CHAPTER I

LIFE AND

GABRIELLA

THE STORY OF A WOMAN'S COURAGE

BY

ELLEN GLASGOW

FRONTISPIECE

BY

C. ALLAN GILBERT

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1916

CONTENTS

BOOK FIRST--THE AGE OF FAITH

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Presents a Shameless Heroine 3

II. Poor Jane 30

III. A Start in Life 61

IV. Mirage 90

V. The New World 122

VI. The Old Serpent 148

VII. Motherhood 176

BOOK SECOND--THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE

I. Disenchantment. 211

II. A Second Start in Life 241

III. Work 274

IV. The Dream and the Years 300

V. Success 331

VI. Discoveries 368

VII. Readjustments 406

VIII. The Test 444

IX. The Past 476

X. Dream and the Reality 501

BOOK FIRST

THE AGE OF FAITH

CHAPTER I

PRESENTS A SHAMELESS HEROINE

After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw

a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour. On the

window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a pot of blue hyacinths

stood in a cracked china plate, and as the sunlight shone into the room,

the scent of the blossoms floated to the corner where Gabriella was

patiently pulling basting threads out of the hem of a skirt. For a

minute her capable hands stopped at their work, and raising her smooth

dark head she looked compassionately at her sister Jane, who was

sitting, like a frozen image of martyrdom, in the middle of the long

horsehair sofa. Three times within the last twelve months Jane had fled

from her husband's roof to the protection of her widowed mother, a weak

person of excellent ancestry, who could hardly have protected a sparrow

had one taken refuge beneath her skirt. Twice before Mrs. Carr had wept

over her daughter's woes and returned her, a sullen saint, to the arms

of the discreetly repentant Charley; but to-day, while the four older

children were bribed to good behaviour with bread and damson preserves

in the pantry, and the baby was contentedly playing with his rubber ring

in his mother's arms, Gabriella had passionately declared that "Jane

must never, never go back!" Nothing so dreadful as this had ever

happened before, for the repentant Charley had been discovered making

love to his wife's dressmaker, a pretty French girl whom Jane had

engaged for her spring sewing because she had more "style" than had

fallen to the austerely virtuous lot of the Carr's regular seamstress,

Miss Folly Hatch. "I might have known she was too pretty to be good,"

moaned Jane, while Mrs. Carr, in her willow rocking-chair by the window,

wiped her reddened eyelids on the strip of cambric ruffling she was

hemming.

Unmoved among them the baby beat methodically on his mother's breast

with his rubber ring, as indifferent to her sobs as to the intermittent

tearful "coos" of his grandmother. He had a smooth bald head, fringed,

like the head of a very old man, with pale silken hair that was almost

white in the sunshine, and his eyes, as expressionless as marbles,

stared over the pot of hyacinths at a sparrow perched against the deep

blue sky on the red brick wall of the opposite house. From beneath his

starched little skirt his feet, in pink crocheted shoes, protruded with

a forlorn and helpless air as if they hardly belonged to him.

"Oh, my poor child, what are we going to do?" asked Mrs. Carr in a

resigned voice as she returned to her hemming.

"There's nothing to do, mother," answered Jane, without lifting her eyes

from the baby's head, without moving an inch out of the position she had

dropped into when she entered the room. Then, after a sobbing pause, she

defined in a classic formula her whole philosophy of life: "It wasn't my

fault," she said.

"But one can always do something if it's only to scream," rejoined

Gabriella with spirit.

"I wouldn't scream," replied Jane, while the pale cast of resolution

hardened her small flat features, "not--not if he killed me. My one

comfort," she added pathetically, "is that only you and mother know how

he treats me."

Her pretty vacant face with its faded bloom resembled a pastel portrait

in which the artist had forgotten to paint an expression. "Poor Jane

Gracey," as she was generally called, had wasted the last ten years in a

futile effort to hide the fact of an unfortunate marriage beneath an

excessively cheerful manner. She talked continually because talking

seemed to her the most successful way of "keeping up an appearance."

Though everybody who knew her knew also that Charley Gracey neglected

her shamefully, she spent twelve hours of the twenty-four pretending

that she was perfectly happy. At nineteen she had been a belle and

beauty of the willowy sort; but at thirty she had relapsed into one of

the women whom men admire in theory and despise in reality. She had

started with a natural tendency to clinging sweetness; as the years went

on the sweetness, instead of growing fainter, had become almost cloying,

while the clinging had hysterically tightened into a clutch. Charley

Gracey, who had married her under the mistaken impression that her type

was restful for a reforming rake, (not realizing that there is nothing

so mentally disturbing as a fool) had been changed by marriage from a

gay bird of the barnyard into a veritable hawk of the air. His behaviour

was the scandal of the town, yet the greater his sins, the intenser grew

Jane's sweetness, the more twining her hold. "Nobody will ever think of

blaming you, darling," said Mrs. Carr consolingly. "You have behaved

beautifully from the beginning. We all know what a perfect wife you have

been."

"I've tried to do my duty even if Charley failed in his," replied the

perfect wife, unfastening the hooks of her small heliotrope wrap trimmed

with tarnished silver passementerie. Above her short flaxen "bang" she

wore a crumpled purple hat ornamented with bunches of velvet pansies;

and though it was two years old, and out of fashion at a period when

fashions changed less rapidly, it lent an air of indecent festivity to

her tearful face. Her youth was already gone, for her beauty had been of

the fragile kind that breaks early, and her wan, aristocratic features

had settled into the downward droop which comes to the faces of people

who habitually "expect the worst."

"I know, Jane, I know," murmured Mrs. Carr, dropping her thimble as she

nervously tried to hasten her sewing. "But don't you think it would be a

comfort, dear, to have the advice of a man about Charley? Won't you let

me send Marthy for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"

"Oh, mother, I couldn't. It would kill me to have everybody know I'm

unhappy!" wailed Jane, breaking down.

"But everybody knows anyway, Jane," said Gabriella, sticking the point

of her scissors into a strip of buckram, for she was stiffening the

bottom of the skirt after the fashion of the middle 'nineties.

"Of course I'm foolishly sensitive," returned Jane, while she lifted the

baby from her lap and placed him in a pile of cushions by the deep arm

of the sofa, where he sat imperturbably gazing at the blue sky and the

red wall from which the sparrow had flown. "You can never understand my

feelings because you are so different."

"Gabriella is not married," observed Mrs. Carr, with sentimental

finality. "But I'm sure, Jane--I'm just as sure as I can be of anything

that it wouldn't do a bit of harm to speak to Cousin Jimmy Wrenn. Men

know so much more than women about such matters."

In her effort to recover her thimble she dropped her spool of thread,

which rolled under the sofa on which Jane was sitting, and while she

waited for Gabriella to find it, she gazed pensively into the almost

deserted street where the slender shadows of poplar trees slanted over

the wet cobblestones. Though Mrs. Carr worked every instant of her time,

except the few hours when she lay in bed trying to sleep, and the few

minutes when she sat at the table trying to eat, nothing that she began

was ever finished until Gabriella took it out of her hands. She did her

best, for she was as conscientious in her way as poor Jane, yet through

some tragic perversity of fate her best seemed always to fall short of

the simplest requirements of life. Her face, like Jane's, was long and

thin, with a pathetic droop at the corners of the mouth, a small bony

nose, always slightly reddened at the tip, and faded blue eyes beneath

an even row of little flat round curls which looked as if they were

plastered on her forehead.

Thirty-three years before, in the romantic and fiery 'sixties, she had

married dashing young Gabriel Carr for no better reason apparently than

that she was falling vaguely in love with love; and the marriage, which

had been one of reckless passion on his side, had been for her scarcely

more than the dreamer's hesitating compromise with reality. Passion,

which she had been taught to regard as an unholy attribute implanted by

the Creator, with inscrutable wisdom, in the nature of man, and left out

of the nature of woman, had never troubled her gentle and affectionate

soul; and not until the sudden death of her husband did she begin even

remotely to fall in love with the man. But when he was once safely dead

she worshipped his memory with an ardour which would have seemed to her

indelicate had he been still alive. For sixteen years she had worn a

crape veil on her bonnet, and she still went occasionally, after the

morning service was over on Sunday, to place fresh flowers on his grave.

Now that his "earthly nature," against which she had struggled so

earnestly while he was living, was no longer in need of the pious

exorcisms with which she had treated its frequent manifestations, she

remembered only the dark beauty of his face, his robust and vigorous

youth, the tenderness and gallantry of his passion. For her daughters

she had drawn an imaginary portrait of him which combined the pagan

beauty of Antinous with the militant purity of Saint Paul; and this

romantic blending of the heathen and the Presbyterian virtues had passed

through her young imagination into the awakening soul of Gabriella.

By the town at large Mrs. Carr's sorrow was alluded to as "a beautiful

grief," yet so deeply rooted in her being was the instinct to twine,

that for the first few years of her bereavement she had simply sat in

her widow's weeds, with her rent paid by Cousin Jimmy Wrenn and her

market bills settled monthly by Uncle Beverly Blair, and waited

patiently for some man to come and support her.

When no man came, and Uncle Beverly died of a stroke of apoplexy with

his will unsigned, she had turned, with the wasted energy of the unfit

and the incompetent, to solve the inexplicable problem of indigent

ladyhood. And it was at this crucial instant that Becky Bollingbroke had

put her awful question: "Have you made up your mind, Fanny, what you are

going to do?" That was twelve years ago, but deep down in some secret

cave of Fanny's being the ghastly echo of the words still reverberated

through the emptiness and the silence.

"Don't you think, darling," she pleaded now, as she had pleaded to Becky

on that other dreadful occasion, "that we had better send immediately

for Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"

"I--I can't think," gasped Jane, "but you may if you want to, mother."

"Send, Gabriella," said Mrs. Carr quickly, and she added tenderly, while

Gabriella dropped her work and ran to the outside kitchen for Marthy,

the coloured drudge, "you will feel so much better, Jane, after you have

had his advice."

Then at the sight of Jane's stricken face, which had turned blue as if

from a sudden chill, she hurriedly opened the drawer of her sewing

machine, and taking out a bottle of camphor she kept there, began

tremulously rubbing her daughter's forehead. As she did so, she

remembered, with the startling irrelevance of the intellectually

untrained, the way Jane had looked in her veil and orange blossoms on

the day of her wedding.

"I wonder what on earth we have done to deserve our troubles?" she found

herself thinking while she put the stopper back into the bottle and

returned to her sewing.

"Marthy has gone, mother," said Gabriella, with her cheerful air as she

came back into the room, "and I shut the children in the laundry with

Dolly who is doing the washing."

"I hope they won't make themselves sick with preserves," remarked Jane,

with the first dart of energy she had shown. "Perhaps I'd better go and

see. If Fanny eats too much we'll be up all night with her."

"I told Dolly not to let them stuff," answered Gabriella, as she sat

down by the window and threaded her needle. She was a tall, dark girl,

slender and straight as a young poplar, with a face that was frank and

pleasant rather than pretty, and sparkling brown eyes which turned

golden and grew bright as swords when she was angry. Seen by the strong

light of the window, her face showed sallow in tone, with a certain

nobility about the bony structure beneath the soft girlish flesh, and a

look of almost stern decision in the square chin and in the full rich

curve of the mouth. Her hair, which was too fine and soft to show its

thickness, drooped from its parting at the side in a dark wing over her

forehead, where it shadowed her arched black eyebrows and the clear

sweet gravity of her eyes. As she bent over her sewing the thin pure

lines of her body had a look of arrested energy, of relaxed but

exuberant vitality.

"You won't go to the dance to-night, will you, Gabriella?" inquired Mrs.

Carr nervously.

"No, I'm not going," answered the girl regretfully, for she loved

dancing, and her white organdie dress, trimmed with quillings of blue

ribbon, lay upstairs on the bed. "I'll never dance again if only Jane

won't go back to Charley. I'll work my fingers to the bone to help her

take care of the children."

"I'll never, never go back," chanted Jane with feverish passion.

"But I thought Arthur Peyton was coming for you," said Mrs. Carr. "He

will be so disappointed."

"Oh, he'll understand--he'll have to," replied Gabriella carelessly.

The sunshine faded slowly from the hyacinths on the window-sill, and

drawing her crocheted cape of purple wool closer about her, Mrs. Carr

moved a little nearer the fireplace. Outside the March wind was blowing

with a melancholy sound up the long straight street, and rocking the

glossy boughs of an old magnolia tree in the yard From the shining

leaves of the tree a few drops of water fell on the brick pavement,

where several joyous sparrows were drinking, and farther off, as bright

as silver in the clear wind, a solitary church spire rose above the

huddled roofs of the town. When the wind lulled, as it did now and then,

a warm breath seemed to stir in the sunshine, which grew suddenly

brighter, while a promise of spring floated like a faint provocative

scent on the air. And this scent, so vague, so roving, that it was like

the ghostly perfume of flowers, stole at last into the memory, and made

the old dream of youth and the young grow restless at the call of Life,

which sang to the music of flutes in the brain. But the wind, rising

afresh, drove the spirit of spring from the street, and swept the broken

leaves of the magnolia tree over the drenched grass to the green-painted

iron urns on either side of the steps.

The house, a small brick dwelling, set midway of an expressionless row

and wearing on its front a look of desiccated gentility, stood in one

of those forgotten streets where needy gentlewomen do "light

housekeeping" in an obscure hinterland of respectability. Hill Street,

which had once known fashion, and that only yesterday, as old ladies

count, had sunk at last into a humble state of decay. Here and there the

edges of porches had crumbled; grass was beginning to sprout by the

curbstone; and the once comfortable homes had opened their doors to

boarders or let their large, high-ceiled rooms to the impoverished

relicts of Confederate soldiers. Only a few blocks away the stream of

modern progress, sweeping along Broad Street, was rapidly changing the

old Southern city into one of those bustling centres of activity which

the press of the community agreed to describe as "a metropolis"; but

this river of industrialism was spanned by no social bridge connecting

Hill Street and its wistful relicts with the statelier dignities and the

more ephemeral gaieties of the opposite side. To be really "in society"

one must cross over, either for good and all, or in the dilapidated

"hack" which carried Gabriella to the parties of her schoolmates in West

Franklin Street.

For in the middle 'nineties, before social life in Richmond had become

both complicated and expensive, it was still possible for a girl in

Gabriella's position--provided, of course, she came of a "good

family"--to sew all day over the plain sewing of her relatives, and in

the evening to reign as the acknowledged belle of a ball. "Society," it

is true, did not reach any longer, except in the historic sense, to Hill

Street; but the inhabitants of Hill Street, if they were young and

energetic, not infrequently made triumphant excursions into "society."

Though Gabriella was poor and sewed for her living, she had been, from

the moment she left school, one of the most popular girls in town. To be

sure, she was neither so pretty as Florrie Spencer nor so clever as

Julia Caperton, but in the words of Julia's brother Algernon, she was

"the sort you could count on." Even in her childhood it had become the

habit of those about her to count on Gabriella. Without Gabriella, her

mother was fond of saying, it would have been impossible to keep a roof

over their heads.

Twelve years before, when they had moved into the house in Hill Street,

Mrs. Carr had accepted from Jimmy Wrenn the rent of the first floor and

the outside kitchen, which was connected with the back porch by a

winding brick walk, overgrown with wild violets, while the upper story

was let to two elderly spinsters, bearing the lordly, though fallen,

name of Peterborough. These spinsters, like Mrs. Carr, spent their lives

in a beautiful and futile pretence--the pretence of keeping up an

appearance. They also took in the plain sewing of their richer

relatives, who lived in Franklin Street, and sent them little trays of

sweet things as soon as the midday dinner was over on Sunday. Sometimes

they would drop in to see Mrs. Carr just before supper was ready, and

then they would pretend that they lived on tea and toast because they

were naturally "light eaters," and that they sewed all day, not for the

money, but because they liked to have "something to do with their hands"

They were tall thin women in organdie caps and black alpaca dresses made

with long basques which showed a greenish cast in the daylight. The

walls of their rooms were covered with family portraits of the colonial

period, and Mrs. Carr, who had parted with most of her treasures, often

wondered how they had preserved so many proofs of a distinguished

descent. Even her silver had gone--first the quaint old service with the

Bolton crest, which had belonged to her mother; then, one by one, the

forks and spoons; and, last of all, Gabriella's silver mug, which was

carried, wrapped in a shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell. She was

a woman who loved inanimate things with the passion which other women

give only to children, and a thousand delicate fibres of sentiment knit

her soul to the portraits on the wall, to the furniture with which she

lived, to the silver and glass that had once belonged to her mother.

When one after one these things went from her, she felt as if the very

roots of her being were torn up from the warm familiar earth in which

they had grown. "There's nothing left in the parlour that I shouldn't be

ashamed to have your grandmother look at," she had once confessed to her

daughters.

Seen by the light of history, this parlour, in which so much of

Gabriella's childhood was spent, was not without interest as an archaic

survival of the fundamental errors of the mid-Victorian mind. The walls

were covered with bottle-green paper on which endless processions of

dwarfed blue peacocks marched relentlessly toward an embossed

border--the result of an artistic frenzy of the early 'eighties. Neither

Mrs. Carr nor Jimmy Wrenn, who paid the rent, had chosen this paper, but

having been left on the dealer's hands, it had come under the eye of the

landlord, who, since he did not have to live with it had secured it at a

bargain. Too unused to remonstrance to make it effective, Mrs. Carr had

suffered the offending decoration in meekness, while Jimmy, having a

taste for embossment, honestly regarded the peacocks as "handsome."

From the centre of the ceiling a massive gilt chandelier, elaborately

festooned with damaged garlands, shed, when it was lighted, a dim and

troubled gloom down on the threadbare Axminster carpet. Above the white

marble mantelpiece, the old French mirror, one of the few good things

left over from a public sale of Mrs. Carr's possessions, reflected a

pair of bronze candelabra with crystal pendants, and a mahogany clock,

which had kept excellent time for half a century and then had stopped

suddenly one day while Marthy was cleaning. In the corner, between the

door and the window, there was a rosewood bookcase, with the bare

shelves hidden behind plaited magenta silk, and directly above it hung

an engraving of a group of amiable children feeding fish in a pond.

Across the room, over the walnut whatnot, a companion picture

represented the same group of children scattering crumbs before a polite

brood of chickens in a barnyard. Between the windows a third engraving

immortalized the "Burial of Latané" in the presence of several sad and

resigned ladies in crinolines, while the sofa on which Jane sat was

presided over by a Sully portrait of the beautiful Angelica Carr,

wearing a white scarf on her head and holding a single rose in her hand.

This portrait and a Saint Memin drawing of Mrs. Carr's grandfather, the

Reverend Bartholomew Berkeley as a young man in a high stock, were the

solitary existing relics of that consecrated past when Fanny Berkeley

was "not brought up to do anything."

To Mrs. Carr, whose mind was so constituted that any change in her

surroundings produced a sensation of shock, the room was hallowed by the

simple fact that she had lived in it for a number of years. That an

object or a custom had existed in the past appeared to her to be an

incontestible reason why it should continue to exist in the present. It

was distressing to her to be obliged to move a picture or to alter the

position of a piece of furniture, and she had worn one shape of bonnet

and one style of hairdressing, slightly modified to suit the changing

fashions, for almost twenty years. Her long pale face, her pensive blue

eyes, and her look of anxious sweetness, made a touching picture of

feminine incompetence; and yet it was from this pallid warmth, this

gentle inefficiency of soul, that the buoyant spirit of Gabriella had

sprung.

For Gabriella was the incarnation of energy. From the moment of her

birth when, in the words of her negro "mammy" she had looked "as peart

as life," she had begun her battle against the enveloping twin powers of

decay and inertia. To the intense secret mortification of her mother,

who had prayed for a second waxlike infant after the fashion of poor

Jane, she had been a notoriously ugly baby (almost as ugly as her Aunt

Becky Bollingbroke who had never married), and as she grew up, this

ugliness was barely redeemed by what Jane, in her vague way, described

as "the something else in her face." According to Cousin Jimmy, who

never recognized charm unless its manifestations were soft and purring,

this "something else" was merely "a sunny temper"; and one of the

constant afflictions of Gabriella's childhood was overhearing her mother

remark to visitors: "No, she isn't so pretty as poor Jane, but, as

Cousin Jimmy tells us, she is blessed with a sunny temper."

"Give me that ruffle, mother, and I'll whip the lace on while we're

waiting," she said now, laying aside the skirt of her Easter dress, and

stretching out her hand for the strip of cambric in her mother's lap.

But Mrs. Carr did not hear, for she was gazing, with the concentrated

stare of Jane's baby, at a beautiful old lady who was walking slowly

through the faint sunshine on the opposite pavement.

"I wonder where Mrs. Peyton can be coming from in her best dress?" she

remarked, forgetting Jane for an instant while her sense of tragedy

yielded to the keener impulse of curiosity.

"She never goes anywhere but to church or to the Old Ladies' home,"

replied Gabriella. "Arthur says she hasn't paid a call since her

husband's death."

"Well, I haven't made one, except of course to my relatives, for fifteen

years," rejoined Mrs. Carr a trifle tartly. Then her manner lost its

unusual asperity, and she added excitedly, "They're coming now, Jane.

There's Cousin Jimmy and he's bringing Cousin Pussy and Uncle

Meriweather!"

"Oh, mother, I can't possibly see them! I feel as if it would kill me!"

cried Jane in desperation.

"Give her the camphor, mother," said Gabriella with grim humour as she

went to open the door.

"Brace yourself, my darling. They are coming," pleaded Mrs. Carr, as she

slipped her arm under Jane's head. At the first hint of any excitement

she invariably lost her presence of mind and became distracted; and

Jane's hysterical outbursts never failed to convince her, though they

usually left the more skeptical Gabriella unmoved. "Don't you think you

would feel better if you lay back on the pillows?" she urged.

Then the bell rang, and before Jane could swallow her sobs, her sister

ushered in Jimmy and Pussy Wrenn, who were closely followed by the

ponderous figure of Uncle Meriweather, a gouty but benign old gentleman,

whose jet-black eyebrows and white imperial gave him a misleading

military air.

"Well, well, my dear, what's this I hear about Charley?" demanded Cousin

Jimmy, whose sprightly manner was never sprightlier than in the hour of

tragedy or the house of mourning. "What does he mean by letting you run

away from him?"

"I've done my duty by Charley. I've never, never failed in my duty!"

wept Jane, breaking down on Pussy's tender bosom, and waking the

sleeping baby.

"We know, darling, we know," said Pussy, patting Jane's shoulder, while

Jimmy drew a white silk handkerchief from his pocket, and hid his face

under the pretence of blowing his nose.

To see a woman cry never failed to wring a sympathetic tear from Jimmy.

Though he was a man of hard common sense, possessed of an inflexible

determination to make money, there was a soft spot inside of him which

was reached only by the distress of one of the opposite sex. The

suffering--particularly the financial suffering--of men left him

unmoved. He could foreclose a mortgage or press a debt (as long as the

debtor's wife or daughter did not appeal to him) as well as another; but

the instant a skirt fluttered on the horizon that soft something inside

of him appeared, as he expressed it, "to give way." Apart from their

afflictions, he had an eye, he used to boast, for but one woman in the

world, and she, thank God, was his wife. Handsome, portly, full-blooded,

and slightly overfed, he had let Pussy twine him about her little finger

ever since the afternoon when he had first seen her, small, trim, and

with "a way with her," at the age of six.

"Poor, poor child," said Pussy, cuddling Jane and the baby together

against her sympathetic bosom. "Something must be done, Cousin Fanny.

Something must be done, as Mr. Wrenn said on the way down, if it's only

for the satisfaction of letting Charley know what we think of him."

"We've got to put down our pride and take some step," declared Jimmy,

wondering vaguely how he could have forgotten the spirited utterance his

wife attributed to him. "I'm all for the authority of the husband, of

course, and the sanctity of the home, and everything according to the

Bible and all that--but, bless my soul, there's got to be a limit to

what a woman is expected to stand. There're some things, and I know

Uncle Meriweather will agree with me, that it isn't in human nature to

put up with."

"If I were forty years younger I'd call him out and give him a whipping

he wouldn't forget in a jiffy," blustered Uncle Meriweather, feebly

violent. "There's no way of defending a lady in these Godforsaken days.

Why, I remember when I was a boy, my poor father--God bless him!--you

recollect him, don't you Fanny?--never used a walking stick in his life

and could read print without glasses at ninety--"

"Making love to the dressmaker," pursued Jimmy, whose righteous anger

refused to be turned aside from its end.

"Don't you think, Cousin Fanny," whispered Pussy, "that Gabriella had

better leave the room?"

"Gabriella? Why, how on earth can we spare her?" Mrs. Carr whispered

back rather nervously. Then, beneath Pussy's compelling glance, she

added timidly: "Hadn't you better go, darling, and see what the children

are doing?"

"They are playing in the laundry," replied Gabriella reassuringly. "I

told Dolly not to let them go out of her sight."

"She knows so much already for her age," murmured Mrs. Carr

apologetically to Pussy.

"I don't know what Mr. Wrenn will think of your staying, dear," said

Pussy, smiling archly at the girl. "Mr. Wrenn, I was just saying that I

didn't know what you would think of Gabriella's staying in the room."

Jimmy's large handsome face, with its look of perpetual innocence--the

incorruptible innocence of a man who has never imagined anything--turned

helplessly in the direction of his wife. All things relating to

propriety came, he felt instinctively, within the natural sphere of

woman, and to be forced, on the spur of the moment, to decide a delicate

question of manners, awoke in him the dismay of one who sees his

accustomed prop of authority beginning to crumble. Surely Pussy knew

best about things like that! He would as soon have thought of

interfering with her housekeeping as of instructing her in the details

of ladylike conduct. And, indeed, he had not observed that Gabriella was

in the room until his wife, for her own purpose, had adroitly presented

the fact to his notice.

"Gabriella in the room?" he repeated in perplexity. "Why, you'd better

go, hadn't you, Gabriella? Oughtn't she to go, Pussy?"

"Just as you think best, dear, but it seems to me--"

"Certainly she ought to go," said Uncle Meriweather decisively. "The

less women and girls know about such matters, the better. I don't

understand, Fanny, how you could possibly have consented to Gabriella's

being present."

"I didn't consent, Uncle Meriweather," protested poor Mrs. Carr, who

could not bear the mildest rebuke without tears; "I only said to Pussy

that Gabriella knew a great deal more already than she ought to, and I'm

sure I'm not to blame for it. If I'd had my way she would have been just

as sheltered as other girls."

"Don't cry, mother, it isn't your fault," said Gabriella. "Uncle

Meriweather, if you make mother cry I'll never forgive you. How can she

help all these dreadful things going on?"

She was sensible, she was composed, she was perfectly sweet about it;

but, and this fact made Pussy gasp with dismay, she did not budge an

inch from her position. With her clear grave eyes, which lost their

sparkle when she grew serious, and her manner of eager sympathy, she

appeared, indeed, to be the only one in the room who was capable of

facing the situation with frankness. That she meant to face it to the

end, Pussy could not doubt while she looked at her.

"Oh, it doesn't matter about Gabriella. She knows everything," said

Jane, with the prickly sweetness of suffering virtue.

"But she's a young girl--young girls oughtn't to hear such things,"

argued Uncle Meriweather, feeling helplessly that something was wrong

with the universe, and that, since it was different from anything he had

ever known in the past, he was unable to cope with it. Into his eyes,

gentle and bloodshot above his fierce white moustache--the eyes of one

who has never suffered the painful process of thinking things out, but

has accepted his opinions as unquestioningly as he has accepted his

religion or the cut of his clothes--there came the troubled look of one

who is struggling against forces that he does not understand. For

Gabriella was serious. There was not the slightest hope in the disturbed

mind of Uncle Meriweather that she was anything but perfectly serious.

Caprice, being a womanly quality, was not without a certain charm for

him. He was quite used to it; he knew how to take it; he had been taught

to recognize it from his childhood up. It was pretty, it was playful;

and his mind, if so ponderous a vehicle could indulge in such activity,

was fond of play. But after the first perplexed minute or two he had

relinquished forever the hope that Gabriella was merely capricious.

Clearly the girl knew what she was talking about; and this knowledge, so

surprising in one of her age and sex, gave him a strange dreamy sense of

having just awakened from sleep.

"I must say I like girls to be girls, Fanny," he pursued testily; "I

reckon I'm only an old fogy, but I like girls to be girls. When a woman

loses her innocence, she loses her greatest charm in the eyes of a

man--of the right sort of a man. Pluck the peach with the bloom on it,

my poor father used to say. He didn't believe in all this new-fangled

nonsense about the higher education of women--none of his daughters

could do more I than read and write and spell after a fashion, and yet

look what wives and mothers they made! Pokey married three times, and

was the mother of fourteen children, nine of them sons. And are we any

better off now than then, I ask? Whoever heard of a woman running away

from her husband before the war, and now here is poor Jane--"

"But it isn't my fault, Uncle Meriweather!" cried Jane, in desperation

at his obtuseness. "I've tried to be the best wife I could--ask Charley

if I haven't. He neglected me long before I let any one know--even

mother. I forgave him again and again, and I'd go on forgiving him

forever if he would let me. I've told him over and over that I was going

to be a faithful wife to him if he killed me."

"Of course, my dear, I'm not meaning to reproach you," said Uncle

Meriweather, overcome by the effect of his words. "We all know that

you've stood as much as any woman could and keep her self-respect. It

isn't possible, I suppose, for you to go on living with Charley?"

"Oh, I couldn't bear a separation, not a legal one at any rate," groaned

Mrs. Carr. "Of course she must come away for a time, but nobody must

hear of it or it would kill me. They are one in the sight of God, and my

dear old father had such a horror of separations."

"Well, I'd kick him out--I'd kick him out so quickly he wouldn't know

it," declared Jimmy. "If a daughter of mine were married to that scamp,

she'd never lay eyes on him except over my dead body. I reckon God would

enjoy the sight of his getting his deserts."

Deep down in Cousin Jimmy, deeper than sentiment, deeper than tradition,

deeper even than the solid bedrock of common sense, there was the

romantic essence of his soul, which hated baseness with a fiery hatred.

His ruddy face, still boyish in spite of his fifty years, blanched

slowly, and there came into his soft dark eyes the look he had worn at

Malvern Hill under the fire of the enemy.

At the sight Gabriella thrilled as she did when drums were beating and

armies were marching. "Oh, Cousin Jimmy, don't let her go back!" she

cried.

"I can't go back to him now! I can never, never go back to him again!"

intoned Jane with passionate energy.

"No, God bless her, she shan't go back," declared Jimmy, as profoundly

stirred as Gabriella.

"But the children? What will become of the children?" demanded Mrs.

Carr, not of Jimmy, but of the universe. Her helpless gaze, roving

wildly from face to face, and resting nowhere, was like the gaze of a

small animal caught in a trap. "If Jane separates the children from

their father what will people think of her?" she asked, still vainly

addressing Heaven.

"As long as she is right it doesn't matter what people think," retorted

Gabriella; but her protest, unlike her mother's, was directed to the

visible rather than to the invisible powers. The thought of Jane's

children--of the innocent souls so unaware of the awful predicament in

which they were placed that their bodies could be devouring bread and

damson preserves in the laundry. The poignant thought of these children

moved her more deeply than she had ever been moved before in her twenty

years. A passion for self-sacrifice rushed through her with the piercing

sweetness of religious ecstasy. Nothing like this had ever happened to

her before--not when she was confirmed, not when she had stood at the

head of her class, not when she had engaged herself to Arthur Peyton two

years before. It was the pure flame of experience at its highest point

that burned in her.

"I will take care of the children," she said breathlessly. "I will give

up my whole life to them. I will get a place in a store and work my

fingers to the bone, if only Jane will never go back."

For a moment there was silence; but while Gabriella waited for somebody

to answer, she felt that it was a silence which had become vocal with

inexpressible things. The traditions of Uncle Meriweather, the

conventions of Mrs. Carr, the prejudices of Jimmy, and the weak impulses

of Jane, all these filled the dusk through which the blank faces of her

family stared back at her. Then, while she stood white and trembling

with her resolve--with the passionate desire to give herself, body and

soul, to Jane and to Jane's children--the voice of Experience spoke

pleasantly, but firmly, through Cousin Pussy's lips, and it dealt with

Gabriella's outburst as Experience usually deals with Youth.

"You are a dear child, Gabriella," it said; "but how in the world could

you help Jane by going into a store?"

In the midst of the emotional scene, Cousin Pussy alone remained sweetly

matter-of-fact. Though she was not without orderly sentiments, her

character had long ago been swept of heroics, and from her arched gray

hair, worn à la Pompadour, to her pretty foot in its small neat boot,

she was a practical soul who had as little use for religious ecstasy as

she had for downright infidelity. There seemed to her something

positively unnatural in Gabriella's manner--a hint of that "sudden

conversion" she associated with the lower classes or with the negroes.

"You are a dear child," she repeated, biting her fresh lips; "but how

will you help Jane by going into a store?"

"I can trim hats," returned Gabriella stubbornly. "Mr. Brandywine will

take me into his new millinery department, I know, for I said something

to him about it the other day."

"Oh, Gabriella, not in a store! It would kill mother!" cried Jane, with

the prophetic wail of Cassandra.

"Not in a store!" echoed Mrs. Carr; "you couldn't work in a store. If

you want to work," she concluded feebly, "why can't you work just as

well in your home?"

"But it isn't the same thing, mother," explained Gabriella, with angelic

patience. "Nobody will get me to make hats at home, and, besides, I've

got to learn how to do it. I've got to learn business methods."

"But not in a shop, my dear," protested Uncle Meriweather in the precise

English of his youth.

"Bless my heart!" chuckled Cousin Jimmy. "Business methods! You're as

good as a show, Gabriella, and, by George! you've plenty of pluck. I

like pluck in man or woman."

"I shouldn't encourage her if I were you, Mr. Wrenn," said Cousin Pussy,

almost forgetting to be indirect.

"Well, of course, I don't approve of that store business," replied

Jimmy, deprecatingly, "but I can't help liking pluck when I see it. Look

here, Gabriella, if you're bent on working, why don't you turn in and

teach?"

"Yes, let her teach by all means," agreed Uncle Meriweather, with

genuine enthusiasm for the idea. "I've always regarded teaching as an

occupation that ought to be restricted by law to needy ladies."

"But I can't teach, I don't know enough, and, besides, I'd hate it,"

protested Gabriella.

"I'm sure you might start a school for very little children," said Mrs.

Carr. "You don't have to know much, to teach them, and you write a very

good hand."

"What about plain sewing?" asked Pussy in her ready way. "Couldn't you

learn to make those new waists all the girls are wearing?"

"I haven't the patience to sew well. Look how hard mother works, making

buttonholes with stitches so fine you can hardly see them, and yet she

doesn't get enough to put bread into her mouth, and but for her

relatives she'd have been in the poorhouse long ago. I'm tired of being

on charity just because we are women. Now that Jane has come home for

good I am simply obliged to find something to do."

"I don't mind your wanting to work, dear, I think it's splendid of you,"

returned Pussy, "but I do feel that you ought to work in a ladylike

way--a way that wouldn't interfere with your social position and your

going to germans and having attention from young men and all that."

"Why don't you make lampshades, Gabriella?" demanded Jane in an emphatic

burst of inspiration. "Sophy Madison earns enough from lampshades to

send her sister and herself to the White Sulphur Springs every summer."

"Sophy makes all the lampshades that anybody wants, and, besides, she

gets orders from the North--she told me so yesterday."

"Gabriella crochets beautifully," remarked Mrs. Carr a little nervously

because of the failure of her first suggestion. "The last time I went to

see Miss Matoaca Chambers in the Old Ladies' Home, she told me she made

quite a nice little sum for her church by crocheting mats."

"And Gabriella can cook, too," rejoined Pussy, with exaggerated

sprightliness, for she felt that Mrs. Carr's solution of the problem had

not been entirely felicitous. "Why doesn't she try sending some of her

angel food to the Woman's Exchange?"

Jimmy, who had listened to this advice with the expression of tolerant

amusement he always wore when women began to talk about the more serious

affairs of life in his presence, made an honest, if vulgar, attempt to

lighten the solemnity of the situation with a joke.

"Gabriella isn't trying to earn church money. You're out gunning for a

living, aren't you, Ella?" he inquired.

"I'm sick of being dependent," repeated Gabriella, while her face grew

stern. "Do you think if Jane had had enough money to live on that she

would ever have stood Charley so long?"

"Oh, yes, I should, Gabriella. Marriage is sacred to me!" exclaimed

Jane, whose perfect wifeliness atoned, even in the opinion of Jimmy, for

any discrepancies in logic. "Nothing on earth could have induced me to

leave him until--until this happened."

The conviction that she had never at any moment since her marriage

"failed in her duty to Charley" lent a touching sanctity to her

expression, while the bitter lines around her mouth faded in the wan

glow that flooded her face. Whatever her affliction, however intense her

humiliation, Jane was supported always by the most comforting of

beliefs--the belief that she had been absolutely right and Charley

absolutely wrong through the ten disillusioning years of their married

life. Never for an instant--never even in a nightmare--had she been

visited by the disquieting suspicion that she was not entirely

blameless.

"Well, you've left him now anyway," said Gabriella, with the disarming

candour which delighted Jimmy and perplexed Uncle Meriweather, "so

somebody has got to help you take care of the children."

"She shall never come to want as long as Pussy and I have a cent left,"

declared Cousin Jimmy, and his voice expressed what Mrs. Carr described

afterward as "proper feeling."

"And we'd really rather that you'd earn less and keep in your own

station of life," said Pussy decisively.

"If you mean that you'd rather I'd work buttonholes or crochet mats than

go into a store and earn a salary, then I can't do it," answered

Gabriella, as resolute, though not so right-minded, as poor Jane. "I'd

rather die than be dependent all my life, and I'm going to earn my

living if I have to break rocks to do it."

CHAPTER II

POOR JANE

Supper was over, and Gabriella, still in the dress she had worn all day,

was picking up the children's clothes from the floor of her room.

According to Mrs. Carr's hereditary habit in sorrow or sickness, Jane

had been served in bed with tea and toast, while several small hard cots

had been brought down from the attic and arranged in the available space

in the two bedrooms. As Gabriella looked at the sleeping children, who

had kicked the covering away, and lay with round rosy limbs gleaming in

the lamplight, she remembered that Arthur Peyton was coming at nine

o'clock to take her to Florrie's party, and she told herself with grim

determination that she would never go to a party again. The Berkeley

conscience, that vein of iron which lay beneath the outward softness and

incompetence of her mother and sister, held her, in spite of her

tempting youth, to the resolution she had made. She had told Jimmy that

she meant to earn her living if she had to break rocks to do it, and

Gabriella, like Pussy, came of a race that "did not easily change its

mind."

Turning to the bureau, she smoothed out the children's hair ribbons and

pinned them, in two tight little blue and pink rolls, to the pincushion.

Then taking up a broken comb, she ran it through the soft lock of hair

that fell like a brown wing over her forehead. Her bright dark eyes,

fringed in short thick lashes and set wide apart under arched eyebrows,

gazed questioningly back at her from a row of german favours with which

she had decorated the glass; and it was as if the face of youth,

flickering with a flamelike glow and intensity, swam there for an

instant in the dim greenish pool of the mirror. Beneath the charm of the

face there was the character which one associates, not with youth, but

with age and experience. Beneath the fine, clear lines of her head and

limbs, the tall slenderness of her figure, the look of swiftness and of

energy, which was almost birdlike in its grace and poise, there was a

strength and vigour which suggested a gallant boy rather than the

slighter and softer frame of a girl.

