for a
+foothold on such a shore, a prospect over such a sheet of rippling blue?
+
+But Rosy had her own conception of Essex. In some miraculous way it
+combined the sweetness of Devonshire, the fatness of Warwick, the
+boldness of Westmorland, the severity of Cornwall. And through this
+enchanting tract the fox-hounds ever sped in full, re-echoing cry.
+
+Paston gave a sudden dig with his shingle, and a lump of damp sand fell
+with a splash far out upon the water. "But, after all, it's dear old
+England," he said, plaintively.
+
+"The dearest land in all the world, I'm sure," sighed Rosy,
+sympathetically. She dug her toe at a single tuft of coarse grass in the
+midst of the sand, and wondered over his "after all."
+
+"Indeed, it is. You would like it, I'm sure."
+
+"I know I should. I shall never be happy until I've seen it."
+
+"But think of me--four thousand miles away from it."
+
+"I do," said Rosy, softly.
+
+"We younger sons," sighed Paston, in a tone of great self-commiseration.
+
+"We younger daughters," echoed Rosy, with an implication that all the
+drawbacks were not on one side.
+
+The rest of the party came flocking down to the shore; the Ingleses among
+them--to see the others off.
+
+"I suppose you go back as you came?" said Ingles, to Paston.
+
+"Pretty nearly," replied Paston, in the cheery tone he usually adopted
+for general converse. And back he went, with this small difference: that
+on the return he occupied the place of William Bates.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+Truesdale returned home from Wisconsin after an absence of ten or twelve
+days; he came back without having visited Geneva. He had visited Madison,
+however.
+
+His feeling, as he traversed the streets of that pleasant capital, was
+distinctly one of pique. To be hemmed in, to be barred out, to be shut
+up, to be cut off, to be turned aside--any and all of these things seemed
+to have been suffered by him; he felt them as stripes or as fetters
+applied to the degradation of an inexpugnable personality. "I shall not
+take it so passively as they think," he said.
+
+His friendly but tempered interest in Bertie Patterson had risen to a
+higher pitch in view of the insensate safeguards thrown around her by her
+friends; besides, he felt himself at a juncture where he must not permit
+himself to falter in the maintenance of his own dignity. "I shall not be
+balked so easily as they imagine," he said.
+
+He paused before a large, white frame-house which stood on a kind of
+banked terrace; the house was shaded by a number of evergreens, and was
+shut in from the street by a picket-fence. "This must be it," he said, as
+he clicked the latch of the gate. Patterson, as one of the large retail
+dry-goods merchants of the town, was of course a "prominent citizen"; his
+residence was easy enough to find.
+
+"Mrs. Patterson is at home?" he uttered with the appropriate inflection,
+and extended his card. He made this tender to a firm-faced woman of forty
+in a plain black dress, who came to the door with a half-hemmed towel in
+her hand.
+
+"I am Mrs. Patterson," she said. She read the card; there was no doubt of
+her appreciation of his identity. The more picturesque and decorative
+phases of his character had been presented to her, doubtless, by the
+docile and transparent Bertie--by letter, possibly. The less approved
+side (concerning which Bertie's own conception was in all likelihood
+darkling enough still) had probably come to her--also by letter--from
+Bertie's conscientious but disappointed guardian.
+
+Truesdale dexterously insinuated himself into the house; he had instantly
+perceived, with a pang of mortification, that no formal encouragement to
+enter was likely to be extended.
+
+"My daughter," said Mrs. Patterson, coldly, in answer to his inquiries,
+"is visiting friends in Watertown." This was true. "She is to remain
+several days." This was not true; Bertie was expected home on the morrow.
+But it was made true, for all purposes, by an instant message which
+permitted the girl to extend the period of her visit.
+
+Truesdale bowed himself out of the house with no apparent diminution of
+grace and prestige. "How inexhaustible are the beauties of nature," he
+thought--"Wisconsin nature. I must make another sketching-tour before
+long."
+
+Four or five days later he sat in his bedroom, looking over a number of
+water-colors that covered the counterpane and largely obscured the
+pillows--views of Green Lake, scenes from the rocks and gorges of the
+upper Wisconsin. "I've done very well," he thought--"very well, indeed."
+He was trying to make himself believe that he had successfully
+accomplished the principal object of his trip.
+
+Rosy also returned from Wisconsin at about the same time; with an air of
+calm decision she announced to her mother her engagement to Arthur
+Paston. She regarded this statement as definitive--an admission towards
+which the others of the family advanced with a doubting reluctance. Jane,
+by reason of the place and of her own participation in the hopes of Susan
+Bates, thought the proceeding characterized by indelicacy, if not by
+disloyalty. Truesdale, on receipt of the intelligence, vented a jarring
+laugh. He saw little reason why Paston should have succeeded at Geneva
+when he himself had failed at Madison (he was conscious, here, of forcing
+the terms in order to compass a striking antithesis); and that it should
+have been his own sister whose hand Paston had won seemed to him a
+triumph greater and more discordant still.
+
+David Marshall himself heard these tidings with a grave concern. It all
+seemed like another weight added to the load under which he was already
+staggering. He debated with himself on the subject of this proposed new
+household: where was it to be established, of whom was it to be composed,
+by whom (above all) was it to be supported? Marshall, in his most
+prosperous and least careworn days, had never acquired the useful and
+agreeable art of spending money; the outlay of any considerable sum had
+always afflicted him as with a physical pain. How much greater, then, was
+his shrinking dread to-day, when demands upon him were doubling up so
+finely, and when the last demand of all was on behalf of an alien who
+might well attempt to make an alien of his daughter too? He talked with
+Rosy about her future in a hesitating and perturbed fashion. Rosy would
+set her lips, and eye him coldly, and tell him that he did not love
+her. In the meantime the new house progressed towards its ridge-poles,
+and it was Jane's daily speculation whether the boudoir designed for Rosy
+would ever be occupied by her--or by somebody else. By somebody else, she
+was afraid; for since that luckless Sunday dinner, Theodore Brower had
+called but twice, and had been as distant as if he had not come at all.
+
+A few weeks after the intrusion of Paston upon the board, another piece
+was happily removed. This removal involved, as is often the case in such
+manipulations, a certain amount of sharp playing and a large element of
+sacrifice. Truesdale, when the recital was made to him in his brother's
+office, showed a scant appreciation of the sacrifice, but listened
+interestedly enough to the detailed report of Roger's endeavor.
+
+"So you have found Monsieur Y, after all? And do you hold him fast?"
+
+Roger contemptuously ignored this revival of his brother's flippant
+Gallic formula. He contented himself with giving a brief and stern
+account of the processes that he had been driven to employ. He had
+prosecuted his inquiries through one of those extra-legal agencies which
+even the highest respectability may be compelled, upon occasion, to fall
+back on, and he had arrived at an acquaintance with the Leppins, in all
+their grovelling ramifications, equal to the previous one which he had
+achieved with the Van Horns. His close inquiries had extended through
+the ranks of all their associates and connections, and in the end he had
+lighted upon one individual whose disposition towards Sophie Leppin and
+her family could be made to serve the end in view. This young man was the
+foreman of a tailor's establishment, and Roger wasted no more
+consideration upon him than upon the rest of them. Before the assembled
+horde he made his proposition with a blunt, business-like brutality
+which almost startled him at the moment, and which disgusted him with
+himself for a fortnight to follow.
+
+"And they accepted it. More shame for me, more shame for them, more shame
+for human nature. But _you_ are safe." He viewed Truesdale with an
+undisguised scorn, and Truesdale did not attempt to withstand it.
+
+"I attended the ceremony," Roger said, grimly. "I presented the bride
+with a bouquet. For the matter of that," he continued, in a scornful jest
+of himself, "I was the one who took out the marriage license."
+
+"Did you pay the minister his fee?" Truesdale asked this principally for
+the purpose of reasserting himself.
+
+"Minister!" cried Roger, half shocked. "No; I had a justice of the peace.
+I was the guest of honor," he went on, with a savage irony. "With good
+reason; it was I who paid the bride's dowry."
+
+Truesdale sat with his eyes on the floor. "The check; was it--was it a
+large one?" he asked, in a low voice.
+
+"Check!" cried Roger again. "I paid them in hundred-dollar bills." His
+fingers played back and forth many and many times.
