He rose. "Thanks for the hint."

She began to unroll the plans.

"Now, _there's_ the man for you," said he, with a gesture toward her

bundle of blue prints.

"Who?"

"Siersdorf."

"If I had to choose, I'd prefer--even you."

"Siersdorf is adaptable and appreciative. He's good to look at, has a

good all-round mind, is extraordinary in his specialty. You couldn't do

better."

"I don't want him," she cried impatiently. "I prefer to suit myself in

marrying." She stood before him, her hands behind her, the pretty face

tilted daringly upward. "Are you trying to make me dislike you?"

He looked down at her; there was not a hint in his expression that her

dare was a temptation. "I must be going," said he.

Tears gathered in her eyes, made them brilliant, took away much of their

natural hardness. "Won't you be friends?" she appealed.

He continued to look straight into her eyes until her expression told

him she knew he was not deceived by her maneuverings and strategies.

Then he said, "No," with terse directness of manner as well as of

speech. "No, because you do not want friends. You want victims."

In sudden anger she flung off her mask. "I am a good hater," she

warned. "You don't want me to turn against you, do you?"

His face became sad and somewhat bitter. There had been a time when

such a menace from a source so near his career would have alarmed him,

would have set him to debating conciliation. But his self-confidence

had developed beyond that stage, had reached the point where a man feels

that, if any force from without can injure him, the sooner he finds it

out, the more quickly he will be able to make a career founded upon the

only unshakable ground, his own single strength.

"I've taken a great deal off you," she went on in a menacing tone, a

tone intended to remind him that he was an employee. "You ought to be

more careful. I'm not all sweetness. I can be hard and unforgiving when

I cease to like."

He laughed unpleasantly as vanity thus easily divested itself of its

mask of love. "And to cross you is all that's necessary to rouse your

dislike."

"That's all," said she. And now she looked like her father in his rare

exhibitions of his true self. She had never deceived Armstrong

altogether. But he was too masculine not to have lingerings of the

universal male delusion that feminine always and necessarily means at

least something of sweetness and tenderness.

"Shall we be friends?" she demanded sharply, imperiously. At bottom,

she could not believe anyone would stand against the power that gave her

a scepter--the power of wealth. "Friends, or--not?"

"As you please," replied he, bowing coldly. And he went, his last look

altogether calm, not without a tinge of contempt. He realized that he

had come there to put an end to his flirtation with her, to assert his

own independence, to free himself from the entanglement which his

temporary weakness of the first days in overwhelming New York had led

him into. The swimmer, used only to pond or narrow river, is unnerved

for a moment when he finds himself in the sea; but if he knows his art,

he is soon reassured, because he discovers that no more skill is needed

for sea than for pond, only a little more self-confidence.

He was not clear of the house when she was saying to herself, "Hugo is

right about him. Father must take him in hand. He shall be taught his

place."

*XI*

*AT MRS. TRAFFORD'S*

Armstrong felt that he had regained his liberty.

The principal feature of every adequate defense is vigorous attack; and,

so long as Amy was pretending to be and was thinking herself his friend,

was in fact as much his friend as it was possible for one to be who had

been bred to self-worship, Armstrong could take only lame, passive

measures against Fosdick. But now-- In the oncoming struggle in which

he would get no quarter, he need give none. Several times, as he was

dressing for dinner, a cynical smile played over his features. What a

queer game life was! In other circumstances, that might easily have

come about, he and Amy would have plunged into a romantic love affair;

they would have been standing by each other against all the world, the

stronger in their love and devotion for the opposition. A few words, and

off flies her mask of sweetness, so deceptive that it almost deceived

herself, and away goes her pretense of friendship; the friends become

enemies, liking becomes hate. No real change in either of them; each

just as likable as before; yet, what a difference! It amused him. It

saddened him. "Probably at this very moment she's edging her father on

to destroy me," he thought. But that disturbed him not at all. He had

no fear of enemies; he knew that they fling themselves against the gates

in vain, unless there are traitors within.

This break with Amy was most opportune. He was dining at the Traffords

that evening; he could tell Trafford he would accept without any

reservations the long-standing invitation to enter the Atwater-Trafford

plot to seize the O.A.D.

Trafford was one of the rising stars in finance. He originated in a

village in southern New Jersey where he was first a school teacher, then

a lawyer. He spent many years in studying the problem of

success--success, of course, meaning the getting of a vast fortune. He

discovered that there were two ways to enormous wealth--by seizing an

accumulation amassed by some one else; by devising a trap that would

deceive or compel a multitude of people to contribute each his mite of a

few dimes or dollars. The first way was the quicker, of course; but

Trafford saw that the number of multi-millionaires incapable of

defending at least the bulk of their wealth was extremely limited, and

that, of them, few indeed kept their wealth together so that one swoop

could scoop it all. His mind turned to the other way. After carefully

examining the various forms of trap, he was delighted to discover that

the one that was easiest to use was also the best. Insurance! To get

several hundred thousand people to make you absolute trustee of their

savings, asking no real accounting; and all you had to do was to keep a

certain part of the money safely invested so that, when anybody died,

you could pay his heirs about what he had paid you, with simple

interest, or less, added. Trafford studied the life insurance tables,

and he was amazed that nobody had ever taken the trouble to expose the

business. He stood astounded before the revelation that the companies

must be earning, on "risks" alone, from ten to thirty per cent, this in

addition to what clever fellows on the inside must be doing in the way

of speculation; that policy holders got back in so-called dividends less

than five, usually less than four, often less than three per cent!

Trafford's fingers twitched. Rich? Why, he would be worth millions!

He made choice among the different kinds of insurance. The object was

to get a company that would draw in the greatest number of

"beneficiaries" and would have to pay the smallest proportion of

"benefits." The greatest number were obviously the very poor; and, by

happy coincidence, the very poor could also be exploited more easily and

more thoroughly and with less outcry than any other class. So, Trafford

made burial insurance his "graft." He would play upon the horror the

poor have of Potter's Field.

He began in a small way in Trenton; he presently had several thousand

policy holders, each paying ten cents a week to his agent-collectors.

As soon as a policy of this kind has run for several months, it is to

the advantage of both agent and company for it to lapse. Thus,

Trafford's policies, obscurely worded, unintelligible to any but a

lawyer, read that the weekly payments must be made at the office of the

company; that an omission promptly to pay a single month's dues made the

policy lapse; that a lapsed policy had no surrender value. He was too

greedy at first, and Trenton was too small a place. When it became "too

hot to hold him," he went to New York--New York with its vast, ignorant,

careless tenement population, with its corrupt government, with its

superb opportunities for floating and expanding a respectable grafting

scheme.

If he had stayed in Trenton, he would probably have gone to the

penitentiary. But in New York he became ever richer, ever more

respectable; he attracted about him a group of eminently respectable

sustainers of church and society, always eager to get their noses into a

large, new trough of swill. The Home and Hearth Mutual Defense Company

soon dwelt in a palace, built at a cost of many millions, every penny of

it picked from the pockets of ragged trousers and skirts; Trafford

himself dwelt in another and even more costly palace farther uptown,

built with the same kind of money. He was a vestryman in the

fashionable Church of the Holy Family, a subscriber to all the

fashionable charities, an authority on the fashionable theories as to

the tenement house question and other sociological problems relating to

the slums. And he thought as well of himself as did his neighbors. Was

it _his_ business if the company's collectors forgot to be accommodating

and to relieve the poor of the necessity of making their payments at the

offices? Was it _his_ business if policies lapsed by the thousands, by

the tens of thousands, through the carelessness or ignorance of the

policy holders? Look at the hundreds of thousands whose funeral

expenses were provided by the Home and Hearth! Look at the charities he

subscribed to; listen to the speeches in behalf of charity and

philanthropy he made! Did he not give the policy holders all that was

legally theirs?--at least, all that was _rightfully_ theirs under the

accepted business code; certainly, more than the law would have allowed

them, if laws could be made so that the good could carry on "practical"

business and yet the wicked not get undue license. Trafford had never

been a moral theorist. He had accepted the code known as legal

morals--"the world's working compromise with utopianism," he sonorously

called it. As he expanded financially, he expanded morally; by the time

he became a high financier, he was ready for the broader code known as

financial morals--wherein allowances are made for all those moral

difficulties which the legal code, being of necessity of wider

application, cannot take into account.

A fine man was Trafford, with a face that the women and the clergy

called "sweet" and "spiritual," with a full gray beard, young eyes,

bright blue and smiling, iron-gray hair that waved a little, and the

dress of the substantial citizen.

His home life was beautiful.

He had made his first and false start with a school teacher--she had had

the first grade in the school where he taught the sixth grade. She was

of about his own age, and indolent, and had never heard that a married

woman ought to keep herself up to the mark; she was, therefore, old at

thirty-two, and he still a mere boy in looks and in feeling. She said

rather severe things when he so narrowly escaped disgrace during his

apprenticeship at Trenton; they quarreled, they separated.