While she stood there, Gabriella thought regretfully of all that it

would mean to give up her half-dependent and wholly ladylike existence

and go to work in a shop. Necessity not choice was driving her; and in

spirit she looked back almost wistfully to the securely circumscribed

lot of her grandmother. For there was little of the rebel in her

temperament; and had she been free to choose, she would have

instinctively selected, guided by generations of gregarious ancestors,

the festive girlhood which Cousin Pussy had so ardently described. She

wanted passionately all the things that other girls had, and her only

quarrel, indeed, with the sheltered life was that she couldn't afford

it. In the expressive phrase of Cousin Jimmy, the sheltered life "cost

money," and to cost money was to be beyond the eager grasp of Gabriella.

The door opened as if yielding under protest, and Marthy entered, still

hurriedly tying the strings of the clean apron she had slipped on over

her soiled one before answering the door-bell.

"Yo' beau done come, Miss Ella. Ain't you gwine?"

"No, I'm not going to the party, Marthy, but ask him to wait just a

minute."

"He's settin' over yonder in de parlour wid his overcoat on."

"Well, ask him to take it off; I'll be there in a moment." She spoke as

gravely as Marthy had done, yet in her face there was a light play of

humour.

Two years ago she would have thrilled with joy at the thought that

Arthur was waiting for her; but in those two years since her engagement

she had grown to look upon her first love as the gossamer, fairylike

romance of a child. For months she had known that the engagement must be

broken sooner or later; and she knew now, while she listened to Marthy's

shuffling feet hastening to deliver her message, that she must break it

to-night. In the dim pool of her mirror a face looked back at her that

was not the face of Arthur Peyton; she saw it take form there as one

sees a face grow gradually into life from the dimness of dreams. It was,

she told herself to-night, the very face of her dream that she saw.

"Well, I must get it over," she said with a sternness which gave her a

passing resemblance to the Saint Memin portrait of the Reverend

Bartholomew Berkeley; "I've got to get it over to-night, and whatever

happens I've got to be honest." Then, with a last glance at the sleeping

children, she lowered the gas, and went across the darkened hail, which

smelt of pickles and bacon because one end of it was used as a

storeroom.

The parlour had been swept since the family council had deliberated

there over Jane's destiny. The scraps of cambric had been gathered up

from the threadbare arabesques in the carpet; the chairs had been placed

at respectable distances apart; the gas-jets in the chandelier were

flaming extravagantly under the damaged garlands; and the sewing machine

had been wheeled into the obscurity of the hail, for it would have

humiliated Gabriella's mother to think that her daughter received young

men in a room which looked as if somebody had worked there.

When Gabriella entered, Arthur Peyton was standing in front of the

fireplace, gazing abstractedly at his reflection in the French mirror.

Though his chestnut hair was carefully brushed, he had instinctively

lifted his hand to smooth down an imaginary lock, and while he did this,

he frowned slightly as if at a recollection that had ruffled his temper.

His features were straight and very narrow, with the look of

sensitiveness one associates with the thoroughbred, and the delicate

texture of his skin emphasized this quality of high-breeding, which was

the only thing that one remembered about him. In his light-gray eyes

there was a sympathetic expression which invariably won the hearts of

old ladies, and these old ladies were certain to say of him afterward,

"such a gentleman, my dear--almost of the old school, you know, and we

haven't many of them left in this hurrying age."

He had done well, though not brilliantly, at college, for his mind, if

unoriginal, had never given anybody, not even his mother, the least bit

of trouble. For three years he had worked with admirable regularity in

the office of his uncle, Carter Peyton, one of the most distinguished

lawyers in the Virginia of his period, and it was generally felt that

young Arthur Peyton would have "a brilliant future." For the present,

however, he lived an uneventful life with his widowed mother in a

charming old house, surrounded by a walled garden, in Franklin Street.

Like the house, he was always in perfect order; and everything about

him, from his loosely fitting clothes and his immaculate linen to his

inherited conceptions of life, was arranged with such exquisite

precision that it was impossible to improve it in any way. He knew

exactly what he thought, and he knew also his reason, which was usually

a precedent in law or custom, for thinking as he did. His opinions,

which were both active and abundant, were all perfectly legitimate

descendants of tradition, and the phrase "nobody ever heard of such a

thing," was quite as convincing to him as to Mrs. Carr or to Cousin

Jimmy Wrenn.

"Gabriella, aren't you going?" he asked reproachfully as the girl

entered.

"Oh, Arthur, we've had such a dreadful day! Poor Jane has left Charley

for good and has come home, with all the children. We've been busy

dividing them among us, and we're going to turn the dining-room into a

nursery.

"Left Charley? That's bad, isn't it?" asked Arthur doubtfully.

"I feel so sorry for her, Arthur. It must be terrible to have love end

like that."

"But she isn't to blame. Everybody knows that she has forgiven him again

and again."

"Yes, everybody knows it," repeated Gabriella, as if she drew bitter

comfort from the knowledge, "and she says now that she will never, never

go back to him."

For the first time a shadow appeared in Arthur's clear eyes.

"Do you think she ought to make up her mind, darling, until she sees

whether or not he will reform? After all, she is his wife."

"That's what mother says, and yet I believe Charley is the only person

on earth mother really hates. Now Cousin Jimmy and I will do everything

we can to keep her away from him."

"I think I shouldn't meddle if I were you, dearest. She'll probably go

back to him in the end because of the children.

"But I am going to help her take care of the children," replied

Gabriella stanchly. "Of course, my life will be entirely different now,

Arthur," she added gently. "Everything is altered for me, too, since

yesterday. I have thought it all over for hours, and I am going to try

to get a place in Brandywine's store."

"In a store?" repeated Arthur slowly, and she saw the muscles of his

mouth tighten and grow rigid.

"Mother doesn't like the idea any more than you do, but what are we to

come to if we go on in the old aimless way? One can't make a living out

of plain sewing, and though, of course, Charley will be supposed to

provide for his children, he isn't exactly the sort one can count on.

Brandywine's, you see, is only a beginning. What I mean is that I am

obliged to learn how to support myself."

"But couldn't you work just as well in your home, darling?

"People don't pay anything for home work. You must see what I mean,

Arthur."

"Yes, I see," he replied tenderly; but after a moment's thought, he

went on again with the gentle obstinacy of a man whose thinking had all

been done for him before he was born. "I wish, though, that you would

try to hold out a little longer, working at home with your mother. In a

year or two we shall be able to marry."

"I couldn't," said Gabriella, shaking her head. "Don't urge me, Arthur."

"If you would only consent to live with mother, we might marry now," he

pursued, after a minute, as if he had not heard her.

"But it wouldn't be fair to her, and how could I ask her to take mother

and Jane and the children? No, I've thought it all out, dear, and I must

go to work."

"But I'll work for them, Gabriella. I'll do anything on earth rather

than see you ordered about by old Brandywine."

"He won't order me about," answered Gabriella cheerfully; "but mother

feels just as you do. She says I am going out of my class because I

won't stay at home and work buttonholes."

"You couldn't go out of your class," replied Arthur, with an instinctive

gallantry which even his distress could not overcome; "but I can't get

used to the thought of it, darling--I simply can't. You're so sacred to

me. There's something about the woman a man loves that's different from

every other woman, and the bare idea of your working in a shop sickens

me. I always think of you as apart from the workaday world. I always

think of you as a star shining serenely above the sordid struggle--"

Overwhelmed by the glowing train of his rhetoric, he broke down suddenly

and caught passionately at the cool hand of Gabriella.

As he looked at her slender finger, on which he had placed her

engagement ring two years before, it seemed to him that the situation

was becoming intolerable--that it was an affront not only to his ideal

of Gabriella, as something essentially starlike and remote, but to that

peculiar veneration for women which he always spoke and thought of as

"Southern." His ideal woman was gentle, clinging, so perfectly a "lady"

that she would have perished had she been put into a shop; and, though

he was aware that Gabriella was a girl of much character and

determination, his mind was so constructed that he was able, without

difficulty, to think of her as corresponding to this exalted type of her

sex. By the simple act of falling in love with her he had endowed her

with every virtue except the ones that she actually possessed.

"I know, I know," said Gabriella tenderly, for she saw that he suffered.

Her training had been a hard one, though she had got it at home, and in

a violent reaction from the sentimentality of her mother and Jane she

had become suspicious of any language that sounded "flowery" to her

sensitive ears. With her clear-sighted judgment, she knew perfectly well

that by no stretch of mind or metaphor could she be supposed to resemble

a star--that she was not shining, not remote, not even "ideal" in

Arthur's delicate sense of the word. She had known the horrors of

poverty, of that bitter genteel poverty which must keep up an appearance

at any cost; and she could never forget the grim days, after the death

of Uncle Beverly Blair, when they had shivered in fireless rooms and

gone for weeks without butter on their bread. For the one strong quality

in Mrs. Carr's character was the feeling she spoke of complacently,

though modestly, as "proper pride"; and this proper pride, which was

now resisting Gabriella's struggle for independence, had in the past

resisted quite as stubbornly the thought of an appeal to the ready

charity of her masculine relatives. To seek a man's advice had been from

her girlhood the primal impulse of Mrs. Carr's nature; but, until Fate

had starved her into sincerity, she had kept alive the ladylike fiction

that she was in need of moral, not material, assistance.

"Of course, if there were any other way, Arthur," said Gabriella,

remembering the earlier battles with her mother, and eager to compromise

when she could do so with dignity; "but how can I go on being dependent

on Cousin Jimmy and Uncle Meriweather. Neither of them is rich, and

Cousin Jimmy has a large family."

Of course she was reasonable. The most disagreeable thing about

Gabriella, Jane had once said, was her inveterate habit of being

reasonable. But then Jane, who was of an exquisite sensibility, felt

that Gabriella's reasonableness belonged to a distinctly lower order of

intelligence. When all was said, Gabriella saw clearly because she had a

practical mind, and a practical mind is usually engrossed with material

matters.

"I understand exactly how you feel, dear, but if only you could go on

just as you are for a few years longer," said Arthur, sticking to his

original idea with a tenacity which made it possible for him to argue

for hours and yet remain exactly where he had started. Though they

talked all night, though she convinced him according to all the laws and

principles of logic, she knew that he would still think precisely what

he had thought in the beginning, for his conviction was rooted, deeper

than reason, in the unconquerable prejudices which had passed from the

brain into the very blood of his race. He would probably say at the end:

"I admit all that you tell me, Gabriella, but my sentiment is against

it;" and this sentiment, overruling sense, would insist, with sublime

obstinacy, that Gabriella must not work in a shop. It would ignore,

after the exalted habit of sentiment, such merely sordid facts as

poverty and starvation (who ever heard of a woman of good family

starving in Virginia?), and, at last, if Gabriella were really in love

with Arthur, it would triumph over her finer judgment and reduce her to

submission. But while she watched him, in the very minute when, failing

for words, he caught her in his arms, she said to herself, suddenly

chilled and determined: "I must get it over to-night, and I've got to be

honest." The scent of the hyacinths floated to her again, but it seemed

to bring a cold wind, as if a draught had blown in through the closed

slats of the shutters.

"Everything has changed, Arthur," she said, "and I don't think I ought

to go on being engaged." Then because her words sounded insincere, she

added sternly: "Even if we could be married--and of course we can't

be--I--I don't feel that I should want to marry. I am not sure that I

love you enough to marry you."

It was all so unromantic, so unemotional, so utterly different from the

scene she had pictured when she imagined what "breaking her engagement"

would be like. Then she had always thought of herself as dissolving in

tears on the horsehair sofa, which had become sacred to the tragedy of

poor Jane; but, to her surprise, she did not feel now the faintest

inclination to cry. It ought to have been theatrical, but it wasn't--not

even when she took off her engagement ring, as she had read in novels

that girls did at the decisive instant, and laid it down on the table.

When she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but

Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the

fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy

and brought it back to Gabriella.

"I'll never give you up," said Arthur stubbornly, and knowing his

character, she felt that he had spoken the truth. He could not give her

up even had he wished it, for, like a belief, she had passed from his

brain into the fibre of his being. She had become a habit to him, and

not love, but the inability to change, to cease thinking what he had

always thought, to break a fixed manner of life, would keep him faithful

to her in his heart.

"I'm sorry--oh, I'm sorry," she murmured, longing to have it over and to

return to Jane and the children. It occurred to her almost resentfully

that love was not always an unmixed delight.

"Is there any one else, Gabriella?" he asked with a sudden choking sound

in his voice. "I have sometimes thought--in the last four or five

months--that there might be--that you had changed--that--" He stopped

abruptly, and she answered him with a beautiful frankness which would

have horrified the imperishable, if desiccated, coquetry of her mother.

"There is some one else and there isn't," she replied simply. "I mean I

think of some one else very often--of some one who isn't in my life at

all--from whom I never hear--"

"Is it George Fowler?"

She bowed her head, and, though she did not blush, her eyes grew

radiant.

"And you have known him less than a year?"

Again she bowed her head without speaking. What was there, after all,

that she could say in justification of her behaviour?

A groan escaped him, smothered into a gentle murmur of protest. "And I

thought women were more constant than men!" he exclaimed with something

of the baffled and helpless feeling which had overtaken Uncle

Meriweather while he regarded Gabriella.

The generalization was not without interest for Gabriella.

"I thought so, too," she observed dispassionately. "I thought so, too,

and that is why it was such a dreadful surprise to me when it happened.

You yourself aren't more shocked and surprised than I was in the

beginning," she added.

"But you've got used to the thought, I suppose?"

"Well, one has to, you see. What else is there to do? I always

understood from mother"--she went on with the same eager interest, as if

she were stumbling upon new and important intellectual discoveries--"I

always understood that women never fell in love with men first--I mean

until they had had positive proof that their love would be returned. But

in this case that didn't seem to matter at all. Nothing mattered, and

the more I fought against it and tried to be true to my engagement, the

more I found myself being false. It's all very strange," she concluded,

"but that is just how it happened."

"And he knows nothing about it?"

"Oh, no. I told him I was engaged to you, and then he went away."

For an instant he was silent, and watching his face, so carefully

guarded and controlled by habit that it had the curious blank look of a

statue's, Gabriella could form no idea of the suppressed inarticulate

suffering in his heart.

"And if he came back would you marry him?" he asked.

Before replying she sat for a minute gazing down on her folded hands and

weighing each separate word of her answer.

"I should try not to, Arthur," she said at last, "but--but I am not sure

that I should be able to help it."

When at last he had said "good-bye" rather grimly, and gone out of the

door without looking back, she was conscious of an immense relief, of a

feeling that she could breathe freely again after an age of oppression.

There was a curious sense of unreality about the hour she had just

passed through, as if it belonged not to actual life, but to a play she

had been rehearsing. She had felt nothing. The breaking of her

engagement had failed utterly to move her.

After bolting the front door, she turned out the gas in the parlour,

pushed back the lump of coal in the grate in the hope of saving it for

the morrow, and went cautiously down the hall to her room. As she passed

her mother's door, a glimmer of light along the threshold made her pause

for a minute, and while she hesitated, an anxious voice floated out to

her:

"Gabriella, is that you?"

"Yes, Mother, do you want anything?"

"Jane has one of her heart attacks. I put her to bed in my room because

it is more comfortable than the dining-room. Don't you think you had

better go back and wake Marthy?"

"Is she ill? Let me come in," answered Gabriella, pushing open the door

and brushing by Mrs. Carr, who stood, shrunken and shivering, in a gray

flannel wrapper and felt slippers.

Though Jane's attacks were familiar occurrences, they never failed to

produce an immediate panic in the household. As a child of nine,

Gabriella remembered being aroused in the middle of a bitter night,

hastily wrapped in her mother's shawl and a blanket, and hurried up the

staircase to Jane, who had broken her engagement to Charley the evening

before. Jane, pale, angelic, palpitating, appeared to draw her last

breath as they entered, while the old doctor supported her in his arms,

and Marthy, in a frenzy of service, rattled the dead embers in the

grate. It had all been horribly vivid, and when Jane had murmured

Charley's name in a dying voice, they had stood, trembling and blue with

cold, around her bed, waiting for the end. But the end had not come, and

three months later Jane was married to Charley Gracey.

After that scene, Gabriella had associated Jane's attacks with a

freezing January night and a fireless grate (though the last but one had

occurred in mid-August), and she was relieved now to find a fire burning

in her mother's room and a kettle singing merrily on the fender. The

elder children, with their flannel petticoats pinned over their thin

little shoulders, were sitting straight and stiff on a box couch which

had been turned into a bed, and their strange little faces looked wan

and peaked in the firelight.

Jane was really ill, Gabriella decided, after a glance at her sister.

Nothing except acute suffering could have given her that ghastly pallor

or made her eyes sink so far back in her head. She lay quite motionless

on the far side of the big tester bed, staring straight up at the

ceiling with an expression which terrified Gabriella, though she had

seen it on her sister's face at least a dozen times before to-night.

"Has Arthur gone?" asked Mrs. Carr in a voice that sounded as if she

were running.

"Yes. Did you want him, mother?"

"I thought we might send him for the doctor and for Charley. Don't you

think Charley ought to be told of her condition? She has asked for the

children."

"Have you given her the digitalis?"

"I can't make her swallow it. There are the drops on the table by the

bed. My hands tremble so I had to measure them three times."

Taking the glass from the table, Gabriella bent over her sister and

implored her to swallow the drops, but, without appearing to hear her

voice, Jane still stared blankly upward, with the rigid, convulsed look

of a woman who has been stricken with dumbness. Her flaxen hair, damp

with camphor, which Mrs. Carr had wildly splashed on her forehead, clung

flat and close to her head, while the only pulse in her body seemed to

beat in irregular, spasmodic throbs in her throat.

"Don't go, mother. I'll wake Marthy," cried Gabriella, for Mrs. Carr,

inspired by the spirit of panic, was darting out of the door in her felt

slippers. Then, while the children, crying distractedly, rushed to

Jane's bedside, the girl ran out of the house and along the brick walk

to the kitchen and the room above it where Marthy lived the little life

she had apart from her work. In answer to Gabriella's call she emerged

entirely dressed from the darkness; and at the news of Jane's illness

she was seized with the spurious energy which visits her race in the

moment of tragedy. She offered at once to run for the doctor, and

suggested, without a hint from Gabriella, that she had better leave

word, on her way home, for Marse Charley.

"I knowed 'twuz comin' jez ez soon ez I lay eyes on 'er," she muttered,

for she was an old family servant. "Dar ain' no use 'n tryin' ter come

betweenst dem de good Lawd is done jine tergedder fur worse. A baid

husban'! Hi! Dar ain't un 'oman erlive, I reckon, dat 'ouldn't ruther

own a baid husban' den no husban' at all. You all is got to teck 'em de

way dey's made, en dar's moughty few un um dat is made right."

Still muttering, she stumbled down the walk and out of the gate, while

Gabriella returned to her mother's room and hurried the weeping children

into their shoes and stockings. Mrs. Carr, still in her flannel wrapper,

with her little flat gray curls screwed up on pins for the night, and

her thin ankles showing pathetically above her felt slippers, ran

nervously to and fro with mustard plasters and bottles of hot water

which she continually refilled from the kettle on the fender.

Occasionally she paused long enough to hold the camphor to Jane's nose

or to lift the quilt from the bottom of the bed and then put it

carefully back in the very spot where it had lain before she had touched

it. And because she was born to take two steps to every one that was

necessary, because she could not accomplish the simplest act without a

prodigious waste of energy and emotion, because she died twenty deaths

over the slightest anxiety, and, most of all, because she was the last

person on earth who ought to have been burdened with poverty and hard

work and an unhappily married daughter--because of all these things Mrs.

Carr wore herself to a shadow in the quarter of an hour they spent

waiting for the doctor and Charley Gracey.

Though she had brought Jane through at least a dozen "attacks," she

still lost her presence of mind as completely as on that January night

when, utterly distraught, she had hurried Gabriella to the first

death-bed scene of her sister; she still grew as forgetful of herself

and her own feelings, and, in obedience to some profound law of her

nature, she still as confidently "expected the worst." For Mrs. Carr's

philosophy, like Jane's, was of that active but dreary sort that thrives

best upon misery. Just as Jane, who had lost every illusion about

Charley, went on loving him in spite of it, so Mrs. Carr, having lost

her illusions about life, retained a kind of wistful fondness for the

thing that had wounded her.

The door-bell rang sharply, and Gabriella went to let in the doctor, a

brisk, authoritative young man of the new school, who had learned

everything there was to be known about medicine except the way to behave

in a sickroom, and who abhorred a bedside manner as heartily as if it

were calomel or castor oil. His name was Darrow, and he was the

assistant of old Dr. Walker, Mrs. Carr's family physician, who never

went out at night since he had passed his seventieth birthday.

Gabriella, who liked him because he was not anecdotal and gave small

doses of medicine, hastily led the way to her mother's room before she

ran back to meet Charley Gracey at the door of the dark parlour.

"You can't see her now. The doctor is with her," she whispered. "I'll

make a light in here and you can wait."

"Let me," said Charley, quite as pleasantly as if he were not a bad

husband, while he found a match and struck it on the sole of his foot.

Then, as the gas flared up, he exclaimed, with a low whistle, "By Jove,

you're a sight, Gabriella!"

"Well, it's your fault," replied Gabriella sharply, letting him see, as

she told herself, exactly what she thought of him. "You've made Jane so

ill we thought she was dying."

"I'm sorry for that," he said, suddenly smitten with gravity. "Is she

really so bad?"

His charming freckled face, with its irrepressible humour, grew almost

grotesquely solemn, while the habitual merriment faded slowly from his

light-gray eyes, leaving them empty of expression. He was a short,

rather thick-set man, not particularly good-looking, not particularly

clever, but possessing a singular, if unaccountable, charm. Everybody

liked Charley, though nobody respected him. He was a scamp, but a

lovable scamp, while Jane, with the best intentions in the world, had

managed to make every virtue unattractive. When people condemned him,

they said that he was "utterly unprincipled"; when they softened in

their judgment, they admitted that he had "the best heart in the world."

"I suppose it isn't any worse than other attacks," answered Gabriella,

"but you know what they are like."

"Yes, I know," replied Charley. "Oh, Lord, don't I?"

"She asked mother to send for you," continued Gabriella. "She wants you

to know that she has forgiven you."

"Has she?" said Charley, without elation. Turning away, he stared for a

minute or two at the engraving of the children feeding fish in a pond;

then, with his eyes still glued to the picture, he burst out

passionately: "Gabriella, I'd hoped she wouldn't this time!"

"If I were she," retorted Gabriella crushingly, "I would never speak to

you again until the day of my death."

"If she were you," rejoined Charley, with barefaced audacity, "I'd have

been a good husband. Why, I was simply starving to be a good husband

when I married Jane. It's my ideal in life. I'm all for the domestic

thing by nature. I was tired--positively dog-tired of the other kind. I

wanted a wife. I adored--I've always adored babies--"

"If that is true," returned Gabriella sternly, for she was not disposed

to soften to Charley, and in her heart she deeply resented what she

called Jane's "weakness," "if that is true why do you behave so

outrageously to Jane and the children? Why can't you be decent?"

"I could," answered Charley, with engaging lucidity, "if she were less

so. It's her infernal virtue I can't stand, Gabriella. No man could

stand it without taking to drink."

"But you knew she was that way. She was always trying to make people

better. It is her mission. Why, I remember one winter night before you

were married mother got me out of bed in the cold to come and hear Jane

forgive you beautifully about something."

"That was the first time, and it was very touching. I suppose the first

time always is touching. Of course, I didn't know she meant to keep it

up. No man could possibly have kept it up," said Charley, with

bitterness, "but she married me to reform me, and it is the only thing

she has really enjoyed about her marriage. She's a born reformer. I

haven't eaten a thing I cared about, nor drank a drop I wanted, nor used

a bad word I was fond of, since I married, without being nagged at about

it. She loved me for my vices, and yet she hasn't let me keep a single

one--not even the smallest--not even cigarettes. Nag! Good God! She's

nagged me to perfection ever since the day of our wedding when she made

me sign the pledge before she let me kiss her!"

"Well, that doesn't make it any easier for us or for the children,"

replied Gabriella, without sympathy; "and if you don't think of Jane,

you might at least think of your children."

"Of course it's hard on the kids," admitted Charley ruefully. "But as

for Jane--now, will you tell me what would become of Jane after she had

reformed me? Why, she'd be bored to death. She'd be a martyr without any

martyrdom. When she made me give up tobacco, she lost interest in

everything for a week. She was like your Uncle Meriweather after the

surrender. There wasn't anything left to fight about, and fighting was

all he could do--"

"I believe--I really believe you have been drinking," interrupted

Gabriella with cold disgust. "Suppose Jane were to die?"

"She won't die. She'll be all right as soon as she has forgiven me."

He was not only bad, she told herself, he was perfectly shameless. He

appeared to have been born without the faintest sense of responsibility.

And yet, while Gabriella listened to him, she realized that, in some

ways, he might be a less trying companion than poor Jane. His candour

was as simple, as unaffected, as the serene artlessness of a child. It

was impossible not to believe in his sincerity. Though she "despised

him," as she told herself, still she was obliged to admit that there was

something to be said on his side. The harsh judgment of youth--of youth

that never tries to understand, that never makes allowances--softened

under the influence of Charley's reprehensible charm. Even badness,

Gabriella conceded grudgingly, might be easier to live with in some

circumstances than a too exalted self-righteousness.

"If you'll bring Jane to that way of thinking," retorted Charley, with

vulgar frankness, "I'll give you five hundred dollars down. If you'll

thoroughly corrupt her mind and persuade her to neglect her duty to me,

I'll make it a thousand."

He was jesting! It was monstrous, with Jane lying ill in her mother's

room; it was indecent; it was grossly immoral; but he was actually

jesting! Not even scandal, not even the doctor's presence in the house,

could suppress his incorrigible spirit of levity. "If I were Jane, I'd

never speak to him," thought Gabriella, and the question flashed through

her mind, "how in the world could she ever have loved him?" It was

impossible for her to conceive of any situation when Charley could have

made a girl fall in love with him. Though she had heard stories of his

early conquests, she had never believed them. There were times when she

almost liked him, but it was the kind of liking one gave to an inferior,

not to an equal. She admitted his charm, but it was the charm of an

irresponsible creature--the capricious attraction of a child or an

animal. Her common sense, she told herself, would keep her from making

a mistake such as Jane had made with her life; and, besides, she was

utterly devoid of the missionary instinct which had lured Jane to

destruction. "If I ever marry, it will be different from that," she

thought passionately. "It will be utterly different!"

The door of Mrs. Carr's room opened suddenly, Marthy's name was called

in a high voice, and the doctor was heard saying reassuringly: "She is

over the worst. There is no need to worry."

"Don't send me in there alone, Gabriella," begged Charley piteously.

"I'd rather face bullets than Jane in an attack." His bravado had

deserted him, and he appeared positively craven. The stiffness seemed to

have gone not only out of his character, but out of his clothes also.

Even his collar had become limp with emotion.

"Well, I don't care," answered Gabriella, "you've got to stand it.

There's no use squirming when you've only yourself to blame." With a

malicious pleasure, she watched the consternation in Charley's face,

while the doctor's footsteps came rapidly down the hall and stopped at

the threshold of the parlour.

"You may go in, Mr. Gracey--your wife is asking for you; but be very

careful not to say anything that might disturb her. Just keep her as

quiet as you can for a few hours."

Then the door in the distance opened again, and Mrs. Carr, in the hollow

tones of destiny, called: "Gabriella, Jane is waiting to speak to her

husband."

"Come, Charley," ordered Gabriella, grimly, and a moment later she

pushed him across her mother's threshold and turned back into the hall.

"I hope she'll make him squirm," she said to herself, with relish.

Nothing, she felt, except the certainty of Charley's squirming, could

make up to her for the half-hour she had just spent with him.

She was still standing there when Jane's medicine came from the druggist

at the corner, and for a while she waited outside the door, fearing to

lighten Charley's punishment by her entrance. The medicine had to be

measured in drops, and she went into the dining-room, where the children

were huddled together in an improvised bed, and diluted the mixture with

water before she could persuade herself to go into her mother's room.

Even then she hesitated until she remembered that the doctor had said

Jane must take the first dose immediately. Not by her, if she could help

it, should the divine wrath of the furies be appeased.

But with the first touch of her hand on the knob, Charley's flippant

voice greeted her with, "Won't you come in, Gabriella?" and swallowing

her angry retort, she entered stiffly, with the glass held out straight

before her. Charley, on his knees beside the bed, with his arm under his

wife's pillow, stared up at his sister-in-law with the guilty look of a

whipped terrier, while Jane, pallid, suffering, saintly, rested one thin

blue-veined hand on his shoulder. Her face was the colour of the sheet,

her eyes were unnaturally large and surrounded by violet circles; and

her hair, drenched with camphor, spread over the pillow like the hair of

a drowned woman. Never had she appeared so broken, so resigned, so

ineffably spiritual; and Gabriella's solitary comfort was the thought

that Jane's attack had conquered Charley as completely as it had

conquered the rest of them.

"Gabriella, I've forgiven him," said Jane, with fainting sweetness,

"and he wants you and mother to do so. He has promised to be good in the

future."

"Well, I shan't forgive him for keeping me up all night," answered

Gabriella resentfully, and she felt that even if it killed Jane, she

could not keep back her reply. "I can't answer for mother, but I haven't

forgiven him and I never shall." She felt her anger hardened to a rock

inside of her, and it hurt her so that she put the glass hurriedly down

on the table and ran out of the room. As she closed the door behind her

she heard Jane saying gently: "Yes, I forgive you, Charley, but I can't

help feeling that you don't love me as you ought to."

An old cape of her mother's was lying on a chair in the hall, and,

throwing it over her shoulders, Gabriella went out on the porch and

stood breathing quickly in the cold air, with her hand pressed on her

bosom, which rose and fell as if she had been running. She was not only

furious, she was grossly affronted, though she had known from the

beginning, she said to herself, exactly how it would end. She had never

trusted Jane--no, not a minute; she had never really trusted her mother.

Something had told her that Jane had never meant in her heart to leave

Charley, that she was only making a scene, after the immemorial habit of

women, before going back to him. And yet, though she had suspected this

all along, she was as indignant as if she had been deceived by a

conspiracy of the three of them. Her sense of decency was outraged. She

despised Jane because she had no strength of character; but even while

this thought was still in her mind, she admitted that Jane had had

sufficient strength of character to upset the household, bring Charley

to repentance, and emerge, faint but victorious, from the wreck of

their peace. Yes, she despised Jane, though it was impossible to deny

that Jane's methods were successful, since she had got what she wanted.

The street was very quiet, for it was in the small gray hours between

midnight and dawn, and a solitary policeman, strolling by on his beat,

appeared as wan and spectral as the bare boughs of the poplar trees

beneath which he moved. The wind was still blowing over the brow of the

hill, and now and then it tossed a wisp of straw or a handful of dust on

the porch where Gabriella was standing. As it swept onward it drove a

flock of shadows, like black birds, up the open street into the clear

space under the old-fashioned gas lamp at the corner. All the lights

were out in the neighbouring houses, but from a boarding-house down the

block there floated suddenly the gay snatch of a waltz played on a banjo

with a broken string. Then the music stopped, the policeman passed, and

Gabriella and the wind were alone in the street. Overhead the stars

shone dimly through a web of mist; and it seemed to her that the sadness

of the sky and the sadness of the earth had mingled there in the long

straight street where the wind blew with a melancholy sound between rows

of silent and darkened houses.

A noise in the hall made her turn, and, looking up, she saw the gaunt

figure of Miss Amelia Peterborough standing in the bend of the

staircase. In her hand the old maid held a twisted candlestick of

greenish brass, and the yellow flame of the candle cast a trembling,

fantastic shadow on the wall at her back. Her head, shorn of the false

"front" she wore in the day, appeared to have become all forehead and

beaked nose; her eyes had dwindled to mere points of blackness; her

mouth, sunken and drawn over toothless gums, was like the mouth of a

witch. The wind, blowing in gusts through the open door, inflated her

gray shawl and the skirt of her dressing-gown, while, with each flutter

of her garments, the grotesque shadow on the white wall danced and

gibbered behind her. And, as she gazed down on the girl, it was as if

the end of life, with its pathos, its cruelties, its bitterness and its

disillusionment, had stopped for a fleeting instant to look back at life

in the pride and ignorance of its beginning.

"There was so much moving about, I thought something might have

happened," said Miss Amelia apologetically, while Gabriella, closing the

door, shut the draught from the staircase.

"Jane had one of her heart attacks," answered the girl. "I'm so sorry we

waked you."

But she was thinking while she spoke, "So that is old age--so that is

what it means to be old?" There is a vague compassion in the thought,

but it held no terror, for the decay of Miss Amelia seemed as utterly

remote and detached from her own life as one of the past ages in

history. The youth in her brain created a radiant illusion of

immortality. By no stretch of imagination could she picture herself like

the infirm and loveless creature before her. Yet she knew, without

realizing it, that Miss Amelia had once been young, that she had once

even been beautiful. There was a legend, fading now into tradition, that

her lover had been killed in a duel, fought for her while she was still

a girl, and that she had worn only white or black since that day--she

who was now well over eighty. She had known love; a man had died for

her; it was said that she had been a famous coquette in the 'thirties;

and now she stood there, grotesque and sexless, with her eyes empty of

dreams and of memories, and her face as gray and sinister as the face of

her shadow.

"I hope she is better, poor child," she said, for, like the rest of

Richmond, she believed Jane to be all saint and Charley all sinner. "If

I can be of any help, be sure to let me know."

"Yes, I'll let you know, thank you. I hope we didn't disturb Miss

Jemima."

The younger Miss Peterborough--called "the happy one" by Gabriella and

Mrs. Carr because she was always cheerful, though, as far as any one

could tell, she had nothing and had never had anything to be cheerful

about--was named Jemima. A chronic invalid, from some obscure trouble

which had not left her for twenty years, she was seldom free from pain,

and yet Gabriella had never seen her (except at funerals, for which she

entertained a perfectly healthy fondness as diversions free to the poor)

without a smile on her face.

"Sister Jemima doesn't wake easily. She is a sound sleeper and she's

getting a little hard of hearing"; and lifting the candlestick to light

her way, Miss Amelia turned back up the stairs, while the flame flitted

like a golden moth into the dimness.

"Poor old thing," thought Gabriella, imagining in her ignorance that she

could understand the tragedy of Miss Amelia's life; "poor old thing, she

must have had a terrible time."

As she approached her mother's door, Charley came out, glanced at her

sheepishly, and hurried to where his hat hung on the walnut hatrack in

the front hall. Then, as if overcoming his first impulse to avoid her,

he beckoned to her furtively, and said in a sepulchral whisper:

"Gabriella, be very careful what you say to her."

The audacity of it! This from Charley, the abandoned, the depraved, the

unutterably abhorrent in her sight. Without replying, she turned

indignantly away and opened her mother's door.

Lying in the middle of the bed now, and slightly propped with pillows,

Jane was sipping a second dose of medicine from a glass Mrs. Carr held

to her lips.

"I know you don't understand my forgiving him, Gabriella," she said very

gently, "but some day, after you are married, you will realize that I do

it from a sacred duty--from a sacred duty," she repeated firmly, while

the shining light of martyrdom illumined her features.

"Well, it's none of my business," answered Gabriella crossly, "but the

sooner you do it, I suppose the sooner you will have to do it again." If

only for once Jane would be direct, if only she would be natural, if

only she would speak the truth and not fiction.

"Oh, no, dear, you don't understand him any better than you do me," said

Jane as sweetly as ever in spite of Gabriella's deplorable loss of

temper. "He is really dreadfully penitent, and he sees that he hasn't

always treated me as he ought to have done. But you'll know what I mean

when you marry, Gabriella. She'll understand me then, won't she,

mother?"

"I'm sometimes tempted to hope that Gabriella will never marry," replied

Mrs. Carr with the uncompromising bitterness of abject despair; "the

Carrs all seem to marry so badly."

In her normal mood she would never have uttered this heresy, for she

belonged to a generation that regarded even a bad marriage as better for

a woman than no marriage at all; but the night had worn her out, and one

of her spells of neuralgia, which followed fatigue, was already

beginning in her face. The purple crocheted "fascinator" she had caught

up at the doctor's entrance was still on her head, and her long pale

face, beneath the airy scallops, appeared frozen in an expression of

incurable melancholy. For the rest she had been too frightened, too

forgetful of herself and her own comfort even to put on her stockings,

though Gabriella had begged her to do so. "Don't think about me. Attend

to poor Jane," she had repeated over and over.

"Mother, go into my room and get into bed," commanded Gabriella, whose

patience, never abundant, was ebbing low. "If you don't get some sleep

your neuralgia won't be any better."

"It isn't any better. I don't expect it to be any better."

"Well, you must go to bed or it will get worse. I'll heat you a cup of

milk and wrap you up in warm blankets."

"Don't worry about me, dear. Think of poor Jane."

"We've been thinking of Jane all night, and you need it now more than

she does. I can tell by your eyes how you are suffering."

In the first streak of dawn, which was beginning to glimmer faintly on

the window-panes, Mrs. Carr looked as if she had withered overnight.

"It's only my left temple," she said dully, "otherwise I am quite well.

No, dear, I must rub Jane's forehead until she falls asleep. The doctor

said it was important that we should keep her soothed."

But it was a law of Gabriella's nature that she never knew when she was

beaten. Failure aroused the sleeping forces within her, and when these

forces were once liberated, the spasmodic efforts of Mrs. Carr and the

indirect methods of Jane were alike powerless to oppose them. At such

times a faint flush rose to her pale cheeks, her eyes shone with a

burning darkness, while her mouth lost its fresh young red and grew hard

in outline.

"You must go to bed, mother," she repeated in a voice which Mrs. Carr

would have obeyed had it issued from the wall or a piece of furniture.

Fifteen minutes later Gabriella stood authoritatively beside the bed,

while her mother, with a mustard plaster at the back of her neck,

obediently sipped hot milk from a teacup. Mrs. Carr had surrendered to

the conquering spirit of her daughter, but her surrender, which was

unwilling and weakly defiant, gave out presently a last feeble flicker

of resistance.

"Don't you think, Gabriella, we might arrange to live with Jane?" she

asked. "It would be a saving of expense for us both, and we might be so

helpful about the children."

"And about Charley, too, I suppose," suggested Gabriella maliciously.

Mrs. Carr, having been born without a sense of humour, never understood

the broadest joke unless it was illustrated; but even to her it became

evident, after a moment's anxious thought, that Gabriella was teasing

her.

"You seem to forget that he is her husband," she replied, with a

pathetic clutch at her dignity, which, owing perhaps to the purple

"fascinator" and the mustard plaster, she failed completely to

recapture. Then, as she finished the milk and handed back the empty cup

to her daughter, she added wearily, for life, as she often said to

herself of late, was becoming almost too much for her, and she was

feeling worn out and old:

"My one comfort, Gabriella, is the thought that Arthur Peyton loves you.

There couldn't be anybody more unlike Charley."

"There couldn't be," agreed Gabriella mildly, for she felt that another

blow would prostrate her mother.

CHAPTER III

A START IN LIFE

In the late 'seventies and early 'eighties the most important shop in

the town of Gabriella's birth was known to its patrons (chiefly ladies

in long basques, tightly tied back skirts, and small eccentric bonnets)

as Brandywine & Plummer's drygoods store. At that period, when old Mrs.

Carr, just completing her ninetieth year with a mind fixed upon heaven,

would have dropped dead at the idea that her granddaughter should ever

step out of her class, Gabriella's mother bought her dresses (grosgrain

of the very best quality) from Major Brandywine. To be sure, even in

those days, there were other shops in the city--for was not Broad Street

already alluded to in the newspapers as "the shopping thoroughfare of

the South?"--but, though they were as numerous as dandelions in June,

these places were by no means patronized so widely by "the best people."

Small shops, of course, carrying a single line of goods and supplying

their particular products to an exacting and discriminating class, held

their own even against the established reputation of Brandywine &

Plummer's. O'Connell's linen store, Twitlow's china store, Mrs. Tonk's

doll store, and Green & Brady's store for notions--all these were

situated in Broad Street hardly a stone's throw from the Second Market.