+
+"Not so much as that!" exclaimed Truesdale, his eyes opening widely.
+
+"More," said Roger. "I put the notices in the newspapers, too. And now,
+Truesdale," he said, with a final brief phrase of dismissal, "think what
+your father and I have had to do for you, and try to be a man." And he
+turned away towards other matters.
+
+Truesdale passed out, crestfallen for the first time in his life. Not
+over his own follies, not over the anxieties and expenditures he had
+caused his father, but over the fact that Roger had treated him like a
+boy--and had done it all so briefly. He blushed, too, for the vulgar
+ending of the episode (if ended, indeed, it were); for it seemed to
+outrage all literary and artistic precedent. No farce at the Palais Royal
+had ever developed so grotesque a dénouement; no novel of Véron, of
+Belot, of Montépin had ever come to so sordid an ending; no Mimi, no
+Musette could have ever followed a line of conduct so little
+_spirituel_ as that taken by Sophie Leppin. What, then; were the
+books wrong, and only life true? No; it was the fault of America itself.
+"_Quel pays_!" reflected Truesdale; "equally without the atmosphere of
+art and the atmosphere of intrigue!" This observation pleased him; he
+felt that he had pierced the marrow of a complicated question, and he
+passed along the street holding a higher head.
+
+He drew a letter from his pocket and creased it thoughtfully in his hands
+as he walked on. The envelope, from which he did not draw the enclosure,
+was addressed in the hand of Gladys McKenna. He had parted from her just
+as he had meant to part--at the carriage door. She had forgiven this, and
+was now writing in terms no less ardent and clinging than before.
+
+"Poor Gladys!" he said, half aloud. "I haven't treated her any too well;
+yet she is about the only one who cares for me or understands me or
+appreciates me. I'm glad, though, she's back home; I should be guilty of
+some horrible _sottise_ or other if she were here."
+
+All the same, he made her absence seem another deprivation; he included
+it in the catalogue of his injuries and woes. "I declare," he said, "take
+it all together, and it's enough to drive a man to--business. It wouldn't
+surprise me very much to be talking with father about that very thing
+within a month or so. For what can a man of leisure do, after all, in
+such a town as this?"
+
+But the summer moved onward, and Truesdale still considerately refrained
+from harassing an anxious and overburdened father with the further task
+of contriving a harmony between such a son and such a _métier_. The old
+man was left to recover from the sting inflicted by the Leppins, to study
+over the future of his youngest daughter, to keep a careful eye upon his
+business associates, and to combat--as one combats the alkali dust of
+the Plains--all the insinuating minutiae of house-building. The new home
+of the Marshalls moved on with the summer, and reached in due course the
+stage when such elemental features as walls and roofs gave way to the
+minor considerations involved in the swinging of doors, the placing of
+gas-jets, and the arrangements of pantries. Eliza Marshall now began to
+appear more frequently on the scene, and to confound both architect and
+builder after the fashion possible for the experienced and accomplished
+house-keeper. She usually exacted the support of her husband, with a
+pertinacity the greater for the smallness of the point at issue; and
+David Marshall, wearied and borne down with more important, more vital
+affairs, wished daily that the new house had never been undertaken at
+all.
+
+Thomas Bingham stood Eliza Marshall's annoying picket-fire with the
+patience proper to a friend of the family; and he took advantage of the
+same position to press further upon her husband his own continuing sense
+of a rich man's duties towards the public. Marshall may be said by this
+time to have fixed himself in the general eye. He had made a second
+public address--the skilful product of Jane's literary knack and of his
+own previous experience. As a consequence of this he had been asked to
+sit on one or two platforms, and to sign two or three addresses and
+petitions; and though his indifferent health and his many preoccupations
+had somewhat impeded his advance, yet his well-wishers felt the marked
+disposition shown to concede him the place that they held him entitled to
+take.
+
+Bingham experienced a personal interest in Marshall's maintenance of the
+foothold thus won. As the two toured through the half-plastered rooms or
+stooped to consider the question of sewerage amid the litter of the
+basement, Bingham, with a tactful seriousness, would urge the old man, as
+he had urged him often enough before, to crown his career and perpetuate
+his memory by the erection of some enduring structure for the public
+good and use.
+
+"All of my experience is at your disposal," he would say. "And all of
+your own"--with a wave of the hand over the chaos prevailing about them.
+
+The old man would give him a non-committal sidelong glance, half smiling,
+half protesting "I'm glad to have you acknowledge, Bingham, that there is
+some experience involved in building a house. There's a good deal more
+than I expected."
+
+"You're not having a hard time of it," returned Bingham. "You don't
+realize how easy I've been making it for you."
+
+But Marshall was coming to develop a firm reluctance towards turning the
+knowledge gained in his private building to the erection of some larger
+and different building for the public good. With every month of the past
+year had his estimate of the public and its character been modified by
+the kind of treatment that he had suffered from certain of the less
+worthy members of it. The Van Horns seemed to have passed the goad on to
+the Leppins, and it was largely under these merciless proddings that
+he had formed his conception of the new town which had evolved itself
+during the past twenty years. To these personal grievances he added the
+general grievances of a tax-payer under the present loose-geared régime,
+and there were days when he thought he saw the legitimate outcome of
+democracy as applied to large capitals: the organizing of criminals for
+the spoliation of the well-to-do. And if Bingham had pushed him too hard,
+he might have precipitated the blunt declaration that a man's best use
+for his own money was to protect himself and his interests from the
+depredations of an alien and rabble populace.
+
+"But Babylon itself was built of mud bricks," Bingham would rejoin. "And
+the noblest mountain in the world, when you come right down to details,
+is only a heap of dirt and rocks strewn over with sticks and stones. But
+if you will just step back far enough to get the proper point of
+view--well, you know what the painters can do with such things as these."
+
+"I can't step back, Bingham. I started here; I've stayed here; I belong
+here. I'm living right _on_ your mountain, and its sticks and stones are
+all about me. Don't ask me to see them for anything else; don't ask me to
+call them anything else."
+
+Then he would say to Bingham what he said later to Susan Bates when she
+came with Jane to view the wainscotings and the panelled ceilings of the
+long succession of rooms: that the man who met all the legal exactions of
+the community and all the needs and requirements of his own flesh and
+blood was doing quite enough for the preservation of his own credit. And
+when Theodore Brower cautiously suggested that the bitterness of certain
+experiences might be turned to sweetness by the institution of a bureau
+of justice for the poor and unfriended, the sensitive old man shrank back
+as if from contact with a nettle. Indeed, it is probable that so
+unconventional and untravelled a road to philanthropic renown would have
+proven uninviting to his feet at any time. And Jane, who, after the
+failure of her own idea, had transferred her support to the idea of
+Brower, now made a second transfer and came to the support of the idea
+of Susan Bates. If she could do nothing for the cause of labor, and
+nothing for the cause of justice, she was willing to accomplish what she
+could for the cause of education.
+
+Under such urgings as these, David Marshall began irritably to impugn the
+motives of those men whose philanthropic disposition had earned for them
+the approval of the well-disposed. One was actuated by vanity and
+vainglory; another by political ambitions; a third took to philanthropy
+as to the current fad.
+
+"There might be worse ones," Bingham would retort. "Sixty or seventy
+years ago the fad hereabouts was scalp-raising. Isn't the present one an
+improvement on that?"
+
+"You bring up Ingles," the other went on; "he's simply philanthropic
+as an additional vent to his own energies. You talk about Bates; he
+merely makes all those benefactions to please his wife. And so with
+others."
+
+"Is that a bad motive--the wish to please one's wife by a generous deed?"
+
+"I have _my_ wife to please," returned Marshall. His observation
+came out with a sort of raw and awkward directness. It seemed to convey
+the odd implication that the way to please this wife would be not to do a
+generous deed, but to refrain from doing it. And Bingham, who appreciated
+the saplessness of Eliza Marshall's sympathies and the narrowness of her
+horizon, made no effort to give his friend's remark a more favorable
+aspect.