In the boarding house where he first stopped in New York there was a

serious, shrewd, pretty girl, the daughter of the landlady and the niece

of one of the high dignitaries of the church. Trafford induced his wife

to divorce him--before she discovered how swiftly and luxuriantly he was

putting forth bough and leaf in congenial New York. He married the

niece of the church dignitary in the parlor of the boarding house; a

"most elegant function" it was pronounced by the boarders--and, as they

read all the "fashionable intelligence" and claimed kinship with various

fashionable people, they ought to have known. The wedding was like the

bright dawn of a bright day--a somewhat cool, even frosty day, but

brilliant. Neither Trafford nor the second Mrs. Trafford had much

affection in them. Who knows, perhaps the marriage was the more

cloudless for that. Instead of exploiting each other, as loving couples

too often do, they exploited their fellow beings, he downtown, she up.

As he grew, she grew. As he became rich, she became fashionable; ten

years after that wedding, hardy indeed would have been the person who

would have dared remind her that she had once lived in a boarding house.

Conventionally, it is man's chief business to get rich, woman's chief

business to keep young looking; the Traffords were nothing if not

conventional. Mrs. Trafford appreciated that she lived in a land where

beauty in a woman counts more than seventy-five points in the hundred,

that she lived in a city where it counts at least ninety points in the

hundred. She had no use for her charms beyond mere show--show, the sole

purpose of all she did and thought and was. She took herself in hand,

after the true New York fashion, at Time's first sign of malice. She

had herself cared for from top to toe, and that intelligently--no

credulous prey to fake beautifiers was Lily Trafford. When Trafford was

fifty-two, though he did not look so much by half a dozen years, his

wife was thirty-eight, and looked less than thirty.

Nor had she neglected her other duties as woman and wife. Her husband

was rich; she had learned how to spend money. The theory among those

who have no money "to speak of," and never had, is that everyone is born

with the knowledge how to spend money. In fact, there are thousands who

know how to make money where there are ten who know how to spend it. The

whole mercantile class fattens on the ignorance of this neglected

science--fattens by selling at high prices to those who do not know what

they want or how much they should pay. Mrs. Trafford knew exactly what

she wanted--she wanted to be fashionable. She had fashion as an

instinct, as a passion. She wanted the "latest thing" in mental and

material furnishings. She cared nothing for knowledge; she was

determined to have culture, because culture was fashionable. She had no

ideas of her own, and wanted none; she followed the accepted standards.

It was the fashion to go to church; she went to church. It was the

fashion to be a little skeptical; she was cautiously skeptical. It was

the fashion to live in a palace; in a palace she lived. She went to the

fashionable dressmakers and art stores and book stores. She filled her

house with things recommended by the fashionable architects. She had

the plainest personal tastes in food, but she ate three fashionable

meals a day; and, though she loved coffee with cream, took it with hot

milk in the mornings and black after lunch and dinner, because cream was

unfashionable. Yes, Mrs. Trafford knew how to spend money. The science

of spending money is getting what you want at as low a price as anybody

can get it. Mrs. Trafford got exactly what she wanted, and got it with

no more waste than is inevitable in spending large sums with people who

lie awake of nights plotting to get more than they are entitled to.

As Armstrong looked round the salon into which he was shown, it seemed

to him he had never seen anything so magnificent or so stiff. Trafford

was housed exactly like a king--and, like a king, he had the air of

being a temporary tenant of the magnificence about him. It was the

typical great house--a crude, barbaric structure, an exhibition of

wealth with no individuality, no originality, ludicrous to the natural

eye, yet melancholy; for, from every exhibit of how little wealth buys

there protrudes the suggestion of how much it has deprived how many. In

such displays the absence of price marks is a doubtful concession to

canons of taste which in no wise apply; the price mark would at once

answer the only question that forms in the mind as the glance roams.

The Traffords, however, were as content as royalty in their

uncomfortable and unsightly surroundings; they had attained the upper

class heaven.

"So glad you could come," said Mrs. Trafford graciously to Armstrong.

Her toilet was the extreme of the fashion, and without a glimmer of

individual taste. "This is my small daughter." And she smiled up at

the thin, pretty young woman beside her in diaphanous white over palest

yellow. "We are to be six this evening," she went on. "And Boris is

coming--you know Boris Raphael?"

"Never heard of him," said Armstrong.

Miss Trafford smiled broadly. Mrs. Trafford was pained, and showed

it--not at her daughter's smile, for it she did not see, but at

Armstrong's ignorance of so important a fact in the current fashionable

fund of information. Ignorance of literature, science, art, politics,

of everything of importance in the great world, would not have disturbed

Mrs. Trafford; but ignorance of any of the trivialities it was

fashionable to know--what vulgarity, what humiliation! "He is _the_

painter of portraits," she explained. "Everyone has him. He gets

really fabulous prices."

"An American?" inquired Armstrong.

"I believe he was born here. But, of course, he has spent his life

abroad. We are so commercial. No artist could develop here."

"Is there any place on earth where they don't take all they can get?"

asked Armstrong. "Does Raphael refuse 'fabulous prices'?"

Miss Trafford laughed. Mrs. Trafford looked pained again. "Oh--but the

spirit is different over there," she replied vaguely.

"Where the men won't marry unless the girl brings a dowry?"

"The customs are different from ours," said Mrs. Trafford, patiently and

pleasantly. "Raphael has done me a great honor. He has asked to paint

me."

"Naturally, he's on the lookout for all the jobs he can get," said

Armstrong, his mind really on his impending treaty with her

husband--arranging the articles, what he would give, what demand in

exchange. The instant the words were out he realized their inexcusable

rudeness. He reddened and looked awkwardly big and piteously

apologetic.

Trafford, who had been stroking the huge deerhound on the tiger skin

before the fire, now burst in. "What's that about Raphael? Did my wife

tell you she has at last persuaded him to paint her picture?"

A miserable silence. Miss Trafford had to turn away to restrain her

laughter. Mrs. Trafford became white, then scarlet, then white again.

"The airs he's putting on!" continued Trafford, unconscious. "Why, they

tell me his father was a banana peddler and----"

"Mr. Raphael," announced the butler, holding aside one of the

ten-thousand-dollar portieres.

"Oh--Raphael!" exclaimed Trafford, with enthusiasm.

"So glad you could come," said Mrs. Trafford, gracious and sweet.

"Miss Carlin," announced the butler.

Armstrong, studying Raphael's face, which instantly attracted him,

wheeled toward the door at the sound of this name as if he had been shot

at from that direction. He might not have been noted, had he not

straightway got a far greater shock. In abandon of sheer amazement he

stared at the figure in the doorway--Neva, completely transformed in the

two years since he saw her. The revolution in her whole mode of life

and thought had produced results as striking inwardly as outwardly.

In America, transformations usually cause, at most, only momentary

surprise; for almost everyone above the grade of day laborer, and not a

few there, changes his environment completely, not once but several

times in the lifetime, readjusting himself to his better or worse

circumstances. After an interval one sees the man or the woman he has

known as poor and obscure; success has come in that interval, and with

it all the external and internal results of success. Or, failure has

come, and with it that general sloughing away and decay which is the

inevitable consequence of profound discouragement; the American, most

adaptable of human beings, accepts defeat as facilely as victory.

In Neva's case, however, the phenomenon was somewhat different. It is

not often that circumstance drags an obstinately retiring person into

activity, breaks the shell and compels that which was hidden to become

open, to develop, to dominate. The transformation of Neva seemed

somewhat as if a violet had become a tall-stemmed rose; it was, in fact,

no miracle of transubstantiation, but one of those perfectly natural

marvels, like the metamorphosis of grub into butterfly. Armstrong had

seen the chrysalis, all unsuspicious of its true nature; now, with no

knowledge of the stages between, he was seeing the ethereal beauty the

chrysalis had so securely concealed. It must be said, however, that

Boris, though he had seen the day-to-day change, the gradual unfolding

of wing and color and grace, was almost as startled as the big,

matter-of-fact Westerner. In the evolution of every living thing, there

comes a definite moment when the old vanishes and the new bursts forth

in full splendor--when bud ceases to be bud and is in a twinkling leaf

or bloom, when awkward boy or girl is all at once graceful youth, full

panoplied. Neva, knowing she was to see Armstrong that night, had put

forth the last crucial effort, had for the first time spread wide to the

light her new plumage of body and soul. And there stood in the doorway

of Trafford's salon the woman grown, radiant in that luminous envelope

which crowns certain kinds of beauty with the supreme charm of mystery.