But none of these, excellent as they were, could bear comparison with

the refined atmosphere, so different from the vulgar bustle of a modern

department store, which enveloped one in the quiet gloom of Brandywine &

Plummer's. In the first place, one could be perfectly sure that one

would be waited on by a lady--for Brandywine & Plummer's, with a

distinguished Confederate soldier at its head and front, provided an

almost conventual shelter for distressed feminine gentility. There was,

for instance, Miss Marye of the black silk counter, whose father had

belonged to Stuart's cavalry and had fallen at Yellow Tavern; there was

Miss Meason of the glove counter, and there was Mrs. Burwell Smith of

the ribbon counter--for, though she had married beneath her, it was

impossible to forget that she was a direct descendant of Colonel Micajah

Burwell, of Crow's Nest Plantation.

Then, if one happened to be in search of cotton goods, one would be

almost certain to remark on the way home: "Miss Peters, who waited on me

in Brandywine's this morning, has unmistakably the manner of a lady," or

"that Mrs. Jones in Brandywine's must be related to the real Joneses,

she has such a refined appearance." And, at last, in the middle

'nineties, after the opening of the new millinery department, which was

reached by a short flight of steps, decorated at discreet intervals with

baskets of pink paper roses, customers were beginning to ask: "May I

speak to Miss Gabriella for a minute? I wish to speak to Miss Gabriella

about the hat she is having trimmed for me."

For here, also, because of what poor Jane called her "practical mind,"

the patrons of Brandywine & Plummer's were learning that Gabriella was

"the sort you could count on." As far as the actual work went, she

could not, of course, hold a candle (this was Mr. Plummer's way of

putting it) to Miss Kemp or Miss Treadway, who had a decided talent for

trimming; but no customer in balloon sleeves and bell-shaped skirt was

ever heard to remark of these young women as they remarked of Gabriella,

"No, I don't want anybody else, please. She takes such an interest." To

take an interest in other people might become quite as marketable an

asset, Mr. Plummer was discovering, after fifty years of adherence to

strictly business methods, as a gift for the needle; and, added to her

engaging interest, Gabriella appeared to know by instinct exactly what a

customer wanted.

"I declare Miss Kemp had almost persuaded me to take that brown straw

with the green velvet bandeau before I thought of asking Gabriella's

advice," Mrs. Spencer was overheard saying to her daughter, as she

paused, panting and breathless, at the head of the short flight of

steps.

"Oh, Gabriella always had taste; I'll ask her about mine," Florrie

tossed back gaily in the high fluting notes which expressed so perfectly

the brilliant, if slightly metallic, quality of her personality.

Beside her mother, a plump, bouncing person, with a noisy though

imperfectly articulate habit of speech, and the prominent hips and bust

which composed the "fine figure" of the period, Florrie seemed to float

with all the elusive, magic loveliness of a sunbeam. From the shining

nimbus of her hair to her small tripping feet she was the incarnation of

girlhood--of that white and gold girlhood which has intoxicated the

imagination of man. She shed the allurement of sex as unconsciously as a

flower sheds its perfume. Though her eyes were softly veiled by her

lashes, every male clerk in Brandywine & Plummer's was dazzled by the

deep blue light of her glances. In her red mouth, with its parted lips,

in the pure rose and white of her flesh, in the rich curve of her bosom,

which promised already the "fine figure" of her mother, youth and summer

were calling as they called in the velvet softness of the June breeze.

Innocent though she was, the powers of Life had selected her as a

vehicle for their inscrutable ends.

"Where is Miss Carr? I must speak to Miss Carr, please," she said to one

of the shop girls who came up, eager to serve her. "Will you tell her

that Miss Spencer is waiting to speak to her?"

Responding to the girl's artless stare of admiration, she threw a

friendly glance at her before she turned away to try on a monstrous

white Leghorn hat decorated around the crown with a trellis of pink

roses. Unless she happened to be in a particularly bad humour--and this

was not often the case--Florrie was imperturbably amiable. She enjoyed

flattery as a cat enjoys the firelight on its back, and while she purred

happily in the pleasant warmth, she had something of the sleek and

glossy look of a pretty kitten.

"How does this look on me, mother?" she asked over her shoulder of Mrs.

Spencer, who was babbling cheerfully in her loud tones to Miss

Lancaster, the forewoman.

Though some of the best blood in Virginia, profusely diluted with some

of the worst, flowed comfortably in Mrs. Spencer's veins, it was

impossible even for her relatives to deny that she could be at times

decidedly vulgar. Having been a conspicuous belle and beauty of a bold

and dashing type in her youth, she now devoted her middle-age to the

enjoyment of those pleasures which she had formerly sacrificed to the

preservation of her figure and her complexion. Though she still dyed her

somewhat damaged hair, and strenuously pinched in her widening waist,

she had ceased, since her fiftieth birthday, to forego the lesser

comforts of the body. As she was a person of small imagination, and of

no sentiment, it is probable that she was happier now than she had been

in the days when she suffered the deprivations and enjoyed the triumphs

of beauty.

"What's that, Florrie?" she inquired shrilly. "No, I shouldn't get that

if I were you. It doesn't flare enough. I'm crazy about a flare."

"But I want a pink bandeau, mother," replied Florrie a little pettishly,

as she patted her golden-red fringe. "I wonder where Gabriella is? Isn't

she ever coming, Miss Lancaster?"

"I thought I saw her when I came in," observed Mrs. Spencer, craning her

handsome neck, which was running to fat, in the direction of the

trimming room. "Florrie, just turn your head after a minute and look at

the hat Patty Carrington is buying--pea green, and it makes her face

look like a walnut. She hasn't the faintest idea how to dress. Do you

think I ought to speak to her about it?"

"No, let her alone," replied Florrie impatiently. "Is this any better

than the Leghorn?"

"Well, I must say I don't think there is much style about it, though, of

course, with your hair, you can carry off anything. Isn't it odd how

exactly she inherited my hair, Miss Lancaster? I remember her father

used to say that he would have fallen in love with a gatepost if it had

had golden-red hair."

Miss Lancaster, a thin, erect woman of fifty, with impassive features,

and iron-gray hair that looked as if it were rolled over wood, glanced

resignedly from Mrs. Spencer's orange-coloured crimps to the imprisoned

sunlight in Florrie's hair.

"I'd know you were mother and daughter anywhere," she remarked in the

noncommittal manner she had acquired in thirty years of independence;

"and she is going to have your beautiful figure, too, Mrs. Spencer."

"Well, I reckon I'll lose my figure now that I've stopped dieting,"

remarked the lively lady, casting an appreciative glance in the mirror.

"Florrie tells me I wear my sleeves too large, but I think they make me

look smaller."

"They are wearing them very large in Paris," replied Miss Lancaster, as

if she were reciting a verse out of a catalogue. She had, as she

sometimes found occasion to remark, been "born tired," and this

temperamental weariness showed now in her handsome face, so wrinkled and

dark around her bravely smiling eyes. Where she came from, or how she

spent her time between the hour she left the shop and the hour she

returned to it, the two women knew as little as they knew the intimate

personal history of the Leghorn hat on the peg by the mirror. Beyond the

fact that she played the part of a sympathetic chorus, they were without

curiosity about her life. Their own personalities absorbed them, and for

the time at least appeared to absorb Miss Lancaster.

"I like the Leghorn hat," said Florrie decisively, as she tried it on

for the third time, "but I'll wait till I ask Gabriella's opinion."

"I hope she's getting on well here," said Mrs. Spencer, who found it

impossible to concentrate on Florrie's hat. "Don't you think it was very

brave of her to go to work, Miss Lancaster?"

"I understood that she was obliged to," rejoined Miss Lancaster, with

the weary amiability of her professional manner.

"She might have married, I happen to know that," returned Mrs. Spencer.

"Arthur Peyton has been in love with her ever since she was a child, and

there was a young man from New York last winter who seemed crazy about

her. Florrie, don't you think George Fowler was just crazy about

Gabriella?"

"I'm sure I don't know, mother. He paid her a great deal of attention,

but you never can tell about men."

"Julia Caperton told me, and, of course, she's very intimate with

George's sister, that he went back to New York because he heard that

Gabriella was engaged to Arthur. Florrie, do you suppose she is really

engaged to Arthur?"

Thus appealed to, Florrie removed the Leghorn hat from her head, and

answered abstractedly: "Jane thought so, but if she is engaged, I don't

see why she should have started to work. I know Arthur would hate it."

"But isn't he too poor to marry?" inquired Mrs. Spencer, whose curiosity

was as robust as her constitution. "Haven't you always understood that

the Peytons were poor, Miss Lancaster, in spite of the lovely house they

live in?"

Her large, good-humoured face, which had once been as delicate as a

flower, but was now growing puffed and mottled under a plentiful layer

of rice powder, became almost violently animated, while she adjusted her

belt with a single effective jerk of her waist. Though Bessie Spencer

was admitted to have one of the kindest hearts in the world, she was

chiefly remarkable for her unhappy faculty of saying the wrong thing at

the wrong time. An inveterate, though benevolent, gossip, she would

babble on for hours, reciting the private affairs of her relatives, her

friends, and her neighbours. Everybody feared her, and yet everybody was

assured that "she never meant any harm." The secrets of the town flowed

through her mind as grist flows through a mill, and though she was

entirely without malice, she contrived, in the most innocent manner, to

do an incalculable amount of injury. Possessing a singularly active

intelligence, and having reached middle-age without acquiring sufficient

concentration to enjoy books, she directed a vigorous, if casual,

understanding toward the human beings among whom she lived. She knew

everything that it was possible to know about the people who lived in

Franklin Street, and yet her mind was so constituted that she never by

any chance knew it correctly. Though she was not old, she had already

passed into a proverb. To receive any statement with the remark, "You

have heard that from Bessie Spencer," was to cast doubt upon it.

"You don't think I'm getting any stouter, do you, Miss Lancaster?" she

inquired dubiously, with her hands on her hips and her eyes measuring

the dimensions of her waist. "I'm making up my mind to try one of those

B. and T. corsets that Mrs. Murray is wearing. She told me it reduced

her waist at least three inches."

"Oh, you aren't like Mrs. Murray--she didn't measure a fraction under

thirty inches," replied Miss Lancaster, with her patient politeness.

Then, after a pause, which Mrs. Spencer's nimble wit filled with a story

about the amazing number of mint juleps Mrs. Murray was seen to drink at

the White Sulphur Springs last summer, Florrie exclaimed eagerly:

"Why, there is Gabriella! Won't you get her for us, Miss Lancaster?"

Near one of the long windows, beyond which large greenish flies were

buzzing around the branch of a mulberry tree in the alley, Gabriella was

trying a purple hat on a prim-looking lady who regarded herself in the

mirror with a furtive and deprecating air as if she were afraid of being

unjustly blamed for her appearance. "I'm not sure--but I don't think it

suits me exactly," she appeared to murmur in a strangled whisper, while

she twisted her mouth, which held a jet-headed hatpin, into a quivering

grimace.

"She's waiting on Matty French," said Mrs. Spencer, and she added

impulsively, "I wonder what it is that men see in Gabriella. You

wouldn't call her really pretty, would you, Miss Lancaster?"

"Well, not exactly pretty, but she has an interesting face. It is so

full of life."

"Can't you get her, mother?" asked Florrie; and Mrs. Spencer, always

eager to oblige, rustled across the room and pounced vivaciously upon

the prim lady and Gabriella.

"We've been looking for you everywhere, Gabriella," she began, nodding

agreeably to Miss French. "Florrie has tried on all the hats in the

room, and she wants you to tell her if that white Leghorn is becoming.

Good morning, Matty! That blue wing is so stylish. I think you are very

sensible to wear colours and not to stick to black as Susie Chamberlain

does. It makes her look as old as the hills, and I believe she does it

just to depress people. Life is too short, as I said when I left off

mourning, to be an ink blot wherever you go. And it doesn't mean that

she grieves a bit more for her husband than anybody else does. Everybody

knows they led a cat and dog's life together, and I've even heard,

though I can't remember who told me, that she was on the point of

getting a divorce when he died. Are you going? Well, I'm glad you

decided on that blue hat. I don't believe you'll ever regret it.

Good-bye. Be sure and come to see me soon. Gabriella, will you help

Florrie about her hat now? I declare, I thought Matty would never get

through with you. And, of course, we didn't want anybody but you to wait

on us. We were just saying that you had the most beautiful taste, and it

is so wise of you to go out to work and not sit down and sew at home in

order to support your position. A position that can't support itself

isn't much of a prop, my husband used to say. But I don't believe you'll

stay here long, you sly piece. You'll be married before the year is up,

mark my word. The men are all crazy about you, everybody knows that.

Why, Florrie met George Fowler in the street this morning, and when he

asked after you, his face turned as hot as fire, she said--"

Gabriella's face, above her starched collar with its neat red tie, was

slowly flooded with colour. Her brown eyes shone golden under her dark

lashes, and Mrs. Spencer told herself that the girl looked almost pretty

for a minute. "If she wasn't so sallow, she'd be really good looking."

Happily unaware that her face had betrayed her, Gabriella slid back a

glass door, took a hat out of the case, and answered indifferently,

while she adjusted the ribbon bow on one side of the crown:

"I didn't know Mr. Fowler had come back. I haven't seen him for ages."

From her small, smooth head to her slender feet she had acquired in

three months the composed efficiency of Miss Lancaster; and one might

have imagined, as Mrs. Spencer remarked to Florrie afterwards, that "she

had been born in a hat shop."

But instead of the weary patience of Miss Lancaster, she brought to her

work the brimming energy and the joyous self-confidence of youth. It was

impossible to watch her and not realize that she had given both ability

and the finer gift of personality to the selling of hats. Had she

started life as a funeral director instead of a milliner, it is probable

that she would have infused into the dreary business something of the

living quality of genius.

"Oh, Florrie hadn't seen him for ages either," chirped Mrs. Spencer,

with her restless eyes on the hat in Gabriella's hand. "I don't know

whether I ought to tell you or not, but you and Florrie are so intimate

I suppose I might as well--Julia Caperton told Florrie that George came

back because he heard in some way that you had broken your engagement to

Arthur. Of course, as I told Julia afterwards, you hadn't mentioned a

word of it to me, but I've got eyes and I can't help using them. I was

obliged to see that George was simply out of his mind about you. It

would be a splendid match, too, for they say his father has made quite a

large fortune since he went to New York--"

"Mother!" interrupted Florrie sternly, over her shoulder, "you know

Julia told you not to breathe a single word as coming from her. She is

the bosom friend of George's sister."

"But, Florrie, I haven't told a soul except Gabriella, and I know she

wouldn't repeat a thing that I said to her."

"Now, isn't that exactly like mother?" observed Florrie, with the casual

disapprobation of youth. "She was on the point of telling Miss Lancaster

all about it when I stopped her."

"Why, Florrie, I didn't say a word except that men were crazy about

Gabriella--you know I didn't. Of course, I talk a great deal," she

pursued in an aggrieved, explanatory tone to Gabriella, "but I never

repeat a word--not a single word that is told me in confidence. If Julia

had asked me not to tell Gabriella what she said, I shouldn't have

dreamed of doing so."

"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least, Mrs. Spencer," said Gabriella

hastily, "only there isn't a word of truth in it."

The becoming flush was still in her cheeks, and she poised a hat over

Florrie's head with a swift, flying grace which Mrs. Spencer had never

noticed in her before. "I wonder if Gabriella can really care about

George?" she thought quickly. "But if it is George she is in love with,

why on earth did she start to work in a shop?" Then suddenly, following

a flash of light, she reasoned it out to her complete satisfaction. "It

must have been that she didn't know that George cared--that is why she

is blushing so at this minute."

An hour or so later, when Florrie and her mother had fluttered volubly

downstairs, and the exhausted assistants were putting the hats away

before closing the cases, Gabriella went into the dressing-room, where

Miss Nash, a stout, pleasant-looking girl, was sitting in a broken

chair, with her shoes off, her blue serge skirt rolled back from her

knees, and her head bowed, over her crossed arms, on the window-sill.

At Gabriella's entrance she glanced up, and remarked cheerfully: "My

feet were killing me. I just had to take off my shoes."

"They do get dreadfully tired," assented Gabriella in the tone of

sympathetic intimacy she had caught from the other girls.

Her naturally friendly spirit had refused to "hold aloof" from her

companions, as her mother had begged her to do, and at the end of three

months she had learned things about most of them which interested her

profoundly. One supported an invalid father, another had a family of six

little brothers and sisters to care for, and still another had lost her

lover through a railroad accident only two days before her marriage.

Several of them were extravagantly loud, one or two were inclined to be

vulgar; but the others were quite as refined and gentle as the girls

with whom she had grown up, and what impressed her about them all was

their courageous and yet essentially light-hearted Southern spirit. To

her surprise, she found an utter absence of jealousy among them. The

elder women were invariably kind and helpful, and though she liked the

girls, she soon discovered in herself a growing feeling of respect for

these older women. They represented a different type, for the hardness

she noticed in some of the younger girls was entirely lacking in the

women of Miss Lancaster's generation. Many of them even her mother

would have called well born, and one and all, they were almost painfully

ladylike. With their thin, erect figures, their wan, colourless faces,

their graying hair, and their sweet Southern voices, they imparted a

delicate social air to the shop.

Usually Gabriella stopped to talk to the girls who crowded in from the

workroom, brushing shreds of silk or ribbon from their skirts, but

to-day her mind wandered while she answered Miss Nash, and when, a

minute later, Miss Lancaster spoke to her on her way out, and asked her

to match the flowers for Florrie's hat, she was obliged to make an

effort before she could recall her roving attention. She was thinking

not of Florrie's hat, but of Mrs. Spencer's words, "He has come back

because he heard that your engagement was broken." And at the first

insurgent rise of emotion, she ceased to be the business woman and

became merely an imaginative girl, dreaming of love.

"They aren't quite the right shade, are they?" she asked with an

uncertainty which was tactful rather than sincere, "or, perhaps, the

ribbon might be darker?"

Her eyes questioned Miss Lancaster, who moved a step nearer the window

as she held the bolt of ribbon toward the daylight.

"Well, we'd better look at it again in the morning. You are in a hurry,

Miss Carr?"

"Oh, no, I've all the time in the world," answered Gabriella, though she

longed to be out with the June scents and her dreams, "but I am sure the

ribbon ought to be a deeper blue to tone with the ragged robins."

"You've a wonderful eye for colour, that's why I ask your advice," said

the other, and a sudden friendliness shone in her tired eyes, for she

had liked Gabriella from the beginning. That the girl possessed a

genuine gift of taste, the elder woman had already discovered. For

herself, Miss Lancaster had always hated the sight of hats, and had

taken up the work merely because a place in Brandywine & Plummer's had

been offered her shortly after her father, a gallant fighter but a poor

worker, had gone to end his kindly anecdotal days in the Home for

Confederate Soldiers. She was a repressed, conscientious woman, who had

never been younger than she was now at fifty, and who regarded youth,

not with envy, but with admiring awe. For she, also, patient and

uncomplaining creature, belonged to that world of decay and inertia from

which Gabriella had revolted. It was a world where things happened

to-day just as they happened yesterday, where no miracles had occurred

since the miracles of Scripture, where people hated change, not because

they were satisfied, but because they were incapable of imagination.

Miss Lancaster, who had never wanted anything with passion, except to be

a perfect lady, was proud of the fact that she had been twenty years in

business without losing her "shrinking manner."

"Yes, you have an eye for colour," she repeated gently; "if you could

only learn to sew, you might command a most desirable position."

"I despise sewing," replied Gabriella, with serene good-humour, "and I

could never learn, even at school, anything that I despised. But I

suppose I can always tell somebody else how it ought to be done."

Then, because her work always interested her, she forgot the disturbing

words Mrs. Spencer had spoken--she forgot even her impatience to feel

the June air in her face. Her best gift, the power of mental control,

enabled her to bring the needed discipline to her emotion; and when the

moment of her release came, she found that the brief restlessness had

passed from her mind. "There's no use letting myself get impatient," she

thought; "I've got to stick to it, so it won't do a bit of good to begin

wriggling."

All the other girls had gone home before her, and on the sidewalk Miss

Meason, of the glove counter, stood talking about the spring sales to

Mr. Brandywine. As Gabriella passed them, in her white shirtwaist and

dark belted skirt, they looked thoughtfully after her until her sailor

hat, with the scarlet band, crossed Broad Street and disappeared on the

opposite side.

"She's a remarkable girl," observed Mr. Brandywine, with his paternal

manner. "I hope she is beginning to feel at home with us."

"I believe she'd feel at home anywhere," replied Miss Meason, "and she's

obliged to get on. There's no doubt of it."

"A pleasant face, too. Not exactly pretty, I suppose, but you would call

it a pleasant face."

"Oh, well, I'd call her pretty in her way," answered Miss Meason. "Her

eyes are lovely, and she has a singularly bright expression. I always

say that a bright expression makes up for anything."

"Her mother was a beauty in her day," said Mr. Brandywine reminiscently;

"she was the snow and roses sort, and her eldest daughter took after

her, though she is a wreck now, poor lady."

"That's Charley Gracey," remarked Miss Meason tartly, for she had the

self-supporting woman's contempt for the rake. "Yes, she was lovely as a

girl. I remember as well as if it were yesterday how happy she looked

when I sold her her wedding gloves. She is a beautiful character, too,

they say, but somehow Gabriella, even as a child, appealed to me more.

She has three times the sense of her sister."

Then they shook hands and parted, while Gabriella, tripping through the

Second Market, was saying to herself: "There's not the least bit of

sense in your thinking about him, Gabriella."

In Hill Street, maple and poplar trees were in full leaf, and little

flakes of sunshine, as soft as flowers, were scattered over the brick

pavement. Beyond the housetops the sky was golden, and at the corner the

rusty ironwork of an old balcony had turned to the colour of bronze. The

burning light of the sunset blinded her eyes, while an intense sweetness

came to her from the honeysuckle clambering over a low white porch; and

this light and this sweetness possessed an ineffable quality. Life,

which had been merely placid a few hours before, had become suddenly

poignant--every instant was pregnant with happiness, every detail was

piercingly vivid. Her whole being was flooded with a sensation of

richness and wonder, as if she had awakened with surprise to a different

world from the one she had closed her eyes on a minute before.

As she crossed the street she saw her mother's head above a box of clove

pinks in the window; and a little later the front door opened and Miss

Polly Hatch, a small, indomitable spinster who sewed out by the day,

walked rapidly between the iron urns and stopped under the creamy

blossoms of the old magnolia tree in the yard.

"It's too late for your ma to be workin', Gabriella. You'd better stop

her."

Pausing in the middle of the walk, she comfortably tucked under her arm

an unwieldy bundle she carried, and added, with the shrewdness which was

the result of a long and painful experience with human nature: "It's

funny--ain't it?--how downright mulish your ma can be when she wants

to?"

"I can't do a thing on earth with her," answered Gabriella in distress.

"You have more influence over her than I have, Miss Polly."

Miss Polly, who had the composed and efficient bearing of a machine,

shook her head discouragingly as she opened the gate and passed out.

"I reckon she's set for good and all," she remarked emphatically, and

went on her way.

"Mother, it's time to stop sewing and think about supper," called

Gabriella gaily, as she ran into the room and bent to kiss her mother,

who turned a flat, soft cheek in her direction, and remarked gloomily:

"Gabriella, you've had a visitor."

Not for worlds would Mrs. Carr have surrendered to the disarming

cheerfulness of her daughter's manner; for since Gabriella had gone to

work in a shop, her mother's countenance implied that she was piously

resigned to disgrace as well as to poverty. It was inconceivable to her

that any girl with Berkeley blood in her veins could be so utterly

devoid of proper pride as Gabriella had proved herself to be; and the

shock of this discovery had left a hurt look in her face. There were

days when she hardly spoke to the girl, when refusing food, she opened

her lips only to moisten her thread, when the slow tears seemed forever

welling between her reddened eyelids. As they had just passed through

one of these painful periods, Gabriella was surprised to find that, for

the moment at least, her mother appeared to have forgotten her righteous

resentment. Though it could hardly be said that Mrs. Carr spoke

cheerfully--since cheerfulness was foreign to her nature--at least she

had spoken. Of her own accord, unquestioned and unurged, she had

volunteered a remark to her daughter; and Gabriella felt that, for a

brief respite, the universe had ceased to be menacing.

"Gabriella, you have had a visitor," repeated Mrs. Carr, and it was

clear that her sorrow (she never yielded to passion) had been overcome

by a natural human eagerness to tell her news.

"Not Cousin Jimmy?" asked the girl lightly.

"No, you could never guess, if you guessed all night."

"Not Charley Gracey surely? I wouldn't speak to him for the world."

Though Jane had returned to Charley, and even Mrs. Carr, feeling in her

heart that her younger daughter had dealt her the hardest blow, had been

heard to say that she "pitied her son-in-law more than she censured

him," Gabriella had not softened in her implacable judgment.

"Of course it wasn't Charley. I shouldn't have mentioned it if it had

been, because you are so bitter against him. But it was somebody you

haven't seen for months. Do you remember Evelyn Randolph's son who paid

you so much attention last winter?"

"George Fowler! Has he been here?" asked Gabriella, and her voice

quivered like a harp.

"I told Marthy to say you were out. Of course I wasn't fit to see

company, but he caught sight of me on his way to the gate and came back

on the porch to speak to me. He remembered all about my having gone to

school with his mother, and it seems she had told him about the time she

was Queen of May and I maid of honour. I asked him how Evelyn stood

living in New York, but he said she likes it better than his father

does. Archie Fowler insists that he is coming back to Virginia to end

his days. They seem to have plenty of money. I expect Archie has made a

fortune up there or he wouldn't be satisfied to live out of Virginia."

"Did George ask when I'd be at home?" inquired Gabriella.

Though she knew that it was unwise to divert her mother's attention from

the main narrative, her whole body ached with the longing to hear what

George had said of her, and she felt that it was impossible to resist

the temptation to question.

"He said something about you as he was going away, but I can't remember

whether he asked when you would be in or not." In spite of the fact that

Mrs. Carr had the most tenacious memory for useless detail, she was

never able to recall the significant points of an interview.

"He didn't ask where I was?"

The question was indiscreet, for it jerked Mrs. Carr's mind back with

violence from its innocent ramble into the past, while it reminded her

of Gabriella's present unladylike occupation. She shut her lips with

soft but obstinate determination, and Gabriella, watching her closely,

told herself that "wild horses couldn't drag another word out of her

mother to-night." The girl longed to talk it over; but she might have

tried as successfully to gossip with the angel on a marble tombstone.

She wanted to hear what George had said, to ask how he was looking, and

to wonder aloud why he had come back. She wanted to throw herself into

her mother's arms and listen to all the little important things that

filled the world for her. If only the aloof virtue in Mrs. Carr's face

would relax into a human expression!

Taking off her hat, Gabriella went into the bedroom, and then, coming

back again after a short absence, remarked with forced gaiety: "I

suppose he didn't have anything interesting to tell you, did he?"

"No." Though the light had almost waned, Mrs. Carr broke off a fresh

piece of thread and leaned nearer the window, while she tried to find

the eye of the needle.

"Let me thread your needle, mother. It is too late to work, anyway. You

will ruin your eyesight."

"I have never considered my eyesight, Gabriella."

"I know you haven't, and that's why you ought to begin."

As it was really growing too dark to see, Mrs. Carr rolled the thread

back on the spool, stuck the needle into the last buttonhole, and

folding the infant's dress on which she was working, laid it away in her

straw work-basket.

"Will you light the gas, Gabriella?"

"Don't work any more to-night, mother. It is almost supper time."

Without replying, Mrs. Carr moved with her basket to a chair under the

chandelier. Once seated there, she unfolded the dress, took the needle

from the unfinished buttonhole, and tried again unsuccessfully to run

the thread through the eye. Then, while Gabriella rushed to her aid, she

removed her glasses and patiently polished them on a bit of chamois skin

she kept in her basket.

"Don't you feel as if you could eat a chop to-night, mother?"

"I haven't been able to swallow a morsel all day, Gabriella."

"I've saved you a little cream. Shall I make you a toddy?"

"I don't want it. Drink it yourself, dear."

After this there followed one of those pauses which fill not only the

room, but the universe with a fury of sound. There were times when

Gabriella felt that she could stand anything if only her mother would

fly into a rage--when she positively envied Florrie Spencer because her

plebeian parent scolded her at the top of her voice instead of

maintaining a calm and ladylike reticence. But Mrs. Carr was one of

those women who never, even in the most trying circumstances, cease to

be patient, who never lose for an instant so much as the palest or the

thinnest of the Christian virtues.

Going into the bedroom, Gabriella changed from her shirtwaist into a

gown of flowered muslin, with sleeves that looked small beside the

balloon ones of the season, and a skirt which was shrunken and pale from

many washings the summer before. She had worn the frock when she met

George, and though it was old, she knew it was becoming, and she told

herself joyfully that if she put it on to-night, "something must come of

it." As she smoothed her hair by the dim gas-jet over the mirror, she

saw again the face of George as it had first smiled down on her beneath

the boughs of a mimosa tree in Mrs. Spencer's front garden. At the

time, a year ago, she was engaged to Arthur--she had even called the

placid preference she felt for him "being in love"--but while she talked

to George she had found herself thinking, "I wonder how it would feel to

be engaged to a man like this instead of to Arthur?" Then, since all

Southern engagements of the period were secret, she had seen a good deal

of George during the summer; and in the autumn, while she was still

trying to make believe that it was merely a friendship, he had gone back

to New York without saying good-bye. She had tried her best to stop

thinking of him, and until this evening, she had never really let

herself confess that she cared. But if she didn't care why was she so

happy to-night? If she didn't care why was there such intoxicating

sweetness in the thought of his return? If she didn't care why had she

dressed herself so carefully in the flowered muslin he had once said

that he liked? Her face, smiling back at her from the mirror, was

suffused with a delicate glow--not pink, not white, but softly luminous

as if a lamp, shining behind it, enkindled its expression. She had never

seen herself so nearly pretty, and with this thought in her mind, she

went back to her mother, who was still working buttonholes under the

chandelier.

"Marthy has brought the lamp, mother. Why don't you move over to the

table?"

"I can see perfectly, thank you, Gabriella."

"I hate to see you working. Let me finish those buttonholes."

"I'd rather get through them myself, dear."

"Have you seen Jane to-day?"

"No."

"Has Cousin Pussy been here?"

"No."

"Did you get out for a walk?"

"No."

The appalling silence again filled the room like a fog, and Gabriella,

moving cautiously about in it, began straightening chairs and picking up

shreds of cambric from the carpet. She felt suddenly that she could not

endure the strain for another minute, and glancing at Mrs. Carr's bent

head, where the thin hair was wound into a tight knot and held in place

by a tortoise-shell comb with a carved top, she wondered how her mother

could possibly keep it up day after day as she did? But, if she had only

known it, this silence, which tried her nerves to the breaking point,

was positively soothing to her mother. Mrs. Carr could keep it up not

only for days and weeks, but, had it been necessary, she could have kept

it up with equal success for half a lifetime. While she sat there,

working buttonholes in a bad light, she thought quite as passionately as

Gabriella, though her mental processes were different. She thought

sadly, but firmly, with a pensive melancholy not untinged with pleasure,

that "life was becoming almost too much for her." It seemed incredible

to her that after all her struggles to keep up an appearance things

should have turned out as they had; it seemed incredible that after all

her sacrifices her children should not consider her more. "They have no

consideration for me," she reflected, while she took the finest stitch

possible to the needle she held. "If Jane had considered me she would

never have married Charley. If Gabriella had considered me, or anybody

but herself, she would not have gone to work in a store." No, they had

never considered her, they had never asked her advice before acting,

though she had brought them into the world and had worked like a slave

in order to keep them in that respected station of life in which they

had been born. Then, her sorrow getting the better of her resolution,

she turned her head and spoke:

"I know you never tell me anything on purpose, Gabriella, but I think I

have a right to know whether or not you have discarded Arthur for good."

"I told you all about it, mother. I told you I found I was mistaken."

"I suppose you never thought for a moment how much it would distress me?

Though Lydia Peyton is so much older than I am, she was always my best

friend--we often stayed in the room together when we were girls. I had

set my heart on your marrying her son."

"I know that, mother, and I am very sorry, but when it came to the point

I couldn't marry him. You can't make yourself care--"

"I should have thought that my wishes might influence you. I should

never wish you to do anything that wasn't for your good, Gabriella."

"Of course, mother, you've given up your life to us. I know that, and

Jane knows it as well as I do. That's why I want to earn money enough to

let you rest. I want you to stop work for good and be happy."

"There are worse things than work," replied Mrs. Carr in a tone which

implied that Gabriella had brought them upon her.

After a pause, in which her needle flew mournfully, she added: "I hope

for your own sake that you will marry some good man before you lose

your attractions. Poor Becky Bollingbroke proved to me how unfortunate

it is for a woman to remain unmarried."

For an instant Gabriella looked at her mother without replying. She felt

tempted--strongly tempted, she told herself--to say something cross.

Then the sight of the bent gray head, of the bowed shoulders, of the

knotted needle-pricked fingers, pierced her heart. Though she could not

always agree with her mother, she loved her devotedly, and the thought

that she must lose her some day had been the most terrible nightmare of

her childhood.

"Don't worry about me, mother, dear," she answered tenderly. "I can

always take care of myself. I can manage my life, you know that, don't

you?" Then she stopped quickly while her heart gave a single bound and

lay quiet. She had heard the click of the gate, and a minute later, as

Mrs. Carr gathered up her sewing, there was a ring at the bell.

"It can't be a visitor before supper, can it, Gabriella?"

"I think not, mother, but I shouldn't run away if I were you."

"I'd better go. I don't feel dressed. Wait a minute, Marthy, and let me

get out of the room before you open the door." She fled, clutching her

work-basket, while Gabriella, turning to lower the flaming wick of the

lamp, heard George's voice at the door and his footsteps crossing the

hall.

"I knew something would happen," she thought wildly, as she went forward

to meet him.

"I saw you pull down the shade as I was going by," he began rather

lamely; and she hardly heard his words because of the divine tumult in

her brain. Her heart sang; her pulses throbbed; every drop of her blood

seemed to become suddenly alive with ecstasy. Under the tarnished

garlands of the chandelier his face looked younger, gayer, more

intensely vivid than it had looked in her dreams. It was the face of her

dreams made real; but with what a difference! She saw his crisp brown

hair brushed smoothly back from its parting, his blue eyes, with their

gay and conquering look, the firm red brown of his cheek, and even the

bluish shadow encircling his shaven mouth. In his eyes, which said

enchanting things, she could not read the trivial and commonplace

quality of his soul--for he was not only a man, he was romance, he was

adventure, he was the radiant miracle of youth!

"Florrie told me this morning that you had come back," she answered

coldly, as she held out her hand.

Her words seemed to come to her from a distance--from the next room,

from the street outside, from the farthest star--but while she uttered

them, she knew that her words meant nothing. She shed her joy as if it

were fragrance; and her softness was like the magnolia-scented softness

of the June night. Even her mother would not have known her, so greatly

had she changed in a minute. Of the businesslike figure in the sailor

hat and trim shirtwaist--of the Gabriella who had said, "I can manage my

life"--there remained only an outline. The very feet of the capable

woman had changed into the shrinking and timid feet of a lovesick girl.

She was afraid to go forward, afraid to move, afraid to breathe lest she

break the wonderful spell of the magic. Not only her basic common sense,

but the very soul that shaped her body had become as light, as sweet,

as formless as liquid honey.

But of course, she knew nothing of this. She was innocent of deception;

she was innocent even of any definite purpose to allure. The thought in

her mind, if there were any thought, which is doubtful, was that she

must be composed, she must be indifferent if it killed her.

"I know I've come at an awkward hour, but I simply couldn't go by after

I saw you."

"Won't you stay?" she asked, trying in vain to shut out the ominous

sound of Marthy bringing their scant supper. She remembered, with

horror, that she had ordered only two chops, and a wave of rebellion

swept over her because life always spoiled its divine instants.

"No, I can't stay. I've an engagement for supper. I merely wanted to see

you. You've no idea how I've wanted to see you."

"Have you?" said Gabriella in so low a voice that he hardly heard her.

Then, lifting her glowing eyes, she added softly, "I am glad that you

wanted to."

"There were times when I simply couldn't get you out of my mind," he

responded, and went on almost joyously, with the romantic look which had

first enchanted her imagination. "You see I believed that you were going

to marry Arthur Peyton. Julia told me that your engagement was broken.

That was why I came back. Didn't you guess it?"

"Yes, I guessed it," she answered simply, and all the softness, the

sweetness, the beauty of her feeling passed into her voice.

Then, in the very midst of her happiness, there occurred one of those

sordid facts which appear to spring, like vultures, upon the ineffable

moments. She heard the bell--the awful supper bell which her mother

insisted upon having rung because her parents had had it rung for

generations before her. As the horrible sound reverberated through the

house, Gabriella felt that the noise passed through her ears, not into

her brain, but into the very depths of her suffering soul.

"There, I must go," said George, without embarrassment, for which she

blessed him. From his manner, the supper bell might have made a

delightful harmony instead of a hideous discord. "I'll see you

to-morrow, if I may. May I, Gabriella?"

He smiled charmingly as he went, and looking after him, a minute later,

over the clove pinks in the window-box, she saw him turn and gaze back

at her from the opposite pavement.

CHAPTER IV

MIRAGE

On a bright Sunday in October Mrs. Carr stopped on her way from church

to tell Mrs. Peyton of Gabriella's engagement. A crape veil, slightly

scented with camphor, hung from her bonnet, and in her gloved hands she

carried a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, for she intended to go on to

Hollywood, where her husband was buried. The sermon had been unusually

inspiring, and there was a pensive exaltation in her look as she laid

her hand on the gate of the walled garden.

"If it couldn't be Arthur--and of course my heart was set on her

marrying Arthur--I suppose George is the one I should have chosen," she

said to Mrs. Peyton with tender melancholy as she turned her soft,

clammy cheek, which was never warm even in summer, to be kissed.

There was nothing against George that she could advance even to

Gabriella. He was well born, for his mother had been a Randolph; he was

comfortably rich (at least his father was); he was good-looking; he was

almost arrogantly healthy--yet because she was obliged to regret

something, she found herself clinging fondly to the memory of Arthur.

"If it could only have been Arthur," she repeated sadly, gazing through

the French window of the drawing-room to the garden where beds of

scarlet sage flaunted brilliantly in the sunshine.

"I hope and pray that dear Gabriella will be happy," replied Mrs.

Peyton, a beautiful old lady, with wonderful white hair under the

widow's ruching in her bonnet. The exquisite simplicity of her soul was

reflected in the rose-leaf delicacy of her skin, in her benignant and

innocent smile, in the serene and joyous glance of her eyes. Never in

her life had she thought evil of any one, and she did not mean to begin

on the verge of the grave, with the hope of a peaceful eternity before

her. If dear Gabriella had "discarded" dear Arthur, then she could only

hope and pray that dear Gabriella would not live to regret it.

"She will be married at once, I suppose?" she said, and beamed as

happily as if Gabriella had not disappointed the dearest hope of her

heart. "There is no need to wait, is there?"

"They have decided on the 17th of November. I wanted you to know it

first of all, Lydia, so I haven't mentioned it to a soul except to

Cousin Jimmy Wrenn."

"You will live with dear Jane, will you not? Poor child, what a blessing

you will be to her."

"No, I shall be with Jane only for a month or two until Gabriella and

George have taken a house in New York. She wouldn't consent to be

married so soon until I promised to live with them. But how on earth

shall I ever manage to go so far away, Lydia? To think of being so far

from Hollywood almost breaks my heart, and yet what can I do?"

Mrs. Peyton's loving gaze enfolded not only her visitor, but the house

and the dreamy garden where frost was already blighting the flowers.