+
+Marshall derived support not only from the narrow selfishness of his
+wife, but also from the fastidiousness of his younger son, who met with
+open derision any project involving the accomplishment of a piece of
+actual architecture. He improvised an ornate and airy edifice of his own,
+which he allowed them to dedicate to art, to education, to charity, to
+what you will. Then he festooned it with telegraph wires, and draped it
+with fire-escapes, and girdled it with a stretch of elevated road, and
+hung it with signboards, and hedged it in with fruit-stands, and swathed
+it in clouds of coal smoke, and then asked them to find it; that was the
+puzzle, he said. His view of the town's architectural conditions--as too
+debased to justify one's serious endeavors towards improvement--was so
+nearly in harmony with the view that his father's inflamed mind sometimes
+took of the town's social conditions that the two were dangerously near
+to the common ground upon which they had never yet met.
+
+Bingham would have completely dissented from all this, of course; and he
+agreed with Marshall no better as regarded the precarious condition of
+his affairs--being disposed to assume that the old man's depression over
+his business was due largely to the multiplied checks on his own control
+of it; nor any better as regarded his unusual domestic expenses--present,
+just past, or just about to come. He was mindful of the house-building,
+but looked upon it, with Roger, as an investment. He knew of the
+thousands extorted through Truesdale, but made the loss less than might
+have resulted from a maladroit barter in real estate, for example. He
+could anticipate, too, the demands foreshadowed by the coming marriage of
+Rosamund; but a considerable expenditure for a favorite daughter at the
+most important juncture of her life was not unprecedented. He even found
+some ameliorating circumstances for the persistent pressure which
+Roger and his affairs were now coming to bring upon the paternal
+estate--Roger, who had served so valiantly his father and his family, and
+who was now demanding a compensatory assistance amid the thickening risks
+and dangers of his own business operations. Not only had he extricated
+Truesdale from his difficulties, but he had supported his father in his
+demand for the dismissal of the unseemly Andreas Leppin from the
+business.
+
+"He shall go!" cried David Marshall, with a trembling voice and a shaking
+hand, which, without reinforcement, would have constituted but a feeble
+demonstration.
+
+"He shall stay!" returned Belden, with a cold insolence. "He is useful to
+me. Besides, he has suffered enough wrong from you already."
+
+"He shall go!" cried Roger, rising into a threatening savagery over the
+brazen hypocrisy of such a pretence. "If he is here another hour, I will
+drag him out with my own hands." The young man seemed to tear out all his
+powers from his own person, as one draws a sword from its sheath, and to
+wield his vehemence and indignation over Belden's head as one might sweep
+a burning brand. He exercised the compelling power that is to be
+attained sometimes only by the free and impassioned employment of all
+one's energies; he seemed capable of an instant physical violence in more
+directions than one, and he carried his point.
+
+Another outbreak of passion followed when he applied to his father for
+assistance during a precarious passage through the risks and dangers of
+an expanding business, and was met with reluctant excuses that seemed the
+very acme of ingratitude. He hurled forth an indignant reminder of all
+the services he had performed for the family--services at once degrading
+and gratuitous; and he demanded if a year's dabbling in such delectable
+detail were not a sufficient warrant for asking the help that he now
+required. In fact, he hectored his father as unscrupulously, as
+unceremoniously, as he had browbeaten Belden.
+
+David Marshall met as well as he could the demands of his choleric son;
+never before had he been trampled on rough-shod by one of his own
+children. He almost seemed to see the moral fibre of Roger's nature
+coarsening--perhaps disintegrating--under his very eyes, and he asked
+himself half reproachfully how much this might be due to tasks of his own
+imposition.
+
+All these things had their place in his mind as he followed Bingham
+through the new house, scuffing over the plaster-encrusted floors,
+watching the adjustment of window-weights, or drawing back before the
+long, thin strips of moulding brought in by carpenters. No, his children
+did not love him. There was Rosy, who had learned her lesson of
+selfishness from the world all too early, and who now, in her
+preoccupations for the future, had less thought of him than ever. There
+was Alice, who saw him often enough if she saw him half a dozen times a
+year, and whose infrequent comings always disclosed some petty motive
+of domestic finance and economics. There was Truesdale, a flippant
+and insolent egotist, who had neither affection nor respect for his own
+parents, his own family, his own birthplace. There was Roger, who hewed
+roughly his own independent course, and who did not scruple to turn his
+powers against his own father if crossed in his desires or balked in his
+ambitions. And there was--
+
+No; not Jane. "She is the only one of them all who really loves me," he
+said. He was standing in one of the upper rooms under the crude light of
+a northern window. On the yellow ground beneath him a workman was
+stacking up sheets of blue slate in regular piles, and from some remote
+quarter of the place came the sharp, metallic hammerings of the last
+remaining plumbers. The searching daylight lit up cruelly the hollows of
+the old man's eyes, and brought out from his whitened chin and cheeks the
+last few threads of dim and dulling red. His tall, thin figure shrank
+away from its loose coverings; never before had he seemed so detached, so
+impersonal, so slightly poised on any mere physical basis.
+
+He turned to Bingham. "This will be _her_ room--Jane's room. It must be
+right, whatever the others are. Jane--cares for me. She has always been a
+dutiful daughter; never a trial, never a disappointment--nothing but a
+comfort. There must be no shortcoming here, Bingham."
+
+Bingham, standing beside him at the window, fixed an intent regard upon
+the sheets of shifting slate. There was a moist smile in his eyes, and a
+warm glow of sympathetic appreciation permeated his whole being.
+
+"There won't be," he said.
+
+And Jane's chamber took on shape and finish in the minds of the two men
+who stood there side by side overlooking the slate piles and saying no
+word further; and neither recognized in her the first cause of all these
+changes and of the many trials and difficulties proceeding from them.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+The approaching completion of the new house did little towards
+diminishing the rigors of the daily routine within the old one; no
+greater insistence upon detail could be encountered at Gibraltar or at
+Ehrenbreitstein than that which prevailed under the direction of Eliza
+Marshall, to whom the near breaking of camp was no reason for the
+slightest break in discipline. Nor was there any relaxation because the
+garrison happened to be on a mere peace footing; it made little
+difference that both Rosamund and Truesdale were spending the better part
+of the summer in Wisconsin. Rosy had resumed her round among the
+country-houses of her friends; she expected to repay these attentions
+in the near future by an elegant and lavish hospitality, whose time,
+place, and method still remained more or less indeterminate. Truesdale,
+too, had made a second and longer excursion northward--Waukesha, Geneva,
+Oconomowoc, and again, Madison. Jane alone remained at home, and it was
+she who helped her mother through the thirtieth and last of the
+annual jelly-makings. For the first time in all these years the
+entire supply of currants had come from outside; the last of their own
+bushes, which had put on faintly its customary greenness in May, had
+peaked and dwindled through June, and had died at last in the early days
+of July.
+
+"That reconciles me, Jane," said Eliza Marshall, as she viewed the dead
+bush while flapping one of her ensanguined cloths from the kitchen
+window; "I shall be ready to move when the time comes."
+
+Jane sighed softly for reply; she was beginning to realize what all this
+change might mean.
+
+David Marshall himself bowed to the same stringent discipline that ruled
+the others. Though he felt his powers weakening beneath days of worry and
+nights of broken rest, he would have been surprised by the smallest
+concession, and would even have considered it a weakness to ask for any.
+That his rest was broken did not postpone the early breakfast by a single
+five minutes; that his health was failing did not alter the somewhat
+primitive and rigorous character of the dishes set before him; that he
+returned home jaded and exhausted by the day's doings did not entitle
+him, any more than ever, to smoke a quiet cigar within doors. He smoked
+without, upon the sidewalk, according to his wont; but he never paced
+very far up or down, nor very long. The old routine went on--a little too
+inexorably. And though many of his nights were coming to be sleepless
+throughout, and though the strain of it all was obvious enough as his
+thin, drawn face bent over a breakfast for which he could find no relish,
+yet the tradition that he was above all physical frailties and exempt
+from all natural laws clamped its curious hold upon his family and even
+upon himself. Eliza Marshall had almost come to regard him as she
+regarded his business: each was a respectable and estimable abstraction
+which held its own without too direct a heed from her; each an admirable
+contrivance that had accomplished its purposes so long and with
+so trustworthy a regularity that the thought of hitch, lapse, failure
+never presented itself as a really tangible consideration. Each
+day he grew a shade paler, a degree feebler, but the change came too
+gradually for the unobservant and over-habituated eyes of his wife.