She paused an instant before Armstrong's stare, which was disconcerting

the whole company. In spite of her forewarned self-control, her eyes

sparkled and her cheeks flushed; that stare of his was the triumph of

which she had dreamed. She came on to her hostess and extended her

hand. Mrs. Trafford, who prided herself on being the "complete

hostess," equal to any emergency, for once almost lost her head;

something in Armstrong's face, in his eyes, raised in her the dread of a

scene, and she showed it. But Neva restored her--Neva, tranquil and

graceful, a "study in lengths" to delight the least observant eye now,

her faintly shimmering evening dress of pale gray leaving bare her

beautiful arms and shoulders and neck, and giving full opportunity to

the poise of her small head with its bright brown crown of thick, vital

hair; and her eyes, gleaming from the long, narrow lids, seemed at once

to offer and refuse the delights such words as youth and passion

conjure.

"I don't wonder you can't keep from staring," said Miss Trafford in an

undertone to Armstrong, with intent to recall him to himself.

With that, he did contrive to get himself together; Mrs. Trafford

introduced him to Neva, not without a nervous flutter in her voice.

Neva put her hand out to him. "How d'ye do, Horace?" she said, with a

faint smile, neither friendly nor cold.

Armstrong took her hand without being able to speak. Mrs. Trafford was

about to say, "You have met before," when it occurred to her that this

might precipitate the scene. Dinner was announced; she paired her

guests--Lona with Armstrong, Neva with Trafford, she herself taking

Boris.

"Did you see him stare at her?" she asked, on the way to the dining

room.

Boris laughed unpleasantly. "And so should I, in the circumstance,"

replied he.

"What circumstance?"

"Seeing such a beautiful woman so suddenly," he said, after just an

instant's hesitation.

Mrs. Trafford looked shrewdly at him. "Is it a scandal?" she asked, at

the same time sending a beaming glance at Armstrong who was entering the

door at the other end of the room with her daughter on his arm.

"Not at all," replied Boris.

The dinner went placidly enough. Raphael had been almost as startled as

Armstrong when Neva appeared in the door of the salon, though he did not

show it. Expert in women's ways, he knew it was for some specific

reason that she had thus taken unprecedented pains with her toilet. Why

had she striven to outshine herself? Obviously because she wished to

punish the man who had so stupidly failed to appreciate her. A

perfectly natural desire, a perfectly natural seizing of a not to be

neglected opportunity for revenge. Still--Boris could not but wish she

had shown some such desire to dazzle him; he would have preferred that

she had been absolutely indifferent to the man of whom he often thought

with twinges of rakish jealousy. He affected high spirits, was never

more brilliant, and helped Neva to shine by giving her every

encouragement and chance to talk and talk well.

In contrast to them, Armstrong was morosely silent; occasionally he

ventured a glance across the table at Neva, and each time into his face

came the expression that suggested he was suspecting his eyes or his

mind of playing him a wildly fantastic trick. So far as he could judge,

Neva was not at all disturbed by his presence. Raphael went upstairs

soon after the women; he refused to be bored with the business

conversation into which Trafford had drawn Armstrong.

"Well," said Trafford, the moment Boris was out of the way, "what have

you decided to do?"

"I'll go in with you," said Armstrong.

Trafford rubbed his hands and his eyes sparkled--like a hungry circuit

rider at sight of the heaping platter of fried chicken. "Good!

Splendid!" he exclaimed. He glanced at butler and waiters busy clearing

the sideboard; but they took no hints that would delay their freedom,

and Trafford did not dare give an order that would put them out of humor

and the domestic machinery out of gear. "No matter," said he. "This

isn't the time to talk business. We'll arrange the details to-morrow.

Or, shall we adjourn to my study?"

"I'll come to you in a few days when I have my plans formed," said

Armstrong. "Wait till you hear from me." He tossed his cigar into a

plate. "Let's go upstairs. I must leave soon."

Meanwhile, Raphael, in the salon, had bent over Neva and had said in an

undertone, "You would like to leave? You can have my cab--it's waiting.

I'll take yours when it comes."

"Thanks, no," answered Neva. "I'm not the least in a hurry."

Her tone ruffled him. His ears had been sentinels and his eyes scouts

from the instant he knew who Armstrong was and with one expert glance

took his measure mentally and physically. He appreciated that the

female method in judging men is not at all like the male method, is

wholly beyond the comprehension of a man; still, he could not believe

that any man of the material, commercial type would attract a sincerely

artistic, delicate, spiritual woman like Neva Carlin. He could not, as

an expert in mankind, deny to Armstrong a certain charm of the force

that in repose is like the mountain and in action is like the river.

"But," reasoned he, "she knows him through and through, knows him as he

is. For her, he's a commonplace tale that is told."

As Armstrong entered, his glance darted for Neva. It had first to meet

Raphael smiling friendlily and suggesting anything but the man on guard,

every nerve alert. Armstrong frowned frank dislike. He felt at a

disadvantage before this superelegantly dressed and delicately perfumed

personage. While he was not without experience with women, he had known

only those who had sought him; his expertness was, thus, wholly in

receiving advances and turning them to such advantage as suited his

fancy, not at all in making overtures or laying siege. He saw at once

that Boris was a master at the entire game of man and woman; he recalled

Neva's passion for things artistic, her reverence for those great in

artistic achievement; despite his prejudice against Boris, he measured

him as a man of distinction and force. It seemed to him that this

handsome master-painter, so masculine in feature and figure, so

effeminately dandified in dress and manner, this fascinating specimen of

the artistic sex that is the quintessence of both sexes, must have

hypnotized his wife. Yes, his wife! For, now that Neva's revealed

personality inspired in him wonder, awe, desire, he began to think of

her as his property. He had quit title under a misapprehension; he had

been cheated, none the less because the cheater happened to be himself.

Boris, ignoring his unfriendliness, advanced, engaged him, drew in Lona

Trafford. Before he could contrive a move toward Neva, Boris had him

securely trapped in a far corner of the salon with Lona as his watchful

keeper, and was himself retreated in triumph to sit beside Neva. So

thoroughly had Boris executed the maneuver, Armstrong was seated at such

an angle that he could not even see Neva without rudely twisting away

from Miss Trafford. He did not appreciate that he was the victim of a

deliberate strategy. But Miss Trafford did; and when she found herself

unable to fix his attention, she took a vengeful pleasure in keeping him

trapped, enjoying his futile struggles, his ill-concealed wrath, his

unconcealed jealousy.

That was a miserable half hour he passed; Lona talked of the painter and

Neva--"his latest flame--you know, he's very inconstant--has the most

dreadful reputation. Mamma wouldn't let him speak half a dozen words to

me, unless she was there. They do say that Miss Carlin is making a

saint of him--though, no doubt it's a disguise that'll be thrown off as

soon as-- I don't admire that sort of man, do you, Mr. Armstrong? I

like a simple, honest man--" This with a look that said she regarded

Armstrong as such--"a man that doesn't understand feminine tricks and

the ways to circumvent women." There her cynical eyes smiled amusement

at Armstrong's ruddy, lip-biting jealousy.

"It's rather cold, so far from the fire," said Armstrong, rising.

Lona rose also; she saw that Neva was about to go. "Just a minute,"

said she. "Miss Carlin is leaving. You can take the sofa as soon as

she's out of the way."

Armstrong wheeled, left Miss Trafford precipitately. He was barely in

time to intercept Neva, on her way to the door with Trafford. "Good

night, Horace," she said. He could only stand and stare. For the first

time she looked directly at him, her eyes full upon his. He remembered

that in the old days, when their eyes occasionally met thus, hers had

made him vaguely uncomfortable; he understood why, now. What was the

meaning of this look she was giving him--this look from long, narrow

lids, this look that searched him out, thrilled him with longing and

with fear? He could not fathom it; he only knew that never before in

his entire singly intent, ambitious life had the thought occurred to him

that there might be some other worth while game than the big green

tables of finance, some other use for human beings than as pawns in that

game. She drew her hand away from his confused, detaining grasp, and

was gone, leaving him an embarrassed, depressed, ludicrous figure, to be

later the jeer of his own sense of humor.

Before Trafford had time to return from escorting her to her cab,

Armstrong took leave. A brief silence in the salon; then Mrs. Trafford

said to Raphael, "There is some mystery here, which I feel compelled to

ask you to explain. You introduced Miss Carlin to me." She noted her

daughter listening eagerly. "Lona, you would better go. Good night, my

child."

Boris looked the amusement this affectation roused in him. "Don't send

her away, Mrs. Trafford. The mystery is quite respectable. Miss Carlin

used to be Mrs. Armstrong. As there were no children, she took her own

name, when it became once more the only name she was entitled to."

"He divorced her!" exclaimed Mrs. Trafford, rearing. "And you brought

her to _my_ house!" She held it axiomatic that no woman would divorce a

well-appearing breadwinner of the highest efficiency.

"_She_ divorced _him_," corrected Raphael.

"I can't believe it," replied Mrs. Trafford. "If she did, he let her,

to avoid scandal."