"I understand your feeling, of course, Fanny," she said, "but you must

think of Gabriella. How different it will be for her if her mother is

with her. I shall miss you every minute, but for the sake of that

splendid child of yours, I must not allow myself to be sorry."

If Mrs. Carr's features could have lost the fixed impression of a

lifetime, they would have appeared almost cheerful while her old friend

held her hand and gazed benignly upon her; but so relaxed had the

muscles of her face become that, even when her spirits rose, her

countenance did not alter, and the flicker of light in her smile only

served to illumine its profound melancholy.

"I try to think of Gabriella," she answered, "but I oughtn't to forget

poor Jane. Whenever I remember her, I begin to reproach myself."

"Don't reproach yourself, Fanny. There is nothing on earth for which you

can justly be blamed. I am sure you have never considered your own

wishes for a minute in your life. If ever a mother gave up everything

for her children, you have done so, Fanny, and you needn't deny it. But

tell me about Gabriella. How thankful you ought to be that she has given

up that work in a store!"

"If it had been God's will, I suppose I must have borne it, Lydia, but I

felt as if it was killing me."

"The dear child has a strong character," observed Mrs. Peyton, and it

seemed to her, while she thought of Gabriella, that a strong character

was a beautiful and wonderful thing.

"You would hardly know Gabriella, she is so changed," replied Mrs. Carr.

"I declare I sometimes think that I never saw a girl so wildly in love

as she is. She positively worships George, and when I look at her, I

remember Becky Bollingbroke's saying that a smart woman in love is

worse than a silly one. She has that much more to get foolish with, poor

Becky used to say.

"How happy it must make you," murmured the other. "There is nothing in

life I'd rather see than my Arthur happily married."

"I always thought that he and Gabriella were made for each other, but

one never can tell--"

"That must be Gabriella now," said Mrs. Peyton as the bell rang. "Is she

coming for you?"

"Yes, Cousin Jimmy was to bring her, and then drive me out to Hollywood.

Isn't that Arthur's voice talking to her?"

"Poor boy," whispered Mrs. Peyton, and then she rustled forward and

enveloped Gabriella in a warm embrace. "My darling girl, your mother has

just told me," she said.

"And Gabriella has just told me," added Arthur at her elbow. Though

there was a hurt look in his eyes, his manner was perfect. Years

afterwards, whenever Gabriella thought of him, she remembered how

perfect his manner was on that morning.

"I wanted you to know first of all," said Gabriella.

As the old lady looked at her with loving eyes, it seemed to her that

the girl was softly glowing with happiness. She accepted joy as she

accepted sorrow, with quietness, but there was a look in her face which

made her appear, for the moment, transfigured. A radiance like that of a

veiled flame shone in her eyes; the cool tones of her voice had grown

richer and gentler; and at last, as Mrs. Peyton said to herself,

Gabriella, the sensible and practical Gabriella, was sweet with the

honeysuckle sweetness of Jane.

"She must be over head and ears in love," she thought; and the next

minute, "I wonder how it will end?"

The question brought a pang to her kind old heart, which longed to make

everybody, and particularly her boy Arthur, happy. Then, because her

eyes were filling, she stroked the girl's arm gently, and said:

"That's a pretty dress, my dear. I never saw you look better."

"She's really getting pretty," remarked Mrs. Carr. "Cousin Jimmy was

saying only yesterday that if Gabriella keeps it up, she'll be a better

looking old lady than Jane."

"Well, I think her a very pretty young one," replied Mrs. Peyton. "She

hasn't such small features as Jane has, but there is more in her face.

Now, I'm willing to wager that George thinks her a beauty."

Gabriella laughed happily. "He hasn't the faintest idea what I look

like, but he declares he won't be a bit disappointed if he finds out

some day that I am ugly."

The glow of youth, of hope, of love, gave to her expressive face an

almost unearthly brightness. She seemed to draw to her all that was

vital and alive in the dim old house, so filled with memories, and in

the October pageantry of the garden. It was the day of her miracle, and

against the splendour of the scarlet sage, she shone with an

unforgettable radiance.

When, a little later, Mrs. Carr, in Cousin Jimmy's buggy, with her bunch

of chrysanthemums held rigidly in her lap, drove off at an amble to

Hollywood, and Gabriella, turning to wave her hand, had vanished behind

the corner of the gray wall, Mrs. Peyton said gently:

"She looked very happy, dear boy. You and I must pray for her

happiness."

The beauty which all her life she had created through faith awoke in

Arthur's suffering heart while she spoke to him. She demanded nobility

of being, and it existed; she exacted generosity of nature, and it was

there. By her mere presence, by the overflowing love in her heart, she

not only banished jealousy and envy, but made the very idea of them

unthinkable.

"She is obliged to be happy. It is her nature," answered Arthur, for his

disposition was hardly less perfect than his manner.

Crossing Broad Street, which wore its look of Sabbath sleepiness,

Gabriella hurried on to Hill Street, and saw George waiting for her

between the two green-painted urns filled with the summer's fading bloom

of portulaca.

He was staring straight upward at one of the poplar trees, where a gray

squirrel was playing among the branches, and for several minutes before

he was aware of her presence, she watched him with her impassioned, yet

not wholly uncritical, gaze. The sunlight sparkled in his eyes, which

shone brightly blue against the red brown of his flesh; and between his

smiling lips, which were thick and somewhat loosely moulded, she saw the

gleaming whiteness of his teeth. She could not explain--she had never

even tried to understand--why this face, which was not in the least a

remarkable one, should so profoundly appeal to her. When George was

absent, his look haunted her with the intensity of an hallucination;

when at last she saw it again, she felt that nothing else in the world

mattered to her, so supreme was the contentment that swept over her.

Though she was more intelligent than Jane, not even Jane herself had

surrendered so unconditionally to the primal force. At least Jane had

made exactions, but so complete was the subjugation of Gabriella that

she exacted nothing, not even a return of her love. To give was all she

asked, and in the giving she bloomed into a beauty and fullness of

nature which Jane's small, closed soul could never attain.

"George!" she called, and went swiftly toward him.

He turned, threw away the cigar in his hand, and held open the gate

while she entered.

"There's a jolly little beggar up in the poplar," he said; "I've been

watching him for ten minutes."

Then, as she passed before him into the parlour, he shut the door, and

catching her in his arms, kissed the back of her neck.

"Oh, George!" she murmured, and her voice was like music. Even to his

short-sighted vision there was pathos at the heart of her happiness--the

pathos of ignorance, Of innocence, of the reckless generosity of soul

that spends its best for the pure joy of spending. With the instinctive

miserliness of the man who realizes that passion to last must be

hoarded, not scattered, he had drawn back almost unconsciously from the

simple abandonment of her love. He wanted her because the deep

discomfort of his nature could not be satisfied without her; but in

possessing her he did not mean to give up anything else. Never for an

instant had he deluded himself with the mystic ecstasies of Gabriella.

The passion which had changed her whole being as if by a miracle, had

altered neither his fundamental egoism nor his superficial philosophy.

He loved her, he knew, as much as it was possible for him to love any

woman; but he was still able to take a profound and healthy interest in

his physical comfort. In one thing, however, they were passionately

agreed, and that was that the aim and end of their marriage was to make

George perfectly happy.

"You are sweet enough to eat this morning," he said as he kissed her.

"I told Mrs. Peyton that you didn't know whether I was pretty or ugly,"

she answered merrily.

"It isn't beauty that takes a man, though women think so," he rejoined

lightly, and yet as if he were imparting one of the basic facts of

experience. "I don't know what it is--but it's something else, and

you've got it, Gabriella."

She looked at him with luminous eyes.

"I've got you," she answered in a whisper; "that's all--nothing else on

earth matters. I want nothing but love."

"But you let me go away for six months. I could never understand that."

"I had to, George. I couldn't be mean even for you, could I?"

"Well, I don't know." His gaze dwelt on her moodily. "Sometimes I wonder

if you haven't too much conscience in your body?"

Careless as were his words, they brought stinging tears to her eyes. Her

throat ached with the longing to pour out her love; but it seemed to her

suddenly that a wall of personality had risen between them, and that she

could only beat blindly against the impenetrable mass that divided them.

She knew now that he could never understand, and yet the knowledge of

this intensified rather than diminished her love. The mere physical

attraction, which she had glorified into passion, was invested with the

beauty and the mystery of an unattainable ideal.

"I believe you are going to cry, darling. Don't be so serious," he said,

laughing.

"But you know--tell me you know that I love you."

"Of course I know it. Am I blind or a fool?"

Then before the glowing worship in her face, he caught her in his arms,

while he said over and over, "I love you! I love you!"

He held her close, thrilling at her touch, seeking her warm lips with an

eagerness which comforted her because she was too inexperienced to

understand how ephemeral was its nature and its sweetness.

"Promise to love me always, George, as you do now," she said,

passionately trying to make the fugitive joy immortal.

"If you'll tell me how to help it, I shall be grateful," he retorted as

gaily as if her eyes had not filled with tears.

"Swear it!"

"I swear it. Now, are you satisfied?"

"I don't believe it. I'll never believe that you love me as much as I

love you. Nobody could."

In his heart he agreed with her. That Gabriella loved him more than he

loved her was a fact to which he was easily reconciled. He loved her

quite as much as he could love anybody except himself and be

comfortable, and if she demanded more, she merely proved herself to be

an unreasonable person. Women did love more than men, he supposed, but

what else were they here for? During the six months when he had thought

that she belonged to another, she had, he told himself, almost driven

him out of his mind; but possession once assured, he had speedily

recovered his health and his sanity. Her worship flattered him, and in

this flattery she had, perhaps, her strongest hold on his heart. Nothing

in his engagement had pleased him more than the readiness with which she

had given up her work at his request. He abhorred independence in a

wife; and Gabriella's immediate and unresisting acquiescence in his

desire appeared to him to establish the fact of her essential and

inherent femininity. Had not all laws, as well as all religions,

proclaimed that woman should be content to lay down not only her life

but her very identity for love; and that Gabriella was womanly to the

core of her nature, in spite of her work in Brandywine's millinery

department, it was impossible to doubt while he kissed her. There were

times, indeed, when the exaltation of Gabriella's womanliness seemed to

have left her without a will of her own; when, in a divine submission to

love, she appeared to exist only for the laudable purpose of making her

lover happy.

"I'd do anything on earth for you, Gabriella," said George suddenly. "I

wonder if you would make a sacrifice for me if I asked it?" From his

face as he looked down on her it was evident that he was not speaking

from impulse, but that he had seized an opportune moment.

"You know I would, George. I'd give up the whole world for you. I'd beg

my bread with you by the roadside."

"Well, it isn't so bad as that, darling--it's only about your mother

coming to us so soon. I've had a letter from home, and it seems that

father has had losses and can't help me out as he intended to do. He's

always either losing or making piles of money, so don't bother your

precious head about that. In six months he'll probably be making piles

again, but, in the meantime, mother suggests that we should postpone

taking a house, and come and live with her for a few months."

"I'd rather live on your income, George, no matter how small it is. I'm

an awfully good manager, and you'd be surprised to see how far I can

make a little money go. Why can't we take an apartment somewhere in an

inexpensive neighbourhood--one just big enough for mother and you and

me?"

"We couldn't live half so well in the first place, and, besides, I'd

hate like the devil to see you working yourself to death and losing your

looks. That's just exactly what Patty is doing. She was the family's

greatest investment, you know. Everything we had for years was spent on

her because she was such a ripping beauty, and mother set her heart on

her marrying nothing less than a duke. So we sent her abroad to be

educated and squandered a fortune on her clothes, and then, just as

mother was gloating over her triumphs, the very day after the Duke of

Toxbridge proposed to her, Patty walked out one morning and married

Billy King at the Little Church Around the Corner. Billy, of course,

hasn't a cent to his name except what he makes painting blue pictures,

and that's precious little. They're up on the West Side now, living in

four rooms with neighbours who fry onions at nine o'clock in the morning

next door to them, and half the time Patty hasn't even a maid, I

believe, and has to do her work with the help of a charwoman."

"And is she happy?" There was eagerness in Gabriella's voice, for she

was sure that she should love Patty.

"Oh, yes, Patty is happy, but mother isn't. It's rough on mother."

"I think she ought to have told your mother before she married."

"Well, Patty thought she could stand the fuss better after she'd done it

than she could before. She said she needed the support of knowing they

couldn't stop it. Cheeky, wasn't it?"

"And is she really so beautiful?"

"Ripping," said George; "simply ripping."

"I know I shall love her. Is she dark or fair?"

"I never thought about it, but she's a towering beauty--something

between dark and fair, I suppose. She has golden hair, you know."

His arm was around her, and lifting her earnest face to his, Gabriella

began in her softest voice: "I shouldn't mind a bit living like that,

George--honestly I shouldn't."

"Yes, you would. It would be rotten."

"I wish you would tell me just how much we shall have to live on, dear.

Even if it is very, very little, it would be so much better not to

expect anything from your father. If the worst comes to the worst, I can

always go back to work, you know, and I feel as if I ought to help

because you are so generous about wanting mother to live with us."

He frowned slightly, while a dark flush rose to his forehead. Already

Gabriella was learning how dangerously easy it was to irritate George.

Serious discussions always appeared to disturb him, and at the first

allusion to the responsibilities he had assumed, she could see the look

of bored restlessness creep into his face. It was evidently abhorrent to

him to hear her talk about business; but with her practical nature and

her fundamental common sense it was impossible that she should be

content to remain in a fool's paradise of financial mysteries. She had

only the vaguest idea how he earned a living, and a still vaguer one of

what that living represented. There was an impression in her mind that

he worked in his father's office somewhere in Wall Street--he had once

given her the number--and that he went "downtown" every morning after

breakfast and did not get home to luncheon. Cousin Jimmy had once told

her that George's father was a stockbroker, but this information

conveyed little to her mind. The men she knew in Richmond were lawyers,

doctors, clergymen, or engaged, like Cousin Jimmy, in the "tobacco

business," and she supposed that "a stockbroker" must necessarily belong

to a profession which was restricted to New York. The whole matter was

hazy in her thoughts, but she hoped in time, by intelligent and tactful

application, to overcome her ignorance as well as George's deeply rooted

objection to her enlightenment.

"Well, you see, my income is uncertain, Gabriella. It depends a good

deal upon the stock market and the sort of stuff we've been buying. Look

here, darling, don't, for heaven sake, get the business bee in your

bonnet. A mannish woman is worse than poison, and the less you know

about stocks the more attractive you will be. Mother has lived for

thirty years with father, and she doesn't know any more how he makes his

money than you do at this minute."

This was as lucid, she suspected, as George was ever likely to be on

the subject, and, since he was becoming visibly annoyed, she abandoned

her fruitless search for information. After she was married there would

be time and opportunity to find out all that she wanted to know; and

even if he never told her anything more--well, she was quite accustomed

to the masculine habit of never telling women anything more. Her mother

and Jane were as ignorant of finance as they had been in their cradles;

Cousin Pussy spoke of the "tobacco business" as if it were a sacred

mystery superior to the delicate feminine faculties; and while Gabriella

was engaged to Arthur, he had fallen into the habit of gently reminding

her that she "knew nothing of law."

"Very well, dearest, I shan't bother you," she said cheerfully, "only,

of course, I couldn't possibly leave mother with Jane and Charley. She

doesn't realize it, but she would be perfectly miserable."

"She told me that leaving Richmond was like death to her."

"That's only because she knows she's going," answered Gabriella, but her

endeavour to explain her mother's habit of mind appeared to her to be so

hopeless that she added unconvincingly: "You can't imagine how dependent

she is on me. Jane doesn't know how to manage her at all, though they

are so much alike."

"Well, of course, if we live at home--"

"But you promised me we'd be to ourselves, George; you can't have

forgotten it. We talked it over, every bit of it, and I told you in the

beginning I couldn't leave mother."

"If you loved me enough to marry me, I should think you'd be willing to

give up your family for me." He spoke doggedly; it was his way to speak

doggedly when he was driving a point.

"It isn't that, dear, you know it isn't that."

Taking a letter from his pocket, he drew a sheet of blue note paper,

closely interlined, from the envelope, and handed it to her.

"You can see for yourself how it is," he said in an aggrieved voice. By

his tone he had managed to put her in the wrong as utterly as if she,

not he, were trying to break her word. Yet she had told him in the very

beginning that she could not leave her mother; she had refused to engage

herself to him until he had offered Mrs. Carr a home with them. It had

all been carefully arranged at the start, and now, within a month of

their marriage, he had apparently forgotten that the matter was settled.

Leaning forward until the light fell on the paper, she read with

trembling lips:

My Dear Son:

Your letter was a blow to me because you had said nothing of

Gabriella's plan to bring her mother to New York to live with her,

and, of course, this makes it out of the question that you should

come straight to us. Now that Patty has gone--poor child, I am

afraid she will live to repent her rashness--your father and I had

quite looked forward to having you young people in the house; but

we haven't room, even if I could bring myself to face the prospect

of a rival mother-in-law under the same roof with me--and frankly I

can't. And your father has simply put his foot down on the idea. As

you know he hasn't been very well of late--the doctor says he is

threatened with diabetes--so my one thought is to spare him every

useless anxiety. He sleeps very badly and doesn't seem able, even

at night, to detach his mind from his business worries. If he

hadn't had such a bad summer, he might have been able to help you

start housekeeping, but there have been a great many failures in

the last few months, and he says he is obliged to cut down all his

expenses in order to tide over the depression in the market. We are

trying to retrench in every possible way, and, for this reason, I

fear we shall hardly be able to go down to your wedding. This is a

terrible disappointment to us both, and your father is particularly

distressed because he will not be able to add to your income this

year. Of course, if you should change your mind and decide to come

to us, we can get Patty's old room ready for you at once, and turn

yours into a sitting-room. Think this over and let me know as soon

as you possibly can.

I see Patty occasionally. She is in high spirits, but looking a

little thinner, I think. Billy has painted a portrait of Mrs.

Pletheridge, but it isn't a bit flattering, and he wouldn't let her

wear her pearls, so I'm afraid she won't buy it. I don't believe he

will ever make anything of himself. What a waste when Patty might

have been Duchess of Toxbridge. Though I am not a bit worldly, I

can't help regretting all that she has lost.

Your loving mother,

EVELYN FOWLER.

When she had folded the letter and given it back to him, Gabriella

dropped her hands in her lap and sat gazing thoughtfully at the square

of sunlight by the window.

"If you cared as much as I do, you'd be willing to give up your family,"

he said suddenly, encouraged not only by her manner, which appeared

yielding, but by his secret ineradicable conviction that her love was

greater than his. Across the romantic screen of his features there

flashed a swift change of expression, like the flicker of light on a

coloured mask. If she could only have looked through the charming

vacancy of his face, she would have been surprised to discover the

directness and simplicity of his mental processes. He wanted his way,

and he meant, provided it was humanly possible, to have whatever he

wanted.

"It isn't that, George. Love has nothing to do with it. It is a question

of right."

For a minute he surveyed her moodily; then, rising from her side on the

sofa, he took two steps to the window and looked up at the boughs of the

poplar tree. The gray squirrel was still there, and he watched it

attentively while he pondered his answer. Yes, the whole trouble with

Gabriella was too much conscience. This conscience of hers had got in

his way before now, and he had suddenly an uneasy feeling, as if he had

struck against the vein of iron which lay beneath the rich bloom of her

passion. The thought of her opposition, of her secret hardness, bitterly

angered him. He wanted her--no other woman could satisfy him--but he

wanted her utterly different from what she was. He was seized with an

indomitable desire to make her over, to change her entirely from that

Gabriella with whom he had fallen in love. Of course, she was right as

far as the mere facts of the case were concerned. He had promised that

her mother should live with them; but he felt indignantly that it was an

act of disloyalty for her to be right at his expense. She ought to have

given in, and she ought to have given in gracefully, there was no

question of that. When a woman loved a man as much as she loved him, it

was unreasonable of her to let these innumerable little points of fact

come between them; it was ungenerous of her to cling so stubbornly to

her advantage. Her very quietness--that look of gentle obstinacy which

refused either to fight back or to surrender--irritated him almost to

desperation. His temper, always inflammable, suddenly burst out, and he

felt that he wanted to shake her. He wanted, indeed, to do anything in

the world except the sensible thing of walking out of the house and

leaving her to reflection.

"I should think your first duty would be to your husband," he said,

while the streak of cruelty which was at the heart of his love showed

like a livid mark on the surface of his nature. His mind was conscious

of but a single thought while he stood there in the wind which fluttered

the curtains and filled the room with the roving scents of October, and

this was the bitter longing to make Gabriella over into the girl that he

wanted her to become. Though it cost him her love, he felt that he must

punish her for being herself.

"Do you mean always to put your mother before me?" he asked

passionately, after a minute.

Still she did not answer, and in the deep, earnest eyes that she turned

on him he saw not anger, not sorrow even, but wonder. As he stretched

out his hand, it fell on Mrs. Carr's window box, where a rose geranium

remained bright green in the midst of the withered stems of the clove

pinks, and the scent of the leaves, as he crushed them between his

fingers, evoked a swift memory of Gabriella in one of her soft moods,

saying over and over, "I love you! Oh, I do love you!" At the image his

temper changed as if by magic, and crossing the room, he bent down and

kissed her with a fierceness that bruised her lips.

"I adore you, Gabriella," he said.

Though she had seen these sudden changes in him before, she had never

grown wholly used to them. Her deeper nature, with its tranquil

brightness, untroubled by passing storms, was unprepared for the shallow

violence which swept over him, leaving no visible trace of its passage.

No, she could not understand him--she could only hope that after they

were married the blindness would pass from her love, and she would

attain that completer knowledge for which she was striving so patiently.

The transforming miracle of marriage, she trusted, would reveal this

mystery, with so many others.

"How can you hurt me so, George?" she asked with reproachful tenderness.

"It's because you are so stubborn, darling. If you weren't so stubborn I

shouldn't do it. Do you know you get almost mulish at times," he added,

laughing, while she moved nearer and rubbed her cheek softly against his

sleeve.

"You frighten me," she whispered. "I was just beginning to believe that

you really meant it."

"Oh, lovers always quarrel. There's nothing in that."

"But I hate to see you angry. It would almost kill me if it lasted

longer than a minute. Never let it last, will you, George?"

"Of course not, Goosey. It never has lasted, has it?"

"Goosey" was one of his favourite names for her. He liked it because it

gave him a merry feeling of superiority when he said it, and Gabriella

liked it for perhaps the same reason. In the first ardour of her

self-surrender she caught eagerly at any straw that she might cast on

the flame of her passion.

"And I'm not really stubborn, dear. Tell me that I'm not really

stubborn."

"You darling! I was only teasing you."

"I'll do anything on earth for you that I can, George."

"I know you will, dearest, and you don't honestly care more for your

family, do you?"

"I love you better than all the rest of the world put together. There

are times when I think it must be wrong to love any man as much as I

love you. My grandmother used to say that when you loved like that you

'tempted Providence.' Isn't it dreadful to believe that you could tempt

Providence by loving?"

He kissed her throat where a loosened strand of dark hair had fallen

against the whiteness.

"Will you do what I ask, Gabriella?"

So it was all to begin over again! He had not really given in, he had

not really yielded even while he was kissing her. She closed her eyes,

leaning her head on his shoulder. For a moment she felt as if a physical

pain were pressing into her forehead.

"Will you do it, Gabriella?" It was as if he put his soul into his

voice, wooing her tenderly away from her better judgment. He was testing

his power to dominate her; and never had she felt it so vividly, never

had her will been so incapable of resisting him as at that instant.

Moving slightly in his arms she looked at the clear red brown of his

throat, at his sensitive mouth, with the faint dent in the lower lip, at

his bright blue eyes, which had grown soft while he pleaded. His

physical power over her was complete, and he knew it. Her flesh had

become as soft as flowers in his arms, while her eyes, like dark flames,

trembled and fell away from his look.

"It isn't only the thing itself, darling, but I don't like you to refuse

me. It hurts me that you won't do what I ask of you."

"If it were anything else, George."

"But it isn't anything else. It is just that I want you to myself--all

to myself, after we are married."

"Don't ask me, dearest. If you only knew how it makes me suffer."

Her voice was a caress when she answered, but, as he told himself

passionately, she had not yielded an inch. Once again he had run against

the iron hidden under the bloom.

"Then you refuse absolutely?" he asked, and though his voice quivered

still, it was no longer from tenderness. He hated stubbornness, and,

most of all, he hated it in the woman who was going to be his wife. A

life of continual contradiction, he felt, would be intolerable. A strong

will, which he had always admired in himself, became a positive failing

in Gabriella. A woman's strength lay, after all, not in force of

character, but in sweetness of nature. And yet how lovely she was! How

soft, how sweet she looked as she gazed up at him with her radiant eyes.

There was a fascination for him in her tall slenderness, in the graceful

curve of her head, which drooped slightly like a dark flower on its

stem. Everything about her charmed him, and yet he had never called her

beautiful in his thoughts.

"I told you how it was, dear, when you first asked me to marry you," she

said, with infinite patience. "I told you that it wasn't fair to ask you

to take mother, but that I couldn't possibly leave her alone in her old

age. Jane's home is wretchedly unhappy--she can never tell when Charley

is to be counted on--and it would kill mother to be dependent on Charley

even if he were willing. I see your side, George, indeed, indeed, I do,

but I can't--I simply can't act differently. I have always known it was

my duty to look after mother--nothing can change that, not even love.

She worked for us while we were little, and it is trouble that has made

her what she is to-day. You must see that I am right, George; you can't

possibly help it."

But he couldn't see it. If the truth had been twice as evident, if

Gabriella had been twice as reasonable, he could still have seen only

his wishes.

"I am only asking you to do what is best for us both, Gabriella."

"But how can it be best for me to become an ungrateful child, George?"

Neither of them wanted to quarrel, yet in a minute the barbed words were

flying between them; in a minute they faced each other as coldly as if

they had been strangers instead of adoring lovers. At the last, he

looked at her an instant in silence while she sat perfectly motionless

with her deep eyes changing to gold in the sunlight; then, turning on

his heel, without a word, he left the house, and walked rapidly over the

coloured leaves on the pavement. As he passed under the poplar tree the

gray squirrel darted gaily along a bough over his head, but he did not

look up, and a minute later Gabriella saw him cross the street and

vanish beyond the pointed yew tree in the yard at the corner.

"I wonder if this is the end?" she thought bitterly, and she knew that

even if it were the end, that even if she died of it, she could never

give way. Something stronger than herself--that vein of iron in her

soul--would not bend, would not break though every fibre of her being

struggled against it. All the happiness of her life vanished with George

as he passed beyond the yew tree at the corner, yet she sat there with

her hands still folded, her lips still firm, watching the tree long

after its pointed dusk had hidden her lover's figure. Had she followed

her desire as lightly as George followed his, she would have run after

him as he disappeared, and bringing him back to the room he had left,

dissolved in tears on his breast. She longed to do this, but the vein of

iron held her firm in spite of herself. She could not move toward him,

she could not even have put out her hand had he entered.

The bell rang, and her blood drummed in her ears; but it was only Cousin

Jimmy bringing Mrs. Carr back from the cemetery. Hearty, deep-chested,

meticulously brushed and groomed, he wore his Sunday frock with an

unnatural stiffness, as if he were still hearing Pussy's parting warning

to be "careful about his clothes." His dark hair, trained for twenty

years from a side parting, shone with the lustre of satin, and his

shining eyes, so like the eyes of adventurous youth, wore their

accustomed Sabbath look of veiled and ashamed sleepiness.

"So you're going to take the old lady to New York with you, Gabriella?"

"I can't bear to think of it, Cousin Jimmy," remarked Mrs. Carr, while

she adjusted her crape veil over the back of her chair. "I don't see how

I can stand living in the North."

"Well, what about our friend Charley? Do you think you could get on any

better with Charley for a son-in-law?"

"You oughtn't to joke about it, Cousin Jimmy. It is too serious for

joking."

"I beg your pardon, Cousin Fanny--but where is George, Gabriella? I

thought he was to meet you here."

"He had to go just before you came. Don't you think mother is looking

well?"

"As well as I ever saw her. I was telling her so as we drove back from

Hollywood. All she needs is to leave off moping for a while and she'd

lose ten years of her age. Why, I tell you if it were I, I'd jump at the

chance to go to New York for a few years. If there wasn't a single thing

there except the theatres, I'd jump at it. You can go to a different

show every night of your life, Cousin Fanny."

"I have never been inside of a theatre in my life. You ought to know me

better than to think it," replied Mrs. Carr, while the corners of her

mouth drooped. She had laid her bag of grosgrain silk on the table at

her elbow, and untying the strings of her bonnet, she neatly rolled them

into two tight little wads which she fastened with jet-headed pins.

"You make her go, honey, when you get hold of her," said Jimmy to

Gabriella in a sympathetic aside "What she needs is bracing up--I was

saying so to Pussy only this morning. 'If you could just brace up Cousin

Fanny, she'd be as well as you or I,' was what I said to her Now I don't

believe there's a better place on earth to brace a body up than old New

York. I remember I took my poor old father there just a month or two

before his last illness, when he was getting over a spell of lumbago,

and it worked on him like magic. We stayed at the Fifth Avenue

Hotel--you must be sure to get a dinner at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,

Cousin Fanny--and went to a show every blessed night for a week. It made

the old man young again, upon my word it did, and he was still talking

about it when he came down with his last illness. Well, I must be going

home to Pussy now. The boys and I went out squirrel hunting yesterday,

and Pussy promised me Brunswick stew for dinner. Now, don't you forget

to brace up, Cousin Fanny. That's all on earth you need. The world ain't

such a bad place, after all, when you sit down and think right hard

about it."

He went out gaily, followed by Mrs. Carr's accusing eyes to the hatrack,

where he stopped to take his glossy silk hat from a peg. Turning in the

buggy as he drove off, he waved merrily back at them with the whip

before he touched the fat flanks of his gray.

"Cousin Jimmy means well, but he has a most unfortunate manner at

times," observed Mrs. Carr.

"What is the matter, Gabriella? Have you a headache?"

"Oh, no, but the sunshine is so strong."

"Then you'd better lower the shade. Why, what in the world has happened

to my rose geranium? I was just going to pot it for the winter."

"I'm sure it isn't hurt, mother. George broke the leaves when he was

looking out of the window."

"I thought he was going to stay for dinner. Did you make the jelly and

syllabub?"

"I made it, but he wouldn't stay."

"Well, we'll send some upstairs to Miss Jemima. Do you know she had to

have the doctor this morning? I met him as I was going out, and he said

he was sorry to hear I was going to leave Richmond. I can't imagine

where on earth he could have heard it, for I haven't mentioned it to a

soul except Lydia Peyton. Yes, I believe I did speak of it to Bessie

Spencer at the meeting of the Ladies' Aid Society the other day. Where

are you going, Gabriella? Would you mind putting my bonnet in the

bandbox?"

No, Gabriella wouldn't mind, and taking the folds of crape in her arms,

she went to get the green paper bandbox out of the closet. Though she

had sacrificed her happiness for her mother, she felt that it would be

impossible for her to listen with a smiling face to her innocent

prattle.

In the afternoon, when Mrs. Carr, with a small and inconspicuous basket

in her hand, had set out on her Sunday visit to the Old Ladies' Home,

and Marthy, attired in an apron with an embroidered bib, had taken the

jelly and syllabub upstairs to Miss Jemima, Gabriella sat down in her

mother's rocking-chair by the window, and tried desperately to be

philosophical. The sound of the old maids from the floor above

descending on their way to a funeral disturbed her for a minute, and she

thought with an extraordinary clearness, "That is what my life will be

if George never comes back. That is what it means to be old." And there

was a morbid pleasure in pressing this thought, like a pointed weapon,

into her heart. "That is all there will be for me--that will be my

life," she went on after an instant of throbbing anguish. "I had no

right to think of marriage with mother dependent on me, and the best

thing for me to do is to start again with Mr. Brandywine. George was

right in a way. Yes, it is hard on him, and I was wrong ever to think of

it--ever to let him fall in love with me." The mere thought that George

was right in a way gave her singular comfort, and while she dwelt on it,

the discovery seemed to throw a vivid light on the cause of the quarrel.

Of course, she had expected too much of him. It was natural that he

should not want to be burdened with her family. What she had looked upon

as selfishness was only the natural instinct of a man in love with a

woman. He had said that he wanted her to himself, and to want her to

himself appeared now to be the most reasonable desire in the world.

Yes, she had acquitted George; but, in acquitting him, it was

characteristic of her that she should not have yielded an inch of her

ground. She drew comfort from declaring him innocent, but it was the

tragic comfort of one who blesses while she renounces. George's

blamelessness did not alter in the least her determination to cling to

her mother.

The afternoon wore on; the soft golden light on the pavement was dappled

with shadows; and the wind, blowing over the iron urns in the yard,

scattered the withered leaves of portulaca over the grass. Though the

summer still lingered, and flowers were blooming behind the fences along

the street, the faint violet haze of autumn was creeping slowly over the

sunshine. Now and then an acquaintance, returning from afternoon

service, looked up to bow to her, and while the daylight was still

strong, Marthy, resplendent in Sunday raiment, came out of the little

green gate at the side of the yard and passed, mincing, in the direction

of the negro church. Then the door opened slowly, and the two old maids

came in and stopped for a minute at the parlour door to see if Gabriella

"had company."

"Such a lovely evening, my dear"--they never used the word

afternoon--"we went all the way to the cemetery. She was buried in her

grandfather's lot, you know, in the old part up on the hill. It was a

beautiful drive, but Amelia and I couldn't help thinking of the poor

young thing all the time."

It was Miss Jemima who had spoken, and her kind, plain face, all puffs

and pleasant wrinkles, had not yet relaxed from the unnatural solemnity

it had worn at the funeral. She was seldom grave, and never despondent,

though to Gabriella she appeared to lead an unendurable life. Unlike

Miss Amelia, she had not even a happy youth and a lover to look back

upon; she had nothing, indeed, except her unfailing goodness and

patience to support her.

"I don't like to see you alone, honey," she said, untying the strings of

her black silk bonnet, which fitted her cheerful features like a frame.

"If the doctor hadn't told me to go to bed as soon as I came in, we'd

sit a while with you for company."

She felt that it was morbid and unnatural in Gabriella to sit alone in a

dim room when there were so many young people out in the streets. "You

mark my words, there's some reason back of Gabriella's moping all by

herself," she remarked to Miss Amelia as she took off her "things" a few

minutes later. "It wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear that she'd had a

fuss with her sweetheart."

"I declare, sister Jemima, you are too sentimental to live," observed

Miss Amelia as she filled the tea kettle on the fender "Anybody would

think to hear you talk that there was nothing in life except making

love."

"Well, there isn't anything else so interesting when you're young. You

used to think so yourself, sister Amelia."

Standing gaunt and black, with the tea kettle held out stiffly before

her, Miss Amelia turned her tragic face on her sister.

"Well, I reckon you don't know much about it," she responded with the

unconscious cruelty of age. Having been once the victim of a great

passion, she had developed at last into an uncompromising realist,

wholly devoid of sentimentality, while Miss Jemima, lacking experience,

had enveloped the unknown in a rosy veil of illusion.

"You don't have to know a thing to think about it, sister Amelia,"

replied the invalid timidly as she put on her flannel wrapper and

fastened it with a safety pin at the throat.

"Well, I reckon it's all right for a girl like Gabriella," said Miss

Amelia crushingly, "but when you look back on it from my age, you'll

know it isn't worth a row of pins in a life."

And beside the window downstairs Gabriella was thinking passionately:

"Shall I ever grow old? Is it possible that I shall ever grow old like

that?"

With the bare question, terror seized her--the terror of growing old

without George, the terror of dying before she had known the full beauty

of life. Looking ahead of her at the years empty of love, she saw them

like a gray road, leaf strewn, wind swept, deserted, and herself

creeping through them, as bent, as wrinkled, as disillusioned, as Miss

Amelia. The very image of a life without love was intolerable to her

since she had known George--for love meant George, and only George, in

her thoughts. That she could ever be happy again, ever take a natural

pleasure in life if she lost him, was unimaginable to her at the

instant. She loved him, she had loved him from the first moment she saw

him, she would never, though she lived a million years, love any one

else. It was as absurd to think that she could love again as that a

flower could bloom afresh when its petals were withered. No, without

George there was only loveless old age--there was only the future of

Miss Amelia before her. And she clung to this idea with a horror which

Miss Amelia, who seldom reflected that she was loveless and by no means

considered herself an object of pity, would have despised.

"I have no right to marry George, and yet if I don't marry him I shall

be miserable all my life," she told herself with a sensation of panic.

It would be so long, the rest of her life, and without George it was as

desolate as the gray road of her vision. All the beauties of the

universe, all the miracles of hope, of youth, of spring; her health, her

intellect, her capacity for work and for taking pleasure in little

things--all these were as nothing to her if she lost George out of her

life. "I oughtn't to marry him," she repeated, "but if I don't marry him

I shall be miserable every minute until I die."

Then a terror more awful than any she had yet suffered clutched at her

heart. Suppose he should never come back! Suppose he had really meant to

leave her for good! Suppose he had ceased to love her since he went out

of the house! The possibility was so agonizing that she rose blindly

from her chair and turned from the window as if the quiet street, filled

with the dreamy sunshine of October, had offered an appalling, an

unbelievable sight to her eyes. If he had ceased to love her, she was

helpless; and this sense of helplessness awoke a feeling of rage in her

heart. If he did not come back, she could never go after him. She could

only sit and wait until she grew as old and as ugly as Miss Amelia.

While the minutes, which seemed hours, dragged away, she wept the

bitterest tears of her life--tears not of wounded love, but of anger

because she could do nothing but wait.

While she wept the bell rang. When she did not answer it, it rang again,

and after an interminable pause the footsteps of Miss Amelia were heard

descending the stairs. Then the door opened and shut, the footsteps

began their slow ascent of the stairs, and after an eternity of silence,

she knew that George had entered the room.

Wiping her eyes on the ruffle of the sofa pillow, she sat up and faced

him, while her pride hardened again.

"Gabriella, I have come back."

"I see you have," she answered coldly, and choked over a sob.

"What are you crying about, Gabriella?"

"I--I have a headache."

"Have you thought about me at all to-day?"

"A little."

He laughed softly, the laugh of a conqueror.

"I'm glad at least that I didn't give you the headache."

"You didn't. I had it anyway."

He was radiant, he was as fresh as the wind. Never in his life had he

looked so gay, so handsome, so kind. His blue eyes were brimming with

light. The mere fact of being alive appeared to fill him with ecstasy.

And she loved him for his gaiety, for his lightness, for the ease with

which he took for granted her unchangeable love. She longed with all her

soul and body to prove this love by a surrender more complete than any

she had made in the past. She longed to say: "I am yours to do with as

you please, and nothing in the universe matters but you and my love for

you." The very core of her nature longed to say this to him; but her

indomitable pride, which even passion could not overcome, kept her

sitting there in silence while she felt that her heart was bursting with

happiness.

"Have you thought it over, Gabriella?"

She nodded. To save her life, she felt, she could not utter a word

without sobbing.

"And you have absolutely and finally decided to have your way?"

This time she shook her head, but the tears fell on her cheeks and she

did not brush them away. From his voice she knew that she had triumphed,

but there was no delight in the knowledge. She did not want to triumph;

she wanted only to yield to him and to make him happy by yielding.

"O George!" she cried suddenly, and held out her arms to him.

As he looked down at her his expression changed suddenly to one of

intense sadness. From his face, which had grown pale, he might have been

contemplating the Eternal Verities, though, in reality, he was

considering nothing more exalted than the dreary prospect of a lifetime

spent in the society of Mrs. Carr.

Then, as Gabriella enfolded him, he laughed softly. He had given in, but

he knew in the very instant of his defeat that he should some day turn

it to victory.