+
+Rosy noticed it, however, when she came back to town, to begin seriously
+her preparations for her wedding. "I don't think papa looks very well,"
+she was contented to observe.
+
+"Of course he doesn't," returned Jane, anxiously. "He ought to go off
+somewhere for a change and rest. I've told him so a dozen times.
+_You_"--to Rosy--"ought to know plenty of places. If I had my way about
+it, he would start off to-morrow."
+
+"Well, I don't know," observed her mother, slowly. "He never _has_ gone
+off. And if you don't happen to feel first-rate, I don't know where you
+can be better taken care of than right at home."
+
+"You might go to Geneva--both of you," replied Jane; "I wish you would,
+if only on my account. Mrs. Bates is just about getting tired of asking
+you, and I'm 'most worn out with making up excuses for your not going."
+Jane had been giving an occasional attendance on Susan Bates's dormitory
+and children. Mrs. Bates herself had bowed to Rosy's preference with a
+resigned reasonableness, and had abated not one jot in her friendliness
+towards Rosy's family.
+
+But to Eliza Marshall a summer's outing could easily be made to seem
+superfluous, impracticable, revolutionary; nor did Jane succeed any
+better with her father himself. He seemed to take a pathetic pride in
+standing at his post; he almost appeared to be imbued with the fatalistic
+notion that there was, indeed, no leaving it. He continued to smoke his
+cigar outside, to cover haltingly sheets of paper with figures under the
+library lamp, and to yield himself to hours of depressing and harassing
+reflection within the shadows of the bay-window.
+
+When Truesdale came home his father's decline was even more noticeable.
+Truesdale commented briefly on his appearance, suggested as briefly a
+little trip into the country, and after these few passes at filial duty
+he concentrated his attention upon his own personal affairs.
+
+On his second visit to Madison he had met Bertie Patterson
+face to face. He had encountered her in one of the broad and
+leafy walks before the Capitol, and she was in company with
+another young man. "One of those students," thought Truesdale,
+as he noted the smooth face and slender immaturity of her escort. "They
+swarm. The town is full of them. What chance has anybody else against
+them?"
+
+Bertie showed him a little face at once surprised, startled, puzzled. She
+bowed slightly and gave him a smile which seemed to him timid, shrinking,
+and amusingly deferential; but she showed no disposition to pause, or
+even to slacken her pace. "She doesn't know, after all," he thought; "she
+is imagining some vague horror or other that is too dreadful to be true,
+or even possible."
+
+Bertie and her youth passed on through the contending sun and shade of
+the path. "Can they be engaged?" thought Truesdale, upon whom certain
+fine shades in posture and address were not thrown away; "he looks hardly
+a junior." He presently met a senior of his acquaintance who told him he
+understood they were. "Ouf!" commented Truesdale, further; "a mere
+boy-and-girl affair." And he pleased himself with thinking how his
+own participation in such an affair would give it a much greater maturity
+and weight.
+
+But as regarded this particular one, he definitely withdrew from all
+participation whatever. He had now done enough to satisfy his
+curiosity--or his interest, as he might have preferred to have it
+called--and fully enough to preserve the dignity so absurdly jeoparded by
+the fantastic scruples of his aunt Lydia. He presently dismissed the
+whole matter, and fell to bestowing an exaggerated care upon the tips of
+his brushes. "The rest of the summer I propose to enjoy," he declared.
+
+As for David Marshall himself, he employed the rest of the summer in a
+laborious attempt to form the acquaintance of his coming son-in-law.
+Scodd-Paston presented to him an assemblage of qualities towards whose
+scheduling and comprehending he received but little help from his
+familiarity with the ordinary workaday type of local young man. Paston
+was uniformly gay, jovial, companionable, definite sometimes as regarded
+particulars, indefinite always as regarded generals. He stood constantly
+in a lambent flicker of humorous good-nature, and he baffled the old
+gentleman as one is baffled by the play of sunshine over a rippling pool.
+Marshall would ask himself whether the depth of the pool was a
+finger-length or a fathom, and would speculate on what there might be
+lying at the bottom of it--strange deposits, perhaps, representing the
+social and business developments of another age, or at least another
+civilization. He sometimes questioned his daughter's capacity to cope
+with the classification of such a collection--supposing so exacting a
+task ever to devolve upon her.
+
+He sometimes canvassed the matter with Theodore Brower, as the two sat
+smoking together on the door-step through the long summer twilights,
+while other warm-weather loungers scuffled aimlessly over the cindered
+paths of the dingy grass-stretch opposite, or, lying on their backs,
+crossed their legs self-indulgently and lifted over-worn brogans towards
+the contemptuous stars. He opened himself unreservedly to Brower, as
+to a friend of the family; and Brower could not but feel that his two
+years' attendance at the house, with thus far no definite outcome, had
+given the head of it ample warrant for considering him as he did. Once or
+twice, while Brower was counselling with X Marshall on the door-step,
+another man--Tom Bingham--had been entertained by Jane within the breezy
+recesses of the bay-window. It was then that Brower realized with a kind
+of muffled desperation how completely he and Bingham seemed to have
+changed positions. One had begun as the friend of a single member of the
+family, to become in the end the common and equal friend of all, and to
+sit discussing now with the head of it as one gray-beard with another.
+The other had begun as the general friend of the household, and had now
+advanced to the stage where he could fill in the dusk of an early
+September evening with the talk and company of the one young woman in
+the world whose talk and company were in any degree worth considering.
+Brower crunched his cigar between his teeth, and replied to Marshall's
+observations with a brusque carelessness for which he rebuked himself as
+being neither respectful nor civil.
+
+"I had never thought," said the old gentleman, looking lakeward through
+the smoky twilight with a kind of vague wistfulnes, "but that all my
+girls would marry Americans." He spoke slowly, musingly, in his huskily
+sibilant tones.
+
+"Um," said Brower, moodily, from the depth of an absurd jealousy. The man
+whose voice was coming to them with a certain deep indistinctness from
+the bay-window was an American--decidedly so.
+
+"And not only an American," pursued Marshall, "but a Westerner."
+
+"Um," said Brower, with an increasing gloom. The man who had just
+provoked that last clouded response from Jane was a Westerner, truly.
+
+"And not only a Western man, but an out-and-out Chicago man; one who
+knows the town, one who is in sympathy with it, one who has done a little
+something to make it what it is."
+
+"Um," said Brower once more, with a deeper despondency. Who had done more
+to make the town what it was than Bingham had done?
+
+"Then I should understand his ideas and ambitions," the old man
+proceeded, in a tone of plaintive yet unavailing protest. "I should know
+better about his connections and belongings. I should be able to foresee
+the future in some degree. I should have a clearer idea of what to
+expect. I should know, perhaps, where he--where he meant to live."
+Marshall ended this discourse with a feeble and helpless sigh.
+
+There was nothing indefinite about Bingham, thought poor Brower; there
+was no doubt as to where _he_ would continue to exist. "You mean to say
+it isn't decided yet where they are going to live?" Brewer's inquiry was
+prompted by civility rather than by interest. It was the first
+observation of any length that he had made for some time. Jane, who had
+been straining her ears during the last ten minutes for the mere sound of
+his voice, leaned back in her chair with an approximate comfort.
+
+"I don't know, just exactly," replied Marshall, rather dismally. His tone
+made him say that he did not know at all. "I've talked with Rosy and I've
+talked with Arthur...." He lapsed into a comfortless silence, and ran his
+thin old hand over his blanched and furrowed forehead.
+
+"When are they going to be married?" asked Brower. His eyes were on the
+bay-window, through whose curtains there showed the face of Bingham, his
+own look anxiously fixed on Marshall.
+
+Jane caught indistinctly the muffled tone of these few syllables.
+She made them mean a dozen different things and finally nothing at all,
+but she was glad of the opportunity to do even that.
+
+"In a month," answered Marshall; "early in October. Rosy lays great
+stress on an October wedding--that's the only right sort, it seems." He
+sighed with a full sense of the imminence of the inevitable. The voice of
+Bingham came with a slow, deep gravity from the bay-window, and Jane's
+voice, responding, mingled nervously with her father's sigh.
+
+"Not from the new house?" said Brower.