"Not at all," protested Boris. "They come from a state which has queer,

sentimental divorce laws, made for honest people instead of for

hypocrites. They didn't get on well; so, the law let them go their

separate ways--since God had obviously not joined them."

"I must look into it," said Mrs. Trafford, with a frown at Raphael and a

significant side glance toward Lona. "People in our position can't

afford to----"

"I have the honor to wish you good evening," said Boris with a formal

bow. And before she could recover herself, he was gone.

"You _have_ made a mess, mamma!" exclaimed Lona.

Mrs. Trafford seemed on the verge of hysterics. "Was there _ever_ a more

unfortunate evening!" she cried. Then: "But he'd not have been so

touchy, if there wasn't something wrong."

Trafford came sauntering in and she explained the situation to him. He

flamed in alarm and anger, impatiently cut off her explanations with,

"You've got to straighten this, Lily. If Armstrong should hear of it,

and be offended, it'd cost me--I can't tell you how much!"

Mrs. Trafford looked as miserable as she felt. "I'll send off a note

apologizing to Raphael this very night," she said. "And in the morning

I'll ask her to the opera. Why didn't you warn me?"

"Warn!" exclaimed Trafford, bustling up and down, and plucking at his

neat little beard. "How was I to know? But I supposed you'd understand

that we never have anybody--any man--here unless he's of use. It's all

very well to be strict, Lily; but----"

"Let's not talk about it," wailed his wife. "I'll do my best to

straighten it. I shan't sleep a wink to-night."

Lona--"the child"--slipped away, a smile on her lips--a cynical smile

which testified that the lesson in life as it is lived in the full

stench of "respectability," had not failed to impress her.

*XII*

*"WE NEVER WERE"*

For the first time in Armstrong's career, it was imperative that he

concentrate his whole mind; and, for the first time, he could not. In

the midst of conferences with Trafford, with Atwater even, his attention

would wander; forgetful of his surroundings, he would stare dazedly at a

slim, yet not thin, figure, framed in the heavy purple and gold curtains

of a doorway--the figure of his former wife, of the recreated Neva, on

the threshold of Mrs. Trafford's salon. He had the habit of judging

himself impartially, and this newly developed weakness of character, as

strange in its way as the metamorphosis of Neva, roused angry

self-contempt; but the apparition persisted, and also his inability to

keep his thoughts off it.

Passion he understood, but not its compulsion, still less its tyranny.

Love--except love of mother and child--he regarded as a myth that

foozled only the foolish. He had sometimes thought he would like a

home, a family; but a glance at the surface of the lives of his

associates was enough to put such sentimentalities out of his head. He

saw the imbecilities of extravagance and pretense into which the wife

and daughters plunged as soon as the wealth of the head of the family

permitted, the follies into which they dragged the "old man"--how, in

his own home, just as downtown, he was not a man but a purse. No,

Armstrong had no disposition to become the drudge and dupe of a

fashionable family. So, in his life he had put woman in what he

regarded as her proper place of merest incident. He spent a great deal

of time with women--that is, a great deal for so busy a man. He liked

women better than he liked men because with them he was able to relax

and lower his guard, where with men he always had the sense of the game.

For intelligence in women he cared not at all. Beauty and a good

disposition--those were the requirements. It was not as at a woman that

he looked at this unbanishable figure--not with the longing, thought he,

or even the admiration of the masculine for the feminine--simply with

wonder, a stupid stare, an endless repetition of the query, _Who_ is it?

His vanity of self-poise was even more hard pressed to explain why he

always saw, in sinister background to the apparition of Neva, the

handsome, dandified face of Boris, strong, sensual, triumphant. He

recalled what Lona Trafford had said of the painter. Yes, that explained

it. Neva, guileless, inexperienced in the ways of the world, was being

ensnared, all unsuspicious, by this rake. And, even though she might,

probably would, have the virtuous fiber to stand out against him, still

she would lose her reputation. Already people must be talking about her;

so far as he could learn, no woman could associate with Raphael without

it being assumed that she was not wasting his time. "The scented

scoundrel!" muttered Armstrong. "Such men should be shot like mad

dogs." This with perfect sincerity; with not a mocking suggestion that

he himself had been as active in the same way as his time and

inclination had permitted.

"Really, somebody ought to warn her," was naturally the next step.

"What the devil do her people mean by letting her come here alone?"

Yes, somebody ought to warn her. Of course, he couldn't undertake the

office; his motive might be misunderstood. Still, it ought to be done.

But-- "Maybe, he's really in love with her--wants to marry her." This

reflection so enraged him that he was in grave danger of discovering to

himself the truth about his own state of mind. "Why not?" he hastily

retorted upon himself. "What do I care? I must be crazy, to spend any

time at all in thinking about matters that are nothing to me."

And he ordered the subject out of his mind. He was not surprised to

discover that it had not obeyed him. Now, hatred of Boris became a sort

of obsession with him. He found in, or imagined into, his memory

picture of the painter's face, many repellant evidences of bad

character. Whenever he heard Raphael's name, or saw it in a newspaper,

he paused irritably upon it; he was soon in the habit of thinking of him

as "that damned hound." Nor did this development unsettle his

confidence in his freedom from heart interest in Neva; he was sure his

antipathy toward the painter was the natural feeling of the normal man

toward the abnormal. "Where's the man that wouldn't despise a creature

who decks himself out with jewelry and wears rolling collars because he

wants to show off his throat, and scents himself like a man-chasing

woman?"

The longer he revolved it, the more clearly he saw the necessity that

she be warned--and the certainty that his warning would be

misunderstood. "I couldn't speak of him without showing my feelings,

and women always misinterpret that sort of thing." He looked up her

address; and, as he was walking to his hotel from the office in the late

afternoon, or was strolling about after dinner, developing his vast and

complex scheme to pile high the ruins of his enemies that he might rise

the higher upon them, he would find himself almost or quite at the

entrance to the apartment house where she lived. "I think I must be

going crazy," he said to himself one night, when he had twice within two

hours drawn himself from before her door. Then a brilliant idea came to

him: "I'll go to see her, and end this. To put a woman out of mind, all

that's necessary is to give her a thorough, impartial look-over. Also,

in ten minutes' talk with her I can judge whether it would be worth

while to warn her against that damned hound."

And at five the very next day he sent up his card. "She'll send down

word she isn't at home," he decided.

He was astonished when the boy asked him into the elevator; he was

confused when he faced at her door old Molly who had lived with them out

in Battle Field. "Step in, sir," she said stiffly, as if he were a

stranger, and an unwelcome one. He entered with his head lowered and a

pink spot on either cheek. "What the devil am I doing here?" he

muttered. "Yes, I'm losing my mind."

He heard indistinctly a man's voice in the room shut off by the curtains

at the far end of the hall--evidently she had a caller. He went in that

direction. "Is this the right way?" he called, hesitating at the

curtain.

"Yes, here," came in Neva's voice. Had he not been expecting it, he

would hardly have recognized it, so vibrant now with life.

He entered--found her and Boris. "I might have known _he'd_ be here,"

he said to himself. "No doubt he's _always_ here."

He ignored Boris; Boris stared coldly at him. "You two have met before?"

said Neva, with a glance from one to the other, her eyes like those of a

nymph smiling from the dark, dense foliage round a forest pool. "Yes, I

remember. Let me give you some tea, Horace."

As she spoke that name, Boris set down his cup abruptly. He debated

whether he should defy politeness and outsit the Westerner. He decided

that to do so would be doubly unwise--would rouse resentment in Neva,

who had had the chance to ask him to spare her being left alone with her

former husband and had not; would give him an appearance of regarding

the Westerner as an important, a dangerous person. With a look in his

eyes that belied the smile on his lips, he shook hands with her. "Until

Thursday," he said. "Don't forget you're to come half an hour earlier."

And Armstrong was alone with her, was entirely free to give her the

"thorough, impartial lookover."

He saw his imagination had not tricked him at Trafford's--his

imagination and her dress. The change in her was real, was radical,

miraculous, incredible. It was, he realized, in part, in large part, a

matter of dress, of tasteful details of toilet--hair and hands and skin

not merely clean and neat but thoroughly cared for. This change,

however, was evidently permanent, was outward sign of a new order of

thought and action, and not the accident of one evening's effort as he

had been telling himself. Their eyes met and his glance hastily

departed upon a slow tour of the room; in what contrast was it to his

own apartment, which cost so much and sheltered him so cheerlessly.

"You are very comfortable here," said he. "That, and a great deal

more."

"The Siersdorfs built this house," replied she. "They have

ideas--especially Narcisse." He thought her wonderfully, exasperatingly

self-possessed; his own blood was throbbing fiercely and her physical

charms gave him the delicious, terrifying tremors of a boy on the brink

of his first love leap.

"What is it that women"--he went on, surprised by the steadiness of his

voice, "_some_ women--do to four walls, a floor, and ceiling, and a few

pieces of furniture to get a result like this? It isn't a question of

money. The more one spends in trying to get it, the worse off he is."