CHAPTER V

THE NEW WORLD

Gabriella stood in front of the station, ecstatically watching George

while he struggled for a cab. In the pale beams of the early sunshine

her face looked young, flushed, and expectant, as if she had just

awakened from sleep, and her eyes, following her husband, were the happy

eyes of a bride. She wore a new dress of blue broadcloth, passionately

overtrimmed by Miss Polly Hatch; on her head a blue velvet toque from

Brandywine's millinery department rested as lightly as a benediction;

and her hands clasped Arthur's wedding present, a bag of alligator skin

bearing her initials in gold. One blissful month ago she and George had

been married, and now, on the reluctant return from a camp in the

Adirondacks, they were confronting the disillusioning actuality of the

New York streets at eight o'clock in the morning. While Gabriella

waited, shivering a a little, for the air was sharp and her broadcloth

dress was not warm, she amused herself planning a future which appeared

to consist of inexhaustible happiness. And mingling with her dreams

there were divine memories of the last month and of her marriage. After

that one quarrel George, she told herself, had been "simply perfect."

His manner to her mother had been beautiful; he had been as eager as

Gabriella to obliterate all memory of the difference between them,

though, of course, after his yielding that supreme point she had felt

that she must give up everything else--and the giving up had been

rapture. He had shown not the faintest disposition to crow over her when

at last, after consulting Mrs. Carr, she had told him that her mother

really preferred to stay with Jane until summer, though he had remarked

with evident relief: "Then we'll put off looking for an apartment. It's

easier to find one in the summer anyway, and in the meantime you can

talk it over with mother."

After this everything had gone so smoothly, so exquisitely, that it was

more like a dream than like actual life when she looked back on it. She

saw herself in the floating lace veil of her grandmother, holding white

roses in her hand, and she saw George's face--the face of her dreams

come true--looking at her out of a starry mist, while in the shining

wilderness that surrounded them she heard an organ playing softly "The

Voice That Breathed O'er Eden." Then the going away! The good-byes at

the station in Richmond; her mother's face, pathetic and drawn against

the folds of her crape veil; Cousin Jimmy, crimson and jovial; Florrie's

violent waving as the train moved away; Miss Jemima, with her smiling,

pain-tortured eyes, flinging a handful of rice; the last glimpse of

them; the slowly vanishing streets, where the few pedestrians stopped to

look after the cars; the park where she had played as a child; the

brilliant flower-beds filled with an autumnal bloom of scarlet cannas;

the white-aproned negro nurses and the gaily decorated perambulators;

the clustering church spires against a sky of pure azure; the negro

hovels, with frost-blighted sunflowers dropping brown seeds over the

paling fences; the rosy haze of it all; and her heart saying over and

over, "There is nothing but love in the world! There is nothing but love

in the world!"

"I've got a cab--the last one," said George, pushing his way through the

crowd, and laying his hand on her arm with a possessive and

authoritative touch. "Let me put you in, and then I'll speak to the

driver."

As he gave the address she watched him, still fascinated with the

delicious strangeness of it all. It was like an adventure to have George

whisk her so peremptorily into a cab, and then stand with his foot on

the step while he curtly directed the driver. Nothing could surpass the

romance--the supreme exciting romance of life. Every minute was an

event; every act of George's was as thrilling as a moment in melodrama.

And as they drove through the streets, over the pale bands of sunshine,

she had a sense of lightness and wonder, as if she were driving in a

world of magic toward ineffable happiness.

"Isn't it strange to be here together, George?" she said. "I can hardly

believe it." But in her heart she was thinking: "I shall never want

anything but love in my life. If I have George I shall never want

anything else." The bedraggled, slatternly figures of the women sweeping

the pavements in the cross-street through which they were driving filled

her with a fugitive sadness, so faint, so pale that it hardly dimmed the

serene brightness of her mood. "I wish they were all as happy as I am,"

she thought; "and they might be if they only knew the secret of

happiness. If they only knew that nothing in the world matters when one

has love in one's heart."

"You'll believe it soon enough when we turn into Fifth Avenue," replied

George, glancing with disgust out of the window. A month of intimacy had

increased the power of his smile over her senses, and when he turned to

her again after a minute, she felt something of the faint delicious

tremor of their first meeting. Already she was beginning to discover

that beyond his expressive eyes he had really very little of importance

to express, that his prolonged silences covered poverty of ideas rather

than abundance of feeling, that his limited vocabulary was due less to

reticence than to the simple inarticulateness of the primitive mind.

Through the golden glamour of her honeymoon there had loomed suddenly

the discovery that George was not clever--but cleverness mattered so

little, she told herself, as long as he loved her.

"I hope your mother will like me," she said nervously after a minute.

"I'll be sorry for her if she doesn't."

"Do I look nice?"

"Of course you do. I never saw you when you didn't."

"I feel so dreadfully untidy. I never tried to dress in a sleeping-car

before."

"It did rock, didn't it?"

"I'll never travel again at night if I can help it. There's a cinder in

your eye; let me get it out for you." It thrilled her pleasantly to

remove the cinder with the corner of her handkerchief, and to order him

to sit still whenever the cab jolted. It was incredibly young,

incredibly foolish, but it was all a part of the wonderful enchantment

in which she moved. The cinder had made an agreeable episode, but when

it had been removed there was nothing more for them to talk about. In

four weeks of daily and hourly companionship they had said very easily,

Gabriella had found, everything they had longed so passionately to say

to each other. It was strange--it was positively astounding how soon

they had talked themselves empty of ideas and fallen back upon

repetition and ejaculation. Before her marriage she had thought that a

lifetime would be too short to hold the full richness of their

confidences; and yet now, after a month, though they still made love,

they had ceased, almost with relief, to make conversation.

After turning into Fifth Avenue they drove for ages between depressing

examples in brownstone of an architecture which, like George, was trying

rather vaguely to express nothing; and then rolling heavily into

Fifty-seventh Street stopped presently before one of the solemn houses

which stood, in the dignity of utter ugliness, midway of a long block.

"They are all so alike I don't see how I shall ever know where I live,"

thought Gabriella. Then, as George helped her out of the cab, the door

opened as if by magic, and beyond the solemn manservant she saw the

short, stout figure of a lady in a tightly fitting morning gown of black

silk. Hurrying up the steps, she was pressed against a large smooth

bosom which yielded as little as if it had been upholstered in leather.

"My dear daughter! my dear Gabriella!" exclaimed the lady in a charming

voice; and looking down after the first kiss, Gabriella saw a handsome,

slightly florid face, with the vivacious smile of a girl and a beautiful

forehead under a stiffly crimped arch of gray hair which looked as hard

and bright as silver.

"I've been up since seven o'clock waiting for you. You must be

famished. Come straight in to breakfast. Your father is already at the

table, George. Poor man, he has to start downtown so dreadfully early."

Bright, effusive, vivacious, and as emphatically Southern as if she had

never left Franklin Street, Mrs. Fowler took off Gabriella's hat and

coat, kissed her several times while she was doing so, and at last,

still talking animatedly, led them into the dining-room.

"Archibald, here they are," she said in a tone of unaffected delight,

while a thin, serious-looking man, with anxious eyes, pale, aristocratic

features, and skin that had a curious parchment-like texture, put down

the _Times_, and came forward to meet them. Though he did not speak as

he kissed her, Gabriella felt that there was sincere, if detached,

friendliness in his little pat on her shoulder. He led her almost

tenderly to her chair; and as soon as she was comfortably seated and

supplied with rolls and bacon, resigned her contentedly to his wife and

the butler. His manner of gentle abstraction, which Gabriella attributed

first to something he had just read in the newspaper, she presently

discovered to be his habitual attitude toward all the world except Wall

Street. He ate his breakfast as if his attention were somewhere else; he

spoke to his son and his daughter-in-law kindly, but as if he were not

thinking about them; he treated his wife, whom he adored, as if he had

not clearly perceived her. In the profound abstraction in which he lived

every impression appeared to have become blurred except the tremendous

impression of whirling forces; every detail seemed to have been obscured

except the gigantic details of "Business." His manner was perfectly

well-bred, but it was the manner of a man who moves through life

rehearsing a part of which he barely remembers the words. From the

first minute it was evident to Gabriella that her father-in-law adored

his wife as an ideal, though he seemed scarcely aware of her as a

person. He had given her his love, but his interests, his energies, his

attention were elsewhere.

"Is that the way George will treat me--as if I were only a dream woman?"

thought Gabriella while she watched her father-in-law over the open

sheet of the _Times_. Then, with her eyes on her husband, she realized

that he was of his mother's blood, not his father's. Business could

never absorb him. His restlessness, his instability, his love of

pleasure, would prevent the sapping of his nature by one supreme

interest.

The table, like everything else in the room, was solid, heavy, and

expensive. On the floor a heavy and expensive carpet, with a pattern in

squares, stretched to the heavy and expensive moulding which bordered a

heavy and expensive paper. Mrs. Fowler's taste, like Jimmy's (he was her

third cousin), leaned apparently toward embossment, for behind a massive

repoussé silver service she sat, as handsome and substantial as the

room, with her face flushing in splotches from the heat of her coffee.

Some twenty-odd years before the house had been furnished at great cost,

according to the opulent taste of the early 'seventies, and, unchanged

by severer and more frugal fashions, it remained a solid monument to the

first great financial deal of Archibald Fowler. It was at the golden

age, when, still young and energetic, luck had come to him in a day,

that he had bought the brownstone house in Fifty-seventh Street, and his

wife, also young and energetic, had gone out "to get whatever she

liked." Trained in a simple school during the war, and brought up in the

formal purity of high-ceiled rooms furnished in Chippendale and

Sheraton, her natural tastes were, nevertheless, as ornate as the

interiors of the New York shops. Though the blood of colonial heroes ran

in her veins, she was still the child of her age, and her age prided

itself upon being entirely modern in all things from religion to

furniture.

As she sat there behind the mammoth coffee urn, from which a spiral of

steam floated, her handsome face irradiated the spirit of kindness.

Because of her rather short figure, she appeared at her best when she

was sitting, and now, with her large, tightly laced hips hidden beneath

the table and her firm, jet-plastered bosom appearing above it, she

presented a picture of calm and matronly beauty. Not once did she seem

to think of herself or her own breakfast. Even while she buttered her

toast and drank her steaming coffee, her bright blue eyes travelled

unceasingly over the table, first to her husband's plate, then to

Gabriella's, then to her son's. It was easy to see that she was the

dominant and vital force in the household. She ruled Archibald, less

indirectly perhaps, but quite as consistently as Cousin Pussy ruled

Cousin Jimmy.

"My dear, you must eat your breakfast," she said urgently to her

daughter-in-law. "Archibald, let me give you your second cup of coffee.

Remember what a trying day you have before you, and make a good

breakfast. It is so hard to get him to eat," she explained to Gabriella;

"I have to coax him to drink his two cups of coffee, for if he doesn't

he is sure to come home with a headache."

"Well, give me a cup, Evelyn," replied Mr. Fowler, in his gentle voice,

yielding apparently to please her. In his youth he must have been very

handsome, Gabriella thought; but now, though he still retained a certain

distinction, he had the look of a man who has been drained of his

vitality. What surprised her--for she had heard him described as "a hard

man in business"--was the suggestion of the scholar in his appearance.

With his narrow, carefully brushed head, his dreamy and rather wistful

blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, his stooping, slender shoulders,

and his long, delicate hands covered with prominent veins, he ought to

have been either a poet or a philosopher.

"You must be happy with us, my dear," he had said to Gabriella, showing

a minute later such gentle eagerness to return to a part of the

newspaper which Gabriella had never read and did not understand, that

his wife remarked pityingly: "Read your paper, Archibald, and don't let

our chatter disturb you. There are a thousand things I want to say to

the children."

"Well, it's time for me to be going, Evelyn," Mr. Fowler responded,

reluctantly folding the pages; "I'll look into this on the way down."

"Remember, dear, that Judge Crowborough is coming to dinner."

"I'll remember. Is there any one else?"

"Mrs. Crowborough, of course, and Colonel Buffington, and one or two

others. Nobody that you will care for except the judge and Patty and

Billy."

"I shan't forget, but I may be a little late getting home. Good-bye, my

dear, until evening."

Bending over her chair, he kissed her flushed cheek, while George

remarked carelessly: "I'll see you later, father, when I've had a bath

and a shave."

After the gentle tones of Mr. Fowler, the vitality of George's voice

sounded almost brutal, and he added just as carelessly when the front

door had shut softly: "The old man looks seedy, doesn't he, mother?"

A worried look brought out three startling lines in Mrs. Fowler's

forehead, and Gabriella observed suddenly that there were tiny crow's

feet around her blue eyes where the whites were flecked ever so faintly

with yellow. Though she was well into the mid-fifties, her carefully

preserved skin had kept the firmness and the texture of youth, and she

still flushed easily and unbecomingly as she had done as a girl.

"He hasn't been a bit well, George. I am very anxious about him. You

know when he worries over his business, he doesn't eat his meals, and as

soon as he stops eating he begins to have nervous dyspepsia. He has just

had a bad attack; that's why he looks so run down and haggard."

"Can't the doctor do anything for him?"

"He gave him some drops, but it is so hard to get your father to take

medicine. Rest is what he needs, and, of course, that is out of the

question while things are so unsettled. You must help him all you can,

my boy, and Gabriella and I will manage with each other's company."

Her bright smile was still on her lips, but Gabriella noticed that she

pushed her buttered roll away as if she were choking.

In the early afternoon, when George had gone to join his father in the

office, and Gabriella, seated at a little white and gold desk in the

room which had been Patty's, was just finishing a letter to her mother,

Mrs. Fowler came in, and pushing a chintz-covered chair close to the

desk, sank into it and laid her small nervous hand on the arm of her

daughter-in-law. She was wearing a velvet bonnet, with strings, and a

street gown of black broadcloth, which fitted her like a glove and

accentuated, after the fashion of the 'nineties, her small, compact

waist and the deep substantial curves of her bosom and hips. Her eyes,

behind the little veil of spotted tulle which reached to the tip of her

nose, were bright and wistful, and though her colour was too high, a

smile of troubled sweetness lent it a peculiar charm of expression.

"How nice you look, my dear," she said, with her pleasant manner, which

no anxiety, hardly any grief, could dispel. "Are you very busy, or may I

talk to you a little while?"

Drawing closer to her, Gabriella raised the plump little hand to her

lips. Beneath the surface pleasantness of Mrs. Fowler's life--that

pleasantness which wrapped her like a religion--she was beginning to

discern a deep disquietude.

"I want to talk to you, mamma," she said, and her manner was a caress.

"You love George very much, dear?" asked Mrs. Fowler so suddenly that

Gabriella looked at her startled.

For a minute the girl could not speak. "Oh, yes; oh, yes," she answered

presently, and choked over the words.

"We wanted so much to go to your wedding--we were afraid you would think

it strange that we stayed away, but Archibald had his attack just then,

and on top of it he was terribly worried about his affairs. We have had

a very hard year, and we feel so sorry, both of us, that we can't do

more for your pleasure. As it is, we are cutting down our expenses in

every way, and I have even decided to give up my carriage the first of

next year.

"I know, I know," said Gabriella, who had never had a carriage, and to

whom the giving up of one seemed the smallest imaginable sacrifice. "We

mustn't add to your cares," she went on after a minute. "Wouldn't it be

better, really better, if we were to take an apartment at once instead

of waiting until June?"

"Until June?" repeated Mrs. Fowler vaguely, and she added quickly: "It

is the greatest pleasure to have you here. Since Patty went I get so

terribly lonely, and I don't think it would be at all wise for you to go

to yourselves. George has hardly anything except what his father is able

to give him, you know. The poor boy hasn't the least head for business."

"But we shouldn't need much. I am sure I could manage just with what

George makes--no matter how little it is."

For an instant Mrs. Fowler looked at her thoughtfully.

"You could, but George couldn't," she answered.

"You mean he is extravagant?"

"He has never had the slightest idea of the value of money--that is one

of the things you must teach him. He is a dear boy, but he has never

made a success of anything he has undertaken, and his father thinks he

is too unpractical ever to do so. But you must try to get him to live

within your means, my dear, or you will both be miserable. Try to keep

him from borrowing."

"But he refuses to talk to me about his work. It bores him," said

Gabriella; and her simple soul, trained to regard debt as a deeper

disgrace than poverty, grew suddenly troubled. In her childhood they had

gone without food rather than borrow, she remembered.

"The matter with dear George," pursued Mrs. Fowler--and from the

sweetness of her manner she might have been paying him a compliment--"is

that he has never been steady. He doesn't stick at anything long enough

to make it a success. If he were left to himself he would speculate

wildly, and this is why his father is obliged to overlook all that he

does in the office. It is just here that you can be of such wonderful

help to him, Gabriella, by your influence. This is why I am telling

you."

But had she any influence over him? In spite of his passion for her had

she ever turned him by so much as a hair's breadth from the direction of

his impetuous desires? Once only she had withstood him--once only she

had triumphed, and for that triumph she had paid by a complete

surrender! She had been too glad to yield, too fearful of bringing a

cloud over the sunny blue of his eyes.

"I want to help him--I want you to tell me how I can help him," she said

earnestly. "While we are with you this winter, you must teach me how to

do it. Before we begin housekeeping in the summer, I want to learn all I

possibly can about George's affairs. He won't talk to me about practical

matters, so you must do it."

"But where are you going, Gabriella? I thought you had decided to live

with us?"

"But didn't George tell you? Surely he must have told you. We are to

take an apartment in June so my mother can come to us. I felt, of

course, that I couldn't leave mother, and George understands. He was

perfectly lovely about it."

"I see, I see," murmured Mrs. Fowler, as if she were thinking of

something else. "Well, that will all come right, dear, I hope."

Rising abruptly, she began to draw on her gloves. "If you only knew how

I long to make you happy," she said softly; "as happy as I have been

with George's father."

"They are so unlike," answered Gabriella, and the next day when she

remembered the admission, she wondered how it had slipped from her.

"Yes, they are unlike," agreed Mrs. Fowler. "George takes after me, and

I am a frivolous person. But there doesn't live a better man than my

husband," she added, glowing. "I've been his wife for thirty years, and

in all that time I don't believe he has ever thought first of himself.

Yes, it was thirty years ago that I drove through the streets with my

bridal veil on, and felt so sorry for all the girls I saw who were not

going to be married. To-day I feel exactly the same way--sorry for all

the women who couldn't have Archibald for a husband. I've lived with him

thirty years, I've borne him children, and I'm still sorry for all the

other women--even for you, Gabriella."

"He seems so kind," said Gabriella; "I felt that about him, and it's the

best thing, after all, isn't it?" It was the best thing, and yet she

knew that George was not kind--that he was not even good-tempered.

"Yes, it's the best thing, after all, in marriage," answered the older

woman; "it's the thing that wears."

"I have always wanted the best of life," rejoined Gabriella

thoughtfully; and she went on gravely after a moment: "I couldn't love

George any more than I do, but I wish that in some ways he would grow

like his father."

"The boy has a very sweet nature," replied George's mother, "and I hope

marriage will steady him." It was a warning, Gabriella knew, and she

wondered afterwards if her silent acquiescence in Mrs. Fowler's judgment

had not been furtive disloyalty to George.

"A great deal will depend on you, dear, for he is very much in love,"

resumed Mrs. Fowler when Gabriella did not speak, and she repeated very

solemnly, "I hope marriage will steady him."

In her heart Gabriella was hoping so, too, but all she said was, "I

promise you that I will do all I can." She had given her word, and,

looking into her eyes, Mrs. Fowler understood that her daughter-in-law

was not one to give her word lightly. Gabriella would keep her promise.

She would do her best, whatever happened.

The older woman, with her life's history behind her, watched the girl

for a minute in silence. There was so much that she longed to say, so

much that could never be spoken even between women. She herself was an

optimist, but her optimism had been wrung from the bitter core of

experience. Her faith was firm, though it held few illusions, for, if

she was an optimist, she was also a realist. She believed in life, not

because it had satisfied her, but because she had had the wisdom to

understand that the supreme failure had been, not life's, but her own.

If she could only have lived it again and lived it differently from the

beginning! If she could only have used her deeper wisdom not to regret

the past, but to create the future! Much as she had loved her husband,

she knew now that she had sacrificed him to the world. Much as she had

loved her children, she would have sacrificed them, also, had it been

possible. To the tin gods she had offered her soul--to the things that

did not matter she had yielded up the only things that mattered at all.

And she knew now that, in spite of her clearness of vision, the

worldliness which had ruined her life was still bound up in all that was

essential and endurable in her nature. She still wanted the illusions as

passionately as if she believed in their reality; she still winced as

sharply at the thought of Patty's marriage and of all that Patty had

given up. In the case of George, she admitted that it was her

fault--that she had spoiled him--but how could she have helped it? She

remembered how he had looked as a child, with his round flushed face,

his chestnut curls, and his eager, questioning eyes. He had been a

beautiful child, more beautiful even than Patty, and because of his

beauty she had been able to refuse him nothing. Then she thought of his

boyhood, of his reckless extravagance at college; of the tales of his

wildness to which she had shut her ears; of his debts, and still of his

debts, which she had paid out of the housekeeping money because she was

afraid to let his father know of them. Yes, George, in spite of his

sweet nature, had given them a great deal of trouble, so much trouble

that she had been quite reconciled to his marriage with any respectable

girl. The memory of a chorus girl with whom he had once entangled

himself still gave her a shiver at the heart when she recalled it.

Money, always more money, had gone into that; and at last, just as she

had grown hopeless of saving him, he had met this fine, sensible

Gabriella, who looked so strong, so competent, and there had come an end

to the disturbing stories which reached her at intervals. Surely it was

proof of her son's inborn fineness that from the pink perfection of

girlhood he should have chosen the capable Gabriella! At first she had

regretted his choice, hoping, as the worldly and the unworldly alike

hope for their sons, that the object of George's disinterested affection

would prove to be wealthy. Then at the sight of Gabriella she had

surrendered completely. The girl was fine all through, this she could

see as soon as she looked at her. She liked her noble though not

beautiful face, with the broad clear forehead from which the soft dark

hair was brushed back so simply, and, most of all, she liked the charm

and sympathy in her voice. George had chosen well, and if she could

trust his choice, why could she not trust him to be true to it?

"I wonder if you would like to put on your hat and come with me?" she

asked, obeying an impulse. "I'm going to drive up to Patty's with some

curtains for her bedroom."

"Oh, I'd love to," replied Gabriella with eagerness, for she hated

inaction, and it was impossible to spend a whole afternoon merely

thinking about one's happiness. "It won't take me a minute to get

ready."

While she put on her hat and coat, Mrs. Fowler watched her thoughtfully,

saying once: "It is quite cool, you'd better bring your furs, dear."

When Gabriella answered frankly, "I haven't any, I never had any furs in

my life," a tender expression crept into the rather hard blue eyes of

her mother-in-law, and she said quickly: "Well, I've a set of white fox

that I am too old to wear, and you shall have it."

"But what of Patty?" asked Gabriella, for she had grown up thinking of

other people and she couldn't break the habit of twenty years in a

minute.

"Oh, Patty has all the furs she'll need for years. We spent every penny

we had on Patty before she married," answered Mrs. Fowler, but she was

saying to herself: "Yes, the girl is the right wife for him. I am sure

she is the right wife for him."

The Park was brilliant with falling leaves, and as they drove beneath a

perfect sky beside a lake which sparkled like sapphire, Gabriella,

lifting her chin above the white furs, said rapturously, "Oh, I am so

happy! Life is so beautiful!"

A shadow stole into the eyes with which Mrs. Fowler was watching the

passing carriages, and the fixed sweetness about her mouth melted into

an expression of yearning. Tears veiled the faces of the women who spoke

to her in passing, for she was thinking of her first drive in the Park

with her husband, and though her marriage had been a happy one, she felt

a strange longing as if she wanted to weep.

"I never saw such wonderful horses," said Gabriella. "Cousin Jimmy would

be wild about them;" and she added impetuously, "But the hats aren't in

the least like the one I am wearing." A misgiving seized her as she

realized that her dresses, copied by Miss Polly with ardent fidelity

from a Paris fashion book, were all hopelessly wrong. She wondered if

her green silk gown with the black velvet sleeves was different in style

from the gowns the other women were wearing under their furs? Had

sleeves of a different colour from the bodice, which Miss Polly

considered the last touch of elegance, really gone out of fashion?

The carriage passed out of the Park, and turning into one of the streets

on the upper West Side stopped presently before a small dingy apartment

house, where a dozen ragged children were playing leapfrog on the

pavement.

"Patty has the top floor--there's a studio." Drawing her skirts away

from the children, for her generation feared contact with the lower

classes, Mrs. Fowler walked briskly to the low brown steps, on which an

ash can stood waiting for removal. Inside, where the hall smelled

uninvitingly of stale cooking, they rang for the elevator under a dim

yellow light which revealed a hundred secret lines in their faces.

"I can't imagine how Patty puts up with the place," remarked Patty's

mother dejectedly. "You wouldn't believe the trouble we went to to start

her well. She was the acknowledged beauty of her winter--everybody was

crazy about her looks--and the very week before she ran off with Billy

she had a proposal from the Duke of Toxbridge. Of course, if I'd ever

dreamed she had a fancy for Billy, I'd have kept him out of her sight

instead of allowing him to paint her portrait whenever she had any time

she could spare. But who on earth would have suspected it? Billy King,

whom she had known all her life, as poor as a church mouse, and the kind

of painter whose work will never 'take' if he lives to be a thousand!

His portraits may be good art--I don't pretend to know anything about

that--but I do know pictures of pretty women when I see them, and his

women are frights, every last one of them. If you're thin, he paints

your skeleton, and if you're fat, he makes you as square as a house,

and, thin or fat, he always gives you a blue and yellow complexion. He

wouldn't even make Patty white, though I implored him to do it--and he

made her look exactly ten years older than her age."

"I've never seen any portraits of living people--only of ancestors,"

said Gabriella, "and I am so much interested."

"Well, you mustn't judge them by Billy's, my dear, even if he did get

all those prizes in Paris. But I always said the French were queer, and

if they hadn't been, they would never have raved so over the things

Billy painted. Now, Augustus Featherfield's are really charming. One can

tell to look at his portraits that he paints only ladies, and he gives

them all the most perfectly lovely hair, whether they have it or not.

Some day I'll take you to his studio and let you see for yourself."

The elevator descended, creaking beneath the weight of a negro youth who

seemed half asleep, and a little later, creaking more loudly, it bore

them slowly upward to the top of the house.

"I feel as if I were taking my life in my hands whenever I come here,"

observed Mrs. Fowler, in the tone of dispassionate resignation with

which she always discussed Patty and the surroundings amid which Patty

lived. Marching resolutely, though disapprovingly, down a long hall, she

pressed a small bell at the side of a door, and stood, holding tightly

to the bundle of curtains, while her expression of unnatural

pleasantness grew almost painful in its determination. Here, also, they

waited some time, and when at last the door was opened by an agitated

maid, without an apron, and they were led into a long, queerly furnished

studio, with a balcony from which they had a distant cloudless view of

the river, Gabriella felt for a minute that she must have fallen into a

dream. Long afterwards she learned that Billy's studio was charming,

with its blurred Italian tapestries, which had faded to an exquisite

tone, with its broken torsos of old marble, warming to deep ivory in the

sunlight, with its ecstatic haloed saints praying against dim Tuscan

landscapes, with its odd and unexpected seats of carved stone on which

the cushions made strange splotches and pools of colour. At the time,

seen through provincial eyes, it seemed merely "queer" to her; and

queerer still appeared the undraped figures of women, all lean lines and

violet shadows, which, unframed and unhung, filled the dusty corners.

"The river is lovely, but it is so far away," she said, turning her

abashed eyes from the nude figures, and thinking how terribly they would

have shocked the innocence of Cousin Jimmy.

"I always look at the river when I come here," responded Mrs. Fowler,

and her tone implied that the river at least was perfectly proper. "A

month ago the colours were wonderful."

In the drive, which they could see from a corner view, a few old men,

forgotten by time, warmed themselves in the sunlight. Far below, the

river reflected the changeable blue of the sky, while the autumnal

pageantry on the horizon was fading slowly, like a burned-out fire, to

the colour of ashes.

"Mother, dear, I'm so glad," said a gay voice in the doorway, and

turning quickly, Gabriella stared with wide eyes at the vision of

Patty--of Patty in some soft tea-gown, which borrowed its tone from the

old tapestries on the wall, with her honey-coloured hair hanging over

her shoulders, and her eyes as fresh as blue flowers in the ivory pallor

of her face.

"And this is Gabriella," she added, holding out her arms. "What a

darling you are to come so soon, Gabriella."

She was a tall girl, so tall that she stooped to kiss Gabriella, whose

height measured exactly five feet and seven inches, and she was

beautiful with the faultless beauty which is seen only once or twice in

a generation, but which, seen once, is never forgotten. For Patty's

beauty, as a poet once wrote of a dead woman, was the beauty of destiny,

the beauty that changes history and turns men into angels or into

beasts. Though Gabriella had seen lovely skins on Southern

women--rose-leaf skins, magnolia skins, peach-blossom skins--she had

seen nothing that resembled the exquisite colour and texture of Patty's

face.

"The curtains were finished, so I brought them," said Mrs. Fowler,

pointing to the bundle. "I wanted Gabriella to see the Park. You are

coming to-night without fail, aren't you, Patty?"

"Without fail, even if we have to walk," answered Patty. "You can't

imagine how much it costs to get about when one lives so far uptown.

That's one reason we are anxious to move. Billy has been looking for a

studio for weeks, and, do you know, he has really found one at last.

Harry Allen is moving out of the Rubens Building, and we are going to

take his studio on the top floor. We're awfully lucky, too, to get it,

for it is the first vacancy there for years."

"But it's over a stable, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Fowler. "How could you

possibly live there? And the East Side way down there is just as bad as

up here"

"I believe there is a stable, but it won't bother us--we're too high,"

replied Patty.

"Well, we can't stop; Gabriella hasn't unpacked her trunks," returned

Mrs. Fowler; "but be sure to come early, Patty. I want your father to

see you."

"I wish there wasn't going to be anybody else. I want to talk to my

sister. Isn't it lovely to have a sister, and mamma was too selfish to

give me one. Do you call her 'mamma,' too, Gabriella?"

"Of course she calls me 'mamma,'" answered Mrs. Fowler before Gabriella

could speak, "and she is a much better daughter already than you ever

were."

"And a much better son, too, than George ever was?" asked Patty slyly.

"We aren't talking about George. George has settled down," said Mrs.

Fowler quickly, too quickly it occurred to Gabriella, who was eager to

hear all that the daring Patty would say. "Don't you think those white

furs look well on Gabriella?"

"She looks like the snow queen in them. Does it matter what I wear

to-night? Who is coming?"

"Nobody you will care about--only Judge and Mrs. Crowborough and Colonel

Buffington."

"That old bore of a colonel! And why do you have to ask the judge again

so soon? He looks like a turkey gobbler, Gabriella, and he has so much

money that it is impossible to judge him by the standards of other

people, everybody says that--even Billy."

"Hush, Patty. You mustn't corrupt Gabriella."

"If the judge doesn't, I shan't, mamma."

"Well, your father has the greatest respect for him, and as for asking

him often to dinner, it isn't by any means so easy to get him as you

think. I don't suppose there's another man in New York who is invited

out so often and goes out so little."

"Papa is a sweet innocent," observed Patty maliciously, "but if you can

stand the judge, mamma, dear, I am sure I can, especially as I shan't

have to sit by him. That honour will be reserved for poor Gabriella. I

wish you didn't have to go, but you really must, I suppose?"

"Yes, we must go. Come, Gabriella, or you won't have time to get into

your trunks before dinner."

On the drive home Mrs. Fowler was grimly silent, while the sweetness

about her mouth ebbed slowly away, leaving the faintest quiver of the

muscles. For the first time Gabriella saw George's mother look as she

must look in her sleep, when the artificial cheerfulness of her

expression faded into the profound unconsciousness which drowns not only

happiness, but the very pretence of happiness. So here, also, was

insincerity, here, also, was the striving, not for realities, but for

appearances! In a different form she saw her mother's struggle

again--that struggle, without beginning and without end, which moved

always in a circle and led nowhere. Was there no sincerity, no reality

even in love? Was George, too, only a shadow? And the visible sadness of

the November afternoon, with its faint haze like the haze of a dream

landscape, seemed a part of this invisible sadness which had sprung from

nothing and which would change and pass away in a breath. "If things

would only last," she thought, looking with wistful eyes on the gold and

purple around her. "If things would only last, how wonderful life would

be!"

"To think that all Patty's beauty should have been thrown away," said

Mrs. Fowler suddenly.

Though Gabriella had never seen Billy, she was inclined at the moment,

in her mood of dissatisfaction with the universe, to sympathize with

Mrs. Fowler's view of the matter. To her frugal mind, trained to economy

of material, it seemed that Patty was altogether too much for a poor

man--even though he could paint her in lean lines and violet shadows.

Upstairs she found her trunks in her bedroom, and after she had unpacked

her wedding-gown of white satin, removed the tissue paper stuffing from

the sleeves, and shaken out the creases with gentle hands, she sat down

and pondered deeply the problem of dressing for dinner. By removing the

lace yoke, she might make the gown sufficiently indecorous for the

fashion of the period, and her only evening dress, the white muslin she

had worn to dances in Richmond, she reflected gloomily, would appear

absurd in New York.

"I wish I didn't look such a fright," she said aloud, as she ripped and

sewed. Then, in a flash, her mind wandered from herself, and she

thought: "I wonder why George didn't tell his mother that we are going

to take an apartment? I wonder why he didn't tell her that mother is

coming in June? When he comes I must ask him."

Looking at the clock, she saw that it was after seven, and hurriedly

taking the last few stitches, she laid the gown on the bed, bathed her

face in cold water, and then, sitting down before her dressing-table,

drew the pins from her hair. In some obscure way she felt herself a

different person from the bride who had watched George so ecstatically

at the station that morning. She could not tell how she had altered, and

yet she felt perfectly conscious that an alteration had taken place in

her soul--that she was not the same Gabriella--that life could never be

again exactly as it had been before. Nothing and yet everything seemed

to have happened to her in a day. Her face, gazing gravely back at her

from the mirror, looked young and wistful, the face of one who, like a

bird flying suddenly out of darkness against a lamp, is bewildered by

the first shock of the light.

When her hair was arranged in the simple way she had always worn it, she

slipped her dress over her bare shoulders, and fastened it slowly--for

Miss Polly had no patience with "back fastenings"--while she told

herself again that George would not be satisfied. She knew that her gown

was provincial, knew that she lacked the "dash" he admired in women; and

from the first she had been mystified by a love which could, while still

passionately desiring her, wish her different in so many ways. "I'd like

him to be proud of me, but I suppose he never will be," she thought

dejectedly, "and yet he fell in love with me just as I was, and he did

not fall in love with any of the dashing women he knows," she added

quickly, consoled by the reflection. "And of course in a few things I

wish him different, too. I wish he wasn't so careless. He is so careless

that I shall have to be twice as careful, I shall have to look after him

all the time. Even to-night he has forgotten about the dinner, and he'll

be obliged to dress in a hurry, which he hates."

Glancing at the clock again, she saw that it was a quarter of eight, and

still George had not come.

CHAPTER VI

THE OLD SERPENT

At five minutes of eight o'clock he came in, with a lighted cigar in his

mouth. For the first few days after her marriage there had been a

pleasant excitement in the scent of George's cigars in her bedroom. Now,

however, habit had dulled the excitement, and the smell of tobacco gave

her a headache.

"Oh, George, you are late!" she exclaimed, sinking the lesser into the

greater offence after the habit of wives. As if he had all night instead

of five minutes before him in which to dress, he stood in the centre of

the room, blandly looking her over.

"You're all right," he said after a pause. "I met a fellow at the club I

hadn't seen for a year. He had been hunting big game in Africa, and he

was telling me about it. By Jove, that is life!"

They had been married but a month; it was their first day at home, and

he could linger at the club to talk of big game while she waited for

him. Flushed, excited, he stood there on the white bearskin rug midway

between the bed and the wood-fire, while she felt his charm stealing

like a drug over her senses. Though she had begun to realize the

thinness of his mental qualities, she was still as completely in the

power of his physical charm as she had been on the day of her wedding.

In the flickering light of the fire he appeared to diffuse the glamour

of romance, of adventure; and she felt that this single day in New York

had left a vital impression upon him. It was as if he had become

suddenly more alive, more inexplicable in his simplicity; and, though

she had grasped vaguely the fact that his personality was composed of

innumerable reactions, she had never really understood before how

entirely he was the creature of his environment. It was as if the very

essence of his soul floated there, a variable and fluid quantity,

forever changing form and colour beneath the shallow ripples of his

personality. She had seen him in many moods, but never in this one. Did

he possess a deeper subtlety than she had imagined or was it the

sincerity of his nature that defied analysis?

"Did you enjoy yourself?" she asked cheerfully. Tell me about it."

"Oh, it was rather jolly," he replied, and she knew that this was as

much as she should ever get out of him. Beyond a few stock phrases,

words hardly existed for him at all, or existed only in foreign

languages, for, having been educated abroad, he spoke French and German

fluently, if without felicity. Already his inarticulateness was like an

encumbering veil between them--a veil in which she struggled as

helplessly as a moth in a net. And only a month ago she had believed

that the very immensity of his nature rendered him dumb.

"Then you had better hurry, dear. Dinner is at eight, and you have only

a minute."

"You go down and tell them not to wait. I was detained downtown, but it

won't take me a second to dress."

As he passed under the electric light by the mirror, she saw his face

with exaggerated distinctness, as if it were held under a microscope,

and a heaviness, which she had never noticed before, marred the edge of

his profile. If he hadn't been George, would she have said that he

looked stupid at the moment? For a flashing instant of illumination she

saw him with a vision that was not her own, but a stranger's, with a

pitiless clearness unsoftened by any passion. Then the clearness faded

rapidly before an impulse of tenderness, and she told herself that he

was merely handsome, gay, and careless, as he had been on their

honeymoon. If he would only talk to her, she felt that he would be

perfect.

"Yes, I'm going. Come as soon as you can," she said; and catching up her

satin train, she descended the oak staircase to the drawing-room, where

a fire was burning and the lights were shaded in crimson.

Twenty minutes later, seated at the round table, which was bright with

chrysanthemums in tall silver vases, she looked with a feeling of

resentment at George's empty place. Why was he so careless? Time had for

him, she realized, as little meaning as words had. Then, in the midst of

her disquietude, she caught the serene blue eyes of George's mother

fixed upon her. With her young face, her red lips, and her superb

shoulders rising out of the rich black lace of her gown, Mrs. Fowler

looked almost beautiful. Had Patty not been present, with her loveliness

like a summer's day, her mother would have seemed hardly more than a

girl; but who could shine while Patty, beside that long, lean man with

the gray imperial, smiled with lips that were like a scarlet flower in

her face?

There were only four guests, but these four, as Mrs. Fowler had said,

"counted for something." The long, lean man beside Patty was one Colonel

Buffington, a Virginia lawyer, who had wandered North in search of food

in the barren years after the war. As his mind was active in a patient

accumulative fashion, he had become in time a musty storehouse of war

anecdotes, and achieving but moderate success in his law practice, his

chief distinction, perhaps, was as a professional Southerner. Combining

a genial charm of manner with as sterile an intellect as it is possible

to attain, he was generally regarded as a perfect example of "the old

school," and this picturesque reputation made him desirable as a guest

at club dinners as well as at the larger gatherings of the various

Southern societies. His conversation, which was entirely anecdotal,

consisted of an elaborate endless chain of more or less historical

"stories." Social movements and the development of civilization

interested him as little as did art or science--for which he entertained

a chronic suspicion due to the indiscretions of Darwin. Change of any

kind was repugnant to his deeper instincts, and of all changes the ones

relating to the habits of women appeared to him to interfere most

unwarrantably with the Creator's original plan. For the rest he had the

heart of a child, would strip the clothes from his back to give to a

friend, or even to an enemy, and possessed an infallible gift for making

a dinner successful.