+
+"Hardly. It will be almost finished, but far from furnished. Perhaps they
+will have their receptions there, if they decide to--to come back."
+
+"Come back?" Brower spoke up loudly; a jangling freight train had paused
+opposite, and the locomotive was blowing off steam.
+
+"To America," the old man explained. He laid his hands to his temples.
+"Do you sleep well?"
+
+"Always."
+
+"Rosy thinks the new house ought to be hurried more. But why should she
+object to being married from the old house she was born in? Most girls
+would be pleased with such a thought as that." He placed his hand over
+his weary old eyes. "You do, do you--always? I don't; I can't. These
+trains--they keep me awake. I slept hardly half an hour last night, and
+none at all the night before. Do you know anything about chloral?"
+
+The voice of Bingham came to a pause, and that of Jane was presently
+distinguished in response--trembling, apprehensive, lapsing away into
+little breaks and pauses.
+
+"I know it's dangerous," replied Brower. "And morphine, too. And all such
+things; they're not to be used except in the last extremity. So they are
+going to England for their wedding-trip, then?"
+
+"To England, yes." He smiled half sorrowfully, half bitterly. He was
+thinking how easy it might be for Rosamund to give up her old home and
+her old friends altogether; and he was asking himself, too, if he had
+really toiled through these many years only to have the results
+squandered at last by a stranger in a strange land.
+
+"To England, yes," he repeated. "Arthur has postponed his vacation until
+late in the fall, and he hopes to be able to spend as much as two or
+three weeks at home. At home; he is a British subject, you know--he has
+never been naturalized."
+
+The air quivered with the quick pulsations of the locomotive of a passing
+suburban train. As it moved away Brower heard again the voice of Bingham
+slow, grave, earnest--a voice of warning and alarm, one might have
+thought.
+
+"Some of them are here for years before they take out their papers,"
+rejoined Brower. "And lots of them never take them out at all."
+
+"I don't know what's to be done," said Marshall, with a fretful anxiety.
+"I've given up coffee; some tell me that I ought to give up smoking, too,
+but others say it really doesn't make any difference. But I must do
+something; I must have better rest.
+
+"I can't work without my sleep, and I--I can't let myself fail--now."
+
+Jane was speaking once again--more steadily, more coolly, more
+composedly, it seemed. "Poor pa;--it can't be so serious as that," the
+listener thought he understood her to say.
+
+"I've heard of bromine," said Brower. "That's simpler, isn't it--and
+safer?" Jane's voice had ceased, and silence maintained its sway within.
+
+"She will meet all his family," the old gentleman went on. "She seems to
+expect to find them very fine people--finer than any we have here. And
+she will see the place where they live--a very much handsomer place, I
+make out, than any in this part of the world." A drawn and weary smile
+passed lightly over his face.
+
+There was a movement in the bay-window, and presently a solid footstep in
+the hall.
+
+"There's nothing like finding things out for yourself," said Brower,
+colorlessly.
+
+Bingham appeared on the door-step, just as the tail of locomotive smoke
+swept over the front yard. "Will you smoke with us?" asked Marshall.
+
+Brower smiled, though neither of the others seemed conscious of any
+secondary meaning in this simple question. "Thank you, no," replied
+Bingham. "I am moving on to an appointment, and am a little late as it
+is." He looked down on Marshall with an expression of friendly
+solicitude, and shook hands with him in a long, slow clasp. "Good-night;
+you are entitled to better care than you are giving yourself." And he
+moved down the footpath towards the front gate.
+
+Marshall looked after him wistfully. "If I were only in that man's shoes!
+If I but had half his health and strength!" Brower heard nothing of this;
+he was straining his ears for a further sound from within.
+
+"I must get rest," cried the old man, pitifully. "I'm wearing out. I stay
+up till midnight and after, every night, and even then it's sometimes
+daylight before I have a minute's sleep, I can't stand it; nobody can."
+
+There was a sound inside, as of scuffling among the furniture. It was
+Jane, feeling her way through the dark, listening for the sound of
+Theodore Brower's voice, and murmuring tremulously with her own,
+"_Toujours fidèle; toujours fidèle!_"
+
+"What can I do?" asked the old man, with an appealing grip on Brower's
+arm. "What doctor can I see? Where can I go for a change and for rest? Or
+how," he groaned, "can I go away at all? They are crowding me down; they
+are wrenching my business from my hands! I can't give way at such a time
+as this!"
+
+Brower hardly heard him; he was listening for Jane, who was now doubling
+the newel-post just within, and whose quavering undertone broke at the
+turn as she chanted once more her phrase of hope and reassurance. Brower
+heard her intonation, and wondered over its meaning; but he would have
+found no meaning in the words themselves, even if they had been
+distinctly audible, for he knew no French.
+
+Jane crooned the same brief snatch of melody many a time as the
+preparations for her sister's wedding moved along--particularly during
+those hours when she sat in her own room and directed the invitations. It
+was the only bed-chamber which she remembered ever to have occupied--the
+same furniture, the same fireplace, the same outlook, the same familiar
+curtains, gas-jets, door-knobs that had been known to her tomboy
+childhood, to her formidably plain girlhood, to her ambitious and
+philanthropic spinsterhood. The very air of it seemed thick with
+her varying hopes and plans and dreams and projects and ideals. In this
+retired bower she had slept for her whole life, and no fairy prince had
+ever penetrated to it to awaken her. One had come for Alice and one for
+Rosy, but never a--"_Toujours fidèle!_" moaned Jane, in her deepest
+contralto, and fell to work with renewed zeal upon her envelopes.
+
+There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Rosy had imagined a function of
+the first magnitude, and it was not to dwindle for mere lack of material.
+She had determined upon a ceremony in church and a large reception at the
+house, with everything in the way of music, flowers, functionaries, and
+supernumeraries that the most approved forms could incorporate. She stood
+out for a bishop, a surpliced choir, a wedding-breakfast after the
+English manner--in short, for the utmost attainable in the way of
+spendor, thoroughness, and distinction. The preparations moved on with a
+swirl and a sweep, and involved the whole household to the exclusion of
+all else.
+
+"But, for Heaven's sake," demanded Jane, "how are you going to get all
+these people into the house?" She had already disposed of Paston's short
+list, and had even found a certain pleasure in the quaint and complicated
+addresses that abounded throughout it. But the other list, compiled by
+Rosy and her mother, seemed to pass all bounds; not her mother's part,
+which was limited to certain old-time friends and connections, but Rosy's
+own, which dealt with "society" almost in its entirety. Jane appreciated
+now, for the first time, the comprehensive thoroughness of Rosy's
+year of social endeavor.
+
+"Here, let me have it," said Rosy, brusquely snatching the list from
+Jane. She fixed her eye upon the part of it that was written in her
+mother's cramped and antiquated hand. "Who are these Browns?"
+
+"Why, don't you remember the Browns? They were old neighbors of ours; pa
+used to think everything of them. They sent Alice a beautiful present."
+
+"Never heard of them in my life," declared Rosy. "They needn't come; they
+can just have announcement-cards. Who are the Grahams?--here's four of
+them."
+
+"Why," faltered Jane, "they used to have the pew right behind us in the
+old church. Ma and Mrs. Graham had a booth together at the Sanitary
+Fair."
+
+"The pew behind, eh? I haven't the slightest recollection of them." She
+marked the name off altogether.
+
+She made a thorough revision of her mother's list. Then she turned to her
+own. "Now, _these_ people--I _know_ all of _them_, and am indebted to
+them, and expect to have relations with them after I come back. They've
+all got to stay on."
+
+"Very good," said Jane, meekly. What else could she say? Was it not to
+some such social triumph as this that for a good six months she had bent
+all her own endeavors? She tried now to make the triumph seem as glorious
+as it should, but she could not feel that she was succeeding.
+
+Another stage in the proceeding arrived when the gowns began to come home
+from the dress-maker's. Jane then laid aside her pen to find pins, to
+contrive ruchings, to catch up the loose ends of draperies, while her
+mother and her sister Alice and her aunt Lydia circled and fluttered and
+swooped and chattered through a hundred suggestions and amendments and
+alterations. Then Jane would stand upon the threshold, and blink
+tearfully and indignantly into the gloom of the hall. "Nobody thinks of
+_me_," she would say, chokingly; "nobody cares for me; nobody seems to
+imagine that I've got a heart, too!"