"It seems to me," said she, "that, in arranging a place to live, the one

thing to consider is that it's not for show or for company, but to live

in--day and night, in all kinds of weather, and in all kinds of moods.

Make it to suit yourself, and then it'll fit you and be like you--and

those who care for you can't but be pleased with it."

"It does resemble you--here," said he. "And it doesn't suggest a palace

or an antique store or a model room in a furniture display, or an

auction room.... You work hard?"

His glance had come back to her, to linger on the graceful lines of her

throat and slim, pallid neck, revealed by the rounding out of her

tea-gown. Never before had he been drawn to note the details of a

woman's costume. He would not have believed garments could be

surcharged with all that is magnetic in feminine to masculine as was

this dress of cream white edged with narrow bands of sable.

"It would be impossible not to work, with Raphael to spur one on," was

her reply. Her accent in pronouncing that name gave him the desire to

grind something to powder between his strong, white teeth. "The better I

know him, the more wonderful he seems," continued she, a gleam in her

eyes that would have made a Raphael suspect she was not unaware of the

emotion Armstrong was trying to conceal. "I used to think his work was

great; but now it seems a feeble expression of him--of ideas he, nor no

man, could ever materialize for a coarse sense like sight."

"You don't like his work, then?" said Armstrong, pleased.

Neva looked indignant. "He's the best we have--one of the best that

ever lived," exclaimed she. "I didn't mean his work by itself wasn't

great, but that it seemed inadequate, compared with the man. When one

meets most so-called great men--your great men downtown for example--one

realizes that they owe almost everything to their slyness, that they

steal the labor of the hands and brains of others who are superior to

them in every way but craft and unscrupulousness. A truly great man, a

man like Boris Raphael, dwarfs his reputation."

Armstrong suspected a personal thrust, a contrast between him and Boris,

and was accordingly uncomfortable. "I'd like to see some of _your_

work," said he, to shift the subject.

"Not to-day. I don't feel in the mood."

"You mean, you think I wouldn't care about it--that I never was

interested in that sort of thing."

"Perhaps," she admitted.

He laughed. "There's truth in that." He was about to say, "I'm still

just as much of a Philistine as I used to be"; but he

refrained--something in her atmosphere forbade reminiscence or hint of

any connection whatever between their present and their past.

"You're like Boris in one respect," she went on. "Nothing interests you

but what is immediately useful to you."

"He's over head in love with you--isn't he?" Armstrong blurted.

Her face did not change by so much as a shade. She gave not an outward

hint that she knew he had rudely flung himself against the barrier

between them, to enter her inmost life on his own ruthless terms of

masculine intolerance of feminine equality of right. She continued to

look tranquilly at him, and, as if she had not heard his question, said,

"You don't go out home often?"

The rebuke--the severest, the completest, a woman can give a

man--flooded his face with scarlet to the line of his hair. "Not--not

often," he stammered. "That is, not at all."

"Father and I visit with each other every few weeks," she continued.

"And I take the home paper." She nodded toward a copy of the Battle

Field _Banner_, conspicuous on the table beside him. "Even the

advertisements interest me--'The first strawberries now on sale at

Blodgett's'--you remember Blodgett, with his pale red hair and pale red

eyes and pale red skin, and always in his shirt sleeves, with a

tooth-brush, bristle-end up, in his vest pocket? And I read that Sam

Warfield and his sister Mattie 'Sundayed' at Rabbit's Run, as if I knew

and loved the Warfields."

This connecting of her present self with her past had the effect of

restoring him somewhat. It established the bond of fellow-townsmen

between them. "I too take the _Banner_," said he. "It's like a visit

at home. I walk the streets and shake hands with the people. I'm glad

I come from there--but I'm glad I came."

But he could not get his ease. It seemed incredible, not, as he would

have expected, that they were such utter strangers, but that they had

ever been even acquaintances. Not the present, but the past, seemed a

trick of the imagination upon his sober senses. His feeling toward her

reminded him of how he used to regard her when he, delivering parcels

from his father's little store, came upon her, so vividly representing

to him her father's power and position in the community that he could

not see her as a person. While she continued to talk, pleasantly,

courteously, as to an acquaintance from the same town, he tried to brace

himself by recalling in intimate detail all they had been to each other;

but by no stretch of fancy could he convince himself of the truth. No,

it was not this woman who had been his wife, who had dressed and

undressed before him in the intimacy of old-fashioned married life, who

had accepted his embraces, who had borne him a child.

When he rose to go, it was with obvious consciousness of his hands and

feet; and he more than suspected her of deliberately preventing him from

recovering himself. "She's determined I shan't fail to learn my

lesson," he thought, as he stood in the outer hall, waiting for the

elevator, and recovering from his awkward exit.

A week, almost to the minute, and he came again. She received him

exactly as before--like an old acquaintance. She had to do the talking;

he could only look and listen and marvel. "I certainly wasn't so

stupid," he said to himself, "that I wouldn't have noticed her if she

had had eyes like these, or such teeth, or that form, or that beautiful

hair." He would have suspected that she had been at work with the

beauty specialists who, he had heard, were doing a smashing business

among the women, had he not seen that her manners, her speech, the use

of her voice, everything about her was in keeping with her new physical

appearance; she had expanded as symmetrically as a well-placed sapling.

The change had clearly come from within. There was a new tenant who had

made over the whole house, within and without.

What seemed to him miracle was, like all the miracles, mysterious only

because the long chain of causes and effects between beginning and end

was not visible. There probably never lived a human being to whom fate

permitted a full development of all his possibilities--there never was a

perfect season from seed-time to harvest. The world is one vast exhibit

of imperfect developments, physical, mental, moral; and to get the

standard, the perfection that might be, we have to take from a thousand

specimens their best qualities and put them together into an impossible

ideal--impossible as yet. For one fairly well-rounded human being,

satisfying to eye and mind and heart, we find ten thousand stunted,

blighted, blasted. Each of us knows that, in other, in more favorable,

in less unfavorable circumstances, he would have been far more than he

is or ever can be. But for Boris, Neva might have gone through life,

not indeed as stunted a development as she had been under the blight of

her unfortunate marriage, but far from the rounded personality,

presenting all sides to the influences that make for growth and

responding to them eagerly. Heart, and his younger brother, Mind, are

two newcomers in a universe of force. They fare better than formerly;

they will fare better hereafter; but they are still like infants exposed

in the wilderness. Some fine natures have enough of the tough fiber

successfully to make the fight; others, though they lack it, persist and

prevail by chance--for the brute pressure of force is not malign; it

crushes or spares at haphazard. Again, there are fine natures--who

knows? perhaps the finest of all, the best minds, the best hearts--that

either cannot or will not conform to the conditions. They wither and

die--not of weakness, since in this world of the survival of the

fittest, the fit are often the weak, the unfit the strong. All around

us they are withering, dying, like the good seed cast on stony

ground--the good minds, the good hearts, the men and women needing only

love and appreciation and encouragement, to shine forth in mental,

moral, and physical beauty. Of these had been Neva.

Boris, with eyes that penetrated all kinds of human surfaces and

revealed to him the realities, had seen at first glance what she was,

what she could be, what she was longing and striving to be against the

wellnigh hopeless handicaps of shyness and inexperience and solitude.

For his own sybarite purposes, material and selfish, from mere wanton

appetite, he set his noble genius to helping her; and the creative

genius finds nothing comparable in interest to the development of the

human plant, to watching it sprout and put forth leaves, blossoms,

flowers, perfume, spread into an individuality.

Every day there was some progress; and now and then, as in all nature,

there were days when overnight a marvelous beautiful change had

occurred. In scores on scores of daily conversations, between

suggestions or instructions as to painting, much of the time

consciously, most effectively and most often unconsciously, never with

patronage or pedantry, he encouraged and trained her to learn herself,

the world, the inner meaning of character and action--all that

distinguishes fine senses from coarse, the living from the numb, all

that most of us pass by as we pass a bank of wild flowers--with no

notion of the enchanting history each petal spreads for whoever will

read. Boris cleared away the weeds; he softened the soil; he gave the

light and the air access. And she grew.

But Armstrong had no suspicion of this. Indeed, if he had been told

that Boris Raphael, cynic and rake, had been about such an apparently

innocent enterprise, he would have refused to believe it; for the

Raphael temperament, the temperament that is soft and savage,

sympathetic to the uttermost refinement of delicacy and appreciation,

and hard and cruel as death, was quite beyond his comprehension.

Armstrong, looking at Neva, saw only the results, not the processes; and

he could scarcely speak for marvel, as he sat, watching and listening.

"May I come again?" he asked, when he felt he must stay no longer.

"I'm usually at home after five."