On Colonel Buffington's right sat Mrs. Hamilton, a very pretty, very

sprightly widow, with her hair coiled into the fashionable Psyche knot,

and the short puffs of her sleeves emphasizing the hour-glass perfection

of her figure. Next to Mrs. Hamilton there was Billy King, who wore a

white flower in his buttonhole and looked like a soldier out of

uniform, and beyond Billy sat Mrs. Crowborough, whom he was trying

despairingly to entertain. She, renowned and estimable woman, was

planning in her mind what she should say at a board meeting of one of

her pet charities on the morrow, a charity which, like all of her

favourite ones, concerned itself with the management and spiritual

elevation of girl orphans. Tall, raw-boned, strung with jet, Mrs.

Crowborough, who had been married for her money, looked as sympathetic

as a moral principle or an organized charity. Unfortunately, for she was

rather heavy in company, Judge Crowborough was obliged by custom to

bring her to dinner; and she came willingly, inspired less by

sociability than by the virtuous instinct which animated her being. Mr.

Fowler had taken her in to dinner, and while she lent an inert attention

to Billy's jests, he talked across Gabriella to Judge Crowborough, who

was eating his soup with the complete absorption of a man to whom the

smallest of his appetities is sacred. It was a grievance of Mrs.

Fowler's that her husband would never, as she said, "pay any attention

to women," and in order to feel assured of even so much as a cheerful

noise at his end of the table, she was obliged to place within hearing

distance of him somebody who could talk fluently, if not eloquently, of

the stock market.

To Gabriella's surprise, her father-in-law, who had appeared inert and

listless at breakfast, became, in the stimulating presence of the judge,

not only awake, but mildly animated. She had felt before the charm in

his scholarly face, with its look of detached spirituality so strangely

out of keeping with the calling he pursued; and she recognized now the

quality of controlled force which had enabled him to hold his own in

the financial whirlpool of his country. Had the girl known more of life,

she would have understood that in the American business world there were

hundreds of such men winning their way and leaving their mark at that

moment of history--men whose natures were redeemed from grossness by the

peculiar idealism they infused into their material battles. Of

Scotch-Irish inheritance, the direct descendant of one Gregory

Truesdale, who had died a martyr for Presbyterianism, Archibald Fowler

was inspired by something of the austere devotion which had fortified

his religious ancestor. Since his college days his private life had been

irreproachable. Though he was a stronger character than his wife, he

regarded her with almost superstitious reverence, and made no decision

above Wall Street without consulting her. His heart, and as much of his

time as he could spare from business, were hers, and she made the most

of them. Women, as women, did not attract him, and he avoided them

except at his own table, where custom constrained him to be polite.

After a few courteous words to Mrs. Crowborough, he had turned with

relief to her husband.

"You've got a bright chap in your office, Stanley," he said; "that

fellow Latham. I was talking to him this morning. He's from Colorado,

isn't he?"

"Oh, yes, they're all from the West now," responded the judge--he had

sat on the bench in his youth. "Ten years ago the bright ones were from

the South, but you Southerners are outstripped to-day, and it's the men

from the West who are doing it. There's a fundamental reason there, I

suppose, if you go deep enough," he added, fingering the ends of his

short gray moustache while he kept an eye on his champagne glass.

"We've done with mere classifying and imitation, and we're waiting for a

fresh explosion of raw energy. Now for pure constructive imagination the

North and South don't hold a candle--they simply don't hold a candle--to

the West. Mark my words, in twenty-five years there'll hardly be a big

railroad man in the country who wasn't born in sight of the Rockies."

Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in a groove leading directly to

business, the judge had a natural bent toward generalization, and when

dining, preferred to discuss impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid

man with an immense paunch flattened by artificial devices, and a

vitality so excessive that it overflowed in numberless directions--in

his hearty animal appetites, in his love of sports, in his delight in

the theatre and literature, particularly in novels of the sentimental

and romantic school, in his fondness for the lighter operas, and in his

irrepressible admiration for pretty women. His face, large, ruddy, with

a hooked nose, where the red was thickly veined with purple, and

protruding lips over square yellow teeth that gripped like the teeth of

a bulldog, aroused in Gabriella a quick repulsion which only the genial

humour of his smile overcame. That he should have married his wife for

her money was less amazing to the girl than that his wife should have

married him for any reason whatsoever. Only a moral principle or a

charitable institution, she felt, could have endured him and survived.

But in spite of his repulsiveness he had evidently experienced the

natural activities of humanity. He had taken a wife; he had begotten

children; he had judged other men; he had dug into the bowels of the

earth for mines, and had built railroads on its surface; he had made

grass grow in deserts and had turned waste places into populous cities;

he had read romances and heard music; he had attained a social position

securely founded upon millions of dollars--and all these things he had

achieved through his unconquerable colossal vitality. "I wonder why they

put him by me," thought Gabriella. "I shall never get on with him."

Then he turned to her and said bluntly, between two mouthfuls of

lobster: "So you're George's wife! Handsome chap George, but he hasn't

much head for business. He lacks the grip of the old man. Where's he

to-night?"

"He got home so late that he wasn't ready for dinner. He'll be down in a

minute."

"It's a bad habit. He oughtn't to be late. Now, I haven't been late for

dinner for twenty years."

"I'm afraid he doesn't pay much attention to time. I'll try to change

him."

"You won't. No woman alive ever changed a man's habits. All you can do

is to hide them."

That his blunt manner was an affectation, she was quick to discern.

While he talked to her, he looked at her knowingly with his light fishy

eyes, and by his look and his tone he seemed to establish an immediate

intimacy between them--as if he and she were speaking a language which

was foreign to the rest of the table. He appeared to be kind, she

thought, and on his side he was thinking that she was a nice girl, with

an attractive face and remarkable eyes. On the whole, he preferred brown

eyes, though his wife's were the colour of slate. "Why the deuce did she

marry that fool?" he questioned impatiently.

Across the table Billy King was working hopelessly but valiantly to

engage Mrs. Crowborough's attention. What a splendid figure he had, and

how clean and fine was the modelling of his features! He was just the

man a girl like Patty would fall in love with, and Gabriella no longer

felt that. Patty's beauty was wasted. Once or twice she caught fleeting

glances passing between them, and these glances, so winged with

happiness, spoke unutterable and ecstatic things.

A hush dropped suddenly on the table, and in this hush she heard the

voice of Colonel Buffington telling a story in dialect. It was an

immemorial anecdote of Cousin Jimmy's--she had heard him tell it a dozen

times--and while she listened, it made her feel comfortably at home.

"'Uncle Amos,' I said to him, 'we've been together thirty years, but

we've got to part. You're a drunkard and a thief and a worthless darky

all round, and you've lived on my place ever since the war without doing

a lick of work for your keep. I've stood it as long as I can, but

there's an end to human endurance. Yes, Amos, the time has come for us

to part.'

"Hi! Marse Beverly,' said the old rascal, 'whar you gwine?"

"Capital!" ejaculated the judge softly. "Capital!" And he added for

Gabriella's ear: "Buffington tells the best negro stories of any man I

know. Ought to have heard him at the club the other night."

Gabriella did not answer; Cousin Jimmy's story had made her think of

Cousin Jimmy, with his soft heart and his dark shining eyes like the

eyes of a good and gentle dog. Then she thought of her mother, and

reminded herself that she must ask George when they were to begin the

hunt for an apartment. He had said they were very hard to find when you

wanted them.

Another hush fell, and Colonel Buffington was just beginning a second

story--one of Uncle Meriweather's this time--when George came in from

the drawing-room, and after a murmured apology, took his seat between

Patty and Mrs. Hamilton.

"That's a handsome boy," said the judge in a husky whisper to Gabriella,

"but he hasn't much to say for himself, has he?"

His manner of playful intimacy conveyed the impression that the secret

understanding between them did not include Gabriella's husband. George

was an outsider, but this hideous old man, with his curious repelling

suggestion of over-ripeness, as of fruit that is beginning to rot at the

core, was the dominant personality in her mind at the moment. She

wondered if he knew how repulsive he was, and while she wondered, the

judge, unaware of his tragic plight, went on eating lobster with

unimpaired relish. His importance, founded upon a more substantial basis

than mere personal attraction, had risen superior not only to morality,

but to the outward failings of the flesh. Had he been twice as

repulsive, she realized that his millions would have commanded a respect

denied to both beauty and virtue.

"I wonder how any woman can stand him," mused Gabriella. Then, glancing

across the table at Mrs. Crowborough, she realized something of the

amazing insensibility of the more ethereal sex. No man, not even in the

last extremity, could have loved a woman as ugly as Judge Crowborough

was. The roughest man would have had sufficient esthetic sense to have

been shocked into revolt; yet a woman, a refined and intelligent woman,

had married the judge and survived it. She appeared now, not only

expressionless and unrevolted, but filled with a healthy zest for social

reforms and the spiritual welfare of girl orphans.

"Well, I've learned something of life to-night," thought Gabriella while

she watched her.

Later in the evening, when she passed into the drawing-room, with Mrs.

Crowborough, bleak, unbending, and trailing her chains of jet, she

comforted herself again with the reflection that what she was "seeing"

might not be particularly exciting, "but it was life."

On a short, hard sofa near the fire, beside Fatty, who bloomed like a

white rose under the red-shaded light, she listened to Mrs. Fowler's

unflagging efforts to "get on" with the judge's wife. Never had the

dauntless little woman revealed more surprising resourcefulness, never

had she talked so vivaciously, never had she appeared so relentlessly

pleasant. It was as if she said in the face of Mrs. Crowborough's

insensibility, which was the insensibility not of mind, but of inanimate

matter, "Whatever you do, you can't keep me from being sweet." And in

this strained sweetness there was something touching, something wistful,

a hint of inner weariness which showed now and then beneath the restless

vivacity.

"Isn't it funny," said Patty suddenly, "how much mamma cares about

things that don't matter at all? You wouldn't believe it to look at her,

but she is in her heart the most worldly one of the family. Father

wouldn't give a tallow candle for anything that isn't real."

A log broke in the centre, and fell, scattering a shower of golden

embers over the hearth. Rising quickly, with one of her sprightly

movements, Mrs. Fowler reached for a pair of small brass tongs and

pushed the broken log back on the andirons. Then she threw some fresh

wood on the flames, and resumed her seat with an animated gesture as if

the incident had enlivened her.

"Now they are talking about the everlasting Pletheridges," whispered

Patty. "I never understand how mother can take so much interest in those

people just because they are rich."

But to Gabriella it was more inconceivable still that her mother-in-law,

with the bluest blood of Virginia in her veins, should regard with such

artless reverence the social activities of the granddaughter of a

tavern-keeper. In her native State an impoverished branch of Mrs.

Fowler's family still lived on land which, tradition said, had been

granted one of her ancestors by Charles the Second in recognition of

distinguished services to that dubious monarch; yet she could long

enviously for a closer acquaintance with the plutocratic descendant of

an Irish tavern-keeper--an honest man, doubtless, who had laid the

foundations of his fortune in a string of halfway houses stretching from

New York to Chicago.

"Yes, I dined with Mrs. Pletheridge once," she was saying in the tone in

which her royalist ancestor might have acknowledged a command from his

King.

"It always makes me angry, I can't help it," pursued Patty. "If dear

mamma had only some other weakness--cards or wine or clothes or anything

else. It's queer, with all her pride, how little social backbone she

has. Now to hear her talk, you would imagine that that vulgar snob,

whose father kept hotels and married one of his chambermaids, had

conferred an honour by inviting her to dinner. And the funniest part is

that, for all her good breeding, and her family portraits, and her

titled ancestors, mother hasn't half so much respect for the genuine New

Yorkers--I mean the New Yorkers whose names really mean something--as

she has for these mushroom plutocrats. She had set her heart on George

marrying one of them, you know, but it's a jolly good thing he didn't."

"That's the girl he told me about," said Gabriella. "Was he ever

interested in her?"

"Not for a minute. We're awfully contrary about our love affairs. We

will marry for love--even mother did though she may have forgotten it.

We never marry the people--" She clipped off the sentence, but Gabriella

caught it up with a laugh:

"I know," she said gaily, "you never marry the people your family pick

out for you."

"Well, of course, Billy went dreadfully hard with them--at least with

mother. She wanted the Duke of Somewhere so very badly. But it was Billy

or nobody for me. I'd have married Billy," she added while her beautiful

face grew stern, "if I'd had to walk all the way across the world to

him."

"He looks as if he were worth it," admitted Gabriella.

"He is, but that probably wasn't my reason for marrying him. One never

knows why one marries, I suppose, unless one marries for money and then

it is so beautifully simple. Now, you and George don't seem a bit alike,

but it all happened on the spur of the moment, didn't it?"

"It always seems that way when one looks back, doesn't it?" asked

Gabriella. "But what I can't understand"--she brought it out with a

frown--"is why marriage doesn't change one. I used to think I'd be

different, but I'm not. And even love seems to leave people wanting

everything else just as badly. Your mother has had a perfect love--she

told me so--and yet it hasn't kept her from wanting all the other things

in life, has it? I wish I could work it out," she finished, a little

sadly, for she was thinking of her mother's cry on the night of Jane's

attack: "I am tempted to hope Gabriella will never marry. The Carrs all

marry so badly!" Why had those words come back to her to-night? She had

not remembered them for months, she had even forgotten that she had

heard them, and now they floated to her as clearly as if they had been

spoken aloud.

In a little while Billy came in, and when, after a few moments of

spasmodic affability, Mrs. Crowborough rose and pleaded an early board

meeting on the morrow, Gabriella watched Patty wrap her honey-coloured

head in a white scarf and then stand, waiting for a cab, in the doorway.

Happiness, with so many people an invisible attribute, encircled Patty

like a garment of light. It crowned her white brow under the glory of

her hair; it shone in her eyes; it rippled in her smile; it lingered in

a beam of sunshine on her lips. With her arm in Billy's she looked back

laughing from the steps, and it seemed to Gabriella that all the

brightness of life was going with them into the darkness. Beside the

curbstone an old cab horse, dazzled by the light from the door, turned

his head slowly toward them; and the look in his eyes, wistful,

questioning, expectant, seemed to say, "This is not life, but a

miracle." And from his box the red-cheeked, wheezy Irish driver gazed

down on Patty with the same wistfulness, the same questioning, the same

expectancy.

"I never see Patty go off in a cab that I don't feel she has thrown

herself away," observed Mrs. Fowler, yawning, while she turned to the

staircase. "Archibald, I hope you had a really good time with the judge.

I must say it is like ploughing to talk to his wife."

Upstairs in her room a little later Gabriella said to George: "Patty was

telling me about the girl your mother wanted you to marry."

He was pouring out a glass of water, and, absorbed in the act, he merely

grunted for answer. It was his disagreeable habit to grunt when grunting

saved effort.

"I wish you'd talk to me, George. It is so annoying to be grunted at."

"Well, what do you want?" he replied amiably enough. "Patty is a regular

sieve, you know. Never tell her a secret."

"Did you ever like that girl--really?"

"The girl mother had in mind?" Having emptied the glass, he returned it

to the tray and came over to her. "Yes, but if you want the truth, I

preferred the girl in the chorus--the one the old lady got in a blue

funk about, you know. She's still there, the last but one from the end,

in the Golden Slipper. I'll take you to see it some night."

"Men are strange," observed Gabriella, with philosophic detachment. "Now

I couldn't feel the slightest interest in a man in comic opera. Did she

really attract you?"

"Um--humph," he was grunting again.

"Wasn't she terribly common?"

"Um--humph."

"Wasn't she vulgar?"

"Rather. They all are."

"And fast?"

"Regular streak of lightning."

Then it was that Gabriella arrived at an understanding of masculine

nature. "You never can tell what men will like," she concluded.

While she spoke he winked at her from the mirror into which he was

looking--mirrors always fascinated George and he could never keep away

from them--and there was in his face the whimsical and appealing

naughtiness of a child. Suddenly Gabriella felt that as far as character

and experience counted, she was immeasurably older than George. Her

superior common sense made her feel almost middle-aged when he was in

one of his boyish moods. At the age of nine she had not been so utterly

irresponsible as George was at twenty-six; as an infant in arms she had

probably regarded the universe with a profounder philosophy. Though of

course George was charming, he was without any sense of the deeper

purpose of life. Like a child he must have what he wanted, and like a

child he sulked when he was thwarted and grew angelic when his wishes

were gratified. A single day had taught her that his father could not

depend on him in business, that his mother could not trust him even to

remember a dinner engagement. Gabriella loved him, she had chosen him,

she told herself now, and she meant to abide by her choice; but she was

not blind, she was not a fool, and she was deficient in the kind of

loyalty which obliges one to lie even in the sanctity of one's own mind.

She would be true to him, but she would be true with her eyes open, not

shut.

"George," she said presently, while she loosened her hair, "your father

told me you didn't stay more than an hour in the office." The question,

"What were you doing?" rose to her lips, but she strangled the words

before they escaped her. Her mind was quick to grasp facts, and she had

learned already something of a man's instinctive dislike to being made

to give an account of himself.

"You've been hearing too much gossip to-night," he rejoined gaily. "Take

care what you listen to."

"Don't joke, dear. I wish you would tell me things."

"There isn't anything to tell, is there?"

"Is your father very rich?"

"Not very. Did you think you were marrying a millionaire?"

"I never thought about it, but everybody at home thinks he has a great

deal of money, and yet your mother talks as if she were poor."

"Well, he made a pile of money in a big deal about ten years ago, and

the papers had a lot about it. After that he lost it, or most of it, and

the papers didn't tell. The fact is, he's always either making or

losing, and now he's losing. That's why they wanted me to put off our

marriage."

"They wanted you to put it off?"

"Mother did--the old man never interferes. She had got into her head,

you see, that the only way for me to make a living was to marry one, so

it was a little while before she could get used to the idea that I was

going to marry because I wanted to, not because my family wanted me to.

She was a brick though when she found out I was in earnest. Mother is

true blue when you know how to take her."

"But you never told me."

"You bet I didn't. If I had, as likely as not, you would be Gabriella

Mary Carr at this minute."

Drawing gently out of his grasp, which had grown possessive, she stood

looking at him with a smile in which tenderness and irony mingled; and

the tenderness was her own, while the irony seemed to belong to the

vision of an impersonal spectator of life. The smile fascinated him. He

could not withdraw his gaze from it, and yet it had the disturbing

effect of placing her at an emotional distance.

"Your mother is very good to me," she said, "but I feel somehow as if I

had taken an unfair advantage of her. And you hadn't even told her," she

added, "that we are going to take an apartment in June."

"Oh, that's all right--there's plenty of time," he responded irritably.

"Only you mustn't make mountains out of molehills."

Then, because she dreaded his anger, she gave up her point as she had

given up many before. He was irresponsible, but he was hers and she

loved him.

"I am so sleepy," she said, stifling a yawn, "that I feel as if I could

cry."

Marriage, at the end of a month, had already disciplined the fearless

directness of Gabriella. She had learned not to answer back when she

knew she was right; she had learned to appear sweet when her inner

spirit demanded a severe exterior; she had learned to hold her tongue

when a veritable torrent of words rose to her lips. And these lessons,

which George's temper and her own reason had taught her, remained with

her in the future, long after she had forgotten George and the severity

of her schooling.

There were many things for her to learn, and the lessons of that first

day and night stretched through the winter and well into the beginning

of spring. Accompanying Mrs. Fowler on her busy rounds, she discovered

that here also, as in the house in Hill Street, the chief end of life

was to keep up an appearance; here also the supreme effort, the best

energies, were devoted to a sham--to a thing which had no actual

existence. Though Mrs. Fowler was rich beside Mrs. Carr, Gabriella soon

found out that she was not nearly so rich as her neighbours were, not

nearly so rich as her position in society exacted that she should be.

She was still not rich enough to be spared the sordid, nerve-racking

effort to make two ends meet without a visible break. Her small

economies, to Gabriella's surprise, were as rigid as Mrs. Carr's; and

though she lived in surroundings which appeared luxurious to the girl,

there was almost as little ready money to spend as there had been in

Mrs. Carr's household. Bills were made recklessly, and dinner parties

were given at regular intervals; for Mrs. Fowler, who denied herself a

hundred small comforts of living, who gave up cream in her coffee and

bought her butter from a grocer below Washington Square, took quite as a

matter of course the fact that she must, as she put it, "pay off social

scores." Though they ate the simplest food in the market for six days of

the week, on the seventh, hothouse flowers bloomed profusely in the

lower rooms and champagne flowed abundantly into the delicate Venetian

glasses on the round table. To be sure, Mrs. Fowler's gown may have been

two seasons old, but it was covered with rare laces, which she had

picked up during her summers abroad; and her pearls--the string was

short, but really good, for she had matched it in Paris--shone, rich

and costly, around her still beautiful neck. After one of these dinners

the family lived on scraps and looked at fading flowers for days, while

Mrs. Fowler, with the air of one who has done her duty, sat upstairs

before the little French writing-desk in her room, and patiently added

accounts from morning till night. A strained look would come into her

plump, firm face, three little wrinkles would appear between her

eyebrows, and her blue eyes, circled by faint shadows, would grow dark

and anxious. Then, when at last the accounts were finished and the

unpaid bills laid away in a pigeonhole, she would remark with animation:

"I don't see how on earth I am ever to pay all these bills," and, after

changing her dress, set out to bring her butcher or her grocer to

reason. On one of these days she took Gabriella (they went in the stage

because she had given up her carriage) on a hunt for bargains in

underwear, and, to the girl's astonishment, her mother-in-law, who

presented so opulent an appearance on the surface, purchased for herself

a supply of cheap and badly made chemises and nightgowns. As she grew to

know Mrs. Fowler better, she found that the expenditures of that

redoubtable woman, in spite of her naturally delicate tastes, were

governed by one of the most elementary principles of economy. Through

long habit she had acquired a perception as unerring as instinct, and

this perception enabled her to tell exactly where extravagance was

useful and where it failed in its effect. She had learned to perfection

never to spend money on things that did not show a result. An appearance

was what she strove for, and one's chemises and nightgowns, however

exquisite in themselves, could not very well contribute to one's

external appearance. "Of course I like good underclothes," she remarked

cheerfully to her daughter-in-law, "but, after all, nobody sees them."

This was so different from the poverty-stricken point of view of

Gabriella's childhood, that the girl puzzled over it afterwards when she

sat in her corner of the stage. Mrs. Carr had kept up an appearance,

too, she reflected, but, like the old maids on the floor above, she had

kept it up even to herself. Perhaps the difference lay in the immense

gulf which divided the appearance of Hill Street from the appearance of

the East Fifties. Mrs. Fowler was obliged by the public opinion she

obeyed to appear affluent, while Mrs. Carr was merely constrained not to

appear destitute. On the whole Gabriella felt that she preferred the

safe middle distance between the two exacting standards of living.

But, though she might disapprove of her mother-in-law's philosophy,

there was no question about her fervent admiration for her disposition.

It was Mrs. Fowler's habit to appear "sweet," and never once did

Gabriella see her lose her temper, never once, no matter how hard the

day or how exasperating the accounts, did she show so much as a passing

hint of irritability. Her temper was so angelic that it was the more

surprising George should not have inherited a trace of it.

If George had not inherited his mother's nature, he revealed, as time

went on, even less resemblance to the perfect reasonableness of his

father's temperament. Ever since her first day in the house, Gabriella

had been drawn to her father-in-law with an affection which his wife,

for all her preoccupied kindness, had not inspired. She respected him

for his calm strength, against which the boisterous moods of George

reacted as harmlessly as the whims of a child, and she liked him for his

unfailing courtesy, for his patience, for his gentleness, which made her

feel that he was, in spite of the material nature of his occupation, the

only member of the household who possessed even a glimmer of

spirituality. All day long, and the greater part of the night, he

thought about money, and yet he had escaped the spiritual corruption

which the ceaseless pursuit of wealth had produced in the other rich men

whom Gabriella met in his house. It was as if some subtle alchemy in his

soul had transmuted the baser qualities into the pure gold of character;

and sometimes the girl wondered if the fact that he worked not for

himself but for others had preserved him from the grosser contamination

of money. For he seemed to think of himself so little, that after three

months in his house, Gabriella was still ignorant of his interests apart

from his work, except, of course, his absorbing interest in the morning

papers. From the time he got up at seven o'clock until he went to bed

punctually on the stroke of ten, he appeared to order his life with the

single purpose of giving as little trouble as was compatible with living

at all. His tastes were the simplest; he drank only boiled water; he ate

two eggs and a roll with his coffee at breakfast; he spent hardly a

third as much on his clothes as George spent; and beyond an occasional

visit to his club in the evening, he seemed to have absolutely no

recreation. His life was in the stock market, and it was a life of

almost monastic simplicity and self-sacrifice. If he had any pleasure,

except the pleasure of providing his wife with the money for her dinner

parties, which bored him excruciatingly, Gabriella had never discovered

it. "He asks so little for himself that it is pathetic," she remarked

to George one night, when Mr. Fowler had gone upstairs, carrying the

evening papers to bed with him.

"Oh, well, he gets what he asks for," retorted George indifferently,

"and that's more than the rest of us can say."

George was in a bad humour; he had been in a bad humour for weeks; and

for this reason Gabriella had put off from day to day telling him that

she expected a child in the autumn. All her efforts to soothe had merely

exasperated him; and there were days when her presence worked him into a

fit of nervous irritability. After four months of marriage prolonged

boredom had replaced the passionate tenderness of their honeymoon. Why

this should be so she was too well-balanced emotionally to understand.

She saw only the outward evidences of change, of gradual

disillusionment; and though at first she wept a little while she

wondered, she ended by drying her tears and attributing his casual

indifference and his explosive violence alike to some obscure disturbing

condition of health. Every evening, except when there were guests, he

spent at his club; he came to bed late, and his waking hour was filled

with complaint about the number and the size of his bills. He treated

these bills as if they had been gratuitous insults, as if they had

leaped, without reason for being, out of a malign world to assail him.

As yet Gabriella had bought nothing; and she dreaded the time when her

clothes would wear out beyond the hope of repairing, and she should be

obliged to add another bill to the growing pile under the silver paper

weight on the little white and gold desk.

But in the last few weeks even this anxiety had faded from her mind,

for the miracle of life which stirred in her body had diffused its

golden halo around every trivial incident of her existence. After days

of physical wretchedness, which she had hidden from George, she sat one

evening, utterly at peace, in front of the fire in the room which had

been Patty's before her marriage. It was past midnight, and she was

waiting for George to come home because she felt that she could not

sleep until she had told him. In the morning he had been unusually

gentle, and as he left the house, she had said to herself a little

sternly that he must know about the child before the day was over. A

secret consultation with her mother-in-law had strengthened her

resolution. "Don't keep it from him another day, Gabriella," Mrs. Fowler

had urged. "It will make such a difference. I shall never forget

Archibald's joy when I told him George was coming. Men are like that

about children, you know."

"Yes, I'll tell him to-night," Gabriella had answered; and sitting now

in the rocking-chair by the fire, she began to wonder if George would be

exactly like other men about children.

The house was very still, but even in its stillness it exhaled the

nervous apprehension which she felt to be its living character--as if

George's parents, sleeping two doors away, had dropped their guard for

the night, and allowed their anxious thoughts the freedom of the halls

until daybreak. And these thoughts, which had become like invisible

presences to the girl, wandered up and down the dim staircase, where the

lowered lights awaited George's return, invaded the drawing-room, filled

with stuffy red velvet chairs, so like crouching human beings in the

darkness, and even thronged about her threshold, ready to spring inside

at the instant when George should open the door. While her fire burned

brightly on the andirons, and rosy shadows danced on the white rug

beside her bed, on the lace coverlet turned back for the night, on the

deep pillows with their azure lining showing through the delicate linen

of the slips, on her simple nightdress, in which the buttonholes were so

beautifully worked by her mother,--while she looked at these things it

was easy for her to shut out the apprehensions of yesterday. But these

apprehensions would come with George and they would not go until George

left her again. The house with its heavy late-Victorian furniture, its

velvet carpets which muffled footsteps, its thick curtains which hid

doorways, its red walls, its bevelled mirrors, its substantial and

costly ornaments, its solid paintings in solid frames--the house and all

that it contained diffused for Gabriella an inescapable atmosphere, and

this atmosphere was like the one in which she had waited expectantly in

her childhood for the roof to be sold over her head. Now, as then, she

waited for something to happen, and this something was a fact of dread,

a shape of terror, which must be ignored as long as its impending

presence was not directly before one's eyes. But with the look she was

familiar, for she had seen it in her mother's face as far back as she

could remember. It was associated in her mind with the need of money,

with scant food, with scant fires, with a brooding and sinister hush in

the house. With the knowledge of these things in her mind how could she

hope that George would be glad of the child that was coming to them in

the autumn?

And yet to Mrs. Fowler the news had appeared to bring no additional

anxiety. She had seemed pleased rather than otherwise, mildly

interested, animatedly sympathetic.

"I am afraid it will be very expensive," Gabriella had reminded her a

little timidly, feeling frankly apologetic when she thought of all the

trouble she must bring to the harassed and over-burdened little woman.

But into Mrs. Fowler's face there had come the look with which she was

accustomed to receive the suggestion that her dinner parties were an

extravagance. That economy which she practised so rigidly, which was so

elastic to cover little pleasures and the minor comforts of life, broke

like a cobweb when she tried to stretch it over larger needs and

desires. The severity of her self-denial was directed entirely against

the trivial and the unessential. With regard to the indispensable

materials for happiness, she seemed to feel that she possessed an

unquestionable right to enjoy them at any cost; and she had reassured

Gabriella with an optimism which appeared perfectly genuine. After

talking to her the girl had felt that she might allow herself to be

happy if only George would change back into his old way.

Four months ago, at the beginning of her marriage, she had told herself

that she needed only the daily intimacy of life to make her understand

him. Now, after living with him, she felt that she was growing to

understand him less every hour--that the relation which ought to have

brought them spiritually closer, had ended by thrusting them to an

incalculable distance from each other. Of the nervous reactions which he

had suffered she knew nothing. All she saw clearly was that the widening

breach between them would soon become impassable unless it could be

filled by their new love for the child. The power to hold him must slip

from her hands to the child's, and she was more than ready, she was even

eager, to relinquish it. In the last few months her feeling for George

had altered, and, though she was hardly conscious of the change in

herself, her love for him had become less passionate and more maternal.

The tenderness was there, but the yearning, the delight in his mere

physical presence was gone. Like every other emotion that she had felt

in the past, her love for her husband had become absorbed in the

passion, the longing, the delight with which she enfolded the thought of

her child.

"I wonder if mother felt like this about me," she would say to herself,

and the wonder was like a cord drawing her back to her mother and to her

own babyhood. Then George would become strangely vague, strangely remote

in her thoughts; and her mother would seem nearer to her than everything

except the child under her heart.

But since her talk with Mrs. Fowler, who had shown her photographs of

George as a baby, some in long clothes, some in his first short frock,

with a woolly lamb in his hands, some in a velvet suit, with his

lustrous curls falling over a lace collar, Gabriella had felt that she

possessed a new understanding of her husband and of the imperative needs

of his nature. The child quality in him, the eternal boy that he

betrayed sometimes by accident, appeared to her now to be the salient

attribute of his character. After all, because of this quality, which

was at once his charm and his weakness, she could not judge him as

harshly as she might judge another man, she could not demand of him the

gravity and the restraint of his father, who had never been young.

"I ought not to have kept it from him. His mother is right. She

understands him better than I do," she thought, as she looked at the

clock. "If I had told him sooner he might be with me now."

Through the muffled stillness of the house the sound of the opening

front door stole up to her, and she heard George come in and stop for a

minute to take off his hat and coat in the lower hail. Then she heard

his footsteps move to the staircase; and while she listened she had a

curious intuitive sense that it was not George at all, but a stranger

who was coming to her, and that this stranger walked like a very old

man. She heard him reach the bend in the stairs, and without stopping to

put out the light, pass on to her door, which was the first on the

landing. As he reached the top of the stairs, he stumbled once; then she

heard his hand on the knob and a fumbling sound as if the knob would not

turn. The door seemed to take an eternity to open, and while she sprang

up with the clutch of terror at her heart, she felt again the sharp,

agonizing premonition that a stranger was approaching her.

"George!" she called in a strangled voice, and waited, standing, for him

to enter.

CHAPTER VII

MOTHERHOOD

At noon the next day Mrs. Fowler came into Gabriella's room and found

her sewing beside the window which looked on a gray expanse of sky and

street, where a few snowflakes were falling.

"Did you tell him, dear?" she asked, arranging a handful of red roses in

a little alabaster vase on the desk.

No, Gabriella had not told him. She felt now that she should never be

able to tell him, but all she said was:

"I didn't get a chance. How lovely those roses are."

Mrs. Fowler set the vase where the gray light fell on it, and then

turning with empty hands from the desk, asked gently:

"Aren't you making a mistake, dear?" Her movements were like those of a

character in a play who is made to fill in an awkward pause with some

mechanical action.

"I couldn't tell him last night," replied Gabriella; "he was sick all

night."

She was very pale, even her lips had lost their rich colour, and her

eyes had a drawn and heavy look as if she had not slept. Without looking

at her mother-in-law, she went on with her sewing, working buttonholes

of exquisite fineness in a small white garment. In her lap there was a

little wicker basket filled with spools of thread and odd bits of lace

and cambric; and every now and then she stopped her work and gazed

thoughtfully down on it as if she were trying to decide how she might

use the jumble of scraps that it contained.

"Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler suddenly, after she had watched her a

moment, "did anything happen last night?"

"Happen? No, what could have happened?"

"At what time did George come in?"

"About one o'clock. I sat up for him."

"Was--was anything the matter with him? Was he in any way different?"

"He was sick. He was sick all night." A look of disgust crossed her face

while she stopped to wipe away a drop of blood from her finger. "I don't

remember pricking my finger since I was a child," she remarked.

"You are keeping something from me," said Mrs. Fowler; and sitting down

in the small chair by the desk, she leaned her elbow, in her full sleeve

of violet cashmere, on the edge of the blotting-pad. She was wearing a

morning gown made, as all her house gowns were made, after the princess

style, and Gabriella could see the tight expanse of her bosom rising and

falling under a garniture of purple and silver passementerie. Her hair,

fresh from the crimping pins, rose in stiff ridges from her forehead,

and her bright red lips were so badly chapped from cold that they

cracked a little when she smiled. She looked as hard as granite though

in reality her heart was breaking with pity.

"I want to help you," she said, "and I can't if you keep things back."

"I told you George was sick. I was up all night with him." Again a look

of disgust, which she could not control, flickered and died in her face.

"But you oughtn't to have let him keep you awake. You need all the sleep

you can get. When he comes in late he must sleep in the spare room

across the hall."

"His things are all in here and he would come in to get them; that would

wake me."

For a moment Mrs. Fowler hesitated while the struggling breath grew more

irregular under the passementerie on her bosom. The ripe colour faded

from her cheeks and her lips looked blue in the harsh light from the

window.

"I think I'd better speak to George," she said. "He is spoiled and he

always thinks first of his own comfort. I suppose it's the way we

brought him up--but when he understands, he will be more considerate."

For the first time Gabriella laid down her sewing and, leaning forward

in her chair, fixed her eyes, with their look of deep stillness, of

wistful expectancy, on the face of her mother-in-law.

"Would you mind telling me if George was ever--ever wild about women?"

she asked, and though her voice was very low and quiet, her words seemed

to echo loudly through the hushed suspense in her brain. It was as if

every piece of furniture, every vacant wall, every picture, and every

pane of glass, repeated the sound.

The pleasant smile on Mrs. Fowler's lips became suddenly painful. As if

she were suffering a physical hurt, she put her handkerchief to her

mouth while she answered:

"He was once--but that was before he fell in love with you. We hoped

that you would be able to steady him--that marriage would make him

settle down."

"Did he drink then?"

"A little--not enough to make him show it. I never saw him really show

it but once, and then he was dreadfully sick. Was--was he like that last

night?"

For a long minute, while she looked out of the window at the falling

snowflakes, Gabriella did not reply. Then she spoke in a voice that was

sternly accusing.

"You ought to have told me. I ought to have known." Her own wild passion

for George was forgotten. She felt only a sense of outrage, of wounded

and stunned resentment, They had treated her as if she were a child or a

fool. That she had been a fool she was not prepared to admit at the

instant--and yet it was less than a year ago, that June night when she

had watched George over the clove pinks while her heart melted with

happiness. She had had her way, and she was already regretting her

madness. "Is this what love comes to?" she asked herself bitterly as she

watched the white flakes whirling out of the gray sky. "Is this what it

all comes to in the end, or am I different from other women?"

Moistening her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, Mrs. Fowler smiled

bravely, though there were tears in her eyes. "Archibald wanted to, but

I wouldn't let him," she replied; "I hoped that you would make

everything different. He was so much in love with you. I thought you

could do anything with him."

Though her reasoning failed to convince Gabriella, it was sufficiently

forcible to justify her in her own judgment, and with an easier

conscience, she settled comfortably behind the impregnable defences of

the maternal instinct. After all, she had only done what she believed

to be best for her boy. She had not been selfish, she had not even been

thoughtless, she had been merely a mother.

"I wish you would tell me what really happened last night, Gabriella,"

she said, and her tone showed that she had recovered her shaken

confidence in the righteousness of her cause.

"I can't tell you," answered Gabriella. "What good would it do? George

was disgusting, that was all." She spoke sternly, for no lingering

tenderness softened the judgment of her youth and her injured pride. How

could she possibly have tenderness for a man who had tired of her in

four months, who had become so lost to common decency that he could let

her see him revoltingly drunk? And she had held her head so high, she

had so despised Jane for her weakness and folly! At the moment she knew

that she was helpless, but deep down within her she felt that this

helplessness would not last--that the wings of her soul were still

strong, still free, still untouched by the shame her body had suffered.

With a single effort she could break the net of passion, and escape into

the wonderful world which surrounded her. Like Jane, she had been a

fool, but, unlike Jane, she would not stay a fool always.

"You seem so hard, Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler. "Is it because you are

young? Young people never make allowances."

The taste of bitterness rose to Gabriella's lips.

"I suppose I am hard," she answered, "and I am going to stay so. There

is safety in hardness."

Remembering Jane, remembering the hereditary weakness of the Carrs, who

had all married badly, she told herself that in hardness lay her

solitary refuge from despair. After all, it was better to be hard than

to break.

"You can't judge George quite as you would other men," began George's

mother, and she was aware after a minute that the maternal instinct had

in this instance led her to defeat.

"I am not judging other men," replied George's wife coldly; "I am

judging George." Against men as men she had never even thought of

cherishing a grievance. All her life she had looked to some man as to

the saviour of the family fortunes, and her vision was still true enough

to perceive that, as a human being, Archibald Fowler was finer and

bigger than his wife, that Billy was finer and bigger than Patty. She

had found men less the servants of mere instinct than she had found

women, less the passive and unresisting vehicles of the elemental

impulses. Then, too, they were so seldom the victims of life, and there

was in her nature a fierce contempt for a victim. She despised people

who submitted to circumstances, who resigned themselves to necessity, as

if resignation were a virtue instead of a vice.

"Well, you must try not to worry, dear; worry is so bad for you. I am so

sorry it happened. You won't mind my speaking to George, will you?"

Gabriella shook her head. "I don't care what you say to him."

"Do you feel able to come down to lunch?"

"Oh, yes, perfectly. I am simply dying for a cup of tea, and afterwards

I think I'll go out for a walk. One gets so stuffy and dull when one

stays in the house."

Her manner had changed as if by magic. In putting the thought of George

out of her mind she seemed to have put aside her resentment and

despondency.