+
+And, lastly, the day itself;--when Truesdale, decorated with a daring and
+wanton orchid, followed Paston out into the middle of the chancel of a
+crowded and buzzing church; when his father, despite his failing powers
+and an innate repugnance to the conscious dramatization involved in the
+ceremonial side of life, led Rosamond up a long aisle with the tremulous
+embarrassment of an invalid and a novice, and parted from her in front of
+a broad pair of lawn sleeves; and when Cecilia Ingles scattered a
+wide shower of rice over the broken flagging of the old front walk, as
+Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Scodd-Paston, of Boxton Park, Witham, Essex, England
+(as one of the newspapers took the trouble to put it) passed out through
+the rusty old front gate into married life.
+
+A few days later David Marshall, to the surprise and dismay of the
+remaining members of the family, took to his bed.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+"Where are you, Jane?"
+
+Eliza Marshall's voice sounded impatiently in the hallway, and presently
+her nervous hand was placed on the knob of her daughter's door.
+
+"Well, here you are, finally. And what is the matter, for the land's
+sake? And where is the pillow you went to get for your father?--we can't
+keep him waiting out in the carriage on such a day as this. Come, get up;
+you'll catch your death of cold yourself."
+
+Jane was lying on the bare floor of her stripped and emptied room, with
+her head pillowed upon the window-sill. She wore her sack, but her hat
+had fallen off and lay at her side. In her hand she held a stiff and
+curling width of paper just torn from the wall, and her body shook with
+sobs as she lifted her wide and welling eyes to her mother's face.
+
+"I am to blame," she cried, wildly; "I am to blame for it all! If it
+hadn't been for me we should never have left our old home and given up
+our old life, and Rosy wouldn't have cut all our friends and gone to
+England to live; and Truesdale wouldn't be talking about starting off
+across the Pacific for somewhere or other, and we should never have made
+enemies of those Beldens, and poor pa wouldn't have lost his business,
+and wouldn't be going off to die inch by inch in that big cold place out
+on the prairie. I'm to blame for it all; but I--I meant as well as
+anybody could!"
+
+"'Sh, Jane! Rosy hasn't gone to England to live, and your father isn't
+dying. How can you talk that way?"
+
+"And my old room!" Jane went on with a stringent cry, as her eyes roamed
+despairingly over its dismantled walls. "I never lived anywhere else, and
+I don't want to, and I can't! I don't want to live at all! And this old
+house isn't ours any longer, and those carriage people will begin to tear
+it down to-morrow. They'll take away the barn and chop down the trees,
+and there won't be a single thing left to remember it all by." She bent
+her head on the window-sill again, and sobbed more vehemently still.
+
+"Oh, Jane, Jane!" cried her mother, protestingly, "how can you act that
+way when there is so much to be done, and when your father is feeling so
+much worse than usual? Where were those pillows left, anyway? Come,
+come!"
+
+Jane rose to her knees and tried to wipe her face with the piece of
+wall-paper. Then her mother lifted her up and led her out through the
+hall.
+
+It was a chilly day in early November--a high wind lashing the gray and
+foaming lake--when David Marshall, wrapped in shawls and bolstered up
+with pillows, was driven carefully over the three miles of flinty macadam
+which led from his old house to his new one, and was put to bed again in
+a large, half-warmed apartment, fitted up scantily and provisionally with
+an old chamber-set that had escaped the auctioneer. His own illness
+and his daughter's marriage had almost brought the furnishing of the new
+house to a stand-still, while the anxiety of the purchasers of the old
+place to get their foundations in before the real cold weather had made
+it impossible for the family to re-remain a single day beyond the
+stipulated term. No new furnishings had been attempted beyond carpets and
+curtains, and for the first few days that the old man lay in these new
+quarters he had little to assure him that he was not in some hotel or in
+some hospital, save the echoing tread of the hard-finishers in other
+rooms about him. The first slight flurry of snow dusted the dead weeds of
+the open spaces round the house, and the reflections from it passed
+through the clear, broad panes of the windows to strike a grimmer chill
+from the shimmering surfaces of ash and oak. Never before had the world
+seemed to him so empty and so cold and so unsympathetic. And when his
+own wife had said to him, in accents almost of reproach, "Oh, David,
+David, how could you take such a time as this to be sick, with all the
+worry of moving and furnishing and Rosy's wedding and everything else?"
+he felt as bare and chill and numb as a naked sailor cast ashore on some
+alien and inhospitable coast.
+
+Susan Bates appeared at the new house almost immediately; she felt its
+need now, if ever, of being habitable. She stuffed her carriage with rugs
+and draperies; she sent an expressman out with her favorite easy-chair.
+She brought alcohol lamps and chafing-dishes. She seldom came without
+fruit or flowers. She set fire-screens and adjusted window-shades. She
+went deeply into the subject of opiates, and she talked by the hour with
+Jane and her mother about symptoms and remedies.
+
+Marshall, while grateful for her attentions, was almost embarrassed
+by them--not that they should come from her rather than from his wife (or
+at least more copiously and spontaneously), but that they should come at
+all. Never before in his life had he received such minute and solicitous
+ministrations; he felt with a shy self-depreciation that he must be
+making himself a great burden. If Susan Bates threw back her
+bonnet-strings and suggested to Jane a lowering of the window-shades,
+he would almost protest against the girl's laying aside her book or her
+sewing; and the preparation of any special dish, such as is an invalid's
+due, would even now still cause him that sense of guilt which he had
+always felt on breaking in upon the household routine of his wife. "Poor
+man!" Susan Bates would say; "how must he have lived all these years!
+Why, I could hardly get him even to let me oil the door-hinges!"
+
+She would sit by his bedside and try to soothe and divert this wan and
+weary and half-desperate old man. He enjoyed but the most fitful slumber,
+and even that only by the action of narcotics. Through the lagging hours
+of the day and through the maddening watches of the night his mind,
+ticking like an unstillable clock, beat for him an incessant rhythmical
+reminder of the impending ruin of his house and of his own powerlessness
+to avert it. He reviewed again and again the whole course of his life and
+his business--they were one: his lowly beginnings, his early struggles in
+the raw but ambitious prairie town, the laborious stages of endeavor by
+which he had developed and strengthened his business--his. Then, as the
+house had grown, others had insinuated themselves, or imposed themselves;
+and these were now banded together to dominate it, and to check
+and circumvent him, its founder and their benefactor, and finally to
+bring it to the very brink of ruin, and to make the labors of his whole
+lifetime come to naught. And he in bed here--with his feeble hands
+working desperately at the hem of the sheet, and his aching head
+throbbing unavailingly through the cruel, open-eyed watches of the night.
+He raged over the world's injustice and his own impotence; the thought
+was never absent from him--he was coming under the disastrous domination
+of the _idèe fixe_.
+
+He spoke of these things to Susan Bates with such an increasing frequency
+and insistency as almost to transfer the rack of them from his own brain
+to hers. Once or twice, in an interval of semi-delirium, he bewept the
+ruin not only of his business, but of himself and of his family and of
+all his belongings. He infected her with his own dread and panic; she saw
+his property dispersed, his home in others' hands, his family in the
+depths of despairing poverty.
+
+One morning she appeared at Roger's office; Minnie Peters accompanied
+her. The one carried a large leather bag in her hand; the other had a
+large brown-paper parcel under her arm.
+
+"Your poor father!" said Susan Bates, advancing straight towards Roger
+with moistened eyes and with a nervous tremor in her voice and body
+alike. She set her satchel on the corner of Roger's desk and began
+tugging at its catches. "You open yours too, Minnie," she said; and
+Minnie Peters began working at the knots in the cord that bound her stiff
+brown bundle with a tight-drawn tension. Roger looked at both his callers
+with a great surprise.
+
+"Poor David!" said Susan Bates, with her lips twitching; "to think of his
+toiling and slaving so many years, and of everything going all to pieces
+in the end, like this! It can't be! It sha'n't be!--not if I can help
+it."