Her tone was conventional--alarmingly so. With a pleading gesture of

both hands outstretched and a youthful flush and frank blue eyes

entreating, he burst out, "I have no friends--only people who want to

get something out of me--or whom I want to get something out of. Can't

you and I be friends?"

She turned abruptly away to the window. It was so long before she

answered that he nerved himself for an overwhelming refusal of his

complete, even abject surrender with its apology for the past, the

stronger and sincerer that it was implied and did not dare narrow itself

to words. When she answered with a hesitating, "We might try," he felt

as happy as if she had granted all he was concealing behind that request

to be tolerated. He continued in the same tone of humility, "But your

life is very different from mine. I feared-- And you yourself-- I

can't believe we were ever--anything to each other."

There was her opportunity; she did not let it slip. She looked straight

into his eyes. "We never were," she said, and her eyes piercing him

from their long, narrow lids and deep shadowing lashes forbade him ever

to forget it again.

He returned her gaze as if mesmerized. Finally, "No, we never were," he

slowly repeated after her. And again, "We never were," as if he were

learning a magic password to treasures beyond those of the Forty

Thieves.

He drew a long breath, bowed with formal constraint, and went; and as he

walked homeward he kept repeating dazedly, "We never were--never!"

*XIII*

*OVERLOOK LODGE*

Overlook Lodge was Amy's first real success at amusing those

interminable hours of hers that were like a nursery full of spoiled

children on a rainy day. Every previous device, however well it had

begun, had soon been withered and killed by boredom, nemesis of idlers.

Overlook was a success that grew. It began tediously; to a person

unaccustomed to fixing the mind for longer than a few minutes, the

technical part of architecture comes hard. But before many months

Overlook had crowded out all the routine distractions; instead of its

being a mere stop-gap between them, they became an irritating

interruption to its absorbing interest. It even took the sharp edge off

her discomfiture with Armstrong; for interest is the mental cure-all.

She dreaded a return of her former state, when an empty hour would make

her walk the floor, racking her brains for something to do; she spun

this occupation out and out. Narcisse Siersdorf lost all patience; the

patience of feminine with feminine, or of masculine with masculine, is

less than infinite. "We'll never get anywhere," she protested. "You

linger over the smallest details for weeks, and you make all sorts of

absurd changes that you know can't stand, when you order them."

Narcisse did not comprehend the situation. Who with so much to do that

the months fairly flash by, can sympathize with the piteous plight of

those who have nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it?

Alois was not so unsympathetic. When the Overlook plans were begun, he

was away; but, soon after his return, Amy fastened upon him, and

presently he had abandoned all other business of the firm to his sister,

that he might devote himself to making this work "really great."

"Concentration's the thing," said he to Narcisse, in excusing himself to

her--and to himself. "Miss Fosdick has the true artistic spirit. She

is willing to let me give full play to my imagination, and she

interferes only to help and to stimulate. I feel I can afford to devote

an unusual amount of time and thought. When the work is done, it'll be a

monument to us."

Narcisse gave him a queer glance, and her laugh was as queer as her

eyes. He colored and frowned--and continued to dawdle with Amy over the

plans. It was not his fault, nor hers, that the actual work finally did

begin; it was the teasing of her father and Hugo about these endless

elaborations of preparation. "When Overlook is begun" became the family

synonym for never. She and Alois suddenly started the work, and pushed

it furiously.

The site selected had nothing to recommend it but a view that was far

and away the most extensive and varied in that beautiful part of New

Jersey--mountains, hills, plains, rivers, lakes, wildernesses, villages,

farms, two cities--a vast sweep of country, like a miniature summary of

the earth's whole surface. But Overlook Hill was in itself barren and

shapeless. Many times, rich men in search of places where they could see

and be seen had taken it under consideration; but always the natural

difficulties and the expense had discouraged them. Fosdick had bought

the site before investigating; he had been about to sell, when Amy took

Narcisse out there. The builder instantly saw, and unfolded to Amy, a

plan for making the hill as wonderful in itself as in its prospect; and

that original inspiration of hers was the basis of all that was done.

When Amy and Alois did set to work, they at once put into motion

thousands of arms and wheels. The day came when the whole hill swarmed

with men and carts, with engines and hoisting machines and steam diggers

and blasting apparatus; and the quiet valley resounded with the uproar

of the labor. Amy took rooms at the little hotel in the village, had

them costlily refurnished, moved in with a cook and staff of servants;

Alois came out every morning, even Sundays. The country people watched

the performance in stupefaction; it was their first acquaintance with

the audacities upon nature which modern science has made possible. And

presently they saw a rugged cliff rise where there had been a

commonplace steep, saw great terraces, slopes, levels, gentle grades,

supersede the northern ascents of Overlook. The army of workmen laid

hold of that huge upheaval of earth and rock and shaped it as if it had

been a handful of potter's clay.

Near the base of the cliff ran the river; barges laden with stone began

to arrive--stone from Vermont and from Georgia, from Indiana, from

Italy. A funicular clambered up the surface of the cliff; soon its cars

were moving all day, bearing the stone to the lofty top of the hill; and

there appeared the beginnings of foundations--not of a house alone, but

of a dozen buildings, widely separated, and of terraces and lake bottoms

and bridges--for a torrent, with several short falls and one long leap,

was part of the plans. At the same time, other barges, laden with earth

and with great uprooted living trees, arrived in interminable

procession, and upon bare heights and slopes now began to appear patches

of green, clumps of wood. And where full-grown transplanted trees were

not set out, saplings were being planted by the hundreds. As the stone

walls rose, sod was brought--acres of grass of various kinds; and

creepers and all manner of wild growing things to produce wilderness

effects in those parts of the park which were not to be constructed with

all the refinements of civilization. These marvels of

nature-manufacture were carried on in privacy; for the very first work

had been to enclose the hill, from cliff edge round to cliff edge on the

other side, with a high stone wall, pierced by only two entrances--one,

the main entrance with wrought-iron gates from France, and a lodge; the

other, the farm or service entrance, nearer the village and the river.

Amy and Alois had begun as soon as the frost was out of the ground. By

June they had almost all the trees planted. The following spring, and

the transformation was complete. Overlook Hill, as it had been for

ages, was gone; in its place was a graceful height, clad in a thousand

shades of green and capped by a glistening white bastionlike building

half hid among trees that looked as if they had been there a century at

least. Indeed, except the buildings, nothing seemed new, everything

seemed to belong where it was, to have been there always. The sod, the

tangle of creepers and underbrush on the cliff and in the ravines, the

cliff and the ravines themselves, all looked like the product of

nature's slow processes. The masonry, the roads, the drives--signs of

age and of long use. One would have said that the Fosdicks were

building on an old place, a house better suited to modern conditions

than some structure, dating from Revolutionary days at least, which must

have stood in those venerable surroundings and had been torn down to

make room for the new.

"The buildings are going to look too new," said Alois. And he proceeded

to have them more artfully weather-stained.

Narcisse had preached the superiority of small houses to Amy until she

had convinced her. So, Overlook Lodge, while not so small as it looked,

was still within the sane limits for a private house. And the interior

arrangements--the distribution of large rooms and less, of sunny rooms,

of windows, of stairways, of closets--were most ingenious. No space was

wasted; no opportunity for good views from the windows or for agreeable

lines, without or within, was neglected. Through and through it was a

house to be lived in, a house whose comfort obtruded and whose luxury

retired.

In the woodwork, in the finishing of walls and ceilings, in the

furniture, Alois followed out the general scheme of the appearance of an

old-established residence, a family homestead that had sent forth many

generations. Before a stone had been blasted at Overlook, the furniture

and the woven stuffs were designed and manufacturing. While the outer

walls of the house were finishing, the rooms were beginning to look as

if they had been lived in long. There was nothing new-looking anywhere

except the plumbing; nothing old-looking, either. The air was that of

things created full grown, things which have not had a shiny, awkward

youth and could not have a musty, rickety, rotten old age.

There came a day when the last rubbish was cleared, when the last

creeper was in leaf, the last flower in bloom, when the grass and the

trees seemed green with their hundredth summer, when the settees and

chairs and hammocks were on the verandas and porticos as if they had

been there for many a year, when no odor of fresh paint or varnish or

look of newness could be detected anywhere about the house--and the

"work of art" was finished. Alois and Amy, in an automobile, went over

every part of the grounds, examined them from without and from within;

then they made a tour of the house, noting everything. Changes,

improvements, could be made, would be made; but the work as a work was

finished. They seated themselves on a veranda overlooking the valley,

and listened to the rush of the torrent, descending through the ravines,

in banks of moss and wild flowers, to spring from the edge of the cliff.

Amy burst into tears.

"You're very tired, aren't you!" said Alois sympathetically. There were

tears in his eyes.

"No, that isn't it," she answered, her face hidden--she knew she didn't

look at all well when she was crying.

