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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/8891-8.txt b/8891-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0ef34cb --- /dev/null +++ b/8891-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9899 @@ +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 + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH THE PROCESSION *** + +***** This file should be named 8891-8.txt or 8891-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/8/8/9/8891/ + +Produced by Distributed Proofreaders + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm +concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared +with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project +Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support. + +Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. +unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. diff --git a/8891-8.zip b/8891-8.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..7699cf2 --- /dev/null +++ b/8891-8.zip diff --git a/8891.txt b/8891.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d618f50 --- /dev/null +++ b/8891.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9899 @@ +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: ASCII + +*** 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 "Bale"; +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 employes 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 debut. + +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 facade; 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 regime. 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 poudre_ 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 role 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 _Aufklaerung_ 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 chateaux 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 entree 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, perche 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 +role--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 role 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 role 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 +cafe--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 +cafe, 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 clientele, 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 cafe 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 cafe 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 cafe 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 debut, 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 Hotel 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 protegee. 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 Marechal 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 boutonnieres--but Brower wore no boutonniere; +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 _outre_ 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 facade 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 boutonniere--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 role 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 naive; 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 naivete 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 _a 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 wreathed 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 +regime 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 fidele_," she would moan in a deep contralto +voice, as she drew her needle slowly in and out; "_toujours fidele_." She +paused lingeringly on the second syllable of _toujours_ and on the +middle syllable of _fidele_, 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 _ingenue_ 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 +_expose_ 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 _role_; "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, _la-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 _arriere-pensee_ 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 denouement; no novel of Veron, of +Belot, of Montepin 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 _metier_. 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 regime, +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 fidele; toujours fidele!_" + +"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 fidele!_" 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 _idee 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 + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH THE PROCESSION *** + +***** This file should be named 8891.txt or 8891.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/8/8/9/8891/ + +Produced by Distributed Proofreaders + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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Fuller + +Release Date: September, 2005 [EBook #8891] +[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] +[This file was first posted on August 21, 2003] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THE 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 "Bale"; +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 employes 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 debut. + +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 facade; 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 regime. 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 poudre_ 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 role 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 _Aufklaerung_ 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 chateaux 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 entree 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, perche 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 +role--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 role 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 role 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 +cafe--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 +cafe, 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 clientele, 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 cafe 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 cafe 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 cafe 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 debut, 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 Hotel 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 protegee. 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 Marechal 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 boutonnieres--but Brower wore no boutonniere; +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 _outre_ 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 distresssed +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 facade 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 boutonniere--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 go'od-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 role 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 naive; 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 naivete 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 _a 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 wreathed 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 +regime 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 fidele_," she would moan in a deep contralto +voice, as she drew her needle slowly in and out; "_toujours fidele_." She +paused lingeringly on the second syllable of _toujours_ and on the +middle syllable of _fidele_, 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 _ingenue_ 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 +attitdues 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 +_expose_ 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 _role_; "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, _la-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 _arriere-pensee_ 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 denouement; no novel of Veron, of +Belot, of Montepin 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 _metier_. 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 regime, +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 fidele; toujours fidele!_" + +"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 fidele!_" 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 _idee 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 indivdual. + +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 + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH THE PROCESSION *** + +This file should be named 7wpro10.txt or 7wpro10.zip +Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 7wpro11.txt +VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 7wpro10a.txt + +Produced by Distributed Proofreaders + +Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US +unless a copyright notice is included. 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Do not change or edit the +header without written permission. + +Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the +eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is +important information about your specific rights and restrictions in +how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: With the Procession + +Author: Henry B. Fuller + +Release Date: September, 2005 [EBook #8891] +[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] +[This file was first posted on August 21, 2003] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THE 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 distresssed +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 go'od-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 +attitdues 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 indivdual. + +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 + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH THE PROCESSION *** + +This file should be named 8wpro10.txt or 8wpro10.zip +Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 8wpro11.txt +VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 8wpro10a.txt + +Produced by Distributed Proofreaders + +Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US +unless a copyright notice is included. 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