+
+She thrust her hand into the top of Minnie Peter's package. She drew out
+a heavy folded document and followed it with others. "There! that's the
+abstract; and here are the leases, and here is the insurance." She threw
+out a sheaf of policies; the one on top was for ten thousand dollars. "I
+didn't know just what you would need; I brought everything connected with
+the whole building--here's the receipt for last year's taxes. Now, I want
+you to put a mortgage on it right away. It's clear, Mr. Bates says."
+
+Roger glanced at one of the leases and placed the building in an instant.
+It was a vast structure in the dry-goods district, occupied by half a
+dozen firms of the highest standing.
+
+Mrs. Bates now thrust her hand into her own bag. She drew it out time and
+time again, until she had covered the top of Roger's desk with packages
+of securities--bank stock, railroad bonds, State and county issues of all
+kinds; there was even one bright-green batch of water bonds from a far
+town in North Dakota.
+
+Roger looked up at her very gravely. "Is this with Mr. Bates's approval?"
+
+Susan Bates answered him pantingly, all a-tremble with nervous
+excitement. "Mr. Bates is a just man, and not an ungenerous man,
+but--but"--She clasped her hands and leaned forward anxiously. "Mr. Bates
+and I have always stepped along together. He has always done whatever I
+have asked him to do. He has never disappointed me. But--oh, Roger, he
+never knew your father in those early days; if he had, could he stand by
+and see him on the edge of ruin without making some effort to save him?"
+She waved her hand over the disorder of Roger's desk. "That's everything
+I've got; use as much of it as you need."
+
+She began to cry a little. Minnie Peters, who always cried when she
+could, pulled out her handkerchief and frankly sobbed aloud.
+
+Roger studied the two women with some perplexity and with a slight shade
+of pique.
+
+"It is true," he began, very proudly and much too coldly, "that the
+affairs of the Marshall & Belden Company are moving towards the hands of
+a receiver, but the affairs of David Marshall himself are in the hands of
+his son; and they were never in better condition than they are to-day."
+
+This was Roger's song of victory over his recent success with the largest
+operation (on behalf both of his father and of himself) that he had ever
+undertaken. It seemed as if all the world must know of that--must ring
+with it, in fact; yet it was this very hour which Benevolence had now
+chosen for the precipitation of her golden shower.
+
+Susan Bates gave a little gasp. "Then--then you don't need it?"
+
+"Never less," replied Roger, with a quivering nostril and a high, slow
+bow.
+
+Susan Bates looked sidewise at Minnie Peters and asked her to behave
+herself. But she gave a few hysterical sobs on her own part, and Minnie
+Peters echoed them with a faithful promptitude.
+
+"Just like a woman," thought Roger, as he sat alone after Susan Bates's
+departure. He drew a hundred lines on an imaginary sheet of paper with a
+dry pen. "Like a woman; yes," he added, under the promptings of a feeling
+for more exact justice, "a woman in ten thousand."
+
+A few mornings later, when this woman in ten thousand was standing in the
+bleak porch of the new house to await the return of her horses from their
+last walk up and down, another carriage slipped into its place and
+another woman alighted on the curbstone. Susan Bates immediately squared
+her shoulders, banished all expression from her face, and began the
+descent of the steps with her eyes fixed upon the gaps in the broken
+building line over the way.
+
+"That woman! She has never entered _my_ house, and she never shall; and
+she should never enter this."
+
+Statira Belden had come to do the decencies; Eliza Marshall received her
+with the grim inexpressiveness of a granite bowlder.
+
+"My husband is resting quietly to-day," she said, in response to Mrs.
+Belden's inquiries. He was--unconscious under chloral, after three nights
+of open-eyed torment.
+
+Mrs. Belden passed one of her large, smooth gloves over the other and
+praised the house.
+
+"It is one of the handsomest on the street," replied Eliza Marshall,
+firmly. "And one of the best built. We feel completely at home in it
+already."
+
+But, in truth, the poor soul was homesick, heartsick, as lost and forlorn
+as a shipwrecked sailor on the chill coast of Kamtchatka.
+
+Mrs. Belden smoothed down her yellow locks and deplored, in her thickly
+sweet accents, the unfortunate condition of the business.
+
+"My husband's own affairs are going very well," returned Eliza Marshall,
+looking forward with unblinking eyes. "My son has charge of them. There
+was a full account of his success in the Sunday paper."
+
+Her tone was one of brazen triumph. Yet Eliza Marshall abhorred
+speculation with all the dread of the middle-aged female conservative.
+One dollar through legitimate trade rather than ten through such paths as
+Roger had of late been so fearfully treading.
+
+Mrs. Belden had heard something of Truesdale's intended departure for the
+Orient. "He finds Chicago uncongenial, no doubt."
+
+"Truesdale is at home everywhere. He will have adventures everywhere. He
+is handsome. He is clever. He can interest wherever he chooses. Sometimes
+he interests too easily and too deeply; sometimes in spite of himself and
+to his own annoyance."
+
+Eliza Marshall shot out these remarks like bullets from behind a
+breastwork. At the end she set her jaws firmly, and stared at Statira
+Belden with a proud defiance. Many a night had Truesdale's courses wet
+her pillow with tears of sorrow and shame; she now wondered if it were
+really she herself who had just celebrated his profligacy, and had seemed
+to glory in it at that. She had surmised her son's disdain for the
+importunities of Gladys McKenna, and she had joined with him in a ringing
+derision when the Beldens had accused him of encouraging her in her folly
+that he might employ her as a spy upon the happenings in their house. "My
+son," she concluded, "will return at his own pleasure, and will always be
+welcome under his father's roof."
+
+Statira Belden's eyes sought the floor. It was she who had made it sure
+that knowledge of Truesdale's transgression should reach the ears of
+Susan Bates; yet her own son had just established relations with a
+"baroness" who still lingered behind on the scene of the late national
+festivities, and at the climax of an insane extravagance had been openly
+cast off by his family.
+
+"And Rosy?" said Statira Belden, presently, with a reconquered sweetness.
+"One would expect to find her home at such a time as this."
+
+Eliza Marshall planted her standard upon her breastwork, and flaunted it
+with a firm and magnificent spirit.
+
+"My daughter Rosamund will be with us inside of a week. She has been
+detained longer than she had expected among her husband's family." The
+old lady rose with a stiff, slow motion, and transferred a large panel
+photograph from the centre-table to Statira Belden's hands. "This
+reached us yesterday."
+
+It was Rosamund. Her proud and splendid young beauty was set off by a
+court-train, an immense bouquet, and a nodding group of ostrich-tips.
+
+"Presented at court!" exclaimed Statira Belden, involuntarily, and bit
+her tongue a second after.
+
+Eliza Marshall answered neither yes nor no. She let the photograph speak
+for itself.
+
+"Rosamund," she went on, presently, "may return a little too late for her
+first reception, but the others will be held here, and she will entertain
+a great deal during the winter."
+
+Statira Belden was cowed at last, and Eliza Marshall's heart beat high to
+see it. This was her only compensation for the tears shed over the
+delayed return of a selfish and unfilial daughter, for the anticipated
+ordeal of the gay social happenings which were to follow that return, for
+the besetting thought that some dread misfortune might displace all this
+future festivity by a worse alternative, and make the lightest diversion
+a black impossibility.
+
+"She kissed the Queen's hand?" palpitated Statira Belden with an interest
+that she could not stifle; and again Eliza Marshall answered neither yes
+nor no.
+
+Rosamund had not kissed the Queen's hand, but her husband's family had
+been so fascinated by her beauty, so amazed by her genius for dress, and
+so confounded by her boundless aplomb, that one of them had suggested
+that she attire herself in a costume which had served a daughter of the
+house at a Drawing-room some six months before, and others had demanded
+that she be photographed in it. This was the pleasantest impression
+that Rosy brought back of her husband's family--their generous and
+unbounded appreciation of herself.
+
+Her other impressions were less acute. Boxton Park itself she had found
+comfortable, but not at all splendid; and as for its occupants, they
+were, in the main, staid and serious people who were doing what they
+could to justify the favors that fortune had bestowed upon them. Rosy
+sometimes felt that, in general terms, they might have appreciated Jane
+quite as fully as they had appreciated her. They were not gay, they were
+not lively, they were not like Arthur. Paston had truly described
+himself as the youngest, and he was by far the most jovial and
+blithesome.