"I understand," said he. "There's something tragic about finishing

anything. It's like bringing up a child, and having it marry and go

away." He sighed. "Yes, we're done."

"I feel horribly lonely," she cried. "I've lost my occupation. It's

the first great real sorrow of my life. I wish we hadn't been in such a

hurry! We might have made it last a year or two longer."

"I wish we had!"

"You can't wish it as I do. You will go on and build other houses. You

have a career. It seems to me that _I've_ come to the very end."

"You don't realize," he said hesitatingly, "that it was the personal

element in this that gave--that gives it its whole meaning, to me. I

was working with you and--for you."

He glanced at her eagerly, but with a certain timidity, for some sign

that would encourage him. A hundred times at least, in those months

when he had spent the whole of almost every day with her, he had been on

the point of telling her what was in his heart, why he was so tireless

and so absorbed in their task. But he had never had the courage to

begin. By what he regarded as a malicious fatality, she had always

shifted the conversation to something with which sentiment would not

have harmonized at all. Apparently she was quite unconscious that he

was a man; and how she could be, when he was so acutely alive to her as

a woman, he could not understand. Sometimes he thought she was fond of

him--"as fond as a nice girl is likely to be, before the man declares

himself." Again, it seemed to him she cared nothing about him except as

an architect. Her wealth put around her, not only physically but also

mentally, a halo of superiority. He could not judge her as just a

woman. He always saw in her the supernal sheen of her father's millions.

He knew he had great talent; he was inordinately vain about it in a

way--as talented people are apt to be, where they stop short of genius,

which--usually, not always--has a true sense of proportion and gets no

pleasure from contrasting itself with its inferiors. He would have been

as swift as the next man to deny, with honest scorn, that he was a

wealth worshiper; and as he was artist enough to worship it only where

it took on graceful forms, he could have made out a plausible case for

himself. Amy, for example, was not homely or vulgar--or petty. She had

good ideas and good taste and concealed the ugly part of her nature as

dexterously as by the arrangement of her hair she concealed the fact

that it was neither very long nor very thick. Besides, in her

intercourse with Alois, there was no reason why any but the best side of

her should ever show.

Narcisse gave over trying to make him sensible where Amy was concerned,

as soon as she saw upon what he was bent. "He wouldn't think of her

seriously if she weren't rich," she said to herself. "But, since he is

determined to take her seriously, it's better that he should be able to

delude himself into believing he loves her. And maybe he does. Isn't

love always nine tenths delusion of some sort?" So, she left him free

to go on with Amy, to love her, to win her love if he could. But--could

he? He feared not. That so wonderful a creature, one who might marry

more millions and blaze, the brightest star in the heavens of

fashionable New York, should take him--it seemed unlikely. "She ought

to prefer congeniality to wealth," thought he, "but"--with an

unconscious inward glance--"it's not in human nature to do it."

As they sat there together in the midst of their completed work, he

waiting for some hopeful sign, she at least did not change the subject.

"Hasn't what we've been doing had any--personal interest for you?" he

urged.

She nodded. "Yes, I owe my interest in it to you," she conceded. But

she went on to discourage him with, "We have been _such_ friends.

Usually, a young man and a young woman can't be together, as have we,

without trying to marry each other."

"That's true," assented he, much dejected. Then, desperately, "That's

why I've put off saying what I'm going to say until the work should be

done."

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "Don't say it, please--not now."

"But you must have known," he pleaded.

"I never thought of it," replied she with an air of frankness that

convinced him.

"Well--won't you think of it--now?"

"Not to-day," was her answer, in the tone a woman uses when she is

uncertain and wishes to convince herself that she is certain. She rose

and crossed to the edge of the veranda.

In such circumstances, when the woman turns her back on the man, it is

usually to signify that she has a traitor within, willing to yield to a

surprise that which could not be won by a direct assault; and, had

Alois's love been founded in passion instead of in interest, he would

not have followed her hesitatingly, doing nothing, simply saying

stumblingly: "I don't wish to annoy you. But let me say one

thing--Amy--I love you, and to get you means life to me, and not to get

you means the death of all that is really me. I think I could make you

happy--you who are so interested in what is my life work. It must be

our life work."

"I've thought of that," responded she softly. "But, not to-day--not

to-day." A pause during which she was hoping, in spite of herself, that

he would at least insist. When he remained silent and respectful, she

went on: "Don't you think we may let father and Hugo come?"

"By all means. Everything is ready." And they went back to talking of

the work--of the surprise awaiting Fosdick.

Fosdick had gratified her and delighted himself by playing the fondly

indulgent father throughout the building of Overlook. He had put the

widest limits on expense, he had asked no questions; he had let her keep

him ignorant of all that was being done. It was a remarkable and most

characteristic display of generosity. When a man earns a fortune by his

own efforts, by risking his own property again and again, he is rarely

"princely" in his generosity. But with the men who grow rich by risking

other people's money in campaigns against rival captains of finance and

industry who are also submitting to the fortunes of commercial war

little or nothing that is rightfully theirs, then the princely qualities

come out--the generosity with which the prince wastes the substance of

his subjects in luxury, in largesse, and in wars. Fosdick felt most

princely in relation to the properties he controlled. Whatever he did,

if it was merely eating his breakfast or consulting a physician when he

was ill, he did it for the benefit of the multitude whose money was

invested in his various enterprises. Thus, when he took, he could take

only his own; when he gave, he was "graciously pleased" to give up his

own.

This simple, easy, and most natural theory reduced all divisions of

profits, losses, expenses, to mere matters of bookkeeping. If his

losses or expenses were heavy, the dividends to policy holders and

stockholders must be small--clearly, he who had done his best and had

acted only for the good of others ought not to cripple or hamper his

future unselfish endeavors. If the profits were large--why dribble them

out to several hundred thousand people who had done nothing to make

them, who did not deserve, did not expect, and would not appreciate?

No; the extra profits to the war-chest--which was naturally and of

necessity and of right in the secure possession of the

commander-in-chief. So, Fosdick, after the approved and customary manner

of the princely industrial successors to the princely aristocratic

parasites on mankind, was able to indulge himself in the luxury of

generosity without inflicting any hardship upon his conscience or upon

his purse.

The distribution of the cost of the new house had presented many nice

problems in bookkeeping. Some of the expense--for raw materials,

notably--was merged into the construction accounts of the O.A.D. and two

railway systems; but the largest part was covered by the results of two

big bond deals and a stock manipulation. This part appeared on the

records as an actual payment by Fosdick out of his own private fortune;

but on the other side of the ledger stood corresponding profits from the

enterprises mentioned, and these profits, on careful analysis, were seen

to have come from the fact that, when profits were to be distributed,

Fosdick the private person was in no way distinguishable from Fosdick

the trustee of the multitude.

If the old man had not had confidence in his daughter's good sense and

good taste and in Siersdorf's ability, he would not have given them the

absolutely free hand. It was, therefore, with the liveliest

expectations that he took the train for Overlook. As he and Hugo

descended at the station, they looked toward Overlook Hill, so amazingly

transformed. "Well, you've certainly done _something_!" he exclaimed to

Amy, as she came forward to meet him. "Why, I'd not have known the

place. Splendid! Superb!" And he kissed her and shook hands warmly

with Alois.

On the way through the village in the auto, he gushed a stream of

enthusiasm and comment. "That cliff, now--what a fine idea! And the

cascade--why, you've doubled the value of real estate throughout this

region. I must quietly gather in some land round here-- You are in on

that, Siersdorf. The railway station must be improved. I'll see

Thorne--he's president of the road and a good friend of mine--he'll put

up a proper building--you must draw the plans, Siersdorf. This

village--it's unsightly. We must either wipe it out or make it into a

model."

His enthusiasm continued at the boiling point until they ascended the

hill and had the first full view of the house. Then his face lengthened

and he lapsed into silence. Hugo was not so considerate. "Do you mean

to tell me _this_ is the house?" demanded he of Amy. "Why, it's a

cottage. How ridiculous to put such a climax to all these

preparations!"

Amy's eyes flashed and she tossed her head scornfully.

Hugo continued to look and began to laugh. "Ridiculous!" he repeated.

"Don't you think so, father?"

"It is hardly what I expected," confessed Fosdick. "It isn't done yet,

is it, Amy?"

"Yes, it's done," she said angrily. "And it's the best thing about the

place. I don't want you to say anything more until you've gone over it.

The trouble with you and Hugo is that your taste has been corrupted by

the vulgarity in New York. You don't appreciate the difference between

beauty and ostentation. Mr. Siersdorf has built a house for a gentleman,

not for a multimillionaire."

That silenced them; and in silence she led the way into and through the

house, by a route that would present all its charms and comforts in

effective succession. She made no comments; she simply regulated the

speed of the tour, trusting to their eyes to show them what she could

not believe any eyes could fail to see. At the veranda commanding the

most magnificent of the many views, she brought the tour to an end. The

luncheon table was there, and she ordered the servants to bring lunch.