In the evening George came home, looking a little yellow, with a box of

gardenias in his hand; but the scent of the flowers sickened Gabriella,

and she put them out of the room while she dressed for dinner. The

attention, instead of pleasing her, brought an ironic twist to her lips,

though she thanked George quite as courteously as if he had been a

stranger to her. At dinner when Mr. Fowler abruptly asked his son why he

had not been to the office, she kept her eyes fixed on her plate, in

which she seemed to see palely reflected the anxious pleasantness of her

mother-in-law's smile. It hardly occurred to her to wonder where George

had spent his day, though, when she met Mr. Fowler's kind and tired

look, a pang shot through her heart. She was sorrier for George's father

than she was for herself. He looked so lonely, yet so patient. He so

obviously needed help, and no one appeared to notice it, not even his

wife, who began planning a dinner party in the futile effort to come to

George's assistance. It was by coming to George's assistance in every

difficulty, Gabriella surmised, that his mother had made George what he

was; and the girl saw in imagination an endless line of subterfuges, of

pitiful excuses and feeble justifications, all hidden in the tortuous

labyrinthine windings of the maternal instinct. She saw, with the

relentless vision of a Hebrew prophet, the inevitable ruin of the love

that does not submit to wisdom as its law.

More than seven months afterwards, when she lay in her room with her

child in the crook of her arm, she prayed passionately that some supreme

Power would grant her the strength not of emotion, but of reason. All

her life she had suffered from an unrestrained indulgence of the

virtues--from love running to waste through excess, from the

self-sacrifice that is capable of everything but self-discipline, from

the intemperate devotion to duty that is as morbid as sin. Balance,

moderation, restraint--these seemed to her, lying there with her child

on her arm, to be the things most worth striving for. She saw her

mother, worn to a shadow by the unnecessary deaths she had died, by the

useless crucifixions she had endured; she saw Jane, haggard, wan, with

her sweetness turning to bitterness because it was wasted; and again she

found herself asking for balance, moderation, restraint. The child, a

little girl, with George's eyes and hair like gauze, had liberated

Gabriella from the last illusions of her girlhood.

And yet, though Gabriella prayed for moderation, she found after a few

months that motherhood was absorbing the full strength of her nature.

George hardly existed for her; he came and went like the passing of a

shadow, and she began gradually to sink her life into the life of her

child. Not until the winter was she brought back to a sharp realization

of her neglected duty to her mother; and this came with a letter from

Mrs. Carr during the last week in January. Mrs. Carr was still living

with Jane, and though she had accepted mildly Gabriella's reasons for

postponing her coming to New York, she was beginning somewhat

plaintively to question. She had made little effort to hide her

disappointment at not being with her daughter when her grandchild was

born, for, in spite of the fact that she had tragically assisted at the

entrance of Jane's six children into the world, she still possessed an

insatiable appetite for the perpetually recurring scenes of birth and

death. Then only did her natural bent of mind appear to be justified by

universal phenomena.

And now on this morning in January, when Frances Evelyn, the baby, lay

good and quiet in her crib, Gabriella read over again the disturbing

letter she had just received from her mother.

MY DEAR DAUGHTER:

Jane wrote you that I had had a slight attack of pneumonia, so you

understood why I was obliged to let so long a time go by without

sending you a letter. Though I have been out of bed now for more

than a fortnight, I still feel so weak and good for nothing that I

am hardly equal to the exertion of writing. Then, too, I have had

some trouble with my wrist--the right one--and this has made it

really painful for me to hold a pen or even a fork. The doctor

thinks it is a nervous affection and that it will pass away as soon

as I get back my strength, and I am sure I hope and pray that it

will. But sometimes I feel as if I should never get any stronger,

and of course while my wrist is crippled I am unable to do any

sewing. This has depressed me very much, for poor Jane has so many

worries of her own that I dread being dependent on her, and Charley

has not been at all well this winter, though kinder and more

considerate than I have ever known him to be. He has his faults,

but I have always felt that he was not entirely responsible and

that we ought to pity rather than blame him. Women can never be too

thankful that they are spared by a merciful Providence the

temptations which seem to beset men. When we consider how much more

sheltered our lives are, we ought to be lenient in our judgment,

and I cannot help feeling that God meant us to be so when he gave

us more spiritual natures than those of men. Dr. Preston gave a

very instructive and impressive talk on that subject before the

Ladies' Aid Society of our church the week before I was taken sick.

Indeed, I am afraid I caught the cold that led to pneumonia sitting

in Charley's pew, which gets a bad draught from the door of the

Sunday-school room.

I must apologize for this dull letter, as I haven't been able to

get out even to market. Before I was taken ill I used to do all of

Jane's marketing, and you know what a place the market is for

meeting people and hearing all the latest news. There are, however,

two things to tell you, and you'll never be able to guess them.

First, poor Miss Amelia Peterborough is dead. She was stricken with

paralysis a week ago when she was all alone in the house--Miss

Jemima was at a funeral--and she never regained consciousness until

the end, which came at three o'clock Sunday night. Poor Miss

Jemima, I feel so sorry for her. She keeps up beautifully and is

very pious and resigned. They say she will go into the Old Ladies'

Home as soon as the arrangements can be made.

The other piece of news is more cheerful, though, for my part, life

seems so short and so uncertain that I can't see much cheerfulness

anywhere. So many people are dying that you can't help wondering

who will be next, and as Dr. Preston said when he called on me

during my illness, our only substantial hope is in a blessed

hereafter. My one regret will be leaving my children and

grandchildren, and especially my precious little Frances Evelyn,

whom I have never seen. I have no doubt that Mrs. Fowler was far

more useful than I could have been at the time of your trial, but

it was a great disappointment to me not to be able to receive the

little darling into the world.

But I had entirely forgotten that I started to tell you about

Florrie Spencer's marriage to Algernon Caperton. Of course I

couldn't go, but Jane says the wedding was lovely and that Florrie

looked really beautiful. Bessie had on rose-coloured brocade. Did

you ever hear of such a thing at her age? She was just as gay and

flirtatious as a girl, Charley said, and she sent me some of the

cake and a bottle of champagne, which, of course, I didn't touch.

It is a pity she is so loud, for there isn't a kinder heart in the

world. Florrie and Algernon are going to New York on their wedding

trip. Isn't it exactly like Florrie to want to go to all the

theatres? They send you word, by the way, that they are certainly

coming to see you and the baby.

And now that I have told all my news, I must write a little about

myself, though I am afraid you will be upset by what I am obliged

to tell you. I put it off as long as I could--for I do hate to

worry you--but the doctor has just been to see me and he says I

must go to Florida immediately to stay until the bad weather is

over. I told him I couldn't possibly afford it--the trip would take

a great deal of money--but he insisted that I should write and tell

you exactly what he said. He said my lungs were very weak and that

he ordered the change--you know they never seem to consider

expense--and when he was leaving, he stopped in the hall to speak

to Jane about it. Poor Jane, she is so worried that she has almost

gone deranged over my health, but as far as I am concerned I feel

that I would rather pass away than cause so much trouble and upset

everybody. Jane, as you know, hasn't a cent to her name, and it is

out of the question her asking Charley, because he has had a very

bad winter financially. Even Cousin Jimmy stopped sending me the

rent of the house since I moved to Jane's, and as for Uncle

Meriweather, he has been obliged to give up his business and go to

live with his niece in the country. So, much as I hate to ask you,

my dear child, I feel that you would rather I did so--and that I

ought to be perfectly frank about the situation, particularly since

poor Jane feels so deeply her inability to help me. I am afraid I

should need about four hundred dollars, as I have bought nothing to

wear for years. Bessie Spencer has told me of a very reasonable

place where I could board, and it is just possible that she will be

going herself by the time I am ready. If for any reason you are

unable to let me have the money, just destroy this letter and don't

think about it again. I wouldn't cause you a moment's worry for

anything in the world.

With love to George and a dozen kisses for my precious little

grandchild,

Your devoted mother,

FANNY CARR.

Did I remember to tell you that Miss Polly Hatch has gone to New

York to look after her nephew's children? He lost his wife a few

months ago, and was left with four little children, the youngest

only a year old.

So her punishment had come! As Gabriella dropped the letter into her

lap, and looked at little Frances, so good and happy in her crib, she

felt that she was punished not only for her reckless marriage, but for

all the subterfuge, all the deceit which had followed it. She had not

told her mother the truth, for she, also, had been chiefly concerned

with "keeping up an appearance." For the purpose of shielding George,

who was blandly indifferent to her shielding, she had lied to her

mother, if not in words, yet in an evasion of the truth, and the result

was that her lies and her evasions had recoiled not on George's head,

but on her own. For George wouldn't care. So little value did he place

upon Mrs. Carr's good opinion, that he would not care even if Gabriella

were to tell her the truth. And if she had only been honest! If she had

only refused to lie because custom exacted that a wife should be willing

to lie in defense of her husband. Some obscure strain of dogmatic piety

struggled in the convulsed depths of her being, as if she had been

suddenly brought up against the vein of iron in her soul--against the

moral law, stripped bare of clustering delusions, which her ancestors

had known and fought for as "the Berkeley conscience." The Berkeley

conscience, bred for centuries on a militant faith, told her now that

she was punished because she had lied to her mother.

Then, as if this reversion to primitive theology had been merely an

automatic reaction of certain nerve cells, she saw and condemned the

childlike superstition. No, she was not punished so quickly; but she had

been a fool, and she was paying the price of her incredible folly. How

little, how pitifully little she knew of the world, after all! A year

ago, on that horrible night, she had thought that her lesson was

finished, but it was only beginning. Her immense, confiding ignorance

would lead her into other abysses. And again, as on the morning after

that night of revelation, she resolved passionately that she would not

stay a fool always--that she would not become a victim of life.

The empty bottle had slipped to one side of the crib, and little Frances

lay smiling at the friendly universe, with her wet mouth wide open and

her blue eyes, so like George's, sparkling with laughter. The down on

her head, as fine and soft as spun silk, made tiny rings over her pink

skull, which was as clear and delicate as an eggshell; and these golden

rings filled Gabriella with a tenderness so poignant that it brought

tears to her eyes. Whatever her mother may have thought about the world,

it was perfectly obvious that Frances Evelyn considered her part in it

remarkably jolly. To be a well baby in an amiable universe was her ideal

of felicity.

When George came up to luncheon, which he did sometimes now, he went

straight to the nursery for a glimpse of his daughter. Ever since

little Frances had lost her first hair and gained her golden down, he

had taken an interest in the rapid stages of her development; and,

though he never "wasted time," as he said, in the nursery, he liked to

look in once a day and see whether or not she had changed in the night.

On her side the baby treated her father as if he were an inexhaustible

family joke, to be enjoyed not too seriously, but with a polite

recognition of its humorous points. If she were sucking her bottle when

he entered, she immediately stopped and laughed at him while the rubber

nipple dropped from her toothless gums; if she awoke and discovered him

at the side of her crib, she greeted him with subdued but inappeasable

merriment; if he lifted her in his arms, her crocheted shoes could

barely contain the kicks of her ecstatic feet. And because she was a

jolly little beggar, George grew, after a time, to cherish a certain

fondness for her. There was some use in a laughing baby, but he hated

anything, child, woman, or animal, that cried.

On this particular day the baby happened to be asleep when he entered,

so, without stopping, he went into Gabriella's bedroom, where the

perfume of roses mingled with the scent of the burning logs on the

andirons.

"That's a good fire," he observed, stopping on the hearth-rug. "I don't

wonder you hate to go out."

"Yes, the room was a little chilly, so I lit the fire for the baby's

bath. I don't usually have one," replied Gabriella, explaining her

apparent extravagance.

"Has she been well?"

"She is always well. I haven't had a day's anxiety about her since she

was born."

"But she isn't very old yet." Already little Frances was supplying

conversational material to her parents.

"I wish you would sit down, George," said Gabriella, with a change of

tone. "I want to read you a part of a letter from mother."

"Can't you tell me instead?"

"If you'd rather. You know I never told mother why we couldn't have her

to live with us. I never told her anything. I simply made excuses."

"That was all right, wasn't it?" He was plainly nervous.

"At the time I thought I couldn't do differently, but now--"

She gave him the letter, and while he unfolded it awkwardly, she watched

him anxiously and yet without interrupting his reading. Beyond the

simple facts, she had told him nothing, and it was characteristic of her

that she did not embellish these facts with picturesque phrases. She

herself was so insensible to the appeal of rhetoric that she hardly

thought of it as likely to influence anybody. Then, too, in moments of

intense feeling she had always a sensation of dumbness.

"I'm awfully sorry about her illness," he said, "but when you think of

it, the best thing that could have happened to her was not to come to

New York. This climate would have been the end of her."

"Will you let me have the money, George? I will try to save in every way

that I can. I've made all the baby's clothes, as it is, and I can easily

make the few things I need, also. Since the baby came I have stopped

calling with your mother."

A flush rose to his face. "I know you've been a regular brick about

money, Gabriella. I never saw a woman buy as little as you do, and you

always manage to look well dressed."

She smiled with faint irony. Her clothes were dowdy, for she had turned

the broadcloth dress she had had at her marriage and was wearing it in

the street; but if he thought her well dressed, it seemed hardly fair to

undeceive him. Had she been any other woman, she reflected, he would

probably have looked at her long enough to discover that she had grown

decidedly shabby.

Since the baby's birth, as she told him, she had stopped calling with

her mother-in-law, and a black net dress, given her by Mrs. Fowler

because it had grown too small in the waist, was still presentable

enough for the family dinners. But she never worried about her

appearance, and it was a relief to find that George was quite as

indifferent on the subject as she was. In the days of their honeymoon he

had been so particular that she had spent hours each day before the

mirror.

"Will you let me have the money, George?" she asked again. The form of

the request had not changed, but there was a deeper note in her voice:

the irony, which had been at first only a glancing edge to her smile, a

subdued flash in her eyes, had passed now into her speech. George,

looking sideways at the slightly austere charm of her profile, thought

suddenly, "Gabriella is growing hard." He noticed, too, for the first

time, that she looked older since the birth of the baby, that her bosom

was fuller and that her figure, which had always been good, was now

lovely in its long flowing lines. She was handsomer than she had been

before her marriage, for her complexion had become clearer since she

had lived in the North, and though she was still pale, her skin was

losing its sallow tone.

Yet, though he thought her more attractive than she had been as a girl,

she had ceased to make the faintest appeal to his senses. There were

times even when he wondered how she had ever appealed to him, for she

had not been beautiful, and beauty had always seemed to him to be

essential in the women with whom one fell in love. But, however it had

happened, still it had happened, and she was now his wife and the mother

of the adorable Frances Evelyn.

"I'm awfully cut up about it, Gabriella," he said, "but honestly I am

out of the money. I couldn't lay my hands on it just now to save my

life."

His excuses convinced him while he uttered them, but he had barely

paused before Gabriella demolished them with a single blow of her

merciless logic.

"You were talking last night about buying a horse," she replied.

He frowned resentfully, and she immediately regretted her words. By

speaking the truth she had defeated her purpose.

"It isn't as if I were buying a horse for pleasure," he answered

doggedly; "I am dependent on exercise--you can see for yourself how I've

gone off in the last two or three months. Of course if the horse were

simply for enjoyment, like a carriage, it would be different. But mother

has given up her carriage," he concluded triumphantly.

He was a spendthrift, she realized, but he was a spendthrift with a

streak of stinginess in his nature. Though he enjoyed gratifying his own

desires, which were many, it pained him inexpressibly to witness

extravagance on the part of others, and by a curious twist of the

imagination, all money spent by Gabriella appeared to him to be an

extravagance. To be sure, he had just told her that she was a brick

about money, but that had been intended as a warning to virtue rather

than as an encouragement to weakness. There was, to be sure, a vague

understanding that she might make bills when they were unavoidable; but

so in want of spending money had she been since her marriage, that

several times she had been obliged to borrow car fare from her

mother-in-law. When she had asked George for an allowance, however

small, he had put her off with the permission to charge whatever she

bought in the shops. As the bills apparently never lessened, and her

conscience revolted from debt, she had gone without things she needed

rather than accept the barren generosity of his promises. At Christmas

her father-in-law had given her fifty dollars in gold, and with this she

had bought presents for her mother and Jane and the servants.

In the old days in Hill Street she had had little enough, but at least

that little had really belonged to her; and since her marriage she had

learned that when one is poor, it is better to live surrounded by want.

To be poor in the midst of wealth--to be obliged to support a fictitious

affluence on one's secret poverty--this was after all to know the

supreme mortification of spirit. There were days when she almost prayed

that the brooding suspense would assume a definite shape, that the blow

would fall, the crash come, and ruin envelop them all. Any visible fact

would be better than this impending horror of the imagination--this

silent dread so much worse than any reality of failure--which

encompassed them with the impalpable thickness and darkness of a cloud.

"Then I can't help my mother even if it's a matter of life and death?"

she asked.

"I don't believe it's as bad as that, Gabriella. Ten chances to one the

rest of the winter will be mild, and she would find Florida too

depressing. You never can tell about doctors, you know. It's their

business to make trouble. Now you mustn't let yourself worry--there's

anxiety enough without that, heaven knows. Why, just look at father! He

has lost almost all he ever had--he is simply staving off failure for I

don't know how long, and yet from mother's manner who on earth would

suspect that there is anything wrong? Now that's what I call pluck. By

Jove--"

Again her impetuous spirit--dangerous gift!--flashed out recklessly in

defence of the truth.

"Then why don't you try to help your father, George?" she asked. "He

tells me that you rarely go down to the office." Her voice vibrated, but

the stern lines of her mouth, which had lost its rich softness under the

stress of her anger, hardly quivered.

His frown darkened to a scowl. The calm disdain in her manner made him

feel that he hated her, and he told himself stubbornly that if she had

been gentler, if she had been more womanly, he would have done what she

asked of him, forgetting in his rage that, if she had been these things,

he would have found even less difficulty in refusing her.

"You know as well as I do that I can't stand office work when I'm not

fit," he returned sullenly. "It plays the devil with my nerves."

Her case was hopeless. If it had not been so in the beginning, she had

ruined it by her irrefutable arguments, and while he rambled on moodily,

making excuses for his neglect of business, she sat silently planning

ways by which she might get the money for her mother. To ask her

father-in-law was, of course, out of the question; and Mrs. Fowler,

beyond a miraculously extended credit, due probably to the shining

bubble of her husband's financial security, was as penniless as

Gabriella. Unless she could find something to sell there seemed little

likelihood of securing four hundred dollars in a day. It was imperative,

then, that she should find something to sell; and remembering her

mother's tragic visits to old Mr. Camberwell, she ran hastily over her

few personal possessions. As her wedding gifts had been entirely in the

form of clothes--the donors doubtless surmising that the wife of a rich

man's son would have other gifts in abundance--there remained only the

trinkets George and George's parents had given her. All through

luncheon, while Mrs. Fowler, with an assumed frivolity which Gabriella

found more than usually depressing, rippled on over the warmed-over

salmon, the girl mentally arranged and sorted in their cases a diamond

brooch, an amethyst necklace, a bracelet set with pearls, and a topaz

heart she occasionally wore on a gold chain, which she valued because it

had belonged to her grandmother. Once she stopped, and lifting her hand,

looked appraisingly at her engagement ring for an instant, while Mrs.

Fowler, observing her long gaze, remarked caressingly:

"I always thought it an unusually pretty stone, my dear. George knows a

good deal about stones." Then, as if inspired by an impulse, she added

quickly:

"Wasn't George upstairs before lunch? I thought I heard his voice."

"Yes, but he said he had an engagement at the club."

"I wonder if he knows I have asked the Capertons to dinner to-night? You

know I got Florrie's card the other day. She is here on her wedding

journey, but even then she doesn't like to be quiet, for she is her

mother all over again. I used to know Bessie very well. Kind hearted,

but a little vulgar."

"I didn't tell George. Perhaps you had better telephone him."

"Oh, well, he usually comes up to dinner because of the baby. I've asked

one or two people to meet Florrie, for I remember that Bessie's one idea

of enjoyment was to be in a crowd. The Crowboroughs are coming and the

Thorntons and the Blantons."

"I'll be dressed in time," responded Gabriella, but she was thinking

rapidly, "I can sell the diamond brooch and the bracelet and, if it is

necessary, the amethyst necklace. The brooch must have cost at least

three hundred dollars."

The meal was finished in silence, for even Mrs. Fowler's cheerfulness

would flag now and then without a spur; and Gabriella made no effort to

keep up the strained conversation. As soon as they had risen from the

table, she ran upstairs to dress for the street, and then, before going

out, she sat down at her desk, and wrapped up the brooch and the

bracelet in tissue paper. For a minute she gazed, undecided, at the

amethyst necklace. Mr. Fowler had given it to her, and she hated to part

with it. George's gifts meant nothing to her now, but she felt a

singular fondness for the amethyst necklace.

"I'd better take it with me," she thought; and wrapping it with the

others, she put the package into her little bag, and went out of the

room. It was her habit to stop for a last look at little Frances before

she left the house, but to-day she hurried past the nursery, and ran

downstairs and out of doors, where Mrs. Fowler was getting into a hansom

with the assistance of Burrows, the English butler.

"May I drop you somewhere, Gabriella?" inquired Mrs. Fowler, while

Burrows arranged the parcels on the seat of the hansom. In the strong

sunshine all the little lines which were imperceptible in the shadow of

the house--lines of sleeplessness, of anxiety, of prolonged aching

suspense--appeared to start out as if by magic in her face. And over

this underlying network of anxious thoughts there dropped suddenly, like

a veil, that look of artificial pleasantness. She would have died sooner

than lift it before one of the servants.

"No, thank you. I need the walk," answered Gabriella, stopping beside

the hansom. "You will be tired if you do all those errands. May I help

you?"

"No, no, dear, take your walk. I am so glad the storm is over. It will

be a lovely afternoon."

Then the hansom drove off; Burrows, after a longing glance at the blue

sky, slowly ascended the brownstone steps; and Gabriella, closing her

furs at the throat, for the wind was high, hurried in the direction of

Fifth Avenue.

The streets were still white after the storm; piles of new-fallen snow

lay in the gutters; and when Gabriella crossed Madison Avenue, the wind

was so strong that it almost lifted her from the ground. Above the

shining whiteness of the streets there was a sky of spring; and spring

was blossoming in the little cart of a flower vendor, which had stopped

to let the traffic pass at the corner. There were few people out of

doors, and these few appeared remote and strangely unreal between the

wintry earth and the April sky. Beside the gutters, where the street

cleaners were already at work, wagons drawn by large, heavy horses moved

slowly from crossing to crossing. At Forty-second Street the traffic was

blocked by one of these wagons; and from the windows of the stage, which

had stopped by the sidewalk, the eyes of the passengers stared with

moody resignation at the hurrying pedestrians. And it seemed to

Gabriella that these faces wore, one and all, the look of secret

anxiety, the faint network of lines which she had seen in the face of

her mother-in-law. "I wonder if I have it, too," she thought, pausing

before a shop window. But her reflection flashed back at her from the

glass, smooth, stern, unsmiling, as if her features had been sculptured

in marble.

Below Fortieth Street there was the shop of a jeweller she sometimes

went to with Mrs. Fowler in that lady's despairing quest for suitable

wedding presents at moderate prices; and something in the kindly,

sympathetic face of the clerk who waited on them made Gabriella decide

suddenly to trust him. As she unwrapped the tissue paper rather

nervously, and keeping back the necklace, laid the brooch and the

bracelet on the square of purple velvet he spread out on the counter,

she raised her eyes to his with a look that was childlike in its appeal.

Again she thought of the morning on which they had surreptitiously taken

her silver mug, hidden in Mrs. Carr's gray and black shawl, to the shop

of old Mr. Camberwell.

"How much might I get for these? I have worn them only a few times. They

do not suit me," she said.

For a minute the clerk looked at her reflectively, but without

curiosity; then lifting the trinkets from the square of velvet, he

passed behind a green curtain into an adjoining room. After a short

absence, in which she nervously examined an assortment of travelling

clocks, he came back and told her that they would give her four hundred

and fifty dollars for the two pieces.

"The stones alone are worth that," he added, "and, of course, they will

have to be reset before we can sell them."

"May I have the check now?"

"Shall we send it to you by mail?"

"No, I must have it now. I want it this afternoon--immediately."

He yielded, still with his reflective but incurious manner; and when she

left the shop a quarter of an hour later the check was in her little bag

beside the amethyst necklace. "I am glad I didn't have to sell the

necklace," she thought. "Now I'll find a hotel and write to mother, and

it will all be settled. It will all be settled," she repeated in a

joyous tone; and this joyousness, overflowing her breast, showed in her

eyes, in the little quivering smile on her lips, and in her light and

buoyant step over the snow. A weight had been lifted from her heart, and

she felt at peace with the world, at peace with the shivering

passers-by, at peace even with George. The wind, hastening her walk,

stung her face till it flushed through its pallor, and sent the warm

blood bounding with happiness through her veins. Under the stainless

blue of the sky, it seemed to her that the winter's earth was suddenly

quickening with the seeds of the spring.

In the Waldorf she found a corner which was deserted, except for an

elderly man with a dried face and a girl in a green hat, who appeared to

be writing to her lover; and sitting down at a little desk behind a

lamp, she wrote to her mother without mentioning George, without

explaining anything, without even making excuses for her failure to keep

her promise. She knew now that George had never meant that her mother

should live with them, that he had never meant that they should take an

apartment, that he had lied to her, without compunction, from the

beginning. She knew this as surely as she knew that he was faithless and

selfish, as surely as she knew that he had ceased to love her and would

never love her again. And this knowledge, which had once caused her such

poignant agony, seemed now as detached and remote as any tragedy in

ancient history. She was barely twenty-two, and her love story had

already dwindled to an impersonal biographical interest in her mind.

When she had finished her letter, she placed the check inside of it, and

then sat for a minute pensively watching the girl in the green hat,

whose face paled and reddened while she wrote to her lover.

"It seems a hundred years ago since I felt like that," she thought, "and

now it is all over." Then because melancholy had no part in her nature,

and she was too practical to waste time in useless regrets, she rose

quickly from the desk, and went out, while the exhilaration of her mood

was still proof against the dangerous weakness of self-pity. "It's life

I'm living, not a fairy tale," she told herself sternly as she posted

the letter and left the hotel. "It's life I'm living, and life is hard,

however you take it." For a few blocks she walked on briskly, thinking

of the shop windows and of the brightness and gaiety of the crowd in

Fifth Avenue; but in spite of her efforts, her thoughts fluttered back

presently to herself and her own problems. "After all, you can't become

a victim unless you give in," she said grimly; "and I'll die rather than

become a victim."

Her walk kept her out until five o'clock, and when she entered the house

at that hour she found her mother-in-law in the front hall giving

directions to Burrows. At sight of Gabriella she paused breathlessly,

and said with undisguised nervousness:

"A very queer-looking person who says she was sent by your mother has

just come to see you, dear--a seamstress of some kind, I fancy. As she

looked quite clean, I let her go upstairs to the nursery to wait for

you. I hope you don't mind. She was so eager to see the baby."

"Oh, it's Miss Polly!" cried Gabriella; and without stopping to explain,

she ran upstairs and into the nursery, where little Frances was cooing

with delight in Miss Polly's arms.

The seamstress' small birdlike face, framed by the silk quilling of her

old lady's bonnet, broke into a hundred cheerful wrinkles at the sight

of Gabriella. Even the grotesqueness of her appearance--of her fantastic

mantle trimmed with bugles, made from her best wrap in the 'seventies,

of her full alpaca skirt, with its wide hem stiffened by buckram, of her

black cotton gloves, and her enormous black broadcloth bag--even these

things could not extinguish the pleasure Gabriella felt in the meeting.

If Miss Polly was ridiculous at home, she was twice as ridiculous in New

York, but somehow it did not seem to matter. The sight of her brought

happy tears to the girl's eyes, and in the attempt to hide them, she

buried her face in the warm, flower-scented neck of little Frances.

"She's the peartest baby I ever saw," remarked Miss Polly with pride.

"Wouldn't yo' ma dote on her?"

"Wouldn't she? But how did you leave mother and Jane and the children?

The baby must be a big boy now."

"He's runnin' around all the time, and never out of mischief. I never

saw such a child for mischief. I was tellin' yo' ma so last week.

There's another baby on the way with Jane, you know."

"How in the world will she take care of it? I suppose Charley is just

the same?"

"Well, if you ask me, Gabriella, I never was so dead set against Mr.

Charley as the rest of you. I helped raise Jane from the time she was no

higher than that--and I ain't sayin' nothin' against her except that Mr.

Charley ain't half as bad to my mind as she makes him out. Some men

respond to naggin' and some don't--that's what I said to her one day

when she broke down and cried on my shoulder--and you've got to be

mighty particular when you begin to nag that you're naggin' the right

sort. But she won't listen, not she. 'If I don't tell Charley of his

faults, who's goin' to?' she asks. You know Jane always did talk pretty

free to me ever since she was a little girl. Well, there are some people

that simply can't stand bein' told of their faults, and Mr. Charley is

one of 'em. It ain't the kind of treatment that agrees with him, and if

I'd been in Jane's place, I reckon I'd have found it out long ago. But

it ain't her way to learn anything--you know that as well as I do. She's

obliged to make the world over even if it drops to pieces in her hands."

"She doesn't seem to have done much with Charley."

"Well, you mark my words, Mr. Charley ain't bad, but he's full of

natur', and Jane, is the kind of woman that's never happy unless she's

gettin' the better of natur'. Whatever's natural is plum wrong, that's

the way she looks at it; but mind you, I ain't sayin' she's all in the

right. Naggin' ain't a virtue to my mind any mo' than drink is, but

Jane, she can't see it that way, and there ain't a bit of use tryin' to

make her. She's soft, but she's mulish, and the hardest thing on earth

to push is a mule that looks soft."

"It's such a pity, but I suppose nothing will change her. Tell me about

mother."

"Yo' ma looks downright po'ly. What with her sickness and her bother

about Jane and the bad weather, she ain't managin' to keep as spry as

I'd like to see her. From the stitch in her back she has most of the

time it wouldn't surprise me any day to hear that she'd come down with

kidney trouble, and she breathes so short that consumption has crossed

my mind mo' than once when I was talkin' to her."

Miss Polly, having, as she expressed it, "an eye for symptoms,"

possessed an artistic rather than a scientific interest in disease; and

the vivid realism of her descriptions had often, on her "sewing days" at

home, reduced Gabriella to faintness, though Mrs. Carr, with her more

delicate sensibilities, was able to listen with apparent enjoyment to

the ghastly recitals. Not only had Miss Polly achieved in her youth a

local fame as a "sick nurse," but, in the days when nursing was neither

sanitary nor professional, she was often summoned hastily from her

sewing machine to assist at a birth or a burial in one of the families

for whom she worked. And happy always, as befits one whose life,

stripped bare of ephemeral blessings, is centred upon the basic

realities, she was never happier than when she put down her sewing, took

off her spectacles, exchanged her apron for a mantle, and after

carefully tying her bonnet strings, departed for a triumphant encounter

with the Eternal Issues.

"I am so anxious about mother," said Gabriella. "Did she tell you she

was going to Florida?"

"She cert'ny did. She was real full of it, and she talked a lot about

you all up here--the baby and you and Mr. George. You know I ain't laid

my eyes on Mr. George mo' than three times in my life. Well, I reckon

I'd better be gettin' along back, or the children will miss me. I've got

four children to do for now, and one of 'em ain't any bigger than

Frances. It does seem funny--don't it, for an old maid to have her hands

full of children? But, you know, I always did dote on children. There

wouldn't be half so much fun in this world if it wan't for children and

men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under their

skins. Yes, I can find my way back real easy. I always was good at

finding my way about, and all I've got to do is to set out and walk in

that direction till I come to a car over yonder by that high building,

and as soon as I get on I'll ask the conductor to put me off right at my

do'."

When she had gone, Gabriella went back into the nursery, and stood

looking down at little Frances, who had fallen asleep, with the smile of

an angel on her face. "I wonder if I can be the least bit like Jane?"

she said aloud while she watched the sleeping child.

George did not come home to dinner; and the wonder was still in

Gabriella's mind when she dressed herself in her black net gown, and

went downstairs to meet Florrie, who looked younger and more brilliant

than ever in a dress of white and silver brocade. Florrie's husband, a

dreamy, quiet man,--the safe kind of man, Gabriella reflected, who

inevitably marries a dangerous woman--regarded his noisy wife with a

guileless admiration which was triumphantly surviving a complete

submergence in the sparkling shallows of Florrie's personality. He was a

man of sense and of breeding. He possessed the ordinary culture of a

gentleman as well as the trained mind of a lawyer, yet he appeared

impervious alike to the cheapness of Florrie's wit and the vulgarity of

her taste. Her beauty had not only blinded him to her mental

deficiencies; it had actually deluded him into a belief in her

intelligence. He treated her slangy sallies as if they were an original

species of humour; he accepted the sweeping comment of her ignorance as

if it had been an inspired criticism of life. While she chattered,

parrotlike, to the judge, who was obviously impressed by her appearance,

Algernon listened to her ejaculatory conversation with a mixture of

admiration and awe.

"How do you think Florrie is looking?" he asked in a low tone of

Gabriella, while his wife's laugh, high, shrill, penetrating in its dry

soprano quality, fluted loudly on the opposite side of the table. Beside

Patty's patrician loveliness, as serene and flawless as that of a

marble goddess, Florrie appeared cheap, common, and merely pretty to

Gabriella. The hard brilliancy of her surface was like a shining polish

which would wear off with sleep and have to be replenished each morning;

and while she watched her, Gabriella saw, in imagination, a vaguely

ominous outline surrounding her which might have been the uncertain edge

of her mother's shadow. In twenty-five years Florrie would be the image

of her mother--protuberant hips, pinched waist, mottled complexion, and

hopelessly tarnished hair; yet, with this awful prospect before him,

Algernon could appear not only tolerant, but positively adoring. He had

seen Bessie--he had known her for years--and he could marry her

daughter!

"I never saw her look handsomer," said Gabriella, "that white and silver

gown is very becoming."

"That's what I told her, but she wouldn't believe me. She thought it was

too plain for her style. Your sister-in-law is something of Florrie's

type, isn't she? Not quite so striking a figure, perhaps, but the same

sort of colouring."

Was it possible that for the first time in his life the simple Algernon

was speaking in irony? Turning in her chair, she looked questioningly

into his kind, grave face, so empty of humour, into his serious gray

eyes, which followed each movement of his wife's with admiring

attention. No, he was not ironic; he was perfectly solemn. It was a

miracle--a miracle not of piety, but of passion--that she was

witnessing.

"Yes, Patty is lovely," she answered, thinking, as she reflected upon

the eccentricities of love, how much too good he was for his wife.

Across the table Florrie's voice was heard exclaiming: "Now, you don't

mean it! Well, I'm just as flattered as I can be!" and Gabriella

surmised that she was completing her conquest of the judge.

"It's wonderful how well she gets on with everybody," observed Algernon.

"She's never at a loss for a word, and I tell her if I had her ready

wit, I'd be the greatest lawyer in Virginia to-day. Have you noticed the

way she is managing Judge Crowborough?"

"She always gets on well with men," acquiesced Gabriella, though without

the enthusiasm of Algernon. "Do you remember what a belle she always was

at the germans?" Though she was willing to admit that love was the

ruling principle of life, it occurred to her that Algernon would be more

amusing if he were less abundantly supplied with that virtue.

They talked of nothing but Florrie until the women went into the

drawing-room; and there, from the safe haven of a window, Gabriella

listened to Florrie's ceaseless prattle about herself. She was as

egotistical, as effervescent, as she had been as a schoolgirl; and it

seemed to Gabriella that she was hardly a day older. Her eyes, of a

grayish blue, like pale periwinkles, were as bold, as careless, as

conquering in their glances; her hair was still as dazzling; her face,

with its curious resemblance in shape to the face of a pretty cat, was

still as frank, as naïve, as confiding in its innocence. If she had

changed at all, it was that, since her marriage to the silent Algernon,

she had become even more talkative than she had been in her girlhood.

Her vivacity was as disturbing as the incessant buzzing of a June

beetle.

"Well, you need never tell me again that you wouldn't rather live in New

York, Gabriella," she fluted at parting, "because I shan't believe a

single word of it. Why, we've been to the theatre every night for a

fortnight, and we haven't seen half the good plays that are going on.

Algy wanted to stay at Niagara Falls--you know we went to Niagara Falls

first--but it was so deadly quiet I couldn't stand it. 'I don't care if

I am married,' I said to Algy, 'what I want is the theatre.'"

After she had gone, adoringly wrapped up by Algernon, Patty turned to

her mother with a little malicious grimace:

"I know it's horrid to say she's dreadful, mamma, but she really is."

"Don't, Patty, it isn't kind, and, besides, she's a friend of

Gabriella's. What I can't understand," she added, "is how Bessie ever

came out of Virginia, yet there were always a few like her. You don't

remember Pussy Prime, do you? Of course you don't, she died long before

your day, but she was just that loud, boisterous kind, and all the men

were in love with her."

"Well, if I'm ever born again," remarked Gabriella, as she kissed Patty

good-night, "I hope I'll be born a fat blonde. They always get taken

care of."

She ascended the stairs wearily to her room. Yes, she was barely

twenty-two and love was over forever. "I couldn't hold a man six

months," she thought dejectedly, "and yet Florrie, who is a fool and

vulgar, will be adored all her life."

BOOK SECOND

THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER I

DISENCHANTMENT

In July Gabriella joined her mother in the mountains of Virginia, and

when she returned in the autumn, she found that the character of her

home had changed perceptibly during her absence. Brightness had followed

gloom; the fog of suspense had dissolved, and the hazy sunshine of an

ambiguous optimism flooded the house. What the change implied she could

not immediately discover; but before the first day was over she surmised

that the financial prospects of her father-in-law had improved since the

spring. If she had had any doubt of his rising fortunes, the sight of

the diminished pile of bills on Mrs. Fowler's desk would have quickly

dispelled it.

And even George had apparently altered for the better. His improved

finances had sweetened his temper and cast the shining gloss of

prosperity over his appearance; and, in a measure at least, time had

revived in him the ardent, if fluctuating, emotions of the lover. For

three months after her return, he evinced a fervent sentiment for

Gabriella, which she, who was staunchly paying the price of her folly,

received with an inner shrinking but an outward complaisance. Her

feeling for George was quite dead--so dead that it was impossible for

any artificial stimulus to revive it--but she had learned that marriage

is founded upon a more substantial basis than the romantic emotions of

either a wife or a husband. Though she had ceased to love George, she

could still be amiable to him; and it occurred to her at times that if

one had to choose between the two not necessarily inseparable qualities

of love and amiability, George was not losing greatly by the exchange.

When, however, at the end of three months, George's capricious symptoms

disappeared as suddenly as they had come, and his attentions lapsed into

casual expressions of a nonchalant kindness, she drew a breath of

relief, and devoted her happiest days to the nursery. There at least she

had found a stable refuge amid the turmoil of selfish human desires.

In the house, which like George, began presently to show the gloss of

prosperity, the winter brought a continuous flashing stream of gaiety,

in which Mrs. Fowler darted joyously about like some bright hungry

minnow beneath the iridescent ripples of a brook. There were new rugs,

new curtains, new gowns, new bonnets; and Gabriella was led compliantly

from dressmaker to milliner, until she lost in the process her look of

shabbiness and developed into the fashionable curving figure of the

period. She had always liked clothes; her taste was naturally good; and

as she followed eagerly from shop to shop, she recalled the three months

she had spent in Brandywine's millinery department, and the rudiments of

a trade she had learned there. "I'd rather design my next gown myself,"

she said one day to Mrs. Fowler, while they were looking at French

models in the establishment of Madame Dinard, who had been born an

O'Grady. "I know I can do better than these, and besides I shan't meet

duplicates of myself every time I go out." That night she dreamed of

hats and gowns, and the next morning she drew pictures of them in

coloured chalk. "It's the only talent I ever had," she remarked gaily to

her mother-in-law, "and it is running to waste."