+
+Rosy had not delayed her return on account of any presentation at
+court--though the achievement of the photograph may have accounted for a
+few days more or less--but on account of the fox-hunting, which had
+completely fascinated her. Horse, habit, and country were all in perfect
+accord; her prosaic and hum-drum practice at home was now transmuted into
+the purest poetry, and under the promptings of this new afflatus she
+developed a grace and a daring which accomplished the final and
+irrevocable conquest of all her husband's family.
+
+Rosy's continued sojourn in England cost her husband his position and
+prospects in America, where he was not of enough importance to assume
+such liberties. But this mattered nothing to his wife. She had lived for
+more than a fortnight at the seat of a county family, she had breathed
+the air of deference that exists for the gentry of the shires, and she
+was far from any thought of a permanent submission to the rasping
+crudities of provincial America. She had already developed the fixed
+determination to return to London for the "season," to accomplish
+an actual presentation at court, and to make England her future home for
+the rest of her days.
+
+One thing more was lost by Rosamund's delay in Essex--all chance of a
+last recognition from her father. When she finally reached home he was in
+a state of slight delirium, and when he passed from that it was to enter
+into unconsciousness. His ideas ran incessantly on gifts, on
+philanthropic endeavor. To-day he built an asylum; to-morrow he endowed a
+hospital. He strewed promises over the counterpane with indefatigable
+hands, and babbled unending benefactions among his hot and harassing
+pillows. Jane, half mad with anguish and remorse, found an added pang in
+the recollection that during one of his conscious and least uncomfortable
+hours he had yielded to her solicitations and those of Susan Bates, and
+had set apart a certain portion of his estate, with the approval of
+Roger, for a collegiate building which was to bear his name. "He will be
+remembered now," said Jane, for all her poignant sorrow, and she was glad
+that Roger had co-operated to make this step a possibility. She tried not
+to see too plainly that her father had made no pretence of a keener sense
+of his duty towards the public, or of a kindlier disposition towards it.
+Whatever he had done was on personal grounds--for the pleasure of a
+daughter and of an old friend.
+
+One morning, a week after Rosamund's return, a bow of crape was hanging
+upon the door-bell, Susan Bates was busy with Eliza Marshall up-stairs
+over certain sombre-hued apparel, and Roger was writing down a list of
+names and addresses for Theodore Brower upon the dining-room table.
+
+"We must have eight out of this list," said Roger to Brower, "and we
+ought to know by night which of them can serve."
+
+"Whose names have you put down?" asked Jane, reaching for the paper. She
+read them over. "Give me that pencil." She wrote down half a dozen more.
+"There!" she said, with a sort of frenzied and towering pride, as she
+passed the sheet on to Brower. "Those are men that my father knew, and
+they are men who must help us now." Roger glanced at the names; each
+was a household word to every soul throughout the city. "Try
+_them_," said Jane to Brower, "and if any of them refuse you, they will
+have to refuse me later." And she walked straight out of the room,
+without turning her head an inch to right or left.
+
+"Shall I?" asked Brower, abashed.
+
+"Why not?" demanded Roger, with a laconic severity.
+
+Brower was a quiet, retiring fellow, and entered upon his day's work with
+a full consciousness of the ordeal. It meant to lean over the desks of
+bank presidents, to intrude upon the meetings of railway directors, to
+penetrate to the retiring-rooms of judges, to approach more than one of
+the magnates whom, with an imposing vagueness, we call "capitalists." But
+Brower, carrying the thought of Jane with him into all these presences,
+accomplished his task with modesty, tact, and discretion, and finally,
+from the few simple types of greatness that the town possesses, evolved a
+list which the pride of the dead man's daughter was willing to accept.
+
+The list of occupants of the carriages Jane made out herself. "In the
+first one, mother and Roger and Alice and her husband. In the second,
+Arthur and Rosy and Truesdale and me. In the third, Aunt Lydia and the
+Bateses--it will be full if Lottie and William both come. I can do
+_that_ much for Aunt Lyddy," concluded Jane, with a rueful yet whimsical
+smile.
+
+"Where do you put me?" asked Brower, with an inviolate sobriety. They
+were alone in the dining-room together.
+
+"In the fourth. You and Mr. Bingham and--"
+
+"I don't want to go in the carriage with Mr. Bingham," interrupted
+Brower.
+
+"Why, Theodore, what do you mean? Mr. Bingham is one of our best and
+oldest friends. Who is there that has been kinder to poor dear pa, and to
+ma, and to me--?"
+
+"Nor in any carriage occupied by--friends," he went on, in the same tense
+undertone. He took a firm grip on the back of the chair beside him; Jane
+saw the swelling veins of his hand and wondered what it all might mean.
+"I want to go in one of the carriages for the family. I want to go in the
+carriage that _you_ go in. Do you understand me?"
+
+A sudden consciousness had swept over him, with the mention of Bingham's
+name, that he himself, as well as any other, filled measurably the dead
+man's ideal of a husband for one of his daughters. He had waited too long
+already before making this discovery; he must not wait so long before
+declaring it.
+
+She did not understand from his voice, which was strained and muffled to
+conceal an emotion all unconcealable. But she understood from his eyes,
+which looked into hers with an immense and endless kindness, and from his
+hand, which had left its heroic clutch upon the chair to take a very
+human hold upon the hand which hung so limply by her side. "Do you
+understand me?" he asked again; and his voice was gentler than before.
+
+"I do," answered Jane, feebly, and her head fell upon his shoulder.
+Nothing ever seemed to happen to her as to anybody else; but if happiness
+chose to come to her swathed in mourning bands, none the less kindly and
+thankfully must it be welcomed. And as she reclined against him she
+breathed a sigh of thanks that not he, but Bingham, had been concerned in
+the laying of her ill-omened corner-stone.
+
+He stood beside her at the open grave, and supported her there, too, as
+the rattling sand and gravel rained down upon the coffin. The grave had
+been set round with evergreen sprays, and the raw mound of earth beside
+it had been concealed in the same kindly fashion. But Jane, in a
+self-inflicted penance, would spare herself no pang; she clutched
+Brower's arm and stood there, motionless, until the grave had been filled
+in and the overplus of earth had been shaped above it. "Put those lilies
+at the head," she directed; "they were from Mrs. Bates." And then she
+walked away.
+
+She read the next day, with a chastened satisfaction, the newspaper
+accounts of her father's career. A new and careless public was carried
+back once more to the early day whose revivification is always attempted
+for a preoccupied and unsympathetic community upon the passing away of
+another old settler. Then the frontier village lifts once more its
+bedraggled forlornness from the slime of its humble beginnings, and the
+lingering presence of the red man is again made manifest upon the grassy
+horizon. Again the struggles of the early days are rehearsed, again fire
+deals out its awful devastation, and once more the city grows from an
+Indian village to a metropolis of two millions within the lifetime of a
+single individual.
+
+One morning, the second after the funeral, Truesdale stood at the front
+parlor window, while the first snow-storm of the season swirled over the
+long reach of the street and across the straggling paths that traversed
+the wide stretches of broken prairie land round about. On the chair
+beside him was a newspaper containing the statement that the affairs of
+the Marshall & Belden Company were to be wound up, all thought of
+continuing the business having been abandoned. And on the table beside
+him lay the cards which announced the marriage of Bertie Patterson.
+
+"No business," he said; "no bride." He feigned to himself that he had
+really designed going into his father's office, and that he had had a
+serious intention of asking Bertie Patterson to become his wife. He
+looked out through the wide, clear pane, and thought of the view, of the
+weather, of the hideous hubbub of the whole town. "Ouf! What a prospect,
+what a climate, what a human hodge-podge! Everything unites for me in
+saying--Japan."
+
+David Marshall's will was opened this same day. It made Japan possible
+for Truesdale, and England possible for Rosamund. A codicil, added in
+Roger's hand at the latest practicable moment, revoked the bequest for a
+collegiate building and transferred the whole amount of it directly to
+Jane.
+
+"This mustn't make any difference," said Jane to Brower. "It shall go for
+that, after all. My father was a good man, and he deserves to be
+remembered."
+
+Brower bowed quietly. He appreciated the gravity of this their joint
+sacrifice, but he would not dispute the justness of it.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of With the Procession, by Henry B. Fuller
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