And a delicious lunch it was, ending with wonderful English

strawberries, crimson, huge, pink-white within and sweet as their own

fragrance--"grown on the place," explained Amy, "and this cream is from

our own dairy down there."

"I take it all back," said Fosdick. "You and Siersdorf were right. Eh,

Hugo?"

"It's better than I thought," conceded Hugo. "There certainly is a--a

tone about the house that I've not often seen on this side of the

water."

"And there's a comfort you've never seen on the other side," said Amy.

"You are satisfied, father?"

"Satisfied!" exclaimed Fosdick. "I'm overwhelmed."

And when they had had coffee, which, Hugo said, reminded him of the Cafe

Anglais at Paris, Siersdorf took them for a second tour of the house,

pointing out the conveniences, the luxuries, the evidences of good

taste, expanding upon them, eulogizing them, feeling as he talked that

he had created them. "A gentleman's home!" he cried again and again.

"It'll be a rebuke to all these vulgarians who are trying to show how

much money they've got. Why, you never think, as you walk around here,

'How much this cost,' but only, 'How beautiful it is, and how

comfortable.' A house for a gentleman. A gentleman's _home_--that's

what I call it."

At each burst of enthusiasm from her father, Amy beamed on Alois. And

Alois was dizzy with happiness and hope.

*XIV*

*WOMAN'S DISTRUST--AND TRUST*

Having got what she wanted of Alois, Amy now permitted her better nature

to reproach her for having absorbed him so long and so completely. She

assumed Narcisse was blaming, was disliking, her for it; and, indeed,

Narcisse had been watching the performance with some anger and more

disgust. Before Alois came upon the scene, and while Amy was still in

the first flush of enthusiasm for her new friend, Narcisse had begun to

draw back. She saw that Amy, like everyone who has always had his own

way and so has been made capricious, was without capacity for real

friendship. If she had thought Amy worth while, she would have held

her--for Narcisse was many-sided and could make herself so interesting

that few indeed would not have seemed tame and dull after her. But she

decided that Amy was not worth while; and to cut short Amy's constant

attempts to interfere between her and her work, she emphasized her

positive, even aggressive, individuality, instead of softening it.

Servants, fortune-hunters, flatterers, the army of parasites that

gathers to swoop upon anyone with anything to give, had made Amy

intolerant of the least self-assertiveness; and to be a very porcupine

of prickly points; Narcisse had only to give way to her natural bent for

the candid.

For example, Narcisse had common sense--like most people of good taste;

for, is not sound sense the basis of sound taste, indeed the prime

factor in all sound development of whatever kind? Now, there is nothing

more inflammatory than steadfast good sense. It rebukes and mocks us,

making us seem as stupid and as foolish as we fear we are. Narcisse

would not eat things that did not agree with her; it irritated

self-indulgent Amy against her, when they lunched together and she

refused to eat as foolishly as did Amy. Again, Narcisse would not drive

when she could walk, because driving was as bad for health and looks as

walking was good for them. Amy knew that, with her tendency to fat, she

ought never to drive. But she was lazy, doted on the superiority

driving seemed to give, was nervous about the inferiority "the best

people" attached to a woman's walking. So she persisted in driving, and

ruffled at Narcisse for being equally persistent in the sensible course.

It is the common conception of friendship that one's friend must do what

one wishes and is no friend if he does not; Amy felt that way about it.

Alois had come back from abroad just in time to save the Fosdick

architectural trade to the firm. Narcisse would soon have alienated

it--and would have been glad to see it go; in fact, since she had

realized where the Fosdick money came from, she with the greatest

difficulty restrained herself from bursting forth to Alois in

"impractical sentimentalities" which she knew would move him only

against herself.

Amy expected Narcisse's enthusiasm toward Overlook to be very, very

restrained indeed. "She must be jealous," thought Amy, "because she has

had so little to do with it, and I so much." But she had to admit that

she had misjudged the builder. It is not easy satisfactorily to praise

to anyone a person or a thing he has in his heart; the most ardent

praise is likely to seem cold, and any lapse in discrimination rouses a

suspicion of insincerity. If Narcisse had not felt the beauty of what

her brother and Amy had done, she could not have made Amy's enthusiasm

for her flame afresh, as it did. Before Narcisse finished, Amy thought

that she herself had not half appreciated how well she and Alois had

wrought. "But it would never have been anything like so satisfactory,"

said she in a burst of impulsive generosity, "if you hadn't started it

all."

"I wish I could feel that I had some part in it," said Narcisse, "but I

can't, in honesty."

And she meant it. Those who have fertile, luxuriant minds rarely keep

account of the ideas they are constantly and prodigally pouring out.

Narcisse had forgotten--though Amy had not--that it was she who was

inspired by that site to dream the dream that her brother and Amy had

realized. It was on the tip of Amy's tongue to say this; but she

decided to refrain. "I probably exaggerate the influence of what she

said," she thought. "We saw it together and talked it over together,

and no doubt each of us borrowed from the other"--let him who dares,

criticise this, in a world that shines altogether by reflected lights.

As the two young women talked on, the builder gradually returned to her

constrained attitude. She saw that Amy was taking to herself the whole

credit for Overlook, was looking on Alois as simply a stimulant to her

own great magnetism and artistic sense, was patronizing him as a capable

and satisfactory agent for transmitting them into action. And this made

her angry, not with Amy but with Alois. "Amy isn't to blame," she said

to herself. "It's his fault. To please her he has been exaggerating her

importance to herself, and he has succeeded in convincing her. She has

ended up just where people always end up, when you encourage them to

give their vanity its head." She tried to devise some way of helping

her brother, of reminding Amy that he was entitled to credit for some

small part of the success; but she could think of nothing to say that

Amy would not misinterpret into jealousy either for herself or for her

brother. When she got back to the offices, she said to him:

"If I were you, I'd not let a certain young woman imagine she has _all_

the brains."

"What do you mean?" said he, clouding at once. He showed annoyance

nowadays whenever she mentioned the Fosdicks.

"She'll soon be thinking you couldn't get along without her to give you

ideas," replied Narcisse. "It's bad all round--bad for the woman, bad

for the man--when he gets her too crazy about herself. She's likely to

overlook his merits entirely in her excitement about her own."

"You are prejudiced against her, Narcisse," said Alois angrily. "And it

isn't a bit like you to be so."

Narcisse, not being an angel, flared. "I'm not half as prejudiced

against her as you'd be three months after you married her," she cried.

"But you'll not get her, if you keep on as you're going now. Instead of

showing her how awed you are by her, you'd better be teaching her that

she ought to be in awe of you, that it's what _you_ give her that makes

her shine so bright."

And she fled to her own office, fuming against the folly of men and the

silliness of women, and thoroughly miserable over the whole situation;

for, at bottom she believed that such a woman as Amy must have feminine

instinct enough fairly to jump at such a man as Alois, if there was a

chance to attach him permanently; and, the prospect of Alois marrying a

woman who could do him no good, who was all take and no give, put her

into such a frame of mind that she wished she had the mean streak

necessary to intriguing him and her apart.

It was on one of the bluest of her blue days of forebodings about Alois

and Amy that Neva came in to see her; and a glance at Neva's face was

sufficient to convince her that bad news was imminent. "What is it,

Neva?" she demanded. "I've felt all the morning that something rotten

was on the way. Now, I know it's here. Tell me."

"Do you recall Mrs. Ranier? She was at my place one afternoon----"

"Perfectly," interrupted Narcisse, "Amy Fosdick's sister."

"She took a great fancy to you. And when she heard something she

thought you ought to know, she came to me and asked me to tell you. She

said she knew you'd be discreet--that you could be trusted."

"I liked her, too," said Narcisse. "I think she can trust me."

"It's about--about--those insurance buildings," continued Neva,

painfully embarrassed. "I'm afraid I'm rather incoherent. It's the

first time I ever interfered in anyone else's business."

"Tell me," urged Narcisse. "I suppose it's something painful. But I'm

good and tough---speak straight out."

"Mrs. Ranier's husband is in the furniture business, and through that he

found out there's a scandal coming. She says those people downtown will

drag you and your brother in, will probably try to hide themselves

behind you. She heard last night, and came early this morning. 'Tell

her,' she said, 'not to let her brother reassure her, but to look into

it--clear to the bottom.'"

Narcisse was motionless, her eyes strained, her face haggard.

"That's all," said Neva, rising. "I shouldn't have come, shouldn't have

said anything to you, if I had not known that Mrs. Ranier has the best

heart in the world, and isn't an alarmist."

Narcisse faced Neva and pressed her hands, without looking at her.

"If there is anything I can do, you have only to ask," said Neva, going.

She had too human an instinct to linger and offer sympathy to pride in

its hour of abasement.

"There's one thing you can do," said Narcisse, nervous and intensely

embarrassed.