Madame, who regarded the sketches with uncompromising disdain, showed

great interest in the practical application of Gabriella's ideas to the

dressing of Mrs. Fowler.

"Yes, you have undoubtedly ideas," she said, discarding in her

enthusiasm the accent she had spent twenty years in acquiring, "and

there is nothing so rare in any department--in any walk of life--as

ideas. You have style, too," she pursued admiringly, turning her eyes on

Gabriella's figure in one of her Parisian models. "It is very rare--such

chic. You wear your clothes with a grace."

"That, also, is a marketable asset in a dressmaker," laughed Gabriella.

"Do you know I ought to have been a dressmaker, Madame. Only I hate the

very sight of a needle."

"But I never sew! I haven't had a needle in my hand for twenty

years--no, not for thirty," protested Madame.

"Then I mustn't give up hope. If I ever have to earn my living, I'll

come to you, Madame."

Then Madame bowed and smiled and shrugged as if at a gracious jest, and

Mrs. Fowler observed in her crisp, matter-of-fact manner: "Yes, my

daughter has a genuine instinct for dress, and, as you say, that is very

rare. She carries her clothes well, doesn't she? It's such a blessing to

be tall--though my husband insists that the women who have ruled the

world have always been small ones. But I do love a fine figure, and she

looks so distinguished in that cherry-coloured cloth, doesn't she?"

To all of which Madame agreed, as she bowed them out, with her

ingratiating professional manner.

"It's so lovely to have clothes," said Gabriella, sinking back in the

victoria, "money is one of the best gifts of the gods, isn't it?"

"It's hard to do without it," replied Mrs. Fowler, brisk and perfectly

businesslike even in her generalizations. "I expect the worst suffering

in the world comes from poverty."

Then, after a thoughtful pause, she added with the practical air of one

who scorns to be abstract: "But do you know I sometimes think Archibald

and I'd both be happier if we had never made any money at all--I mean,

of course, except just enough to live simply somewhere in the South.

When once you begin, you can't stop, and I wish sometimes we had never

begun." Above the narrow black velvet strings of her bonnet, her round

florid face, from which the fine tracery of lines had vanished, assumed

the intent and preoccupied expression which Gabriella associated with

the pile of unpaid bills on the little French desk. "I believe Archibald

feels that way, too," she concluded after a minute, while her firm and

unemotional lips closed together over the words.

"But you enjoy it so much when you have it."

"That's just the trouble. You have to enjoy it as quickly as you can

because you never know when you are going to lose every bit of it

without warning. It's been that way ever since I married--rich one year,

poor the next, or poor for two years and then rich for three. Life has

been a seesaw with prosperity at one end of the plank and poverty at

the other. Of course I know," she pursued, with characteristic lucidity,

"that you think me dreadfully extravagant, but we'd just as well spend

it as lose it, and it's sure to be one thing or the other."

"But couldn't you save something? Couldn't you put by something for the

future?" Saving for the future was one of the habits of Gabriella's

frugal past which still clung to her.

"That would go, too. If we ever come to ruin--and heaven knows we've

been on the brink of it before this--Archibald would not keep back a

penny. That's his way, and that's one of the reasons I spend all we

have--up to the very margin of his income."

The logic of this was so confusing that Gabriella was obliged to stop

and puzzle it out. At the end she could only admit that Mrs. Fowler's

reasoning processes, which were by nature singularly lucid and exact,

showed at times a remarkable subtlety--as if some extraneous hybrid

faculty had been grafted on the simple parent stock of her mind.

"I can't help feeling, though," resumed the practical little lady before

Gabriella had reached the end of her analysis, "that I'd be a great deal

happier at this minute if we'd been poor all our lives."

"It wouldn't have suited George," observed George's wife with an

inflection of irony.

"He mightn't have liked it, but I believe it would have been a great

deal better for him," replied Mrs. Fowler, while she bowed gravely to a

woman in a passing victoria. "There are many things George can't be

blamed for, and the way he was brought up is one of them. Of course,

he's no good whatever as a business man--his father hardly ever sees

him in the office--but it's useless to scold him about it, for it only

exasperates him. But he might have been a sensible, steady boy, if he

had been brought up in some small place in the South where there was

nothing to tempt him."

That there was any place in the South small enough not to afford

temptation to George seemed improbable to Gabriella; but she felt that

Mrs. Fowler's earnest belief, supported as it was by the unshakable prop

of maternal feeling, hardly justified the effort she must make to dispel

it; and she had still no answer ready when the carriage turned into

Fifty-seventh Street, and stopped beside the pavement where little

Frances--they had already begun to call her Fanny--sat in a

perambulator. Flushed and smiling, with her red mouth gurgling

delightedly, and a white wool lamb clasped in her arms, the adorable

child was certainly worth any seesaw of destiny, any disillusioning

experience of marriage.

Before the beginning of the next winter Gabriella's second child was

born--a brown, sturdy boy, who came into the world with a frowning

forehead and crying lustily from rage (so the nurse said) not from

fright. He was named Archibald after his grandfather, who developed

immediately a passionate fondness for him. His eyes were brown like the

eyes of the Carrs, though by the time he was two years old, he was

discovered to be painfully near-sighted, a weakness which Mrs. Carr,

when she heard of it, insisted he must have inherited from his father's

side of the family. He was not nearly so beautiful a baby as little

Fanny had been; but he was from the very beginning a child of much

character, strong, mutinous, utterly uncompromising in his attitude

toward life. When he was first put into shoes he fought with

desperation, and surrendered at last, neither to persuasion nor to

punishment, but to an exhaustion so profound that he slept for hours

with his small protesting feet doubled under him and sobs of fury still

bursting from his swollen lips. The next day the struggle began again,

and Mrs. Fowler remarked sympathetically:

"You'll never be able to break his will, Gabriella. He is unmanageable."

"I don't want to break his will, mamma," replied Gabriella, for she

belonged to a less Scriptural generation, "but he must be disciplined,

if it kills me." Pale, gentle, resolute, she waited for Archibald to

surrender. In the end she carried her point and won the adoring

obedience of Archibald. There was a magnanimous strain in him even at

that age, Gabriella used to say, and though he fought to the bitter end,

he bore no malice after he was once soundly defeated.

Long afterwards, when Gabriella looked back on the next few years of her

life, she could remember nothing of them except the tremendous

difference that the children had made. All the rest was blotted out, a

drab blur of what Mrs. Fowler described with dignity as "social duties,"

moving always against the variable atmosphere of the house, which was

gay or sombre, light or gloomy, according to the fluctuating financial

conditions in Wall Street. There were extravagant winters and frugal

winters; winters of large entertainments and winters of "women's

luncheons"; but always the summers shimmered green and peaceful against

the blue background of the Virginia mountains. The summers she loved

even in memory; but of the winters she could recall but one glowing

vision, and that was of Patty. Though she had lost George, she had

gained Patty, and it was impossible to deny that Patty might be

compensation for almost any lack.

For the rest she made few friends, partly from reserve, partly from the

shyness she always felt in the presence of strangers. It was difficult

to establish fundamental relations at dinners or even at women's

luncheons; social reforms were scarcely beginning to be fashionable; and

apart from the reading which she did in order, as she said, "to keep her

mind open," her life narrowed down gradually to a single vivid centre of

activity. She lived in her children and in the few books she obtained

from the library--(since the purchase of books, even in extravagant

years, represented gross prodigality to Mrs. Fowler)--in Patty's

friendship, and in the weekly gossiping letters she received from her

mother.

Mrs. Carr had long ago given up her plan to live with Gabriella and

George; and a failure of circumstances, which fitted so perfectly into

the general scheme of her philosophy, had done much to fortify the

natural melancholy of her soul. Since even so gentle a pessimist was not

devoid of a saving trace of spiritual arrogance, she found consoling

balm in the thought that she had refrained from reminding Gabriella how

very badly the Carrs had all married. There was, for example, poor

Gabriel's brother Tom, whose wife had "gone deranged" six months after

her wedding, and poor Gabriel's sister Johanna, who had died (it was

common gossip) of a broken heart; and besides these instances, nobody

could possibly maintain that Jane had not made a disastrous choice when

she had persisted, against the urgent advice of her mother, in marrying

Charley. Yes, the Carrs had all married badly, reflected Mrs. Carr, with

the grief of a mother and the pride of a philosopher whose favourite

theory has been substantially verified--every one of them, with, of

course, the solitary exception of poor Gabriel himself.

Her weekly letters, pious, gossipy, flowing, reached Gabriella regularly

every Monday morning, and were read at breakfast while Mr. Fowler

studied the financial columns of the newspaper, and his wife opened her

invitations in the intervals between pouring out cups of coffee and

inquiring solicitously if any one wanted cream and sugar.

"What's the news?" George would sometimes ask carelessly; and Gabriella

would glance down the pages covered with the formless characters of Mrs.

Carr's fine Italian handwriting (the ladylike hand of the 'sixties), and

read out carefully selected bits of provincial gossip, to which a

cosmopolitan dash was usually contributed by the adventures, matrimonial

or merely amorous, of Florrie Caperton. Hard, dashing, brilliant on the

surface at least, a frank hedonist by inclination, if not by philosophy,

Florrie had triumphantly smashed her way through the conventions and the

traditions of centuries.

"It's really dreadfully sad about Florrie," wrote Mrs. Carr. "I am so

sorry for poor Bessie, who must feel it more than she lets any one see.

While Algernon was alive we always hoped he would keep Florrie straight

(you remember how everybody used to talk about her when she was a girl),

but now he has been, dead only a year and a half, and she has already

married again and gotten a divorce from her second husband. You know

she ran away with a man named Tom Westcott--nobody ever heard of him,

but she met him at the White Sulphur Springs, where he had something to

do with the horses, I believe--and the marriage turned out very badly,

though for my part I don't believe he was the least bit to blame.

Florrie is so reckless that she would make any man unhappy, and two

weeks after the wedding she was separated from him and was back here

with Bessie, looking as well and pretty as I ever saw her. You know

black was so becoming to her that she didn't take it off even when she

eloped, and now after her divorce she always wears it, just as if she

were still in mourning for poor Algernon. Nobody would believe, unless

they had seen her in it, how very loud black can be. I used to think

widows ought to wear it because it kept them from being noticed, but on

Florrie it is the most conspicuous thing you ever imagined--as Cousin

Jimmy says it simply makes her blaze, and you know how striking she

always was anyway. I am sure I should think it would be embarrassing for

her to go in the street in New York where nobody knows that she is

really a lady--or at least that she was born a lady on her father's

side--and this reminds me--(I declare I ramble on so I can never

remember what I started to say)--but this reminds me that she has just

been in to tell Jane that she is going to New York to take an apartment

somewhere downtown; she told me the street and the number, but I have

forgotten both of them. Jane says she looks more beautiful than ever

after her last tragic experience (though she doesn't seem to think it

tragic at all), but I was brought up to believe that a divorced woman,

even if she is in the right, ought to live in a retired way and show

that she feels her position. Now, I saw Florrie for a minute as she was

going out and she ran on like a girl of sixteen--you would think from

her talk that she is not a bit sensitive about the unfortunate situation

she is in. She had on a huge bunch of violets, and Cousin Pussy tells me

another man is paying her the most devoted attention. Please don't

mention this to a soul--I hate so to spread gossip--but I felt that you

ought to be prepared, for Florrie will certainly come to see you, and

you must be kind and polite to her, though I do not think you ought ever

to be intimate again. It is not as if she were merely unfortunate--many

divorced women are that, and we sympathize with them because they show

that they realize their position--but I cannot believe that Florrie is

unfortunate if she allows another man to pay her such marked attention,

and even accepts handsome presents from him. So do be careful, my child,

and if you find yourself in an embarrassing situation, consult Mrs.

Fowler and be guided by her advice."

"Florrie Spencer is coming to New York," said Gabriella on the morning

she received Mrs. Carr's letter. "You know she has just been divorced

from her second husband--somebody she met at the White Sulphur Springs."

George looked up interested, from his breakfast.

"Florrie coming, is she?" he remarked. "Well, she's great fun. I wonder

if she has her eye on anybody now?"

"Not on you, I hope," observed his father, who joked mildly on the

mornings when the news was good; "but she's a beautiful woman, and

she'll doubtless be able to get whatever she has set either her heart or

her eye on."

"She'll marry again within six months," prophesied Mrs. Fowler, with an

anxious glance in the direction of her husband's coffee cup. "Poor Algy,

I always thought he was a hundred times too good for her," she added,

while she abstractedly buttered her toast. It was one of their

extravagant years, and the butter was delicious.

"He adored her," said Gabriella. "I shall never forget the evening they

spent here. He couldn't keep his eyes away from her. If she had been the

most admirable character on earth he couldn't have loved her better."

"As if a man ever loved a woman because of her character!" remarked Mrs.

Fowler, from the security of her experience.

Several months later Florrie arrived, gay, brilliant, and beautiful,

with her waxlike complexion as unlined by care as if it had been on the

face of a doll. Though she had lightened her mourning since Mrs. Carr

had described her to Gabriella, she still wore black, and her flaring

skirt, her inflexible collar, and her lace sleeves, narrow at the

shoulder and full at the wrists, resembled a fashion plate. Perched at a

daring angle above her wheaten-red pompadour, with its exaggerated

Marcel wave, she wore a curiously distorted hat of black velvet,

lavishly overtrimmed with ostrich feathers; and before this miracle of

style, Gabriella became at once oppressively aware of her own lack of

the quality which Florrie would have described as "dash." Already

Florrie's figure was becoming slightly too protuberant for the style of

the new century, and after kissing Gabriella effusively, she stood for a

minute struggling for breath, in the attitude of her mother, with her

hands pressed to the palpitating sides of her waist.

"I told mother I was certainly coming to see you right straight," began

Florrie, while, with her recovered breath, her figure curved as suddenly

as if it were moved by a spring into the fashionable bend of the period.

"I've been perfectly crazy to come, but between dressmakers and theatres

and I don't know what else, I simply haven't had a minute in which I

could sit down and breathe. Mother says I ought to be downright ashamed

of myself for being so frivolous when I've just got out of such a

scrape--did you ever hear before of anybody getting married for two

weeks, Gabriella? But I know you never did--you needn't trouble to tell

me so. Well, mother says I oughtn't to look so pleased, and I tell her

there might be some sense in that if I'd stayed in the scrape, but if I

haven't a right to look pleased at getting out, I'd like to know who

has. It was all too funny for words, now, wasn't it? Of course, I

shouldn't dream of talking to everybody like this--even if I am a big

talker, I reckon I know when to hold my tongue and when not to--but I've

always told you everything, Gabriella, and I don't mind the least bit in

the world telling you about this. It always relieves my mind to talk to

somebody I can trust, and I know I can trust you. Don't you remember the

way I used to run in on rainy afternoons when you lived way over in Hill

Street, and tell you all about Fred Dudley and Barbour Willis? And then

I used to come and talk about poor Algy by the hour. Wasn't it too

distressing about poor Algy? I don't believe I'll ever get over it if I

live to be a hundred, and even if I do run on like this, it doesn't mean

that my heart isn't broken--simply broken--because it is. Mother used

to say, after father died, that you couldn't measure a widow's grief by

the length of her veil; and that's just exactly the way I feel about

Algy. I know you'll understand, Gabriella, because you always understand

everything--"

"He was so deeply in love with you," observed Gabriella sympathetically,

while Florrie, diving amid the foam of her laces, brought out a tiny

handkerchief, and delicately pecked at the corner of her eye, not near

enough to redden the lid and not far enough away to disturb the rice

powder on the side of her nose.

"He was crazy about me to the very last, you never saw anything like it.

Of course we weren't a bit alike, I don't mind telling you so,

Gabriella, because I know you'll never repeat it. We weren't really

congenial, for Algy was just wrapped up in his law books, and there were

whole days together when he wouldn't open his mouth, but that didn't

seem to make any difference because, as he used to say, one of us had to

listen sometimes. But, you know, mother says a pair of opposites makes

the happiest marriage, and after being married to Algy, I feel how true

that is. I got into the habit of talking so much when I used to run on

about nothing to cheer him up--he was always so grave and glum even as a

boy, you remember--and during his last illness--you know he died of

Bright's disease, poor darling, and it came on just like that!--he used

to make me talk to him for hours and hours just to keep him from

thinking. Well, well, that's all over now, and I don't care what anybody

says, my heart's buried with Algy. I don't believe you were ever in love

but once either, were you, Gabriella?" she inquired cheerfully.

"Well, what about Mr. Westcott? Is that his name?" asked Gabriella,

without malice. As a study Florrie had always interested her, for she

regarded her less as an individual than as an awful example of the utter

futility of moral maxims. Florrie was without intelligence, without

feeling, without imagination, virtue, breeding, or good taste, yet

possessing none of these qualities, she had by sheer beauty and "dash"

achieved all the ends for which these qualities usually strive. Good

humour she had as long as one did not get in her way; but, beyond this

single redeeming grace, she was as empty of substance as a tinted shell

filled with sea foam. If power and efficiency are the two supreme

attributes of success, then by all the laws and principles of logic,

Florrie ought to have been a failure. But she was not a failure. She was

a fool whose incomparable foolishness had conferred not only prosperity,

but happiness upon her. She shone, she scintillated, she diffused the

glow of success. Though she was undeserving of admiration, she had been

surfeited on it from her childhood; though she was devoid of the moral

excellence which should command love, by a flashing glance or a waving

curl, she could bring the most exalted love down from the heavens. There

was no question that Algernon had really loved her to distraction, and

Algernon was a man of sense, of breeding, of distinction. As for

Florrie, she had, of course, as little capacity for loving as she had

for thinking.

"Tom Westcott! I declare, Gabriella, I am almost ashamed to tell you

about him. You've never been to a Virginia summer resort, so you

couldn't understand that there is something about a Virginia summer

resort that just seems to make any man better than none at all. You get

so bored, you know, that you'd flirt with a lamp-post if there wasn't

anything human around; and when you haven't laid eyes on a real sure

enough man for several months, it's surprising how easy it is to take up

with the imitation ones. Of course, I don't mean that Tom wasn't all

right as far as family and all that goes; but he was simply no earthly

account--he was just mean all through, and as soon as I found it out, I

packed right straight up and left him. After Algy I couldn't have stood

one of that sort, and there was no sense in my trying to. Life is too

short, I always say, for experiments. There's no use sticking to a bad

job when you can get away from it. That's the trouble with so many

women, you know; they try and try to stand the wrong man when they know

all the time that it isn't a particle of use, and that they are just

bringing wrinkles into their faces; and then by the time they give up,

they're all worn out and it's too late to look about for another chance.

Now, I've seen too much of that kind of thing, and so I thought two

weeks weren't long enough to bring wrinkles in my face, but they were

plenty long for me to find out whether or not I could stand any man on

earth. So here I am in little old New York instead of being stuck away

in some God-forsaken Virginia town, where there isn't even a theatre,

darning stockings for a family of children. But there's no use talking

about that--" And Florrie, who had been born a lady on her father's

side, adjusted her pompadour under the high bandeau of her hat, and rose

with a dashing air from the sofa.

"I'd love to see the babies, darling," she said; "I'm just crazy about

babies."

"They are out in the Park. I'm so sorry. Perhaps they are coming in now,

I hear the door-bell."

But it was George instead of the children; and he entered presently with

a moody look, which vanished quickly before the brilliant vision of

Florrie.

"I thought I heard you," he observed with the casual intimacy of an old

playmate, "so I came in. Have you got fixed yet? What about the

apartment? You'd better let me help you hunt for it?"

"Oh, I'm not sure about the apartment. I may take a house--a teeny weeny

one, you know," said Florrie, as she bent softly toward him, scented and

blooming. If one didn't know there wasn't really a bit of harm in her,

one would be puzzled just what to think of her, Gabriella reflected.

Amid the perfect order of Gabriella's inner life, the controlled

emotion, the serene efficiency, the balanced power, Florrie's noisy

beauty produced a disturbing effect. She liked her because she had known

her from childhood, and it was impossible to think any harm of a girl

one had played with at school; but she could not deny that Florrie was

vulgar. As a matter of fact, Florrie's mother had been vulgar before

her, and the thin strain of refinement inherited from her father's stock

had obviously been overborne by the torrential vulgarity of the maternal

blood.

"A house? Well, that's even better," replied George. "I've no use for

apartments, have I, Gabriella?"

His effrontery was incredible! That he should joke about his broken

promise before Florrie amazed Gabriella even after her disillusioning

experience with him.

"Then I'll get you to help me. Will you lend him to me, darling?"

trilled Florrie piercingly from the door, where she stood in a striking

pose which revealed her "fine figure" to the best advantage. The request

was directed to Gabriella, but her blue eyes mocked a challenge to

George while she spoke.

"Oh, I'll give him," answered Gabriella pleasantly. There was no harm in

it, she told herself innocently again; but it was a pity that Florrie,

with her remarkable beauty, should be quite so ill bred.

Five minutes later when George came back from putting Florrie into her

hansom, he remarked carelessly:

"She's got a figure all right."

"Yes, she looks beautiful in black. No wonder she won't leave it off."

"By Jove, to think it's little Florrie! Why, I don't believe there's a

finer figure in New York. When she passed by the club yesterday the men

were breaking their necks to look out of the window." Then, as if struck

by a sudden suspicion, he added quickly: "Where did she get her money

from? I thought Algy died rather hard up."

"I never heard much about it. Mrs. Spencer must give her something."

"I don't believe the old lady has a penny over three thousand a year,

and that won't do in New York. This Westcott didn't have anything, did

he?"

"It never occurred to me to ask," replied Gabriella indifferently. What

did it matter to George where Florrie got her money? But, then, George

was always like that, and though he never made a penny himself, he was

possessed of an insatiable curiosity about the amount and the sources of

other people's incomes.

"Well, it looks queer," he observed with intense interest after a

prolonged pause. "That short pearl necklace she had on couldn't have

cost a cent under ten thousand dollars."

"It was lovely. I noticed how well the pearls matched," replied his

wife. She was not in the least excited about the methods by which

Florrie had obtained the necklace--all that was a part of the miraculous

way she got everything she wanted in life--but she liked the pearls and

she had envied Florrie while she looked at them.

A deep furrow had appeared between George's eyebrows, and his mouth

sagged suddenly at the corners, giving his face the ugly look Gabriella

distrusted and dreaded. While she watched him she recalled vaguely that

she had once thought the latent brutality in his face an expression of

power. How young she had been when she married him! How inconceivably

ignorant! Yet at twenty years she had imagined herself wise enough to

judge a man. She had deluded herself with the sanctified fallacy that

mere instinct would guide her aright--that her marriage would be

protected from disaster by the infallible impulse which she had mistaken

for love.

"I wonder," said George with a suddenness that startled her out of her

musing--"I wonder if it can be Winston Camp!"

And Gabriella, who had forgotten Florrie, looked up to remark

absentmindedly: "Winston Camp? You mean the man who dined here last

winter and couldn't eat anything but nuts?"

In the months that followed George did not mention Florrie again, and if

he pursued his investigations into the obscure sources of her

livelihood, his researches did not lead him back in the direction of

Gabriella. But, from the day of Florrie's visit, it seemed to Gabriella,

when she thought of it afterwards, his casual indifference began to

develop into brutal neglect. Not that she regretted his affection, or

even his politeness, not that she cared in the least what his manner

was--this she made quite plain to herself--but her passion to see life

clearly, to test experience, to weigh events, brought her almost

breathlessly round again to the question, "What does it mean? Is there

something hidden? Am I still the poor abject fool that Jane was or am I

beginning really to be myself?"

"You aren't looking well, Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler at breakfast one

morning when George, as she confided afterwards to Patty, had behaved

unspeakably to his wife before his father came down. "I want you to go

about with me more, as you used to do before the children took up all

your time."

Gabriella had just crossed George's will about something--a mere trifle,

something about calling on Florrie--and he had turned to her with a look

of hatred in his eyes, a kind of nervous, excitable hatred which she had

never seen until then. "Why does he look at me like that?" she had

thought quite coldly; "and why should he have begun all of a sudden to

hate me? Why should my words, my voice, my gestures even, exasperate him

so profoundly? Of course he has stopped loving me, but why should that

make him hate me? I stopped loving him, too, long ago, yet there is only

indifference, not hate, in my heart."

"You must go about with me more, dear," repeated Mrs. Fowler, in

obedience to a vague but amiable instinct, which prompted her to shield

George, to deceive Gabriella, to deny the truth of facts, to do anything

on earth except acknowledge the actual situation in which she found

herself. "Don't you think she ought to go about more, George?"

"I don't care what she does," returned George brutally, while his blue

eyes squinted in the old charming way from which all charm had departed.

"I don't care--I don't care--" He checked himself, snapping his words in

two with a virulent outburst of temper, and then, rising hurriedly, as

his father entered the room, he left the table with his breakfast

uneaten.

"He's so nervous. I can't imagine what's the matter. I hope Burrows

wasn't in the pantry. Did you say anything to hurt his feelings before

you came down, Gabriella?" asked Mrs. Fowler, distractedly, with one eye

on her daughter-in-law and the other on the pantry door, through which

the discreet Burrows had disappeared at the opportune instant.

"No, I haven't said anything that I can remember," answered Gabriella

with calmness. It occurred to her that George's behaviour was hardly

that of a man whose "feelings" had been wounded, but she made no audible

record of her reflection; "and of course I'll go out with you if you

want me to," she added, for she felt sincerely sorry for her

mother-in-law, even though she had ruined George in his infancy. "I am

going to the library to return a book, and we might pay some calls

afterwards."

"That's just what I was thinking," responded Mrs. Fowler, embarrassed,

bewildered. Was it possible, she asked herself, that Gabriella had not

noticed George's outrageous behaviour?

But Gabriella did not "go about" with her mother-in-law that season, for

a higher will than Mrs. Fowler's frustrated that lady's benevolent

intentions. To a casual glance it would have seemed the merest accident

which disturbed these felicitous plans, but such accidents, when

Gabriella looked back on them afterwards, appeared to her to be woven

into the very web and pattern of life. It was plainly incredible that

her whole existence should be changed merely because Archibald was

naughty, as incredible as the idea that Destiny should have used so

small a medium for the accomplishment of its tragic designs.

But Archibald had hardly reached the Park before he was brought home,

resisting with all his strength, because he had given his shoes and

stockings away; and the next ten minutes, while Gabriella gently

reasoned with him on the pavement, were pregnant with consequences.

"He's fierce, that's what he is," declared the nurse, who was Irish and

militant. "He kicked me so I'm black and blue, ma'am, all over the

shins, and every bit because I wouldn't let him pull off his shoes and

socks and give 'em to a barefooted boy in the Park. You tell her,

darlin'"--to Frances, who stood, bright-eyed and indignant, in her white

fur coat and little fur cap which she wore drawn down tight over her

curls--"you tell your mamma, darlin', you tell her how fierce and bold

he was, and how he kicked me about the shins because I wouldn't let him

take off his shoes and socks."

"The poor boy wanted 'em! I won't wear 'em! I will give 'em to the poor

boy!" screamed Archibald, furious, scowling, struggling in the

restraining hold of his nurse. He was a robust, thick-set child of four

years, with a thatch of dark-brown hair, and strange near-sighted brown

eyes, behind spectacles which he had worn from the time he could walk.

"What is it, Archibald? Tell me about it. Tell mother," pleaded

Gabriella while he struggled desperately to escape from her tender

grasp. "Who was the poor boy and where did you see him?"

"He oughtn't to have been in the Park, ought he, mamma?" inquired

Frances, who was guiltless of democratic tendencies. "Ragged people have

no right to be in the Park, have they?"

"Hush, darling, I want to hear what Archibald has to say. Tell me about

him, Archibald. Shall you and I go out to look for him?"

"If you do, he'll pull his shoes and socks right off again," insisted

Frances emphatically. "He had got one quite off and had given it to the

boy before we saw him, and Nanny was obliged to go and take it back, and

I had to hold Archibald while she put it on him. He screamed very loud

and everybody stopped to ask what was the matter, and one old gentleman

with a long beard, like Moses in the Bible, gave Archibald a little box

of candy--he took it out of his pocket--but Archibald threw it away, and

kept on hollerin' louder than ever--"

"That's right, darlin', you tell her," urged nurse, a stout woman with a

red face and three gold teeth in the front of her mouth.

"I understand now. Don't tell any more, Fanny," said Gabriella. "Now,

Archibald dear, will you stop crying and be good?"

"Am," replied Archibald sullenly, twisting out of her hands.

"Am what, darling?"

"Am good."

"Well, will you stop crying?"

"Have."

"Then what do you want? Shall we go back and look for the poor boy?"

"Hadn't any shoes. Feet were red. Wanted to give him shoes, 'cause I had

plenty more at home. Nanny jerked him back. Hated Nanny. Hoped she would

die. Hoped bears would eat her. Hoped tigers would eat her. Hoped lions

would eat her. Hoped robins would cover her with leaves in the Park--"

While he sobbed out his accusations against nurse, Gabriella, holding

his hand tightly in hers, turned toward Fifth Avenue, and by the time he

was pacified, they had walked several blocks together, with nurse and

Fanny sedately bringing up the rear. Then, at last, having reasoned him

alike out of his temper and his generosity, Gabriella retraced her

steps, and entering the house with her latchkey, ran quickly up the

stairs to the closed door of Mrs. Fowler's room. As she raised her hand

to knock the sound of her own name reached her, and almost involuntarily

she hesitated for an instant.

"Yes, Gabriella is out. I saw her a minute ago on her way to the Park

with the children."

"Well, somebody ought to tell her, mother. I think it is perfectly

outrageous to keep her in ignorance. Everybody is talking about it."

"Oh, Patty, you couldn't! How on earth could you tell her a thing like

that?" wailed George's mother, and she went on with a plaintive sigh as

Gabriella opened the door: "George was always so mad about beauty, and

though Gabriella has a fine face, she isn't exactly--"

Then, at the startling apparition of Gabriella, with her face paling

slowly above her black furs and her large indignant eyes fixed on them

both, Mrs. Fowler wavered and broke off with a pathetic clutch at the

pleasantness which had entirely departed from her manner. "Why,

Gabriella, I didn't know you had come in! I was just saying to Patty--"

It was, as she said afterwards to her husband, exactly as if her mind

had become suddenly blank. She couldn't to save her life think of a

single word to add to her sentence, and all the time Gabriella was

standing there, as white as a ghost, with her accusing eyes turning

slowly from one to the other of them. "Somehow I just couldn't lie to

her when she looked like that, and the truth seemed too dreadful," Mrs.

Fowler added that night to Archibald. "Damn George!" was Mr. Fowler's

fervent retort. "And it took me so by surprise I almost fainted, for I'd

never in my life heard him swear before," his wife had commented later.

"But aren't men strange? To think he knew how all the time and kept it

to himself! I declare they are entirely too secretive for anything!"

"I heard what you were saying when I knocked," began Gabriella, with

perfect composure. "I don't quite know what it was about, but I think--I

think--"

"It was nothing, dear; Patty and I were gossiping," replied Mrs. Fowler,

with an eagerness that was almost violent. "Oh, Patty, you

wouldn't!"--for Patty had broken in, conquering and merciless, with the

declaration: "If you don't tell Gabriella, mamma, I'm going to. It's

outrageous, anyhow, I've always said so, the way people keep things from

women. Gabriella has a right to know what everybody is saying."

"Of course I've a right to know," rejoined Gabriella, with a firmness

before which Mrs. Fowler felt herself gradually dissolving--"melting

away" was the description she gave of her feeling. "If anybody has a

right to know, I suppose I have. Of course, it's about George. I know

that much, anyhow," she added quietly.

"I don't believe it's half so bad as they say," protested Mrs. Fowler

feverishly. "I don't believe he really keeps her. His father says he

couldn't possibly do it on the allowance he gives him, and, you know,

George doesn't make a cent himself--not a cent. He never supported

himself in his life--"

She paused breathlessly, with a bright and confident glance as if she

had made a point--a minor one perhaps, but still a point--in George's

favour. The jet fringe on her bosom, which had rattled furiously with

her excited palpitations, became gradually quiet, and as she pressed her

lips firmly with her handkerchief, which she had rolled into a ball, she

appeared to be pressing her customary smile back into place.

"It won't last, Gabriella," she began again very suddenly with renewed

assurance. "These things never last, and I think Patty is quite wrong to

insist upon telling you. Of course it is humiliating for a time,

but--but"--she hesitated, and then brought out triumphantly--"he married

very young, you know, and men aren't like women--there's no use

pretending they are. Now when a woman loves a man--"

"But, you see, I don't love George," answered Gabriella, and her awful

words seemed to reverberate through the horrified silence that

surrounded her.

"Not love him? O Gabriella! Of course, it's natural that you should feel

angry and wounded, and that your pride should resent what looks like an

affront to you; but you can't mean in your heart that you've got over

caring. Women don't change so easily. Why, you're his wife--poor foolish

boy that he is--and Florrie--"

"So it's Florrie?" observed Gabriella, with a strangely dispassionate

interest. It was queer, she reflected afterwards, that she had not felt

the faintest curiosity about the woman.

"I always suspected that there was something wrong about her," pursued

Mrs. Fowler, reassured by the knowledge that she was placing the blame

where it belonged according to all the laws of custom and tradition. "I

must say I never liked her manner and her way of dressing, and she made

eyes at every man she was introduced to--even at Archibald--"

"Well, I didn't believe there was any real harm in her," said Gabriella,

in a tone she might have used at one of her mother-in-law's luncheons.

She was still standing near the door, in the very spot where she had

paused at her entrance, with her head held high above the black fur at

her throat, and one gloved hand playing with a bit of cord on the end of

her muff. She could not possibly have taken it better. Bad as the

situation was, it might have been a hundred times worse except for

Gabriella's composure, thought Mrs. Fowler discreetly, adding with an

inexplicable regret, that in her youth women were different. Yes, they

had shown more feeling then, though they had behaved perhaps less well

in a crisis. In spite of her gratitude--and she was sincerely grateful

to her daughter-in-law for not making a scene--she became conscious

presently that she was beginning to cherish an emotion not unlike

resentment on George's account. That the discovery of George's

faithlessness should be received so coolly by George's wife appeared

almost an affront to him. Mrs. Fowler liked Gabriella, she was fond of

her--and nobody could look in the girl's face and not see that she was a

fine woman--but there were times, and this was one of them, when she

thought her a little hard. Had Gabriella wept, had she raged, had she

threatened Florrie's life or happiness, it might have been painful, but

at least it would have been human; and above all things Mrs. Fowler felt

that she liked women to be human.

"Nothing that anybody says or does can excuse George," said Patty

sternly. "He has behaved abominably, and if I were Gabriella, I'd simply

wash my hands of him. I don't care if he is my brother, that doesn't

make me blind, does it? If he were my husband," she concluded

passionately, "I'd feel just the same way about it."

"Oh, you mustn't! Oh, Patty, hush, it's wicked! It's sinful!" moaned

Mrs. Fowler, shutting her eyes, as if the sight of Patty's indignant

loveliness gave her a headache. "Don't try to harden Gabriella's heart

against him. Don't try to make her think she's really stopped loving

him."

Gabriella's answer to this outburst was a look which, as poor Mrs.

Fowler said afterwards, "cut her to the heart." Backing weakly to a

chair, the valiant little lady sat down suddenly, because she felt that

her legs were giving way beneath the weight of her body. And, though she

was unaware of its significance, her action was deeply symbolical of the

failure of the old order to withstand the devastating advance of the

new spirit. She felt vaguely that she wished women and things were both

what they used to be; but this, since she had little imagination, was as

far as she penetrated into the psychology of Gabriella's behaviour.

"But, you see, you're making the mistake of thinking that I love

George," said Gabriella, with a reasonableness which made Mrs. Fowler

feel that she wanted to scream, "and I don't love him--I don't love him

at all. I haven't loved him for a long time--not since the night I saw

him drunk. How could I love a man I've seen drunk--disgustingly drunk--a

man I couldn't respect? I'm not made that way, and I can't help it. Some

women may be like that, but I'm not. I couldn't, even if I wanted to,

love a man who has treated me as George has done. I don't see how any

woman could--any woman with a particle of pride and self-respect. Of

course I had to live with him after I married him," she finished

abruptly. "Marriage isn't made for love. I used to think it was--but it

isn't--"

"But, Gabriella, you don't mean--you can't--" Mrs. Fowler was really

pitiable, for, after all, George was her son, and the ties of blood

would not break so easily as the ties of marriage. In the depths of her

humiliation she had almost convinced herself that she had never

respected George, that she had never believed in him, forgetting the

pride and adoration of her young motherhood. Whatever George did she

could not change his relation to her--she could not shatter the one

indissoluble bond that holds mankind together.

"Gabriella, you don't--you can't--" she repeated wildly.

Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, a scene--she

became conscious presently that she was beginning to cherish an emotion

not unlike resentment on George's account. That the discovery of

George's faithlessness should be received so coolly by George's wife

appeared almost an affront to him. Mrs. Fowler liked Gabriella, she was

fond of her--and nobody could look in the girl's face and not see that

she was a fine woman--but there were times, and this was one of them,

when she thought her a little hard. Had Gabriella wept, had she raged,

had she threatened Florrie's life or happiness, it might have been

painful, but at least it would have been human; and above all things

Mrs. Fowler felt that she liked women to be human.

"Nothing that anybody says or does can excuse George," said Patty

sternly. "He has behaved abominably, and if I were Gabriella, I'd simply

wash my hands of him. I don't care if he is my brother, that doesn't

make me blind, does it? If he were my husband," she concluded

passionately, "I'd feel just the same way about it."

"Oh, you mustn't! Oh, Patty, hush, it's wicked! It's sinful!" moaned

Mrs. Fowler, shutting her eyes, as if the sight of Patty's indignant

loveliness gave her a headache. "Don't try to harden Gabriella's heart

against him. Don't try to make her think she's really stopped loving

him."

Gabriella's answer to this outburst was a look which, as poor Mrs.

Fowler said afterwards, "cut her to the heart." Backing weakly to a

chair, the valiant little lady sat down suddenly, because she felt that

her legs were giving way beneath the weight of her body. And, though she

was unaware of its significance, her action was deeply symbolical of the

failure of the old order to withstand the devastating advance of the

new spirit. She felt vaguely that she wished women and things were both

what they used to be; but this, since she had little imagination, was as

far as she penetrated into the psychology of Gabriella's behaviour.

"But, you see, you're making the mistake of thinking that I love

George," said Gabriella, with a reasonableness which made Mrs. Fowler

feel that she wanted to scream, "and I don't love him--I don't love him

at all. I haven't loved him for a long time--not since the night I saw

him drunk. How could I love a man I've seen drunk--disgustingly drunk--a

man I couldn't respect? I'm not made that way, and I can't help it. Some

women may be like that, but I'm not. I couldn't, even if I wanted to,

love a man who has treated me as George has done. I don't see how any

woman could--any woman with a particle of pride and self-respect. Of

course I had to live with him after I married him," she finished

abruptly. "Marriage isn't made for love. I used to think it was--but it

isn't--"

"But, Gabriella, you don't mean--you can't--" Mrs. Fowler was really

pitiable, for, after all, George was her son, and the ties of blood

would not break so easily as the ties of marriage. In the depths of her

humiliation she had almost convinced herself that she had never

respected George, that she had never believed in him, forgetting the

pride and adoration of her young motherhood. Whatever George did she

could not change his relation to her--she could not shatter the one

indissoluble bond that holds mankind together.

"Gabriella, you don't--you can't--" she repeated wildly.

Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, Mrs. Fowler rose

stoically to her feet, adjusted her belt with a tremulous movement of

her hands, and smiled bravely as she went to the mirror to put on her

hat. Heartbroken and distraught of mind though she was, she submitted

instinctively to the lifelong tyranny of appearances.